62 80 The Iconoclasts Sarah Sze: The second installment Shorter Than of a four-part short story the Day by Anne Boyer. 66 Multiplo, diverso, plural: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Louise Neri speaks with Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), about the history of this unique Brazilian museum and his vision for its future.
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Raymond Foye offers a window into his longstanding friendship with Graham Nash, guiding us through the legendary musician’s evolving interest in art and the visual world.
The Last Gangster Show Carlos Valladares explores the gangster-film genre, tracing the conventions and evolutions in the form from the exuberance of Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) to the heavy silence of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019).
26 Donald Judd Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of the Judd Foundation, speaks with Kara Vander Weg about the recent installation of the sculptor’s eightyfoot-long plywood work from 1980 at Gagosian, New York.
32 Leaders in the Arts: Los Angeles Edition In this first installment of a new series about artworld leaders, Joanne Heyler, the founding director of The Broad, Los Angeles, sat down with Kristin Sakoda, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and Bettina Korek, the new chief executive director of the Serpentine Galleries, London, and former executive director of Frieze Los Angeles, for a wide-ranging conversation about their careers and their goals.
The artist writes on a recent collage.
86 Building a Legacy: Time-Based Media Conservation How do you conserve art as dependent on rapidly changing technology as video or as ephemeral as performance? Jennifer Knox White speaks with Glenn Wharton about the conservation of timebased media and more.
90 Georg Baselitz: Life, Love, Death Richard Calvocoressi writes on the painter’s
38 Cy Twombly: Making Past Present The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will present a survey of Cy Twombly’s artwork alongside selections from their permanent ancient Greek and Roman collection. The curator for the exhibition, Christine Kondoleon, and Kate Nesin, author of Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and advisor for the show, spoke with Gagosian director Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition and the aesthetic and poetic resonances that give the show its title: Making Past Present.
54 Cowboy Luc Sante tracks the powerful American archetype through mass media, advertising, and the art of Richard Prince to illuminate the cowboy’s enduring appeal.
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The fact that you move so beautifully On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Frank O’Hara’s celebrated poem “Having a Coke with You,” Gillian Jakab takes a look at the “poet among painters” and the poem’s “You.”
Front cover: Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece 1, 1969, photograph from performance at Annandale-on-Hudson © 2020 Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Top row, left to right: Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Photo: courtesy Netflix Alexander Calder and Margaret French dancing while Louisa Calder plays the accordion outside of James Thrall Soby’s house, Farmington, Connecticut, 1936 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: James Thrall Soby © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York Bottom row, left to right: Vincent Warren, 1963. Photo: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images Installation view, Katharina Grosse: Is It You?, Baltimore Museum of Art, March 1–June 28, 2020. Artwork © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020. Photo: Mitro Hood, courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art
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Alexander/Ballet/Calder
130 Bigger Picture: Recess Recess Fundraising Committee Member and Gagosian director Sarah Hoover sat down with Founder & Executive Director, Allison Freedman Weisberg, and Program Manager, Anaïs Duplan, to discuss the community art nonprofit’s evolution, recent programs, and dreams for the future.
Jed Perl spells out the ABCs of Alexander Calder’s lifelong engagement with ballet as well as many other forms of dance and theater. latest bodies of work, detailing the techniques employed and their historical precedents.
96 Fashion and Art, Part II: Azzedine Alaïa For the second installment of our Fashion and Art series, we offer a conversation held among the late couturier Azzedine Alaïa, actress Charlotte Rampling, fashion historian Olivier Saillard, and writer Donatien Grau.
124 Simon Hantaï Anne Baldassari reflects on her time working with the artist on an unrealized stainedglass commission at the Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-etSainte-Juliette, Nevers, and explains how this endeavor served as the catalyst for an exhibition of his paintings that she curated in 2019.
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Katharina Grosse: I see what she did there On the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Terry R. Myers muses on the manipulations of time in Grosse’s work.
134 Book Corner: Private Pages Made Public Megan N. Liberty explores artists’ engagement with notebooks and diaries.
150 Game Changer: Pontus Hultén Wyatt Allgeier pays tribute to the museum director, curator, educator, and collector Pontus Hultén (1924–2006).
TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMER 2020
Photo credits:
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ime has felt different these past few months in our shared isolation. We have found solace in the outpouring of empathy, perseverance, ingenuity, and support that has emerged in response to this international crisis. While we navigate this worldwide paradigm shift, Anne Boyer’s serial fiction seems suddenly uncanny. The world she creates has us asking what dystopia looks and feels like, and analyzing the importance of home, faith, and idealism at a time when those things are needed more than ever. Our cover features a photograph from Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1, a groundbreaking performance from the late 1960s. For Jonas the mirror was “a metaphor, a device to alter the image and to include the audience as reflection, making them uneasy as they viewed themselves in public.” Reflection, the gaze, and discomfort: the present moment reveals the work’s prescience. We are launching a new series, Leaders in the Arts, with a focus on Los Angeles. Joanne Heyler of The Broad invited Kristin Sakoda, who heads the county’s Department of Arts and Culture, and Bettina Korek, former director of Frieze LA, to discuss their personal journeys, the social responsibility of commissioning public art, the evolution of their city’s cultural landscape, and more. Also in this issue, Luc Sante considers the enduring appeal of the cowboy and the resonance of that archetype in the work of Richard Prince. Carlos Valladares contemplates the history and evolution of gangster films, questioning whether the genre will continue or is fading away. Jed Perl composes an abecedarium of Alexander Calder’s lifelong engagement with theater and dance. And Gillian Jakab reads the love poems of Frank O’Hara, revealing the inspiration behind some of his most celebrated poetry. Our Building a Legacy article in this issue focuses on the complexities involved in the preservation of time-based media. And Flavin Judd talks to Kara Vander Weg about the responsibility of maintaining the legacy of a great artist—in his case that of his father, Donald Judd—while passing along insights that only a son could have. We hope this issue will provide inspiration and respite from the challenges of this moment. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief
GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY ONLINE Right: Fabrication of Casa Malaparte furniture editions in Italy, 2020. Video stills courtesy Pushpin Films; footage: Dariusz Jasak Below, left: Tatiana Trouvé in her Paris studio, 2020. Video stills courtesy Pushpin Films; footage: Lumento, Paris. Artwork © Tatiana Trouvé
Below, top right: Stanley Whitney in his New York studio, 2020. Video still courtesy Pushpin Films. Artwork © Stanley Whitney Below, bottom right: Concert at Simon Hantaï: les noirs du blanc, les blancs du noir . Video still courtesy Alban Jadas/jadeo prod’. Artwork © Archives Simon Hantaï/ ADAGP, Paris
Behind the Art: Casa Malaparte Furniture Featuring an interview with Tommaso Rositani Suckert, this video presents a unique look at the fabrication of these iconic pieces in northern Italy.
Work in Progress: Stanley Whitney Join Stanley Whitney in his New York studio as he discusses his latest paintings with Gagosian director Louise Neri.
Artist Interview: Tatiana Trouvé The artist invites us into her Paris studio for a far-reaching interview on her practice, inspirations, and upcoming projects.
Events: Simon Hantaï Concert The late artist’s three sons perform a concert at Gagosian, Le Bourget, surrounded by the exhibition Simon Hantaï: les noirs du blanc, les blancs du noir .
"CAMÉLIA" NECKLACE IN WHITE GOLD, RUBY AND DIAMONDS "CAMÉLIA" RING IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS
CHANEL.COM
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LO S A N G E L ES
N E W YO R K
LO N D O N
Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2020
Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald
Founder Larry Gagosian
Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier
Business Director Melissa Lazarov
Text Editor David Frankel
Published by Gagosian Media
Online Editor Jennifer Knox White
Publisher Jorge Garcia
Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Assistant Editor Gillian Jakab Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio
Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia Advertising Representative Michael Bullock For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Manager Kelly McDaniel Prepress DL Imaging
Cover Joan Jonas
Printed by Pureprint Group
Contributors Wyatt Allgeier Anne Baldassari Anne Boyer Richard Calvocoressi AnaĂŻs Duplan Raymond Foye Mark Francis Allison Freedman Weisberg Joanne Heyler Sarah Hoover Gillian Jakab Flavin Judd Jennifer Knox White Christine Kondoleon Bettina Korek Megan N. Liberty Terry R. Myers Louise Neri Kate Nesin Adriano Pedrosa Jed Perl Charlotte Rampling Olivier Saillard Kristin Sakoda Luc Sante Sarah Sze Carlos Valladares Kara Vander Weg Glenn Wharton
Thanks Richard Alwyn Fisher Leslie Antell Andy Avini Mike Barnett Georg Baselitz Jennifer Belt Chris Berkery Priya Bhatnagar Susan Braeuer Dam Marie Brodeur Michael Cary Sofia Castoldi Serena Cattaneo Adorno Alice Chung Virginia Coleman Susan Cooke Nicola Del Roscio Sarah Duzyk Andrew Fabricant Elsa Favreau Kate Fernandez-Lupino Emily Florido Brett Garde Matt Gaughan Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman Donatien Grau Katharina Grosse Delphine Huisinga Nicole Elizabeth Jedinak Joan Jonas Sarah Jones Jona Lueddeckens Lauren Mahony Susannah Maybank Rob McKeever Olivia Mull
Graham Nash Louise Neri Sam Orlofsky Kathy Paciello Jaimie Park Aileen Passloff Richard Prince Stefan Ratibor Alexander S. C. Rower Robert M. Rubin Isabel Shorney Jacqueline Simon Rani Singh Carla Sozzani Sarah Sze Andie Trainer Gabriela Valdanha TimothĂŠe Viale Caroline Washburne Emily White Stanley Whitney Hanako Williams Ealan Wingate Sarah Womble Kelso Wyeth
CONTRIBUTORS
Sarah Sze Sarah Sze’s art utilizes genres as generative frameworks, uniting intricate networks of objects and images across multiple dimensions and mediums, from sculpture to painting, drawing, printmaking, and video installation.
Jennifer Knox White Jennifer Knox White is Gagosian Quarterly’s online editor. She joined Gagosian in San Francisco in 2018.
Flavin Judd Flavin Judd is artistic director of Judd Foundation and the son of Donald Judd. He oversees art installations, book designs, and architectural design for Judd Foundation. He is co-designer and co-editor of the recent publications Donald Judd Writings (2016), Donald Judd Interviews (2019), and Donald Judd Spaces (2020). Photo: Alex Marks © Judd Foundation
Megan N. Liberty Megan N. Liberty is an arts writer, editor, and archivist. She writes about artists’ books, ephemera, the archive, and other intersections of text and image, and has served, since 2018, as the Art Books section editor at the Brooklyn Rail.
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Jed Perl Jed Perl was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor to Vogue for a decade. He is currently a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Among his many books are Calder: The Conquest of Time, Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, New Art City, and Paris Without End. He has written for Harper’s, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and teaches at the New School in New York. Photo: Duane Michals
Sarah Hoover Sarah Hoover is a director at Gagosian, where she has worked since 2007. She is a founding member of the Accelerator board of American Ballet Theatre and has sat on the development committee at Recess since 2019. She has a two-year-old son named Guy Sachs and a French bulldog named Napoleon. Photo: BFA.
Anne Baldassari Anne Baldassari is general curator of heritage. She entered the French Ministry of Culture in 1983, where she was responsible for a program of support and innovation in the field of contemporary art. In 1985 she joined the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and in 1991 was appointed to the Musée national Picasso, Paris, where she was a curator, director, and then president of the museum until 2014. Baldassari is the lead curator of two major exhibitions of modern French collections in Russian museums: Icônes de l’art moderne: La collection Chtchoukine (2016) and Icônes de l’art moderne: La collection Morozov (upcoming) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 1992 she published the complete catalogue of Simon Hantaï’s work in the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou.
Allison Freedman Weisberg Allison Freedman Weisberg is the founder and executive director of Recess, a nonprofit arts organization that partners with artists to build a more just and inclusive creative community. She approaches all of her work through a racial justice lens, collaborating with radical thinkers who reimagine an equitable future.
Luc Sante Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris. His new collection, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, will be published in September. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard. Photo: Laura Levine
Anaïs Duplan Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020); a fulllength poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016); and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). Photo: Walid Mohanna
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Terry R. Myers Terry R. Myers is a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles, and an editor-at-large of the Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (2007) and the editor of Painting: Documents of Contemporary Art (2011). His most recent curatorial project was the survey exhibition Candida Alvarez: Here at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2017. He has held faculty positions at Pratt Institute, Otis College of Art and Design, ArtCenter College of Design, the Royal College of Art, and, most recently, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was professor and chair of painting and drawing from 2013 through 2018.
Kara Vander Weg Kara Vander Weg is a senior director at Gagosian, New York, where she has worked for more than fifteen years. She manages a number of the gallery’s established artists and estates, among them the Richard Avedon Foundation, Walter De Maria Collection and Archives, Michael Heizer, Neil Jenney, David Reed, Richard Serra, and Mark Tansey.
Anne Boyer Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist, the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a 2018 Whiting Award winner. Her latest book is The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
Richard Calvocoressi Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. Previously a curator at the Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and a director of the Henry Moore Foundation, Calvocoressi joined Gagosian in 2015.
Carlos Valladares Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford and began his PhD in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University last fall. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg
Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab is assistant editor of the Gagosian Quarterly and, since 2016, has served as the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail. Photo: Hayim Heron
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Glenn Wharton Glenn Wharton is a professor of art history at UCLA and chair of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials. He is co-director of the Artist Archives Initiative, based at New York University, and in 2010 founded the nonprofit Voices in Contemporary Art.
Kate Nesin Kate Nesin is a writer, educator, and adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has organized shows with Frances Stark, Kemang Wa Lehulere, and Helena Almeida, among others, and has written most recently on Tomma Abts, Julia Fish, and Philip Guston.
Christine Kondoleon Since 2001, Christine Kondoleon has been the George D. and Margo Behrakis Senior Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was formerly the curator of ancient art at the Worcester Art Museum (1995–2001). In addition to her curatorial work, she is the author of numerous publications, including Aphrodite and the Gods of Love (MFA: Boston, 2011) Domestic and Divine: Roman Mosaics of the House of Dionysos (Cornell University Press, 1995); and Art of Late Rome and Byzantium (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1994).
Louise Neri Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, working with artists and on exhibitions, editorial projects, and communications across the global platform.
Adriano Pedrosa A Brazil-based curator of major international exhibitions, including the São Paulo and Istanbul biennials, as well as key monographic exhibitions of Brazilian artists, from José Leonilson to Adriana Varejão, Adriano Pedrosa became artistic director of the renowned Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 2014. In this issue, he speaks with Louise Neri about the evolution of his innovative curatorial philosophy and practice as it applies to the ongoing revitalization of MASP, itself an original trailblazer for museum design and practice from its inception. Photo: courtesy MASP
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Mark Francis A director at Gagosian since 2002, Mark Francis was formerly founding director and chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. He has been a curator at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England.
judygeib.com Mother of Pearl Sun and Moon necklace, 18K gold.
DONALD JUDD Flavin Judd, the artist’s son and artistic director of the Judd Foundation, speaks with Kara Vander Weg about the recent installation of the sculptor’s eighty-foot-long plywood work from 1980 at Gagosian, New York.
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Thank you for joining me over tacos. Let’s start by discussing the installation of this work from 1980. How important is the surrounding architecture to this particular work? FLAVIN JUDD The space is important aesthetically. It needs to be neutral and clean, with natural light being a huge benefit. Because the piece is eighty feet long, there are not a lot of choices in terms of installation, but the Gagosian space is good for it. KVW When the work was originally installed, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, it was partly illuminated by natural light. Was your dad particular about artificial lighting on his art? FJ He wanted neutral lighting, the reverse of a dark room with a spotlight on the precious object. KVW No drama. FJ Yes, let the art do the drama, not the lighting. KVW When Roberta Smith reviewed the Castelli show, she called the work “environmental” because it is eighty feet long. This is the longest Judd work made, correct? FJ Well, the longest indoor work, yes, because it’s a single piece. There are long works at Dia Beacon but they’re separate pieces. KVW Did your father intend to show it in a compressed space, so that viewers would be unable to see it from a single perspective? At Castelli you couldn’t view it fully from one end of the room or the other, you had to walk by the work to entirely see it. FJ I think the Castelli space was a bit of a squeeze. I think it will look better at Gagosian because you’ll have more room in which to see it. KVW Typically, how would Judd work when he was KARA VANDER WEG
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making a work for a particular installation? Did he adapt the design to the space? FJ He would have seen the limitations of the space and kept that in mind, but otherwise wouldn’t necessarily have tailored the piece to the space. In no way is it site-specific. KVW I was reading something that Judd wrote for a book on Leo, where he talks about how extraordinary his support was for this particular work, saying: “Leo has always accepted the necessity of doing new work, usually large, expensive, and unsaleable. . . . I think no dealer and certainly no museum would provide the space and most of the money to construct the large plywood piece of mine that was recently in the gallery on Greene Street. For there to be serious art, these things have to be done.” Did your father see dealers as necessary to his business, even if he remained wary of them? FJ Yes, his thinking was that the art that went out the door was sold so that he could continue to keep and look at other art. All of the works were really expensive to make, and he didn’t have the luxury of being a painter, where the cost of materials is negligible. So he had to engage in a whole system of support. KVW Did he see any benefit in having a work on view in a commercial gallery, where it would have reached a different public than in his spaces in Marfa, for instance? FJ Whether it was at Marfa or The Museum of Modern Art, it didn’t matter to him in the sense of exposure—the art just had to be up somewhere. KVW Was the public important to him?
He saw the public as an unknown. He made works for himself and assumed that if he found it interesting, other people would. You can’t generalize about an American versus a French or Swiss public, so why even bother? KVW Roberta Smith describes the work as a significant evolution in your father’s practice, the equivalent of going from silent movies to talkies. For many people at the time, it was a revelation to see work like that. FJ Yes, that kind of radicality has been totally forgotten. So it will be nice to see the piece again. It’s radical within what’s known of Don’s work, which is what can be discerned from the “greatest hits” of single stacks or progressions in museums around the world. KVW What strikes me as particularly interesting about this work is that it emphasizes space as a form. FJ There’s no negative space, right? KVW Well, the negative is a form. And this work also emphasizes absence through its lack of applied colored, the lacquered paint that Judd was known for. FJ The plywood has such a lustrous surface, it’s a multitude of colors at once. KVW Was Judd involved in selecting the wood for the work? I know that Peter Ballantine constructed it. FJ Don would only have indicated that it should be made from Douglas fir plywood, that’s all. KVW Did he prefer that the grain line up in a certain way? FJ That had been decided through previous plywood works. There were long discussions about FJ
Throughout: Donald Judd, untitled, 1980, plywood, 12 × 80 × 4 feet (3.7 × 24.4 × 1.2 m) © 2020 Judd Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photos: Previous spread: Glenn Steigelman, courtesy Castelli Gallery, New York. This spread: Rob McKeever
the fabrication of plywood works and how things went together with Peter, and in the case of the metal works with Bernstein Brothers. KVW In a world that has speeded up exponentially in the last several decades, where “seeing” an artwork is taking an Instagram photograph of it, do you think there’s today a particular benefit to art that makes you slow down to look at it? FJ That’s projecting onto the audience again, so who knows? KVW What’s your own experience? You’ve been looking at your father’s work for a long time. FJ Well, it’s like watching certain movies that might seem slow and complex, but the payoff is commensurate with the effort that the viewer puts into it. Instagram is like a shorthand for aesthetics, and it’s limited. KVW Judd was not a fan of most museums. FJ No, because they treated the work as a temporary interloper in the museum, and the works would ship back damaged. KVW Were there curators he respected? FJ He was friends with and liked Rudi Fuchs, Brydon Smith, and Bill Agee. But that didn’t mean he agreed with them on everything. KVW This work was said to have been damaged by the Saatchi Gallery, but that was not the case. FJ The installation and deinstallation of this work was supposed to be overseen by a representative of Don’s, Peter Ballantine. Saatchi ignored that request and took the piece down alone. So Don got very angry, and though he never saw the piece after that, he declared it destroyed. We later found out that it wasn’t damaged, the only issue
was that Don’s representative had not been present. It was just an argument and the piece is fine. KVW In terms of the work’s formal qualities, it has twenty-eight sculptural elements and only the first two and the last two repeat. All of the others are unique. Is this developed from another work? FJ No, that’s him playing with the math. Given a height, a length, and a depth, what can you do? And it goes from there: if you have an open front box you can have a division. Then you can have a division that’s slanted. Then you can have two divisions that are slanted. Et cetera. So you’re adding complexity to the simplified boxes of the piece. It’s just a way of going from simplicity to complexity and back, in a pattern analogous to music. The link is math. KVW Was Judd interested in mathematical theory? FJ He was interested in math as a language for figuring out the world. KVW What about the idea of legacy around these works? Judd conceived of his foundation in 1977, when it was prescient for an artist to think so far ahead about his future. Were there things that precipitated his planning? FJ Well, he was going to turn fifty the next year. But also he realized that Marfa wasn’t going away. By 1977, things were really established in Marfa. He had gone to Australia and loved it, but he realized it was too late for that—he’d spent years in Marfa, installing works, restoring buildings, and it was already too much effort to abandon. That’s where everything was going to be. KVW Did he talk to you and your sister, Rainer, about his wishes? 29
IT’S A WAY OF GOING FROM SIMPLICITY TO COMPLEXITY AND BACK, IN A PATTERN ANALOGOUS TO MUSIC. THE LINK IS MATH. —Flavin Judd
We were clearly told there would be a foundation eventually. There was no question about what was supposed to happen. But the “how” was left out. KVW How you were going to pay for it, who was going to run it. . . FJ None of that was figured out. KVW At twenty-five years old, you and Rainer became codirectors of the foundation. FJ Yes. I assumed that lawyers would take care of everything because I thought that was their job. But as soon as Don died, the lawyers, who didn’t know anything at all, said, “What do you want to do now?” It became clear that Rainer and I would have to take care of everything because nobody else knew the combination of weird things that a) Don wanted and b) what Don did and how to put it all together. KVW That’s an incredible responsibility. FJ We decided we had to try. And we didn’t put a time limit on the trying part, so we’re still trying. KVW I would imagine that there are circumstances where you and your sister look at one another and say, “What would Don have done?” And then you have to make decisions based on that. FJ That happens every day. That’s what our job is. And that’s what we can’t delegate, because it’s judgment. KVW Are there situations where you’ve made a decision knowing it’s different from what your father would have decided because you think it’s better for his legacy? FJ I don’t really know where the divergence from his possible wishes happens because we have FJ
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to make decisions regardless. KVW Would he have wanted the Museum of Modern Art show that’s coming up? FJ He would have agreed to it, but he would have attached a lot of conditions that we didn’t include. We agreed to it twelve years ago, so it’s been in the works for a long time. We’ve had offers to do things that we know Don wouldn’t have wanted, and we’ve said no, based on that. KVW Are there conversations that you and Rainer have about how to keep Don’s legacy alive for the future? FJ I think institutions become things, and they have institutional memories, and they have institutional patterns and habits. You train the institution to have good habits. We have a really great board and a really great staff who will do things in a way that’s totally in accord with how Don would have wanted them done. So it works. KVW You’ve taught them. FJ Yes. Or Don taught them. KVW Do you have institutions, foundations, or families coming to you and asking for advice as they’re making plans? FJ Yes, because for better or worse we’re one of the ones who went through all this, starting from having $200 in the bank and owing millions of dollars to where we are now. It’s a path that could have gone wrong in many different ways. KVW Your father was very close with and supportive of some artists. Do you think that that was unusual at the time? FJ No, I think it was more the rule than the exception. It was a much smaller community.
When my parents lived on Park Avenue and 19th Street, and then Spring Street, in the early ’70s, they were surrounded by their friends. Within six blocks, there was the who’s who of the art world, and it was much closer. I can’t speak for the art community now, I’m only in it by accident. I think it’s much broader, and the Internet has changed it to be flat. KVW I would imagine that in New York at that time, because everybody was in a small geographical area, there were creative evolutions. FJ It was amazing and really radical. And I don’t think it has happened anywhere since. KVW As a kid, did you know how extraordinary it was to have such accomplished artists coming to your house at night and talking to your dad and mom? FJ No, I thought that was what everybody did. If John Chamberlain and Roni Horn came over for drinks, that’s what happened every week, so, so what? All I had to compare my life to when I was really small was my friends at school who lived on the Upper East Side in little shoeboxes and were really proud to do so. I was totally mystified as to why they would want to live in those shoeboxes. KVW If you had to advise a midcareer artist who is thinking about her or his legacy, what would you say was something to consider? FJ If you do plan on dying, assume it’ll happen tomorrow. KVW That’s good. Plan accordingly.
Leaders in the Arts
Los Angeles Edition 32
In this first installment of a new series about art-world professionals who are leading the way in their fields, we invited Joanne Heyler, the founding director of The Broad, Los Angeles, to choose two outstanding executives in the arts for a wide-ranging conversation about their careers and goals. Joining Heyler are:
Kristin Sakoda the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.
Bettina Korek the new chief executive of Serpentine Gallery, London, and former executive director of Frieze Los Angeles.
Joanne Heyler Perhaps you could start by telling me about your early experience with the arts and the path your career took. Kristin Sakoda My first exposure to the arts happened when I was very young, four years old, taking dance lessons. My parents moved us from the South Side of Chicago to the suburb of Oak Park, where I was fortunate to find myself with access to ballet lessons, public schools that taught visual art and music, and a town rich with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. My experience with the business side started when I was an artist: I was a professional performer at the early age of seven years old, in large-scale professional ballet productions and local dance performances. And while I never thought of it as a career, when I was graduating college I decided, “I’m only young once and this is my opportunity to experience being a dancer.” And so I danced. That led me to the renowned dance company Urban Bush Women, as well as to work in off-Broadway and then Broadway theater. Later, I went to law school, which is what I’d been planning to do all along, but by then I knew I wanted to stay in the arts or entertainment. Other than that, I was completely open. I was just as interested in being an artist in the nonprofit sector as I was in being a music lawyer at a record label. There was a great fellowship program at New York Theatre Workshop, which is an off-Broadway company that produced Rent and other amazing shows. They had an arts-administration fellowship, which they only offered a few times, though their fellowship program has for many years supported writers and directors of color. It was the most amazing opportunity to look behind the scenes at what’s really going on when you’re running an arts nonprofit. After that, I actually decided I wasn’t sure if I wanted to run a nonprofit. So a friend introduced me to the general counsel at New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, who was looking for someone to be her deputy counsel. People there were doing great work, supporting incredible institutions with government funding. That’s how I got into this work. Joanne, I’m curious how you started your career? Joanne Heyler I grew up in LA. My family had nothing to do with the arts, they ran an auto-repair shop, but my sister is an opera singer and I’m an art historian [laughs]. My career is a testament to the value of the cold call. In the 1980s, when I was attending Scripps College, just east of Los Angeles, an internship was a requirement. There was a predetermined list of law firms and other kinds of businesses where you could go, but I didn’t really see anything I was interested in. I’d been reading in the paper about this new museum of contemporary art that was being built in Downtown, and I’d been to the Temporary Contemporary [now the Geffen Contemporary], the forerunner to MOCA’s Grand Avenue building, which was under construction. Anyway, that all sounded more interesting to me than interning at a law firm [laughter]. So I called the main line at MOCA and basically said, “I need an internship.” I had no connections—zip, zero, nothing—I mean, I was studying art history, but other than that I had zero qualifications. Yet I ended up in an interview with Kerry Brougher, who was an assistant curator back then. We had an amazing conversation, luckily he saw something in this 34
college student, and I ended up working part-time with him for over a year and a half. The Grand Avenue building opened while I was there. That I would be opening The Broad across the street many, many years later is a full circle of major and completely unanticipated proportions. Eli Broad was the founding chairman of MOCA, but I didn’t meet him at that time. After the MOCA internship, I went on to the Courtauld Institute in London for graduate study. When I came back to LA, after I finished my degree, I asked Kerry for his advice about what to do next. For a short while I worked for a start-up art magazine, but long story short, it was Kerry who first told me about a new art space in Santa Monica called The Broad Art Foundation— thirty years ago [laughs]—and I could never have dreamed what was in store for me there, which really in a way started with me as a college kid making a cold call. Bettina Korek Though I started at LACMA in the Prints and Drawings department, I eventually moved into Development and Communications for the museum. We’d done a lot of research about audiences and on how hard it can be to get people interested in something new. As a result, I became really interested in encouraging temporary public art in LA. In New York there are many established organizations, such as Creative Time and the Public Art Fund, that consistently present public-art projects. Because public-art projects were a big part of Lauri Firstenberg’s program at LAXART, I began working with her as she first launched it, in 2005, and also with Emi Fontana, who’s a dealer and a curator and was always open to working in different modalities. My experience with Emi early on gave me a lot of confidence in terms of wearing different hats in the art world and seeing how these various approaches could be interwoven. It was incredible working with her and being a part of the Women in the City project, which was about recognizing women artists of the 1980s, the first generation to break through the market— Joanne Heyler We worked on that at the Foundation with you because of Barbara Kruger, which we helped make happen [laughs]. Bettina Korek Of course. You were the hero of that project, getting Barbara’s screen on top of LACMA West [laughter]. From there it was a very organic procession. While I was working at LACMA, people would ask me about what art to go and see. I began ForYourArt very informally from these conversations as an email newsletter. From there, many people in the city wanted an international art fair to establish roots here, and Frieze LA was the perfect opportunity to create an annual moment on the art-world calendar for our city’s community. We already had the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, but those happen less regularly. Of course, the Getty’s work on Pacific Standard Time laid much of the groundwork for the success of Frieze LA, in terms of elevating the general consciousness about how much a city-wide collaboration benefits the landscape. And of course The Broad has also had an amazing impact on the cultural landscape of LA, it’s been a huge milestone for the city. It feels like everyone in the city knows where their museums are now, and every museum plays an important and complementary role in this effort.
So it’s critical for institutions to make themselves more open, more relevant, more inclusive. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s actually way beyond that: it’s a business imperative. – Kristin Sakoda
Joanne Heyler One of the most interesting recollections I have from the opening of The Broad is that I kept getting the same question over and over again from so many people in the media and in the community: “Why would LA need another contemporary art museum?” It’s wonderful to be 4 1/2 years in and seeing our attendance surpassing nine hundred thousand people last year and growing by a hundred thousand visitors every year. It feels like proof that there was and continues to be an appetite for art in Los Angeles. There’s a great untapped audience for contemporary art— while I’m superproud that we’ve got these attendance figures, it’s still true that the majority of people living in LA or LA County don’t know about us. So there’s more work to do. I’m curious to hear about the differences you see between the nonprofit and for-profit initiatives, the private and the public sector. Kristin Sakoda My career has comprised work in both. In fact, public/private partnership is key to a lot of what I do. I’ve dealt with that in my personal career, as a dancer, as well. The economy of being an artist has changed over time: we’re probably old enough to remember when, if you were a performing artist and your song was in a commercial, you were “selling out”? It has blended a lot more. But I’ve never felt any hierarchy, or that somehow the nonprofit sector is more “true.” It’s also not true that nonprofit artists are all struggling, or that a higher level of sophistication is possible in the commercial world. It’s actually one big ecosystem—though it does feel as though there might be more experimentation in the nonprofit sector, like somehow it can be an incubator for talent. Joanne Heyler Yes. That’s true in many fields beyond the arts, actually. Kristin Sakoda Los Angeles in particular, from an outsider’s point of view, was traditionally perceived as being dominated by Hollywood, which is clearly commercial. Artists of earlier generations may have thought that if you wanted to be an artist then you had to go to New York. Joanne Heyler Yes, that’s a really interesting point. Thinking back on so many artists who became influential, to make a living they had to be entrepreneurial. They were in an environment where they had to patch things together—teaching at CalArts, for example, like John Baldessari. But when you take the long view and see how many students Baldessari influenced, it’s fascinating. What would LA look like today if there was never a CalArts? That’s an abstraction, but would the city be as interesting and vibrant as it is now? Would different artists be celebrated? Kristin Sakoda The market can be such a dominant force, it can impact who’s valued and can literally place value on a certain style or perspective. In some ways that’s what we’re seeing now with so many African American artists being recognized as seminal, but their work has always been great American art, right? There’s this evolving valuation, which is external, that’s happening now. It’s not the values of the artists themselves, or the values the communities placed on them. Joanne Heyler The market can have its own language, and it’s not always a language completely
anchored to the values that were part of the artmaking to begin with. Bettina Korek Right, and the relationship between symbolic value and market value is constantly in flux. Kristin Sakoda Yes. Bettina Korek One of my favorite things John wrote was, “I enjoy giving books I’ve made to others. Art seems pure for a moment and disconnected from money. And since a lot of people can own the book, nobody owns it. Every artist should have a cheap line. It keeps art ordinary and away from being overblown.” He wrote that in 1970, and it is still, fifty years later, so prescient. Earlier, you made this point about selling out, but I would say that in the past decade there’s been a turning point where collaborating with a brand is now seen as a signal of success. Kristin Sakoda For some artists it’s not just about collaborating with a brand, but really almost coopting a brand. Just look at Lauren Halsey and her Nike shoe: she’s integrating her own message and putting it forward with things that ref lect the iconography of a black urban neighborhood, right? Bettina Korek In the same way that there’s more openness to collaborating with brands, I feel like there’s more of an appreciation for how important it is to work in the civic realm as well. Kristin Sakoda Yes, many artists are shifting toward a more social practice, and thinking about the civic nature of how the public encounters, engages with, or is even part of the development of the work. I love that we’re increasing opportunities for encounters with art, and pushing civic conversations through art, but it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes there are funding restrictions where you can only use the money to create a hard asset, an object. And that has set up interesting challenges and opportunities for us in terms of how we find support for different ways and mediums and approaches and social structures and everything else that artists actually want to use. Joanne Heyler So Kristin, you’re running a county commission. Can you talk about LA County’s Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative? Kristin Sakoda A few years ago, the LA County Arts Commission—now the county’s Department of Arts and Culture—was asked to lead some constructive conversations about diversity and access in the arts. We had town halls, working groups, and an advisory committee and we were able to reach hundreds of people and stakeholders throughout the arts and the county and asked them to come together and think about what would be needed to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts. In the end, in 2017 we released the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative report, which has thirteen actionable recommendations. Right now we’re implementing five of the recommendations that the board approved and funded. One of my big goals has been to look at how we can ensure value across audiences for the work that we do at the department for the whole county.
