90 Frank Gehry Drawings Frank Gehry speaks to Jean-Louis Cohen about the early years of his practice, including his work with LA artists, and the role of sketching in his design process.
104 Northeast Regional A short story by Emma Cline, published here on the occasion of her forthcoming collection of stories entitled Daddy.
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110 Ive by Gursky: A Meeting of Minds
The legendary choreographers discuss their history together, the evolution of Oliver’s boom!, imposed boundaries on “Black dance,” and the choreographies of the pandemic.
Maria Morris Hambourg unpacks Andreas Gursky’s ingenious recent portrait of former Apple designer Jony Ive to reveal its layered meanings.
In Conversation: Bebe Miller and Cynthia Oliver
34 Theaster Gates: Black Image Corporation Theaster Gates speaks with Louise Neri about this issue’s cover image, the Johnson Publishing Company, and the rich, and often overlooked, history of Black photographers in America.
48 Andy Warhol: Race Riot Gillian Pistell examines the artist’s aesthetic engagement with the social and political discord of the 1960s in America.
52 Seeing the Child A poetic rumination on Titus Kaphar’s latest body of work, From a Tropical Space (2019– ), coauthored by the artist and novelist Tochi Onyebuchi.
60 Building a Legacy: Helen Frankenthaler Foundation The Quarterly’s Alison McDonald speaks with members of the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation about their decision to establish a multiyear initiative dedicated to providing $5 million in covid-19 relief for artists and arts professionals.
78 Louise Bonnet Filmmaker and author Miranda July joined Louise Bonnet on a video call to discuss life during lockdown, the luminosity of oil paint, and Bonnet’s forthcoming exhibition of new work.
86 The Iconoclasts The third installment of a four-part short story by Anne Boyer.
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Jacques Demy Carlos Valladares reminisces, in this personal essay, about the director’s films.
117 Fashion and Art, Part 3: Jonathan Anderson Jonathan Anderson, creative director of JW Anderson and Loewe, tells Derek Blasberg about his engagement with art historical figures and his commitment to fostering new talent with the Loewe Craft Prize.
122 Lockdown: Henri Matisse’s Domestic Interiors John Elderfield reexamines Matisse’s Piano Lesson (1916) and Music Lesson (1917), considering the works’ depictions of domestic interior spaces during the tumult of World War I.
Front cover: Photo: Moneta Sleet Jr., 1968. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. A project by Theaster Gates/Black Image Corporation Top row, left to right: Bebe Miller’s Necessary Beauty, 2008. Photo: © Yi-Chun Wu Derek Jarman in the garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, England. Photo: Geraint Lewis/ Alamy Stock Photo Bottom row, left to right: Film still from Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) Laurie Anderson, United States Part II, presented by The Kitchen at The Orpheum Theater, October 26–27, 1980. Photo: © 1980 Paula Court
146 The Bigger Picture: Artist Persecution and Protection Gillian Jakab highlights the work of individuals and organizations who have risen to take up the cause and fight on behalf of artists facing persecution, both historically and today.
150 I’ll Be Your Mirror: Allen Midgette Looks Back on the Great Warhol Lecture Hoax Raymond Foye speaks with the actor in Woodstock, New York.
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166 Game Changer: Mercedes Matter
Mark Hudson considers the filmmaker’s enduring legacy and complex relationship to British culture.
Lauren Mahony and Michael Tcheyan pay homage to the founder of the New York Studio School.
Derek Jarman: A Saint in the Garden
128 Gregory Crewdson: An Eclipse of Moths Gregory Crewdson discusses his new work with actress Cate Blanchett.
136 Always on My Mind Text by Alex Israel.
142 In Conversation: Lars Ulrich Derek Blasberg met with Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and spoke with him about the unexpected similarities between collecting art and playing metal.
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The Kitchen To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing New York institution The Kitchen, we present an oral history that includes Laurie Anderson, Charles Atlas, Jacqueline Humphries, Wade Guyton, Joan Jonas, Ralph Lemon, and Anicka Yi. Statements organized by Christopher Bollen, Alison Burstein, and Tim Griffin.
TABLE OF CONTENTS FALL 2020
Photo credits:
T
he work of Theaster Gates, with its message of resilience and its insistent exploration of questions surrounding agency, history, and material conditions in Black culture, led us to the cover image for this issue. Gates’s Black Image Corporation project, which grew out of his prescient engagement with the archives and legacy of the legendary Johnson Publishing Company—creator of Ebony, Jet, and other publications devoted to the positive imaging of contemporary Black life—inspired a novel approach to our Quarterly cover: never before has it featured the work of an artist from the past. The historic image of the crowd at the public funeral of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 was taken by Moneta Sleet Jr. The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism—for the iconic photograph of King’s widow with her young daughter that he took during the church service for her slain husband—Sleet was also known for his high-fashion photography, which appears in the related article, where Gates discusses Black Image Corporation in the context of his upcoming exhibition at Gagosian, New York, in the fall. In this issue we present a poetic rumination coauthored by Titus Kaphar and Tochi Onyebuchi on Kaphar’s new series From a Tropical Space, a group of paintings that reflect on Black motherhood and haunting loss. These works remind us of the powerful role that art can play in acutely heightening awareness and empathy, challenging conventions, and opening up the conversations vital to achieving much-needed change. As we continue to confront the mounting difficulties and complexities of the ongoing covid-19 crisis, we offer perspectives on relief efforts for artists and arts communities. Our Building a Legacy feature focuses on the decision of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to gift $5 million in direct response to the pandemic. And for our Bigger Picture series, Gillian Jakab explores organizations rising to the challenge of providing sanctuary for artists experiencing persecution and threat. For fifty years The Kitchen has been a New York stronghold of performative and visual experiment. We hear from a wide range of innovative artists who honor the anniversary of the organization, share their memories of it, and consider the problems it faces at a time of crisis for the art of public performance. Legendary choreographers Bebe Miller and Cynthia Oliver likewise consider ways to bring dance to new audiences during this paradoxical moment of shared isolation. Film is providing refuge to many, and so perhaps it is no surprise to find Cate Blanchett in conversation with Gregory Crewdson and Miranda July with Louise Bonnet. Plus we have articles dedicated to the filmmakers Jacques Demy and Derek Jarman. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief
GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY ONLINE Right, top: Sky High Farm, Columbia County, New York Right, bottom: Project EATS’s rooftop farm at Essex Crossing in Manhattan, New York. Photo: courtesy Linda Goode Bryant/ Project EATS
Below, left: Willem de Kooning at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1959. Photo: Arnold Newman Properties/Getty Images Below, top right: Quanice G. Floyd, Alysia Lee, and Joshua Jenkins. Photo: Ceylon Mitchell II
The Bigger Picture: Sky High Farm × Project EATS
Below, bottom right: Jenny Saville, 2020. Video still: courtesy Pushpin Films
Each the founder of a nonprofit working to address food insecurity, Dan Colen and Linda Goode Bryant discuss the intersection of art and farming, and the urgency of their organizations’ missions during the current moment.
The Bigger Picture: Arts Leaders of Color Jess Sims interviews Quanice Floyd and Joshua Henry Jenkins of the Arts Administrators of Color Network to discuss the organization’s covid-19 emergency fund for BIPOC artists and arts administrators.
Essay: “There Is Woman in the Landscapes”: Willem de Kooning from 1959 to 1963
In Conversation: Jenny Saville and Nicholas Cullinan
Lauren Mahony considers a critical four-year period in the painter’s career, examining the technical changes that occurred between his “abstract parkway landscapes” and the “pastoral landscapes” that succeeded them.
Join Jenny Saville and Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, for a discussion about portraiture, Saville’s art historical influences, and the shifting nature of perception in the age of digital communication.
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Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 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
Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia
Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility
Advertising Representative Michael Bullock
Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio
For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Manager Kelly M. Quinn Prepress DL Imaging
Cover Moneta Sleet Jr.
Printed by Pureprint Group
Contributors Jonathan Anderson Laurie Anderson Charles Atlas Cate Blanchett Derek Blasberg Christopher Bollen Louise Bonnet Anne Boyer Emma Cline Jean-Louis Cohen Gregory Crewdson John Elderfield Raymond Foye Theaster Gates Frank Gehry Tim Griffin Wade Guyton Mark Hudson Jacqueline Humphries Frederick J. Iseman Alex Israel Gillian Jakab Joan Jonas Miranda July Titus Kaphar Ralph Lemon Lauren Mahony Alison McDonald Bebe Miller Maria Morris Hambourg Lise Motherwell Louise Neri Cynthia Oliver Tochi Onyebuchi Gillian Pistell Clifford Ross Elizabeth Smith Michael Tcheyan Lars Ulrich Carlos Valladares Anicka Yi
Thanks Staffan Ahrenberg Richard Alwyn Fisher Sérgio Amaral Leslie Antell Chloe Barter Jennifer Belt Chris Berkery Priya Bhatnagar Alison Burstein Laura Cali Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Virginia Coleman Emily Cooper Danny Corcoran Alejandra de Borbón Stephanie Dudzinski Sarah Duzyk Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Emily Florido Paatela Fraga Mark Francis Jennie Freeburg Brett Garde Gaëtane Girard Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman Andreas Gursky Freja Harrell Delphine Huisinga Matt Jones Sarah Jones Alexa Kemalyan Sarah Krueger Annie Leibovitz Raphael Lepine Meaghan Lloyd Lily Matthews Susannah Maybank Rob McKeever
Jeff McLane Deborah McLeod Kate Mester Allen Midgette Olivia Mull Karen Mulligan Sam Orlofsky Kathy Paciello Stefan Ratibor Rani Singh Putri Tan Andie Trainer Louis Vaccara Annette Völker Robin Vousden Jeff Wall Amy Wilkins Hanako Williams Sarah Womble Kelso Wyeth Ben Wymer
Correction The Gagosian Quarterly notes the following corrections in the Summer 2020 edition: In “Simon Hantaï” by Anne Baldassari (pages 124–29) (a) Introduction text: misspelling of location, corrected to “Cathédrale SaintCyr-et-Sainte-Julitte”; (b) introduction text: inclusion of fact that the exhibition was curated in a complimentary capacity; (c) sixth paragraph: misspelling of location, corrected to “Cathédrale Saint-Cyr-et-Sainte-Julitte”; (d) seventh paragraph: misidentification of location, corrected to “Manufacture des Gobelins”; (e) twelfth paragraph; miscategorization of creation of Tabula (1980), corrected to indicate that the work was “made for the exhibition of the CAPC in Bordeaux.” Corrections reflected in the digital edition of Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2020
CONTRIBUTORS Elizabeth Smith
Clifford Ross
Elizabeth Smith joined the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in 2013 as its first executive director. Previously she held curatorial and administrative positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is an adjunct professor at Bennington College.
Clifford Ross is a multimedia artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, including a mid-career survey at MASS MoCA in 2015. His next exhibition will open at the Portland Museum of Art in 2021. He is a nephew of Helen Frankenthaler.
Titus Kaphar Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist Titus Kaphar confronts history by dismantling classic structures and styles of visual representation in Western art in order to subvert them. Dislodging entrenched narratives from their status as “past” so as to understand and estimate their impact on the present, he exposes the conceptual underpinnings of contested nationalist histories and colonialist legacies and how they have served to manipulate both cultural and personal identity. Photo: John Lucas
Dr. Lise Motherwell Dr. Lise Motherwell is president of the board of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, where, with Elizabeth Smith, she recently cocurated the exhibition Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown. A licensed psychologist, she is a stepdaughter of Helen Frankenthaler.
Tochi Onyebuchi Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Beasts Made of Night, its sequel Crown of Thunder, War Girls, and his adult fiction debut Riot Baby, published by Tor.com in January 2020. He is a graduate of Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’Institut d’études politiques, where he earned a master’s degree in global business law. Photo: Christina Orlando
Frederick Iseman Frederick Iseman is chairman and CEO of CI Capital Partners LLC. A nephew of Helen Frankenthaler, he serves on the board of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and is on the chairman’s councils of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Works from his collection are on loan to the National Gallery, London, and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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Theaster Gates Theaster Gates’s practice traverses an extraordinary range, from collecting to social gathering, architecture and object making, experimental music and sound, and the ethical and physical reconstruction of civic life. His interdisciplinary fusion of archiving, performance, institution building, painting, and sculpting is deeply rooted in African-American histories and cultures, and revolves around the transformation of objects, edifices, and communities through art and cultural activity. Photo: Chris Strong
Louise Neri Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, working with artists and developing exhibitions, editorial projects, and communications across the global platform. A former editor of Parkett magazine, she has authored and edited many books and articles on contemporary art.
Louise Bonnet In softly luminous portraits of bulging, distorted figures, Louise Bonnet explores sensations of discomfort and angst to probe the experience of what it means to inhabit a body. Her protagonists— faces and individuality obscured by stolid helmets of hair—are more akin to emotional receptacles than to people. Engaging in mundane domestic activities such as lying in bed or eating dinner, they appear in impossible contortions, body parts bursting out of scale and proportion. Photo: Lucas Michael
Michael Tcheyan Michael Tcheyan is president of Investment Strategy Advisors Inc. and studied art with Mercedes Matter and Philip Guston at the New York Studio School in the early ’70s. He served on the board of the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts and is past president of the Mayor’s Partnership for the Arts in Summit, New Jersey. He is cochair of the New York Studio School’s alumni association.
Miranda July Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and artist. Her most recent book, Miranda July (Prestel, April 2020), reimagines the monograph as an oral history on her career to date. July’s story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for 2007. She wrote, directed, and starred in the feature films The Future (2011) and Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won the Caméra d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, a Special Jury Prize at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, and was recently added to the Criterion Collection. Her latest film, Kajillionaire, which she wrote and directed, world-premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by Focus Features this fall. Photo: Olivier Zahm
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Lauren Mahony Lauren Mahony organizes special exhibitions for Gagosian. She joined Gagosian in 2012 after seven years in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Gregory Crewdson Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. Crewdson’s career has spanned three decades. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is featured in many public collections. Drawing: Eugene Gladun
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, The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
Cate Blanchett Cate Blanchett is an internationally acclaimed actor, director, and producer both on screen and on stage. She has won two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, and three baftas. She was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017 and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012. She has won honorary doctor-of-letters degrees from the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, and Macquarie University. She has performed in over seventy films and twenty theatrical productions, including standout roles in the films Elizabeth (1998), Blue Jasmine (2013), and Carol (2015) and in the plays Plenty (1999), A Streetcar Named Desire (2009), and The Present (2017). She studied economics and fine art at the University of Melbourne and graduated from Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. Drawing: Eugene Gladun
Mark Hudson Mark Hudson’s books include Our Grandmothers’ Drums (1989; winner of the Thomas Cook and Somerset Maugham awards), Coming Back Brockens (1994; winner of the AT&T Award), The Music in My Head (1998), and Titian, The Last Days (2009). He has written for the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Observer, and the Financial Times and was for five years chief art critic of the Daily Telegraph.
Alex Israel Alex Israel lives and works in Los Angeles. Deeply entwined with his hometown, his work explores popular media, Hollywood, and the cult of celebrity, while positing LA as central to an understanding of American culture and the American Dream. Israel’s practice has included high-profile collaborations with Bret Easton Ellis, Louis Vuitton, Rimowa, and Snapchat, as well as his own Freeway Eyewear and Infrathin Apparel designs. His ongoing web series, an LA-centric talk show hosted by the artist and titled As It Lays, is streaming on YouTube, and his feature-length art film SPF-18 is now streaming on Netflix, following a tour to high schools across the United States. Photo: Quentin de Briey
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Raymond Foye Raymond Foye is a writer, editor, publisher, and curator who lives in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. A former director of exhibitions and publications at Gagosian, he most recently coedited Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books. A contributing editor at the Brooklyn Rail, he is currently editing Collected Poems of Rene Ricard, to be published in 2020.
Frank Gehry The designs of Frank Gehry, one of the most innovative architects working today, grace numerous metropolitan skylines around the world. Known for their deconstructivist approach and creative use of materials, his buildings incorporate a wealth of textures that lend a sense of movement to his dynamic structures. Gehry is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989) and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016). Photo: © Alexandra Cabri
Jean-Louis Cohen An architect and a historian, JeanLouis Cohen holds a chair at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and one at the Collège de France. His forty books include Architecture in Uniform (2011), The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History (2012), and Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013).
Bebe Miller Bebe Miller first performed her work in New York in 1978 and formed the Bebe Miller Company in 1985. Since then she has created over fifty dances for the company, which has performed them in the United States, Europe, South America, and Africa. A professor emerita of dance at Ohio State University, she is the winner of a United States Artists Fellowship and of a Doris Duke Artist Award, and was honored by the Kennedy Center as a Master of African American Choreography.
Cynthia Oliver Cynthia Oliver is a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie)– winning choreographer whose work incorporates textures of Caribbean performance with African and American aesthetic sensibilities. She currently serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the Humanities, Arts and Related Fields at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned and daring creative pioneers. Best known for her multimedia presentations, innovative use of technology, and first-person style, she is a writer, director, visual artist, and vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, and experimental music.
Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab is an editor of the Gagosian Quarterly and the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail.
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LO S A N G E L ES
N E W YO R K
LO N D O N
Joan Jonas Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures. Jonas has exhibited, screened, and performed her work in museums, galleries, and largescale group exhibitions throughout the world. In 2018 Jonas was the recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. Photo: Lila Gavagan
Maria Morris Hambourg Maria Morris Hambourg is a writer, independent curator, and consultant. As the founding curator of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, she helped to build an audience for photography through exhibitions and catalogues of works by Richard Avedon, Nadar, and many more.
Anicka Yi A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi’s work fuses multisensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush biofictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her “techno-sensual” artistic exploration, Yi is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, and “biologized” machines. Yi’s projects include collaborations with engineers, robots, synthetic and microbiologists, computer scientists, perfumers, ant and bacterial colonies, algae, tempura-fried flowers, and snails. Photo: David Heald
Christopher Bollen Christopher Bollen is the editor-atlarge of Interview magazine. His third novel, The Destroyers, was published by Harper Publishing in June of 2017. Photo: Sébastien Botella
Charles Atlas Charles Atlas has been a pioneering figure in film and video for over four decades, forging new territory in a far-reaching range of genres, stylistic approaches, and techniques. Atlas has fostered collaborative relationships throughout his production, working intimately with such artists and performers as Antony and the Johnsons, Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramović, Yvonne Rainer, Mika Tajima/New Humans, and most notably Merce Cunningham, for whom he served as in-house videographer from the early 1970s through 1983. Their close working relationship continued until Cunningham’s death, in 2009. Photo: Lori E. Seid
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Tim Griffin Tim Griffin is the executive director and chief curator at The Kitchen, where he has organized exhibitions and performances by artists such as Chantal Akerman, anohni, Charles Atlas, Gretchen Bender, Laurel Halo, Joan Jonas, Ralph Lemon, Aki Sasamoto, Wadada Leo Smith, Danh Vō, and many others. From 2003 to 2010 he served as editor-in-chief of Artforum.
Ralph Lemon Ralph Lemon is an artist, writer, and choreographer.
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
Wade Guyton Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana, and lives in New York. His work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2017), the Museo Madre/ Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Naples (2017), the Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2017), the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (mamco), Geneva (2016), Le Consortium, Dijon (2016), the Kunsthalle Zürich (2013), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012).
John Elderfield John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, joined Gagosian in 2012 as a senior curator for special exhibitions.
Jacqueline Humphries Jacqueline Humphries lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Dia Art Foundation, The Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, New York (2019); Greene Naftali, New York (2017, 2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2015); Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, New Orleans (2015); Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (2014); Greene Naftali, New York (2012); and Prospect.1, New Orleans (2008).
Emma Cline Emma Cline is the author of The Girls. Her story collection Daddy will be published September 2020. Cline was the winner of the Plimpton Prize, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Girls was an international bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
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THEASTER
GATES BLACK IMAGE CORPORATION 34
As a prelude to his first-ever solo exhibition in New York, Theaster Gates discusses his prescient work with the photographic archive of Chicago’s Johnson Publishing Company and his formation of Black Image Corporation as a conceptual project. In conversation with Louise Neri, he expands on his strategies as artist and social innovator in his quest to redeem and renew the sacred power of Black images and Black space. The cover of this edition of the Quarterly—an iconic image of the public funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—was taken in 1968 by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Moneta Sleet Jr. LOUISE NERI How did Black Image Corporation come
into being?
Black Image Corporation is a tribute to the Johnson Publishing Company, one of the most important Black publishing houses in the world. Johnson Publishing was founded in 1942 in Chicago and remained privately held and run by John H. Johnson until his death in 2005, publishing magazines such as Ebony and Jet as direct complements to Life and Reader’s Digest, which, while having broad circulation, did not cater to the interests of Black people. The photographic archive of Johnson Publishing, which numbers over 4 million assets, was interesting to me as a body of work; re-dressing it as Black Image Corporation felt like a huge innovation. I was compelled to take this corporation, which was becoming less active, and create a new corporation. LN And you proposed the idea of this new corporation as an active, migratory structure with no fixed place. TG Yes. In the introduction I wrote for the Prada exhibition in 2018, I outlined how the collection came to me in the same way as other material objects do—under duress, in distress, and in need of an immediate financial and logistical ally. I saw the opportunity that I could partner with Johnson Publishing—that an artist could redirect the value proposition of a Black corporation, or, rather, that artists could be directly involved in the thing called “business,” not for the sake of business alone but to actually capture the possibility of a greater cultural moment. To the outside world, the collection may have seemed to be in peril, but to me the photographic images were waiting on their next life— not as historical inventory to a contemporary publishing company but as extraordinarily valuable images that would reaffirm the power of both Black identity and Black business. Sometimes for me, the art part comes as a response or reaction to the crises that seem to pervade Black material culture and cultural production. How can we effectively intervene not only as artists but also as skilled negotiators, silent partners, and national strategists on behalf of important cultural legacies? Thus this THEASTER GATES
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work felt similar to other projects in that the Johnson Publishing archive was under duress, but different because what it needed from me was not necessarily an artistic response but a response that might look like conventional business. LN I’d disagree that it was not an “artistic” response. First, you’ve described yourself not as a scientific archivist but as an artistic one, which gives you license not to be bound by technical rules and constraints. Second, very soon after your initial negotiations with Linda Johnson Rice, the Johnson Estate heir, you devised a strategy to reify and reenergize this valuable archive of Black cultural image-making and edification by presenting it in prominent cultural spaces, from the Fondazione Prada in Milan—the cultural arm by which one of today’s most media-savvy and sophisticated global fashion corporations maintains an intellectual soul—to venerable museums and arts institutions across Europe: the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Gropius Bau, Berlin, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Your response is artistic because you’re using the spaces of art, to which you have access precisely because of your power and access as an artist. TG Sure, but what I’m suggesting is that the initial engagement required legal negotiating while staying mindful of the optics of the organization, as well as strategizing the dissemination of the images through the best possible platforms. This entailed being both an artist and something else. It was after creating Black Image Corporation—now a trademark brand and company name—that I could then return to being the artistic director of the Johnson Black Image Archive and become a creative partner to the work of Black photographers. LN Let’s talk about your role as editor in your concept of artist. Within the huge cultural milieu that Johnson Publishing represents, you chose to focus on two key Black image-makers of the civil rights era, Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton. Why? TG Sleet and Sutton captured some of the most potent and searing images of Black political life. While thinking about the hope represented by Black beauty and fashion, between them they photographed some of the most beautiful and radically elegant women in the world. Having access to these images gave me permission to perform as a publishing house. Because Johnson Publishing owned these images, my artistic intervention was not directly on the images themselves; rather, my art was located in the form-making, whether corporate form or artistic direction as form. In this instance my choice of images focused primarily on Black women, femininity, the workplace, mothers, anomalies within the feminine, drag culture (1950s cross-dressers and the trans ballroom scene), and the idea of sacredness within the image itself, all under the unifying concept of “Black Madonna.” LN How did you work with the archive in practical terms? TG I got permission to use 20,000 images at my artistic discretion, and for each of these images to be reproduced once. To date, we’ve used approximately 5,000 of the 20,000 images. To have this permission has been very exciting, but it’s been even more exciting for me to create the platform through which these images might be disseminated. For example, the huge cruciform wooden cabinet that I made for the Kunstmuseum Basel was conceived as both a tool and a sanctum whereby people could look at Black images in a direct and intimate way. The cabinet was essentially a cabinet of Black feminine curiosities. We knew that many
Previous spread, left: Installation view, Black Image Corporation, curated by Theaster Gates, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan, September 20, 2018– January 14, 2019. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Fondazione Prada Previous spread, right: Photo: Moneta Sleet Jr., 1965. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. Opposite: Photo: Moneta Sleet Jr., 1966. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. This page, top: Photo: Isaac Sutton, 1969. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. This page, bottom: Photo: Isaac Sutton, n.d. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution. Following spread, top left: Installation view, Black Image Corporation, curated by Theaster Gates, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan, September 20, 2018– January 14, 2019. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Fondazione Prada Following spread, bottom left: Installation view, Black Image Corporation, curated by Theaster Gates, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan, September 20, 2018– January 14, 2019. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Fondazione Prada Following spread, right: Photo: Moneta Sleet Jr., 1973. Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution.