The social piece is very important. Coming to a museum is a social experience. It sounds like such a basic thing to say, but I think some institutions forget that when they think too academically. It isn’t just one person connecting intellectually with one object. We encourage visitors to talk about the art while they are going through our galleries as much as possible. – Joanne Heyler 35
I think a lot of large institutions, and museums in particular, feel off-putting to a lot of folks, whether it’s because they don’t see their cultural background, or where they live, or their income level, or their race represented there, or just because they don’t have a habit of going to museums, or they don’t feel welcome. Traditionally there’s been a position of “We’re the scholars and we’re telling you what’s important and we’re not going to explain it to you and don’t touch anything.” People don’t feel like a museum is their institution, or it doesn’t feel relevant to them. So it’s critical for institutions to make themselves more open, more relevant, more inclusive. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s actually way beyond that: it’s a business imperative. Joanne Heyler When people walk in the door at The Broad, we want them to feel that this place is theirs. I’ve had the luxury, because Eli and Edye Broad fully fund the museum, to pull back all the things you see that people probably don’t even consciously register but that are there, like donor walls, all sorts of signage, lots of little things that sometimes add up to visual static, to an underlying sense that the museum is not for you the ordinary visitor. When you walk into The Broad, you have agency as a visitor. There aren’t a lot of signs telling you where to go or in what order to see the collection. It might even feel a little disorienting for those who prefer structures, but people find their way, and encounter the collection on their own terms, and get drawn in very authentically—which is what you want in the end, right? Kristin Sakoda We have a small research and evaluation team and we just released a new report on arts audiences. We talked to people from all walks of life throughout the county who self-identified as loving the arts. And what we learned is, people were talking about how much it affects them when they feel culturally represented in art. If a particular organization isn’t speaking to them or their experiences or their backgrounds, they aren’t drawn in. And if they don’t have somebody to go with, they won’t go—truly, that was one of the top reasons for not going, apart from things like access and cost. Joanne Heyler The social piece is very important. Coming to a museum is a social experience. It sounds like such a basic thing to say, but I think some institutions forget that when they think too academically. It isn’t just one person connecting intellectually with one object. We encourage visitors to talk about the art while they are going through our galleries as much as possible. How important are collectors for each of your institutions? Bettina Korek Incredibly important. For collectors, it’s often quite straightforward to be a patron for a project that relates directly to their collections, but there are also opportunities to partner with civic entities and to support organizations that are more ephemeral. Joanne Heyler Do you think the old-school idea of a collector, as someone assembling a cabinet of curiosities, is changing? Do you see a trend of collectors more attuned to cross-fertilization in the arts?
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Bettina Korek Yes, I’ve been seeing that happen in LA. There’s always been this understanding of how collecting can be a creative practice, but in the past two decades, the activity of ownership and taking care of work is seen as part of a greater activity of patronage. Lately I’ve seen more collectors participating in conversations and supporting interdisciplinary projects than ever before. It makes sense: the art world is such an inspiring, exciting context that being part of it fosters all other areas of your life. Kristin Sakoda I love that as a mission—to expand the conversations around patronage, what it looks like, how you support artists, what this creative economy is and what that actually means. Of course, artists themselves are often also collectors. It’s interesting to think about how collecting is quite personal but can also be political when it intersects with civic engagement. The Broad is an example of that, and of course Agnes Gund recently established the Art for Justice Fund, with $100 million from the sale of a Roy Lichtenstein painting, to support criminal-justice reform. That is such an amazing example of philanthropy, with a connection between the arts and a specific civic issue. We probably need to highlight more incredible examples of patronage and of collectors being philanthropists. Just imagine if we could inspire a few more collectors to sell a work of art and donate the proceeds, or even part of the proceeds, to a community in need of support. It’s also important for collectors to realize that their patronage is supporting the talent of tomorrow. Joanne Heyler Right, there’s definitely a growing group of mission-driven collectors. That’s not unprecedented; certainly, collectors have always had areas of interest outside of the objects themselves. But maybe there’s a difference between a personal curiosity and a passion that connects to the wider world that you can see in Agnes Gund as one example. The Broad collection contains so many artists whose work is political and about social justice, and we’ve tried to complement that thread through some of our special exhibitions at the museum like Soul of A Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983. Today, many collectors, including prominent celebrities such as Sean Combs or Beyoncé and Jay Z, are collecting with a particular mission in mind: to advocate for artists of color. And of course, collectors have the privilege of being able to offer opportunities in unexpected ways to young talent coming from lots of different perspectives. Collectors usually collect because they’re intellectually curious; well, this is a great area to get curious about as well. There’s a growing knowledge bank, including the two of you, of people thinking very innovatively about how to widen and strengthen the art world through diversity. I hope collectors will take advantage of that.
There’s always been this understanding of how collecting can be a creative practice, but in the past two decades, the activity of ownership and taking care of work is seen as part of a greater activity of patronage. Lately I’ve seen more collectors participating in conversations and supporting interdisciplinary projects than ever before. – Bettina Korek
CY TWOMBLY: MAKING PAST PRESENT
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will present a survey of Cy Twombly’s artwork alongside selections from their permanent ancient Greek and Roman collection. The curator for the exhibition, Christine Kondoleon, and Kate Nesin, author of Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and advisor for the show, spoke with Gagosian director Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition and the aesthetic and poetic resonances that give the show its title: Making Past Present.
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ARK FRANCIS Christine, your exhibition, called Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, looks into the relations between Twombly’s work and the classical world. How did you come to focus on this transhistorical theme? CHRISTINE KONDOLEON I had a revelation at the fantastic Cy Twombly sculpture show in 2001 at the National Gallery of Art in DC. It was one of those moments when you walk into a show and you go, “Okay, I am in conversation with this artist and I understand who he is and what he’s doing.” And that doesn’t often happen with twentieth-century art, since I’m a Greek and Roman expert [laughs]. It was a moment of jolt and I set out to learn more about him. I felt a real, physical attraction to the work and to his thinking. There were a number of specific pieces there that resonated, especially the sculpture Thermopylae [1991]. Having been a reader of the poet Cavafy for many, many years— his work inspires my work—there was this trajectory or continuum between antiquity, poetry, the artist, the creation, and the reductive simplicity of the coat of white paint. I thought, “Oh, one day that would be an interesting exhibition,” and that was packaged away.
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You’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Yes, I’ve been sitting on this idea for quite awhile. I mentioned it a few times to my contemporary art colleagues at the MFA in Boston, and it was met with enthusiasm. And then we—all at different times—went to Venice and saw the 2015 show at the Ca’ Pesaro: Cy Twombly. Paradise. Walking around Venice and seeing all of the appropriated bits and fragments from Constantinople embedded in the architecture there prepared my mind, subliminally in a way, for viewing that show. The idea of appropriation and the idea of a modern artist mining history clicked between the show and the location. KATE NESIN You have mentioned the Venice exhibition a number of times during preparations for the show here in Boston. Was it Twombly’s Leda and the Swan suite from 1980 that you said made the biggest impression? CK Yes, it did! KN That has stuck with me, this particular instance of Leda and the Swan (among Twombly’s several) having regalvanized you; it’s a sequence of spare works on paper that’s particularly abstruse, one of the most abstracted routes to thinking about myth, storytelling, and antiquity that I could possibly choose from Twombly’s hefty catalog. MF CK
Previous spread: Annabelle d’Huart, interior of Cy Twombly’s apartment in Rome, 1978, gelatin silver print, 11 7⁄8 × 17 5⁄8 inches (30.2 × 44.8 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of Annabelle d’Huart. Artworks © Cy Twombly Foundation
Opposite: Cy Twombly, Sesostris II, 1974, oil paint, wax crayon, and graphite on paper, 27 5⁄8 × 39 ¼ inches (70 × 99.7 cm). Cy Twombly Foundation © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Belisario Manicone, Rome Right: Cy Twombly, Chariot of Triumph, 1998, wood, paint, plaster, cloth, and nails, 48 1⁄8 × 21 ¼ × 74 7⁄8 inches (122 × 54 × 190 cm). Cy Twombly Foundation © Cy Twombly Foundation Below, top: Model cart, Near Eastern, Syrian, 2750–2000 BC, terracotta, 4 ½ × 5 ¼ × 4 ½ inches (11.5 × 13.1 × 11.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; purchased with funds donated by Peggy Baseman, Suzanne M. Capone, and Marilyn MacLellan. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Below, bottom: Blue lotus chalice, Egyptian, New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, reign of Thutmose III, 1479–25 BC, faience, 5 ½ × 4 3⁄8 inches (14 × 11 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Egypt Exploration Fund by subscription. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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And there I was—the revelatory moment [laughs]. Yes. I was looking closely, noting, “here is the swan, here’s the explosion.” There was this sort of intuition about what he was doing, and that’s how I work in general so it gave me a large comfort. And then as I was doing the reading to prepare for the exhibition and the catalog, it was like visiting an old friend. MF But then the idea of doing it here in Boston made a certain sense in another way, too. Twombly started here as a young man at the Museum School, in the late 1940s, right across the road from the Museum of Fine Arts. CK Yes. The icing on the cake for me was when I discovered that he had been here in his youth. It became very important to understand the young student crossing the street, visiting this collection. What’s important for viewers in general to know is that at that time, from 1947 to 1948, this museum was full of antiquities; nothing was in storage. It was more like study collections. Another interesting discovery that informed the show came about through the reading I have done for the exhibition. When he was in Boston, he took a Fayum portrait course. He has spoken about the difficulty of that technique. We’re going to have a Fayum portrait from our collection that he could have seen at the time. We know he was an
avid museum goer who looked closely at objects and we know that he visited the MFA often so we can extrapolate what he might have focused his attention on while there. KN Your work, Christine, has drawn out the objects that Twombly may have seen as a student here in the 1940s, yes. And these he seems to have stored away—objects absorbed at that time only to reemerge in his work later. For instance, he first travels to the Mediterranean in the early 1950s and to Egypt in the early 1960s, yet some of the forms that you underscore in the MFA’s Egyptian collection, which Twombly surely would have seen again in Egypt, in fact appear in his own artworks later still. You know, the lotus shapes in the seventies, or the boats that really arrive in full force in the nineties. Such forms hibernate and reemerge across decades. He accumulated places and objects into an internal archive of sorts. And this has been important for your show in part because there are as many, or more, points of indirect and subjectively remembered connection to ancient precedents, in Twombly’s works, as there are direct ones. CK The materiality of these objects and the materiality of the techniques stay with him. Yet, at the same time, he is looking for inspiration from immaterial things—from words and poets. 41
We owe a lot to Kirk Varnedoe for his wonderful work in the 1990s on Twombly. He surfaced a lot of these rather arcane bits of information that are footnoted in that terrific essay from the MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art, New York] retrospective catalogue, where he writes about Twombly’s reaction to the Tutankhamun displays at the Cairo Museum. Twombly was attracted to these little, simple daily objects you’d find in the tomb, white painted constructions of wood—not unlike things he had already been making, and would later continue to. That clicked for me quite a bit; that simplicity attracted him, the daily-life quality of it. But that also gets married with a deep appreciation and sense of the sacred and the ancient world’s ideas of creating places for worship. MF Kirk Varnedoe also came from the American South, and there was this great generation of American artists—Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns—all from the South. It’s quite often alluded to that Twombly’s upbringing had a big impact on him. And of course, he went back to Virginia and lived part of each year there in later life, too. But the curious thing to me is that in a way, Johns and Rauschenberg don’t really bring that supposedly classical reference into their work—and perhaps that’s because they’re not from Virginia. I mean, the South isn’t just one thing. This idea of daily life maybe is quite close to their work, too, in a different way. 42
KN This connection is often drawn between Twombly’s two homes, yes, an artist born and raised in the American South who then moves to southern Europe. He himself elaborated on those connections, joking about a kind of Neoclassical excess—how there were more columns where he grew up, in the South, than in all of Greece and Rome—which is a joke that, in my view, raises all sorts of questions about the “neo-” or new, revival, belatedness, and both the means and the ends of certain kinds of cultural identification. Your daily-life question is interesting. For me, it’s as if Twombly treats classical material, with its grand, even epic associations, as a kind of vernacular—he felt it could be. That it could be treated personally, in any case, and sometimes lightly, too. Mary Jacobus’s work, and now Christine’s work, have helped me focus on the fact that Twombly was reading ancient texts in translation, appropriating lines from English translations and often editing as he went. Maybe misspelling, mistaking, in many cases I would guess intentionally, playfully, performing a casual relationship to such material, and in the process showing just how mediated such historical material always is. There’s a way in which his work offers the classical world as available both to him and through him, as a kind of vernacular. CK The idea of misspelling is a key thing about him—we keep going back to the fact that he trips
Opposite, top: Cy Twombly, Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (III), 2009, acrylic on canvas, 105 ¼ × 83 ½ inches (267.3 × 212.1 cm). The Broad, Los Angeles. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation Opposite, middle: Model of a boat, Egyptian, Middle Kingdom, late Dynasty 11—early Dynasty, 2010–1961 BC, wood, 23 5⁄8 × 4 ¾ × 6 3⁄8 inches (60 × 12 × 16 cm). Harvard University— Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Opposite, bottom: Oil flask (lekythos) in the form of Aphrodite, Greek, Late Classical Period, first half of the 4th century BC, ceramic, height: 7 ½ inches (19 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; purchased with funds donated by Mrs. Samuel Torrey Morse. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston This page: Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1959, wood, plastic leaf, plaster, pigment, and house paint, 27 ¾ × 13 5⁄8 × 15 ½ inches (70.4 × 34.6 × 39.4 cm). Cy Twombly Foundation © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: courtesy Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio
over himself in a way, purposely perhaps, or erases himself on drawings and canvases. Yet, there are also moments where it’s clear that he’s transcribing complicated Greek words and he has to pay attention to how he’s doing it. There’s no way he would’ve known some of these obscure Greek words without a heavy engagement with footnotes and commentary on the original texts. I’m proud to say that the exhibition includes these fixed points of revelation that show him as a very close student of mediated text, which is translated and footnoted and annotated. MF I wonder, too, whether his time at Black Mountain College, right after his time in Boston, further developed his interest in language. Charles Olson was such a key figure there, as well as Cage and others. CK That was another revelation for me; I’m not a Black Mountain College aficionado. Olson wrote so much about sound and breath. And then if you look at the way Twombly spaces letters or leaves space on the canvas or paper — that’s where I started connecting the dots and thinking about how he’s inviting you into the active processes of enunciation, to recitation. Sound was so important. KN And Christine, I have learned from you that so many of the ancient, carved inscriptions that Twombly would have seen on the streets in Rome— which I had thought about a lot in terms of the
formal properties of his sculptures—were actually meant to be read aloud. CK Yes. The ancients were very much about recitation, much more than about writing. Writing wasn’t so important to them. It was recitation and memorization. MF Because it was an oral culture— CK Yes, absolutely. Again, I think Twombly was very smart, an autodidact, and that he intuited some of that. But if you think about it, as you yourself walk down the street in Greece or Rome and you see an inscription, you start to sound out things, right? That’s what the ancients intended you to do. It’s interesting for our readers and visitors to understand the context of use in the ancient world and how contemporary artists like Twombly in some way or another create that bridge. KN I think the title of the show, Making Past Present, is true to that sense of bridging. It is a show that demonstrates how profoundly Twombly loved this material, which isn’t the same thing as romanticizing it. We are looking at one, quite singular artist’s relationship to material antiquity—yet Christine has also conceived a show about how those same ancient objects, and now Twombly’s objects, too, exist in an ever shifting present, our present. MF Do you t h ink you could even say t hat his inscribing of names is itself a form of love
and a form of memory? Where he simply writes “Orpheus” or refers to Aphrodite or Dionysus. CK The fact that he’s writing “Venus,” or “Dionysus,” naming them on the surfaces of drawings and paintings—in many different ways, naming—he is memorializing the gods. That’s the act. It is not the trivial, schoolboy work of a copyist. It’s a very conscious decision to say, “I’m carrying forth this tradition. I’m bringing forth these names. Just as I want you to remember me, you’re going to remember them.” MF Does this project indicate that the museum will continue to show contemporary artists within these historical collections? CK Yes. I’m excited that this exhibition proposal grew very quickly into a second stage on the part of Matthew Teitelbaum, our director, who immediately saw the opportunity, beyond this show, to link the encyclopedic collections here—which are extensive—with contemporary art, which is his particular interest. He’s been able to endow a gallery within our classical wing, which will be dedicated for the next twenty-five years to a rotation of artists who will bring us both forward and back. So you have the juxtaposition of ancient collection objects with a gallery dedicated to recent artists who are in some sort of dialogue with the ancient world, or who have lived in or been inspired by the Mediterranean one way or another closer to our own time. 43
A B C LEXANDER
ALDER
An Alphabetical Guide to Calder and Dance. Text by Jed Perl
ALLET
When Alexander Calder died, in 1976, at the age of seventy-eight, his old friend Saul Steinberg saluted him as “a dancing man.” The artist, known to everybody as Sandy, loved to improvise on the dance floor, preferably to the beat of a jazz band or one of the samba records that he and his wife, Louisa, had picked up in Brazil. Calder’s fascination with dance takes us to the heart of his revolutionary reimagining of sculpture. His mobiles move through time and space: that’s what dancers have done from time immemorial. It’s no wonder that all through his life Calder pursued any and all opportunities to embrace the art of dance. A belly dancer by the name of Fanni was one of the attractions in the miniature Cirque Calder that he began performing for small audiences in Paris in the late 1920s. In the succeeding years he worked with choreographers and musicians in the theater and produced a number of versions of what he called a “ballet without dancers.” This alphabet presents some glimpses of Calder’s lifelong engagement with ballet as well as many other forms of dance and theater. Much of the material comes from my biography of Calder; the second and final volume, Calder: The Conquest of Space, has just been published by Knopf.
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Amériques The avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse, whose startlingly percussive compositions earned him a special place in the history of modern music, became friends with Calder in the early 1930s. From the Calders’ home in Paris, Louisa wrote about Sandy and Edgard’s friendship in a letter to her mother: “Sandy is working downstairs, and talking to Varèse, the composer whose music corresponds to Sandy’s wire abstractions, so he likes to watch him work.” What connected these two creative spirits? The composer’s fascination with what he called the movement and collision of “sound-masses” had aural analogies with the way the sculptor used forms to “compose motions.” The search for affinities between sound and sight went back to the late-nineteenth-century Symbolists and their fascination with synesthesia. In 1971, six years after Varèse died, Calder saluted the dreams they had shared when he designed sets and costumes for a ballet set to Varèse’s Amériques, a symphonic composition with an enormous percussion section and the screeching sound of a siren.
seemed to be in the offing. Lincoln Kirstein, who brought Balanchine to America and worked with him to set up a school and a company, may have sensed some af f inity when he took the choreographer to see Calder’s f irst show at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery in April 1934. “Balanchine thought he might make fine décor for ballet,” Kirstein wrote in his diary. “Great big toys.” The following October, there was a meeting between Calder and Balanchine. Again, the evidence is in Kirstein’s diary: “Sandy Calder into the School [of American Ballet] with designs for a ballet on a pad of paper. A great red heart-like shape, and his mobiles shooting around. I thought it might be nice but Balanchine said it was too close to [Joan] Miró’s Jeux d’Enfants,” a ballet, with choreography by Léonide Massine, mounted in Europe two years earlier. In 1946 or ’47, Kirstein again had conversations with Calder about doing sets or costumes, but again it came to nothing. Flash forward to the early 1970s and a French friend of Sandy and Louisa’s, in New York on a visit, stopped by the Perls Galleries on Madison Avenue; the Calders used one of the upper floors of the gallery as a pied-à-terre when they were in the city. She was told that Calder was upstairs in a meeting. When the door of the upstairs office opened, there were Calder and Balanchine. They were almost certainly discussing the possibility of bringing to the New York City Ballet the “ballet without dancers,” entitled Work in Progress, that Calder had mounted at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma a few years earlier, in 1968. Although Work in Progress was never performed in New York, we know from correspondence that Calder wasn’t averse to having the original electronic score, by three contemporary Italian composers, replaced with something by Balanchine’s great friend and collaborator Igor Stravinsky.
C
Charleston The year 1926, when Calder f irst arrived in Paris, is generally seen as the year when the Charleston, the dance that defined the Roaring Twenties, reached the height of its popularity. Something of the breakaway beauty of the Charleston can be felt in the work that Calder did for the next fifty years. In a lithograph that he made in New York before leaving for Paris, Florence King (whom her husband, the art dealer Carl Zigrosser, called an “athletic feminist”) entertains a group of their friends in a Greenwich Village apartment by stepping into the middle of the living room and kicking up her heels in an explosive rendition of the Charleston.
D
The Dancer and the Dance A mong t he speakers at Calder’s memorial service, held at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art on December 6, 1976, a month after his death, was his great friend the critic, curator, and museum director James Johnson Sweeney. Sweeney had the deep, melodious voice of a Shakespearean actor or a Roman orator. He closed his panegyric by invoking William Butler Yeats’s poem “Among School Children” as he proclaimed: “Though the dancer has gone, the
B
Balanchine Although Calder and George Balanchine, by most estimates the greatest ballet choreographer of the twentieth century, never worked together, they knew each other to some degree. Both men joined an old-world grace and elegance with a very American feeling for speed and muscularity. On a few occasions a collaboration 45
dance remains. You have left us happiness not sadness, Sandy;—miss you as we must.”
E
Ellis Calder’s father, the sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, was a great admirer of the social reformer Havelock Ellis, whose Dance of Life (1923) he counted among his favorite books. I feel pretty sure that Calder too read this book, in which the art of dance is related to the rhythms of life and the universe, which Calder was harnessing when he made sculpture move. “Dancing and building,” Ellis writes, “are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. . . . The significance of dancing, in the widest sense, thus lies in the fact that it is simply an intimate concrete 46
Previous spread, top: Alexander Calder, Edgar Varèse, c. 1930, wire, 13 ¾ × 11 5⁄8 × 14 ½ inches (34.9 × 29.5 × 36.8 cm) © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York Previous spread, bottom: Alexander Calder, untitled, 1926, lithograph showing Calder, Carl Zigrosser and his first wife, Florence King, Peggy Bacon, and others, 9 3⁄8 × 12 1⁄8 inches (23.8 × 30.8 cm) © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York This page: Set for The Glory Folk, 1958, performed during the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
appeal of a general rhythm, that general rhythm which marks, not life only, but the universe.”
F
Folk In 1958, the very first year of the Festival dei Due Mondi in the Italian city of Spoleto, Calder was commissioned to create sets for The Glory Folk, a ballet by a young American choreographer, John Butler, who had earlier danced with Calder’s old friend Martha Graham. Spoleto was a tremendously exciting place that summer, what with the inauguration of a festival designed to celebrate fresh cultural collaborations and alliances between Europe and America. The theme of The Glory Folk was American evangelical experience. Calder’s set took the form of a red stabile with gothic arches, suggesting a place of prayer, and a silvery mobile that,
as the artist wrote, evoked “revelation.” The dancers reached out to the mobile, their arms extended in gestures of religious striving and yearning. Calder ordinarily took no interest in organized religion. The Glory Folk was one of a small number of occasions when he seemed to at least consider the possibility that the art of the mobile could suggest transcendence and maybe even the ineffable. Chandler Cowles, one of the people involved with The Glory Folk, wrote to Calder, “I can hardly wait to see the effect of your ‘Holy Ghost’ when it reveals itself in Spoleto.”
G
Graham Calder and Martha Graham were lifelong friends. In the mid-1930s, when Graham was already recognized as the preeminent modern-dance choreographer of her time, she worked with Calder on elaborate sets for two dances. Years later she would remember the famously informal Calder arriving in Bennington, Vermont, where the first of these collaborations was mounted, wearing “nothing but his undershorts.” For the Bennington dance, an elaborate survey of American history entitled Panorama, Calder created mobile elements hung over the rafters in the Vermont State Armory. The plan was for the dancers to manipulate Calder’s creations as they moved around the stage, but the critics found Calder’s interventions arbitrary. The response was no better in New York, where Graham presented her second collaboration with Calder, a dance called Horizons. In the New York Telegraph, Calder’s contribution was ribbed as “a series of floating balloons, ropes wriggling like sleepy snakes, and something that resembled a huge turnip.” Graham, herself a great adventurer, was interested in Calder’s adventures. The dance critic Arlene Croce once called a Graham solo, Lamentation, “solid geometry as live emotion”; that could double as a description of some of Calder’s work. But in the face of a critical press and the technical foul-ups that dogged Calder’s mobile sets, Graham must have concluded that she needed to look elsewhere for a collaborator. She found wh at she wa nte d w it h a not her friend of Calder’s, Isamu Noguchi, who over t he ye a rs c re ate d for Graham an extraordinary succession of stage designs. But Calder was there at the beginning. He worked with Graham on Panorama within months of Noguchi’s first outing with her, a setting for Frontier.
H
Harvard In 1930, Calder was invited to exhibit at t he Har vard Societ y for Contemporary Art, a pathbreaking art center organized by Lincoln Kirstein, then still an undergraduate at
the college, and a few of his friends. By the time, decades later, that Kirstein was recalling his Harvard days in a memoir entitled Mosaic (1994), he had pretty much rejected abstract art, but he described Calder’s appearance in Cambridge as among the “few golden hours” of the Harvard Society. He singled out the theatrical chops that Calder brought to a performance of his Cirque Calder, which began, “unforgettably, before the show, with sly, self-deprecating ingenuity [as] he padded through his audience handing out peanuts.” That little salute to Calder’s gifts as a performer is a high compliment, coming from one of twentieth-century America’s supreme connoisseurs of the theatrical arts.
I
Ives In 1975, the year before he died, Calder produced costumes for Mobilissimo, a ballet by René Goliard set to music by Charles Ives, whose bold modern vision embraced the sights and sounds of an older America. A Le Monde critic judged the ballet a failure, but did say that “the décor, Calder’s jerseys, very colorful, go wonderfully with the facetious music of Charles Ives, music that evokes an America of fairs, military parades, ice creams, and football games.” Calder never said much, at least not that found its way into print, about his taste in modern music. But he may have felt some affinity with Ives, another genius who admired Yankee ingenuity.
J
Josephine Baker Calder said that he never actually saw a live performance by Josephine Baker, the g reat A frican A merican dancer who was the toast of Paris when he arrived there in 1926. Maybe not, but in photographs and films of this long-legged, riotously funny queen of the Paris cabarets, Calder discovered an American original who inspired some of the earliest and choicest of his wire sculptures. The dance critic André Levinson described Baker as a “sinuous idol . . . there seemed to emanate from her violently shuddering body,
This page: Alexander Calder, Josephine Baker I, c. 1926, wire and wood © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Peter A. Juley & Son © Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC/courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
her bold dislocations, her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm.” Working with curves, curls, and spirals of wire, Calder produced a number of portraits of Baker. He reimagined her performances as mobility incarnate. His lengths of wire became calligraphic lines of force careening through space.
K
Kleist In 1811, the German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist published his essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (On the puppet theater). It is a curious piece of prose, arguably not so much an essay as a short story or maybe even a fable. The author, staying in a small town, has noticed a famous dancer watching a marionette show in the town’s fairground. When they fall into conversation one day, the narrator expresses surprise at the dancer’s fascination with this rather crude bit of theater. The dancer doesn’t find it crude at all: there is, he explains, a purity and even a 47
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spirituality in these humble marionettes, a quality he finds lacking in the movements of most dancers. Grace, the dancer explains, appears “most purely in that bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either the puppet or the god.” The string that connects the puppet to the puppet master strikes him as suggesting “nothing less than the path of the dancer’s soul.” While there is no way to know whether Calder knew Kleist’s essay, the dancer’s words help us grasp the power of Calder’s grandest mobiles of the 1940s and ’50s. Those unprecedented sculptural inventions, with their arrays of metal elements, are suspended from the ceiling by a single string that allows inanimate forms to take on a life of their own— as pure, as graceful, and (dare I say it?) as soulful as the marionettes that held the attention of a dancer in a little German town in the early nineteenth century.
L
Léger Calder’s fascination with a union of the visual and the theatrical arts had roots deep in the nineteenth century, when Richard Wagner brought together a range of creative spirits in what he dubbed the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art. Soon afterward, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, an aficionado of all things Wagnerian, asked composers, choreographers, and dancers to collaborate with a host of European artists, including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, in the productions of his Ballets Russes. It’s unclear what Calder knew of the work of the Ballets Russes, which folded with Diaghilev’s death, in 1929, three years after Calder arrived in Paris. But he certainly felt the afterglow of Diaghilev’s work, through various companies that echoed and built on the Russian’s achievement. I’m convinced that Calder was familiar with the sets that Picasso designed for Mercure, a ballet with music by Erik Satie and choreography by Massine that premiered in 1924 with a rival company, the Soirées de Paris; those sets, with their rattan image of a horse and rider, are somewhere in the prehistory of Calder’s wire sculptures. We know that Calder saw Jeux d’Enfants, with music by Georges Bizet, choreography by Massine, and sets by Calder’s friend Miró, because Kirstein reported seeing him (and Noguchi) at a performance in Paris in 1933.
Opposite: Letter from Alexander Calder to James Johnson Sweeney illustrating A Merry Can Ballet (1933), July 19, 1934 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York This page: Finale of Work in Progress, Teatro dell’Opera, Rome, 1968 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs/courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
Calder couldn’t have attended the ballets Skating Rink and Origins of the World, with which another great friend, Fernand Léger, was involved; they were mounted by the Ballets Suédois before he came to Paris. But there are enough echoes of Léger’s work in Calder’s designs for his own triumphant experiment in Gesamtkunstwerk, Work in Progress, that I am left wondering if he didn’t know, at least from photographs, some of what Léger had done for the Ballets Suédois. What is certain is that Calder’s most ambitious theatrical adventures are episodes in a history of the Gesamtkunstwerk that also involves the Symbolists of fin-de-siècle France, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and the theatrical experiments of the Russian Constructivists, the Dadaists, and the Bauhaus.
M
Massine In Paris in the spring of 1933, Calder received a studio visit from Massine, the dancer and choreographer who, in the wake of Diaghilev’s death, aimed to build on his legacy with a new company, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Massine had a huge reputation; he had thrilled audiences with his brilliant comic cancan in La Boutique fantasque (1919) and had collaborated with Satie and Picasso on Parade (1917), the striking invention
that brought Cubism’s discombobulating juxtapositions into the world of ballet. Calder was hoping to persuade Massine to let him mount what he was already calling a “ballet without dancers” for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Among the works Massine probably saw in Calder’s studio was what the artist referred to as A Merry Can Ballet. Calder described this as “an abstract ballet using a frame with rings in the 2 top corners through which strings passed from the hands to the objects—springs, discs, a weight with a little pennant.” There were also some tin cans—thus the punning title. For some while after Calder and his wife returned to the United States, in 1933, there was talk about his returning to Europe to work with Massine. As late as 1937, a reporter in Time magazine commented that he “wanted to make enormous enlargements of his bobbling Mobiles to be the background for a modern ballet.” The truth was that he wanted his mobiles to become the ballet. Massine, though, could not see his way to a stage without living, breathing dancers. “Massine,” so a friend of Calder’s recalled years later, “insisted that there should be dancers on stage.” He was, after all, a dancer himself.
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P
Provincetown Players For a few weeks or months in 1924, when Calder was still studying at the Ar t Students Leag ue in New York, he worked as a stage hand at the Provincetown Players, perhaps the most exciting experimental theatrical group then operating in the United States. T he man he took orders from was Cleon Throckmorton, a towering figure in early-twentieth-century stage design. In a letter to his sister, Peggy, who was living on the West Coast, Calder wrote of “my venture into the theatrical business. I guess mother told you that last week I worked every night down at the Provincetown Playhouse shifting scenery. It was rather fun.” Throckmorton was famous for dramatically lighting the stage, so that the actors sometimes appeared almost as silhouettes. The play of light and shadow would always mean a great deal to Calder. There may be echoes of what amounted to Throckmorton’s light shows in the ghosts and doppelgängers that Calder’s wire figures and abstract mobiles create as their shadows move through a space.
N
Nineteen Minutes It was Calder’s great Italian friend the curator and critic Giovanni Carandente who helped him to realize his dream of a ballet without dancers at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in 1968. Calder decided to call it Work in Progress, but as he and Carandente were working out the details in Rome, he commented that what the work, with its enigmatically autobiographical elements, really ought to have been called was My Life in Nineteen Minutes.
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O
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress This book of essays about James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was known as Work in Progress in the years before its final publication, in 1939, appeared in Paris a decade earlier. Among the essays is one by Robert McAlmon, w ho s e c i rc le s overl app e d w it h Calder’s, entitled “Mr. Joyce Directs an Irish Word Ballet.” During Calder’s years in Paris, ballet was becoming a metaphor for a new kind of freedom in the arts. McAlmon goes to the heart of that trend: “Music and the ballet are less inhibited by the demands of meaning than literature has been,” he writes. “Audiences do not insist upon
a story or a situation to appreciate the movements of a dance or the strains of music. Critics allow that there can be a pure art in these mediums; they have sometimes come to permit with painting, sculpturing and architecture, that for evoking a pleasurable emotion or sensation, form and colour does not have to be utilitarian, descriptive, literal or possessed of meaning other than the intent to awaken response. Also good comedy, clowning, pantomime, nonsense, slapstick, drollery, does not appeal to the sense of humour by explanation but by gesture. In such good dances or music as are humorous, it is rarely possible to define the reasons for the comic appeal. Prose too can possess the gesticulative quality.” If Joyce created an “Irish Word Ballet,” Calder created what he called an A Merry Can Ballet. Calder had probably met Joyce. He certainly knew Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, who wanted to be a dancer and briefly took art lessons with Calder; there is reason to believe that she was a little in love with him. And Calder’s great friend and supporter Sweeney—we have already heard him speak at Calder’s memorial service—was very much a part of Joyce’s circle in Paris in the 1930s.
Q
Quartet I n 1938, hopi ng t hat somebody would commission a large-scale kinetic sculpture from him for the New York World’s Fair, Calder created three maquettes. In each—one was later titled Dancers and Sphere— four differently configured forms are set on a single base and engineered so that each object moves in its own
particular way. Years later Calder laughingly confessed to an interviewer that “nobody ever looked at them.” What he did manage to create for the World’s Fair was what he called his Water Ballet, a group of water jets engineered to go off at different times in different ways. The work was set up, at the entrance to the fair’s Consolidated Edison building, but whether it was ever fully operational isn’t clear. A version was resurrected in 1956 for the General Motors Technical Center in Michigan. Five years later, with The Four Elements, mounted outside the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Calder finally realized at full scale one of the four-part inventions that nobody had been interested in back in 1939. One element in The Four Elements suggests an abstraction of a dancing figure, a triangular conical apparition with arms as if draped in some sort of robe. The other elements in this richly colored work are a column composed of semicircles, a disk mounted on a striped pole, and a lozengelike shape made of two intersecting arcs. These singular forms, propelled by hidden motors, create a comic dance performance, though the comedy is closer to the gravitas of Buster Keaton than to the giggles of the Marx Brothers.
R
Roxbury People never stopped talking about the dance parties that Sandy and Louisa Calder organized at their home on Painter Hill Road in Roxbur y, Connect icut. Rob Cowley, son of the Calders’ close friend the writer Malcolm Cowley, still remembers a party he attended in the summer of 1950. The night began mildly enough with spaghetti in the Calder kitchen. The entertainment was provided by none other than the famous stride piano player Willie “The Lion” Smith, along with “a pudgy clarinetist” named Cecil Scott. The teenager, already beginning to be interested in jazz, was awestruck by Smith. Meanwhile, Louisa was “set[ting] her ample hips in motion” and Sandy “was swinging a woman with surprising grace for a big man.” A little later, “Sandy had donned an outlandish Carmen Miranda–like headdress and was doing his version of the rhumba.”
Opposite, top: Alexander Calder’s Dancers and Sphere (maquette for 1939 New York World’s Fair) set in motion in Calder’s “small shop” New York City storefront studio, 1938 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Herbert Matter © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York Opposite, bottom: Alexander Calder, Water Ballet, General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan, 1956 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York This page: Reconstruction of Alexander Calder’s decor for Erik Satie’s Socrate, mounted at the Beacon Theatre, New York, in 1977 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
S
Samba
T
Never to be forgotten by the guests at the Calders’ parties in Roxbury were the Latin records and the Latin dances, the Calders’ beloved samba, which had what Calder called a distinctive “shuffle,” the body gliding sensuously, the arms probably doing something ornamental in the air, the variety of movements perhaps not unlike the movements of a mobile. The samba came into Sandy and Louisa’s world with their first trip to Brazil, in 1948, when Rio de Janeiro was full of dance clubs where people learned the new songs and dances in the months leading up to Carnival. In 1960 the Calders finally fulfilled their dream of seeing the Rio Carnival itself. The poet Elizabeth Bishop— who was living in Brazil with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, both friends of the Calders’—described Sandy and Louisa as thrilled by the festivities and undaunted by a night of rain: “The beautiful Louis XV costumes were all draggled, but they danced on until dawn. Calder stood up and watched for six hours. He is made of iron like one of his own creations, I think.” Another friend whom the Calders encountered in the midst of the festivities, the architect Frederick Kiesler, described Calder “in the jolliest of moods, with friends. We drowned in his energy, his continuous dancing and swirling and twirling.”
In 1936, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, one of the first American museums to embrace the avant-garde innovations emerging in Europe, mounted a festival of the arts. Two years earlier, the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, w it h a libretto by Gertrude Stein and music by Virgil Thomson, had had its premiere at the Atheneum, a now legendary event that Sandy and Louisa had attended. For the 1936 festival, Thomson mounted a production of Satie’s chamber opera Socrate, a setting of excerpts from the Platonic dialogues, concluding with Socrates’s death. It was performed on the same bill as a new ballet by Balanchine, Serenata: Magic, choreographed to music by Mozart and with decor by the Neo-Romantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Calder designed the set for Socrate, an exquisitely austere combination of circular and rectilinear forms. Years later Thomson would say that Calder’s work had “long remained in my memory as a stage achievement.” He described a sphere and a disk moving slowly across the stage, and he remembered how, as the singers recounted Socrates’s end, a rectangular form, initially white, turned to become entirely black— something, as Thomson said, “stelelike.” Never before and perhaps never since were the essentials of Calder’s art—the pull of gravity, the f lux of
Thomson
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Left: Alexander Calder, Dancer, 1944, bronze (in four parts), 27 × 23 ¾ × 17 ¾ inches (68.6 × 60.3 × 45.1 cm) © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York Below: Film still from Giulio Gianini’s footage of the dress rehearsal of Work in Progress, Teatro dell’Opera, Rome, 1968 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
from Calder’s mobiles. Among the most striking of these objects was Dancer, a sculpture in four parts: a base consisting of one massive leg, on which are mounted three elements that together comprise the other leg and the torso, the breasts, and, finally, the head and the arms. When given a gentle shove, Dancer, a ballerina who doubles as a comedian, gently circulates and rises up and bends down. In the context of Valentin’s gallery, where Degas’s sculptures of ballerinas were seen from time to time, Calder’s Dancer must have struck viewers as an evolutionary leap— Degas’s frozen motion reanimated.
W
Work in Progress
movement, the rising and falling forms—so deeply tied to questions of life and death, the connection unspoken even as the words were spoken. Who could doubt that a work about the death of Socrates had a particular resonance in 1936, when the Europe of creative, exploratory thought was already dead in Germany and dying in so many other places? “Attention to words and music had not been troubled,” Thomson wrote thirty years later of Calder’s setting, “so majestic was the slowness of the moving, so simple were the forms, so plain their meaning.”
U
Urbanism In Calder’s later years the lion’s share of his energy went into creating monumental sculptures for public spaces. The dance critic Edwin Denby, whom Calder knew slightly, once gave a lecture entitled “Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets”; Denby’s feeling for urban life as theatrical drama—a drama that took different forms in different times and places—was something that Calder definitely shared. The artist regretted, so he told an old friend, that “most architects and city planners want to put my objects in front of trees or greenery. They make a huge error. My mobiles and stabiles 52
ought to be placed in free spaces, like public squares, or in front of modern buildings.” He saw his larger works as elements in the urban drama; when he imagined a setting for one of his monumental sculptures, he wanted it to function as what he called “a real urban signal.” Nowhere is that drama more beautifully fulfilled than in the Federal Center in Chicago, where three dark, almost saturnine buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe define the plaza and Calder’s brilliant red Flamingo (1973) provides an ebullient, explosive counterpoint. At any time of day, the plaza is filled with men and women in motion; they become dancers in the urban dance, defining and redefining the dynamics of city life.
V
Valentin For his first show in New York with the gallerist Curt Valentin, in 1944, Calder exhibited works made in plaster and then cast in bronze, a medium he used only rarely. His bronzes were like nothing done in the medium before: they were works with multiple parts, the elements pivoting one atop the other, so that this most stolid and earthbound of media achieved some of the buoyant, kinetic quality that gallerygoers already knew
In 1968, when Calder finally got a chance to put together the “ ballet without dancers” that he had been dreaming of for close to forty years, he filled the stage of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma with standing and hanging mobiles, colorful birds and sea creatures, cyclists doing figure eights, and a man waving a red flag. The music was by three young Italian composers who combined electronic sounds with more conventional orchestral instruments. Work in Progress was the story of Calder’s life, but told in signs and symbols. It was also an exploration of the origins of life; and before all that it was the culmination of a lifelong fascination with dance, music, drama, and theater. Opinion at the premiere was divided: a critic in the London Daily Mail reported that “glittering guests gasped with horror at Alexander Calder’s Work in Progress,” but the novelist Alberto Moravia told Newsweek, “As a sculptor he realized
a great sense of theater. It was done w it h delicacy, w it h elegance, or maybe the word I mean is magic.” That this spectacle was mounted in Rome sets me to thinking about Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the preeminent sculptor of the Roman Baroque, who had been as fascinated by the theater as Calder would be three hundred years later. The English visitor John Evelyn wrote in 1644 that Bernini, “a little before my coming to the city, gave a public opera (for so they call shows of that kind), wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy, and built the theater.” That would pretty neatly describe what Calder brought off with Work in Progress.
X
Xylophone Among the many percussion instruments that Earle Brown assembled for Calder Piece, first performed in Paris in 1967, were glockenspiels, marimbas, cymbals, temple blocks, xylophones, vibraphones, cowbells, congo drums, and tom-toms. At the center of the action was a standing mobile, Chef d’orchestre, that Calder had created especially for the occasion. T he four musicians moved between their percussion instruments and Calder’s mobile, which became a percussion instrument as they raced (in a sense danced) around it. The critic Dore Ashton caught some of the comic, almost Keystone Cops craziness of a performance of Calder Piece. She was amazed at the way that “as the mobile gains momentum, the musicians accelerate their movements until they are literally running, producing an extraordinary visual effect as they chase and sound the bobbing red forms. Here, the synesthetic element, cherished for more than a century, is in full play. The rhythms produced by the mobile, swinging wildly into space, and the players who must keep pace, are rhythms that are endemic to both arts, visual and musical, and that are joyously tapped by the composer for expressive perceptions.” The art critic Pierre Descargues, writing shortly after the premiere, put the whole mad adventure in a nutshell: “It is a ballet and a game.” Silly and serious, simultaneously comically simple and crazily complex, Calder Piece was Calder, nearly seventy at the time, doing cartwheels with an avant-garde composer some thirty years his junior.
Below: Alexander Calder, Tightrope (1936), c. 1943 © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Herbert Matter © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York
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Z
Pageants and spectacles of all kinds had fascinated Calder since he was a boy. When he was nine, his family lived in Pasadena, California, where he was thrilled by the Tournament of Roses. His sister would particularly remember a f loat with “a peacock constructed wholly of white flowers, with the tail made entirely of unbelievably fragrant lilies of the valley.” She would also recall that the morning after the tournament, Calder was already busy sawing at six-thirty, making “horse heads from an old wooden box and hammering them onto handles—Mother just managed to save the handle of her new broom.” These horses were mounted by the local children for jousting matches. T hen Sandy proceeded to make chariots out of orange crates. What his friend Sweeney called Calder’s lifelong interest in spectacle began very early.
In Tightrope (1936), four enigmatic abstract acrobats are suspended on a long wire. When the wire is plucked, Calder’s spectral tightrope dancers are set in quivering life, each vibrating in its own way. For the photograph that Calder’s friend Herbert Matter made a few years after Tightrope was completed, he set the sculpture in a darkened space, where the abstract forms, like actors illuminated on a stage, suggest the protagonists in an archaic drama. They bring to mind Nietzsche’s words about the tightrope and the tightrope walker in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.” Any man or woman is a tightrope walker—an acrobat, a dancer—crossing an abyss.
Youth
Zarathustra
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On the occasion of the publication of Richard Prince: Cowboy, a major monograph on the artist’s preoccupation with the mythic American West, Luc Sante tracks the archetype through mass media, advertising, and the art of Richard Prince to illuminate the cowboy’s enduring appeal.
COWBOY
The mythic West was pretty much over by 1910, when John A. Lomax published his seminal collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. The big cattle drives from Texas to Fort Dodge, Kansas, had ended; the trails had been grassed over; roundups were by then confined to a few obscure valleys in southern New Mexico. “The last figure to vanish is the cowboy, the animating spirit of the vanishing era,” Lomax wrote. “He sits his horse easily as he rides through a wide valley, enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night,—with his face turned steadily down the long, long road, ‘the road that the sun goes down.’” And there’s your photograph, although you couldn’t quite get those effects with a camera in 1910. The proper cowboy picture requires a landscape, an impression of weather, a horse, and an outfit. “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,” says the dying cowboy to the passing buckaroo in “Streets of Laredo,” authored by the mighty Anonymous and included in Lomax’s book. What is it about that outfit? Anybody can wear a hat. Is it the jingle of his spurs? The tightness of his britches, the buttress of his chaps, the authority of his boots, the dash of his neckerchief? By 1949 the popular image of the 56
cowboy had evolved from Diamond Dick to Frederic Remington to Tom Mix and William S. Hart and had now arrived at Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, with his enormous hats and elaborately embroidered suits, unlike anything ever seen anywhere near the range. It was then that a photo essay in Life, by Leonard McCombe, redefined the terms. McCombe went to a ranch southeast of Amarillo, where he found some actual working cowboys. He photographed them doing cowboy things—roping, riding, branding—in a documentary style that had been the rule at Life for a decade but hadn’t yet affected motion pictures or advertising, at least in the United States. Suddenly America saw real cowboys standing in real dirt, secreting real sweat, laboring and lassoing and rolling cigarettes and reading western pulps in the bunkhouse. The text weighs the differences between them and movie cowboys, who could not be expected to ride sixteen hours a day, let alone castrate 50,000 calves and beat a thousand rattlesnakes to death over the course of their careers. The real cowboys wore standard Sears, Roebuck cowboy duds for the most part, but wore them better than anyone merely kitted up by the wardrobe department.
On the cover was Clarence Hailey Long, the star of the spread. The hat said cowboy but the rest of the package could maybe read existential, although nobody outside Paris would have known that word then. Actually, he does look weirdly French—a bit like Jean Gabin in a desert picture—with his baked skin and slitted eyes and thousand-mile stare; his roll-up and the curve it imposes on his mouth, almost but not quite a smile; and the polka dot foulard he wears around his neck, frayed at the edges, as elegant as anything you’d see on the rue de Rivoli. But if anyone was having those thoughts then, they remained private. Long and his friends personified western male authenticity, and their image made everyone in the image business take note. The feature reverberated through advertising for the next half-century and counting. To latter-day eyes it can look an awful lot like a Ralph Lauren fashion spread. Most famously, it led straight to Philip Morris’s forty-five-year campaign for its Marlboro brand (“The Big Job of Branding,” runs a section head in the Life piece), initially to reposition it from a woman’s to a man’s cigarette. The Marlboro campaign involved heroic photographs of cowboys in their element. Every item in
Previous spread: The cover of Richard Prince: Cowboy, 2020. Published by Fulton Ryder and DelMonico Books | Prestel. Artwork: © Richard Prince. Editor: Robert M. Rubin Opposite: Clarence Hailey Long. Photo: Leonard McCombe, courtesy the LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images Above: Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 2016, dye coupler print, 59 ½ × 89 ¾ inches (151.1 × 228 cm)
Lomax’s evocation is present somewhere, from the purple haze to the ring of mountains. Every scene was drawn from the common well of images also employed by western painters since the nineteenth century (filmmakers, too, although they had budgetary restrictions): roping a wild one, traversing the snowy pass, riding ’em across the stream, facing the sunset, tying up to the chuck wagon, and so on. They are a genuine artifice, meaning that every element of the picture actually existed on the physical plane at the time the photos were taken—even the cowboys were often actual cowboys, when actors couldn’t pass the realness test—but every scene constructed from those elements was staged. Even the horses were acting. The landscapes were reconfigured by long or wide lenses, the skies were enhanced in the darkroom, and who’s to say they didn’t now and then shift the moon a few degrees to the left? Twenty-odd years into the campaign’s run, Richard Prince, then working in the morgue at TimeLife, began to photograph tearsheets of those ads, cropping them to eliminate verbiage and capitalize on their dynamic. The editorial and aesthetic aims worked together seamlessly; removing the text helped to emphasize the pure western horizontality of those
scenes—or occasionally the vertical, as in tall grass or bucking bronco. Prince obviously wasn’t just making cowboy pictures; he was making pictures of cowboy pictures, or perhaps pictures of pictures of cowboy pictures. He was extracting and purifying a fixed image at large in the culture, by way of what was by then—after westerns had all but disappeared from movie houses and television—its most common and widespread vernacular representation. There was much talk about appropriation at the time, and claims made on behalf of the artisans who had confected the Marlboro pictures—which missed the crucial point that Prince was not rephotographing the tearsheets because he wished he could have been making his own cowboy pictures. He was depicting and imposing his frame upon an object within his purview, namely an advertisement in a magazine. He might have been, say, dramatically cropping an architectural structure with his camera to emphasize some aspect of its construction, as Charles Sheeler did with his Bucks County barn. Prince was not using his camera to capture a fleeting scene in the instant before it dissolved, as was the norm for art photography then; that was a particular use of photography that had received disproportionate attention beginning in the 57
mid-twentieth century. Instead he could be said to be harking back to the origins of photography, when William Henry Fox Talbot included a photo of a satirical print by Louis-Léopold Boilly, cropped and uncredited, in The Pencil of Nature in 1844. The original Marlboro pictures are highly wrought objects, each one something like a cross between a western movie and a military painting, that are intended for instantaneous capture and recognition by the preoccupied eye. Every fine detail of their construction has been engineered to flick across the retina for a fraction of a second and register by way of sedimented memory. They cannot, therefore, challenge preexisting notions or impose a new way of seeing. Their job is to provide familiar comfort, to reach back to childhood and revive dormant sentiments and aspirations. The passive viewer is meant to triangulate between the cigarette brand and a primordial dream of self-reliance, effortless mastery, untrammeled masculinity, and independence from all threats to the id. All of that plus the romance of violence, since while guns are never pictured in the Marlboro ads, they are nevertheless present in every frame; the ten-gallon Stetson always brings along its friend, the bluesteel .44. The transaction implicit in the ads is the true subject of Prince’s pictures—or one of them, anyway. 58
Prince is interested in shared culture, the sort of culture that rejects the word and even the idea of “culture” while doing all the work that culture does: everything from muscle cars to fan memorabilia, from truck-tire planters to Instagram posts, from bad jokes to drugstore paperbacks. He is not engaged in a reclamation project; however he may actually feel about Trans Ams or nurse novels, he is not in the business of dusting them off and helping them out of the gutter. He is not a sentimentalist. His interest in those things begins with the fact that they have largely gone unexamined, because they lie beyond the pale of elite esteem. Like a cowboy, Prince is hog-tying wild animals, and then he drags them into the surgical light of galleries, where they can be assessed and purchased. Of course he alters them along the way—a philosophical inevitability, no matter how much he sticks with their given properties—but his interventions usually consist of helping them be more themselves, even, than they were in their original form. The bad jokes occupy the centers of large canvases as if they were commandments or epitaphs; the Instagram posts are blown up to a size commensurate with the egos that supply them; the Rastafarians are assigned the guitars the white spectator needs them to hold. The cowboys were Prince’s first big project and remain his most classic subject. Most of his works
This page: Richard Prince, Untitled (original), 2009, original illustration, collage, and black cloth (bandana), 41 × 33 inches (104.1 × 83.8 cm) Opposite: Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 2012–13, inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 59 × 36 inches (149.9 × 91.4 cm)
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Opposite: Richard Prince, Untitled (original), 2006, original illustration and paperback book, 37 × 25 inches (94 × 63.5 cm) Above: Interior spread from Richard Prince: Cowboy, 2020. Published by Fulton Ryder and DelMonico Books | Prestel. Artwork: © Richard Prince. Editor: Robert M. Rubin Artwork © Richard Prince
involve cultural matters that first arose within his lifetime, but the cowboys go back to the beginnings of the nation. The Marlboro cowboys represent the refinement—the reification, you might say—of a national image slowly accreted over the better part of two centuries. The cowboy lurks deep in the back brain of people all over the world, including people who were never boys, never saw a cowboy movie, never saw a horse, never smoked a cigarette, never visited Texas or the continent in which it lies. And this despite the fact that cowboys have been steadily receding from the culture for fifty years. The canonical cowboy artists, Remington and Charles M. Russell, are far less likely to be included in a traveling survey of American art than they would have been decades ago. Whenever Hollywood makes a cowboy picture, pundits swarm in to declare a revival, which then fails to happen. Cigarette ads are, of course, prohibited nearly everywhere. But there is no confusion about the appeal of Lil Nas X and Sheriff Woody Pride: both in their separate ways have emerged from the cowboy’s most enduring range, the nursery. They ensure the survival of the cowboy in places where citizens—who may live in condominiums and work in offices—do not equip themselves with hat, boots, and gun to run routine errands. Recently Prince has rephotographed the tearsheets as tearsheets, mirrored rips along the page gutter
included, but with the language digitally excised. These works represent a change in that they restore the full expanse of the originals and emphasize their source in disposable printed matter. They remind us that we are looking at highly artificial representations of a thankless agrarian task, now almost entirely obsolete, that consisted of shifting herds of animals from one place to another many miles removed, along trails replete with hazards of all kinds, in near isolation and precluding much verbal communication, in harsh weather of all sorts, for negligible pay that was frequently converted into a single weekend’s toxic pleasure at the end of the drive. And that for complicated and intertwining reasons this job became an exemplar, a dream, an aspiration, a legend, a national identity, a sales pitch, an alibi for antisocial behavior, an excuse for violence, a basis for inhumane politics, and a model for alienation. And that even in full knowledge of all that, the appeal of the cowboy still remains, primal and sexual and powerful, as if exposure to his image had first occurred in the womb. Richard Prince: Cowboy, a monograph on the artist’s series, was released in the spring of 2020. Published by Fulton Ryder and DelMonico Books | Prestel. Edited and introduced by Robert M. Rubin. Rubin is also the author of Richard Prince: American Prayer (2011), copublished by Gagosian and the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name.
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PART 2
T
he sacraments of the newly converted were performed in the torrential summer rains, but the sacraments of my counter-religion were performed once every twenty-four hours, at nightfall, after I’d pressed the keycard against my hotel-room door. I’d turn on all the lights, charge my devices, call room service for a steak and French fries, watch HBO with the volume full blast, look at the Internet, sign for my meal with a 30 percent tip and eat only half of what came to me, unscrew the caps of all the toiletries, fill the bathtub with hot water, empty it, fill it again, wash the streets and crowds and conversions off me, drench myself in lotion from tiny plastic bottles, throw all the towels on the floor, call the front desk for more lotion, climb into the Egyptian-cotton sheets and take a selfie there. Some people act out of principle but the rest of us are easier to understand. I had $57,043 in art-school debt, a $5,189 balance on my Discover card, $213 in my checking account, a $20 Apple Music gift card, and $43 and a jarful of coins in cash. My mother lived with my aunt and cousins in a three-bedroom townhouse after losing my childhood home to Hurricane Brittany and losing my father to a polyamorous project manager he met at CrossFit. My older brother had disappeared in late 2020, along with his life savings, into a neoorthodox, purpose-driven cloister, and I only ever heard from him once a year when he forwarded a mass e-mail about the war on Christmas. It was spring when I stayed up late filling out the application for the job that got me here, clicking sane-enough-sounding answers on the psychological screening, signing the releases and privacy agreement, and offering up my writing samples, biometrics, social media passwords, and phone and laptop log-in information to an unspecified entity represented, upon reception of the application materials, by a slender, ponytailed woman in athleisure pants. She met me at a coffee shop, ordered an absinthe flavored green tea with a spirulina shot, said I seemed like a self-starting team-player, and promised me a job that could change the world. I should think of it as a performance, she said—a content provider crossed with a spy !—parting her plumped lips and laughing. I was to be myself, but different, should pretend to be myself as if I were
someone radicalized by the era’s movements, enlightened and hungry. “Do you know people like that?” she asked, not pausing for an answer. What I was to get in exchange for being myself, but different, she said, was a paycheck that would cover my student loans and health insurance and give me some money to spare. I had been given, too, the promise that if I successfully did what I was asked, I’d receive a bonus substantial enough to buy a cuteenough house and adopt a sweet-but-troubled rescue dog and an easy life somewhere safe from the future, some place like Minnesota where the coasts could not flood and the fires would not burn. I said yes, of course, after lingering over the contract long enough to suggest I had read it. The ponytailed woman laughed again, her face barely creasing where in another era a wrinkle might have appeared. Her ponytail, as she walked away, was the only worried thing about her. Her face was professionally unbothered but her hair quivered with concern.
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he had instructed me to spend time among the converts on the streets, so that’s what I did between nights in that bed. I had packed up my journals, clothes, books, and small kitchen appliances and surrendered them to a storage locker. I sat my housemates down and explained that I couldn’t help but join the believers in the streets. My housemates rolled their eyes, tried to dissuade me, then cried. I told them they would join me soon enough. I texted my mother and posted a photo of myself among the faithful in the park. Each day I would pretend to be one of the faithful, then back in the hotel room I’d pretend not to think of them or of the way I was using them, try to amuse myself with a vivid fiction about my employer, the one whose name I was never told. I’d convinced myself it must be a billionaire, probably a famously vindictive, sea-steading neofascist for whom any slight was not slight enough to overlook on the schedule of vengeance. I was working, I hoped, for the kind of money-grubber who could, with a hand gesture, destroy empires. It comforted me to think I was working for someone like that, the kind of person about whom you could watch a Netflix documentary narrated in conspiratorial and crypto-admiring tones.
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It comforted me to think of myself as an agent in a primitive and visceral personal revenge plot with payrolls and go-betweens and geo-trackers. It comforted me in the way one might be comforted by peeling off a scab, or pulling out a hair, or cutting into one’s own skin with a blade in order to feel. I would meet the eyes of the dubious hotel employees as I entered the threshold of evening, trying to hide any sign that I had been among the believers in the open air. But they knew I wasn’t up to good and I knew it too. Any suggestion that the job I’d accepted was about saving the world was nonsense, but I could at least find comfort in feeling that revenge was a plausible motivation. This seemed like a simple case of it, and I could understand revenge. I wanted revenge, too. I had a long list of targets, which I would also think of each night in that hotel room, and on it were pretty much half the people I’d ever met and many whom I hadn’t. I wanted revenge against my ex-girlfriend, against all the guys I’d hooked up with only to be disappointed again and again in the lack of pleasure available in the act of pleasure, against the seventh-grade teacher who gave me a C- in English, against the insurance company that wouldn’t pay to rebuild my mother’s home, against the art school that had indebted me by promising me that my education would improve my life when instead it just sensitized me to its miseries. I wanted revenge against the people who had given me what they called “opportunities” that ended up being opportunities to work for nothing wages, increasingly broke, too tired at the end of any day to undertake the great system of self-discipline that everyone told me was necessary to overcome being tired. I wanted revenge that I was too tired to eat right, too tired to work out, too tired to get things done, too tired to do anything but read the productivity listicles, the recipes for hacking into the form of rightness in this whole world of wrong, too tired, even, to love, which only took the form of cloying sexual need and emotional desperation, soon to lead to disappointment and despair, not just for me but for everyone. Those who were coupled up were in ragingly needy pairs, their wounds now symbiotic, posting obnoxious photos online together, treating each other horribly but afraid to leave. I wanted revenge for how vapid all love was, how degraded sexual pleasure was too.
I wanted revenge, but the person or people responsible for the misery in my life couldn’t be tracked down. If you tried to make a documentary exposing my enemies, no one would be on-screen, or else what was on-screen would be everything, a screen so crowded with the world you wouldn’t be able to make out the world at all. If I asked a stranger who was responsible for my misery, I knew what answer they’d have. And if you asked me who was responsible for my misery, even I would probably identify that person, too: it was me, we would all say. Me is the enemy we are all supposed to share. Like anyone else, I could enumerate my own defects, bad decisions, and ethical inadequacies, like the one about how I didn’t care enough about anything to refuse this job, to refuse this money, to question what it was all about, or the one where when I felt the stirring of desire for meaning I got sick about it and ran away. If you asked me who was responsible for my own misery, I’d blame myself with good reason and blame my own heart, which I believed was full of nothing but fleeting sensations and the hatred I then felt for this world. Or if you asked anyone else who was responsible for my misery and if this anyone else claimed to be politically enlightened, they might say some version of the system was to blame. I thought of these people, too, as I rested in the hotel’s clean sheets in the bed perfected by the exhausted cleaning ladies, my stomach swollen from the room service that the sad young men brought me from the kitchen where the sad old men cooked it. The enlightened would name the source of my unhappiness the system, meaning the mechanical and godlike methods of capitalism and its weapons of execution that are necessities of survival, the greatest weapon of all being the ability to make all existence feel like the loneliest thing in the world. It’s not that they were wrong. But the problem with those people, the problem with blaming the system, call it capitalism or whatever else, call it anything else, call it fate or history or the illuminati, call it bullshit, even, was that the word system confirmed a kind of irrevocability of the world. Pretty much all the system could do was break down, and us along with it. To call what made me miserable the system was pretty much to call it eternity. That’s what it felt like even in these hotel nights, and this, too, is why I blamed
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myself. I blamed myself that I couldn’t even accept the heartfelt explanations offered by well-meaning housemates and college friends, the ones who spoke of bringing it down or setting it on fire all the while unconsciously doing everything they could to stabilize and sustain the same system that they were thrilled to hate. I’d spent so much of my life agreeing with the world that I was responsible for my life’s disappointing course that in those days I found in this fiction of agency the perfect place to exact revenge against the world. If I believed the problem was me, I could live with knowing that nothing mattered, that nothing meant anything, and in this I could enact revenge against the source of all misery, myself, for once having desires at all, for once having imagination, for sometimes wanting life to mean something, anything, for sometimes even hoping, or at least hoping for something beyond money and safety and comfort, something even beyond the stupid lie of love. I hated all this about myself and wanted to kill it. I hated all the soft things that made up my person, the ones that remained vulnerable to the storm of the world, and so it was that the revenge I desired so fervidly was always against me, and never against the world, unless it could be said that my revenge against the world was withholding any concern for it, withholding any faith in it or its capacity to change.