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of the people engaging with the cabinet had never encountered Black women in such a frontal way. It was both an educational tool and an altar. LN You framed each print so that viewers could pick it up in their hands, using conservator’s gloves, and look at it closely. Thus you considered how to control and slow the process of perception itself. TG Exactly. One has to choose images from the cabinet’s racks; they’re not immediately accessible. A collective curatorial experience emerges when people gather around the cabinet and look closely at the archive. LN In a second iteration at the Osservatorio in Milan you produced individual, lecternlike cabinets. Did this change the way people approached the act of looking at the images? TG Yes. I conceived the lecterns as “stations” to allow individuals to have their moment with the Black image—in this case, the sacred presence of Black women. LN Is there a relationship between Black Image Corporation and the upcoming New York exhibition Black Vessel? TG Both Black Image Corporation and Black Vessel have legal structures that help substantiate and legitimize, respectively, the reproduction of images and the activity of brick manufacturing. I take this work very seriously. It’s also significant to me that both projects engage the ways in which gathering, convening, or cooperation allows for a more ambitious activity to occur, one that goes beyond the actions of a single individual. Finally, Black Image Corporation and Black Vessel deal with histories that have both national nostalgia and individual sentimentality—using the core memories of, say, looking at a Jet magazine or playing with mud in Mississippi to exhume a conceptual foundation. LN Can you elaborate? TG During the last nine months I’ve been reflecting on the things that matter most in my practice. There’s a material essence, a conceptual foundation, and a social, spiritual dimension. Black Madonna accesses this social, spiritual dimension, so for the past nine months I’ve also been pursuing that idea in my studio. In addition to making works of art, the question of the sacred remains very important to me. I’ve been asking myself whether it’s possible to convert a place of commerce into a sacred space. LN Does the fact that the Johnson Publishing archive was recently acquired by a consortium of four leading American philanthropic foundations— the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the MacArthur Foundation—change how Black Image Corporation will function in the future? TG I’m glad the images have a home. I’m glad to have had my encounters with the archive and that my encounters will continue. LN Can you say more about your interest in Moneta Sleet Jr., who photographed the image of the public funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that appears on the cover of this issue of the Quarterly? [Editor’s note: Sleet won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his iconic image of King’s veiled widow and daughter in the church on that same day.] TG Sleet’s legacy felt underappreciated to me, so my project with him was an opportunity to celebrate not only the Johnson Publishing Company but the artist himself.
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THE KITCHEN: FIFTY-YEAR ANNIVERSARY
THE KITCHEN HAS HAD MORE INFLUENCE than we can grasp or measure. For fifty years this mercurial institution has variously acted as a TV studio, theater, gallery, lecture hall, concert venue, club, poetry stage, conference room, activist meeting place, dance theater, media lab, choreography studio, and so much more. Despite being so influential, it interestingly remains relatively unknown in the established art world and strangely unknowable among those who know it best. In a way, its power even comes from how it is unknowable. Unspoiled, unpopularized, mysterious, weird— but if you know, you know. Rather than chasing the phantasmagoric mass audiences that many younger institutions look for, The Kitchen serves and embraces many micro-audiences. It is nimble and gets there before anyone else, and also probably goes where no one else would. Larger institutions have ripped off The Kitchen’s recipes of art, dance, music, and performance all served up together. All those departments of performance or time-based work in museums now— we wonder where they got that idea? It’s now the fiftieth anniversary of this place, this idea, this process, this community, this laboratory, this kitchen. But The Kitchen, to survive, is having to look again at its home on Chelsea’s West 19th Street: the building works, but needs repairs to help artists make the projects they need to make. We all know what Chelsea looks like now: The Kitchen is surrounded on all sides by the sprawling symptoms of bloated global capitalism, now perhaps doomed to become empty ruins in a post–covid New York. Nevertheless, the 1920s brick icehouse that later became, first, the studio of the theater artist Robert Whitman and then, for the past thirty-four years, the home of The Kitchen, needs repairs. We thought about moving away from the real-estate obscenities of Chelsea, but decided to stay put and be a thorn in development’s side. To do so we need a new elevator, new stairs, structural support, some bathrooms, some new office space, and, above all, improved workspaces for artists (who currently have to walk through our lobby to enter the theater). We also need to meet all the city’s building codes. In New York this costs a lot of money, more than it should, more than anyone wants to pay. But every artist in New York understands the deal with the devil one makes with the place. The Kitchen needs to survive. We know it’s not an easy campaign to improve our spaces, 42
but where other building campaigns promise architect-driven spectacles or expansionary dreams to bring in the masses and attract likes, we won’t do that. Every artist we spoke to said one thing: “Don’t fuck it up.” And we will listen to them. Before covid changed everything, we decided as board members, with Director Tim Griffin, to do an exhibition in the building and invite Kitchen veterans and artists who care about this institution to exhibit and sell works, in partnership with their galleries, to raise needed funds. Now we are all wondering what an exhibition is anymore. How do we install an exhibition for no audience? We’re figuring that out. We hope we succeed. Meanwhile, generous and brilliant artists including Cory Arcangel, Tauba Auerbach, Robert Bordo, Carol Bove, Cecily Brown, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, Alex Israel, Michael Krebber, Barbara Kruger, Simone Leigh, Zoe Leonard, Robert Longo, Senga Nengudi, Laura Owens, Mai-Thu Perret, Matthew Ritchie, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Danh Vō, Charline von Heyl, Mary Weatherford, T. J. Wilcox, and Christopher Williams have all donated works along with the both of us. With the help of the Gagosian Quarterly, we hope news of these gifts will reach past and future Kitchen supporters who will help the artists and their galleries place works in good homes and raise the money we need to keep The Kitchen here for the next generations. In the following pages we’ve invited author Christopher Bollen to interview a group of Kitchen veterans to share their thoughts about The Kitchen. Those represented here are only some of the people who have made the place the legend it is—here are some others to think about too: Muhal Richard Abrams, Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Chantal Akerman, Maryanne Amacher, Laurie Anderson, anohni , Penny Arcade, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, John Baldessari, Judith Barry, Kevin Beasley, the Beastie Boys, Jérôme Bel, Gretchen Bender, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, Glenn Branca, Troy Brauntuch, Anthony Braxton, Trisha Brown, John Cage, John Cale, Rhys Chatham, Lucinda Childs, Bruce Conner, Tony Conrad, Dennis Cooper, Merce Cunningham, Julius Eastman, Brian Eno, Fab Five Freddy, Karen Finley, Simone Forti, Diamanda Galas, Philip Glass, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, Group Material,
David Hammons, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Gary Hill, Yuka C. Honda, Gary Indiana, Vijay Iyer, Darius James, Jazzy Jeff, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Mike Kelley, John Kelly, Jeff Koons, Chris Kraus, George Kuchar, Mike Kuchar, Elad Lassry, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ralph Lemon, Sherrie Levine, George Lewis, Arto Lindsay, Mary Lucier, Lydia Lunch, Robert Mapplethorpe, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Maxwell, Rodney McMillian, Sarah Michelson, John Miller, Charlotte Moorman, Jason Moran, Butch Morris, Tracie Morris, Fred Moten, Nico Muhly, Matt Mullican, Laura Mulvey, Senga Nengudi, Okwui Okpokwasili, Luigi Ontani, Tony Oursler, Virginia Overton, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Zeena Parkins, Steve Paxton, Sondra Perry, Adrian Piper, Stephen Prina, Éliane Radigue, the Raincoats, Yvonne Rainer, Claudia Rankine, Ishmael Reed, Steve Reich, Vernon Reid, Rock Steady Crew, Martha Rosler, Arthur Russell, Carl Hancock Rux, David Salle, Carolee Schneemann, Allan Sekula, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Mike Smith, Wadada Leo Smith, Michael Snow, Sonic Youth, Keith Sonnier, Laurie Spiegel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, the Swans, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Amy Taubin, Cecil Taylor, Lynne Tillman, Yasunao Tone, Urban Bush Women, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Whitman, Hal Willner, David Wojnarowicz, the Wooster Group, La Monte Young, and Steina and Woody Vasulka. —Wade Guyton and Jacqueline Humphries Steina Vasulka once told me that The Kitchen took shape early on by becoming a “home for the homeless” in art, providing an early place for video, music, and before long any artistic approach that didn’t yet have an infrastructure to house it. Communities of people gave rise to the culture, reorienting its spaces and structures time and again. For the fiftieth anniversary, The Kitchen aims to honor that legacy by ensuring our space remains there for the next generation of artists and artwork, putting the organization in a position to adapt nimbly—and to strengthen culture—in a landscape changing vastly from that of The Kitchen’s beginnings in the 1970s. The Kitchen’s fiftieth-anniversary benefit exhibition represents a key first step in making certain The Kitchen remains in Chelsea as a key platform for the artistic community of New York City. —Tim Griffin, executive director and chief curator
LAURIE ANDERSON
WHY DID I WORK SO MUCH WITH THE Kitchen over the years? It was the only place in town. From early on, it was a place where you could really do things. There were folk and jazz clubs, but that wasn’t my scene. The Kitchen was tied more to the art galleries and in the ’70s I was hanging out more with visual artists than with musicians. I was making paintings and sculpture—visual work. It was after I incorporated music and sound in the gallery and started doing concerts that I drifted over to The Kitchen. And as I recall, The Kitchen started out focusing primarily on electronics and video art, but later on in the ’70s it started to broaden its scope. You have to remember, the art scene in New York was tiny. No one ever thought they’d make a living doing art, and you’d just walk everywhere. Basically, art scenes are all about real estate— the kind of spaces artists can get to live and work in. At that time there was a lot of really great cheap loft space in SoHo. I’d gotten in the habit of just walking over to The Kitchen to see what was going on. I’d end up seeing the same fifty people at every single event. It was nice that way, it was a really local scene. And really nothing was more local than The Kitchen. The art scene wasn’t international back then. Maybe the most international it got was Brian Eno, but that was because he was living in New York at the time. The first big memory I have of working in The Kitchen was for the New Music, New York festival in 1979. That was really era defining in terms of what was the future, and it suddenly put The Kitchen on the map in a way that it hadn’t been before, particularly in terms of music. I was in a band then with Arthur Russell. Peter Gordon was in it for a while. Everything was a band in those days—you were a band if you played together once, so we were a band. But I think New Music, New York was what brought punk to The Kitchen. Previously it had been a little more hippy-ish, with everyone wearing white. For New Music, New York, everyone wore black, and a different scene emerged that was more connected to the club scene. The most recent project I did at The Kitchen was [She Who Saw Beautiful Things] in 2019, with anohni . I had a small role in that, and the spirit of the show reminded me of the old days. It was fun watching how involved the Kitchen production staff was. For some of my shows early on, I just brought in what I had to work with. But it’s always been an interesting mix
of music, theater, performance, and visual art, which is unique. The Kitchen really sort of invented that combination. Not everything ran perfectly. Nam June Paik organized a live television show called Good Morning Mr. Orwell [1984]. It was a mess—but it was an interesting mess. And then there were early versions of works like United States [1980] that I got to put on there. In the ’80s, I began to tour more in other places so I wasn’t in New York as much. But I did get to be on The Kitchen’s board. We didn’t have a say in the curatorial program, we were simply about keeping the space afloat—although we did care very much about who the director was and finding the best person to fill that post, because we always wanted to keep true to what The Kitchen was about. We weren’t necessarily trying to stage big commercial successes; what I appreciated about The Kitchen was the flops as much as the successes, and giving people the right to flop in order to experiment. You were allowed to come in with an idea and to try to execute it. It didn’t have to be polished. It was always an experimental situation. Even now, in a world that’s much more professionally oriented and where artists often seem to be preparing for big professional careers, The Kitchen still lets you play around. Back when we got started, none
Laurie Anderson, United States Part II, presented by The Kitchen at The Orpheum Theater, October 26–27, 1980. Photo: © 1980 Paula Court
of us were thinking professionally, not for one second, not in our wildest dreams! I became more deeply engaged as a board member again when Tim Griffin came on. Obviously it’s a wild and turbulent moment ahead. Who knows when we’ll be able to go into theaters again—probably not for a long time. I think The Kitchen is well set up for the plague, though, because of its roots in electronics and recordings. In a way, it’s the perfect covid venue because, as people try to figure out how to make something— anything—in this era, we’re going to realize that it’s going to be about not how many people you can pack into one place but how you need to stay small. And it will be about recording the work. That’s where The Kitchen has a unique role to play in this new world. We have to go back to the electronic origins and say, “Okay, remember when The Kitchen was on TV?” Because that’s how it started, and it has this long relationship to recording live performance. So this is a moment for The Kitchen to shine.
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CHARLES ATLAS
IN THE EARLY 1970S, AS PART OF THE Merce Cunningham Company, we were aware of what was going on in New York in terms of progressive art. The Kitchen was very much at the center of that. It was known as the place where people showed interesting work that wasn’t mainstream. The first time I visited The Kitchen it had already moved to Wooster Street. I was one of the artists invited to participate in a performance show called Soup and Tart [1974]. I remember my partner Kate Parker and I did a dance based on the Castle Walk, as danced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle [1939]. It was a comedy performance, really, where I was wearing white tie and tails, all held together with Velcro so off it came during our dance, right down to my underwear. I’d never performed before and I was so nervous. I had such stage fright. We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed, and of course when we got up there I completely forgot what I was supposed to do. It was organized by John Dupuy, who was a mentor of mine when I was very young. As I recall, each artist was given two minutes max. The audience sat on the floor around the central performance area. After that, I continued to show at The Kitchen regularly. I also did lighting and costumes for other artists who performed there. For Karole Armitage’s performance Do We Could [1979], I put ivy on the back wall and strung it with small flashing lights. The dancers wore colored makeup on their palms so that when they touched the walls and columns, it left a mark. That was sort of the punk period. And then in 1980 I did my first retrospective at The Kitchen. I was around thirty at the time, and had done these works with Merce Cunningham, and a lot of Super 8 pieces as well. The Kitchen was the logical choice to show that work, because it was really the main place in the city where you could go and see avant-garde and experimental video. And that was so important. It welcomed dance, music, and video, and that meant a lot of my friends worked and showed there too. I ended up staging some of my most important pieces at The Kitchen. In 1982, I did a screening there of More Men, which was a two-channel synced video before syncing video was really possible. Basically, I had two three-quarter-inch players 44
Charles Atlas, The Years, installation view, the past is here, the futures are coming, The Kitchen, March 28–May 12, 2018. Photo: Jason Mandella, courtesy The Kitchen
that were approximately the same speed. I knew one was a little faster, so I had to keep pausing and unpausing it to keep it in sync during the screenings. We had pairs of television monitors spread around the space, with chairs around them so people could watch. I also showed Hail the New Puritan there in 1986 and S&D in 1988. The Kitchen has really been the site of my most experimental work, often in first versions where I didn’t entirely know what the piece was yet. That was what was so great, they allowed artists to experiment and develop. I guess you could say they were highfliers. Part of S&D was designed to be adapted into a television show but it got banned from PBS. Apparently that was because it was ambiguous, people would be upset and not know why—and I said, “That’s the whole point.” It had drag queens in it, and blood and killings. It was about aids , basically. It’s one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever done and it’s very personal for me. The funny thing is, I’m still trying new things at The Kitchen. In 2019 I was part of anohni’s two-act performance [She Who Saw Beautiful Things]. I’ve never learned lines before and gone up on stage and recited them—never—so it really was my stage debut. Dancing or performing on the side of the stage, sure, but never speaking
lines in front of an audience. It was a lot of fun. anohni made this outrageous poem for me to recite while doing a dance. I was very proud of myself because I was so nervous and had no idea if I could do it. Every time I’ve been involved with a project at The Kitchen it’s because they’ve sent me an invitation. The invitation is usually, “What do you want to do?” And what I want to do at The Kitchen is something that’s risky, something I’ve never done before, something where I’m not repeating myself. The Kitchen is really the only place in New York that’s ever invited me to do something like that. It’s been my home base.
JOAN JONAS
Left: Joan Jonas, They Come to Us without a Word II, The Kitchen, April 6–8, 2016. Photo: © 2016 Paula Court. Right: Poster for Joan Jonas’s The Juniper Tree, The Kitchen, October 27–30, 1977. Poster designed by Pat Steir. Courtesy The Kitchen.
THE KITCHEN’S FOUNDERS, STEINA AND Woody [Vasulka], were an important part of the video community; they made very special experimental video pieces and developed a lot of their own systems, which included a space to present new works. By the time I started showing at The Kitchen, it had moved from its original location on Mercer down to the corner of Wooster and Broome. It was a nice big space, and it became a very important place for exhibitions. The Kitchen was really one of the central spaces where you went to see new work, and as an artist, you could do whatever you wanted there. You were really given the space. Usually you brought your own props in with you and so on, it was very collaborative. Nobody had much money but you were given a lot of freedom. The first piece I staged there was [Videotapes and Performance] in 1974. It was based on a magic show. I made a set with paper walls and behind them I hung a big six-foot hoop, which was revealed at the end when I removed the layers of paper, like curtains. Then at the end of the piece I played reggae music, which I was working with at the time, as the hoop spun. It was an important piece for me and one of my favorites. Back in those early days of performing, you really had to build your own audience. The Kitchen advertised a little, but mostly we made our own posters and put them up ourselves,
and one collected one’s own audience as one went to dances and performances and shows. It was primarily a downtown audience of friends—artists, musicians, performers, video artists, dancers—a mixed audience that represented the downtown art world at the time. The Kitchen performances were very well attended, because it was the key place where you could actually see that kind of new work. As new directors and curators of The Kitchen came, its aesthetic changed, and, of course, as artists our own work changed over time. When Eric Bogosian became the dance curator, I showed a piece called The Juniper Tree [1977], which was a little more theatrical, as Eric’s leanings were more theatrical. But even with each different director, you always had complete freedom. You’d spend a week setting up the installation and then you’d do your performance. I remember some terrific pieces by other artists. Luigi Ontani did a beautiful installation where he filled the space with these prismatic lights floating around [Astronaut, A Tableau Vivant, 1979]. There was a real sense of community with the other artists who showed there. Later on I did Lines in the Sand [2004] and They Come to Us without a Word II [2016], both of which included collaborations with other artists. For me, the collaboration was often in terms of music. For Lines in the Sand I worked on the
soundtrack with Paul Miller and Steve Vitiello. For They Come to Us without a Word, Jason Moran composed the music and played the piano. Plus, there were children who performed in that piece. It was a revision of the piece that I showed at the Venice Biennale [in 2015]. When it came to choosing where to present it in New York, The Kitchen made sense because of my long connection to it. I asked Tim Griffin and once again I found a home there. The evolution of The Kitchen from its early days to the present really mirrors how the art world itself has changed over time. I remember seeing the Talking Heads perform there in the Broome Street space [1976], standing right in the front. It was a tiny crowd. The Kitchen got bigger when it moved to Chelsea, and with a bigger space came a greater variety of work and bigger productions. That’s true with much of the art world, so the history of The Kitchen reflects that development. But throughout, it has remained one of the most important and vital venues for experimental work. Sometimes I think there has to be a limit to how many times an artist can work in one space, because you want other artists to have the opportunity—especially young artists. But I always keep in touch with The Kitchen. And who knows, maybe in the future I’ll be back again.
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RALPH LEMON
I FIRST PERFORMED AT THE KITCHEN IN the 1980s. I was a young artist, and that meant performing wherever you could. The Kitchen was one of the great spaces that gave you the freedom to do just that. I did a collaboration with the fantastic Vernon Reid, who was a good friend of mine, as part of a series called Music/ Dance in December 1983. He played some blues guitar while I did a choreographed piece about the military, dancing with my wife at the time, Mary Good. The great thing about The Kitchen was that it was available. It was an available space, and for a young choreographer that space in SoHo was sacred. Everyone was performing there, and it offered such an extraordinary range of work. There was a real sense of freedom compared to the tyrannical hierarchy that certain spaces so often become in terms of who’s allowed to be there and who isn’t. So that was really encouraging and generative to me as a young artist. Being a space for multidisciplinary action is part of The Kitchen’s DNA, and the fact that it’s been able to sustain that is a miracle. The Kitchen has always maintained this incredible equipoise where you’re going to see video, you’re going to see music, you’re going to see dance. I remember going to see Glenn Branca and one of his crazy symphonies going on at The Kitchen. So they’d have this operatic stuff one night and then I’d be going in to do these dances with my friends the next. Early on, in the SoHo space, we’d bring in the materials we needed. Now I’m a little older and maybe more sophisticated—and The Kitchen is too—so I go into a project at The Kitchen knowing exactly what’s available to me. But it’s been the same mission with the different directors there, with Debra [Singer] and with Tim [Griffin]—they let me go and do what I want. That’s why, as an artist, it’s my favorite space. Especially, with Tim, I’m going to ask to use the whole building and see what happens. And they let me. In 2015 I showed Scaffold Room, where I built my own little theater inside The Kitchen, and then I asked for the second floor, where I wanted to show some visual works and have the space be all black instead of white. I was playing with, What is theater? And, What’s a white cube?—turning that conversation in on itself. So basically I’m going in there and playing with all the possibilities of having a container, and I’m asking Tim to give the whole space to me in order to do that. Really it’s a conversation 46
April Matthis in Ralph Lemon, Scaffold Room, The Kitchen, November 3–10, 20, 2015. Photo: © 2015 Paula Court.
of, “Tim, I want to do this,” and him saying, “Yes, it’s yours.” And, of course, I realize that in terms of economic politics it’s a different time to say yes to that than it was back in the early days of The Kitchen, when there was less at stake. So saying yes to an artist coming in and taking over the whole building is really incredible. But I feel that The Kitchen speaks to a whole community of art-makers. I can’t think of another space where you can do that. Now, in our current pandemic, that whole way of making art feels very endangered— especially for dance artists. I hope that energy will still be there. Those of us who have survived have done so partly because of the available space that has been there for us to interact with. Now those available spaces are in question. The Kitchen has always run on pure spirit, thank God. The last project I did before the shutdown was at The Kitchen, a piece called Rant #3, performed on the night of February 29, 2020. It was a free show in one of my dream spaces. I was working on Rant #3 as part of a larger constellation of work. This was a collaboration with Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Samita Sinha, Paul Hamilton, Stanley Gambucci, Mariama Noguera-Devers, Dwayne Brown, and Darrell Jones. It was a work dealing with a kind of ranting about freedom, particularly freedom of the body, and there were certainly racial politics involved in that because it was all black bodies inhabiting the space. It’s a haunted piece.
I thought at the time that it was the momentum for asking the next question—I’d been playing with questions of space and audience and sharing live work. Now it all feels in danger. A friend told me that she thinks, when it all comes back and we’ll be allowed to have live performance again, we’re all going to be so hungry for it. That feels encouraging. But we’d better hope that spaces like The Kitchen stay supported and open for the work that’s next. We’re certainly going to have a different idea of freedoms when we come out of this.
ANICKA YI
Left: Anicka Yi, You Can Call Me F, The Kitchen, March 5–April 11, 2015. Photo: Jason Mandella, courtesy The Kitchen. Right: Anicka Yi, Your Hand Feels Like A Pillow That’s Been Microwaved, 2015. Photo: Jason Mandella, courtesy The Kitchen.