W
hen people asked me later how I felt about my deception, my answer would be that how I felt was that I tried not to feel. I tried to only feel the sensation of the hotel-room nights between the working days, tried to enjoy my steak or my extravagant bath or the voluptuousness of making a mess for the workers to clean, tried not to think about what was wrong or right, what was logical or nonsensical, what was a good or bad idea. Ideas were merely dust particles in the sun compared to the noisy and metallic and costly things that circulated and whirred and weighed the world down, the things that poisoned and cured and killed and sedated. The powerful needed no ideas, and, as far as I could tell, needed no protection from them either. Power itself was not an idea, or not much of one. It was a word that meant
having the greatest accumulation of things possible, the things people needed to make other things, the things that could hurt people if withheld, or that could hurt people, too, when deployed. When power took human form, that form was more often than not the form of a servant, a person who had been made into a thing, an instrument for power’s uses. The woman with the ponytail and the toned upper arms, the one who carefully delivered my instructions, was an instrument of power, and her servitude to it was signaled in every aspect of her person, from her anxious hair to her pedicured feet. This job wouldn’t save the world, and neither could the believers in the streets. The powerful were the ones who could change things, but they were also the ones with the most at stake in keeping everything the same. Everyone who knew anything said there was no future, and this is what all the new believers on the street said too, but I couldn’t understand. How could there be no future if each day I found myself waking up into one? Every minute I lived was followed by a future minute that was, if I were to believe what everyone said, impossible. Every minute, every worry, every care and unpaid bill I had carried forward with me accumulated into even more future, a tedious and difficult one that hurt to enter. It wasn’t that there was no future. The problem was that there too much of one. Everything seemed to want to make that overwhelming and giant future ahead a grimmer version of the past, a heavier, more difficult version of being alive, so that anyone who lived in the present would dread the future, would regret its coming, would pray for it never to crash upon the present, wrecking in its infiltration all possible joy and torturing all possible meaning out of the minutes as they passed. It was as if we were not to think of the future as anything but a present made so terrible that we would have to avert our eyes from all tomorrows. All these, too, however, were merely ideas, and so were finally of little consequence. I was sorry that I had them. That there was even a group of people called “the powerful” was merely an idea, and a childish one at that. As you must surely understand by now, in those times, and even for many of the days after, the powerful were only ever real to me as far as their pale cold fingers reached into my bank account and put money in it and took money out.
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This page, from top to bottom: Installation view, Picture Gallery in Transformation: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, at MASP, April 5–December 30, 2019, Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Photo: Eduardo Ortega Installation view, Picture Gallery in Transformation: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, at MASP, April 5–December 30, 2019, Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Photo: Eduardo Ortega Exterior of Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Photo: Eduardo Ortega Opposite page, from top to bottom: Pietro Maria Bardi and Lina Bo Bardi, c.1940s. Photo: MASP Research Center Archive Installation view, Picture Gallery in Transformation, 1969, Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Photo: MASP Research Center Archive
MULTIPLO, DIVERSO, PLURAL
MUSEU DE ARTE DE SAO PAULO
Louise Neri speaks with Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), about the history of this unique Brazilian museum and his vision for its future. The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) was founded in 1947 by Brazilian entrepreneur Assis Chateaubriand. The founding director, Pietro Maria Bardi, remained there until the early 1990s. In 1968 the museum moved to a new building on Avenida Paulista designed by Lina Bo Bardi, Bardi’s wife, specifically to host MASP’s collection. Besides designing the bold and distinctive red building, its single elevated span a feat of structural engineering for its time, Lina also devised a radical method of display for the permanent collection, as well as innovative exhibitions embracing popular and vernacular art forms. After Pietro retired, the museum’s signature display was forsaken in favor of a more conventional model. In 2014, just a year after being appointed artistic director of MASP, Adriano Pedrosa, known for his large-scale international exhibitions as well as for important monographic studies of Brazilian artists, announced his commitment to restoring the Bo Bardis’ design aesthetic and exhibition philosophy at the museum. Here he speaks with Gagosian director Louise Neri—with whom he collaborated curatorially on the 1997 São Paulo Bienal, under the direction of Paulo Herkenhoff—about recollecting the past in order to reinvigorate and reinvent a museum for our time. LOUISE NERI Let’s start with your philosophy and its
evolution, which have profoundly impacted and reshaped the program of the museum as it appears today, and with the three catch words—multiplo, diverso, plural, or inclusive, diverse, and plural— that encapsulate your directorial approach to the program and MASP itself.
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The museum’s original mission, which we revisited two years ago, is what I identify myself with today. Every catalogue cites this mission, defining the museum as inclusive, diverse, and plural. It’s a starting point in terms of the museum’s philosophy, concept, and the development of its program. It’s also linked to the institution’s history: the founding director, Pietro Maria Bardi, and his partner Lina Bo Bardi, the building’s architect, tried to develop exhibitions and programs in that spirit, even though MASP was always known, both locally and internationally, as Brazil’s major museum for European art. Now we’re in the twenty-first century and these challenges are still there. What might it mean to be an inclusive, diverse, plural museum, and how might that be reflected in our program, with its cycles of different themes? ADRIANO PEDROSA
In terms of aesthetic histories, dispelling the idea of a single narrative has always been central for you in your own curatorial practice. AP Indeed. It’s also what motivated us in 2017 to develop a year-long program around histories of sexuality; in 2018, Afro-Atlantic histories; in 2019, feminist histories, women’s histories; this year, histories of dance; in 2021, Indigenous histories; and in 2024, histories of “diversity,” which in Brazil means queer histories. And we’re developing the exhibition program with a commitment to incorporating many of the thematic works into the display of the permanent collection as well. LN Can you discuss the ongoing threads of discourse that define your programming, from the permanent collection across the signature thematic exhibitions on popular themes, cultural themes, and social themes? You mentioned this conceptual shift in 2017, but let’s go further back, to when you first started at the museum: you had specific ideas about how to revivify it, not only in terms of its important local cultural legacy but toward a much broader consideration of art, society, and culture. AP Yes, t he idea of “ h istor ies” is cent ra l. Histórias in Portuguese is rather different from the English term “history,” because it can encompass both fiction and nonfiction. Also, being plural, it infers the idea of more diverse and inclusive histories, polyphonic histories that are processual, fragmented, and incomplete, not all encompassing. LN Where did this idea start? AP With a catalogue that I edited on the work of Valeska Soares, in 1995, titled Histórias. And then it came up again in the historical segment of the 1998 São Paulo Bienal: my major contribution to that segment, which was directed and largely curated by Paulo Herkenhoff, was to add the “s” to “histories” in the title of the project, Anthropophagia: Histories of Cannibalism. Then followed an exhibition project with Adriana Varejão, Histórias nas margens [Histories at the margins], and another with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Histórias mestiças [Mestizo histories]. This sequence of exhibitions and catalogues led to what we’re developing at MASP. LN As a comprehensive program. LN
Opposite, top: View of MASP’s construction at Paulista Avenue, São Paulo, 1963. Photo: MASP Research Center Archive Opposite, bottom: Installation view, A Mão do Povo Brasileiro (The Hand of the Brazilian People), 1969. Photo: MASP Research Center Archive This page: Installation view, Histórias da infância (Histories of Childhood), April 6–July 31, 2016. Photo: Eduardo Ortega
Yes. And perhaps because I’m not an art historian—I trained as an artist and a lawyer—I’ve developed my interests around social history, political history, contemporary themes that affect people’s lives. For museums around the world, those themes seem much more relevant today than purely art-historical ones such as “expressionism” or “abstraction.” LN Was the inextricability of life and aesthetics also one of your points of conceptual engagement with Lina Bo Bardi? AP Yes. Pietro Maria Bardi was very invested in art history while Lina was keenly interested in the popular and vernacular. I find it quite amazing that this museum could combine the development of a magnificent collection of European art with a deep interest in the self-taught, the vernacular, and the popular. LN And that this relationship could be housed in a radical modernist building. Bringing these three aspects together is a really powerful gesture. AP Yes. LN Can we discuss Bo Bardi’s philosophy of display, which impacted the actual programming of the museum? It seems important that you not only restored her radical method of display, using a system of glass-and-concrete easels, but you also restaged one of her most important exhibitions, The Hand of the Brazilian People. AP The glass-easel display is a model of possibility, alternative and liberating (although it has its restrictions as well). I think it’s interesting to understand it as a tool for decolonizing what is otherwise a canonical collection of European masters. LN What was Bo Bardi’s rationale for the glass easels? AP I think it came from some of the experimentation in exhibition display that was going on in Italy in the 1940s, such as the work of Franco Albini, who devised alternative ways of showing art, even sometimes suspending and floating it. But his approach was more precious than Bo Bardi’s, on a smaller scale and in an almost bespoke kind of context, using very refined materials. Bo Bardi’s concrete and glass, on the other hand, were both raw and everyday, bold choices that developed and complexified her approach. Although the glass-easel gallery is a really remarkable space, she worked against the idea of the museum as a luxurious, refined location. This is an important starting point. To take the pictures off the wall of the museum has deep philosophical and political implications; Bo Bardi may have realized that from looking at Albini. In her installations you walk through the art, you walk through the pictures, and by doing so you develop a closer rapport with them: they don’t exist on a different plane from you. This new situation gives them a democratic, open, accessible quality. AP
They also assume a new object quality, because the viewer can see their backs for the first time. They are no longer simply images. AP Yes, suddenly Bo Bardi’s notion of trabalho [work], as opposed to “artwork” or “oeuvre,” becomes visible. A painting can be a work as much as a wooden spoon can be a work, doing away with the distinction between art and artifact. This idea is put to extreme effect in the exhibition The Hand of the Brazilian People. LN Yet Bo Bardi conceived the glass-easel gallery specifically for the historical painting collection, didn’t she? So the painting collection was still somewhat reified, as opposed to the artifacts in The Hand of the Brazilian People, where everything was laid out on the floor. AP Funnily enough, I’ve argued just this myself in the past, but I’ve been criticized for it! When MASP opened on Avenue de Paulista in 1968, the canonical European and Brazilian artists were on the second floor, in an exhibition organized by Pietro using Lina’s display methods, and The Hand of the Brazilian People, her exhibition, was on the lower ground floor. Like their respective exhibitions, I always have seen this couple as polar opposites who negotiated with each other, thesis and antithesis resulting in synthesis. LN In this context, what does “decolonization” mean for you? AP In Europe and the United States, “decolonizing” implies including Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In Brazil, I think “decolonizing” means looking at the popular, the self-taught, the outsider, the vernacular. That’s why, for me, it was so interesting and rich to revisit The Hand of the Brazilian People and to raise Lina’s concept up to the second floor for the first time, which we did in 2016. We’ve also dedicated a number of solo shows to self-taught artists. As this is complicated territory to navigate, we decided to look at artists who have been important in the museum’s history. LN What are some of the other continuing evolutions in your programming? AP The next, crucial step for us, in 2021, is the inclusion of indigenous art. That entire year will be dedicated to indigenous histories, not only from LN
IN OUR EXHIBITIONS EVERYTHING IS IN PROCESS, EVERYTHING IS IN MOTION, IN PLAY, IN TRANSFORMATION— WHICH GOES AGAINST THE PERMANENT COLLECTION AND THE PERMANENT AND DEFINITIVE HIERARCHY OF HISTORYTHAT THE COLLECTION IMPLIES. ADRIANO PEDROSA
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Installation view, Histórias das mulheres: artistas até 1900 (Histories of Women: artists until 1900), August 23— November 17, 2019. Photo: Eduardo Ortega
Brazil but also internationally: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Scandinavia, and so on. Revisiting the history of the museum is interesting and rewarding because we keep finding previous cases of what we want to do in the history of the exhibition and the history of the museum. Under Pietro’s direction, the museum staged about fourteen exhibitions a year, including, once every two or three years, an exhibition of indigenous art. That stopped when he left. In the five years that we have been at the museum, we’re still working toward bringing that material back into the program. LN In discussing this general broadening of the program, of building on the museum’s existing conceptual infrastructure, we can also mention your outreach to museums around the world to create novel situations of exchange. Did your background as an organizer of major international exhibitions, where these kinds of exchanges happen very regularly, inspire you to transpose your imaginative curatorial praxis into the mechanisms of institutional exchange? Other museums are doing this, but you have been very proactive and consistent in your move to supplement certain irremediable lacks in the collection through temporary exhibitions. AP Many museums around the world are questioning the idea of the permanent-collection display, which tends to ossify artworks, rendering them canonical. I think it’s more interesting to think of them in a more lively and dynamic way. So we call our permanent-collection display Picture Gallery in Transformation and the idea of that title 70
connects to Bo Bardi’s glass easels, which are easy and quick to install once the artworks are prepared. Museums have limited space for their collections, but they can generate a certain dynamism by constantly changing the installation, moving things around, and offering new settings, new groups of works, new juxtapositions, new dialogues. LN Are there “destination” works that have to stay permanently on display? AP Yes, by artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Manet, Modigliani, and also Brazilian artists. LN What are some of your other strategies? AP We have a rather generous policy on outgoing loans to institutional partners, even though lending works is a big sacrifice and a lot of administrative work. We have to be strategic. LN Can you say more about Picture Gallery in Transformation? AP In 2018, we established a program with Tate, in London. We borrowed seven key works of theirs for nine months and installed them among the permanent collection display in the glass-easel gallery. LN And what was the selection predicated on? AP We’re interested in showing works that we can’t acquire ourselves. With Tate, we were looking at modernisms outside of Europe and America, in this case British or British-based artists— Ibrahim El-Salahi from Sudan, Francis Newton Souza from India, Francis Bacon, L. S. Lowry, Sylvia Sleigh, and Gwen John and more thematically at the figure, which is interesting for us, given that the focus or trend of our own collection is mostly around figurative art. Following that, we engaged in a more ambitious project with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, this time borrowing eighteen works. In terms of looking at their collection in relation to our own, we have a strong international collection up until the early twentieth century, but we have very little international art from the postwar period itself. So when we started working with MCA, we considered many postwar artists who are lacking in our collection—Magritte, Matta, Wilfredo Lam. Since then, we’ve committed to ensuring that at least half of the artists are
women. So this year from MCA we have Marlene Dumas, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Dorothea Tanning, and Gertrude Abercrombie. And now we’re working on a book, MASP Picture Gallery in Transformation, which maps all of these exchange exhibitions and shows what happens when a specific artwork is introduced to create a mindful juxtaposition with the collection. LN Up to mid-career you were a curator of ambitious international projects that were also innovative exhibition models. Can you discuss how that part of your work has informed your distinctive and unique approach in the museum? You’re reinventing the institution, emphasizing aliveness and creativity, rethinking artworks as dynamic entities rather than distended in a fixed historical framework. AP Two artist-curated exhibitions in American museums were formative references for me: Joseph Kosuth’s Play of the Unmentionable, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1990, and Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992. I didn’t see either of them but I have the catalogs. What interested me was how those exhibitions regathered and recontextualized different objects in the museum, and how these new contexts, juxtapositions, and gatherings created entirely new meanings or uncovered latent ones. LN A critical and deconstructive practice. AP Yes, they debunked the high modernist belief that an artwork can be presented neutrally, the whole idea of the neutral white cube and the neutrality of the exhibition space, the institutional space, the exhibition narrative itself. The Historias exhibitions are also trying to tackle this idea by bringing together different chronologies, works from different origins or different periods, or with totally different qualities. LN In doing so, you’re creating a sort of chronotopic thickness of history, looking at so many things in the same spatial and temporal zone. AP Yes, exactly. LN Anthropology insists on the different temporalities embedded in forms of art that do not subscribe to modernist principles and mythologies of modernist truth. AP Yes, so in our exhibitions everything is in process, everything is in motion, in play, in transformation—which goes against the permanent collection and the permanent and definitive hierarchy of history that the collection implies. For example, the cover of the catalogue for Histories of Childhood juxtaposes Auguste Renoir with Bárbara Wagner with children’s drawings—high European, contemporary Brazilian, and the child, whose art and voice are important for us at the museum. LN In talking about exhibition models, we still talk about benchmark exhibitions such as Magiciens de la terre [Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989] or High and Low [The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990–91]. In fact, these were not novel structures for exhibitions; they just appeared to be so because of the centrist context in which they were produced and promoted. AP Yes, absolutely. LN There was even a time in American museums when the artist’s-choice exhibition, such as the Kosuth and Wilson exhibitions that you cited, was an extremely provocative idea. AP It goes back to the issues of diversity and inclusion. It’s political. LN But this revelation is now becoming visible in museums everywhere. AP Yes, it’s a worldwide trend, a zeitgeist.
This page, top to bottom: Installation view, Histórias feministas: artistas depois de 2000 (Feminist Histories: artists after 2000), August 23–November 27, 2019. Photo: Eduardo Ortega Installation view, Histórias afro-atlânticas (Afro-atlantic Histories), June 29–October 21, 2018. Photo: Eduardo Ortega Installation view, Picture Gallery in Transformation: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, at MASP, April 5–December 30, 2019, Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Photo: Eduardo Ortega All photos courtesy Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Raymond Foye offers a window into his long-standing friendship with Graham Nash, guiding us through the legendary musician’s evolving interest in art and the visual world.
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One day I was in a taxi with Graham Nash. As we passed a large self-storage unit in the borough of Queens, he shared a confession that has quietly haunted me ever since. He allowed that one of his erstwhile fantasies in life has been to purchase just such a storage building and then open every single room to examine the contents, thereby coming to know each person through their possessions. A biography in objects might be a good way to describe this essay. Or, how does one use a work of art as an instrument for self-knowledge? This is the question Nash has been asking himself since he came of age in the 1960s. Nash’s interest in art began in swinging London in the 1960s, where surrealism and psychedelia were transforming the drab postwar cityscape. “I was sitting home in my flat in London, it must have been 1967, and I was in the Hollies. Eric Burdon and I
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were friends because we both came from the north of England. Eric stopped by with a book under his arm, a monograph on the work of M. C. Escher. I’d actually just taken a tab of acid and it was coming on as I began looking at the images. It was like falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland.” Around the same time, Nash had dinner with Paul McCartney in his home in St Johns Wood, and it was there he saw his first painting by René Magritte, The Listening Room (1952), depicting a large green apple in a room—the inspiration for the Apple records logo. McCartney might well have been speaking for Nash when he told The Guardian in 2008, “What I love about Magritte is he turned the world upside down and inside out in terms of meaning and significance. . . . the world is a jungle of crazy interpretations.” The notion that one could live with an object that radiated this kind of power was something Nash had never experienced. The third crucial factor in shaping Nash’s visual world was his friendship with the Dutch artists Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger, a design team collectively known as The Fool. Their blend of psychedelia was a continuation of the florid graphics and paisley styles of Fortuny and Liberty of London, turn-of-the-century design houses that were likewise influenced by the colors and patterns of India and the Near East. The Fool designed posters, album covers, and clothing for Cream, the Move, Procol
Harum, the Incredible String Band, and the Beatles. Nash hired The Fool to design the Hollies’ 1967 album Evolution, where the band are arrayed in full Fool attire. They also designed some of the earliest psychedelic episodes on film, including the “I am the Walrus” sequence in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967) and the 1968 cult film Wonderwall with soundtrack by George Harrison. Nash’s good manners and English civility mask the rapacious predator that lies at the heart of Nash the collector. Whether he is discussing his own photography or his collecting, Nash always refers to it as “the hunt,” and as long as I have known him, he has been hunting images, voraciously. Nash is one of the only two musicians I have ever known who would wake up early in the city where he would be performing that evening and head out to the local museum. (Tony Bennett is the other.) He always has a camera slung over his shoulder, alert to the chance encounter with the unexpected image. He has been a regular at the galleries and auction houses of New York, San Francisco, and London, where he has kept homes over the years. Flea markets and thrift shops are a favorite pastime, and today he often spends his spare hours searching the Internet for artists, or just pursuing a random encounter with a compelling object. I spent a gray and drizzly afternoon this February with Nash and his wife, the
Previous spread: Graham Nash shopping for antiques, 1972. Photo: Joel Bernstein Opposite, top: René Magritte, La chambre d'écoute (The Listening Room), 1952, oil on canvas, 17 ¾ × 21 ¾ inches (45.2 × 55.2 cm). Menil Collection, Houston. Artwork © 2020 C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Menil Collection, Houston/Art Resource, New York Opposite, bottom: Graham Nash at home, San Francisco, 1972. An M. C. Escher print from his collection can be seen on the floor to the right. Photo: Joel Bernstein This page: The cover of Graham Nash’s first solo album, Songs for Beginners, 1971.
photographer and painter Amy Grantham, in their Lower East Side apartment. These days he lives a life on St. Mark’s Place that is creative and anonymous. That might seem like a strange word to apply to one of the most famous rock musicians of his generation, but Nash has always had the gift of not calling attention to himself. Once in 1991, Nash and I walked the entire length of Golden Gate Park, and not a single person recognized him—and I should add we were walking in the midst of one hundred thousand fans who had just watched him perform on stage with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as part of the Bill Graham memorial concert (which also featured John Fogerty and the Grateful Dead). How is this possible, I kept asking myself? It simply had to do with the way he carried himself. Jack Kerouac once said it is the duty and oath of a writer to observe and not be observed, and this attitude lies at the heart of Nash’s life as a musician and artist. “I had a poor upbringing in Manchester, England, following the war,” Nash told me. “We had no images on the wall, not a print or a reproduction in a frame, absolutely nothing. I think I’ve always thirsted for images as a result.” Perhaps the mistrust of images can be traced to a strong streak of iconoclasm in British history, such as the sixteenth-century Reformation, in which religious images were destroyed on an unprecedented scale. But there was another reason for the visual scarcity that Nash recalls: following World War II, virtually everything that could be recycled,
was—including paper and cardboard. All in all, postwar Manchester was an exceedingly stark environment. Nash’s collecting did not begin in earnest until after he moved to America and met extraordinary success with Crosby, Stills & Nash. “Suddenly I had almost limitless income.” Nash settled in San Francisco, preferring the music scene there, and shunning the commercialism of Los Angeles. He bought an old Victorian house on Buena Vista Park in the Haight, with beautiful woodwork that he meticulously restored. Suddenly he had walls, in fact many walls, and they needed to be filled. Through a chance encounter with a small newspaper ad, his earliest artistic awakening was rekindled. “I saw by chance an ad in the newspaper from the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco, they were showing M. C. Escher, so I went by. After years of studying them in books, I’d built up such anticipation of seeing them for real that I bought seven prints the first day. I think in the end I acquired about twenty.” It was also through a small newspaper ad for Escher that Nash met the private dealer Charles Wehrenberg, who would become a close friend and trusted advisor. Wehrenberg was dealing maps, rare books, and fine-art prints out of the vault of the Bank of America on California and Montgomery streets. “Nash was the first millionaire I dealt with back in the days when people answered their own phone and acquired things to suit their own taste,” Wehrenberg recalled. (The fact that Nash was pursuing
his collecting through newspaper want ads is another sign of how the art world has changed.) Nash arrived at the vault with his manager, Elliott Roberts. Both made purchases and both became regular clients. “Escher’s standing in the art world was tiny, so Nash was foresighted,” Wehrenberg told me. “Escher is easy to criticize, but the good ones are absolutely rare twentieth-century iconic items. I believe his is one of the few artistic careers that will resurface century after century and mean the same thing, because he’s tied into geometry and the logic of thought.” Nash concurs about Escher’s standing: “I think he’s been terribly underestimated, and unfortunately it may have been some of us hippies who were responsible for that, making all those blacklight posters of his work.” For years Nash sought and eventually acquired Escher’s masterpiece Metamorphosis III (1968), the artist’s largest work (7 1/2 inches by 22 feet) printed (in an edition of six) from thirty-three woodblocks and hand colored. Nash’s copy remains the only one in private hands. Nash’s eyes still light up when he recalls his first encounters with Escher’s work in the flesh. “I like to be as close to the flame as I can get, and to handle those Escher prints was a true joy.” Soon, Nash traveled to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and spent three days poring over Escher’s work, examining in person nearly the entirety of the Dutch artist’s graphic work. Much of the joy of collecting is furthering one’s education, and Nash is voracious in this regard: “I wanted to understand the entire
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development, and how he made these discoveries. Collecting is an education, you go down the worm hole. If someone did this wonderful thing, what else did they do?” The way one thing leads to another is one of the more fascinating aspects of collecting: context, influence, and precedence are integral aspects of art history, and these same elements always seem to play themselves out in a personal collection. Close on the heels of his Escher acquisitions, Nash began collecting German Expressionist prints, drawn to the stark beauty of Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. This in turn led him to a collection of the wordless novels (in woodcut) of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, which in turn led him to the German antifascist propaganda art of John Heartfield. “Communication: that’s what I’m trying to do in my own work, and that’s what I’m drawn to in others,” Nash explains. Does he make any distinction between high and low, popular and fine art? “I’ve tossed this question around in my mind for years. I just like what I like and I go on that. My eye is a strange one, I’m always interested in the
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surreal moment that disappears in a flash.” In 1970 Nash began collecting underground comic art of the 1960s. In retrospect this seems like a logical move, especially for a figure at the center of that vortex, but in 1970 there were no serious collectors in this field, and nothing to indicate that the material would ever appreciate to a significant degree. But the art-historical awareness Nash had gleaned from his earlier purchases lent a new perspective, and he purchased R. Crumb’s drawing for the cover of Zap Comix #1 for the healthy price of $5,000—a bold move, and one that paid off well in 2017, when it sold at Heritage Auctions of Dallas for $525,800, part of a $1.1 million sale of Nash’s comic art. Why does he sell, I asked? “I think when you have three kids and households in several places, sometimes you need money,” he notes unsentimentally. On further reflection he adds, “When I’ve gotten all the juice out of an object.” It’s a telling remark, because it shows how Nash thinks of these objects as sources of inspiration for his own work.
Nash’s career as a photography collector began in earnest in 1970, when he met the late San Francisco dealer Simon Lowinsky. “Keep in mind that in 1970 serious curators and critics were still debating whether photography could be considered a fine art,” Nash told me. The impetus was seeing Diane Arbus’s classic image Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. (1962). It was the first photograph he purchased, paying $4,000. Once again, he felt compelled to acquire the image. “The image gave sharp focus to the madness of war,” Nash later wrote in the introduction to Eye to Eye (2004), a monograph on his own photography. “There’s such hatred in his twisted face. . . . It had a chilling effect on me because I was then deeply involved in trying to raise awareness of the horrors of the war in Vietnam by playing benefits and antiwar rallies. And it was then that I began to realize that I wasn’t seeing the world with enough clarity. Arbus, with her great gift of clear vision, was teaching me how to see. . . . I resolved right there and then to make a greater effort to absorb and
react to what I saw, and not just be a passive bystander.”1 O ver t h e nex t t went y ye a r s, N a s h amassed a collection of over 400 photographs that included virtually every major name in the history of the medium. When I asked him to single out a few favorites, in addition to Arbus he named P. H. Emerson and John Herschel from the nineteenth century and Lewis Hine, Weegee, W. Eugene Smith, and Robert Frank from the twentieth. I recall visiting him at his home in Encino, California, in the 1980s, when one could hardly open a cupboard for a tea cup without dozens of photographs tumbling out. Soon Graham Howe was hired as collections-management specialist and the photographs were moved off-site. In April of 1990, Nash decided he wanted to get in on the ground floor of the digital revolution and opened a fine-art workshop with some of the finest talent Silicon Valley had to offer. “I realized it was going to cost a couple of million to do that, so I decided to sell my entire photo collection.” The auction at Sotheby’s, organized by Wehrenberg, raised $2.4 million, still a record for a single photograph-collection sale. I attended the preview reception with Nash and as we stood in front of the Arbus photograph that had started the whole journey for him, a tall thin man in his late thirties shyly approached. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. Nash looked at him carefully and said no. “I’m the boy in that photograph.” And indeed he was. “You must tell me the story,” Nash pleaded. “It was very simple, I was in Central Park with my mother, playing with my toys, and a young woman approached and asked if she could take my picture. My mother agreed. I happened to be holding that toy hand grenade. All of a sudden I decided to make a funny face and she snapped it. There was nothing sinister happening at all. It was just a nice day in the park.”
In truth, Nash was no stranger to photography. He’d been taking photographs seriously since the age of eleven, as many surviving examples testify, including a haunting portrait of his mother, absorbed in thought, taken unawares. “I had a camera before I had a guitar,” Nash told me. His father, Bill, was an avid amateur photographer. “One day, when I was ten years old, he showed me a piece of magic that changed my life forever. He would develop his negatives in the kitchen, and then nail my blanket to the window in my bedroom, transforming it into a darkroom. I will never forget the moment when I first saw him make a print.”2 The relationship between photography and social justice has always been appealing to Nash, but there is a more personal underlying connection. In the late 1950s, Nash’s father unwittingly purchased a stolen camera from a friend. The police arrived at the house, and rather than reveal the name of his friend—an unforgivable move in the poor working class city where they lived—his father instead accepted a oneyear jail sentence in Manchester’s Strangeways prison, an event Nash memorialized in his 1974 “Prison Song.” “My father was an ordinary, God-fearing, good, hard-working man, and he couldn’t understand why the judicial system was not fair in this particular case. A year in jail for a camera that cost twenty quid is preposterous, but to ruin a man’s life for keeping his sense of honor proved totally confusing to him. He was only thirty-two when he went to jail, but he was ultimately devastated by the experience. I think it broke his heart and very much contributed to his early death at forty-six.”3 Nash has discovered subtle but important parallels between collecting and appreciating art and his own creative life as a songwriter. “When I write a song I may have a very specific idea in mind, and I almost always do, but once you release the song everyone has their own interpretation of it,
Nash’s eyes still light up when he recalls his first encounters with Escher’s work in the flesh. “I like to be as close to the flame as I can get, and to handle those Escher prints was a true joy.”
Opposite: Robert Crumb, the unused cover of ZAP Comix, issue number 1, 1968. Artwork © Robert Crumb, 1968. Photo: courtesy Heritage Auctions, Dallas This page: Duane Allman’s Gibson SG guitar, c. 1961. Photo: courtesy Heritage Auctions, Dallas
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and in time all those different interpretations actually constitute its meaning. I think all works of art are like that. How I think about art is very similar to how I make music. I love it when someone comes up to me years later and says, You know, I never heard that piano part before. I’m interested in things that unfold, that don’t remain static.” The chance encounter has always been the basis of Nash’s collecting. “I’m not walking around lusting after objects all day long,” Nash told me. “I try to keep myself open to inspiration. You put yourself in the right mood and the spirit of discovery just happens.” Being on tour became a convenient way for Nash to explore galleries and rare-book shops in locations he might not
This page, above: Bob Dylan, Nashville, 1970. Photo: Graham Nash This page, right: Graham Nash, Scotland, 2019. Photo: Amy Grantham Opposite: Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash, Nashville, 1970. Photo: Graham Nash
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otherwise visit. Or he could maintain regular contact with favorite dealers, such as Maggs Bros. in London, where, in 1974, he popped in on the afternoon of a sold-out show for 90,000 fans at Wembley Stadium and made one of his finest acquisitions: a large folio of camera lucida drawings by Sir John Herschel, a prized possession that Nash eventually donated to the Getty Museum. The mark of any great collector is the combination of education and gut instinct. “Whenever I leave a gallery after seeing something significant, as I’m turning the door handle, there’s always a voice that says, ‘Don’t do it, don’t leave.’ When I hear that voice, I always go back and buy,” Nash told me. I repeated to him a remark Mrs. Vincent Astor once made—that she never regretted anything she ever bought, she only regretted things she didn’t buy. “Easy for her to say,” he said with a smile. And if money were no object today? I asked him. “Off the top of my head, two things I would immediately buy would be the complete twenty-volume photogravure run of Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian and the double-elephant folio of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America.” “The life of objects is transmitted through the people who own them,” Nash muses. “Great art never stops working, but when it has satisfied you, it’s time to pass it along to another person.” Nash is unsentimental about parting with artworks once they have satisfied his curiosity. “When I have soaked in what an image or object can teach me, then I can let it go. But not until.” Now seventy-eight, Nash is feeling the need to let go of some of the objects he owns. Last year at Heritage Auctions he sold nineteen vintage guitars, including the Martin D-45 he played at Woodstock, Johnny Cash’s 1934
Martin O-17, and Duane Allman’s circa-1961 Gibson SG, the latter selling for $591,000, making it one of the most expensive guitars ever sold. One guitar that Nash parted with in 1970 recently made $420,000 at Bonham’s: a 1955 Fender Stratocaster he purchased in a Phoenix pawn shop for $300 and gave to Jerry Garcia as a thank you for playing the pedal steel part on “Teach Your Children.” “There was no budget for studio musicians and he played such a memorable part I had to give him something.” Known as the “Alligator” because of a sticker placed on the front by the previous owner, it was Garcia’s touring guitar from 1971 to ’73 and was played on Workingman’s Dead (1970), American Beauty (1970), and Europe ’72. One thing I’ve always admired about Nash’s collecting is how no object is too small or insignificant to him if it holds some spark of inspiration. For years when he lived in Encino, his favorite pastime was the enormous flea market in the Pasadena Rose Bowl, which often houses five thousand dealers. “I liked it because when I went there I was invisible,” Nash said with a twinkle. “Everyone was just looking straight down, at stuff. You could be Mick Jagger and nobody would know.” W ho a re the collectors he cu rrently admires? “In photography? Michael G. Wilson, the producer of James Bond movies. Everything he owns reflects a perfect eye.” Nash ponders the question further. “I’m also deeply impressed with what George Kaiser is creating in Tulsa, with the Woody Guthrie Center, the Bob Dylan archive, and his many other activities. To purchase the entire personal archives of Bob Dylan all in one go showed tremendous foresight. Sure it was expensive, but a year later Bob was awarded the Nobel Prize and the value of the collection must have tripled overnight.”