I’VE ALWAYS REGARDED THE KITCHEN AS a hallmark of avant-garde performance—to me, it was the essence of 1970s and ’80s New York. But The Kitchen is really a zigzag of temporalities. You can’t help but feel it’s this temple of the past while at the same time it’s ushering in the future. I came to New York in 1996, and my first exposure to The Kitchen was through two good friends, Steven Parrino and Arto Lindsay, who told me about their own performances at The Kitchen back in the 1980s. Someone like Parrino is more known as a visual artist but he had also had a music career and his work is very much steeped in the practice of music-making. I think what appealed to me right away about The Kitchen was, to borrow a 1990s phrase, its DIY approach. It immediately seemed accessible and welcoming, and it didn’t have the stuffy airs and graces of a lot of museums and institutions. It felt more like it was speaking directly to the people, with less of that hierarchal, gatekeeper mentality. That makes it unique in the art ecosystem. One of the great things about The Kitchen for an artist is that there’s no permanent collection, no exquisite art objects that might get contaminated by an experimental project. It really is art and performance downstairs and art and installation upstairs, and they’ve remained dedicated to that model. It’s impossible to ignore The Kitchen’s history when you’re working in the space. It’s like being invited to be part of a conversation that has spanned decades. I suppose
“camaraderie” is the word that comes to mind— I don’t mean that in an overly romantic sense, I mean it as someone who has experienced the opposite in a lot of uptight institutions. The Kitchen is not that. And it’s New York City. You want to do something special for your hometown. In 2015, then Assistant Curator [now Curator] Lumi Tan approached me about doing an exhibition at The Kitchen. It happened to coincide with a residency I had at MIT, and it became a perfect cocktail of the microbial research I was doing there. What I wanted to do wasn’t easy or tame: I was bringing bacteria into The Kitchen, and that met with a lot of strong opinions and concerns. But I felt very supported. There was a really progressive sense at The Kitchen of what an artist might be able to accomplish. It certainly took a collective effort. On a very practical level, there’s a lot less bureaucracy at The Kitchen than there is at other institutions. Institutions tend to talk a big game, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, there seems to be a manual that says no, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Probably a lot of regulations would forbid what I bring to the table. The Kitchen, though, was very open and really allowed me to develop my ideas and push the boundaries. For that show, I remember, the timing was perfect in terms of my subject because of the Ebola virus. We had a nurse in quarantine in New Jersey and a male doctor who had gone bowling in Brooklyn right when he got back from
Africa. Everyone in the city was really panicked and worried, you could feel this palpable tension everywhere. And that was really the inspiration for the exhibition: contagion and outbreaks and viruses. Of course that was just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s happening now, but I remember that it was the first time I’d ever really been conscious of a virus stateside, and we as a collective society were responding to it in very obvious ways—we were terrified of germs and bacteria and cross-contamination. That was what I was working with at The Kitchen, these microbial entanglements. It was a very challenging and demanding show, to stand up to people’s fears and phobias about the biological. And it’s a very rare space that would allow me to do that. Artists can try as much as possible to push the envelope or move the needle forward, but if the institution and everyone involved in it—the curator, the director, the board, everybody—isn’t supportive, then artists can only do so much. People look to artists to ask where the art world is going, but we have to take into consideration the rest of the art world too, the people in positions of power who are designing the programs and directing the institutions and their funding. It can’t just be artists clamoring to envision a brighter, more progressive world. We have to work together on this. My hope is that artists will continue to be visionary, but also that everyone else in the ecosystem will be visionary too, and willing to take leaps of faith. 47
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ANDY WARHOL
REVISITING THE ARTIST’S RACE RIOT PAINTINGS FROM THE MID-1960S IN 2020. In 1963 and 1964, as he prepared for an exhibition at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, Andy Warhol turned his attention and his silkscreens to a subject matter drastically different, though not entirely separate, from his earlier studies in celebrity, consumerism, and American glamour. These new works, conceived with the later-abandoned exhibition title Death in America in mind, engaged similar techniques of repetition, multiscreen vibration, and monochrome color blocking as his earlier work, but they meditated on the imagery of American social and political tragedy—they were the id to the earlier works’ ego. Instead of soup cans, Brillo boxes, and Elvis, Warhol was re-presenting the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy, newspaper photos from suicides, and photographs of police violence against civil rights marchers in Birmingham, Alabama. These works, the Death and Disaster series, shine a light—an ambiguous, perplexing, and challenging light—on the artist as a painter of history and on the American media landscape in the middle of the twentieth century, with its taste for circulating horrific images of a tumultuous time. As we find ourselves in our own tumult—this liminal space where things are undoubtedly changing and with little sense of where they will go—Warhol remains a valuable and generative source for artists and scholars interested in interrogating how artists reflect their historical moment. His Race Riot series from 1963–64, painted from a series of Charles Moore photographs that ran in Life magazine, engages questions of racial inequality, police brutality, and the mediation of these tragedies in ways still, sadly, relevant to our time. In the following article, Gillian Pistell discusses these works and their lasting influence on scholars such as Okwui Enwezor and Anne Wagner. 49
For the catalogue of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, Okwui Enwezor contributed a focused discussion of the artist’s Race Riot paintings. Enwezor titled the essay “Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe,” thereby signaling to the reader the utter failure to achieve racial equality that has plagued the United States for generations—the struggle for which has continued with heightened urgency in our current moment. Throughout his text, Enwezor draws parallels between the fraught racial context at the time of the paintings’ creation, their presentation in the Museum of Modern Art’s Warhol retrospective in 1989, and the racial polarization incited by the divisive 2016 election of Donald Trump to the American presidency—only two years prior to the opening of the Whitney’s retrospective. “On reflecting back on that period in the 1980s, it seems to me uncanny that three decades later a new Warhol retrospective should be staged at a moment when the United States is caught in another political and cultural crisis in which activists have taken new stances in a renewed struggle for recognition.”1 Today, Warhol’s Race Riot paintings stand as perhaps his most prescient and socially engaged works—a tall claim for an artist’s oeuvre known for its discerning and revealing observation of the human condition. The paintings illustrate white police brutality towards America’s Black populace—an issue that dates back to slavery and continues today. Warhol’s work is celebrated for the mirror it holds up to the time in which it was produced; the Race Riot paintings must do this over and over, harking back not only to the cruelty enacted on African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but also foretelling the 1992 Los Angeles uprising after the acquittal of police officers recorded beating Rodney King; the upheavals in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer; and now the protests that continue across the country—and worldwide—demanding change after the murder of George Floyd, once again at the hands of a white police officer. The Race Riot paintings belong to Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, a group of approximately seventy works that take as their subjects
car crashes, suicides, and electric chairs, among other grisly content—the darker side of American life as opposed to the shiny consumerism displayed in works like his earlier Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Warhol culled this grim imagery from tabloids, newspapers, and police reports; he even sought out photographs deemed too disturbing for publication. The Death and Disaster series coincided with the artist’s adoption of the screenprinting process; it is often noted that his mechanical repetition of these macabre images served to desensitize both the artist and the viewer to the aura of death that haunts them, reflected in statements Warhol himself made: “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” he once commented, “it doesn’t really have any effect.”2 The Race Riot paintings, however, do not picture death; rather, they picture racial conflict, a disaster for our country then as it is now. The Race Riot paintings are based on three photographs that document the dramatic confrontation between a peaceful Black protestor and the white police force during the extended civil rights protest now known as the Birmingham campaign, which stretched from April 3 to May 10, 1963.3 Co-organized by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a local organization called the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, the protest comprised numerous “nonviolent direct actions”—King’s term for his strategy of peaceful demonstrations. In what was already a charged year—1963 marked the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation—King turned his attention to what he deemed “the most segregated city in America.”4 The decidedly violent institutional and public reaction to King’s strategy—spearheaded by the nefarious commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor—sparked the attention of the country at large, and Birmingham was flooded with journalists eager to report on the turmoil erupting in the city’s streets. Veteran civil rights photographer Charles Moore was among them. Already known for his pictures documenting King’s arrest for loitering in Montgomery in 1958, Moore again followed the activist—this time to Birmingham— and the photographs he took there became an eleven-page photo-essay published in Life magazine’s May 17, 1963 issue, titled “They Fight a Fire
That Won’t Go Out: The Spectacle of Racial Turbulence in Birmingham.” The three pictures from Moore’s photo-essay that Warhol selected for his paintings were published on a two-page spread, a design decision that serves to unapologetically draw the viewer into this particular moment. Frame by frame, we watch as the clash between protestor and police unfolds: a white police officer sets his dog upon a Black protestor, who appears to turn in shock as the dog tears his pants from his leg; the protestor attempts to escape as yet another police officer and dog come up behind him; and lastly, in the final frame, which takes up three-quarters of the spread, the protestor is surrounded by officers and attacking dogs, while in the forefront of the photograph a third dog provocatively stares at the camera as its club-wielding handler watches the assault. Warhol reprinted these three photographs in varying sequences and groupings in eleven versions of the Race Riot paintings, each in what Enwezor describes as “gaseous colors—reddish pink, sulphuric mustard, arsenic blue, mercury silver, and combinations of red, white, blue, and silver—as if to suggest they were poisoned.”5 Much ink has been spilled debating Warhol’s political engagement with the subjects he pictures. Though Warhol’s decision to use these photographs in his work and his purposeful inclusion of them within the Death and Disaster series might be understood to indicate his political position, artworks like the Race Riot paintings trivialize the argument. They are inherently political, for one must always view them through the lens of contemporary events. As Enwezor notes, “History repeats itself,” and “the Race Riots display the wound [of racial injustice] in all its resplendent and sickening colors.”6 1. Okwui Enwezor, “Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe,” in Donna De Salvo, ed., Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018), 36. 2. Andy Warhol interviewed by G.R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art?,” reprinted in Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2004), 19. 3. “Birmingham Campaign,” Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, accessed August 4, 2020, https:// kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/birmingham-campaign 4. Anne Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America,” in “Race and Representation: Affirmative Action,” special issue, Representations, no. 55 (Summer 1996): 105. 5. Enwezor, “Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe,” 37. 6. Enwezor, “Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe,” 40.
Previous spread: Andy Warhol, Race Riot, 1964, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, in four parts, 60 × 66 inches (152.4 × 167.6 cm), Private Collection. Artwork © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This page: Documentary image from civil rights demonstration, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photo: Charles Moore/Getty Images
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judygeib.com Giant Peter Pan collar, with “B� monogram, 18K gold
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SEEING THE CHILD BY THE NOVELIST TOCHI ONYEBUCHI AND THE ARTIST TITUS KAPHAR
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Panic brought them here. Fear brought them here. Under a chemical sunset, palm trees patchy silhouettes against pinkpurple-gold, the boys vanished. The Greyhound bus is an empty-eyed sentinel between their mothers. Its door is open, but no one ascends or descends. The mothers have their luggage about them, a moment of peace and calm during their flight, an interlude during which their muscles can relax. One mother has her back resting against the edge of a table, one arm draped over its top while the other rests gently upon the neck of her boy, fingers of that hand picking a piece of lint out of his hair. He had been asleep or on his way there, head nestled on the bag resting on his mother’s lap. She worries for the boy. A part of her is always plotting through alternate presents and futures for him, trying to head off tragedy at the pass. Dress this way, don’t shout, stay close. And now he’s gone, his mother’s fingers twisting air where her boy’s hair had been. Her fingers still retain the heat of his scalp. And there’s still the impression of his weight on the wrinkles of her skirt. I don’t know what they’re running from. But I know where they’re going. I’ve seen the others. Last time I saw Mama, the sky was purple. We was at the bus station. Mama had picked me up so I would stop crying. But I was so hungry. It felt like my stomach was on fire. We had left so fast I couldn’t finish my breakfast, and all I could bring with me was toast with a little bit of butter on it. My friend Brandon was at the bus station too. His mama lives on the same block as us. I hope he’s comin’ with us wherever we’re going. He’s facin’ away from me. I take a peek over at him, then I bury my face in Mama’s neck. I can’t see the look on his face, but I can tell from the way he’s hunched over on his mama’s lap that he’s been crying too, even though he’s bigger than me. Is all this ’cause of us? I don’t wanna cause no trouble, and I don’t wanna make Mama mad. I just want her to be happy and not scared all the time. Brandon feels it too. And I know he’s wishin’ the same thing I’m wishin’ because one moment we’re there in the too-hot outside of the bus station, then the next moment we’re not. And I don’t know if what we did was a good thing or a bad thing. But I hope Mama can be happy. I already miss her.
Titus Kaphar, The distance between what we have and what we want, 2019, oil on canvas, 108 × 84 ¼ inches (274.3 × 214 cm)
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If I rush, then I’ll have to start over. I’ll have to untangle and double back, and more time will have been lost. If I focus—focus on this scalp that glows golden before me, focus on the geometrical patterns I’m making out of this hair, focus on the message trapped in these patterns like parchment in a storm-tossed bottle—then maybe we’ll make it out in time. In the book, Pa’s saying to me: Hey, baby girl. Tell me what you want. You want the moon? She doesn’t know what’s waiting for her. Even as the vanishing happens. Already her shoes have lost their laces and tongues. They’re blocks of magenta on her feet. The vanishing has done the same to one of my sneakers. The other is creased and shadowed and lovingly lined. Like her. She’s not scared, and I want to wrap this moment in my arms. I want to fit it as snugly between my knees as I fit her. I want to braid a warning into its hair. You want me to tie this rope together and throw it up high in the sky? Pa’s asking me. The creeping continues. The folds of my dress undo themselves. The fabric flattens. Get that rope nice and tight around the moon. I don’t know what this thing is that is taking her from me. But I’m braiding and watching her read about a father lassoing the moon for his daughter and hoping that these things are enough of a message for her when we are apart. That she will be able to decode these things and know that she is not alone. Now when I get you that moon what are you going to do with it? The book is losing its texture. The moon on its cover has vanished. You’re gonna eat it? She’s still here. With me. Sitting on the ledge colored green. The child has soaked up all of the sun so that all around her is deeply saturated color—the smudged emerald coloring the door and the floor and the plastic chair against the wall; the red of the portal to elsewhere; the row of blue stripes cutting diagonally across the door. Well, if you swallow the moon, it’ll sit in your belly. Then it’ll break apart, then it’ll become like air inside you. She has the cosmos in her. Wherever she’s going, she’s taking the universe with her. I’m losing her. It’ll shoot through your toes and your fingertips. This is what it’s like to live on the other side of the vanishing. To lose what was loved. Before, I was the lost thing, and now she must be the lost thing. I’m almost done with her hair. The moon will glow in your hair. My fingers thread through absence. Titus Kaphar, Braiding possibility, 2020, oil on canvas, 83 ¾ × 68 inches (212.7 × 172.7 cm)
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They all got the question in their eyes. All three of ’em. The boy in the blue ball cap with the teal book bag hangin’ too heavy off his shoulders. The girl in red with her hair done in two thick braids that come down to the small of her back. And her brother, wearin’ a yellow polo and a satchel, clingin’ to his sister’s arm. She’s the one with the surest gaze. The boy in the ball cap looks to me, the girl in red looks at me. Her brother’s the only one to notice the hound down the river. It ain’t close to us, but it’s curious and dangerous the way all hounds are and have been and will be. I know these waters, perpetually pink with eternal sunset, the river flanked by overtall reeds and slopin’ riverbed. This place is nowhere and everywhere, no-when and every-when. But these kids all come here from the same place: their mother’s arms. I don’t know how long I been doing this, guiding children, conducting them, but it’s long enough for me to have started fading. I’m not all the way here and not all the way now, and the boy in yellow sees it and is scared, but his sister doesn’t let a single bit of fear wrinkle her brow. If there ever come a time when I can’t do this anymore, I hope there’s someone like her to take my place. Someone who knows for sure how to protect the other children from hounds and what to say to them when they get here. What do I tell these kids who just a second ago were with their mamas? Smelling their hair and lyin’ in their laps? They’re standin’ in the river like this is just what you do this time of day, and they’re kids so maybe a bit of them does thrill at the thought of adventure, at the newness of what’s happening to them, but they miss where they come from. I know it. I wanna tell them they’ll get back, but I don’t know that for sure. I wanna tell them it’s gonna be okay, but I don’t know that for sure. I wanna tell them they’re loved. Love brought them here. That’s what I need to tell them. That, I do know for sure. I wanna tell them these things, but I ain’t said a word out loud in years. I don’t think I would even recognize the sound of my own voice. I don’t know if anyone else can see it, but the little girl’s smilin’ at me. Like we sharin’ a secret that I don’t know yet. My own face ain’t used to joy so it takes a moment for the chuckle buildin’ in my throat to reach my lips. It bubbles in my chest. Then it climbs through my throat, all harsh with disuse, on its way to the air in front of my face. Like she’s just cast a spell on me. I see you, girl.
Titus Kaphar, Final chapter, 2020, oil on canvas, 84 × 68 inches (213.4 × 172.7 cm) Artwork © Titus Kaphar Photos: Alexander Harding
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Building a Legacy In this ongoing series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staffs, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald speaks with the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation about their decision to establish a multiyear initiative dedicated to providing $5 million in covid-19 relief for artists and arts professionals. Clifford Ross, chairman of the board of directors, Frederick J. Iseman, president of the board of directors, Dr. Lise Motherwell, vice president of the board of directors, and Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the foundation, detail their strategy in addressing this critical moment. ALISON MCDONALD The
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is providing $5 million in grants dedicated to covid-19 relief over the next three years. How do you see this act of generosity and outreach as reflecting and furthering Helen Frankenthaler’s legacy? In a way, this question addresses the mission of the foundation, but at this moment, with this struggle that we’re facing, how does this generosity reflect what Helen would have wanted? LISE MOTHERWELL This pandemic is so much bigger than Helen that when the proposal was brought up, there was no question it was the right thing to do. Helen would certainly have wanted us to support the arts and to offer help to artists who are struggling. FREDERICK ISEMAN Helen was always very aware of current events, including medical issues. She would have been horrified by what’s going on. AMCD How did the conversation start? What turns did it take along the way? CLIFFORD ROSS The public-health crisis fell on all of our shoulders collectively, as a team, including Michael Hecht, our treasurer. Working together, we developed a pretty simple idea: our job was to determine how generous we could be in this crisis and still be able to attend to our mission in relation to Helen’s work. It was clear that we had to do something extraordinary, and we were united in our vision. The right number for us, which was a leap far beyond anything we’d done previously, was $5 million. covid is a health and economic disaster, and from what we could see, there’s at least a three-year window of need. When we decided to 60
take a leading role, it meant giving at a scale that was uncommon for us. And really it fell to Elizabeth to research where these funds could best be given and at what scale. The board was unanimous in supporting Elizabeth’s vision of where to give the money. LM Clifford just described our three-year commitment. As a foundation that has provided grants to various organizations, we’ve realized that providing a grant every so often doesn’t work very well. We understood that the devastation from the coronavirus was significant and we wanted our support for organizations that support artists and the arts community to last a significant period of time. FI Helen was a mixture of great discipline and impulse. Obviously that’s reflected in her painting, but it also shapes the way we think about the foundation. We have to be disciplined, and yet, when something like this comes along, it’s very much in Helen’s spirit to be creative and passionate in responding to it. And those two things coalesced in this instance—a combination of discipline, because we’re giving the money in a disciplined way, and an impulse to respond to an urgent situation. We’re all related to Helen; we incorporate her spirit of both spontaneity and creative discipline in a good way. That’s part of our DNA and part of our mission. AMCD Your response was both swift and thoughtful. You offered clarity and led by example. The money seems to be reaching a range of institutions, artists, and people who work in the arts. Elizabeth, how did you select organizations for the grants?
What criteria did you set and how did you narrow it down? ELIZABETH SMITH We worked hard to conceive and implement a response in a way that was both timely and considered. Of course we measured each opportunity by what would make the most direct impact, particularly for artists and arts workers. Early on, we became aware of efforts being developed by a few organizations. One of these was the Foundation for Contemporary Arts [FCA], where we had recently established the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting. They wanted to put together an emergency covid-19 relief fund in addition to the emergency fund for artists they already operate. We also heard from the Drawing Center, where we have supported programs and operations. They had aligned with a group of small New York City–based arts institutions to collectively fundraise for operating support. That also felt vital—we appreciated the collaboration among these organizations, their recognition that banding together is necessary in times of crisis. We were also approached by the organizers of a newly created fund called Artist Relief. We had no prior connection with the groups involved in spearheading that but we knew several of them by reputation. So that effort also got our attention. Several weeks later, as part of a group of four foundations, we contributed to launching a relief fund dedicated to art workers: the Tri-State Relief Fund to Support Non-Salaried Workers in the Visual Arts. That gift was initiated by our colleagues at the Willem de Kooning Foundation, who
One of the interesting things that has happened from this is a renewed level of communication among artist foundations, with new ideas being generated and shared. The Frankenthaler Foundation was able to swing into action early, and to join with other foundations to start a movement. —Clifford Ross
invited our participation. And in June we contributed to another artist-relief fund organized by the Hamptons Arts Network [han], acknowledging Frankenthaler’s connection with the Hamptons during her lifetime. CR One of the interesting things that has happened from this is a renewed level of communication among artist foundations, with new ideas being generated and shared. The Frankenthaler Foundation was able to swing into action early, and to join with other foundations to start a movement. The sentiment that we needed to help members of our creative community in need feels like it’s ricocheting around the larger art world now. AMCD Most of the organizations you are giving to are concentrating on the economic impact of covid specifically in the arts and culture space. There also seems to be a focus on helping people in New York and the United States. Was that part of your plan? Will that evolve as you consider where to put the monies moving forward? FI We’re thinking about this in both a national and an international context, but we want to focus on the United States. Internationally, many governments offer arts funding, whereas here, support of the arts is primarily based on individual giving. We therefore think our role is most needed in the United States. We started in the New York region because that’s where we’re based, and because it was an epicenter for the health crisis. LM We started in New York in part because it was the hot spot, but it was clear to us early on that we didn’t want to be New York–centric; we
wanted to make sure that the monies got distributed nationally. That’s why we partnered with some of the organizations we did: the FCA and Artist Relief have been distributing emergency funds to artists all over the country. It was great to work with organizations that had the ability to distribute money very quickly, which we don’t have. That way we knew the people who were most in need could get support right away. CR America’s notable tradition of philanthropy is particularly critical in the cultural world because, as Fred was saying, we are not a country that has given governmental support to the arts in a significant way. Frankly, it’s anguishing that our country doesn’t do more for the folks that we’re trying to help. These new grants differ from the other work we do because this is about survival; we’re not helping to publish a scholarly book, or supporting a scholarship—that’s important work too, but this is about people who don’t have the resources to get by. All of us felt moved on a fundamental, humanitarian level for our colleagues in the art world. AMCD And if people working in the arts don’t give to those in the art space who are struggling, then it’s very unlikely others will, right? ES The first four funds we chose to support are directed to very vulnerable populations—individual artists and art workers and small but vibrant institutions. AMCD How do the funds differ in terms of who is eligible and how need is determined? ES FCA’s Emergency Grants covid-19 Fund provides emergency grants of $1,500 each to artists to
offset income losses resulting from canceled performances or exhibitions due to the pandemic. Artist Relief offers direct grants of $5,000 each for general financial hardship. The Tri-State Relief Fund, which is administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts, provides $2,000 grants to behindthe-scenes workers in the art world—freelance art handlers, registrars, archivists, and others. And the han fund supports artists and others in creative fields with grants of $1,000 each. FI I happen to be familiar with a lot of the government funding programs. Whether it’s the PPP [the federal Paycheck Protection Program] or loan guarantees or whatever. In general this is a population that is not going to get government money. It’s one thing if you work at the Met or a big institution like that, but individual artists are not going to get government money. They might get a $1,200 check signed by Donald Trump if they happened to file a tax return last year, but they may not have had enough income to need to file a tax return. So we’re addressing a population that the government is not. And that was part of our plan. There’s a huge amount of need, a huge amount of suffering. Millions of people have applied for unemployment benefits, but not everybody files; so I don’t know, and nobody knows, what the real number is, but it’s massive. So we’re trying to go where there is no help. And that was part of our plan. Think of Amedeo Modigliani: exactly 100 years ago, he died starving and sick in a garret surrounded by rejected masterpieces that today are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. 61
The arts can be healing at a moment like this, and it’s important for people to get through these times. Hopefully this period will generate an enormous amount of creativity. We’re going to change our lives dramatically, and artists will show us the way. —Lise Motherwell
Starving artists still exist, and we have to take care of them. LM It’s also true that the arts are a huge driver of the economy. According to the National Endowment for the Arts and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the arts contribute $763 billion to the US economy and are a bigger share of America’s GDP than either construction or agriculture. Five million people work in the field; half of them are artists. And many of those jobs are now gone. It’s crucial that we value their contribution to the economy and recognize what the wreckage will be without them. Not only that, but the arts can be healing at a moment like this, and it’s important for people to get through these times. Hopefully this period will generate an enormous amount of creativity. We’re going to change our lives dramatically, and artists will show us the way. AMCD To that point, do you think this moment will change the Frankenthaler Foundation’s mission moving forward? CR None of us know what the future holds, but it’s certainly going to be different from what we all thought it would be. FI And yes, the mission was intentionally designed to be broad enough to allow for change, and we’re like-minded enough that we can be flexible. So we’ll see it evolve. LM Helen knew us all very well and she entrusted us with her legacy. We all come from very different perspectives but we respect each other and appreciate the conversation, so we trust each other to make good decisions. 62
AMCD Do you have any thoughts about next steps?
Where might you be directing the next round of funding? LM Well, there’s certainly going to be more rounds of funding. We want to see the impact of this round and then ascertain where the need is greatest. ES We are remaining responsive and open to other possibilities that might come our way. And we’re also continuing to research. AMCD Are your recent collaborations with other arts foundations similar to anything you’ve done previously? LM We typically have people propose projects to us. This is really the first time we’ve worked closely with other organizations to provide funding as a group. ES In 2014, though, the Dedalus Foundation invited us to join them and some others in providing support for a project by the art magazine the Brooklyn Rail centering on the impact of Hurricane Sandy. AMCD Did the covid crisis put any of your other projects on hold? ES When we were pivoting to figure out how we could do what we felt was necessary, we decided that certain things no longer felt like pressing priorities. Several upcoming shows were postponed and we also chose to step back and put some projects on hiatus. But we’re continuing to work on them. And it’s been extraordinarily satisfying to be able to take a leadership role with this covid19 relief effort without sacrificing the core programmatic mission of the foundation, which is to
steward Helen’s legacy, to lend to exhibitions, to undertake and foster scholarship, and to get all of that out in the world. CR And of course the catalogue raisonné— ES Yes, that work is ongoing. CR The plans and dreams still go forward, yes. AMCD To stay with Helen, is there an artwork, or a quote from her, that’s been inspirational during this time? FI Helen was a mold breaker. She always spoke disparagingly about the “Shoulds,” meaning people who said “You should do this, you should do that.” You should you should you should you should you should. Her rejection of that conformity has always served as an inspiration to me. She taught me this when I was sixteen. I had the benefit of forty years of her message that it’s okay to break the mold. LM A painting I’ve looked at over and over again since the pandemic started is Cool Summer, which was painted in Provincetown in 1962. It’s a colorful painting, full of hope, and it represents the values that Helen imparted to me as a child: the importance of friends and family, a sense of community, time and space for creativity, and a simple, fulfilling life. So for me, it’s going back to the basics and really simplifying everything. CR Even with the optimism and radiance that Helen could summon as an artist, she was also a realist. Among all the colorful pictures there were dark ones as well. To address a dark time, we’ve broken some new ground for ourselves with our covid response, and it feels very much like the kind of thing Helen would have believed in.
Derek Jarman MARK HUDSON CONSIDERS THE FILMMAKER’S ENDURING LEGACY AND COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP TO BRITISH CULTURE.
A Saint in the Garden
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Previous spread: Derek Jarman, 1981. Photo: Janette Beckman/Getty Images Left: Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, England. Photo: PA Images/ Alamy Stock photo Below: Derek Jarman in the garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, England, 1988. Photo: John Cole/Alamy Stock Photo
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n September 22, 1991, Derek Jarman was “canonized” in the garden of his house at Dungeness, on a bare shingle beach overlooked by a nuclear power station at the southeasternmost corner of Britain. Enthroned in golden robes, the forty-nine-year-old filmmaker and artist, his health severely diminished by aids, smiled, his eyes half closed in the autumn sunshine, as “nuns”— members of the Canterbury branch of the American drag performance group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—declared him Saint Derek of the Celluloid Knights of Dungeness. The whimsically camp ceremony culminated in a riotous “laying on of hands” by friends and admirers, a ritual only partly ironic: for those around Jarman, his uncompromising positions on gay rights, his own sexuality, and—not least—his art had lent him a saintly aura. Those present would have done anything to keep this much loved but already mortally ill figure a few months longer on this earth. I’m walking now toward Jarman’s garden on a blazing Monday in May. It’s the first public holiday since the easing of the covid lockdown and there are plenty of people out on the bare coast road, with the power station looming out of the hazy middle distance and worn scrub rolling away toward the English Channel. This walk has attained something of the air of a pilgrimage. Since Jarman’s death, in 1994, his status as a kind of secular saint has expanded greatly, not only in the LGBT and avant-garde art worlds but across a far wider spectrum of British culture and society. The garden he created around his house, meanwhile, is in the process of becoming a national monument. On the international stage, Jarman is seen as an important artist filmmaker, probably best known for his 1993 film Blue: simply a single, screen-filling field of glowing ultramarine, over which Jarman weaves a complex soundscape around the cultural and political connotations of his own imminent death. In Britain he is known for a wider range of activities: as the director of feature films, many on queer cultural figures—Caravaggio, Saint Sebastian, Ludwig Wittgenstein—and as a painter, stage designer, diarist, and gay activist. First and foremost, however, Jarman is a charismatic public personality in Britain, a position that seems only to have been strengthened by his death over a quarter 66
century ago. While he personifies his tumultuous times (punk, the ’80s aids crisis and the attendant upsurge in gay consciousness) he also corresponds to a particular British archetype: the gay icon who owes their popularity to the way they perform their homosexuality on the public stage—think of Oscar Wilde, Cecil Beaton, Noël Coward, or David Hockney. Jarman, like Hockney, was a natural on television and radio. Yet where Hockney’s art has long since succumbed to coziness, Jarman’s retains its cachet at the cutting edge. He’s at once a “national treasure” for the solidly middle-class, middle-aged audience of Radio 4—the BBC’s current-affairs channel—and a name to drop among young artists wanting to embrace art’s darkest and most transgressive possibilities. This contradictory status has come to focus on the garden to which I’m now headed, which became a national cause célèbre earlier this year when it and his house and an area of the surrounding beach were put up for sale. The Art Fund, which acquires works for Britain’s galleries and museums, immediately launched a campaign to save this cultural monument “for the nation”—the sort of attention usually reserved for major old master paintings. Fundraising initiatives, such as costume-designer Sandy Powell’s auctioning of a suit covered in celebrity signatures, made national headlines. Jarman came to live here in 1986, shortly after he was diagnosed HIV positive. The house, a blackpainted fisherman’s cabin, one of many dotted along the coast, looks as though it’s been dumped directly onto the shingle—flint gravel—with the unfenced “garden” sprouting apparently accidentally from the mass of white pebbles: crimson verbena, orange California poppies—which seem to do very well here—and untended masses of spikey gorse stand among circles of phallic stones, pieces of upended driftwood, and rusting metal objects stabbed into the gravel like surreal totems. Jarman, who saw himself as locked in a bitter struggle with the British cultural mainstream, would have been aghast and amused at the way the British heritage industry has subsumed his personal domestic space, turning it into a popular visiting site, a focus point in the selling and—as he would have seen it—the falsification of the British past. In his films and writings, Jarman rails constantly against the small-minded philistinism— and, naturally, the homophobia—of patriarchal
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Left: Film still from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978) Below: Film still from Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990) Opposite: Film still from Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990) Following spread: Derek Jarman in the garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, England. Photo: Geraint Lewis/Alamy Stock Photo
Britain, as embodied in television (“lies and bribery flowing through the National Grid”), the mainstream film industry (“propaganda for Thatcher’s Britain”), and the tawdry spectacle of “the Windsors.” Yet he was aware that in “gardening” he was engaging in perhaps the quintessential British art form. And beneath the invective, there’s a deep feeling in Jarman’s work for an older and more essential Britain that’s been usurped and obscured by the forces of commercialization. In his love-hate relationship with his homeland, Jarman’s own garden became a stage on which his visionary fantasies were played out, while the garden in a larger sense became a key symbol, not least for Britain itself. The idea of Britain as a garden transcending the boundaries of the wild and the cultivated, the public and the private, is well established in British culture, and it permeates A Journey to Avebury (1971), one of Jarman’s earliest forays into Super 8 film— an “amateur” format that he valued for its ease of use and its painterly qualities. The work’s series of static views of Neolithic stone circles around a Wiltshire village are lent a psychedelic quality by the yellow tinting of the film, while the framing of the farm tracks and clusters of trees around the ancient stones brings to mind “neo-romantic” artists of the interwar period such as Paul Nash, who shared a sense of ancient forces brooding beneath the placid southern-English landscape. It might seem a jump from this antiquarian home movie to Jubilee, the first punk feature film, a scabrous satire on the music industry made on a shoestring budget six years later. Yet Jubilee starts in an ancient garden (not so far from Avebury), the grounds of an Elizabethan palace, where the magician John Dee—a historical figure and a cypher for Jarman himself—summons Ariel from Shakespeare’s Tempest to transport Elizabeth I into the future. The world they arrive in isn’t the euphoric real-life 1977, where the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations were lampooned in the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” but a skewed, dystopian wasteland of burning cars and graffiti. The Queen has been killed in a random mugging and Buckingham Palace is being turned into a music venue—a nightmare inversion of William Blake’s “green and pleasant land,” the idealized garden of the collective British imagination. 68
The monarch’s crown becomes the plaything of a band of murderous, nihilistic female punks led by Amyl Nitrate, played by Jordan, assistant in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex—perhaps the ultimate punk, “the original Sex Pistol,” in Jarman’s phrase. In a typically paradoxical gesture, Jordan also plays Britannia, symbolic embodiment of Britain. In a key scene, Amyl reads from a self-penned history of Britain: “It all began with William the Conqueror . . . dividing the land into theirs and ours. They lived in manors and ate beef at fat tables, whilst the poor lived in houses minding the cows on a bowl of porridge.” If that’s hardly the most sophisticated analysis of British history—even as satire—it confirms the sense, pervasive in Jarman’s work, of an Eden riven by primordial and still unreconciled class and culture conflicts. At the end of Jubilee, Jarman’s “heroines” escape into what he describes in his book Dancing Ledge (1984) as “a dream England of the past: the England of stately homes, which are the indispensable props for the British way of life. . . . Any film or TV series that has one is halfway to success. Private schools are housed in them, so the children of the wealthy get a taste for them young.” At Longleat House, the popular Wiltshire tourist destination where these sequences were filmed, Jarman sees “centuries-old oaks”—an ancient symbol of Britain—“wrapped in barbed wire and plastic,” apparently for their own protection: the English garden subject to a kind of totalitarian commercialism. It is only when his characters arrive on unspoiled cliff tops in Dorset, where Jarman holidayed as a child, that they appear able to breathe. Often with Jarman, you feel that the authentic England is best accessed through his own autobiography. In The Last of England (1987), Jarman’s Super 8 camera tracks past rows of suburban houses, fenced off and apparently waiting demolition: the ruins of the world of Little English houses and gardens that covered the wider garden of England in the industrial era. While Jarman longs to escape this conformist England, he now feels sympathy for it as much as revulsion, as he sees it steamrollered by something far worse: the untrammeled monetarism of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Seated at his worktable in a white skullcap, Jarman appears the embodiment of his alter ego John Dee—“the magus, inventor and universal man”—as he controls the
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film’s action, writing and drawing it as we watch, or so we’re made to feel. The blizzard of flickering, superimposed, distressed imagery, slowed down or sped up, with clouds streaming through tainted skies over Britain’s ruined cities, creates a sense of wild, accelerated entropy. Old home movies and faux newsreel footage are collaged together, with Jarman’s handheld Super 8 photography blown up to fabulously grainy 35mm, as though he were painting with his “amateur” camera directly onto the commercial cinema screen—and thanks to the notoriety of Caravaggio, released the previous year, the film received far wider distribution than you’d expect for an experimental film. Jarman fuses the ancient and the modern, high culture and low, the avant-garde and the populist, more fully than any filmmaker I can think of, and not least through his instinct for picking performers who would become stars in the wider world, their glamour reflecting back on him: actors Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean, musician Adam Ant, as well as Toyah Willcox, star of Jubilee and The Tempest (1979), who went on to a prominent pop career in Britain. David Bowie, who was to have starred in the aborted nuclear thriller Neutron and visited Jarman at the height of his own coke-fueled paranoia, was unnerved by the sight of a skull on the filmmaker’s desk, taking him for a more than merely cinematic magician. Finally, in The Garden (1990), the cinematic alchemist lies slumped across his desk in his Dungeness house, as though dreaming his own apotheosis as it’s played out in his garden and
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the surrounding wasteland. Live-action filming is intercut with green-screened imagery, so that the sky at moments resembles an immense television screen. Christ with his stigmata wanders beneath the power lines beside the nearby power station, like some lost figure from a film by Pier Paolo Pasolini (a key influence on Jarman), while the Devil, a sinister dildo-wielding leather man, crawls through the shrubbery outside. While Jarman claimed that conventional religion had nothing to offer him as a gay man, the film bursts with Christian iconography. The scrub between the house and the sea becomes the stage for a delirious religious/erotic phantasmagoria, with the Madonna, played by Swinton, presiding over the twelve Apostles, seated at a long table and represented variously by a group of elderly women and twelve cane-wielding school masters who stand, we assume, for patriarchal, academic authority. A small boy, clearly representing Jarman himself, is obliged to dance for them. In the driftwood-strewn Eden of Jarman’s garden, a young male couple have taken up residence. As often in Jarman’s films, the unself-conscious beauty of the young male is presented as a state of primitive innocence, from which Jarman, the self-regarding artist, is necessarily excluded. In a telling moment, one of the young lovers looks up and pushes away Jarman’s prying camera. In the film’s climactic sequence, the pair are humiliated (a moment recalling the Crowning with Thorns) before being beaten by the servants of the British state, a group of satanically cackling policemen—or
that’s certainly what they look like—wearing sinister Santa Claus costumes over their dark uniforms, as though attending some gruesome seasonal celebration. Jarman, meanwhile, carries on gardening, pruning shrubs and digging in compost, as his own end approaches. Jarman may have loathed the British class system but he completely understood his relation to it: a bohemian gay-activist dissident, he was inescapably a product of the lower end of the upper middle class—one born with the right to speak and be heard. I doubt it ever seriously occurred to Jarman to doubt the importance of his work. And it says a great deal about the depth of his understanding of the chemistry of British society that he would have realized exactly how his house and garden—and to a degree the rest of his work—would be accommodated by the British mainstream. Yet much in that work still challenges. There are moments of silliness in Jarman’s films, a tendency toward facile horror and adolescent overstatement that at times brings to mind his early mentor Ken Russell. Yet it’s precisely that lack of conventional good taste that keeps his art relevant; the fact that it’s difficult to pick apart what’s inexcusably sentimental from what’s righteously abrasive keeps you interested. In a world where art is dominated by timid, curator-led formalism, and where innovation in the cinema proceeds painfully gradually, Jarman’s larger-than-life individualism stands out. Approaching half a century on from their inception, his filmic struggles with his homeland still feel fresh and magnificently uncomfortable.
BEBE  MILLER
AND
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CYNTHIA OLIVER  73
The legendary choreographers discuss their history together, the evolution of Oliver’s boom!, imposed boundaries on “Black dance,” and the choreographies of the pandemic. GILLIAN JAKAB It’s
so wonderful to have the two of you in conversation. What has kept you busy during the pandemic? CYNTHIA OLIVER I’m sitting in the midst of all of my videotapes and books. I’m using this moment to get all of the tapes digitized. BEBE MILLER Wow. GJ T h a t ’s i m p o r t a n t f o r d a n c e -h i s t o r y preservation! CO It’s been a long time, I’ve wanted to do it for years. Recently I came across a DVD of Bebe’s piece Necessary Beauty that I’d forgotten I had, and I reached out to Bebe. I watched it and I was brought to tears because it was so beautiful. My body felt like I could do it again. We were working on that over a great distance and over a considerable amount of time. Bebe would record our rehearsals and then send me the recordings. GJ When was that? CO We premiered in 2008, so we were working on it in 2007. I’m in this beautiful barn at [the Massachusetts dance center] Jacob’s Pillow. I’m dancing by myself so the pressure is on. Bebe is directing me—I’m improvising and she’s talking as I’m moving. Even now, while watching, my stomach is up in my throat from the nerves of having Bebe Miller watch me and make comments while I dance. BM All choreographers start with ideas about time, space, and energy. I’m looking at those elements in a certain way, but I’m also looking at what it is that you are doing, and what you’re aiming for, and then trying to imagine that intersection where we both have access to shared questions. It’s not, “Do it this way,” it’s, “What if . . . ?” or, “Consider this …” GJ Cynthia, were you dancing with other people and doing your own choreographing simultaneously, or was there a moment when you switched from one to the other? CO If that was 2007, I’d only been doing my own work for about seven years at that point. I moved to Illinois in 2000. Prior to that, I was in Laurie Carlos’s theater company and I was dancing with Ron Brown in New York. My history with Bebe goes way back. She’s going to hate this but I’m going to tell you a story: I auditioned for her in 1985 or ’86 and I got cut really early. I was guided to her audition by Nina Wiener, who I had taken a summer workshop with. I was really young. I was trying to figure out who I was as a dancer. Bebe, were you dancing with Nina at the time? BM No. CO You were starting your own thing. Bebe was hot in New York and everybody was showing up at this audition, there were hundreds of people there. And a girlfriend of mine and I went. I got cut before she did so I was waiting outside for her and she came downstairs and told me about all that went on. We were super young. I followed Bebe’s work for years after that. I started dancing with other companies, but whenever I was in town and Bebe had a show, I would go. I was a fan for years. 74
Then, when I took a position at the University of Illinois, Bebe had already been teaching at Ohio State for some years. And every once in a while she would tap my shoulder and say, “Well, there’s a position over here at Ohio State that you might think about.” And one year she called me and I thought she was coming to tell me about a teaching position. Instead, she tells me, “I’m working on a new project and I wonder if you might be interested in working with me on it.” I was elated. That’s when I told her about my audition in 1985 or ’86. And she was like, “Oh God, don’t tell me.” BM I hate those stories, because I feel like, What was I thinking? GJ Well, it worked out in the end. BM In the end it worked out. CO It was amazing because I’m expecting to go to this rehearsal and see the Bebe get down! And I walk into a rehearsal and the dancers are following a video of a construction tractor that they’re imitating with their arms. There was very minimal movement [laughs]. It was hilarious. It became the beginning of the process that Bebe called “Watching Watching.” BM Right, Talvin Wilks and I were behind a television that a group of three or four dancers were watching to learn choreography; they were doing something in unison and then they’d rewind it and
Previous spread: Bebe Miller and Cynthia Oliver in Necessary Beauty, 2008. Photo: © Julieta Cervantes This spread: Leslie Cuyjet and Cynthia Oliver in BOOM!, New York, 2014. Photo: © Yi-Chun Wu
You think? Yeah. It might come back as a different desire from wanting to get up in that performative way. For me, I’ve turned much more toward improvising. I even performed in March, right before the shutdown, in Rhode Island, and improvised a ten/ twelve-minute piece. In it, I was learning something off a video of Darrell Jones; I was doing “Watching Watching.” There was a texture of trying to pay attention to him while I was in view of other people, and also knowing that my body can’t do what it once did. I realized, “Oh, it’s a range. I’m not going to do what he does, but at the root of it, there’s a song in his rhythm.” So could I get that? You get to give yourself a different kind of problem to solve. But there’s an exchange of vulnerability. As the audience is watching this, I’m trying to do CO
BM
do it again. There was a beautiful unselfconsciousness to it. That began this whole thing of watching the watching, and eventually we even incorporated a bit of it into the performance of Necessary Beauty. CO Yes, that was the start of me dancing in Necessary Beauty. BM I really love to watch and take stock of, not the subtext, but the subdermal of what’s happening when dancers improvise. Spatially reading it in a way that perhaps the dancer is not. I feel there’s such a pleasure in working with people who are interesting and have a sense of what it is that they’re doing and what they’re creating. How do I add another dimension or facet to what’s already there? I don’t feel responsible for making it happen. I’d rather just take part in the building. GJ That’s a beautiful way to put it. CO To m e , t h e t h i ng a b out B e b e that’s different from anyone else I’ve ever worked w it h is her insistence on, and ability to sit in, that place of unk now ing a nd st ill be assured that it’s going to congeal into something. It’s an ability that resides deeply in her, and it amazes me. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about a willingness to be in the world of the unknown. A lot of times, because of the demands of the funding we have to talk about our work as if we know what it’s going to look like, but so often we really don’t know where it’s going. BM And then, at a certain point, we have a sense of where we’re heading, but there’s a particular kind of leap that we can ask of each other: “Let’s go there and see what happens.” GJ It sounds like there’s a pressure to know where you’re going, how you get there, and what happens once you’re arrive. And right now, to bring it to the present, is a major moment of unknowing with dance, with the world. How, if at all, has the pandemic affected the way you work? CO Well, I’ve been in a place of not knowing what the next moment is for me careerwise. I’ve had a couple of clear and distinct eras: one where I wanted to dance for other people, and then that shifted and I started to be interested in the “making.” That eventually started to slow down and I wanted to dance with other choreographers, like Bebe, or Tere O’Connor. And now I don’t feel the desire to dance in that performative way anymore. Of course I’ll get down when the music is right; it doesn’t mean I won’t dance again. But I can’t imagine wanting to do that right now. BM But you know what? It’s going to come for you.