Nash himself is an important collector of Dylan manuscripts. He disappears into the next room and emerges with a manuscript box filled with Dylan’s song lyrics, a college memoir, an unpublished play, and a highly personal reflection on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, among other things. Nash becomes downright morose when I pose the question every great collector gets asked: What’s the one that got away? “That would have to be the Bob Dylan little red spiral-bound composition notebook to Blood on the Tracks. I was out on tour and somehow missed it at auction by one day. Fortunately my friend George Hecksher acquired it, and later donated it to the Morgan Library here in New York.” I asked Nash to give me a quick tour of the art and objects that surround us in the apartment where we are sitting. “ These are pretty much all things that have randomly found their way into my life recently,” he notes. There is a Joan Miró tapestry, a Henry Miller watercolor, a weaving by Edith Zimmer, and a magnificent large Hilla Rebay watercolor. (Rebay is an overlooked abstract painter and the person responsible for commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to design New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work is the latest passion for both Nash and his wife
Amy.) “Not all of these are great works of art,” Nash says unapologetically, “but that’s the fun of collecting, to mix it up a little.” There are also many examples of folk and outsider art in the apartment. “I often go to the American Folk Art Museum here in New York. You see the most incredible conceptions outside of what we normally think of as ‘art.’ There’s no theory. They’re just doing it to communicate something.” For Nash there is a strong but subliminal correspondence between photography and songwriting. Time and again in classic songs like “Our House” and “Marrakesh Express,” scenes are portrayed with a vividness and precision that have been honed from close looking. Story, tableau, light, local color—all are memorably presented. “I don’t see the difference between photography and music. To me it’s all just energy. Being a performing artist you can deliciously change a song each time you perform it.” How do you remain invested in the same material year after year, I ask him. Nash answers with a simplicity and conviction that remind me of his fellow northerner David Hockney, “Because I believe in it. Every time I sing ‘Our House’ I’m back in that living room I shared with Joni Mitchell. And I understand that members of my band sometimes hate it when
people sing along, but I thoroughly enjoy it, because they’re invested in that music— it changed their life at some point in some way. And when all you’re trying to do in life is write a memorable tune, why are you getting mad when people sing it?” An attraction to demanding and difficult situations is part of the personality of the collector. “Contemporary art: it’s an endlessly weird thing and it’s not for everybody, but it’s terribly important to allow your mind to escape to places where that kind of vision exists,” Nash muses. “It’s about being forced to come to grips with different views of reality. You have to work at these things. Curiosity is the key.” A few years ago, Nash was doing a book signing for his autobiography Wild Tales, in his home town of Manchester. After having a book signed, a man slipped him an envelope and said, look at this later. “When I returned to my hotel I opened it, “ Nash said with a smile. “It was my school report card from when I was eleven years old. And the teacher wrote, ‘This boy wants to know everything.’ So I guess I haven’t changed much.” 1. Graham Nash, Foreword, Eye to Eye: Photographs by Graham Nash, ed. Garrett White (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004), pp. 8–9. 2. Ibid., p. 8. 3. Nash, quoted in White, Introduction, Eye to Eye, p. 11.
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SARAH SZE When a studio becomes very active, you find works. They appear. This collage started as just a remnant lying around in the studio, but over time it stood out as a work in itself. Its first use was as a tool to work out the concept for a huge permanent public artwork. The collage is about 2 1/2 feet long and 1 foot wide, made up of hundreds of individual, torn-up photographic images strewn across a sheet of paper; the finished sculpture will be spherical and at a scale of 50 by 25 feet. I wanted to record the sky over New York during the span of an entire day, but what’s 80
more important is that the photographs could have been taken anywhere in the world, or on any day—yesterday or in 200 bc. So the collage has an anytime, any-place timelessness to it, and yet it has an intimate quality. Somehow you sense that it is one specific day: one dawn, one dusk. I needed it in fragments to create a gradient, where I could move the elements around like cards in a deck, or a palette. When you set up a traditional painter’s palette, you can then understand how to mix colors. It creates a way of making decisions, of understanding
a color before you even start a painting. In the collage, I was using the torn fragments of photographs like strokes of color, in the way they appear in nature. The dark outer edges are dawn and dusk, and at the center—which represents noon—the sun is so strong that the image is blown out completely, a sort of perfect reflection of what a photograph is—just a way of recording light. Of course dawn and dusk are brief moments in the day, but they have a way of “burning into time” in a more significant way; if calculated rationally, they would be just tiny dots
SHORTER THAN THE DAY on the spectrum, a few minutes out of hundreds of minutes of daylight. Because the photographs were taken at evenly timed intervals, there are many, many more images than appear here. But I didn’t want a regular ticking recorder of what the sky looked like every single minute, but instead to play around with how time waxes and wanes: correspondingly, every image was printed at a different size. The collage is like a wall calendar, a diary, or a deconstructed datebook; these forms embrace our compulsion to create little boxes of time to make sense of our lives passing.
The collage is more intuitive than mathematical because it tries to measure what a day feels like, how it is perceived, how one day is remembered to the next—no matter how absurd, futile even, that effort is. This visual timekeeper is idiosyncratic, fragile, and approximate; the fragments are of many different sizes; torn, not cut, uneven at the edges. It is not about finding a true perceptual frame or tool for reality, but more about how tenuous the effort to measure is, in and of itself. The collage in the studio is just a temporary grouping of elements; if you
sneeze, it’s gone! So my effort to figure it out is present in all the odd formal decisions that involve irregularity, anomaly, randomness— all human qualities that computers don’t compute. It has the rhythm of life, where the space between things is never the same.
Sarah Sze, Shorter Than the Day, 2019–20 © Sarah Sze. Text © Sarah Sze; edit: Louise Neri 85
Building a Legacy In this ongoing series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. Here Glenn Wharton, professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, chair of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, and former media conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, speaks with the Quarterly’s Jennifer Knox White about the conservation of time-based media. They discuss best practices for the storage of digital media and approaches to addressing the evolution—and obsolescence—of technologies.
JENNIFER KNOX WHITE Let’s start by talking about the
type of work that we call “time-based media.” Single-channel videos and films immediately come to mind, but of course the term encompasses other forms of work as well. What would you include under this umbrella term, and what are we not talking about? GLENN WHARTON Well, it’s a problematic term, but so are all such terms. I’ve landed on it rather than on “audio art,” “video art,” “technology art,” “media art,” and so on, because I like its implication that time is part of the medium, that duration is involved. It’s problematic in that some works that I might consider time-based—some software-based works, say—really don’t take that much time, but it’s a better term than any others I’ve found. For me it covers film, audio art, video art, software-based art, performance art, human interaction, and of course there are often installation works and sculptures that include time-based media. JKW I’m curious how you found your way into this field. You specialize in archaeological conservation as well—that’s an interesting range. GW Yes, I trained as an archaeological conservator and worked on excavations for many summers. I also trained as a sculpture conservator. For a number of years I worked in museums and ran a private practice, and I spent a lot of time with public art, working with public-art agencies to maintain their collections of outdoor 86
sculpture. Through this I became interested in artists who were creating works that engaged communities in their fulfillment, and in 1998 I closed my practice to pursue a PhD at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology with the idea of developing a model for participatory practice in conservation, engaging communities in research and decision-making about traditional cultural heritage. After completing my PhD I moved to New York and started teaching in the Conservation and Museum Studies programs at New York University. After about a year, Jim Coddington, then the chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, approached me and told me about a grant that the museum had received to bring somebody in for two days a week for two years to survey what they then called their video-art collection to help them figure out how to take care of it. And I said, “Well, great, Jim. But why are we having lunch?” And he said, “Well, name one video conservator.” I knew of only one person, Pip Laurenson at the Tate, but she had a job. And he said, “We could bring someone in with a technical background in audiovisual technology or we could bring in a conservator who would put a conservation mind on this problem. I’d rather bring in a conservator, because a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with are beyond the technology. It has to do with working with artists and capturing their concerns.” I said, “If you’re
willing to have me, I’m willing to give it a try.” And I became the nation’s first time-based media conservator. This was in 2005. JKW I imagine the field has changed considerably since then, and quite rapidly, too. Could you talk about some of the shifts that have taken place, and about the role of artists in the conservation process? GW Yes, there’s been a seismic shift in our field regarding contemporary art and how we approach conservation problems with living artists. We’re trained as material scientists, so we understand an art object through its materiality: how it was made, what it was made out of, how it’s deteriorated over time, and how to slow down or arrest that deterioration and bring it back to what we think it looked like at some point in its life. Conserving an object from the past also involves decisions around aesthetics and symbolic intent. With the changes in art production over the last thirty or forty years—starting with Conceptual art, where the idea was sometimes more important than its physical manifestation, or, say, with installation art that’s variable, meaning that the artist hands over interpretive authority to the person who buys the work—there’s now a whole new set of questions involved in conservation. Often it’s not just about shepherding an object through time, it’s about understanding from the artist, What is this thing? What’s the relationship between
There’s now a whole new set of questions involved in conservation. Often it’s not just about shepherding an object through time, it’s about understanding from the artist, What is this thing? What’s the relationship between your idea and its material manifestation? What’s the relationship between the work and its viewers, or with the community?
your idea and its material manifestation? What’s the relationship between the work and its viewers, or with the community? We also often work with artists who are still alive and may have very strong feelings about how we conserve and exhibit their work. So when I took the job at MoMA, my work really shifted from being primarily concerned with materials to being more concerned about building the institutional capacity to show these works in the future. That meant interviewing artists, working with them in the galleries, understanding from them how they wanted changes to occur with their work, and then documenting those ideas and developing a whole system for managing that documentation for future caretakers. JKW Am I correct in recalling that you developed a questionnaire to help document some of this information? GW We developed questionnaires for audio art, video art, installation art, software art, and performance art that we would ask artists to fill out when we acquired their work, or, if not the artist, someone who knew the artist’s concerns. Some artists would come with a full packet of documentation, and for many works that was all we needed, but for the more complex works a curator and I would interview the artist to get a deeper understanding about different scenarios for the future and to help inform future staff. We would then build on this
documentation as the work lived on, and from one installation to the next. JKW What sort of details would you seek to record, either through questionnaires or through interviews, to help guide future decisions around how best to present or care for the work? GW The kind of information we needed was very practical. For a video work, for instance: how did you shoot it, how did you edit it, what software did you use? Do you have master copies, and what format are they in? If there were physical sculptural elements along with the media elements, how should they be installed? What kind of a room? Can it be outside? And how should people in the future think about replacing the technology if necessary—if a certain brand, or the technology itself, is no longer available? Is it important to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor or is it really more about the image than about the equipment? Could we show the image on the wall? JKW You mention CRT monitors as one example of a technology that’s no longer readily available off the shelf, and there must be countless other types of equipment and formats we could point to that have been similarly superseded. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to what to do when a technology becomes obsolete, is there? If a certain projector is no longer manufactured, we can’t simply assume that the latest projector can take its place; maybe the sound of the original projector
was important, or the quality of the image it produced. How do you approach resolving questions like this if the artist is no longer here to turn to? GW It gets tough when the artist is no longer alive. Fortunately, there are now a number of time-based media conservators in this country—NYU [New York University] has a training program, and there are programs in Europe—so the field really is growing, and so is the documentation. And conservation is by nature a sharing profession: through conferences or publications or informal networks, we tend to be aware of the work that others are doing. I might be able to post on a listserv, Has anybody interviewed this artist about this kind of work? And I might receive a transcript of the interview that way. I might also look into people who are still living and might know about the work. Did the artist have a working partner? Do they have an estate? Do they have a spouse? Were there people they worked with? And I would then conduct interviews to gather that kind of secondhand information. JKW Looking back on a project you’ve worked on that has involved this kind of process, could you talk about how you came to the conclusions that helped determine the approach you took? GW A good example is Nam June Paik’s Untitled [1993], in the MoMA collection—an upright piano with fifteen CRT monitors piled on top of and around it. Paik retrofitted the piano to play show tunes, so it had a player-piano element, and 87
As human beings we’re going to make different decisions at different times. As long as we document not only what we did but also our rationale in doing it, and share that documentation through publication or other means, then I think collectively we can build an understanding of how these works are moving into the future in different ways.
it had four video feeds: two were recorded videos, played on laserdiscs, and two were from live security cameras attached to the piano, one shooting the movement of the keys and another shooting the movement of the other camera. I was able to get a grant to be proactive in conserving the work, because we were worried that we’d be unable to buy new CRT monitors in the future. I particularly wanted to pursue this project because Paik had died, in 2006, without giving really clear instructions on how to conserve his work in the future, and he was a very playful artist who incorporated chance into its production and exhibition. He would often ask people around him, “How do you think it should be displayed?” Or he would delegate authority to make decisions to others. So the question for us was, Do we continue those kinds of practices after his death? Or do we freeze the work at the moment he died and say, Yes, he had this artistic practice of delegating authority, but we should do something else moving forward. So we worked with people from the Nam June Paik estate, and we interviewed a number of curators and conservators and artists. I also worked very closely with Barbara London, who was our curator of media art at the time. I found a similar piece at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, so I went up there and spoke with them and looked through their files. In the end, we 88
decided to alter the work in some ways and not in others. We were able to buy two full sets of similar CRT monitors in South Korea, which are now kept at MoMA’s warehouse. We took the piano to a piano repairman out on Long Island, and I had to convince him that we didn’t want him to clean up the piano and remove the scratches, but just to replace missing hammers and to glue down lifting keys. We replaced the player-piano element with a digital element so that it no longer relied on a floppy disk. So it was a mixed bag of solutions— we made certain changes while still honoring the original technologies. After that, I researched and wrote an article about how museums and different constellations of people are coming to different decisions about conserving Paik’s media installations. I really think that’s okay—that as human beings we’re going to make different decisions at different times. As long as we document not only what we did but also our rationale in doing it, and share that documentation through publication or other means, then I think collectively we can build an understanding of how these works are moving into the future in different ways. I think that’s in keeping with Nam June Paik’s spirit. JKW Could you talk about digitizing works, or components of works, that were created in analog formats? What advice would you offer around the storage of digital assets?
This is now ancient history, but when I got to MoMA in 2005, there were over 2,000 audio- and videotapes, and I faced the dilemma of whether to put resources into copying the tapes or digitizing them. The answer seems so obvious now, but to digitize all of those analog tapes was really frightening because no museum had ever done it. All of the existing literature said that you needed to copy tapes onto newer-format tapes. But at that moment you could hardly find new tape—the whole field was shifting to digital. So we made the leap and digitized all of MoMA’s audio and video works. That involved clearing the rights with the artists or the artist’s estates. It was a huge project for us. Then it became a question of managing all of these digital assets. We looked around and saw that no museums had trusted digital repositories as yet, but they were being developed in libraries and archives. So we consulted with a number of people in the library and archive industry to learn best practices about managing digital collections. Some of those practices, of course, are just backing up off-site and backing up regularly, keeping multiple copies. To insure against digital corruption, we would run what’s called a checksum when we uploaded a digital work onto the server, and then again maybe five years later; each checksum would give us a set of numbers and if there was any discrepancy between them we would know there’d GW
It’s not an easy thing to take care of digital files in the best way possible, but it’s essential in conserving digital artworks. It’s more than just getting a portable hard drive or having a server somewhere, it’s a whole system of very high-level protections for the integrity of the files.
been digital corruption. It was a very complicated system that they’re still working out, and now other museums are starting to do that as well. Of course, practices like this are one thing for a museum like MoMA; for an individual artist or a collector or a gallery or a smaller nonprofit, there’s a very different set of strategies. An artist or a smaller organization won’t have the resources to create a trusted digital repository. What I’d like to see in the future are businesses providing this service for artists and collectors, and that’s starting to happen; there are business models evolving where people can pay a fee and have their works properly cared for. Short of all that, I would say, again, back up, back up often, and keep backups off-site somewhere. Create checksums, or fixity checks, when you upload files to assist in detecting future digital corruption. Also make sure to use a write-blocker when uploading from a computer or hard drive to make sure that the server doesn’t alter the drive’s contents. Make sure you retain your masters in the original unedited format, and then make derivatives for exhibition or for sending around. And then have some kind of a system to track the various versions—so you know that this file was created from this file, which was created from this file, and so on, so if you do get any digital corruption, you can go back far enough to find a file that’s not corrupted. JKW It’s quite complex.
That’s correct, it’s not an easy thing to take care of digital files in the best way possible, but it’s essential in conserving digital artworks. It’s more than just getting a portable hard drive or having a server somewhere, it’s a whole system of very highlevel protections for the integrity of the files. I’d suggest to someone who is really concerned about their digital collection to find a professional, maybe an organization, that has a trusted digital repository for digital-artwork storage. JKW Are there resources or organizations that people can turn to for information or advice on these matters? GW Yes, there’s good information available online. The Matters in Media Art website [http:// mattersinmediaart.org/], for instance, is a very good resource. That was created by a consortium of staff at MoMA, the Tate, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it provides a lot of information from museums and collectors and artists about the production and care of media art. Our professional organization in the United States is called the American Institute for Conservation [AIC]. Though it primarily serves conservators, there’s information on the website [https:// www.culturalheritage.org/membership/groupsand-networks/electronic-media-group], through the Electronic Media Group, on best practices around acquiring and managing time-based media art. It’s also a way to find professional time-based GW
media conservators, either to consult or to help instruct a program for caring for a collection. After I left MoMA, I created a research initiative at NYU called the Artist Archives Initiative [http://artistarchives.hosting.nyu.edu/Initiative/]. We created an information resource for the artist David Wojnarowicz, and now we’re creating an information resource for the artist Joan Jonas. These will be open to the public and will have a lot of information about these artists’ creation of their works and how they want them to be presented in the future. We hope that the models we’re creating for sharing information about displaying and conserving works by these artists will serve others who are interested in sharing information about other artists. I also founded a nonprofit in 2010 called Voices in Contemporary Art [https://voca.network/]. I’ve stepped back to be an emeritus board member now, but the organization does a lot of programming around documenting contemporary art, and offers training for art professionals in interviewing artists. They also have online publications available. And then there are organizations like the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which has created resources related to archiving and documentation [https://joanmitchellfoundation.org/artist-programs/call]. And there are others. So, I would get out there and find what kinds of organizations are available for the kinds of questions you have. 89
GEORG BASELITZ: LIFE, LOVE, DEATH
Richard Calvocoressi writes on the painter’s latest bodies of work, detailing the techniques employed and their historical precedents.
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Georg Baselitz doesn’t stand still. His capacity for hard work and his inexhaustible energy are remarkable for an artist in his eighties, especially one who paints crouched over the f loor, bent double. Last summer he started experimenting with an entirely new technique. This is best described as a process of transferring an image from a painted canvas lying unstretched on the floor, the oil paint still wet, to a second canvas laid over it, covered with either a white or a black ground. Baselitz then applies various degrees of pressure to the back of this second canvas. Once it has been peeled away from the first canvas, the latter is usually discarded, though occasionally it is worked on and exhibited in its own right. The transfer differs from the original in that it is a mirror image, reversed as in printmaking. Some of the first works on a black ground produced in this way were given a coating of gold paint mixed with gold varnish, either through a spray pump or with a brush or both. Others, including those in a San Francisco exhibition this spring and in a second body of work to be shown in Hong Kong, have not been directly touched by the artist’s hand.1 The two shows could not be more different but they are in a striking sense complementary. The San Francisco paintings, a riot of acidic colors on white grounds, are possessed of a luminosity and vigor that point to their inspiration in earlier works by Baselitz—the first nude self-portraits and portraits of his wife Elke, for instance, culminating in the monumental, authoritative Schlafzimmer (Bedroom, 1975), and the ferociously painted, wild-looking Orangenesser (Orange Eaters) from the early 1980s. In the new paintings, however, Baselitz’s touch is much lighter, the paint is thinner and more fluid, like watercolor, and the forms are broken. The result suggests a fleeting, fragmentary view, due in part to the fact that Baselitz brushes paint onto small pieces of cloth that he then impresses on the canvas laid out on the floor; and in part to his use of stencils or templates to block off areas of canvas or to achieve sharp contours. The procedure is analogous to collage, while the effect is of an image that pulsates with a dancelike energy—with the rhythms of life itself. The grandest of the San Francisco paintings (over eight feet high by thirteen feet wide) is a double portrait of Baselitz and Elke in that tradition of portraits of couples of which Otto Dix’s unsparing portrait of his ageing parents, Die Eltern des Künstlers II (The Artists’ Parents II, 1924), in the Sprengel Museum Hannover, has served as a model for Baselitz in the past. But there is no hint here of the preoccupation with vulnerability and physical decline that characterizes his earlier portraits. This elderly naked couple exude resilience and even zest, their enduring love for each other clearly as strong as ever, whatever the future holds. The painting’s long, alliterative title gives a clue to a more recent artistic affinity: Wenn das Wörtchen wenn nicht wär, wär’s ein Lichtenstein gewesen translates as “If if were not a word, it would have been Lichtenstein.” The bright, Pop colors of the double portrait, and of many of the new paintings inspired by the Orangenesser, recall Roy Lichtenstein, an artist who often alluded to previous styles and subjects in art history just as Baselitz does. Both believe that a painting is essentially a two-dimensional object whose flatness must be respected, rather than a window onto the world, an illusion of reality. In 1995 Lichtenstein described his own Perfect and Imperfect abstract paintings as “meaningless,”2 perhaps echoing the remark of Willem de Kooning—another of Baselitz’s heroes—that “it is exactly in its uselessness that [painting] is free.”3 Baselitz would certainly have concurred with de Kooning’s belief that art should not be obliged to reflect social, political or religious dogma. The Hong Kong paintings depict tall, vertical figures, usually in pairs but one vast canvas shows three figures,
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resembling violet X-rays of the human body, side by side on a black ground. With the exception of this latter painting, all the figures are black, silhouetted against gold, like Byzantine icons or Egyptian funerary monuments. The gold describes the area between the figures’ legs and around the contours of their bodies and heads. In other words, Baselitz did not paint a figure on the unstretched canvas on the floor; he painted negative space, in gold paint, then pressed the canvas covered in black paint onto the canvas laid out on the floor. What appears on the upper canvas once it is peeled back are figures consisting of the black ground surrounded by gold—a reversal of the usual process of painting the figure as a positive form against a neutral, uniform background. Baselitz’s working life over the last decade has been interrupted by periods in hospital. From about 2014 to 2018, an unflinching preoccupation with his own decaying body dominated his work. Elke’s naked body joined that of her husband in seated double portraits, their poses reminiscent of Dix’s portrait of his parents; while in other canvases each was also portrayed alone, standing unconfidently, or hesitantly descending a staircase— an ironic reference to the painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), by Marcel Duchamp, who famously went on to denounce “retinal” art. The figures tended to be flesh colored, mottled gray or deathly white, and were shown against oppressive black backgrounds. Baselitz also used an aerosol spray that created a nebulous effect, like an aura or emanation. The figures seemed to float like ghosts. In the new paintings they have been reduced even further, to little more than sexless, faceless shadows, as flat as tombstones or corpses on a mortuary slab, which they bring to mind. The artist’s hand has not modeled them; there is no suggestion of volume, depth, or perspective. In some instances the gold paint appears to be eating into the black figure, as if he or she were disintegrating before our eyes. In postwar painting, both Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol produced compelling works in which shadows are equated with dematerialization and ultimately death. The Hong Kong paintings are arguably closer in spirit to Warhol’s multipart series Shadows (1978–79), sharing those works’ massive scale, their repetition of simplified forms to the point of abstraction, their interplay of positive and negative shapes, their removal of the artist’s direct touch—in Warhol’s case by screenprinting photographs onto canvas—and above all their feeling of transience. If Baselitz once contemplated achieving an impersonal, styleless style, in these poignant new paintings he has come nearer to it than ever before. They signal a renunciation of corporeality of almost Shakespearean proportions:
Opening spread, left: Georg Baselitz, Die andere Seite vom Ölfleck (The other side of the oil stain), 2019, oil and painter’s gold varnish on canvas, 118 1⁄8 × 83 ½ inches (300 × 212 cm) Opening spread, right: Georg Baselitz, Da sind zwei Figuren im alten Stil (That’s two figures in the old style), 2019, oil and painter’s gold varnish on canvas, 118 1⁄8 × 83 ½ inches (300 × 212 cm) Previous spread: Georg Baselitz, Wenn das Wörtchen wenn nicht wär, wärs Lichtenstein gewesen (If if were not a word, it would have been Lichtenstein), 2019, oil on canvas, 99 5⁄8 × 161 ½ inches (253 × 410 cm)
Opposite: Georg Baselitz, Eisbahn (Ice Rink), 2019, oil on canvas 98 ½ × 78 ¾ inches (250 × 200 cm) Below: Georg Baselitz, Orangenesser 8 (Orange Eater 8), 2019, oil on canvas, 67 × 57 1⁄8 inches (170 × 145 cm) Artwork © Georg Baselitz Photos: Jochen Littkemann
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. 4 1. The exhibition at Gagosian in San Francisco opened on March 12, 2020. The exhibition at Gagosian in Hong Kong is planned but not yet scheduled. 2. Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, Roy Lichtenstein: Perfect/ Imperfect, exh. cat. (Beverly Hills: Gagosian Gallery, 2002), p. 18. 3. Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” talk delivered in “What Is Abstract Art?,” symposium at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 5, 1951, in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art XVIII, no. 3 (Spring 1951):7–8. 4. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610–11, ed. Frank Kermode, Arden Shakespeare Paperbacks (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, 1970), act IV, scene 1, lines 148–58.
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FASHION AND ART For the second installment of our Fashion and Art series, we offer a conversation held among the late couturier Azzedine Alaïa, actress Charlotte Rampling, fashion historian Olivier Saillard, and writer Donatien Grau on the nature of time and its relation to fashion and the other arts.
PART 2: AZZEDINE ALAÏA
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Azzedine Alaïa was concerned with the acceleration of time, and the negative impact it has on our lives. He saw the unhealthy speed of production and consumption as damaging for any form of creation: whether it was in art, design, poetry, film, dance, theater, clothing—the field he redefined—or in anybody’s life. He did not see any separation or hierarchy between the different forms of creative practices: it was only through work that artifacts became relevant. He would define himself not as a designer, but as a couturier, heir to the history of sewing and cutting; a history marked both by the likes of Charles Frederick Worth, Paul Poiret, and Cristóbal Balenciaga as well as by the many anonymous practitioners who never achieved celebrity. In 2014, along with his close friend scholar and writer Donatien Grau, he began inviting some of the luminaries he famously hosted at his house at 7, rue de Moussy, Paris, to converse on their personal relationships to time. Robert Wilson spoke with Isabelle Huppert; Jonathan Ive with Marc Newson; Jean Nouvel with his mentor Claude Parent; Carla Sozzani with philosopher Emanuele Coccia; and the poet Adonis with the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. There were no boundaries of discipline: had there been more time, a chef was to participate. All members of Alaïa’s extraordinary community—once described as the last salon—were to contribute to this collective adventure undertaken for the sake of public creative safety. When Azzedine Alaïa passed away, on November 17, 2017, a first volume was ready. More conversations and publications were to follow. The dialogues had been moderated, recorded, and edited by Alaïa himself, with Donatien Grau. While reading them, we are confronted with a manifesto made testament, a statement that has considerable truth and gravitas in today’s world. We are also presented with a self-portrait of one of the greatest couturiers in history, who decided not to have it written by others, as Coco Chanel did, or to write it himself, as Poiret, Christian Dior, or Elsa Schiaparelli did: but to have it write itself organically in all the conversations held with the friends he invited. Ultimately, we are offered many pearls of wisdom, by individuals aged between thirty and ninety when the conversations took place, each coming with their own experience, their own thoughts, at once particular and deeply human. They took time, speaking together: they reflected on their lives. As such they offer a collective lesson. The issue of time concerns all of us—especially those of us who engage with creative matters. How can we remain creative while having to deal with pressure? Is pressure a gift or a curse? Should we work fast or slow? Alaïa did not want to offer any imposed or preconceived answer, quite the opposite: he aimed for everyone to speak for herself or himself. In her foreword to the collection of these conversations Taking Time (released by Rizzoli in March), Naomi Campbell notes, “When you see the people Azzedine has collected in this book, you will understand how expansive his mind was. He had a vision beyond clothing. So many collaborations happened in Papa’s kitchen: people gathering and meeting each other, finding a way to work together. Not forced—it just happened that way. He still is, now more than ever, an inspiration.” The last of the conversations in the book happened a few weeks before Alaïa’s passing: held between actress Charlotte Rampling and fashion historian (and curator of the 2013 Alaïa retrospective at the Palais Galliera, Paris) Olivier Saillard, it is filled with thoughts and memories. “An inspiration” for all of us. Here is an excerpt from this conversation.
Previous spread: Grace Jones and Azzedine Alaïa, 1985. Photo: Sharok Hatami/Shutterstock Opposite: Charlotte Rampling, 1974. Photo: Alain Dejean/Sygma via Getty Images
Text: © Taking Time by Azzedine Alaïa with Donatien Grau, Rizzoli Ex Libris, 2020
AZZEDINE ALAIA: Why did I want to have these conversations about time? In observing fashion’s various movements, I sensed there was a deeper phenomenon. Time didn’t matter to people anymore. There was no more respect for the human being, or design, or work. Now, when I don’t have the time to do something, I just don’t do it. At the same time, though, it was important to see our era, and the important people of our era, and to talk about their notions of time. OLIVIER SAILLARD: Charlotte and I worked together. I’ve come up with questions about time but also about cinema, about Charlotte’s profession of acting. There’s a similarity between cinema and fashion: namely, the relation to time. In cinema, you make films whose temporality is never today’s. You make a film about the past because maybe your story takes place in the eighteenth century, or in the 1960s, or even in the 2000s. It’s about yesterday. You also do it out of sequence. When I was a child I thought people made films from beginning to end, in the same chronology that the spectator sees. And when you start talking about your film, spectators think you’re still in it, when in fact you’ve already moved on to something else. My first question for you is, what is your experience of all those moments that make up the relationships of a story that takes place in the past, that’s written today, and that you belong to at a certain moment and then not at all? CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: I started early, young. Your relationship with time at that age is very different. When you’re eighteen, you’re sort of impelled toward what the future’s going to bring. You couldn’t care less about the past. You don’t have a past. I’ve never been bound to time. To make films, that’s precisely what you need—not to be bound to time—because, as you say, there are all kinds of different times within an account, within a story, inside what we imagine within another time. I haven’t necessarily given the subject much thought before, but I think I’ve got very little connection to time. OS: We often talk about an actress in relation to her roles, and then right away we gloss over that time. For example, I’m full of admiration for your role in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned [1969]. Does the time you spend playing the role count? Or is it just the woman you were embodying? CR: It becomes a whole. I enter and exit. I come in dressed like someone from another era, another world. And I go out and put on my own things. There’s a sort of inner choreography to it. There’s no separation. Again, there’s no time. OS: It’s a stretch of time that’s a costume... CR: You might say that, yes. OS: In fashion, which is what concerns Azzedine and me, it’s always seemed odd that designers, especially today, should have to put out collections as fast as possible, collections that should reflect the future. Designers want nothing to do with the past. For example, aside from a few greats like Azzedine, if you tell designers to take inspiration from a dress from the past, they display a sort of fear, even if they secretly buy a lot of vintage clothes for inspiration. They’ll all talk about “vintage,” yet they’ll disdain the past. CR: In fashion, you always have to be inventing something very different and very new, even if you look back and go retro. You’re always led to make new creations. There’s always a frenetic creativity. AA: It’s four to eight times a year nowadays. Before it was twice a year. You had six months to undertake some self-examination, carry out your search, look for fabrics—and live while you were at it. I don’t understand why we do so many collections that bring in nothing these days. It’s commerce and nothing more. At fashion’s present moment, we should reflect more on what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, why we’re doing it. Soon, many of the things we’re making will cease to exist. A person’s creativity will one day vanish, and only the things will be left. When you paint, your works remain; when you act, the images remain. Today, the stylists arrive and go shopping. If an actress comes to me, l’d rather she do a fitting. If a garment doesn’t fit, I’ll alter it for her. You have to make the garment for such-and-such person, for her character, and for her comfort. OS: Fashion, and design as well, have succumbed to the syndrome of novelty. In your relationship to fashion, Charlotte, are there clothes that you’ve always worn? CR: Yes, absolutely. I love the feel of aged fabric. When it’s well cut it’s wonderful for a very long time, and it becomes part of your world. You grow with the garment. OS: One day, when we were rehearsing for the performance Sur-exposition, you said something very beautiful to me. You said you liked to look at yourself only in mirrors that you knew. I liked that a lot. I’ve taken an interest ever since 99
in the relationship between time, the mirror, the reflection, and no doubt the age we see in the mirror. I like the idea that we should see ourselves in the same mirror throughout our lives. CR: Since it shows you an image you trust, you think, “I’m like that; that’s what I look like.” In all the various periods of a life, some years you’ll have confidence in the evolution of who you are, visually. Every mirror will show you something very different, depending on the light. I think, then, that over time it’s good to trust in the gaze you cast on yourself. OS: I like the idea that we should choose our mirror, because it’s quite distasteful to come across an image of yourself out in the wild. CR: We’re very fragile with respect to our own image, so we have to build trust in our image. Otherwise we’re lost. OS: I’d like to come back to the position of the actress. Actresses are part of a pantheon; there are actresses who, for me, will never die: Bette Davis and Greta Garbo…Cinema invented stars, and eternity. When you decided to take up the profession of acting, was the desire not to die at the heart of your decision? CR: No. I wasn’t aware of that at all. But it ends up being a fascinating notion, especially as you age. You see other people who’ve grown up after you and see you at the age of twenty, while you are now sixty. OS: It’s a frozen time. AA: For actresses, age is not age. When an actress is important, the myth is always the same. The admiration doesn’t change. They’ve done something, and we never forget it. Even if the face is very different. I met Garbo and Arletty. I was so fascinated with certain actresses that I didn’t see them age. Arletty was always young. OS: Garbo is certainly the one who made the use of time into a work of art. CR: She practically made it into an architecture. She brought time to a halt. AA: One afternoon there was a Garbo retrospective at the Pagode cinema in Paris. I didn’t know her. I saw the film and was struck by the image, the makeup, the eyes: all very modern. The next day I was at home, on rue de Bellechasse, and Cécile de Rothschild shows up with Garbo. The saleswoman who was with me said, “It’s Garbo.” I thought she was fooling with me. I go in and see Garbo sitting on the canapé with her bangs and her high turtleneck. I said, “Dear God, it’s not possible.” That’s how I met her. I’ve always kept that image, even when I saw her older…I don’t like the word old. Age and time are two different things. I thought, “It’s crazy. That face is fascinating.” I’d seen her in all her beauty the day before on-screen, and I felt the same emotion now. She had the gumption to make a decision; she entered the world of silence. OS: Didn’t Garbo bring time to a halt by deciding to end her career? She evaporated by killing off a professional career. She had so thoroughly vanished that her biological death became secondary. She’d fled. Isn’t that the most sublime way to escape the world of mortals? AA: Garbo, whom I knew very well, wanted to enter into silence. She wouldn’t speak. When she dined, she spoke only with her family. In the morning she’d take her tray and go to her room. She was a woman who understood how to retain a place in history. CR: It was a sacrifice she made, but she was up to it because her personality and character urged her in that direction. DONATIEN GRAU: Charlotte, what do you think of Garbo’s sacrifice? The sacrifice of absenting yourself in order to construct a work of art, for example.