this thing, and we’re both meeting in the middle. I think that’s about trust, and that can happen at any age. It doesn’t feel like a task to me; it’s more like an opportunity—“Here we go.” I’m curious as to how you will deal with that. CO It’s interesting to hear you say that, because the creation of boom! came out of a moment like that. You’ve pulled me out of another moment like this before, Bebe: I’d just come out of cancer treatment and I didn’t know if I’d be able to dance again. And Bebe, you said, “Well, why don’t you try making just a little something for this Danspace [Project, New York] event?” I was mortified. I really was. But I talked it over with my partner and I said, “Well, I wouldn’t want to do a solo because I don’t know if I’m going to have the stamina. I don’t know what I can do with my body.” And so I decided that I would do a duet with Leslie Cuyjet, because she’s someone—speaking of vulnerability, Bebe—she’s someone I thought I could be in a studio with for hours on end and be vulnerable. So I decided to try it, and to build into the choreography moments where I could forget, move around, look at her, say something that betrays, “Oh shit, I don’t know what I’m doing right now” [laughter]. That’s how boom! came about. BM I feel honored to have had any kind of place in that. It just speaks so personally and fully. There’s no doubt involved. That whole speaking section— CO We call it “the rant.” BM The rant! The tone, that bit of accent—it was such a pleasure to hear that, and to feel that, and to feel the two of you there, your partnership was just really wonderful. CO So much of it came out of play. For one, I had to write it because this cancer came out of nowhere. So boom! was a reference to that struggle. Writing that text, I started expressing that sentiment, and all the ways that cancer, and life in general, undoes your world, or what you thought was your world. Leslie and I started riffing on that. BM That’s so interesting because I feel the subject matter in a very different way: I feel the him you were directing this to. We understood it as a romantic relationship, but in fact it came from a different kind of physical vulnerability, of health, and it’s about a relationship between you and your body. That’s fascinating. GJ This was in 2012, for the Danspace platform Parallels? CO That was the first version. BM But that was a short version. GJ And then you continued to work on it. Does each iteration of boom!, particularly this most recent streaming through New York Live Arts, feel different in some way? In live dance, each time you perform a work it has a new life, physically. Revisiting something on the screen, did it take on a new life in today’s context? CO Oh, for sure. I mean, I think every dancer, when they see themselves on-screen—you feel it viscerally as you’re watching. I feel my muscles sort of twitch in the places they would need to be activated in a certain section. We did the seventeen-minute version for the Danspace platform. It was a kind of universal set of experiences that people could relate to, so the 75
response was overwhelming and we were asked to do it again. Later, New York Live Arts invited me to do whatever I wanted and I said, “Well, I want to keep this piece as is.” So we had a shared evening of two short works with Souleymane Badolo. Then, as we were toasting the success of the evening, the artistic director of New York Live Arts, Carla Peterson, said, “Well, we’re going to commission Cynthia to turn boom! into a full-evening work.” I was surprised and honored, but I didn’t want to do that classic compositional thing of “stuffing”— opening up each section and exploring it further. I thought that it was successful in the chunk that it was and I didn’t want to fuck with that. So I posed a question to myself, which was, If that’s perfect for me as it is, where would I go from there? That’s what led to the development of what you saw in the streaming, the sections that followed. We continued the rant and made it more elaborate, and it developed into something that ended in a very long silence. GJ Bebe, I’d love to hear about your curatorial perspective, and the choice to include this piece in the Danspace platform. Maybe just to take a step back, could you give an overview of the themes that were part of that platform in 2012, which itself was a revisiting of the original Parallels that took place in the ’80s, right? BM The original Parallels was in 1982. Ishmael [Houston-Jones] was the organizing curator. He was interested in who the Black folks were who were doing alternative dance and choreography at the time—let’s see: Ishmael, Ralph [Lemon], me, Harry Sheppard, Blondell Cummings, Rrata Christine Jones, Fred Holland, and Gus Solomons. And I think it was the first gathering of that particular group—we kind of knew of each other but we didn’t all hang out. Then, in 1987, we were asked to put together a tour. The group expanded to include other artists such as Jawole [Willa Jo Zollar]. We called it “Josephine Baker Contingent” and it went to Paris, London, and Geneva. Because of that thing that happens on tour—you’re together for a length of time, you see each other constantly, you have multiple performances, you hang out—we became friends. I still remember we were on some street in Paris hanging out, just standing around, and the police came by and they just kind of slowed down, like, “Hmm, who are you guys?” That was 1987, so you think, “Oh, here we are again.” This is one of the things about touring, about showing your work to an audience that’s not familiar with you: you get a whole other sense of how the work works, what feels successful, what feels unexpected or not. And you’re met with the audiences’ expectations of African Americans in Europe. I remember there was a
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white gentleman in the audience once who was getting on Ralph’s case for not being African American enough in his work. You know, those kinds of things that, well, still happen. I was pretty quiet back then, but I just got up and said, “You can’t say that! Who are you to say that?” I just thought, “The nerve of that person.” There was such a range of work among us. I mean Fred and Ishmael in their boots and cowboy hats had something of a western thing to it, and Ralph in a long skirt doing his Wanda in The Awkward Age. Jawole, did she have a raw egg that she broke on herself? What a great group! To fast-forward to 2012, it wasn’t about re-creating that original moment of Parallels but just jumping off from that point and seeing what other voices were doing thirty years later. CO It’s also interesting to think that the question still circulates about Black dance or Black people creating dance. Sally Banes passed on recently, and the first time I read about you [Bebe] and Jawole might have been in an essay of hers that categorized you both, and others I knew at the time, as doing kind of “identity dances.” Well, why are certain artists labeled “identity-dance makers” and others are not? Are people who are not Indigenous, people of color, not considered to be making dances that say something about their identity every time they create something? Essentially, we’re all always doing that. We’re always making something about what it is that we’re thinking about, what captivates us, what torments us, what we’re in dialogue with or trying to figure out. For me, choreography is about trying to figure shit out. Can I figure it out physically in space and time? And to think that because the material was unfamiliar it was somehow an “identity dance” was really irritating. I suspect there are sectors of the population that still think there’s a standardized “Black dance” that comes out of an [Alvin] Ailey-esque tradition. There are people of color across the globe who are doing dances that divert from that. So it’s interesting that was anointed “Black dance,” and if people were doing something different, they were traitors to the race, and they had to take a stand to say, “I’m an artist first before you label my dancing.” I know that was irritating for a while because people felt like, “No, we need more people who are claiming the identity.” But I also know that you want the work to be considered without having to carry that burden all the time. I’m proud of Black culture, I love it, I love it everywhere I see it. But it’s interesting how those kinds of limitations are imposed. BM I was thinking about this idea: for a while, the telling of the Black experience was just considered a particular part of the Black experience. But there’s no separating myself from the Black experience, regardless of whether anyone else has had the same experience that I have. I think there’s still
a bit of surprise at the range of how the world can be seen. Choreographically, I find myself moving away from demonstrating a particular, fixed point of view. Rather than being the point of view, I get to go forward with the view that I happen to have in front of me. And Cynthia, it’s been three and a half years now since I stopped teaching at Ohio State. And I wonder, what do you find with students up and coming? Is that story of Black identity in dance still being fleshed out, or trying to be claimed? Or are we more familiar, in a sort of Afrofuturism way, with just saying, “This is where I am—I don’t need to bring you along if you don’t get it. This is what it is.” CO I wish I could say that were the case, but because so much of the design of the curriculum in institutions is descended from a Eurocentric point of view, every step of the way has to be questioned. Because of tenure also, those traditions are still dyed in the wool. They’re in the fabric of every program. So looking at difference ends up being an elective, an add-on to the program as opposed to the core of it. Trying to figure out how to fundamentally change something that has historically been anchored in Eurocentrism is a really tall task. GJ Right now, when dance isn’t happening on stages but on screens, with streaming, such as with boom!, and in streets, with Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations, I’m curious to hear any thoughts you have about dance and its community in this moment. BM Even at my age, I feel there’s time to take in this very particular moment, physically, where we’re in small rooms. I’m watching the pacing of masked faces and the way we signal each other now: there’s a kind of choreography in the pandemic. And there’s time to take this in. It’s disrupting our regular sense of how work is made and produced and performed, but I don’t feel that we’ve left live performance behind at all; there are pockets of that appearing online and on the street. But there’s a physical humanity that we’re all witnessing. CO I’m fascinated, too, by the everyman who now has to choreograph every time they go out in the street. I’m constantly observing the movement choices people make—I’ll think, Let me take charge of this and design how we negotiate each other because you are clearly confused [laughter]. And maybe we can use this moment to choreograph very different relational experiences with one another, in an effort to fix what’s broken.
Bebe Miller in Necessary Beauty, 2008. Photo: Š Julieta Cervantes
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It’s funny seeing you onscreen when we now live so close to one another. But I wouldn’t have gotten to see you if not for this conversation. LOUISE BONNET I know, it’s been so long. MJ Quarantine wasn’t a good time to be neighbors for the first time [laughs]. I know the point where I came into your life, but will you give the short version of your path, or your painter’s story? LB I moved to LA in 1994 from Geneva, where I was born. I went to art school in Geneva and then I moved here for a year off, thinking I’d go back, but I never left. I’ve never even lived anywhere else in the States but here. A few years ago, two things happened: I started to try oil painting and it was a revelation, and I decided that I would never care again what other people thought. Which I can’t actually always do, but it was a conscious decision to try and stop thinking about it. MJ When was that? LB I still have the first oil painting I made, so that was 2013. MJ It’s interesting because I remember you saying you’d figured something out. I remember you actually asked Mike [Mills] and me to come for a studio visit. And I didn’t go to art school, I don’t know the conventions of studio visits, so I remember that struck me. I thought, “What? Why the hell would she want that?” But I think what you were doing was sort of formalizing your practice for yourself. LB That’s a good point. To have someone I admire come over and formally look at my work, to put myself out there, felt like a big professional step. MIRANDA JULY
I remember you saying, “Okay, I need a gallery now.” I always think it’s interesting: how do you go about that if you’re not super well connected with the local art school or other scenes? And I was like, “Well”—this is embarrassing for me—I was like, “Sometimes when I go into galleries, the people working there recognize me and say hi, so maybe let’s just go to some galleries together.” I was hoping I could be that connection. And so we went around to some galleries and literally not one person looked at either of us [laughter]. LB I remember we went to Hannah Hoffman and we walked around really slowly for a while, and sort of lingered, and they never looked up [laughs]. MJ Giving them every opportunity. It’s so crushing when that doesn’t work, when no one recognizes you. It’s not like I’m JLo but I was so ready [laughs]. I was like, “Yes, we’ve got to crack this.” LB In a way, that day felt like the beginning of something serious. MJ Yeah, now that I think about it, it was another case of setting your intention. You were exposing yourself—you were saying, “This is what I want. I’m open to this.” And then from my point of view, it all happened really quickly after that. I mean, I know I had nothing to do with it. It was just so satisfying to watch. LB I really appreciated that you would do that with me, and that you wouldn’t be embarrassed or feel like it was beneath you. I needed to find creative ways to get myself out there because it’s true, since I didn’t go to art school here I didn’t have that MJ
Filmmaker and author Miranda July joined Louise Bonnet on a video call to discuss life during lockdown, the luminosity of oil paint, and Bonnet’s forthcoming exhibition of new work. Longtime friends—and newly neighbors—the two reflect on their shared history and shared interests in the unconscious, vagueness, and the mixture of humor and pain.
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network. And I didn’t really know how to do it, either. I think the trick is studio visits, to get people to see your work and it can hopefully speak for itself. MJ Right. I mean, in the end, it’s always the work. The right eyeballs have to fall on the work and let it naturally do its job. And now, just looking at your paintings, there are many things I wonder. Can you talk me through how the ideas came for some of these new paintings? LB I usually actually try to not have ideas, to stop thinking. But this period, this quarantine, is kind of a nightmare for me; to have this panicky endless stream of no plans, no structure, and I was thinking, “How do you structure time so it doesn’t have this feeling of being unmoored?” Being Swiss, I really need plans and lists, and I don’t like unpredictability or spontaneity, really. I was thinking about those medieval books, the books of hours: a prayer book, with text and images, that set out all the times in the day, and even the year, when you were supposed to do certain things and say certain prayers. That seemed so soothing and exactly what I needed. I’m not religious at all, but Christianity has such a good way of structuring things, right? MJ Right. I guess the whole point of that kind of religion is that life is scary without an imposed structure. LB Yeah. But then they come up with these unbelievably scary things within that. MJ Right [laughs]. Like scary things that are named are better than formless ones. LB Yes. Actually I think that’s my whole practice: to freeze the scary things—rage, death—so you can look at them from the outside. In freezing events, you’re able to remove yourself from all these feelings and fully look at them. And they don’t look back at you. I think that’s why I don’t ever paint eyes. You can be a voyeur. MJ You said you try not to have ideas—it’s funny, 80
I’m always asked where my ideas come from as a writer and a filmmaker and I try to give an answer like yours, because it’s closer to the truth. It’s coming from the unconscious and the rigor of it is to take care of that unconscious space. How do you take care of that space? Did the book of hours help you to do that, or is there some more direct connection between this work and those books? LB Well, each of my paintings is based on a time of day. Being stuck in the house during quarantine, I draw from everyday domestic activities. So I realized that that was the structure I needed and I was looking at this book and it came together. The process is not to try to come up with stuff but to let it happen. I need to be alone a lot to be able to get in touch with this unconscious space. But it’s hard right now. MJ How did your life change during the pandemic? It’s an adjustment both logistically and mentally to be painting for a future you don’t really understand. I know on the one hand, we’re people who don’t go to work in the same way that people in other professions might; our work is self-generated. So that’s good. But this thing of the kids leaving the house to go to school is also crucial [laughs], as it turns out. LB I really like having a deadline, which comes back to the need for plans. But aside from that, I was able to terrify my family enough that they would leave me alone and let me work—otherwise it’s just such a nightmare at home [laughs]. I mean, I do need to deal with everyday stuff for the kids being unable to have a normal life. But in a way, aside from this anxiety—anxiety about the future and the state of things—day to day it’s not that different, actually. MJ Right. LB And right now, [my husband] Adam is taking care of a lot of the family stuff and I am so
Previous spread: Louise Bonnet in her Los Angeles studio, 2020 This page: Louise Bonnet, Red Wailer, 2020, oil on linen, 72 × 120 inches (182.9 × 304.8 cm) Opposite: Louise Bonnet, Vespers, 2020, oil on linen, 72 × 60 inches (182.9 × 152.4 cm)
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lucky to have someone who is completely supportive and encouraging. But I have to say that also, when I decided to really put myself out there with the paintings, it coincided with my last kid going to school for a period of time long enough that I could sustain a train of thought. MJ I think it’s important for people to hear that— that there are many different ways a painter’s life can look. There’s this emphasis on starting at this particular time in your life when you’re very free, but the truth is, you will find your freedom. You’ll find opportunities to reunite with your mind. And it’s a great mind—your mind at this age I feel is a pretty special thing. I want to see work made by women of this age. It seems valuable to me, and something that’s largely missing. LB I can’t remember who said that your life doesn’t have to be chaos for you to make great art. This tortured-artist myth—I mean, I’m sure some people are like that, but you also don’t have to be at all. MJ It’s such a privilege, the tortured-artist thing. You either have to be a man with a wife who’ll take care of everything or really wealthy. I think part of me would love to be more tortured, but I just can’t afford it [laughs]. My torture tends to end at six every day. You know, there are real responsibilities. There shouldn’t be one kind of artist’s voice we get to hear. I was looking at what I see as these kind of vaginas in the tops of the blonde hair that you painted, and I was thinking about vaginas and breasts and how consistent these images have been in your work. You have this voice—or rather, it can look that way from the outside, codified and consistent, but there’s actually constant transformation there, and realizations that no one else knows about. So I’m wondering how your painting language has changed, and what you’ve become more or less interested in over time. LB I think it’s just that I do need to work every day and not see anyone and just do it, and things change on their own. I get more confident and interested in more of what’s hidden, the story behind the painting, rather than showing everything or trying to explain everything. Now I’m more comfortable just being vague—even to myself. MJ Right. Gosh, that sounds nice. I want to screenshot that idea. Hold on, I am actually going to write it down. That’s sort of the sweet spot, when you let go in that way. I know writing is a different process, but this idea could help me right now: “Just let it make less sense.” There’s more room than you think. One thing that our work has in common, I think, is this mixture of humor and pain—bodies and pain and humor and sex. Often there’s something really quite painful or uncomfortable that I’ll end up writing in a way that is funny to me. LB Yes. MJ And it’s really like you’ve redeemed yourself— you’ve redeemed that part of life in a way where it doesn’t lose any of its pain but it’s open now. LB The feeling doesn’t take full shape if you can’t laugh about it, right? But it’s also funny because I just finished a painting and I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s a penis again.” I didn’t really set out to make a penis. MJ Yeah. I think one reason I love talking to you is the space you get as an artist: you get to paint these body parts, these vaginas, these penis-y things again and again, and no one goes, “What’s up with that?” A seriousness is granted. Whereas if you’re in popular culture— LB People are more judgmental. MJ It really becomes as if you don’t know that you’ve written about butts again and again in different ways, like I have. I’ll be like, “Oh shit, butts come 82
This spread: Louise Bonnet, Calvary 2 (Potatoes Again), 2020, oil on linen, 60 × 72 inches (152.4 × 182.9 cm) Following spread: Louise Bonnet, Calvary with Potato, 2020, oil on linen, 72 × 120 inches (182.9 × 304.8 cm) Artwork © Louise Bonnet Photos: Jeff McLane
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up again in this thing.” And, well, why the fuck not? It’s very limited, what we have here. There are really only a few symbols; whatever is there in your unconscious, that’s what you have to work with. LB Yes, and in addition to humor, I think about the relationship between pain and beauty. Those medieval Crucifixion pictures are so amazingly rendered: dead Christ with these sores and mold that are incredibly detailed and lovingly done. When I saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining [1980] for the first time, I felt the same thing: oh my God, you can show these gruesome things and feelings but it’s symmetrical and it’s beautiful. MJ When speaking to other artists, I’m always curious about . . . what does it feel like to be you? What’s the speed of your mind? For me, I’m sort of constantly rushing and there’s a voice in my head that’s pretty harsh and admonishing, like I’m in trouble a lot of the time—it’s almost like I’m in a video game or something. LB I think one of the big things I have is a feeling of being trapped, of trying to escape many things. But I’m a coward too—I can’t do drugs, for example, I’m scared of that stuff. So being able to be in my studio and paint and not think and listen to audiobooks is my escape. Just now I’m listening to the history of Deutsche Bank: it’s interesting, but it’s not going to overwhelm and interfere. The audiobook makes me mad, but it’s sort of like this invigorating outrage-y feeling, you know, like coffee. But basically, I think, in my head, the main thing is I’m trying to escape everything all the time. MJ God, I’m really with you on that [laughter]. I was looking at your paintings and thinking how, for a director, light is everything. It’s emotion. That’s always a big question, what I want the light to be like in my films. You’re working with light too, but you have to create the light. It’s not from electricity, or from the sun; you’re making it. The things that are so teeth-gritting to me about your work are the
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different opacities and sheens and densities and volumes—so much of that is light. LB Actually, that was what happened with oil. You can do that with oil, manipulate light. I mean, some people can do it with other mediums, but with oil you can have really thick, deep, filled-in colors. Sometimes it feels like the medium does what you want on its own. It’s just amazing. MJ Wild, yeah. LB I don’t know if people who went to school to study oil painting are used to it, but I’m still amazed. MJ Right. Some of it is just pure joy in getting to work with the medium. How lucky it is that this medium actually holds meaning on top of its form. LB I couldn’t do anything else, really. Which is why what you’re doing is so amazing, being able to move between art forms—writing, filmmaking, performing. You’re like this flower bush that can grow all these different leaves and flowers and buds and succeed at making them all wonderful. I’m more one of these cacti that just go straight up and that’s it, until they get a fungus and fall over at some point. MJ It’s really just that I’m counterdependent. That’s a new phrase I’ve learned, meaning, I never want to be too dependent on a person. And I now realize I’m the same way with my work. I choose not to be artistically monogamous as a form of security, because I can’t trust anyone or anything [laughs]. Anyways, we’ll work on that later. I do actually have Zoom therapy after this so I’ll just move right on into that [laughs]. I relate to the way you use reality to the degree that it’s useful—as a sort of common code, but not as our only common language or even our most effective one. Are there times when your work becomes too real, or else too abstract? Is there a line you can walk that feels the best to you right now? I’m thinking about what you were talking about
earlier, about getting to be vague. I imagine that has to do with how much you literally need to tell a story. Could you talk more about that? LB Right now, I feel like I want to tell a story more, because everything’s so bizarre. Someone said the paintings I’m currently making are like allegories of something. MJ Like collecting the tears. LB Yeah. I do go back and forth with trying to be more abstract. I always thought removing stuff was the way to go, but now I’m not actually sure anymore. Right now I’m actually wondering if I should add stuff, like more threads of stories, and environments in which you can really get lost. MJ That’s making me think of a genre I’ve seen: paintings of rooms where every detail of the room is a world. You feel like you’re there, like you could almost walk around in that room. That’s what I imagined when you said that. LB Yeah, those types of enthralling environments. I’ve done many paintings in the past that feature one figure; now, more people are appearing in my work. I think with more than one figure, relationships emerge, and you can make a story in your head about them. MJ Yeah, you can. I noticed I was doing that—I was trying to see secrets. Well, I can’t wait for your opening. I know it may not happen on schedule, but I can’t wait for when it does. I heard a therapist say on the radio that it’s really important for us during this time to plan events in our future, even what we’re going to wear—it helps our mood. That’s going to be one of the events in my head to get me through this: Louise’s opening. LB I want to see what you’re going to wear. MJ I want to stand among many other admiring people and look at your new paintings. The thought makes me want to weep.
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PART 3
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ll scriptures start in medias res but must pretend to begin at genesis. A holy book can’t begin at the real beginning because the real beginning of a holy book must be the beginning of God, and no one who believes in God can believe that God begins as all humble things do, begins as books do, begins as infants and basketball games and viruses do. Yet in the beginning, we had no God. This is why we called for the prophet. We called for the prophet as tweens call to pop stars, called as children call to parents, called as lovers call for a beloved, called as hikers call for their unleashed dogs. We called for the prophet from courtyards and bicycle trails, called for the prophet after a long breakfast, between shifts, and before bed. We called for the prophet because we knew we could not begin a bible this way, which is by telling the truth: In the beginning, we found no God, thus we needed to invent one. We had lived our entire lives in the structures of built and falling-down things and in this we were always lost, wandering through a maze of air conditioning and entropy. Ours had been lives in which we were kept irreligious and alien from the world itself, and so, in the beginning, we found no God because we did not have eyes capable of initiating the search. How were we to find God among the arenas, high-end shopping centers, corporate campuses, and cul-de-sac-heavy suburban developments? Those properties were upheld by law and its enforcers, and the sacredness of all property was fecund and determinative of all godlessness. There could be no knowledge of God near HVAC units or inside vinyl fences or in the mostly empty buildings
called churches. We no more had God than we had the key to every jail cell or front door. We said among ourselves, at the bleak gray entrances of parking garages, “How will we find a God when we can see nothing with our own eyes but iPhone screens and rent payments?” Let’s say an old-fashioned God had descended from some erstwhile sky-blue heaven to arrive in the outdoor dining area of a Cheesecake Factory in an entertainment district: even if clad in ethereal light and gossamer robes, and accompanied by the fluttering wings of angels, we could not see this because we were taking photos of the food on our plates. We could see our screens but we could not see God because we were so committed to seeing ourselves and our visions as flattened surfaces imprisoning pixelated light. We hated this life but admit we participated in it. We bathed ourselves in the light of screens, desk lamps, and streetlights. This is why we were sad and lost in the shadows. We turned our light-seeking cameras on the faces we loved and on any known or unknown body we saw. We recorded the angle of a lover’s arm as it rested on the table, recorded the faces distorted by the pleasures of a Friday night. We turned our cameras to the walls and sometimes forgot them there, recorded the quiet of a backpack’s interior or the dull white of an aunt’s kitchen ceiling. We captured our children’s faces from every angle and entered them into the databases, and we turned the same devices on our genitals, our feet, our breasts. We took photos of ourselves committing crimes. We thought what we did was a form of love and also a form of preservation, but inside the love was the act of that turning, and the turning on of lights and the
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turning lens of the cameras were a turning on ourselves. We had not yet learned that this was not love but its absence, and that these were not our own memories but the memory of who would do us harm. We did not know that what we did was a danger. This was because we believed that safety hid inside a camera the way an idol hides a wraith. We believed that we would be safe from forgetting, safe from being forgotten, safe from time, too, from decay and from each other. We petitioned our police to strap themselves into the cameras. We put the cameras in our doorbells and dashboards so that we would know whoever or whatever came near. We recorded images of bad deeds and believed, as children might, that any record of bad deeds would mean that the bad deeds would soon end. With the innocence of those who believe that the face of evil can be recognized and by recognition be transformed, we captured our own faces in systems we named security. We lit up our world like a stage so that we might be seen on every inch of earth, and in this exposure we felt assured. We did not know yet that evildoers are those who have always existed without a face, whose evil does not attach to any but cartoonish, provisional particulars. The faces of the quiet men of power were forgettable and forgotten, but our faces were as if made of cement, heavy and unchangeable, and the fact that we had them, and that they could be known, was the burden we dragged around with us, through borders, police stations, schools, and malls. This is why we called for the prophet. We could not see because the lights were too bright, there had been too many eyes staring
in our direction. We had been flattened by all the turning cameras and then rendered again into a data set. We had been made into math, and our children, our bodies, had been made into patterns, and with all this identification we were all made sick and predictable. Wherever we looked there seemed to be a screen in which we were captured and then in turn displayed—now captive—to ourselves. We were tired of seeing, of being seen, of illumination, of illuminating.
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o we called for the prophet to see what we could not see. We called for the prophet to see the unseen, to blow out the candle, to turn off the lights, to break the bulbs, to smash the screens. We called for the prophet to collage a useful God from refuse and scraps and mysteries, to compose our God in the darkness from customs and tragedies, as all Gods had, in secret, been composed before. The poets who wrote the old bibles had done the same, only they could not admit the dirty work of divine invention. Instead, in order to describe the creation of God, the poets of those bibles had to write their books as mirrors to reflect the process in reverse. In each, God created humans in the way these humans had once created God. They would not say that God was created as Adam was created, that God was created by Adam from necessity and breath and mud. They would not admit that God was pleasantly benign and innocent among the animals until he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or that God had then become too clever and had had to be exiled from his own happiness. They
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could not tell the story of when and how God was made to toil in the universe’s fields. They would not admit freely that as they described themselves, they were really describing their God, or that when God brought the flood upon the world, it was they themselves who had invited rain to destroy the God of whom they had grown weary. What the poets who wrote the old bibles wouldn’t tell you was that each account of God destroying the world is in fact an account of humans doing the same. The old poets might have hidden the beginning of God, but we are not those poets. We freely admit that we called for the prophet, and called and called until the day came when the God who called in our image finally called the prophet, too.
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od called the prophet as petroleum calls to profiteers, as gold once called to conquistadors, as fish call to anglers, as root vegetables call to the hungry in the fall. And God called the prophet as a dying person calls from under the rubble of an apartment block toppled in an earthquake. God called to the prophet not from above but from below, from under the crust of earth, under the heaps of rubbish, called as tungsten calls from the trash dumps, called as seeds call out to the sun and air. God called the prophet from the heaviness of what buries anything else, called as human forms once called out from marble, called as fetuses do when they stir to become people who are born. God called the prophet from below these earthly suffocations, called out from the layers and piles of things, called out from the economic overdevelopment, called out from
the heating planet and from both the rapid catastrophes and the slow, called out from the crisis and called from online shopping, called from the dumpsters and called from the selfhate that the prophet, along with everyone else who ever let themselves feel anything about being alive at this time, felt. And as God called the prophet, the prophet called for God. Feeling that there was a dying person under the rubble and that this dying person was divine, the prophet called the dying person’s name and undertook to unbury all that was once believed lost. The prophet knew that to unbury God at this point in history was going to be hard work. There was a reason God had been buried in the first place, a reason that God had been covered up by the weight of the built world, a reason, too, why the truth had been obscured and the image world substituted for all. This is why when the security cameras shorted, when the phones were stolen from the hands of their users, when the children smashed the cameras left on the table by their mothers, when the iPhone factories burned, one person was certain that this was divine intervention. Then the drones fell from the sky. Then the photojournalists became gravediggers. Then the flat files were thrown into the sea. Then the yearbooks disintegrated. Then our faces turned into light-repelling surfaces. Then the links all broke. Then we called the prophet and the prophet called for God, and the old world called the new before it went away.
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FRANK GEHRY DRAWINGS The first volume of the catalogue raisonné of the architect’s drawings was published by Cahiers d’Art earlier this year.
Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings. Volume One, 1954–1978, the first of eight planned volumes, is more than a catalogue of Gehry’s drawings. It’s an opportunity to see the evolution of his vision, exemplified by the medium that has remained paramount in his creative process: drawing. To this day, Gehry’s sketches and drawings are critical to his architectural concepts. They are, for him, “the process to get to an idea.” Produced under the direction of Staffan Ahrenberg, publisher of Cahiers d’Art, and edited by architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, the catalogue raisonné gives us a comprehensive view of the work that defines one of the most expressive architects of our time. In an industry where the final product is reliant on many hands and machines, Gehry’s drawings are an intimate peek into his creative process. Gehry recently spoke to Cohen about the early years of his practice, including his work with LA artists and the role of sketching in his design process. —Rani Singh Director of Special Projects, Gagosian JEAN-LOUIS COHEN Frank,
we’ve been in conversation for forty years, since I first came to see you in your wonderful house, which is the highlight of this volume. This is a particular book in the realm of books about architecture. There are lots of oeuvres complètes, complete works, out there, but they’re usually filled with photographs of buildings and final plans. This book is about the process—or, I should say, it’s about two processes. The first, of course, is the design process: how buildings are imagined, developed, and finally built, or remain unbuilt. The second is the process of your development as an architect: the process that took you from the late 1950s, and the Steeves House in Bel Air, to your own house in Santa Monica in 1978. What we see in the book, through a series of seventy-five built or unbuilt designs, is the process that led you to become Gehry, that put you on the map, ending with your house, which completely redefined the discipline of architecture. So it’s a curtain opening in terms of the full catalogue raisonné, and it’s of course a curtain opening in terms of your work. My first question is about this period of your life. How easy was it to become the architect you wanted to be in Los Angeles during that time? 91
Previous spread: Frank Gehry, Steeves House, Los Angeles, California, 1958–59: perspective from valley side, reproduction of original drawing This page: Frank Gehry, Hollywood Bowl Renovations, Los Angeles, California, 1969–76, early 1980s: initial condition and version with Sonotubes (left) and version with suspended spheres (right), early 1980s, ink on paper, each: 10 ¾ × 8 ¼ inches (27.2 × 21 cm) Opposite: Frank Gehry, Ronald Davis Residence and Studio, Malibu, California, 1972: unfolding of the façade, perspective and elevation, 1964, ink on paper, 11 × 8 inches (28 × 20.5 cm)
FRANK GEHRY I had no clue who I wanted to be. The
Santa Monica house was circumstantial: we were going to have a child, Berta and I, and we needed to move out of an apartment. My mother convinced Berta to go out and find a house because I would never do it. So Berta bought a house, and I looked at it and said, “Well, we’ve got to do something.” I kind of liked the idea of building a new house around the old house and having them both exist and talk to each other. That was the idea. We didn’t have much money so we built it on a shoestring, and it leaked [laughter], and a lot of other things. Anyway, there it was. We fixed the leak. But the neighbor across the road came over to me and said, “What are you doing here? You’re ruining our neighborhood” [laughs]. And I looked at him and said, “Well, your house has a chain-link fence in the backyard, right?” He said yes. And I said, “So I’m just building in the spirit that you set.” JLC But it took you some time to arrive there. FG Well, like everything else, it’s intuitive, right? I didn’t plan to disrupt the neighborhood. I was interested in asking could it be raw like that and could we still find some comfort in it, could it still be comfortable to live in. And it was cheap [laughs]. I was inspired by a lot of people. JLC Yes, this is one of the most fascinating aspects in these years. You meet artists, you build for artists. I’m thinking of important structures that are in the book, like the Danziger Studio and Residence [for graphic designer Louis Danziger, Los Angeles, 1963–65], like the Davis Residence and Studio [for artist Ronald Davis, Malibu, 1972]. And you installed the works of artists, particularly at LACMA [the Los Angeles County Museum of Art], beginning with the [Billy Al] Bengston show in 1968. Can you say something about your relationship with the LA art scene of those years? FG So, I was a truck driver. I went to night school. I took a class in ceramics. The ceramics teacher—it was Glen Lukens, the great ceramist—said he was building a house by Raphael Soriano. He took me to see the house. There was Soriano in a beret, all in black, telling the guys how to put the beams in 92
the house, big steel beams. The next day in class, Lukens came over to me and said, “You aren’t going to make it in ceramics but you really looked excited about architecture.” So he enrolled me in a night class in architecture. And that’s how it started. The Danziger building attracted a lot of funny people. Ed Moses—who I became friends with later—was on the construction site regularly, watching the building go up. He brought Kenny Price once, and he brought Bengston—I forget who else, but they all kind of started talking to me, inviting me into their social world, and it felt much more comfortable than what my architectural peers were doing in LA. To those peers the Danziger building was an affront to architecture. JLC But it was the only contemporary building reproduced in Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles book [Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies] of 1971. FG Yeah. When Banham called me, I didn’t take the call and I refused to have him come to see it. I told him it was my first building and I wasn’t ready for prime time [laughs]. They published it anyway. JLC Can you say something about the early practice of installation in your work? Beginning with the Bengston show, where you installed sheets of corrugated steel and half-painted plywood, there’s something that appears first in the museum gallery and then leaks out to the street. FG It’s hard to relive that installation. By that time Billy and I were friends, so he asked me to do this show. The director of LACMA, Ken Donahue, and [the curator] Maurice Tuchman, who was there—they didn’t have a big budget and they were worried that I was going to go out and buy raw plywood and corrugated metal and they said they didn’t want that. So I went down to their storage room and there was a bunch of painted plywood there that had been used in a previous show. So I used that. Then I got the guy from the Hollywood Wax Museum, Spoony Singh, to come over, and I said, “Can you make an image of Billy Al?” So we made Billy Al with his head and all the stuff. Billy Al
was a motorcycle rider, so I borrowed his motorcycle-racing outfit. We got a motorcycle. And that was the entry to the show. JLC The Davis house is another pivotal project that connects you with an artist. It was published in Architectural Record under the title “The Search for a ‘No Rules’ Architecture,” a phrase that was one of your statements and your first slogan in the mid-1970s: “no-rules architecture.” Can you return to the Malibu intrigue? FG [Laughs] Yeah. So in the profession of architecture there are all these little enclaves. New York had one, and at Princeton they were having a lot of high-level philosophical discussions about what architecture was. If your work didn’t fit into that, you were no one. And I couldn’t fit into it. I mean, I’d studied art history, I knew what they were alluding to, but it didn’t make it for me. I think my relationship to the LA artists was a big factor: it was a comfort zone. I didn’t have to explain myself and they were very supportive. I felt like I wasn’t screaming in the wilderness. So I just never bothered to meet with the architects—I was kind of interested, but not really. JLC Your projects with artists are probably the most poetic statements of that period of your work, but I think it’s also interesting to see you operating with other programs, among them commercial programs—the stores you designed for J. Magnin, for example, where you experimented with light, with acoustics, with interiors, with ideas that would later filter into your museum projects. This probably goes back to your early years working with Victor Gruen in the 1950s, designing supermarkets and shops. FG Well, when you design a shop, you have to design a place where they’re going to sell stuff; that’s the reason they’re going to build the room. I think there’s a respect for the client’s needs. I’ve never had a problem with that. I like the idea of a collaborative client/architect relationship where something unpredictable grows out of that relationship. It doesn’t come from any rules. The project has to meet a budget, it has to be safe to go into—you
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This page: Frank Gehry, Ronald Davis Residence and Studio, Malibu, California, 1972: volume studies, n.d., graphite on tracing paper, 17 ¾ × 26 3⁄8 inches (45 × 67 cm) Opposite: Frank Gehry in front of his residence, Santa Monica, California, 1978 Works by Frank Gehry © Frank O. Gehry. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2017.M.66)
have to meet all those criteria. But then what? And the “then what” is the interesting thing. JLC Other projects of that period are also foundational to me. You’ve worked on major music projects; you’re currently working on a new building for the Colburn School in downtown LA. What’s striking is your engagement with spaces for music in these early years: the Hollywood Bowl [1969–76], the Merriweather Post Pavilion of Music [Columbia, Maryland, 1967], the Performing Arts Pavilion [Concord, California, 1971–75]. Was it already important in your life at that time? FG Well, yeah, my family name was Goldberg, and Bach created the Goldberg Variations [laughter]. I was born in Toronto and Glenn Gould was playing them. In my high school I was responsible for a graduation event, and I got Oscar Peterson, who was nineteen at the time, to come and play for it. I was into jazz. I used to go to classical concerts— my mother took me from when I was a kid. The music projects were circumstantial, though. The Concord Pavilion called and asked me to do it. They had a jazz drummer, Louie Bellson. I met him and that gave me the energy to work on it. JLC You also worked with acousticians, as you do now with Yasuhisa Toyota. That’s been a major aspect of your work, trusting competent people who bring you additional knowledge and expertise, and it was already present in your early work. FG Ernest Fleischmann, who was the director of the LA Philharmonic, opened all the doors to exploration. JLC And the connection started at the Hollywood Bowl. FG Yeah. JLC You were alert to music, you were alert to the arts and engaging in the art scene—but there’s very little in your writings about cinema. Is it an art form you’ve ignored or don’t want to address? FG The great thing about cinema for me when I was starting out was that it was like a protective cover. The East Coast thought of LA as Hollywood, so all of us worked under the radar. Nobody cared that much. And it was very, very good, I think, for all of us. 94
So it was a self-conscious attitude in respect to LA— FG I knew a few famous movie stars, some of whom I befriended, but it was never about that. The ones I met were more artists and really interested in the art world. JLC A slightly different issue. This book is not a book of projects, it’s led by the drawings—mostly your own and sometimes drawings by others, including Gregory Walsh, who was a classmate of yours. Can you address this question of you drawing like Greg, Greg drawing like you, and other people contributing to this immense production, which is now stored at the Getty Research Institute, where much of your archive resides? FG Well, one thing I should say about Greg is that he’s a classical pianist. So working with him on our projects for school, we would stay up all night working and listening to the Goldberg Variations [laughter]. He really got me into the highest level of classical-music thinking. During that period we contrived to learn to draw the same so that we could work on each other’s projects for different deadlines. And now, with some of the drawings, I can’t tell whether they’re mine or his. JLC Yes, all the tricks historians use to identify drawings don’t work—the way cars, trees, people are drawn is totally similar. Maybe your handwriting is more specific. FG Well, neither of us could draw people, so that was great [laughter]. JLC This book is the prototype for many more to come. When we started, five years ago, you, Staffan Ahrenberg, and I decided to make eight volumes. This took into account only the production to 2012, but almost ten years have passed since then and you continue to design and build intensely. So I don’t know where we’re ultimately going to land. Basically, the story is what I would call a diachronic story: project after project with sketches carrying the narrative within each. We see the projects through the sketches. Sometimes there are almost none, sometimes there are hundreds, as with the beautiful Santa Monica Place Shopping JLC
Mall [1973–78], for example, which is now only a memory. The intent was to try to document the movement of the project: the different options, the turns in the relationship with the client, how the projects appeared. This is very clear, for instance, in the case of the Davis house, where one finds your sketches echoing what Davis was doing in his painting. So it’s a sort of genetic story of each project based on sketches, plus other types of materials— ephemera, correspondence, notes—that give an account of what happened. I really love the way you wrote letters in those days, Frank, with fantastic one-liners, and you still continue today. I will only mention one that for me characterizes your work of that period. Mies van der Rohe famously said in an interview, “I don’t invent new architecture every Monday morning. I don’t want to be interesting, I just want to be good.” And in a letter to someone you said, “I don’t want to be good, I just want to be interesting” [laughter]. For me that’s the key to this part of your work and what follows. FG A lot of people worked on these projects over the years. It’s not the sound of one hand clapping. We have 160 people in the office today. JLC That’s true. The book is also very explicit about the design team for each project. I’ve been talking with some of them from that time, hearing stories that allow me to understand better what happened. FG It’s a collaborative effort. JLC And we see traces of that process in the drawings: “Let’s ask Frank what he thinks,” and we see your intervention with your answers. It’s clearly a chronicle. Anyway, hopefully we’ll see two more volumes in the coming year and a half. And I think we’re up for much more after that, since you’re— FG I’m just beginning. JLC You’re going full speed ahead. Adapted from a conversation presented as part of Gagosian’s Building a Legacy initiative at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, in early 2020.
JACQUES 96
DEMY Carlos Valladares reminisces, in this personal essay, about the director’s films.
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Without love , plea sure’s inve ntions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours. —James Baldwin, Just above My Head, 1979 Although by and large people were asleep or had gone home, Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates were still awake, all by themselves. . . . Socrates was carrying on a conversation with them. Aristodemus said he couldn’t remember most of the discussion, . . . but the nub of it was that Socrates was trying to get them to agree that knowing how to compose comedies and knowing how to compose tragedies must combine in a single person, and that a professional tragic playwright was also a professional comic playwright. —Plato, Symposium, c. 385–70 bce The cinema’s most enthusiastic lover, Jacques Demy, poured all of himself into a single moving shot in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). We are in the coastal city of Cherbourg, 1957. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), the blonde daughter of an upper-middle-class umbrella-shop owner (Anne Vernon), has just been told by Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), her dark-skinned prole mechanic boyfriend who smells of gasoline all day, that France has drafted him to fight its terrorizing war in Algeria, for reasons neither will ever understand. In a stream of mournful song (no words are spoken in this film opera), they fill each other up with youthful promises: I will wait for you, I will keep faithful to a present we cannot see, a future that can never hold. Suddenly Demy launches into an extraordinary traveling shot: as if by centrifugal force (or is it Cupidinal?), Guy hugs Geneviève, his yellow bike pulling forward without the need to steer or pump the pedals. It’s an extraordinary shot for its blatant artifice. Even Demy had his doubts when he reflected back on the making of Cherbourg, saying that this movement, crafted in homage to his cinematic idol Jean Cocteau, went a step too far. Not to protest the master, but I must. Here, illogic and sensation are piqued by a rejection of friction. The traces of this space-deforming force can be glimpsed in the shifting of colors as the camera tracks the lovers deeper and deeper toward their eventual destiny in bed: from the brick reds of impersonal Cherbourg streets, past an unstable palette of green doors, pink shutters, and bitter lemons in a crate, until we rest in an alleyway’s faded blue, the working-class hues by which Guy is constantly identified. (His bedroom, where the couple will make love for the only time, has been plastered
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over by Demy and production designer Bernard Evein in the blue a primary-school-boy uses to tell his story by the color jeans he wears.) As the two let themselves be pulled toward their fate—sex, departure, war, pregnancy, the forgetting of the obscure object of desire—out tumbles their entire love story, what they dread will occur (and does): “I’m so afraid when I’m alone.” “We’ll be reunited, stronger than before.” “You’ll meet other women, you’ll forget me.” “I’ll love you to my dying day.” They think what they’ve dreamed is unique, that war exists only insofar as their self-sustaining love will allow it to invade. In fact, they will find themselves alienated from the world around them. Guy will return from the Algerian War hobbled, a husk of his former smiling self, yet a peace-craving class-climber all the same, and none the wiser. Crippled, he will fill up gas at an Esso station as if the job were the culmination of all he is capable of. (And maybe it is.) He will pretend that he is his own owner, not Charles de Gaulle, not the CEO of Esso, not the CIA. He will run the station with a woman (Ellen Farner) who will resign herself to the truth that, at the end of the day, she unconditionally loves a married friend who regards her silently as a substitute, however filling. He will still love his old flame to his dying day—even when she will have married someone else, will be bejeweled and coiffed like the doll of the child that sprang from that single night of passion, the strongest of either of their lives. This story is a happily ever after. Life is a Jacques Demy musical. I began to cohere as a soul when I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on a shitty DVD in the basement of the campus library, my freshman year of college. Since then, the lights from that screening have never gone up. I learned French just so I could eye-lick the wallpaper and absorb Demy’s dialogue in rhyming alexandrines without the distraction of subtitles. In senior year I began to fall into love, a roulette wheel circling dangerously round in a winning streak as hot as Bay of Angels (1963); in New York and New Haven, I crashed out of it—bed drunk, dazed, and frozen into a static blob, like the pathetic Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) in Lola (1961). Now I drift in a state of worry and barely concealed rage, but with glazed memories of Santa Monica sunlight, almost as if I were driving nonstop up and down the hazy Sunset Strip of Model Shop (1969), a cozy meander. All the while, the forces that the stealth existentialist Demy saw as givens—a romanticism all but abandoned by postwar French capital, chance encounters that mingle freedom and doom in a
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single flash, a fate that doesn’t discriminate among identities—are always bearing down on me, even as I push them back. Those forces will linger. As Vincent van Gogh saw, and Maurice Pialat after him, “La tristesse durera toujours.”1 It is not the artist’s sadness so much as the sadness he sees around him that lasts. In this, Demy’s world is suffused with rose-tinted melancholia, which makes the militant of love want to wallow in bed until she dies, giving up the whole game altogether. Those attuned to the Demyian vision do not— really, they cannot.
Opening spread: Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Demy, and Françoise Dorléac on the set of Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Photo: Philippe Le Tellier/Paris Match via Getty Images Previous spread: Film stills from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) This spread: Françoise Dorléac during the filming of Jacques Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Photo: Philippe Le Tellier/Paris Match via Getty Images
Demy was born on June 5, 1931, in the village of Pontchâteau, near Nantes in western France. He and his family lived in a home that doubled as a garage, a family business that his father, Raymond, expected his son to take over when he was of age. But Jacques had no such plans. His mother, Milou, was a hairdresser (a role Demy’s favorite actress, Deneuve, would play in 1973’s A Slightly Pregnant Man) who also pulled the gas pumps, and who would take the precocious Jacques to local puppet shows. He became obsessed with learning the secrets of how the shows were assembled. At home, with wood sets and dolls in ratty clothes, the young Jacques would stage marionette versions of his most beloved fairy tales for his friends. 2 Milou would also treat Jacques to sojourns at the Théâtre Graslin, absorbing operas such as Bizet’s Carmen. The Allied bombing of Nantes on September 16, 1943, ruptured the otherwise happy tranquility of his childhood. The family spent the entire event huddled in a shelter, leaving the young Jacques traumatized. “When something so dreadful has happened,” Demy says in his fellow filmmaker and lifelong wife Agnès Varda’s film The World according to Jacques Demy (1995), “you think that nothing more awful can happen. From that point, therefore, you dream up another, more ideal existence.” That ideal existence would ultimately lead to the magnum opuses of the mid-1960s, the Umbrellas of Cherbourg/Young Girls of Rochefort suite of candy-colored musicals. (I don’t like to think of them as separate films, but rather part one and part two, 1964 and 1967, yin and yang, of the same project of epic emotion.) The ideal dreamers in these remixes of classical Hollywood musicals by Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli are glassy-eyed romantics in search of uplift, whether at the Cherbourg opera house playing Carmen or the plein air french-fry cafés in Rochefort’s place Colbert. Undoubtedly, the Rochefort romantic with whom I most vibe is Françoise Dorléac’s pragmatic composer Solange. Say the name softly to yourself: Solange, so-la, two steps up a musical flight to the climax of the implied ti-do. Dorléac, whom her sister Deneuve (two years younger) insisted was the better actor of the two, is always bursting into a room in fits of fab glamour, commanding any space (café, music shop, street) into which she stalks or sulks but never merely walks. This flâneuse loves a sneak attack, the idle waiting that switches to impulsive action in those aforementioned bursts—a groundswell of Michel Legrand’s arpeggios, the casually sublime high kicks as she leans over a café counter to kiss the cheek of Maman (Danielle Darrieux) or to inquire about the new beau of Sis (Deneuve)—and then back to normal, back to being a member of a harmonized ensemble, the family in triple harmony. Amid the madness of a carnival in town, the soldiers on display, an axe murderer on the loose, Solange just towers and makes art out of her life (which is made for music). With her millisecond-long shrugs, husky voice, the readjusting tuck of her lavender dress as she takes her place at the piano stool to toss off another sonata, the flâneuse whispers to the boys and girls who pass her by: Why strain yourself, darlings. The lips never break. 101
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Opposite: Françoise Dorléac and Gene Kelly in Jacques Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). Photo: courtesy AF Archive/Alamy Stock Photo This page: Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, and child actors on the set of Agnes Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes (1991). Photo: © United Archives/Impress/ Bridgeman Images
Yet even in sunlight, clouds roll in. On June 26, 1967, a few months after production wrapped on The Young Girls of Rochefort, Dorléac, twenty-five, was rushing to the Nice airport; she needed to go to London to finish shooting her scenes for Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain. Afraid of missing her flight, speeding irregularly, she lost control of the car she drove and hit a signpost. The car burst into flames. Her body was charred beyond recognition. Knowing that and rewatching The Young Girls of Rochefort, the postmortem sublimity of her ballet with Gene Kelly becomes horrifying, unsettling. It would be the apotheosis of anybody’s life to dance with Kelly, but it’s all the eerier that it was Dorléac, whose instinct for the unheralded gesture already made her a prime candidate for a nose-to-the-ground, ordinary woman made extraordinary, nearly immortal at the apex of joy. Even without knowledge of her eventual fate, it’s written in her being. There is a bleak, cosmic, Demyian irony at work in the fact that Deneuve could not watch The Young Girls of Rochefort for years after finishing it— and still cannot really return to it. The happiest movie in the world is nothing but sadness for its star. Demy had the keen ability to attract this manic depression in whatever coastal town he washed up in: not just Rochefort or Cherbourg but also Nantes, Nice, and—in his one trip to the States—Los Angeles. His rendering of this latter American city has personal significance for me: my childhood memory of the city of angels is tied to a single image at the skittering periphery of Model Shop, in which Demy is just as obsessed as I was at ten with the oil rigs that drill into the coastal outskirts of the city. These sad flamingos pump a dismal patch of Venetian ground—a silent soundtrack to lives whizzing by on the freeway, cars filled with rowdy kids turning the corner into a lot festered with moss, the sad, gray-skied Manhattan Beach. Somehow, Demy saw beneath this unpromising terrain and unearthed it in its perpetual act of becoming, never solidifying into oil or money, a sea of undead birds neither bland nor holy. Once again, he recycled his pet tracking shot (first seen in his 1959 short Ars and repeated in Lola and Bay of Angels)—this time, along a forgotten road in Venice upon which has settled the blanket of 1960s LA smog, a seldom imagined city in neither Hollywood sight nor Bel Air mind. The image is stark, laying bare the poor dreamer’s conundrum (how to maintain the
dream in the face of stasis, failure, and death) in a stylistic register that can only be properly identified as “Angeleno neorealism.” Los Angeles pushed Demy to radically simplify his language.3 No storefronts are painted over. Legrandian strings are replaced by the hungover hippie dawdling of Spirit. Here, the sullen Angelenos still pine the way they do in France, but it’s a pining rendered with neither passion nor depth, by players (Alexandra Hay of Skidoo, Gary Lockwood of 2001: A Space Odyssey) who are terminally incapable of relaxing, and who talk as if they were glued beneath the proscenium arch of Hollywood High School. 4 Yet from this reduction comes an expanded sense of daily melancholy: men who have been drafted to fight in Vietnam and realize they leave nothing behind, women who ride the winds of America in search of novelistic danger only to find banal sex everywhere they drive. Demy’s movies are built on a simple premise: we have no idea along what cruelly random byway life will lead us. Rochefort is where Demy’s great obsession, the chance encounter, blooms in all its insanity. Is it by seconds that I will miss the one I love, the person with whom I’m meant to chart the sounds of the city in double harmony? Will anyone even notice the art I’m trying to make, the voice I’m projecting as far and clear as I can? Do I stay in my hometown, do I move on to greener (maybe grayer) city pastures? If you see me walking down the streets of the East Village on the first day of spring, headphones in, bouncing like a sugared-up schoolkid, I’ll most likely be listening to Legrand’s score to The Young Girls of Rochefort. This is the only apt cinematic soundtrack for a city brimming with manic chance encounters as you turn the corner, a city whose very grid system is open to the contaminations brought on by le grand jazz. It’s my personal tribute to the one work of art in which, when I saw it on the big screen for the first time, I felt the space of the screen and the space of my seat collapse into one. I wasn’t high, I can’t explain the sensation, and it will never repeat. All I can do is listen to the song of the sailor Maxence (“Je ne connais rien d’elle, et pourtant je la vois”; I know nothing of her, and yet I see her) as we enjoy a blackand-white egg cream outside Ray’s Candy Store. At that point, I’m home. Jacques, je t’aime—what a pity we could only meet through your films—and what a joy.