This page: Charlotte Rampling on the set of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, 1969. Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
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Opposite: Azzedine Alaïa and model Frederique in the February 1986 edition of Vogue. Photo: Arthur Elgort/Condé Nast via Getty Images
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Installation view, Azzedine Alaïa: Je Suis Couturier, Association Azzedine Alaïa, January 22–June 10, 2018. Photo: courtesy Association Azzedine Alaïa
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CR: To build a work of art is to make a genuine choice about how to live. It’s a big decision, one that you can’t help but respect. OS: Have you considered it at times? CR: Yes, but I’m doing it dram by dram. For many who take it up, this profession is like death and resurrection. It’s a way to bring time to a halt, not to want to be looked at anymore, or even adulated. To come down from the heights and become a real being again, of flesh and bone, perhaps just ordinary. To live that feeling, so that the desire can return. OS: How do you react—what do you feel—in the ‘death’ stage? Because there’s a strong, dangerous association with death about your acting. I’ve spoken of cinema and of a form of eternity that actresses achieve. With you, it’s easier to speak of death. I think that, in this respect, you’ve been dangerous, scorching, and for a very long time. CR: Scorching but necessary, because if the sensation of death isn’t really there, the sensation of being alive can’t be absolutely there, either. When you’re filming, you’re carried along by a sort of continual exaltation, which is more or less good. So what is the exaltation? Are you in great exaltation when you create, Azzedine? AA: Yes, but afterward, in the end; you feel you’ve entered a void and find that you’re alone. CR: But without exaltation, you can’t do it. You have to have the time and experience the death as well. All lives are little deaths. If you’re in the kind of exaltation that, for me, is necessary to any creative act—and for film it’s fairly long; you go, and go, and go, and hold out; it’s a marathon—you’re going to be completely abandoned in the end, naturally. There’s only you, and you’ve got nothing left. This is the moment when, if you’ve entered the time of death, you can rightly say, “Well, I’m going to live this time until I feel the urge and desire to return.” OS: At present, whatever the artistic event, at fashion shows or other shows, all people do is photograph themselves, at the risk of missing the event. They’re never connected to what’s going on because there’s always a smartphone to take a picture and serve as an interface. Do you have this habit of constantly taking pictures? CR: Ah no, not at all. It’s yet another proof that we don’t want to really think or really see, that we don’t want to really hear or really live, because we’re always sticking this thing, the screen, in front of us. The screen before what you really see, what you really hear, and so on. OS: A filter. What’s it like for you, this tyranny of the present? CR: I don’t know where it’s going to lead because I’m not of that generation, but it holds no interest for me whatsoever. OS: Wanting to witness the present, we fail to witness it. CR: Absolutely. For his fortieth birthday, one of my sons threw a great, impromptu party at a pub in London, and the minute the cake arrived everyone took out a phone. I took a photo of everyone else taking a photo of the moment. It was fascinating. OS: They think they’re living the moment as it happens by capturing it, by taking a picture. DG: If we look back at all the photos you’ve done, from Helmut Newton to Juergen Teller, it seems that there’s no getting at you, that you exist in a sort of exteriority, and therefore outside of time and outside of us. Can you tell us something about that frontier—being outside of time and outside of us— with Newton and Teller? CR: Those are perhaps projections because, if you think back to Helmut’s pictures from 1972, the nude on the table, and to Teller’s, where I’m nude in front of the statues, it’s a capacity to preserve yourself from time, to preserve your space. When I did the shoot with Juergen, I was sixty-two. I was nude in front of statues. I didn’t do it to provoke. It’s work that I do regularly with Juergen. It’s a work about time. I find it beautiful. DG: You have the parallel experiences of existing outside of time as a model in photography; as having a history in cinema; and as living, speaking, and having a life. And your name is Charlotte Rampling. What’s your experience of these three lives, each with a temporality by definition different from the others: the glazed temporality of the instant, the separated temporality of film, and your own time? CR: If you are unaware of what you’re representing, then everything can happen, and nothing can happen. I’ve never been aware of what I represent. You forget it all in order to survive and to lead a genuine life. To reconcile those three dimensions, there mustn’t be a barrier; I mustn’t be aware of any of them. Because if you’re unaware of something, you don’t see it, but you do feel it. You are that thing; you live it.
ATELIER CALDER
ANNOUNCES 2020 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Gui (1976), The Red Feather (1975), Reims croix du sud (1969), Horizontal (1974), and Feuille d’arbre (1974) outside the new studio in Saché, 1976. © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
TARIK KISWANSON JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER
BARTHÉLÉMY TOGUO
The Last Gangster Show Carlos Valladares explores the mobster film genre, tracing the conventions and evolutions in the form from the exuberance of Raoul Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939) to the heavy silence of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019).
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Previous spread: Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Photo: courtesy Netflix Left: Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties (1939). Photo: Bettmann Collection/Getty Images Below: Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Photo: courtesy Netflix
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here have all the gangsters gone? It’s not enough to say they’re in the White House. The current American criminal at the top is doing a dismal job of acting like the old popular gangster, that glamorous yet deadly creature who cut men down with the agility of a ballerina (Jimmy Cagney) or swung with a brutality doubled by Catholic guilt (Harvey Keitel). Martin Scorsese’s recent film The Irishman tells us where all the gangsters have gone: once a hell-raising anticop icon of nonconformity, the gangster went to work, integrating himself into the business of workaday late-capitalist society. By now, such an answer isn’t particularly fresh. Crime dramas like The Godfather, Part II (1974) and Scorsese’s own Casino (1995) have already given similar glimpses of killers donning suits and forsaking “honor” in the name of bureaucracy and the dollar. So what distinguishes The Irishman, the culmination of America’s last bard of classical gangsterism? The Irishman is the kiss-off to a breed of sick men and to a cruel genre. The antithesis of Goodfellas, which was all noise and nonstop action, The Irishman is built around a series of increasingly melancholic silences: the silence of daughters to fathers, the silence of a mundane morning breakfast in a Howard Johnson’s on the day you’re to kill your best friend, the silence of history when no one wants to remember it, the taxing spiritual trek of Scorsese’s Silence (2016), the silence of the living room in which viewers are asked watch The Irishman. This depressing Final Gangster Epic is good at showing what it’s like to be forgotten in the digital age. It has a sleek look as relentless as The Conformist (1970), Bernardo Bertolucci’s film of a clockwork Italian “civilization” in political and moral freefall. Simply put, the gangster has gone out of style because the job is no longer specialized: today, any idiot with a Twitter handle, a 401K job, and a trust fund can steal enough to become a symbol of infamy. With the consolidation of power by Silicon Valley tech, the gangster has become ordinary, nerdy, looking like Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network— milquetoast on the surface but our greatest threat in the long run. This parallels what’s happening in movies today, as we forego the power of a theatrical space in order to see the film in the numb cocoons 106
of our beds, with the film’s scope shrunk to the size of a plate and distractions all around. In making The Irishman with Netflix, Scorsese was recognizing that the only way to bring his vision to life was by dealing with a company set on returning viewers to the solipsistic couch, a departure from the communal, shared, submersive experience that has been the basis of moviegoing for more than a hundred years. And with The Irishman—which I consider less a gangster picture and more one of his intense psychological dramas, like Silence or New York, New York (1977) or The Age of Innocence (1993)—Scorsese makes a weird, stately epic (his Barry Lyndon [1975]), obviously designed for the big screen but consumed en masse on the home front. Here’s the curious thing: Scorsese’s not mourning the loss of gangsters or cinemas in fawning reverence for the good ol’ days, he’s not overcome with the frozen nostalgia that grips Quentin Tarantino in Once upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019), or Christopher Nolan in his painful Zola-like attempts to literalize each shiny helmet of each English boy of each battalion at Dunkirk. Rather, Scorsese accepts the new, outrageous state of the world, and brings to The Irishman, and to the people, all the memory and knowledge of history, moving art, and labor politics that can’t be accessed by a mere Google search. The Irishman saps the glamour out of mobster killing, business, and betrayal. By contrast, Scorsese’s previous gangster pictures saw the ins and outs of these clandestine clubs with a glorifying eye, à la Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932)—that is, they were as much voyeuristically swayed as repulsed by the carnage on display. Certain images of criminal macho swagger took on a disturbing pop-cultural beauty beyond any of the films’ critiques of such a life: messy bar fights set to the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” (Mean Streets), bodies discovered in frozen meat vans to the tune of “Layla” (Goodfellas), psychotic Joe Pesci (Casino). One finds no such allure in The Irishman. The performances by Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino are low-key, slowed by a softness that comes with age. Interestingly enough, the two films that seem to have been jangling through Scorsese’s head are none of his own but rather Bertolucci’s Conformist 1 and especially Raoul Walsh’s Roaring Twenties (1939), an era-capping testament to gangster pictures that confirmed the legend of Cagney. Walsh
recontextualized Cagney’s career as a snappy hood; he had Cagney go through familiar motions but filtered them through an old-age grace, with stakes of mortality that ran deeper than the simple tommy-gun kills of earlier Cagney ventures. 2 Along a similar vein, The Irishman is Goodfellas drained of blood, wiser and without its seductive jangle. Both The Roaring Twenties and The Irishman are nostalgia-adjacent tributes to an era that the filmmakers are glad to be rid of. The lingering after-odor that connects De Niro’s yes-man, Cagney’s once-big hood, and Jean-Louis Trintignant’s fascist coward in The Conformist is failure. Failure to get with the times. Failure to change. But whereas Cagney goes out with flair and panache (note the pirouette as he stumbles down a set of proto-Godfather steps), and Trintignant goes mad in Bertolucci’s baroque geometric playpen, the fate of De Niro’s meek, stuttering “house painter” Frank Sheeran stings harder because his fade-out is so unremarkable, visually and narratively. Isolated in an old-folks’ home, stuck in a wheelchair, his friends dead or shot (by his own hands), Frank slips into shadowy nothingness for The Irishman’s gruelingly paced final half-hour. His last
act is to tell a priest to keep his door open, since his daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin, who conveys hatred and loss in pure stares, the way silent actors used to) might walk in at any second (even though she has damned his soul) and he needs to be awake for her. The air around the male heavies is pathetic and dejected, infested with the same time-is-runningout quality of the late work of John Huston.3 In the same vein, The Irishman is very much the work of an artist unapologetic about entering his late period. From the opening, Goodfellas-evoking tracking shot through a retirement home, Scorsese announces that this, his Last Gangster Picture, will be a conscious retread of his passions and his past, sapped of youth but not of vigor. The echoes of Scorsese’s eclectic universe pile up. There’s a famous scene in Taxi Driver (1976) where Travis Bickle (De Niro), the Vietnam veteran hell-bent on “cleaning up” the majority-black parts of Manhattan, buys an array of guns from a slick salesman (Steven Prince); that scene reappears in The Irishman when Sheeran (again, De Niro) is preparing to gun down Crazy Joe Gallo.4 The difference is that by the time of The Irishman (more than forty years after Taxi Driver), De
Niro’s character is his own salesman, no middleman needed. In this and other scenes, his very being is def ined by a fated aloneness 5—and, as Robert Warshow wrote in his famous essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), “No convention of the gangster film is more strongly established than this: it is dangerous to be alone.”6 For a generation, moviegoers have come to associate the poststudio gangster picture with Scorsese and his gaba-goon squad: Keitel, Ray Liotta, and especially De Niro and Pesci. Let us first consider where Pesci fits into this strange new world, seeing as it is his persona that goes through the most strikingly radical transformation in The Irishman. As the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino, who pulls the strings and gives his blessing for the assassination of Jimmy Hoffa, Pesci has captivated so many in part because he’s the anti-Hoffa, both in his role in the movie and in his character outside it, where he presents as a team player who detests the spotlight and could give a shit about prizes, Oscars, or the threat of an outsized Pacino outburst.7 The Irishman’s key existential line, “It is what it is,” is whispered by Pesci of all people, an actor who made his name portraying
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sadistic firecrackers subject to fits of rage that are still the stuff of drunken late-night impressions (“Funny, how?”). Now, shockingly aged, Pesci-as-Bufalino is a barely speaking sage, acting as the unofficial uncle of young Peggy, who does little to conceal how unimpressed she is with him. Pesci has become a steady, unconditionally loving wise man who prefers to sit in the corner and lurk unnoticed. As he chats with De Niro in a bowling alley, Pesci crooks his arms in the air against the nonexistent back of his low chair. From any other actor the gesture would seem awkward, a strained attempt at looking casual, but the relaxed Pesci makes it seem refreshingly ordinary. The Irishman hints that men like Pesci/Bufalino are fin de siècle leftovers not long for the brave new iWorld. Pesci maintains an economy of expression and a refusal of blustering presence that’s not only a rejection of his young dependence on sadistic mile-a-minute Cagneyisms, it’s also his response to changing times, in which those in the amnesiac present see a classical mode of living and find it too clean, too irrelevant, too old. De Niro in The Irishman plays without a doubt the most unnervingly passive of all of Scorsese’s gangster leads. For the most part, his Frank Sheeran is a collection of blank and confused stares. He lets out shrugs at odd times when he talks, revealing his discomfort and bemusement at any situation in which he has to talk to anyone but Hoffa and Bufalino. His first lines are telling: “When I was young, I thought house painters painted houses. Heh-heh. What did I know.” We soon see that Frank doesn’t seem to know much of anything. He’s a frustrating drone who’s only good at dispatching civilian undesirables on demand— then muttering to himself, seconds before or after the deed, “What’s that about.” Scorsese glimpses inside a killer and finds empty space. Sheeplike and nervous, passion tamed and without a garrulous inner life, following orders on a nine-to-nine time clock, Frank Sheeran has more in common with newly graduated centennials than one might expect. Of particular note is the voice, filled with stutters and cracks, that De Niro has developed for his character. A nervous babble creeps into Frank’s attempts to recall Cuba/union/Mafia dealings that are too complicated to remember and that no one alive cares about anymore. Here is a worker (an exsoldier who killed scores of Germans during World War II) who is scarily complacent, confident that the Gray Flannel Suit world in which he ekes out a humble mid-century living as a contract killer will never change. Like the meek fascist hitman of The Conformist, Frank takes good ol’ US business-as-usual as a permanent given— with tragic naiveté. He refuses to pay attention to the larger 1970s global realities of Vietnam, Richard Nixon, political assassinations, civil rights. All that matters is figuring out which of his friends will tail the wife of an enemy union man running for president of local-chapter XXX. De Niro’s Frank is rarely vindictive and lacks the ability to launch into male pyrotechnics, like previous Scorsese hotshots: his own Johnny Boy of Mean Streets (1973), Keitel in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), or De Niro himself again as the abusive sax-player Jimmy Doyle in the surprisingly mean-spirited and brutal “musical” New York, New York. This is Frank’s spiritual failure: unable to really feel anything, he is doomed to a life of both solitude and mediocrity. Yet the question remains: why is the classical gangster dying now? It would seem that Scorsese is doing a double trick: he kills off the gangster he helped to create in order to point us in the direction of a world that’s about to change more vastly than we ever thought possible, new lines drawn in the sand, new allies and 109
enemies to be aware of. Along the same lines as David Lynch’s 2017 reboot of Twin Peaks, The Irishman is defeatist but not defeated. In this it runs counter to a current trend that I find it fit to call the New Hollywood Pessimism. By way of brief historical context: in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Warshow identified a sickening American optimism, of which, he argued, the popular movie gangster was but one of many consequences. “At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety,” he wrote, “euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot.” Euphoria, for Warshow, was the postwar state of mind in a popular culture that saw prosperity in every nook and cranny of a Levittown suburban home, a euphoria that had been building in the minds of American moviegoers, what with the scores of happy-go-lucky wartime films ranging from the asinine (Wilson, 1944) to the sublime (Vincente Minnelli’s touching, aching Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944). Against the backdrop of such films, so cheery on their Technicolor surfaces, the blackand-white gangster rocketed into the sky, riding on his own sadistic glee and the ease with which he could quickly be pinpointed as the only menace to an otherwise “healthy,” blessed republic. The wearily optimistic 1948 viewer could thus see gangsters shoot up hoods on the street, smash women’s faces with grapefruits—but all with the assurance that order would be restored, that Cagney or Robinson would get some narratively bland comeuppance. To Warshow, the singular gangster made morality in the modern age too easy to understand. The problem was not the system, these films argued; it was just Cody Jarrett (Cagney in White Heat of 1949), whose defeat called for nothing less than literal explosion in order to restore order and stall chaos. The American viewer’s naive confidence in a boom that was not felt by all, that did not last, was thus confirmed. Bit by bit—a Manchurian Candidate and a Kennedy killing here, a Nashville and a Nixon impeachment there—Americans became disillusioned. They distanced themselves from art and the direct world around us through irony, nostalgia, computers, and a suspicion of new popular cultural trends (the idea of a thriving studio-funded cinema not of the Star Wars kind, what was called “multiculturalism”). On the whole, Americans became distrustful of far more than just politicians—they started to distrust most public sectors of US life, the newspapers and the media, and any belief that the person next door holds with a sickly bold conviction. Today we are no longer living with the blanket euphoria that so bored Warshow, but with something just as bad: morbidly obvious nihilism. The basic line: everything that’s worth seeing or saying has been seen or said, plus end times are here, so let’s just ride the bomb and, instead of taking active measures to enhance our perception and change the world, go underground and wait for all this to blow over. American movies have been there to reflect the curdling. Something like Joker (2019)—in which Todd Phillips of the manically stupid Hangover movies rebrands himself as a renegade Jean-Luc Godard of gritty comic books (and gets away with it!)—is the latest culmination of Lobster/Deadpool cinema and of the New Hollywood Pessimism. Pop culture has become sanitized, corporate, and serious to a malignant and boring T. Phillips microwaves the original breakthroughs of a Scorsese 8 in order to sell a pop vision that appeals to the blanket pessimism of now—yet still handsomely profiting him and his fellow filmmakers, who scowl 110
and frown and guilt-trip their way to the bank.9 As Warshow saw the gangster in his time, so do I see a cardboard bundle of mannerisms like Joker’s Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), whose empty anarchist glee only exists to confirm the viewer’s fear of the truly original, the truly wild and reckless and weird. By being against everything, these new spate of films are for nothing. What we need now is a radical uplift, a refusal to be wooed by the same basic Lars von Trier–isms or Yorgos Lanthimos cruelties. Perhaps some answers lie in the aesthetics of late films—works by directors in their twilight years who were around to see the once mighty studios, bastions of pop dreams, crumble before their eyes. 10 In the Denmark of 1964, an auteur such as Carl Theodor Dreyer could use his own conviction to make a final film like Gertrud, in which he has his lead declare, with a frightening lack of compromise, “When I’m near the grave and look back on my life, I’ll say to myself: I suffered much and made many mistakes, but I have loved.” To give love back to an unloving world makes Gertrud the only revolutionary of her time; undoubtedly, her route will end in pain, tragedy, jeers of hate, and promises of obscurity. Yet Gertrud accepts this, as does Dreyer, as do we. Gertrud ends with a closed door, but the dominant mood is one of surging, manic hope—what else have we left? Now, in 2019, an auteur like Scorsese ends his late film with the least-inviting open door in all of cinema, the atmosphere heavy with defeat: daughter Peggy will never come, no one will mourn the loss of “just another” mob guy—what else have we left? The dead don’t die (Jim Jarmusch), the Irishman fades into the still of the night (Scorsese), and, in a silly fantasy, the slaughtered princess is saved and invites her hero into her Cielo Drive castle, while we either leave brutally aware of Sharon Tate’s real-life fate or, if we’re under thirty and don’t know anything about the 1960s, remain blissfully ignorant of history (Tarantino). All of these late visions put the power of cinema to its highest possible uses, but they land with a depressed thunk. They serve to confirm the viewer’s exhaustion. They are dead points. To varying degrees, they all flirt with the fashionable allure of New Hollywood Pessimism. By contrast, last year saw late films by auteurs such as Agnès Varda (Varda by Agnès), Pedro Almodóvar (Pain and Glory), and Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life) that go somewhere light, nonearthly— angelic, even. Malick, for example, guides our vision toward daily details that we ignore: donkey pelts, pulsing greens that turn the world into transcendent garden scenes for three hours, the spells of flood and drought in an Austrian village whose people don’t understand where they fit in the larger landscape of history-morality-politics. By burrowing so fastidiously into the mundane, Malick transports us out of our time and, like Dreyer, makes us aware of our mortality and need for love, companionship, movement—and all without a smack of defeat. Like Dreyer, he cannot compromise—which means he’s been branded as a naïf and a fool. And so he is. Just as one tense settles (the ethereal/eternal past-future tense of Malick), another tense takes its place (Scorsese’s brute, necessary, hard-edged present tense). From whose and which tense will we choose to speak now? More than ever, as the dreamers of musicals and the second-wave gangsters die away, we study the legacy they left behind—and we must choose to conjure up their spirit in new forms of expression, not to trot out the old dependable classics, unchanged, unchallenged, and declare humanity a lost cause.
Previous spread: Al Pacino and Talia Shire in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974). Photo: John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Getty Images Above: Robert De Niro, Amy Robinson, and Harvey Keitel in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973). Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
1. The critic and filmmaker Neil Bahadur was, to my knowledge, the first to make this crucial connection, in his Letterboxd film review of November 8, 2019, online at https://letterboxd.com/ neilbahadur/film/the-irishman-2019/3/ (accessed March 20, 2020). 2. Those earlier Jimmy Cagney ventures include William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931), Roy Del Ruth’s Taxi (1932), Archie Mayo’s Mayor of Hell (1932), and Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). 3. I am thinking of Fat City (1972) and The Dead (1987). 4. Bob Dylan later wrote a song in tribute to Crazy Joe, “Joey,” for his 1976 album Desire, an album he later promoted with his nowlegendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour—and which, in 2019 (the same year as The Irishman), Martin Scorsese would document in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, another Netflix exclusive. 5. It’s necessary to point to the large influence of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and specifically of its central character, the doomed loner/wanderer Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), on Scorsese’s imagination of his male leads. 6. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” 1948, in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 132–33. 7. Joe Pesci may hold the record for short Oscar speeches.
When accepting his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Goodfellas, in 1991, he simply said, “It was my privilege. Thank you.” 8 From Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967) through After Hours (1985), Scorsese made consistent breakthroughs in the history of US cinema in his unsparing, realistic depictions and critiques of masculinity, from its brutality (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore [1974], New York, New York [1977]) to its farcicality (The King of Comedy [1982], After Hours [1985]). Here was an artist unafraid to show the extent of the violence inflected by the male loner. Scorsese learned all the best lessons from gangster films to create remarkably original studies of American masculinity and its sputtering failures. 9. After seeing Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2018), either in theaters or on Amazon Prime, one might consider it the film for which Joaquin Phoenix might more aptly have won his Joker Oscar. It’s a performance of the same Joker intensity and woven from similar material: the descent of a mentally unstable male loner into an expressionistic pit of New York madness, inspired by Taxi Driver. But I find Phoenix better employed in Ramsay’s film—it’s gutsier and of a piece with Ramsay’s last film, We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), which might be bluntly characterized as an existentialist hate letter to American masculinity in crisis.
10. Key to the late film’s charm is the prizing of small, scruffy bits of action over the tightness of a narrative in which each action exists along a clean arc. At the expense of narrative propulsion, the late auteur’s focus is on process, planting the camera on actors who like each other and recording the ensemble harmony. This relaxed state results in films that are odes to mere being, a love of people that is baked into the drawl of such landmarks as Howard Hawks’s Hatari! (1962; a study of horny white zebra-chasers in Africa that is stretched to an absurd 160 minutes), the DIY home-movie comfort of Agnès Varda’s final films where each theatrical audience feels like part of a family, and even the buddy-buddy drudgery on display in The Irishman. Scorsese directs his best friends, who happen to be De Niro and Pesci and the like, to show the effort it takes to maintain a nonbloody front. For most of the film’s 200plus minutes, actual business and killing are kept offscreen. When someone does get whacked, it has the quality of a telegram dispatch. Deaths are perfunctory facts, not a big deal, and the way blood pours out of an eye socket becomes less interesting to the late auteur than the brownstones nearby, lit in moonglow like the stoops where lovers meet in songs by the Platters.