1. According to Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, “La tristesse durera toujours” were the artist’s dying words. Maurice Pialat quoted them in his film À nos amours (1983). 2. These memories are beautifully fictionalized in Jacquot de Nantes (1991), made by Jacques Demy’s wife, Agnès Varda, while he was dying of aids-related complications—a fact not publicly disclosed until her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès. 3. Demy struggled to speak English and hired the still underappreciated American screenwriter Carole Eastman (Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Five Easy Pieces, The Shooting) to write dialogue for him. 4. Certainly the relaxed Harrison Ford, Demy’s first choice before the studios forced him to choose the then-better-known Gary Lockwood, would have given the role of George Matthews a smoother vibe. But Lockwood’s unease and stilted demeanor strike me as perfect for the character, a man whose imminent draft has made him nihilistically lose all shred of hope for a future, any future, in which he’s happy, in love, and alive.
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NORTHEAST REGIONAL
A S H O RT S TO RY BY E M M A C L I N E , P U B L I S H E D H E R E O N T H E O C CA S I O N O F Â H E R F O RT H C O M I N G C O L L E C T I O N O F S TO R I E S E N T I T L E D DA D DY .
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Close to five hours on the train. And then twenty minutes by taxi from the station to the school. He would have time to call the lawyer, work through the options. He had the number of a consultant, in case Rowan needed to apply somewhere else. Maybe the school legally had to contact the college he’d got into, but Richard wasn’t sure. And maybe it wouldn’t come to that. The school wouldn’t want to make anything public. The thought calmed him—good, good. They were on his side, even if they had not said so in so many words: they weren’t stupid. The trains were housed underground, in cool alleys of concrete, and Richard headed for the first car. It was only half full, the interior air recirculated to an unnatural chill. Richard settled in, that brief moment when he could present himself anew in the context of this narrowed world. He could be kind, he could be neat and conscientious, and all it took was laying his folded jacket on the seat beside him, tucking his newspaper into the webbed nylon pocket. Richard’s pills were in his bag, consolidated in one container. He could easily identify them by shape and color, the pills for depression and insomnia. Offering nudges in his mood like the touch of a dance partner, a subtle but real pressure. He felt for the pill tube through the bag’s front pocket— there it was—and he was reassured, lightened. The car filled slowly. Newcomers maintaining a zone of polite privacy, choosing seats and shaking out their newspapers as if they were making a bed. Everyone excessively tidy, excessively generous. Passing their gum silently into a napkin held to their mouths. No matter that, an hour into the ride, all solicitousness would be forgotten, music leaking through headphones, bawling phone conversations, children racing down the aisle. A sullen girl and her father were stopped in the aisle beside him, waiting for a man to hoist his luggage. The girl stared at Richard, a fresh zit between her brows like a third eye. She was maybe fourteen, a few years younger than Rowan, but how much more childish she seemed than his son. Her gaze was unsettling, too specific—Richard looked down at his phone. There was bad service underground, no reassuring stairstep bars on his screen, but once the train started moving he could make calls. He reread the email from Pam. Then the lawyer’s email referring the consultant. “She’s very good,” he’d written. “A real pro.” Nothing from Ana. Poor Ana, her weekend ruined. She had tried her best to be a good sport. That was the phrase he was sure was circling down at the bottom of her thoughts, stern ticker tape: be a good sport be a good sport be a good sport. He and Ana would have had a better time if they could’ve gone in the water. If it had been summer, they could’ve gone in the water, and that would’ve helped, but it wasn’t summer, so they didn’t. They sat with their backs against the base of a driftwood fence that marked someone’s beachfront rectangle. The sand was baked and pale, the sea dark. Ana held his hand loosely, her face shaded under a floppy white hat. Richard had the thought that she might have bought the hat specifically to wear this weekend, and the idea made him wince. They had lunch in town, an endless lunch. Richard could not catch the waiter’s eye, and the plates lingered too long, the silverware dirtied and askew, and who wanted to stare at the soiled instruments of their feeding? The white wine tasted like granite. Ana stepped outside to call her husband. Richard could see her from the table, pacing in the courtyard. She touched her collar, turning away so her face was hidden. She returned to the table, tore a roll in half, and soaked it in oil. She chewed energetically, her enthusiasm without veil. She piloted the conversation: work, work, a problem with a tenant who wouldn’t
vacate a house. Bad health news from a cousin on the West Coast. Richard’s responses were clipped, but Ana didn’t seem to notice, taking time with her lunch: she ate normally, sensibly, free from darker hungers. “How’s Rowan?” she asked. Richard had not got the call, not yet, so he felt no anxiety at the mention of the name— Rowan was doing fine, he said, his grades were fine. Though he saw Rowan’s grades only if his ex-wife sent them to him, never mind that he paid the tuition. The waiter came by to see if they wanted dessert. “Should we?” Ana asked, breathlessly, the waiter grinning in practiced collusion. Richard couldn’t bear to enact his role, play at naughtiness. “If you want,” he said, lightly, forcing himself to erase any impatience from his voice. But Ana picked up on it anyway. “Nothing for me,” she said, handing the menu back to the waiter, making a face of cartoonish regret. You don’t have to apologize to him, he wanted to say. The waiter really doesn’t care. Then he felt bad for being unkind. He squeezed her hand across the table; she brightened. Her husband was out of town for the entire weekend, and this was the first time they had spent the night together. Everything seemed significant to her—the groceries she put in the fridge, the movies she had downloaded to her laptop, that hat. Stress had caused a haze of pink to cloud her eyes, a mild case of conjunctivitis that she tried hard to downplay. Every four hours, she tipped back her head and squeezed a dropper of antibiotic into each eye. Richard didn’t need to do it, but he did—sought out these married women, the ones who looked at him across a table of catered tournedos and cut peonies while their husbands talked to the people on their right. Women whose lingerie was haunted by the prick of the plastic tag they’d tried to snap off so that he wouldn’t realize it was new. They were the type of women whose own sorrow moved them immeasurably. Who wanted to recount the details of their worst tragedies in the lull after sex. Ana hadn’t seemed like that kind of woman. She tended to all her own weaknesses, briskly removing her own underwear but never taking off her watch. Like the other married women, she always knew what time it was. She was a real estate agent, one of her listings the house in which they were staying. It had been Richard’s mother’s house, until she died, and was now his. He had never liked visiting his mother here, on the occasions he did, and there was no thought of keeping the place. The afternoon they’d first met, Ana had been optimistic about the property. “It’s nice acreage,” she said. “Big but not too overwhelming.” She walked ahead of Richard, opening doors, passing through rooms, turning on lights and faucets. Wearing tailored shorts, so that her nice legs showed. The second time: Richard’s hands loose on Ana’s head as she gamely kneeled. They were outside, on the back porch, Richard’s ass pressing into the slick plastic slats of a lawn chair as he tried feverishly to imagine someone watching. He said thanks, when it was over, as Ana discreetly spat into the grass. “Really,” Richard said. “That was great.” Ana’s smile was crooked. It was summer then, and behind them the massed green of the trees moved in silence. That was the thing about being with married women, how hidden pockets of the day were suddenly revealed. The slightest pressure and the grid buckled, exposing the glut of hours. It was only eleven and he still had the whole day ahead of him. Back in the city, she came over at strange times, carrying a gym bag that stayed untouched by the door. Her husband, Jonathan, was an 105
importer of olive oil and other things kept in dark, cool warehouses. Ana said his name often when she was with Richard, but he didn’t mind. He was glad for the helpless invocation of her real life—he didn’t need a reminder of the limits, the end already visible from the moment she had first shaken his hand, but maybe she needed a reminder. The groceries she’d brought this weekend worried him, the purity of their domestic striving, and so did the questions about his son, the assumption that Richard was tracking the saga of her cousin’s health. How she had made up the bare mattress with the sheets they’d brought, eager as a new bride. They would go back to the city the day after next, and Jonathan would return from wherever Jonathan had gone and the house would sell and all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well—the phrase surfaced in his brain, some hippie scrap that Pam used to incant to herself. It was dark outside, the sky faltering to black. Ana squeezed a dropper of her antibiotic into one eye and then the other, then shut her eyes tight. “A minute,” she said, eyes still closed. “Tell me when a minute is up.” Richard was putting the dishes away. “A minute,” he said, after a while, though he’d forgotten to check, and she opened her eyes. “They feel any better?” he said. “Yeah,” she said. “Lots.” She was a smart woman. She had sensed some shift in his attention and was now willfully cheerful, cool, not giving away too much. Her bare feet kneaded the cushions. She’d plugged in her laptop, and a menu screen was queued up for a blackand-white movie that he didn’t want to watch. “Someone could take down this wall,” she said, nodding at the room, “and then have their dining table in here.” “Someone could,” he agreed. “That’s Rowan?” she said. There was a framed photo: Rowan, a few hours old, in Pam’s arms. “Yeah.” Ana got up to look more closely. “She’s pretty.” He wanted to tell Ana that there was no need to catalog Pam’s attractiveness, or try to gauge Richard’s feelings for her—nothing residual remained. They’d been divorced sixteen years. She lived in Santa Barbara, had married again and divorced again, existed only as a voice on the telephone arranging logistics or relaying information. “Is he sad you’re selling the house?” Ana said. It took him a moment. “Is Rowan sad?” “He must have had fun here. In summers and stuff.” Richard wiped his hands on his pants; there were no dishtowels. “We only came here a few times. Rowan likes the city better, I think. I don’t think he cares.” Pam and Richard had divorced when Rowan was two. Pam had moved to the West Coast—really, since then Richard saw Rowan only in summers, and then for only the few weeks the boy wasn’t at camp. But they had been good times. Good enough—Rowan a small stranger who’d arrive for the summer, dark- eyed and bearing a Ziploc of vitamins from Pam with detailed instructions for their distribution. With his private ways and ritualized habits, one summer obsessed with a leather wallet some boyfriend of his mother’s must have given him. *** Richard fell asleep during the movie, snorting awake with his head on his chest. Ana laughed, a little unkindly. “You snore,” she said. “I didn’t know you snore.” 106
“It’s still going?” he said. The actors on the screen had soft-looking faces; he had no idea what was happening. “We aren’t even halfway through,” she said. “You want me to go back?” He shook his head, forcing himself to stay awake. The movie finished to violent trumpets, the end scrolling in gilded, overblown script. She shut her laptop in the middle of a horn blast. “Bed?” he said. She shrugged. “I might stay up.” She wanted to talk, he could tell, itching for him to push back, probe for the source of her discontent. “I have to sleep,” he said. Ana rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said, stretching out her pretty legs without looking at him, her youth the ultimate trump card. Alone in the upstairs bedroom, Richard took off his pants and raked his fingers through the hair above his belly. He left his boxers on, swimmy white cotton that Ana hated, and pulled just the top sheet over himself. Where had Ana even found that movie, and what logic had made her think he would like a black-and-white movie? He was only fifty. Or fifty-one. He fell asleep. “Hey.” Ana was shaking him, pushing his shoulder. “Richard.” He recognized her voice, dimly, a ripple on the water, but didn’t open his eyes. “Your phone,” she said, louder. “Come on.” It had vibrated, she told him, an incoming call, and she had ignored it, except it happened two more times. Richard sat up and took the phone, dumbly: Pam. Three missed calls. He oriented the time: it was only ten in Santa Barbara. But one a.m. here—Rowan. Something to do with Rowan. He was still half asleep, a bad feeling only beginning to make itself known. “Is everything okay?” Ana said, and he started; he had forgotten her, the stranger on the bed, staring at him with her pinkish eyes. He went down to the kitchen to call Pam back. “Richard, Jesus,” she said, picking up on the first ring. “He’s fine, fine, totally safe,” and Richard told himself that he had never thought otherwise, though immediately his mind had zoomed through a pornographic strip of every evil thing that could have befallen his son. “The school called— I don’t really understand, they aren’t telling me anything. He’s fine, but they need one of us there. Some trouble, a fight or something.” There was a pause. “I was sleeping,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Pam sighed. “I can’t get there until Monday,” she said. “Why do they have these schools out in the middle of nowhere?” “But he’s fine.” “He’s fine. I guess someone got hurt. He was involved, or so they said.” As a child, Rowan had not liked violence. He found the tightest corner of every room and folded himself there. “Have you talked to him?” “He didn’t say very much. It’s hard to tell.” Richard pushed a finger between his brows. “Those people at that goddamn school,” Pam said, off on a tear. As she talked, he spotted Ana in the doorway, listening while trying to appear as if she weren’t, her eyes cast carefully down. “I’ll go up,” he said, interrupting Pam. “First thing.” Ana snapped to attention—here was information that affected her, and she tried and failed to hide her disappointment.
The train moved at a forgotten pace, quaint. He had taken the train often when he worked for the Treasury Department, ten years before. The express, with regulars heading straight to their usual seats. The train rattled along with all the carnival heave and huff. Passing houses, boxy and plain, with aprons of lawn, the hedges sheared neatly like military haircuts. Rowan’s school used to require such haircuts. Uniforms, too. Dark gray, worsted wool, jackets with rows of brass. But that was fifty years ago. Now it was scrubbed of any implication of violence, less like a school and more like a coed holding pen, funneling students into Ivy League and liberal arts colleges— there was no focus on anything beyond college itself, the first fact of acceptance. The invitation to a party when the party was incidental. Rowan had got into a better-than-expected college—Pam was surprised and pleased—its website a well-designed labyrinth of photographs and italicized quotes in a vaguely corporate color scheme. The boy wanted to study international relations, but that seemed to mean he wanted to study abroad and drink in new countries. He didn’t exhibit any interest in Richard’s work, apart from a desultory question or two, offered out of nowhere. “How much money do you make?” he’d asked Richard once. Richard didn’t know whether to lie, whether other parents had some complicated moral arithmetic about these things. He told Rowan the truth, embellishing slightly—the year would pick up, he was sure—and Rowan seemed appropriately impressed, his eyes going cold and adult as he processed the information. Richard had not thought of Rowan so much in a long time, not this condensed concern. He called him every once in a while, or pinged off a series of texts, Rowan’s responses shorter and shorter until the exchange trailed into virtual silence—How are your classes? Fine. They were useless missives, but he felt he had to make these offerings. If there was a reckoning, a moment when they demanded to see the record, he could present these messages. Proof that he had tried. Ana would be driving back to the city now. He’d sent off a quick text to her as the train pulled out, apologies that the weekend had ended so abruptly, but there was still no word from her. Maybe she hadn’t seen it. Or maybe she was sulking. She was a childish woman, he thought, and let himself feel free of her, glad for the escape Pam’s call had offered. He drank water from a plastic bottle. He checked his phone again. He would meet with the headmaster in the afternoon. Richard was going to wait until the train was halfway there to take a pill. This was the kind of rule he was only foggily aware of, the patter under the surface of his waking brain. But the rules were easily bent by obscure rationalizations. A cold look from a stranger, a rumble of hunger or impatience, discomfort: any of these could tip Richard into a sudden certainty that he deserved to have the pill now. So he uncapped the tube and didn’t acknowledge what he was doing until he was already staring into the abundance. Oval, he decided, after a moment. He washed the pill off his tongue with a slug of water, swallowing hard. When it dropped, there was no more doggy-paddling against the riptide of the day—he could relax, let it pass over him. Clicking in like rails. He waited ten minutes for a taxi: none appeared. All around him, people streamed off to the parking garage or hustled to the cars of loved ones, cars that arrived like magic and painlessly collected their cargo. Passengers sorted themselves into their proper places, trunks slamming. Richard checked his phone—still nothing from Ana, Christ. It was almost noon, clouds beginning to condense overhead. Richard went to ask the attendant at the parking garage about taxis. “One’ll show up,” the man said, and Richard stalked back to the curb, his bag thudding into his side.
Finally a burgundy minivan pulled up. Richard exhaled loudly, though no one was there to hear him. The driver had long hair and rimless glasses, and hustled to open the trunk. “I’ll just keep my bag with me,” Richard said. “Sure,” the man said, bobbing from foot to foot. “Sure. You want to sit up in front?” “No,” Richard said, after a moment of confusion. Did people ever want to sit in front? Though, now that he was getting in the back, he understood that some people did sit in the front, or the man wouldn’t have asked. What kind of people? People who wanted to advertise their own goodness. He didn’t care if the driver thought he was a shitty person because he didn’t want to ride alongside him. When he gave the name of the school, the driver turned to the backseat. “Do you have the address?” Irritation prickled up Richard’s scalp. “It’s the only school around,” he said. “You don’t know it?” “Sure I do,” the driver said, churlish now. “I just wanna plug it into the machine, see, it’ll tell me the best way to go.” This was why you lived in cities—abundance buffered you from the vagaries of human contact. If this had happened at home, Richard would have got out and grabbed the next cab. But here he was forced to sit as the man fumbled with his GPS, forced to encounter the full, dull reality of this person. He sat back and closed his eyes. “All set,” the driver announced. Richard picked up a punitive lilt in the man’s tone, but when he opened his eyes the car was moving and the man was silent, staring ahead. The school was at the top of a hill, overlooking the town, the swift-moving river spanned by a stone bridge. The campus buildings were gray limestone, tidy and stark. It had snowed a few days earlier, it seemed, but not enough to be picturesque, and in the muddy aftermath everything looked cheerless. Rowan was supposed to meet him in front of the chapel, but he wasn’t there. Richard should have stopped first to stow his bag at the one inn in town, with its basket of Saran-wrapped corn muffins at the front desk. He had been to the school twice before: dropping Rowan off the September of his freshman year, and picking him up for a single, awkward Thanksgiving. He moved his bag to the other shoulder, checked his phone. An hour until his meeting with the headmaster. Rowan wasn’t answering texts or calls. Richard glanced at his phone’s blank screen—the galactic space of it, the empty hum. How often was he checking? Ana hadn’t texted even once. He typed another note to her. All okay here. He watched the cursor blink—he erased the message. He stood there for another few minutes before a boy and a girl ambled toward him, the boy not immediately recognizable as his son. It was Rowan, obvious now as the boy got closer, and Richard pretended he’d known all along. Wasn’t that what parents were supposed to do? Be able to spot their children in a crowd, in an instant, the most primal of recognitions? “Father,” Rowan said, half smiling. His son had never called him Father, even when he was a little boy. He wore a shiny jacket that seemed borrowed from someone else; his wrists strained in the toosmall sleeves. Richard looked from the girl to his son. He went to hug Rowan, but stuttered, a moment of hesitation, and his bag dropped down his arm and he had to reshoulder it, an awkward lurch, and in that time the girl thrust out her hand. “Hi, Mr. Hagood,” she said. Before Richard could understand who she was, she was shaking his hand. She had washed green eyes, thickish animal hair that fell 107
to her waist. “Hi.” “Livia,” Rowan said. “My girlfriend.” Richard had never heard anything about a girlfriend. He stared at Rowan. “Why don’t you and I talk alone for a minute?” “We can talk in front of Livia. Right, babe?” A dormant headache pulsed back to life. “I think we need to talk,” Richard said. “Alone.” “Come on,” Rowan said. “She’s great.” Richard could feel Livia watching them. “I’m sure she’s great,” Richard said, trying to keep his voice even. “And I’m sure she can excuse us for a moment. Right, Livia?” He forced a smile, and, after a moment, the girl shrugged at Rowan and ambled a few feet away. She breathed into her cupped hands, studiously looking away when Richard glanced over. “I’m meeting with your headmaster in less than an hour,” he said. Rowan’s face didn’t change. “Yeah.” “Is there anything you want to say?” Rowan was staring past Richard, his arms folded and straining against the jacket sleeves. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, and smiled. Out of discomfort, Richard told himself, and he felt it, too; a grimace tightened his own face. Rowan seemed to take this as some kind of collusion, and his posture relaxed. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one with a teenager’s elaborate casualness. “Don’t smoke,” Richard said. “It can’t be allowed?” Rowan let the cigarette hover a moment in the air, the smell rising between them. “Frisch doesn’t care. And there’s worse things than smoking,” he said, taking a drag. “It’s not even that bad for you.” Richard’s hands flexed, then relaxed. What could he do, snatch the cigarette away? His headache was worse. The pill was wearing off, the granularity of each minute becoming more apparent. He wanted to check his phone. His son kept smoking, his exhale threading thinly through the air before breaking apart. The girl was stamping her feet now, her puffy boots making her legs above them seem tiny and breakable, and Richard imagined, for a second, snapping them clean. He cleared his throat. “Where’s the headmaster’s office?” Paul Frisch had attended the school as a teenager, back when it was still single-sex. His time there had been slurred over by distance until it seemed blessed, four years steadily knit with hearty friendships and kindly teachers and good-natured pranks. No matter that he had been somewhat unpopular, occasionally the recipient of pointed abuse, once punched so hard that he vomited in a tidy unreal circle in the snow. They pushed his face into his own warm sick. It was easy to forget, though. And enough had happened on the other side of the fulcrum—a scholarship to college, a sensible girl who became his wife, her long hair worn in a single braid. He’d returned to teach at the school for many years before taking over as headmaster. This office with its oak furniture and mullioned windows. A life tipping toward good, and it was only this kind of thing, the occasional meeting of this sort, that called up a sour whiff from the back of his throat, a familiar feeling elbowing its way to the light. The student: chubby with the helpless bulk that came from psychiatric drugs, not from excess of enjoyment. Thatchy hair, like the nests that deer make in grass. He wasn’t unattractive, just raw, all there on the surface. Frisch had met with his parents that morning. The boy’s mother looked older than she was. A high flush on her neck, a darty, wild look. Her husband kept one arm around her in a weary huddle. They were decent people, unable to imagine or prepare for anything like this. 108
And now here was Rowan Hagood’s father, wearing a wool overcoat that smelled like the cold air, a man who kept tilting his phone in his lap to check the screen, as if Frisch couldn’t plainly see what he was doing. Frisch shifted in his chair, the leather seat giving off a flatulent squeak that triggered an old self-consciousness. Rowan’s father was hearty, at first, ready to find a solution, to cooperate. He had a full head of hair and the aggressively pleasant affect of someone used to getting what he wanted. Smiling a contained, respectful smile, a smile that assumed a shared interest here. Rowan could not stay at the school, though his father seemed to expect otherwise. Not even the most rabid of parents with the most rabid of lawyers could have kept Rowan there. Frisch repeated the facts. As he went on, the man’s heartiness started to fray, and he began passing his phone from palm to palm with increasing agitation. Frisch laid out the time line they had pieced together, what the hospital’s report had concluded. Rowan’s life was not ruined. In lieu of expulsion, he and the others would be asked to leave. Rowan would be given the chance to transfer somewhere else to finish the semester. Colleges wouldn’t be notified, the incident never part of any formal, accessible record. This was the best possible outcome for Rowan, Frisch explained, and Mr. Hagood should be grateful that his son’s future was intact. All this would recede in Rowan’s life, Frisch knew, a blip easily calcified. People like Rowan and his father were always protected from themselves. Earlier that morning, before the other boy’s mother and father had left his office, the mother had stopped and looked at Frisch. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” she asked, her voice unraveling. Frisch had assured the parents that their son would be fine. They needed to hear him say it. Everything would be okay. And how could he say otherwise—confess that he had spoken with the boy a few hours after everything, had looked into the boy’s black, roving eyes, and that he couldn’t say what would happen later, what any of this would mean? Richard descended the dark, narrow stairs that led to the dining room of the one fancy restaurant in town. White tablecloths and stiff lace curtains—this was a part of the country where somber stood in for formal. Rowan and Livia followed behind at the respectful but vaguely menacing distance typical of bodyguards and teenagers. Their whispers were punctuated only by the girl’s grating laugh. The kids had been twenty minutes late meeting him at his hotel, but the restaurant was mostly empty, Richard’s reservation an unnecessary urban habit. Pam had cried on the phone when he called her after the meeting, though Richard was careful to repeat what the headmaster had said: Rowan would still go to college; this could all be dealt with soon enough. There were logistics to get through, but it was fixable. Richard didn’t fill in the blanks in the story. Didn’t flesh out the incident in full, obscene detail—details the headmaster seemed to linger over, studying Richard’s face as he recounted the whole thing. Like he wanted Richard to feel bad, like Richard should be the one to offer an apology. And he did feel bad—the story was awful, perverse, made his gut tighten. But what could he do now, what could anyone do? He apologized, pitching the wording carefully—enough to acknowledge that the incident was bad but not enough to encourage any kind of future lawsuit. The waitress handed out menus while Rowan and Livia scooted their chairs closer together. Rowan had obviously told her that he would have to leave the school—when the kids had finally shown up at Richard’s hotel the girl’s eyes were swollen from crying. Livia
seemed fine now, no lingering sadness that Richard could discern. If anything, she was fizzy with secret hilarity, she and Rowan exchanging significant glances. They started to giggle, bizarrely, keeping up some coded conversation that he didn’t try to follow. Crescents of sweat were darkening the underarms of the girl’s shirt. Richard tipped his phone onto the table, casually, so he could tell himself he wasn’t really checking. Still nothing from Ana. His stomach hollowed and he picked at his napkin. He made an effort to smile at Livia, who looked back blankly with a shake of her uncombed hair. Rowan had taken the news stoically, with a maddening tilt of his head as he stared past Richard out the window of his dorm room. He twisted a lacrosse stick in his hands while Richard talked, an inand-out roll that kept a white ball trapped in the net. The movement was unusual, hypnotic, a kind of witchy glide. In the corner, his roommate’s humidifier motored away, loosing puffs of dampness. Rowan’s nonchalance doubled Richard’s headache. “You understand this could have been much worse,” Richard said. Rowan shrugged, keeping the ball in the net. “I guess.” This was his son, Richard kept reminding himself, and that fact had to be bigger than anything else. “We will always help you,” Richard said, conscious of trying to gather some formality, a sense of fatherly occasion. “Your mother and I. I want you to know that.” Rowan made a noise in the back of his throat, the barest of responses, but Richard saw the mask drop for a second, saw a quick flash of pure hatred in the boy’s face. Richard knew he shouldn’t drink with the pills, but he ordered a beer anyway. “Actually,” he said, “gin and tonic.” Ana had told him once that clear alcohol was the healthiest—she drank vodka. Ana, with her nice legs and practical shoes and her skin, soapy and pale as a statue’s. “I’ll have one, too,” Rowan said, sending Livia into a fit of giggling. The waitress looked at Richard for permission. “No,” he said. “Christ.” The rage in Richard grew and fizzled, easy as taking a breath, easy as not responding. He stuffed his mouth with a slice of bread, dry and lacking salt, and chewed intently. *** After they ordered—the girl got the most expensive thing on the menu, Richard noted—he stepped out to the parking lot. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he announced to the kids. They ignored him. The river was close enough that he could hear it. He called Ana. Pushing the button quieted some immediate anxiety, dropped it down a notch. He was taking action, he still had some control. But the phone kept ringing into space. Now the anxiety had doubled. It rang too many times. He felt the silence between each ring. He hung up. Maybe she had just been surprised by his call—they didn’t speak on the phone, as a rule. Or maybe she had her phone on silent, or maybe Jonathan was home early. Maybe. Or maybe she was just ignoring him. Back at her apartment, doing nothing, wearing her unflattering sweatpants, her dingy bra. Revulsion caught in his throat. Richard knew he shouldn’t call again, but it was so easy to endure the same series of rings. He pressed the phone to his ear, wondering how long the rings could possibly go on. There was a moment, a click, when he thought she had answered—his stomach dropped— but it was only her voicemail. The recording made her voice sound eerie and far away. In the silence that followed the beep, he tried to
think of something to say. He could see his breath. “Cunt,” he said, suddenly, before hanging up. *** He returned to the table, bending to retrieve his napkin from where it had fallen on the floor. An oblique thrill was animating his movements, a buoyant flush. The food arrived quickly, the waitress smiling as she set down the plates. Richard ordered a second drink. When the waitress left, Rowan stabbed a finger at her retreating back. “Lizard person,” he announced. “Two points.” Livia started laughing again. Richard just blinked, the drink a wave he was riding, another on its way. This was his son sitting beside him at the table? All is well, he thought, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. He sawed at his pork loin, salting the mashed potatoes, loading up his fork. Rowan had ordered the pasta—claiming to be a vegetarian, which seemed like another joke of some kind—and he ate steadily, his lips coated with oil. Livia sipped at her water and poked at her steak. She cut up some of the meat but only moved the pieces from one side of the plate to the other. Rowan was in the middle of a sentence when Livia quickly shifted one of the slices onto his plate. He looked down, but kept talking. “Listen,” Richard said to Livia. He hadn’t meant to speak at all. “You can’t just drink water for dinner.” Livia stared at him. “You have to eat something,” Richard said. “God,” Rowan said. “You aren’t eating that much, either.” “I’m just fine,” Richard said. His son looked tense. Richard could tell that his hand was on Livia’s knee under the table. “I’m fine,” he repeated, “but I won’t allow Livia to starve.” “What the fuck?” Rowan said. Richard had never hit his son, not once. His mouth filled with saliva, and there was a pounding behind his eyes. Across the table, Livia still stared at him. “Eat your food,” Richard said. “We aren’t going anywhere until you eat.” Her eyes got wet. She picked up her fork, clutching it hard. She stabbed at a thick slice of steak and brought it to her mouth, chewing with tight lips, her neck surging when she swallowed. She took another bite, her eyes widening. “God, stop it,” Rowan said. “It’s fine.” Livia kept eating. “Stop, babe,” Rowan said, grabbing her wrist, her mouth still cartoonishly full. She dropped her fork, letting it clatter onto the floor. “You’re a prick,” Rowan said, glaring at his father. “You were always such a fucking prick.” The waitress hurried over with another fork, her face frozen in a frenzy of politeness that meant she’d seen the whole thing. “Sorry,” the girl said, tears dripping into her lap. “No problem,” the waitress sang, “no problem at all,” replacing the girl’s fork, bending to snatch the soiled one off the floor. Smiling hard but not making eye contact with anyone. When she retreated, leaving Richard alone with his son and the crying girl, it occurred to him, with the delayed logic of a dream, that the waitress must have thought he was the bad guy in all this.