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THE FACT THAT YOU MOVE SO BEAUTIFULLY
On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Frank O’Hara’s celebrated poem “Having a Coke with You,” Gillian Jakab takes a look at the “poet among painters” and the poem’s “You.” In April 1960, four days after returning from a trip to Spain, Frank O’Hara dashed off the poem “Having a Coke with You.” The open arms of the second person beckon anyone in; we are at home in the delights of Frank’s quotidian world. But eventually a clue emerges of the poem’s very real recipient, whose thrall over Frank outpaces some impressive competition: and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me A “poet among painters,” O’Hara could be found most nights in the late 1950s and ’60s at readings, exhibitions, studios, dinners, or the Cedar Tavern with the many contemporary painters he counted among his intimate friends and wider circle: Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, and Willem de Kooning, to name a few. 1 His weekdays he spent among paintings, first at the front desk, then as a curator, at The Museum of Modern Art. The poem’s precipitating visit to Spain was in fact a research trip for an exhibition he was organizing to open at MoMA that summer, New Spanish Painting and Sculpture. The museum’s dedication of a minigallery to O’Hara last fall attests to his role in celebrating Abstract Expressionism (he helped to curate MoMA’s influential Cold War-driven exhibition The New American Painting, of 1958, and wrote the first monograph on Jackson Pollock the following year) and in championing the movement’s second generation, his friends and contemporaries. The gallery assembles poems, ephemera, and paintings of and in the vicinity of O’Hara to describe how he shaped the history not only of the museum’s own collection but of modern art. So who could have moved so beautifully as to render Leonardo, Duchamp, and the entire movement of Futurism dispensable? In O’Hara’s eyes, that would have been the not-yet-twenty-one-year-old dancer Vincent Warren. And what to make of these rhetorical devices elevating his lover above greats of the Western canon? In “Having a Coke with You” as in much of his work, the poet admixes life and art. Here, life seems to come out on top: person over portrait (except maybe Rembrandt’s Polish Rider in the Frick). But we know that O’Hara didn’t sort the world into such stilted categories. As the writer Joe LeSueur, his roommate, and occasional bedfellow, through four apartments, put it, “He didn’t make distinctions, he mixed everything up: life and art, friends and lovers—what was the difference between them?”2 O’Hara aestheticized life and vivified art. And for either to be worthwhile for him, they had to be both immediate and action-filled. Warren, as both lover and dancer, embodied a quality that fed O’Hara’s appetite for a fresh union of life and art, a quality next to which the works of the great painters were found wanting. In O’Hara’s poem, Warren’s moving, breathing presence at home and on stage is a foil to what’s static and anchored: 114
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles O’Hara devalued both fixed definitions of the past and lofty theories of the future. Instead, he cast his gaze on the ever-shifting present before him and transcribed it in real time with his portable Royal typewriter.3 On the resulting quick, cascading poetry and its bursting imagery, the critic Marjorie Perloff comments that “photographs, monuments, static memories—‘all the things that don’t change’—these have no place in the poet’s world.”4 While O’Hara and the other New York School poets were closely and famously entwined with the Abstract Expressionists, it was the immediacy and dynamism of their work that drew him, not their focus on the inherent characteristics of the medium. Perloff writes, “We can now understand why O’Hara loved the motion picture, action painting, and all forms of dance—art forms that capture the present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor.”5 A trained pianist, O’Hara kept pace by “playing the typewriter,” in his phrase, anytime, anywhere. His apartment’s revolving door of friends, the city honking by, a typewriter shop at lunch, a trip to an art opening, a party—everything and everyone before him was fodder for his poetry. So naturally, from the summer of 1959, when O’Hara and Warren met, dance— among the most immediate and least mediated of
Previous spread: Vincent Warren in Catulli Carmina, c. 1969. Photo © Jack Mitchell, courtesy Vincent-Warren Dance Library This page: Vincent Warren and Frank O’Hara. Photo © George Montgomery, courtesy Vincent-Warren Dance Library Opposite: “Having a Coke with You” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
HAVING A COKE WITH YOU
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
(1960)
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art forms—pops in and out of poems the way a Larry Rivers or Joan Mitchell painting had earlier done. That year is considered O’Hara’s annus mirabilis and marks the beginning of his “Vincent Warren period,” which stretched until 1961 and lines up more or less with what are grouped as his love poems, sixteen of which are collected in Love Poems (Tentative title), published by the art gallery Tibor de Nagy in 1965. These works are held to be among his finest achievements. They’re where he really honed his signature “I do this; I do that” style and are plainly more enjoyable than his headier, symbolist poems. For LeSueur, who had the daily, intimate insight of a roommate, “These marvelous poems testify to what finally came together for Frank, what he at long last experienced, love and the reciprocation of love—physical, sexual, romantic love, fully and deeply realized.”6 For someone to embody this tall order of fulfillment was a feat, and in LeSueur’s estimation, some of O’Hara’s distinguished friends may have raised their eyebrows over Warren, this “unlikely love object.” Besides his youth, there was likely some bias in play against his métier, one continually relegated to the lower ranks of the disciplinary hierarchy: “He was a dancer,” LeSueur writes, “not a poet or a painter or an intellectual.”7 Even this progressive scene retained vestiges of America’s puritanical roots, which divided the mind from body and condemned the latter. Warren grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and came to dance not as a child enrolled in class by his parents but through films and books. At the age of eleven, he saw Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes, in its stunning Technicolor, and began saving for dance lessons and collecting everything dance—newspaper clippings, glossy photographs—in a scrapbook. Cyril Beaumont’s Complete Book of Ballets became his “bible.”8 At seventeen, he left for New York with a scholarship to the school of the American Ballet Theatre (now the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School) and soon won another scholarship to the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, where he studied with Antony Tudor. With his capacious curiosity and constant reading, he held his own in O’Hara’s avant-garde crowd, proving witty and knowledgeable to those who took the time to get to know him. LeSueur recalls Warren’s wide-ranging artistic interests, from old movies to the history of ballet: he “always seemed to be reading something, either a classic or some obscure book like the Mary Desti autobiography.”9 LeSueur must be remembering Desti’s memoir-cum-biography of the modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, an “obscure” reading choice that probably remained with him as it inspired, and is memorialized in, O’Hara’s poem “Mary Desti’s Ass” (1961): in Bayreuth once we were very good friends of the Wagners and I stepped in once for Isadora so perfectly she would never allow me to dance again that’s the way it was in Bayreuth 10 By this point Warren, with his infectious enthusiasm, had heaped some hearty doses of dance history onto O’Hara, and a few stanzas later O’Hara references his newfound education. He quickly casts it aside, though, probably because, as always, the living moving before him are more engaging than those frozen in pages: and Frisco where I saw Toumanova “the baby ballerina” except she looked like a cow 116
I didn’t know the history of ballet yet not that that taught me much 11 Yet O’Hara was clearly soaking it up. One poem dedicated to Warren is titled “At Kamin’s Dance Bookshop,” citing a niche dance shop and publishing house on Sixth Avenue. What’s more, the lovers would go to the ballet together two to three nights a week.12 To be fair, the stream of dance education ran both ways. O’Hara had been friends with dance-world luminaries and a perceptive fan of ballet long before he met Warren. In the couple’s mutual thrillings over dance, the poet would tell of his love for an earlier generation of George Balanchine dancers, many of whom make cameos in his poetry: Maria Tallchief (“John Button Birthday,” 1957), Diana Adams and Allegra Kent (“Poem read at Joan Mitchell’s,” 1957), and Tanaquil LeClercq (a starring role in “Ode to Tanaquil LeClercq,” 1960). And his dear friendship with the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby provided for many an impassioned lobby discussion over the merits of this or that dancer and the latest choreography. LeSueur remembers these ballet debriefs as staples of their lives together: “The three of us—Frank, Edwin, and I—would sometimes adjourn to Edwin’s loft on West 29th Street after the ballet at City Center. We’d drink bourbon, nibble on whatever tidbits Edwin could rustle up, reflect on the ballets we’d seen that night, and then go on to related aesthetic matters.”13 In the introduction to Denby’s essay collection Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965), O’Hara writes, “Denby is as attentive to people walking in the streets or leaning against a corner, in any country he happens to be in, as he is to the more formal and exacting occasions of art and theatre.”14 O’Hara, like Denby, observed and delighted in movement in all its forms and settings: from the streets (“and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes/in little bags”), to film musicals (“Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage/on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet”), to the campy social dance of bars (“Button’s buddy lips frame ‘L G T TH O P?’/across the
This page: View of the crowded interior of the Cedar Street Tavern, 24 University Place, New York, on its closing night, March 30, 1963. Among those visible are American poets Jack Micheline (left, smiling towards camera), Frank O'Hara (center, looking towards Micheline), Barbara Guest (looking at camera, in light colored jacket), and American sculptor Abram Schlemowitz (right fore, with glass in hand). Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images Opposite: Vincent Warren in Aileen Passloff’s Cypher, 1960. Photo © V. Sladon, courtesy Aileen Passloff
the pained “St. Paul and All That” (written when Warren was moving to Montreal to join Les Grands Ballets Canadiens), represent the height of O’Hara’s powers. They’re full of references to Warren but rarely mention him by name (although his first and last names read acrostically in the first letter of each line of “You Are Gorgeous and I Am Coming,” and his middle name appears in the title of “St. Paul and All That”). The secrecy is usually attributed to Warren’s fear of being outed as gay, especially to his mother, and of the threat that would have carried, in those days, to his career. The result is a low profile among poetry’s great muses. In a considerable number of the poems, however, Terpsichore, the Greek muse of dancing, stands in for Warren and takes center stage among the goddesses. As for Warren’s legacy, he’s not much more than a footnote in the choreographer-centric American dance canon, but he is a celebrated figure in Canada, where he grew as an artist. Leaving O’Hara’s raucous and consuming New York scene in search of his own identity, he rose to become principal dancer at the Ballets Canadiens and continued to stretch his range, starring in Norman McLaren’s experimental dance film Pas de deux (1968) and also in the Ballets Canadiens ballet set to the Who’s rock opera Tommy (1975). In Warren’s retirement he turned to teaching and his love of dance history, amassing an impressive library, now named the Bibliothèque de la danse Vincent-Warren and housed at L’École supérieure de ballet du Québec. If it was Warren’s lively beauty and joie de vivre that pushed O’Hara to his greatest work, it was O’Hara’s untimely accidental death, in 1966, at the age of forty, that propelled the love of his life to reach his potential as an artist and dance historian: “To say [O’Hara’s] death was like my birth as an artist, it sounds terrible but it’s probably true. I think that’s what pushed me through, to be not just an okay dancer but to be someone who had something more to show. . . . I think every artist has to have lived before they can make art.”18
bar. ‘Yes!’ I cry, for dancing’s/my soul delight. (Feet! Feet!) ‘Come on!’”).15 O’Hara shifted seamlessly from the body framed by the proscenium of the Metropolitan Opera to the body rolling on the floor of Judson Memorial Church. In those days, few made the leap from uptown to the downtown dance scene. There were two camps: one of ballet, over which Balanchine presided, and one of modern dance, whose gates were still kept by the old guard of the modern dance of the 1930s (Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and their stylistic lineages). When Merce Cunningham moved beyond the two camps of the dance world in the early 1950s, he found a home among avant-garde visual artists and musicians, paving a path for the collective known as Judson Dance Theater, which would later become synonymous with “postmodern” dance. At this mid-century moment, Warren was a unique dancer who cast off his ballet shoes and traipsed downtown, shunning distinctions in the fashion of his lover. “I was one of the rare ones who did both because I needed to do both,” he professes in Marie Brodeur’s touching 2016 documentary A Man of Dance, released the year before Warren passed away, in October 2017. One of Warren’s contemporary-dance performances was in James Waring’s 1958 Dances Before the Wall. The set’s multilayered landscape of boxes grew from the design of Julian Beck, cofounder of
the Living Theater, a kind of precursor to Judson where O’Hara had his own plays produced. These politically radical downtown spaces, Warren would recall, are “now sort of put on a pedestal as the hotbed and the birth place of ‘the new dance,’ but at the time it was a funhouse—they were doing crazy things, off the wall things, it was great to be there.”16 This new wave of dance elevated the pedestrian, the everyday, in contrast to ballet’s otherworldly artifice. O’Hara found inspiration in both—the natural and the stylized—fueled by the presentness of Balanchine’s fast, streamlined technique and of Waring’s whimsical, uninhibited compositions. In response to Dances Before the Wall, he wrote an eponymous poem that begins, “a monotonous revery of space is growing/like an early Greek statue I forget how B.C./suddenly everybody gets excited and starts/running around the Henry St. Playhouse.” Here is another statue, again signaling an apprehension of stasis, a fear of boredom, before the action picks up and the poem becomes a parodic web of players in the world of contemporary dance, some now forgotten, others lionized: Midi Garth, Fred Herko (Warren’s roommate), Sybil Shearer, Paul Taylor, Robert Rauschenberg, Doris Hering. And finally the poem, and evening, end: “we go to Edwin Denby’s and quietly talk all night.”17 The poems of the Warren period, beginning with the gleeful “Joe’s Jacket” and concluding on
All of the poems by Frank O’Hara quoted here appear in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen, with an introduction by John Ashbery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). In writing this essay I also relied on Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993) and Joan Acocella’s “Perfectly Frank,” The New Yorker, 1993, repr. in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), pp. 471–94. 1. The phrase “poet among painters” is the title of Marjorie Perloff’s study Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (New York: George Braziller, 1977). 2. Joe LeSueur, “Four Apartments,” Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. xx. 3. O’Hara’s feelings about past, present, and future come through in “Joe’s Jacket”: “returning by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom/like the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future I am here/and the night is heavy though not warm, Joe is still up and we talk/only of the immediate present and its indiscriminately hitched–to past/the feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city.” The Collected Poems, p. 329. 4. Perloff, “The Aesthetic of Attention,” in Poet among Painters, p. 21. 5. Ibid. 6. LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, p. 224. 7. Ibid. 8. See Marie Brodeur’s documentary on Vincent Warren, Un Homme de danse/A Man of Dance (Montreal: La Compagnie de la Marie/SPIRA, 2016), 83 min. 9. LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, p. 224. 10. Collected Poems, p. 401. 11. Ibid., p. 402. 12. See Warren, untitled essay in Bill Berkson and LeSueur, eds., Homage to Frank O’Hara, 1978 (reprint ed. Bolinas, CA.: Big Sky, 1988), pp. 74–76. 13. LeSueur, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, p. 93. 14. O’Hara, “Introduction,” in Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), p. 9. 15. Respectively from “Steps” (1960), “To the Film Industry in Crisis” (1955), and “At the Old Place” (1955). All from The Collected Poems, respectively pp. 370, 232, and 223. 16. Warren, in Brodeur, Un Homme de danse. 17. Collected Poems, pp. 334–35. 18. Warren, in Brodeur, Un Homme de danse.
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KATHARINA GROSSE I SEE WHAT SHE DID THERE On the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Terry R. Myers muses on the manipulations of time in Grosse’s work.
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Throughout: Installation view, Katharina Grosse: Is It You?, Baltimore Museum of Art, March 1– June 28, 2020 Artwork © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020 Photos: Mitro Hood, courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art
ccording to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be transferred from one form to another. There has been and will be no more and no less energy in the universe than there is now; it is what it is. Katharina Grosse has transferred far more of her share of the energy of painting from one form to another than most of the other artists of her generation, but I am getting way ahead of myself right off the bat. I will leave myself plenty of time to demonstrate the tremendous impact she has made with her work since the mid-1990s, work that I have had the pleasure and challenge of engaging with for nearly as long. Time—here, now, in this text about this artist’s work—may be no more than an inconsistent construct allowing us to cling to our concepts of past, present, and future. The complexity of this idea has, well, everything to do with that First Law above. I’ve been stuck on it ever since my mind was blown by my first reading of Carlo Rovelli’s recent book The Order of Time, in which he tells us such things as “For everything that moves, time passes more slowly,” and “not only is there no single time for different places—there is not even a single time for any particular place.”1 A quantum-gravity physicist by trade but a poet/philosopher at heart, Rovelli introduces the key hypotheses of quantum gravity while demonstrating how much we still don’t know about our universe. (Much less any other possible ones, like the “mirror universe” hypothesized by physicist Julian Barbour, a universe attached to the back of ours in which what we call time runs backwards.)2 Rereading Rovelli’s book while once again taking in the multisensory, multitemporal, yet fundamentally visual expanse of Grosse’s enterprise has finally enabled me to better grasp how she has been able to do something I always thought near impossible in her chosen field of painting: to produce work both in the expanded if not exploded field of painting and, simultaneously, within the literal boundaries of its history and traditions (like, of course, the stretched canvas that merely hangs on a wall). Somehow she has been able to be a painter and an artist who uses painting all at once; usually a choice has had to be made, and there are plenty of artists out there who seem to have made the wrong one. Grosse’s work is unconventional and traditional, antiform and formal, associative and nonobjective, and even present and absent, again, all at once. And as if those seeming contradictions weren’t enough, they are often all in play in a single work. Katharina Grosse: Is It You?, her current exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art (on view through June 28), provides a prime opportunity to experience the seeming contradictions listed above in a manner that challenges their boundaries. The exhibition brings together seven paintings (made between 2009 and 2017) and a site-relational work made in the central gallery of the museum’s contemporary wing, together presenting, it could be said, the two “halves” of Grosse’s production. Even within the parameters of the first half, represented by the five paintings, the range of approaches and materials on view activates what I will call here the “quantum” aspects of Grosse’s work: discrete units of energy that come in waves, measurable in material and visual terms. Key characteristics of a particular vertical painting, Untitled (2016), indicate an aspect of Grosse’s work that has captivated me from the beginning. Two large, white, rectangular areas—one running 121
from top to bottom of the painting’s left edge, the other starting next to it along the bottom edge and continuing past the painting’s center point—read as absences created by the removal of something that blocked paint from those areas while the work was being made. We are given no information about how long these barriers were there, other than that it was long enough for the painting to be completed. Or maybe not? Residue and drips in these blank areas of removal suggest either that some things happened after the reveal of the entire canvas, or that the barriers weren’t secure enough to keep that paint out. It is a painting perpetually tied to the site of its making (the studio?) by those moments of tangible absence. On its own, this connection is not extraordinary; all paintings are connected to the site of their making, whether we or not we are made aware of it by the work itself. I mention the studio with a question mark, however, because Grosse has also produced paintings on-site that she has moved from the position where they were made to another in the space, leaving behind the “spray” of paint that landed on the wall beyond the edges of the canvas. In those instances the work is allowed to play with its own making and its own duration, while also enabling us to visually fit it back into that place, as if it were a puzzle piece. We won’t ever know the exact amount of time that passed from one place to another, but we’re given direct evidence that it could have been measurable and recorded, if not analyzed and categorized. Time, as they say, is relative. Rovelli takes care to make sure that we recognize that there are no things but only events. A rock, for example, is a very slow event; a painting is much faster. Some of Grosse’s paintings incorporate all manner of events fast and slow, from the propulsion of particles of pigment out of an industrial spray gun to some of those rocks themselves. Another painting in Baltimore, also titled Untitled (2016), incorporates soil into its acrylic paint while also presenting a large white void with an irregular and granular border that is almost replicating if not fractal in appearance. It also incorporates whiplash looping gestures that merge the terms of yet another contradiction, one that pretty much ended with postmodernism: the either/or of high and low. Grosse is like a renegade graffiti artist and the contemporary version of a Renaissance ceiling painter rolled into one, a hybrid artist who is able to embed her work in both the detritus of everyday life and the multiverse of a chapel interior, directly taking on the entropy that comes with both environments—just as it does with everything else under those laws of physics. Things come together, things fall apart. They all have duration, but they don’t all have the same time. In the terms of physics, of course, there is no empty space; the phrase is an oxymoron. Moreover, everything is in motion, no matter whether we can perceive the movement or not, no matter how fast or how slowly anything has been placed somewhere, or painted, or sprayed, or replaced somewhere else. Grosse proves again and again that she is exceptionally capable of filling both the space we enter and the visual space we see. A quick recent check of her Instagram account provided a glimpse of a massive iceberglike (it’s not painted yet) work in progress that went on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in late April. Its title? It Wasn’t Us, an answer to the question asked in the title of the Baltimore exhibition, and in the new work made on site there: Is It You? Some might read that response as an artist not taking responsibility for her actions; I take it as the exact opposite, as a potent reminder of a statement Grosse made in an interview from 2002 that has 122
stuck with me ever since: “I feel like my work, in this sense, is narrative, without telling a story.”3 The narrative comes from what she did (what she painted, what objects she painted, what ways the painting is installed), but also from what the work itself will do once we’re left to look at it (or walk through or even on it) in order, as is said these days in social media, to see what she did there. In that same 2002 interview, Grosse says this about her use of the spray gun: “I’m looking and painting at the same time. It is very direct. That reflects my experience of painting generally, that thinking about and looking at something happens at the same time.”4 At its best—which is probably a rare occurrence on social media—saying “I see what you did there” could be an effective way to indicate that some thinking took place on the part of viewers while they were doing their looking. The second half of Grosse’s Baltimore show—the one given the same name as the exhibition, Is It You?—is at its most basic a large cloth curtain that drapes from the ceiling of the room, cascading in ripples down the walls and across the floor. Grosse has been working with this format for a few years now, most notably with works such as yes no why later, at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, in 2015, and The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped, at Carriageworks, Sydney, in 2018. Many of Grosse’s environmental works have components that are part of the architectural situation they cover; the building itself may provide, for example, a supporting structure, as in Grosse’s spectacular interventions in abandoned buildings: the empty house of untitled (2008), in post-Katrina New Orleans, looking almost on fire in radioactive orange, or the disused army aquatics building of Rockaway (2016), looking sandblasted with red and white paint that spread out over a beach in Queens, New York. Those buildings are crucial to Grosse’s goal of creating narratives without stories, as were the components of what now stands as one of the crucial works of her development, Das Bett (Bed, 2004), created by spray-painting her Düsseldorf bedroom and the objects in it. In hindsight, that work could have gone all wrong and let everything down the retrograde path of a romanticized notion of memory. If Grosse’s work is successful largely because of her ability to do her thinking while she is doing her making, it has also been spared the trap of falling into the type of meaning beholden to sentiment. That said, a curtain could be tricky territory— vulnerable to melodrama and overly reliant upon effect, if not affect. Those qualities could suck the energy out of a room, the laws of physics notwithstanding. In Grosse’s hands they warp two- and three-dimensional space while enabling an association with the hypothetical phenomena of folds in spacetime, which should, according to the science, be able to bend space and time to open up the wormholes of quantum-gravity physics, as they do in blockbuster superhero movies.5 Grosse may not be a superhero (or is she?) but her work just might be that and then some. 1. Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), pp. 38, 40. 2. See Tim De Chant, “Big Bang May Have Created a Mirror Universe Where Time Runs Backwards,” Nova, December 8, 2014. Available online at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/big-bang-maycreated-mirror-universe-time-runs-backwards/ (accessed March 6, 2020). 3. Katharina Grosse, in Grosse and Jonathan Watkins, “How to Start and Stop Painting,” 2002, quoted here from extracts in Terry R. Myers, ed., Painting, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011), p. 162. 4. Ibid. 5. Some day I hope to write a text about how much my immersion in Marvel Comics has impacted my relationship to contemporary art.
Quidel eicaborit reperum quisimaiorum imoles dolorep udictem faces de optaspe riostrum vel magnati onsequi corestet exerume ndanda ipsam, con culparcNobis exeri autatate laborehendi berro bea inctibus. Aditis eic tem re explam quamus esequibus is est in et litium fuga. Nam, nonserro deles quae mo ium ilique dessunto que volest facepudam, solest,
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SIMON HANTAÏ
Anne Baldassari reflects on the time she spent working with Simon Hantaï on an ultimately unrealized stainedglass commission for the Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-SainteJulitte, Nevers, and explains how this endeavor served as the catalyst for an exhibition of Hantaï’s paintings that she graciously curated at Gagosian, Le Bourget, in 2019.
SIMON HANTAÏ
Anne Baldassari reflects on the time she spent working with Simon Hantaï on an ultimately unrealized stainedglass commission for the Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-SainteJulitte, Nevers, and explains how this endeavor served as the catalyst for an exhibition of Hantaï’s paintings that she graciously curated at Gagosian, Le Bourget, in 2019.
“Absence, silence, for ten years now. Lost years?” Simon Hantaï often spoke in these terms, enjoying their tone of evasive condemnation. And he did let time flow, let it ebb. White, the light of white, the influx of the white of the canvas honing the color one last time before making it disappear, raised painting to an unbearable pitch. A beauty such that it had to be refused. The overly effective discipline of this “ doing” raised to the point of perfection. “I would prefer not to,” Herman Melville’s Bartleby repeats, eyes riveted on the soot-black wall across the yard. S. H. inhabits a deserted place. From this inner exodus, in the empty room on whose walls canvases sometimes several layers thick recede into oblivion, he looks unseeingly through the window, book in hand. Turning toward something else, something discreet and restrained, he is clandestinely accomplishing work alien to profitable virtue, to fertility, to the predominance of the “I” in painting. To all appearances, he is not working! Unless here, at this moment, the whole body of work takes its meaning from a suspension of pictorial activity. “I would prefer not to.”1 Previous spread: Installation view, Simon Hantaï, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, May 15–August 29, 1981
I met Simon Hantaï in 1984, in the highly formal context of a public commission for new stained glass for the Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-SainteJulitte in Nevers. Largely destroyed by bombing in July 1944, the building was still a construction site. The project was initiated by François Mathey, a former director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the organizer of some of the city’s most important exhibitions of modern art, including retrospectives of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, between 1955 and 1980. Mathey was Hantaï’s foremost champion. He had shown as much in 1969 with a one-day exhibition of the artist’s monumental Études (Studies, 1968–71) in the great hall of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an installation foreshadowing the wall project that Hantaï was working on for a school in Trappes. Hantaï and Sam Francis—old friends—had been chosen by the French ministry of culture to conceive and execute the ambitious stained-glass project together. Francis was excited about it and even bought a house and studio in the rue Georges Braque, just opposite the house and studio that Hantaï, his wife Zsuzsa, and their children had
moved into in 1979 after a reclusive decade-plus at Meun, in the forest of Fontainebleau. And so we went from one house to the other, and sometimes in procession all the way to the Manufacture des Gobelins, home to a giant model—a veritable building—that they had asked for and I had had made, one big enough for them to enter and walk around in, looking at the cathedral’s volumes and the relations between its spaces, testing materials, or setting designs in the open bays that were to contain their glass. Hantaï had a long-standing interest in the stained glass that Jackson Pollock conceived for a chapel, ultimately unbuilt, designed by Tony Smith in 1950. Pollock’s Black and White Polyptych, from 1951, and the series of black paintings that followed it were an essential point of reference for Hantaï, who originally conceived his own stained-glass designs in black and white. Then they gradually became white on white, or, more precisely, completely transparent. An experimental glass that we worked on with the research laboratory of the Saint-Gobain company allowed Hantaï to apply physical principles to his models and drawings
THE TABULAS THUS PROPOSE A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF PURE VISION. THEY ARE, IN FACT, MACHINES FOR THINKING ABOUT PAINTING WITHOUT ANY OF THE BALLAST OF NARRATIVE OR ICONOGRAPHY.
that had never been tried before: this glass was multilayered, and the layers had different refractive indexes, so that the glass, when exposed to light, acted like multiple prisms, generating colors directly in space—immaterial colors without a physical support. Hantaï took the idea for these colors, caused by contrasts among complementaries and the phenomenon of retinal persistence, from the fabulously poetic optical experiments described by Goethe in his Theory of Colors (1810). In about 1968, Hantaï had also observed the optical events created by Matisse’s slender black-andwhite wall drawings at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (1949–51), whose space they seem to tinge with purple. Matisse too had been a keen reader of Goethe; Theory of Colors was his bedside book when he was cutting into gouache-colored paper and using the play of these cutouts and cuttings against the white ground of the walls to conjure a “dance of space.” The series of Tabulas that Hantaï occupied himself with between 1973 and 1982 was guided by this same project. Each of these canvases is covered entirely by a pattern of solid color, generating
This page: Simon Hantaï, Tabula lilas, 1982, acrylic on canvas, 114 ¼ × 185 1⁄8 inches (290 × 470 cm) Opposite: Installation view, Simon Hantaï: LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR, Gagosian, Le Bourget, October 13, 2019–March 21, 2020. Photo: Thomas Lannes
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“Absence, silence, for ten years now. Lost years?” Simon Hantaï often spoke in these terms, enjoying their tone of evasive condemnation. And he did let time flow, let it ebb. White, the light of white, the influx of the white of the canvas honing the color one last time before making it disappear, raised painting to an unbearable pitch. A beauty such that it had to be refused. The overly effective discipline of this “ doing” raised to the point of perfection. “I would prefer not to,” Herman Melville’s Bartleby repeats, eyes riveted on the soot-black wall across the yard. S. H. inhabits a deserted place. From this inner exodus, in the empty room on whose walls canvases sometimes several layers thick recede into oblivion, he looks unseeingly through the window, book in hand. Turning toward something else, something discreet and restrained, he is clandestinely accomplishing work alien to profitable virtue, to fertility, to the predominance of the “I” in painting. To all appearances, he is not working! Unless here, at this moment, the whole body of work takes its meaning from a suspension of pictorial activity. “I would prefer not to.”1 Previous spread: Installation view, Simon Hantaï, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, May 15–August 29, 1981
I met Simon Hantaï in 1984, in the highly formal context of a public commission for new stained glass for the Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-SainteJulitte in Nevers. Largely destroyed by bombing in July 1944, the building was still a construction site. The project was initiated by François Mathey, a former director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the organizer of some of the city’s most important exhibitions of modern art, including retrospectives of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, between 1955 and 1980. Mathey was Hantaï’s foremost champion. He had shown as much in 1969 with a one-day exhibition of the artist’s monumental Études (Studies, 1968–71) in the great hall of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an installation foreshadowing the wall project that Hantaï was working on for a school in Trappes. Hantaï and Sam Francis—old friends—had been chosen by the French ministry of culture to conceive and execute the ambitious stained-glass project together. Francis was excited about it and even bought a house and studio in the rue Georges Braque, just opposite the house and studio that Hantaï, his wife Zsuzsa, and their children had
moved into in 1979 after a reclusive decade-plus at Meun, in the forest of Fontainebleau. And so we went from one house to the other, and sometimes in procession all the way to the Manufacture des Gobelins, home to a giant model—a veritable building—that they had asked for and I had had made, one big enough for them to enter and walk around in, looking at the cathedral’s volumes and the relations between its spaces, testing materials, or setting designs in the open bays that were to contain their glass. Hantaï had a long-standing interest in the stained glass that Jackson Pollock conceived for a chapel, ultimately unbuilt, designed by Tony Smith in 1950. Pollock’s Black and White Polyptych, from 1951, and the series of black paintings that followed it were an essential point of reference for Hantaï, who originally conceived his own stained-glass designs in black and white. Then they gradually became white on white, or, more precisely, completely transparent. An experimental glass that we worked on with the research laboratory of the Saint-Gobain company allowed Hantaï to apply physical principles to his models and drawings
THE TABULAS THUS PROPOSE A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF PURE VISION. THEY ARE, IN FACT, MACHINES FOR THINKING ABOUT PAINTING WITHOUT ANY OF THE BALLAST OF NARRATIVE OR ICONOGRAPHY.
that had never been tried before: this glass was multilayered, and the layers had different refractive indexes, so that the glass, when exposed to light, acted like multiple prisms, generating colors directly in space—immaterial colors without a physical support. Hantaï took the idea for these colors, caused by contrasts among complementaries and the phenomenon of retinal persistence, from the fabulously poetic optical experiments described by Goethe in his Theory of Colors (1810). In about 1968, Hantaï had also observed the optical events created by Matisse’s slender black-andwhite wall drawings at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (1949–51), whose space they seem to tinge with purple. Matisse too had been a keen reader of Goethe; Theory of Colors was his bedside book when he was cutting into gouache-colored paper and using the play of these cutouts and cuttings against the white ground of the walls to conjure a “dance of space.” The series of Tabulas that Hantaï occupied himself with between 1973 and 1982 was guided by this same project. Each of these canvases is covered entirely by a pattern of solid color, generating
This page: Simon Hantaï, Tabula lilas, 1982, acrylic on canvas, 114 ¼ × 185 1⁄8 inches (290 × 470 cm) Opposite: Installation view, Simon Hantaï: LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR, Gagosian, Le Bourget, October 13, 2019–March 21, 2020. Photo: Thomas Lannes
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HE SAW THE EXTINCTION OF PIGMENTARY COLOR AS THE PRECONDITION FOR THE APPEARANCE OF A COLORED LIGHT THAT WOULD FILL SPACE TO THE BRIM, A COLOR WITH NEITHER FRAME NOR FORM. a white drawing in the areas left bare. The interlaced painted lines form a grid, regular but not rigidly so and marked by accidents throughout. The contrast between the white and the swaths of pure pigment induces intense optical effects, even “visions”: each patch, as Goethe would have predicted, seems to be tinted along its edge with its complementary color, generating haloes or incandescent sparks in the eye. The viewer of a big blue Tabula, then, may see superimposed over the actual grid a virtual one in yellow or bright orange, which sharpens his or her vision and, depending on the light, may seem to dance in front of the painting. The Tabulas thus propose a unique experience of pure vision. They are, in fact, machines for thinking about painting without any of the ballast of narrative or iconography. In 1982, Hantaï came as close as he could to capturing immaterial color with the Tabulas lilas series, which are painted in white on white—the white of the paint acting as a cold shade on the warmer white of the bare canvas support. When these large paintings are hung on the four walls of a gallery, the contrasts among their infinitesimally various tones saturate the space with a shade of lilac. This “sublime” result is generated by the chance interactions between the panels, the place, and the light suffusing it. Hantaï imagined the Nevers stained-glass project as capturing light itself. He committed himself to it passionately, but in the end it was taken away from him and Francis for obscure “administrative” reasons. At the same time, following the limit experience of the Tabulas lilas, Hantaï stopped painting for nearly ten years. But he gradually made his way back to it. In his last work as a painter—he died in 2008—he saw the extinction of pigmentary color as the precondition for the appearance of a colored light that would fill space to the brim, a color with neither frame nor form. As with Pollock, his choice of black and white in these final pieces was designed to establish a purely theoretical status for the work. The exhibition LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR (The blacks of white, the whites of black) was conceived as an homage to the Nevers project, that rigorous quest to which I was the solitary witness. The show traced the line from Hantaï’s monochrome Études of around 1969 5
to the experiments in cutting and reassembling seen in the big black Tabula (1980) made for the exhibition of the CAPC in Bordeaux—the work from which, working piece by piece with a blade, Hantaï derived his first Laissées (Left, 1980–94)—and on to the ink-colored silk-screens of the late 1990s. The natural light diffused around Gagosian’s enormous Le Bourget space, a former aircraft hangar, by the curves in its concrete roof worked to induce the indescribable chromatic manifestations, simultaneously mental and spatial, that Hantaï sought. Depending on the weather and the time of day, the light might reveal to those prepared to wait for and apprehend them an evanescent purple cloud, orange-hued haloes, a yellow veil, a pink mist. . . .
1. Anne Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, Jalons. Collections du Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992), p. 10. The phrase “I would prefer not to” is a quotation from Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), to which Hantaï often referred in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical analysis of that story.
Installation view, Simon Hantaï: LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR, Gagosian, Le Bourget, October 13, 2019–March 21, 2020. Photo: Thomas Lannes Artwork © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris
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HE SAW THE EXTINCTION OF PIGMENTARY COLOR AS THE PRECONDITION FOR THE APPEARANCE OF A COLORED LIGHT THAT WOULD FILL SPACE TO THE BRIM, A COLOR WITH NEITHER FRAME NOR FORM. a white drawing in the areas left bare. The interlaced painted lines form a grid, regular but not rigidly so and marked by accidents throughout. The contrast between the white and the swaths of pure pigment induces intense optical effects, even “visions”: each patch, as Goethe would have predicted, seems to be tinted along its edge with its complementary color, generating haloes or incandescent sparks in the eye. The viewer of a big blue Tabula, then, may see superimposed over the actual grid a virtual one in yellow or bright orange, which sharpens his or her vision and, depending on the light, may seem to dance in front of the painting. The Tabulas thus propose a unique experience of pure vision. They are, in fact, machines for thinking about painting without any of the ballast of narrative or iconography. In 1982, Hantaï came as close as he could to capturing immaterial color with the Tabulas lilas series, which are painted in white on white—the white of the paint acting as a cold shade on the warmer white of the bare canvas support. When these large paintings are hung on the four walls of a gallery, the contrasts among their infinitesimally various tones saturate the space with a shade of lilac. This “sublime” result is generated by the chance interactions between the panels, the place, and the light suffusing it. Hantaï imagined the Nevers stained-glass project as capturing light itself. He committed himself to it passionately, but in the end it was taken away from him and Francis for obscure “administrative” reasons. At the same time, following the limit experience of the Tabulas lilas, Hantaï stopped painting for nearly ten years. But he gradually made his way back to it. In his last work as a painter—he died in 2008—he saw the extinction of pigmentary color as the precondition for the appearance of a colored light that would fill space to the brim, a color with neither frame nor form. As with Pollock, his choice of black and white in these final pieces was designed to establish a purely theoretical status for the work. The exhibition LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR (The blacks of white, the whites of black) was conceived as an homage to the Nevers project, that rigorous quest to which I was the solitary witness. The show traced the line from Hantaï’s monochrome Études of around 1969 5
to the experiments in cutting and reassembling seen in the big black Tabula (1980) made for the exhibition of the CAPC in Bordeaux—the work from which, working piece by piece with a blade, Hantaï derived his first Laissées (Left, 1980–94)—and on to the ink-colored silk-screens of the late 1990s. The natural light diffused around Gagosian’s enormous Le Bourget space, a former aircraft hangar, by the curves in its concrete roof worked to induce the indescribable chromatic manifestations, simultaneously mental and spatial, that Hantaï sought. Depending on the weather and the time of day, the light might reveal to those prepared to wait for and apprehend them an evanescent purple cloud, orange-hued haloes, a yellow veil, a pink mist. . . .
1. Anne Baldassari, Simon Hantaï, Jalons. Collections du Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992), p. 10. The phrase “I would prefer not to” is a quotation from Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), to which Hantaï often referred in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical analysis of that story.
Installation view, Simon Hantaï: LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR, Gagosian, Le Bourget, October 13, 2019–March 21, 2020. Photo: Thomas Lannes Artwork © Archives Simon Hantaï/ADAGP, Paris
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BIGGER PICTURE
RECESS
Over the last decade, Recess has reimagined the relationship between art and the public. What began in 2009 as a storefront artists’ residency in SoHo has morphed and expanded with the artists and community members who have passed through its doors. Today, headquartered in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Recess runs a variety of programs offering artists and communities time and space to create outside of institutional models. Among them are Session, a program supporting artists’ projects from development to exhibition in close relation with audiences; Analog, a digital platform in which artists document and share an aspect of their labor over a year; and most recently Assembly, a partnership with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives and the Brooklyn DA’s office, to steer young people caught up in the criminal-justice system into alternatives to incarceration. Assembly also provides participants with long-term support through paid training, internships, and job placement in the arts. These programs—whether for professional artists or novice students—often inform one another. Assembly lead teaching artist Shaun Leonardo, for example, has exhibited his own work probing the justice system in a format much like a Session residency, making it a jumping-off point for the program’s collaborative pedagogy. As Sara Roffino writes in Cultured magazine, “From this starting point of arrest and prison, the group has collectively built one of the most powerful social practices within contemporary art.” Recess Fundraising Committee Member and Gagosian Director Sarah Hoover sat down with Founder & Executive Director Allison Freedman Weisberg and Program Manager Anaïs Duplan to discuss the organization’s evolution, recent programs, and dreams for the future.
SARAH HOOVER Allison, when you launched Recess,
what were its initial goals?
ALLISON FREEDMAN WEISBERG I started with the hope
of partnering with artists to build a more just and equitable creative community. The fun part about that mission is that artists are constantly elevating and expanding it. Everybody who comes here— our program participants, our writers, our young people—are reinventing what a creative community can look and feel like. ANAÏS DUPLAN Within that general mission there are various program models that we work from. Each one has a different way of doing what Allison so eloquently described. There’s the Session program, which gives artists access to our wonderful space to develop projects in tandem with different communities, which they identify through impromptu, one-on-one engagements with people who walk through the door, through public programs that we design collaboratively, and through interactions people have with the projects themselves, which develop in the public eye over the course of six weeks. Rather than inviting people to engage with the finished set of works, we’re thinking about how to invite people into artists’ processes as they are unfolding. Related to that, there’s the Critical Writing program, which pairs a Session artist with a writer. The writer is asked to produce a piece written on the occasion of the artist’s work, rather than about the artist’s work. So the writing ends up being as much about the writer’s practice as about the ideas explored in Session. Then we have Assembly, a newer program that has really expanded our community. Assembly welcomes young people, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, to participate in a workshop designed by artist Shaun Leonardo for a court-mandated period of four or ten weeks. The workshop deals with what we call “visual
storytelling”: our young people have been told narratives about who they are that are toxic and false, so they’re working through how to retell their own stories. And then they’re welcome to stay on with us as what’s called a “Peer Leader” for ten more months. That’s a paid position where they learn things like art handling, screen printing, videography, photography, and other skills useful in establishing a career in the arts. AFW The through line of all of these programs is about taking down the perceived veneer that often makes art spaces seem unapproachable, especially if you’re someone who doesn’t feel welcomed in a museum, gallery, or other traditional arts environment. The hypothesis early on was that if artists are present and able to speak about their work and their ideas as humans, first and foremost, the connection to art and artmaking would be about relationship and proximity, which is innately human and accessible for everyone but doesn’t require any watering down of the critical content of the artwork. SH To backtrack a bit, can you tell me a little bit what was in your head when you decided to start Recess? AFW I’d been working in museums in New York for about five years. I started at The Museum of Modern Art, then ran youth and community programs for the Whitney [Museum of American Art] in their education department uptown. I also ran a partnership program with a homeless shelter on the Upper West Side. Their young people, between the ages of six and fourteen, would come after school and look at art and make a project. I loved what would happen to artists who got a chance to share their work with the young people in that program, and, likewise, what would transpire for the kids and teens. This was all on my mind in my first thinking about Recess, which actually started as a completely theory-based graduate thesis. Then, about
THE QUESTIONS THAT EACH ARTIST BRINGS TO THE TABLE ARE CONSTANTLY PERPLEXING AND REDOUBLE MY INTEREST IN THIS WORK AS A CREATIVE PURSUIT. —Allison Freedman Weisberg
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halfway through writing, I realized this could actually be a thing in the real world. The line of thought radiated out from the basic question of what happens when you have closeness among artists and audiences, not only a physical proximity but also a social and intellectual closeness. What happens when you give an artist the time and space to really work through tough questions and prioritize the questioning rather than the answer? That’s true in the context of Assembly, too: sure, it starts as an alternative to incarceration and it has this very clear path, but really that’s just a starting point for what can be a lifelong exploration of creativity and problem solving and relationship building. SH Do you have favorite projects that you’ve been involved with here? AFW It’s really easy for me to give a different answer every time I’m asked this, so I can share the love. The questions that each artist brings to the table are constantly perplexing and redouble my interest in this work as a creative pursuit. A lot of artists make work about social, political, and economic issues, but Recess really tries to take that one step further and ask: what are the ways in which asking these questions and demanding answers—or at least demanding a process of searching for answers—can have real manifestations on the ground for the communities that are living the fallout of our broken systems? Chris Udemezue just finished a project at Recess that I think Anaïs and I both fell in love with. AD That Session was called Duppy, a word that in Jamaican patois means “ghost.” Udemezue was thinking about his mother’s relationship to Jamaica throughout her life, the stories she told him about Jamaica growing up and how they informed his own relationship to Jamaica, which was initially one of fear and trepidation. Then he went there and had a marvelous, paradisal kind of time. Since then, Udemezue has been trying to reconcile the
WHAT DRAWS ME HERE EVERY DAY IS THIS QUESTION OF WHO THE ARTWORK IS IMPORTANT TO. IT’S NOT A SECONDARY QUESTION; CURATORIAL WORK DOESN’T HAPPEN FIRST AND THEN SOMETHING CALLED “EDUCATION” OR “PROGRAMMING” HAPPENS LATER. —Anaïs Duplan
differences between those two conceptions of an ancestral home by talking with his mother, trying to learn more about her traumatic experiences of Jamaica growing up and why she might have been afraid for him in that environment. I have to say, as a caveat, that I was born in Haiti, so I have a fondness for projects on Afro-Caribbean diasporas. But we had a class visit with some high school students from McKinney Secondary School for the Arts, in Brooklyn, and I realized just how many people in New York are Afro-Caribbean or of Afro-Caribbean descent. We talked for a long time about how Chris’s pieces were made, and we got to this really amazing point where, as a group, we realized that what was powerful about Chris’s work wasn’t that he was depicting his subject matter in a straightforward way. Only in looking at how he made the works, the colors, the compositions, could you come into the emotional and thematic subject matter. It’s not like I arrived at that understanding by myself and then tried to convey it to these high school students. Rather, being in conversation with them, I learned more about the work. That’s what I appreciate about Sessions: by bringing people in and talking with them about the work, I learn so much from each person. AFW He activated the space with programming about healing and trauma. There were a couple of times when participants in our Assembly program were in these healing workshops and were thinking about their own past traumas, and the ways that they’ve inherited the traumas of their families. I witnessed them speak so beautifully about their experiences and come away with tools for feeling empowered and strengthened moving forward. A lot of the young people in the Assembly program are also of Afro-Caribbean descent. They often sit at our front desk and welcome visitors, or
lead school groups through the space, and there was one young man who was able to explain so much about the project by virtue of his own experience with the diaspora and his mom. Here, an artist can support a young person, a young person can support an artist, and in so doing they can welcome more folks from other communities into the space and grow that ecosystem in a really beautiful and organic way. SH It sounds like you’ve kept up the rigor of the artmaking naturally somehow, but have you made specific efforts to do so—to make sure things don’t get watered down in any way? AFW Yes, I think our artists are our best spokespeople. The projects they put forward are constantly of such high caliber. But I also think credit goes to Anaïs and other program staff at Recess who constantly insist that watered-down art is boring for everybody. I think there’s a mistaken assumption that community engagement implies some kind of “less than,” like it makes for an easier pill to swallow for folks who’ve been historically excluded from a critical dialogue. But that’s exactly why community-based art doesn’t work a lot of the time: it’s condescending, it’s boring, and it does a disservice both to participants and to the artist. When given the time and space to unpack difficult subject matter in a creative context, people can arrive at responses to these entrenched, systemic questions that in another context just might not be possible. SH Is there anything that either of you would want someone unfamiliar with the nonprofit sector to know? AFW I would say we work really hard to present a rigorous, strong, compelling program, both for our artists and for our young people. But you know, tenplus years in, it is never not a struggle to meet that
bottom line. I think we run a pretty tight ship, but a nonprofit model is tough; it’s a labor of love to keep going. If the artists and the program participants and the audiences weren’t constantly upping the ante for us, it would be an easy proposition to just walk, but every time another artist comes in and reinvents the possibilities of what contemporary art can be and do, and every time a young person helps me understand better the way that art can be a tool toward social change, I understand we have to do more. AD What draws me here every day is this question of who the artwork is important to. It’s not a secondary question; curatorial work doesn’t happen first and then something called “education” or “programming” happens later. There has to be a reason the artist’s work is publicly available, and that has to be established from the beginning. SH What would you do if you found out tomorrow that your budget had doubled for the year? AFW I’m going to give the most boring answer. Our budget is $1 million; if you gave me another million tomorrow, I would put it away, invest it, and let it grow. If I look back over the last thirty years and think of the art spaces and nonprofits that have survived, it’s the ones that own real estate or have an endowment. And we have neither of those things. I’m really thinking about stability, which is like the most unsexy thing, right? But I’ve never thought of Recess as growing exponentially in terms of our square footage or our programs. I believe the ethos of Recess has the ability to spread with each artist and each young person that comes through the program. With stability, we can provide more support for individuals to imbue their own communities with the Recess ethos. Photos: courtesy Recess, New York
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BOOK CORNER
PRIVATE PAGES MADE PUBLIC Megan N. Liberty explores artists’ engagement with notebooks and diaries, thinking through the various meanings that arise when these private ledgers become public.
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In his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” the French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault asked what delineates an author’s work: “If an individual is not an author, what are we to make of those things he has written or said, left among his papers or communicated to others? Is this not properly a work?”1 If what might be of value to future audiences is established by the status of “author,” the net cast is wide enough to have troubled Foucault: “Plainly, we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively undertake the publication of the complete works of an author often suffers from the absence of this framework.”2 Foucault posited this question as a problem, but the absence of an answer to it, I suggest, gives artists an opportunity and plays into their performance of self, allowing them to subvert established notions of authorship. As public interest in archival materials grows, archives give artists a way to speak for themselves. We have recently seen the publication of a flurry of notebooks and sketchbooks by a variety of artists both living and dead, including Anni Albers, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Lee Lozano, Brice Marden, Stanley Whitney, and Jack Whitten, to name just a few. These books, many of which have grown out of exhibitions, range from visually driven volumes, focusing on the plans and trials for finished art, to more diaristic forays that visually or verbally disclose thoughts about the artists’ lives and work. Regardless of where a book falls across this spectrum, it offers an intimate experience of behind-the-scenes material. T he publicat ion of archival facsimiles as mass-media art books raises issues of privacy and audience, in terms not just of making private sketches and notes public but also of wide access to materials that would otherwise remain behind closed doors, available only to researchers and institutions. When a sketchbook is more preparatory and less private, access to it is still often limited to visiting an exhibition or an archive, a very different experience from reading a facsimile. Even archives that offer online access still remain somewhat exclusive, resources only for those in the know, or even only those with institutional affiliations. In a 2008 interview, Whitney admitted to not formally exhibiting his sketchbooks: “I have a sketchbook that I draw in all the time. But I don’t really show them.”3 In 2017, though, to accompany an exhibition of his drawings at Lisson Gallery, New York, Whitney published a facsimile sketchbook, a slim, 120-page floppy paperback. 4 According to the gallery, a priority of this publication was affordability: it was priced at $30 so that students could buy it. Making the unique available and affordable, this sketchbook circumvents issues of access, functioning instead in the spirit and ethos of artists’ books as a democratic multiple for the masses. In 2015, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited notebooks of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, making an argument for the visual as well as the poetic complexity of his writing. Selected pages from his marble composition notebooks were framed on gallery walls, prioritized as art objects. The show exemplified Foucault’s query about the line between archive and art. Basquiat wrote in a bound and sequenced book; reading individual pages as single framed objects in a gallery space certainly changes their meaning. Contemporaneous with the exhibition, Princeton University Press published a facsimile collection of Basquiat’s notebooks, bound together in a mock composition book.5 The book lets readers
read as well as see, engaging with the writing in a context closer to the one it was created in. Along these lines, in 2015 Karma published two volumes of Brice Marden’s notebooks, which include mockups of paintings, collaged photographs of Marden and his friends, reproductions of other artworks, and clipped newspaper ads, together suggesting references he draws on for his abstract paintings.6 There are also lines of more personal handwritten text: “Life is but the stream I go a fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.”7 Lying at the intersection of artist’s book and study resource, these facsimiles represent the nexus of art object and tactile thing-for-use. The ubiquity of these books suggests they are not straightforwardly private things made public, but part of a more complicated dynamic between artist and audience. In a review of Benjamin Moser’s recent biography of Susan Sontag, the writer Nausicaa Renner revisits both Sontag’s journaling habits and her own. She quotes from Sontag’s diaries (published by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, after her death)—“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people”—then asks herself, “Should we also think of Sontag’s diaries that way? Do I think that of mine? As I page through undated fragments, I come across an abstract drawing. The caption of the drawing: ‘Will someone look in here someday?’”8 Writers like Sontag and Renner may consciously or unconsciously hope for a level of success that will warrant an archive and therefore an audience for their once private thoughts. The sketchbook is akin to the diary in that it is filled with an artist’s inner thoughts, whether they be visual or verbal. Even notebooks or sketchbooks without personal writings offer otherwise unknowable insights, informing readers on references, failed designs, and experiments with materials. A sketchbook of Kara Walker’s published in 2017 by Roma, Amsterdam, includes a number of lengthy diarylike entries scrawled alongside sketches and watercolor studies.9 In an introductory note, Walker calls the materials “uneasy, unrefined, unfinished thoughts and anxieties” that were “never intended to be shared,” and yet she published it. In an early entry she reminds herself, “This is not my diary, leave it,” yet the content pushes against this assertion: the book contains lengthy entries meditating on Walker’s outsider status and relationship to European whiteness, or voicing considerations of race, nationality, and slavery, themes that resonate throughout her work. These musings are accompanied by figurative sketches in pen and watercolor. The line between sketchbook and diary is sometimes thin, perhaps even irrelevant. Renner writes of Sontag’s journals, “She, almost against her will, wrote them to be read.” Diaries cultivate the self we wish to leave behind, both consciously and unconsciously. They are a performance of self for the self, with the desperate hope that others too will want to see the show. Painter Louis Fratino, to accompany his first show at New York’s Sikkema Jenkins & Co. last year, published a facsimile of his sketchbook in lieu of a traditional catalogue. The book, which documents the period leading up to the show, includes sketchy doodles of people in transit, studies for larger works, and more-fleshed-out, colorful experiments with wax scratchings, the transfer of pigment between facing pages, and the transparency of the paper. Speaking to me in his studio, Fratino called his sketchbook “diaristic” and underscored
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Previous spread: From top to bottom: Brice Marden: Sketchbook (Gagosian, 2019); Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967–70 (Primary Information, 2010); Stanley Whitney: Sketchbook (Lisson Gallery, 2018); Kara Walker: MCMXCIX (ROMA, 2017); Louis Fratino,Sept ’18–Jan. ’19 (Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 2019); Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks (Princeton University Press, 2015); Keith Haring Journals (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2010)
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This page: Spreads from Kara Walker: MCMXCIX (ROMA, 2017) Opposite: Spreads from Brice Marden: Sketchbook (Gagosian, 2019)
this kind of book’s ability to provide context and offer the artist a more nuanced voice: “The criticism I get is so rarely about the formal quality of the work. Part of the moment now is so focused on the identity of the artist.” Publication of the sketchbook allowed him to put forward his formal process. Like Sontag in her diaries, though, Fratino is not unaware of his audience. “I have to first consider myself the only audience,” he told me, “you have to feel like you are the only person in the room, but then you also entertain the small voice in the back of your head that is everyone who is ever going to see.”10 Fratino is an admirer of the journals of Keith Haring, which were published by Penguin in 1997, several years after the artist’s death. Fratino particularly respects his conviction, even early in his career, that “this ephemera matters.”11 Haring was known for work that was publicly accessible: murals, street art, affordable multiples. “I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached,” he wrote in
a journal entry of October 1978.12 The books include Haring’s writing (typeset rather than in facsimile), with doodles and sketchbook drawings added as illustrations. A 2010 deluxe edition of the journals opens with a “Note on Sources and Acknowledgments” that claims, “It is clear from Keith Haring’s comments in his journals that he expected they would ultimately be read by others.” The sentiment is echoed by the Haring Foundation’s archivist, Anna Gurton-Wachter.13 In 2011, to coincide with an exhibition of Haring’s work, the Gladstone Gallery, New York, published a sketchbook of his from 1978. This spiral-bound book covers two important periods in Haring’s life, when he was a student at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center and when he first moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts. The pages in the first half of the sketchbook are signed and some are even dated, suggesting that they could potentially circulate as single drawings, while the second half of the book is a series of pencil drawings titled “Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks.”14 For the exhibition, the pages were displayed in vitrines as detached single sheets. As Gurton-Wachter told me, Haring often disassembled his books and then gathered the pages together within a book shell, which is likely the case with these pages, now reassembled into a facsimile publication much as Haring would reassemble his loose pages. The visual style of the first half is primarily geometric and includes block-lettered notes throughout, so that it shows both workings-out of visual ideas, evidence of his conceptual thinking, and more personal, diaristic, written entries, such as a page where Haring meditates on a finished drawing, ultimately proclaiming, “but my work is never ‘finished’ and ‘always’ finished.” These lines illuminate the conceptual thinking behind Haring’s popular imagery. As Fratino observes, the sketchbook and the journal foreshadow the immense audience Haring’s work would grow to have, and his willingness to share with them seemingly deeply private considerations. Lee Lozano was an artist well-known for playing with notions of public and private. Published as a facsimile by Primary Information in 2010, her “Laboratory Notebooks” span 1967–70. Early on in the book, Lozano writes, “I have started to document everything because I cannot give up my love of ideas.”15 To read through its pages is to engage with both work in progress, diary entries, and finished works. According to James Hoff, a cofounder of Primary Information, while Lozano was still living she and her assistant unbound this notebook (as Haring did his), xeroxed its pages for her records, and then began selling them off individually. She treated these pages, then, as finished works, and this was certainly the case in her series of “language pieces,” which she made directly in her notebooks before removing them for sale. Yet each book is labeled “private” on the cover. Karma’s in-progress series of facsimiles of Lozano’s small spiral notebooks (seven of a planned eleven have been produced, beginning in 2016) includes mundane details—lists of contacts, agendas—as well as more personal entries, and bears the same “private” label across the front. On the inside cover of each book is a note revealing that Lozano went back to edit them all in 1972, suggesting—as her selling of their pages did—that she saw an audience for them. As Madeline Weisburg writes of the notebooks, “The notion of the private is closely related to overarching ideas that fundamentally formed her practice, in which boundaries
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between objectivity and intimacy, both in art and everyday life were often dissolved, or at least confused.”16 The books document Lozano’s political views, often shared in lists or bulleted proclamations such as “i am not a feminist. i speak to both men and women because i think both men and women are slaves in today’s society.” A list of institutions in which she does not believe includes slavery, marriage, parenthood, and God. The “private” label serves to heighten we readers’ voyeuristic craving to learn something intimate and personal about an artist’s inner life. The sheer number and variety of the artists who have produced these books, and the books’ highly various contents, illustrate that conceiving of them as private is something readers may do more than artists. The art audience has a thirst for archival materials, for the behind-the-scenes rather than the finished product, although it depends on scholars and editors to select the most interesting materials. For Foucault, the status of “author” was a means of narrowing down those writers whose materials would count as “work” for the editor and the audience: “we can say that in our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author.”17 Assigning that status of “author,” however—which an artist’s importance as a visual artist may do—shifts the letter from private to public. The rise in the publication of artists’ notebooks and sketchbooks, and the artists’ willingness to share these private materials, demonstrate an embrace of these expanded boundaries around work, and all the complications that come with it. Rachel Churner has discussed the impact of the archive on Eileen Myles after the poet’s papers were acquired by Yale University’s Beinecke Library: “As Myles explained in a postscript called ‘My Secret,’ they began ‘writing as if someone is reading’ and consequently wanting to withhold their most intimate ideas, words, and experiences from the page.”18 As artists embrace their own archives, it will be interesting to follow how they perform themselves in the once private space of the archive for a looming public audience that we all know is out there thirsting for their secrets. Opposite: Spreads from Louis Fratino,Sept ’18–Jan. ’19 (Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 2019) This page: Spreads from Stanley Whitney: Sketchbook (Lisson Gallery, 2018) Photos: Carey MacArthur
A version of this essay was presented at the College Book Art Association Conference in New Orleans in 2020. The essay would not have been possible without the help of: Scott Briscoe, Sikkema Jenkins & Co.; Jake Brodsky, Hauser & Wirth; Louis Fratino; Anna Gurton-Wachter, The Keith Haring Foundation; Mackie Healy, Lisson Gallery; James Hoff, Primary Information; Andrew Huff, Gladstone Gallery; Rebecca Schiffman, Hauser & Wirth; Lauren Mahony, Gagosian; Roger Willems, Roma Publishers; and Lucas Zwirner, David Zwirner Books. And thanks to Robert GordonFogelson, Levi Prombaum, and Jennie Waldow for early notes and feedback. 1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 1969, in J. Marsh, J. D. Caputo, and M. Westphal, eds., Modernity and Its Discontents (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 302. 2. Ibid. 3. Stanley Whitney, in “In Conversation: Stanley Whitney with John Yau,” Brooklyn Rail, October 2008. Available online at https://brooklynrail.org/2008/10/art/show-and-tell-contemporarypractice-in-artists-books (accessed March 25, 2020). 4. Stanley Whitney, Sketchbook (New York: Lisson Gallery, 2018). 5. Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Notebooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 6. Brice Marden, Notebook Sept. 1964–Sept. 1967 and Notebook Feb. 1968– (both New York: Karma, 2015). 7. Marden, Notebook Sept. 1964–Sept. 1967, n.p. 8. Nausicaa Renner, “Confessions of a Mask,” n+1, December 30, 2019. Available online at https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/ online-only/confessions-of-a-mask/ (accessed March 25, 2020). Renner is writing on Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work (New York: HarperCollins, 2019). 9. Kara Walker, MCMXCIX (Amsterdam: ROMA Publishers, 2017).
10. Louis Fratino, conversation with the author in the artist’s Brooklyn studio, February 24, 2020. 11. Ibid. 12. Keith Haring, Keith Haring Journals, deluxe edition (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), p. 18. 13. Anna Gurton-Wachter, e-mail exchange with the author, December 10–11, 2019, and conversation with the author, February 18, 2020, Keith Haring Archive, New York. 14. Ken Hicks is today unidentified, according to Gurton-Wachter. 15. Lee Lozano, Notebooks 1967–70 (New York: Primary Information, 2010). 16. Madeline Weisburg, “Lee Lozano Private Books 1–3,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2018. Available online at https://brooklynrail.org/2018/02/art_books/Lee-Lozano-PrivateBook-1-3 (accessed March 25, 2020). 17. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” p. 305. 18. Rachel Churner, “Never Too Late: The Late Style of Eileen Myles and Yvonne Rainer,” Artforum 58, no. 6 (February 2020): 167.
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Heinrich von Füger (1751 – 1818, DE)
L.A. Schou (1838 – 1867, DK)
Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 – 1553, DE)
Felice Ficherelli (1605 – 1660, IT)
Jacob Isaacz. van Swanenburgh (1571 – 1638, NL)
Master I.W. (work shop of Cranach)
Francis Danby (1793 – 1861, IE)
Nicolas Chaperon (1612 – 1656, FR)
Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528, DE)
Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli (Giampietrino) (1495 – 1549, IT)
Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1515 – 1586, DE) Hendrik van Steenwijck the Elder (c. 1580 – 1640, BE) Balthasar van der Ast (1593 – 1657, NL) Pieter Claesz (1597 – 1661, BE) Alexander Tovborg (1983, DK) Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640, BE) Antonio Bellucci (1654 – 1726, IT) Ferraù Fenzoni (1562 – 1645, IT) Carlo Dolci (1616 – 1686, IT) Nicolas Régnier (1591 – 1667, FR) Ludovico Carracci (1555 – 1619, IT) Abraham Janssens (1567 – 1632, BE)
Wilhelm Marstrand (1810 – 1873, DK) C.A. Lorentzen (1749 – 1828, DK) William T. Maud (1865 – 1903, GB) Mårten Eskil Winge (1825 – 1896, SE) Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831 – 1892, NO) Jani Leinonen (1978, FI) Horace Vernet (1789 – 1863, FR) Erik Henningsen (1855 – 1930, DK) Hubert Lanzinger (1880 – 1950, AT) Leni Reifenstahl (1902 – 2003, DE) Dmitrij Moor (1883 – 1946, RU)
Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844, DK)
Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset (1961, DK / 1969, NO)
C.W. Eckersberg (1783 – 1853, DK)
Poul Gernes (1925 – 1996, DK)
Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (1725 – 1805, FR)
Marguerite Humeau (1986, FR)
Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743 – 1809)
Robert Boyd (1969, US)
Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825, CH)
Shana Moulton (1976, US)
Joseph Dufour (1754 – 1827, FR) & Jean-Gabriel Charvet (1750 – 1829, FR)
Raphaela Vogel (1988, DE)
Fritz Melbye (1826 – 1869, DK) Frederik von Scholten (1796 – 1853, DK) Martinus Christian Rørbye (1803 – 1848, DK) William Hodges (1744 – 1797, GB) Helene Nymann (1982, DK) Nicolas Colombel (1644 – 1717, FR) Ferdinand Bol (1616 – 1680, NL) Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758 – 1823, FR) Jakob van Loo (1614 – 1670, NL) Francois Boucher (1703 – 1770, FR)
Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980, FR) Sam Durant (1961, US) Kader Attia (1970, FR) Anika Schwarzlose (1982, DE) Anselm Kiefer (1945, DE) Christian Jankowski (1968, DE) John Akomfrah (1957, GH) Damien Hirst (1965, GB) Anri Sala (1974, AL)
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Damien Hirst 'Mermaid', 2014, (detail) bronze, private collection, courtesy Gagosian Š Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS / VISDA 2020. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Putting fire to it, 1989 (Detail), Courtesy Parrino Family Estate / Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds | Foto: Pierre Bohrer, Le Locle
21.2. – 17.5.2020 Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein with Hilti Art Foundation Städtle 32, P. O. Box 370, 9490 Vaduz Tu–Su 10am–17pm, Th 10am–20pm, www.kunstmuseum.li
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GAME CHANGER PONTUS HULTÉN Each issue we pay homage to a person who influenced the course of contemporary art. Here is the museum director, curator, educator, and collector Pontus Hultén (1924–2006). Text by Wyatt Allgeier Niki de Saint Phalle, the jubilant, mystical sculptor who may be best known for her Tarot Garden in Tuscany, was due to have a retrospective at MoMA PS1, Queens, this spring. Whether I’ll ever see the show is at the time of this writing unknown, given museum closures resulting from the pandemic, but looking with longing through an online preview of its contents, I was reminded of Saint Phalle’s legendary 1966 exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Entitled She—The Cathedral, the show— coconceived by Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt, and the museum’s visionary director, Pontus Hultén—was a trailblazing redefinition of what a museum exhibition could be; it was humorous, multimedia, erotic, immersive, and built collaboratively for popular enjoyment. It was a sensation in every sense of the word. Saint Phalle had created for it one of her iconic Nanas at a momentous scale, the reclining figure serving as the architecture for the other works included in the show. Attendees had to enter through the Nana’s womb, whereupon they were greeted with a milk bar, screenings of an early Greta Garbo film, an aquarium, ad hoc artworks, and even a slide for the children. 1 It was a feat that could only have been imagined through the collaborative minds of artists, and only staged by someone as daring and devoted to them as Pontus Hultén. In fact, She—The Cathedral is but one star in a constellation of experiments conducted by Hultén over the course of his long career. Over four
decades and in multiple cities, and whether as curator, museum director, educator, collector, or patron of artists, Hultén worked with a creative, populist, anarchistic spirit rarely seen before or after. Saint Phalle, like many others in Hultén’s orbit, greatly admired the Swede: “Pontus works in the same way as an artist does—mainly on instinct.”2 That instinct was formed in his youth, first as a student at the University of Stockholm, where he studied art history and wrote a graduate thesis on Spinoza and Vermeer, then developing strongly during the 1950s as he traveled between Stockholm and Paris. Precocious and with a potent desire to know working artists, by 1955 he was working on such exhibitions as the first exhibition of kinetic art (ever) at Galerie Denise René, Paris.3 Planned in concert with René, Tinguely, and the painter Robert Breer, Le Mouvement included work by Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp. Not a bad start for one barely cresting thirty. From there, Hultén took charge of the nascent Moderna Museet, working on the plans that would separate it from its original parent institution, Stockholm’s National Museum, and organizing its first exhibition—nothing less than a comprehensive presentation of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. In 1959, the year after the Moderna Museet opened, he became its director. During his tenure there he used his endless curiosity, his friendships with artists, and the changing face of the art audience to Pontus Hultén, 1983. Photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Photo
1. See Daniel Birnbaum, “Passages: Pontus Hultén,” Artforum 45, no. 6 (February 2007). Available online at www.artforum.com/ print/200702/pontushulten-12381 (accessed April 2, 2020). 2. Niki de Saint Phalle, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “A Good Monster,” New Yorker, January 16, 1978. Available online at www.newyorker.com/ magazine/1978/01/16/a-goodmonster (accessed April 2, 2020). 3. See Tomkins, “A Good Monster.” 4. Ibid. 5. Pontus Hultén, quoted in ibid. 6. See Anna Tellgren, ed., Pontus Hultén and Moderna Museet. The Formative Years (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, and London: Koenig Books, 2017), pp. 183–85. 7. Hultén, quoted in Tomkins, “A Good Monster.”
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redefine not just the role of a museum director, and the ways a museum might engage the public, but what the very goals of a museum might be. As Calvin Tomkins argued in his 1978 profile of Hultén in the New Yorker, the democratic notion of a museum that we now take for granted was not always in place—these institutions were elitist, static, and conventional right up until the mid-twentieth century. 4 It was through the work of directors like Hultén, and his mentor Willem Sandberg at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, that living artists and a broad public were brought in. Dynamic programming came to be seen as a necessary function of the museum, and the idea of what constituted visual culture was vastly broadened. No longer would the museum be a rarefied house; for Hultén, it had to meet the needs of a new “anonymous public, curious, much larger, more varied, and, in a way, disoriented, which has replaced or bypassed the literate and curious traveller of the last century.”5 Hultén did this at the Moderna Museet with solo exhibitions of, among others, Paul Klee (1961), Jackson Pollock (1963), Barbara Hepworth (1964), and Francis Bacon (1965); landmark group exhibitions such as 4 Americans: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz (1962) and Poetry Must Be Made by All! Transform the World! (1969); and with prescient risk-taking, including Andy Warhol’s first solo museum exhibition, in 1968.6 He did this as the curator of the historic 1968 exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He did this as the founding director of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, for which he left the Moderna Museet in 1973. He did this as the founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, leaving a deep impression during his time there despite exiting before the museum’s much delayed opening. He did this as the founding director of the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and as one of the founders of the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, that intimate postgraduate art school in Paris. Hultén’s time at the Pompidou may end up what he’s most remembered for. When the building opened, after a prolonged construction process during which the project endured vicious criticism, Hultén brought his desacralizing impulse to the space and staged a number of beloved exhibitions, beginning with a Duchamp retrospective, then moving on to a series of encyclopedic shows that traced the role of Paris in the development of twentieth-century art and visual culture. As he told Tomkins, “The museum must be opened to disciplines once excluded, and to the largest possible public, and this right away.”7 Hultén’s intuition and perception in all of his roles strikes me as tied to his lifelong enthusiasm for sailing. It was the activity with which he most often filled his holidays. Honed by his enduring passion for the hobby, Hultén knew the power of following currents, working with the changing winds, and keeping an eye on the ever changing horizon.
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