From the book Daddy by Emma Cline. Copyright © 2020 by Emma Cline. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. This story originally appeared in The New Yorker. All rights reserved. 109
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IVE BY GURSKY
By exploring the conventions of past portraits of industrial designers and architects, Maria Morris Hambourg unpacks Andreas Gursky’s ingenious recent portrait of Apple designer Jony Ive to reveal its layered meanings.
A MEETING OF MINDS
Last year London’s National Portrait Gallery commissioned Andreas Gursky to photograph Sir Jonathan Ive, lead designer of Apple’s iMac, iPad, and iPhone. Mantled with awards, arguably the most famous designer alive, and credited with the most successful commercial products in history, Ive, clad in white, stands on the arcing fin of a curving building. Having recently decided to leave Apple to start his own company, he looks composed and thoughtful, his outward focus suggesting his future-oriented vision. Gursky, equally famous, is a German photographer known for his huge, highly detailed and suprarealistic color pictures of the global economy’s infrastructure. Lauded for the gorgeous, razor-sharp precision of his style, Gursky has blunted the rendering in this image with a veiling layer of muted bands; this uncharacteristic and curious surface shimmer suggests the conveyance of something important that is not evident at first glance. Gursky is highly accomplished at the meticulous description of technological and industrial installations. Although his parents were commercial photographers, and he was thus versed from birth in the glorification of technological prowess typical of annual reports and advertising, he pivoted toward art and studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie with Bernd and Hilla Becher, famous artistic mentors of Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and others. He made his mark in the 1990s with large-scale images of landscape and architecture in which individuals, if they are represented at all, are usually subsumed into crowds, and the focus is on the spaces—often commercial or industrial—where people work. Hagiographic portraits were not a part of his practice, so the National Gallery’s commission posed a tricky question: how to convey the true character of this admired designer, evoking his unique accomplishments and the scale of their diffusion in modern life, while retaining
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Previous spread: Andreas Gursky, Jonathan Ive, 2019, fine art print mounted on dibond, 64 ½ × 50 5⁄8 inches (163.7 × 128.5 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London, commissioned; made possible by the Outset Commission, supported by Scott Collins in partnership with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, 2019. Artwork © Andreas Gursky/VG BILDKUNST, Bonn
Gursky’s native idiom of impressive yet believably realistic documentation? Gursky might well have asked himself what others tasked with similar commissions had done. Generally, they have depicted great designers surrounded by their creations in matter-of-fact show-and-tell scenarios: Henry Dreyfuss and the Bell telephone, Charles and Ray Eames with their iconic Lounge Chair, and Dieter Rams, whom Ive cites as an important early influence, surrounded by the products he designed mainly for Braun. This sort of simple demonstration was inadequate to Gursky’s ambition, as well as to his complex grasp of the scope of Ive’s influence, which he saw as more akin in its vast societal reverberations to the metaprocesses engaged by architecture. What models had he, then, in this category? Traditionally, photographers have portrayed architects with their buildings, with models of them, or working in the studio or at the construction site. I am immediately reminded of a dapper Frank Lloyd Wright depicted at his nearly complete, but long-challenging, late-life project the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Its dove-gray tones match his attire and the slicing shadows of its spiraling rings rhyme with his natty topper, while the aged architect, knee cocked and lost in thought, is at one with his creation. The fact that only a corner and a smidgen of the rotunda can fit into the frame is characteristic, for scale discrepancies bedevil this scheme. Smart photographers know better than to reduce the creator to an ant in front of his overwhelming structure; better an equalizing compromise, as with Wright, or with Robert Howlett’s famous portrait of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great British designer of tunnels, dry docks, and steamships, standing
Opposite, left: Frank Lloyd Wright, 1959. Photo: William H. Short © Guggenheim Foundation, New York Opposite, right: Robert Howlett, Isambard Kingdom Brunel Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, 1857, albumen silver print from glass negative, 11 × 8 ½ inches (27.9 × 21.5 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005
before his final masterpiece, The Great Eastern. That 22,500-ton ship would hardly have fit into the frame, but Howlett was still able to present Brunel as a heroic figure, more than holding his own against the ship’s massive launching chains. To avoid scale dilemmas as well as from expediency, photographers frequently pose designers with models of their large structures. In these cases, the inverse scale obtains: Witness a Brobdingnagian Kazuyo Sejima examining a tiny treasure in her palm, as if she had chanced to find her inspiration for New York’s New Museum like a shell on a beach. Annie Leibovitz’s droll exaggeration is a delight of this sort; many architect-plusmodel shots are notably less felicitous. Tracing the hidden pathways of creation is difficult enough in words, but describing the process photographically is nearly impossible. Showing the architect at work aims at a portion of the process but is an obvious simplification. Even so, photographing the drafting studio and the maestro on a site visit tends to do a better job on ambient details or personal relations than on inner inspiration, and often fails through overscripted direction. While such images can capture facts that in time prove interesting as historical documents— such as the assemblage of remarkable talents in Peter Behrens’s studio in 1908—the photographs scarcely get inside the problems the minds in the room are trying to solve. To illustrate those internal mysteries, several pictorial tropes repeat: the concentrated brow, the shining pate, smoke, and eyeglasses, typically owlish, on nose or forehead.
Above: Kazuyo Sejima, Atlantic Beach, New York, 2006 © Annie Leibovitz, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Below: Dieter Rams with products he designed for Braun.
A portrait of Oscar Niemeyer in shirt sleeves and braces, his balding head bent over his drawing board, head on hand, with pen at the ready to sketch the forthcoming idea, is a home run of this sort. Here is photography rounding all the bases to create a set of visual clues equivalent to the invisible path of a design idea coursing through mental circuitry. When the usual pictorial signals for the thinking mind—books, plans, drawings, stylus, cigarettes and pipes—are unavailable, all that remains is metaphor. A fair example is a portrait of Louis Kahn in which the background and some of the ceiling coffers of his Yale University Art Gallery have been blacked out, the better to suggest this mystic’s inspiration as unknowable, even Divine. Daring to attempt to illustrate cerebration is not a task at which most photographers are willing to fail. Gursky wisely chose to avoid it, electing the balanced scheme: man and creation, equalized through a partial view. The creation here is Ive’s stage, the spectacular new Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, California, designed by Norman Foster and his firm. Although the building is not credited to Ive, not only did his designs fuel Apple’s rise to the top but his design sense was essential to the building’s realization in myriad ways. From the point of view of Gursky, a photographer whose principal subject has been the intersection of global money, labor, technology, and industry, this building was a prime locale from every angle, and the most obvious and appropriate one for Ive. The structure was commissioned by Steve Jobs in 2009 to replace the company’s accumulation of twenty-six buildings with a singular architectural statement of its design excellence, its business philosophy of dissolving boundaries, and its commitment to communication and sustainability. Foster proposed a vast, circular, four-story building containing 2.5 million square feet of open workspace, clad in glass and set in a landscape planted with native species and fruit trees. The entire donutshaped building, so large as to be fully visible only in aerial views or in models, looks decidedly the 113
Left: Oscar Niemeyer. Photo © Sérgio Amaral Below: Louis Kahn looking at his tetrahedral ceiling in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, 1953. Photo: Lionel Freedman, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery Archives Transfer
way UFOs were imagined to look when these figments, fanned by cold war fears, popped up in the popular imagination in the middle of the last century. Exactly how Jobs identified Foster for the job is not clear, but it may well have been through Ive, his close and constant colleague; in any case, Foster + Partners has had among the highest global profiles for iconic company headquarters since their HSBC bank design for Hong Kong, completed in the mid1980s and photographed by Gursky in 1994. Like Ive, Foster is British. As a youth in industrial Manchester, he became fascinated by locomotives, a passion that eventually led him to Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture, 1923), the modernist design of the 1950s (Niemeyer and the Scandinavians), and ultimately to Yale University, where his futuristic bent was reinforced by Buckminster Fuller’s designs for “Spaceship Earth.” There, too, he absorbed the Bauhaus principles of functionalism, minimalism, and truth to materials via Paul Rudolph, who had been trained by former Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Ive for his part is the son of a design-technology professor-cum-silversmith, so he was drawing, making, and deconstructing objects with his father’s encouragement from an early age. He was educated at Newcastle Polytechnic, where his training was multidisciplinary, object and problem oriented, and espoused minimalist, essentially ex-Bauhaus design principles as codified by Rams. Ive had no success whatever with computers until he met a Mac, whose intuitive use and “human soul” greatly appealed to him. In 1992, he visited Silicon Valley and met people at Apple, one of whom hired him, at twenty-seven. In 1997 Jobs returned to the company after a twelve-year absence, put the designers in charge of the engineers instead of vice versa, and put Ive in charge of design. Dyslexic like Jobs, and like Jobs a stickler 114
for design excellence and simplicity, Ive is especially devoted to humanizing technology and is particularly sensitive to touch. Through his calm, deliberate, and remarkably modest manner and his iterative and collaborative working method, he managed to form one of the most conducive creative partnerships in modern history with the demanding and opinionated Jobs. Although Jobs implicitly claimed Apple’s products as his own, their creation was shared, and was largely attributable to Ive’s process and character, not least his remarkable willingness to disappear into his designs. Gursky’s vision of this unprepossessing man is deft, if initially a bit puzzling. We note Ive’s odd stance: he looks like a fencer, sans protections and foil, and he stands shoulder to shoulder with a vaporous body double—a fault, if he were fencing, termed “corps à corps.” Then, too, the “air” in the picture is not transparent but weirdly palpable, as if constituted of some denser medium, variably segmented. Ive stands enveloped in this scrim on the second floor of “Apple Spaceship,” as its denizens call it, leaning toward its fins. These protruding canopies, providing shade and cutting glare, are a critically important element of the design, for without them the building’s enormous panes of curved glass (the world’s largest, at forty-seven feet by ten on the exterior) would allow the California sun to overheat the interior. The underside
of these “eyebrows” (per Foster) are of a highly reflective metal, which, together with the curved glass skin, create cascades of ref lections and refractions marked by the nearly invisible vertical joints of the glass-to-glass panels, causing the segmentation of the “air” in the picture. Ever since 1913, when Gropius and Adolf Meyer built the curtain wall of the Fagus-Werk, in Alfeld, Germany, glass has been an important and efficient industrial material for cladding modern buildings. Technological advances in manufacturing ever larger panels, and more invisible fittings to secure them, have blurred the boundaries between in- and outside, providing the unexpected security of transparency. As Stephen Eskildsen writes (in The Age of Glass, 2018), when inside a glass wall you can feel “swaddled” in a sense of impregnability. This feeling is distinctly relayed in Gursky’s image, where Ive’s stance, a kiltered contrapposto achieved by leaning against the (invisible) glass wall, is actually confidently nonchalant and not at all precarious. Photographers have long noted how glass walls can work pictorially. They principally provide an easy, leading-edge aura, as in the 1951 home that Lina Bo Bardi designed for herself and her husband in São Paulo, for example. Glass can also generate fields of visual complexity that will pump metaphorical energy wherever needed—witness a highly charged portrait of the contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas. But Gursky’s use of the glass in Foster’s building is by every measure a virtuoso performance. Through digital manipulation of the original photograph, he heightened its ref lections and refractions,
Left: Peter Behrens’s assistants in his atelier. Left to right: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Meyer, Max Hertwig, Bernhard Weyrather, Jean Krämer, and Walter Gropius Below: Zaha Hadid, London, c. 1985. Photo: Christopher Pillitz/Getty Images
resulting in those intangible waves that softly nap the scene, as well as, perhaps, in Ive’s ghostly body-double. The overall, nonspecific digital iteration suggests an all-pervasive cloud, like the zeitgeist one exists within but cannot pin down, analogous to our current mental condition of information saturation and media distraction. Is not this the modern human condition within the new dimension of global cyberspace? And what of Ive’s clothing? Designers are known for paying close attention to their personal style; the early moderns sometimes wore finely tailored suits from Knize of Vienna. Compared to them—or to Zaha Hadid, posing in her London office—Ive might seem out of step, but in fact he is utterly in character in T-shirt and jeans. The choice of white recalls early modernist architectural notions of white walls as tabulae rasae, the undecorated antistyle, but it also evokes the minimalist purity of Ive’s designs. The outfit additionally points to Silicon Valley’s origins in garage tinkering and to the jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, and sneakers worn there. Termed “dressing down” when relaxed clothing began to dilute office attire in the mid-1980s, this comfortable nonstyle expanded in the mid-1990s to include Hush Puppy shoes (first issued in 1958) as a cool retro item of mid-century comfort; Ive sports a pair in grassy green. Besides these and his immaculate version of the Silicon Valley uniform, the illustrious designer wears only his own Apple Watch, a small but prodigious bit of technology that took its cue from Dick Tracy’s wrist radio but is lightyears smarter and able to connect its wearer with ever expanding worlds. Ive and Gursky admire one another; their exquisite artistry and technological prowess are complements. Gursky positions Ive as a figure on the cutting edge of techno-contemporaneity, a man who inhabits, and as much as any single individual, has designed, the early-twenty-first-century version of reality, where the privileged will work via cyberspace in cool, transparent structures like this one, a flagship of the future, still lightly tethered to planet Earth.
With thanks for help from Sarah Ganz Blythe, David Frankel, Peter Galassi, Daniel Hewett, and Ijlal Muzaffar.
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FASHION AND ART For the third installment of our Fashion and Art series, we offer a conversation between Jonathan Anderson, creative director of JW Anderson and Loewe, and Derek Blasberg. They discuss Anderson’s engagement with art-historical figures and his commitment to fostering new talent with the Loewe Craft Prize.
PART 3: JONATHAN ANDERSON
add another rung to that foundaDEREK BLASBERG: You and I are supposed to talk about the intertion and then not even stop there. section of the fashion world with We’ve done things outside of craft art and contemporary design, but too, working with people like the with you, there are so many places artist Anthea Hamilton when she to start. You head the Loewe Foundid the Duveen Galleries at Tate dation Craft Prize; you have a colBritain. We helped her make the laboration with the estate of Tom costumes that she wanted. The of Finland that’s about to come Foundation is an evolving thing, out; you’ve worked with the founand yes, it’s got the word Loewe in dation of David Wojnarowicz— the name, but for me it was where JONATHAN ANDERSON: We we could put money and support have another one coming out with into something more detached Wojnarowicz soon too. from the brand. It’s got its own DB And another with Paul Thek. team, it’s got its own thing. And So where do you want to start? I think it’s very important today. JA At the beginning? I’m the We’re seeing this throughout the world: brands need to be able to creative director of two brands, recognize their cultural responsiLoewe and my own brand, JW bility. For Loewe it was about proAnderson. I’ve always asked, “How do you show your influences tecting artisans, the people who and at the same time create a platmake these things. form to convey a message? ” At DB I know that you started your Loewe I wanted to build a platform eponymous brand, JW Anderson, that was trying to break down the before you started working with barriers between craft and art and Loewe. Talk to me a bit about your fashion. That’s why we started the process and how fine art informs Craft Prize, and to use the influwhat you do. ence of the brand to promote JA Let’s take David Wojnaroyoung, new, or forgotten talent. wicz. I’ve been obsessed with him DB In fashion we’ve seen many since university. He was like a gay crossovers with art—an obvious icon to me. When I was conceptualizing the identity of what we were example is what Gianni Versace Above: Eric Gamperl, Tree of Life 2, 2016, oak, 20 7⁄ 8 × 20 × 36 ¼ inches (53 × 51 × 92 cm). trying to build as a brand, I thought did with Andy Warhol—but I havPhoto: courtesy Loewe en’t seen as much emphasis put Wojnarowicz’s burning-house Below: David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Burning House), 1982, stencil and spray paint, 24 × 17 7⁄ 8 on crafts or handiworks or textiles image [1982], for instance, would inches (60.8 × 45.4 cm). Photo: courtesy JW Anderson as you do. Why was that a big deal complement but not overpower Opposite: Jonathan Anderson. Photo: courtesy Loewe the general attitude of the guys we for you? JA One of my fashion heroes, were hoping to dress. whom I’ve never met, is Issey Miyake. Since the early ’80s, Issey Miyake, DB Have you ever seen Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance [2018]? through his work, has promoted people like the potters Dame Lucie JA Yes. Rie and Jennifer Lee, he’s been looking at craft and thinking about how DB For some reason, when you mentioned Wojnarowicz’s burning his platform could promote it. I’ve always been personally interested in house, it reminded me of the house that appears at the end of the first act. doing that too, so how could I, with a brand based on the art of making JA What’s fascinating about good art like Wojnarowicz’s is that it will bags by hand, give a bigger audience to an always conjure something. Whether it’s artist who makes amazing ceramic bowls about politics or the aids epidemic or Vietor glasswork? I wanted to give more exponam, when art is very good it will hold its sure to craft as a discipline and at the same political value in different periods. It doesn’t time increase people’s knowledge of it. matter if it was done in the early ’80s, it’s Craft has had this odd connotation that it’s still relevant today. not contemporary art, but I think, in today’s DB You do much in the queer art space. world, we’ve broken down all these barriJA Well, I am queer. ers. When you look at people like Lucie Rie DB Wait! You are? or Hans Coper, their works are sculptural JA [Laughs] I like the relationships in that and they’re just as important as sculpture. space. Peter Hujar with David Wojnarowicz. When I look at a Coper, I think it can be just Then you have Paul Thek—all of these interas powerful as a Giacometti. esting dialogues. Look at Paul Cadmus, DB When you told your bosses at LVMH George Platt Lynes: they’re in different that you wanted to create a prize for crafts, time periods but the support mechanism what was their response? is similar. It’s like defiance through art. I JA They were incredibly supportive. I like the romance in it. Sometimes I strugshould mention that Loewe has had a foungle with blockbuster art because I feel like dation for poetry since the 1980s, awardI can’t find the romance. I like digging into ing one of the most important prizes for movements of people. Think of someone poetry in the Spanish language. [The Funlike Tom of Finland: he comes out of World dación Loewe’s poetry prize, the Premio War II, does these images that birth a clothInternacional de Poesía, was established ing movement, a queer-culture movement, in 1988 by the foundation’s president at the a very provocative aesthetic, and at the time, Enrique Loewe, together with the poet same time you have people like George Luis Antonio de Villena and the editor Jesús Platt Lynes taking incredible pictures in the Visor.] So with the Craft Prize I hoped to ’40s—like, incredible pictures. 118
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DB It took me a long time to never thought much about the relation between fashion and craft. come around to Tom of Finland’s Was that sort of the point? work as an artistic movement. I was such a prude, I always wrote JA I don’t think it was intentional it off as pornography or fetishism. in the beginning, but I’ve seen the JA It took me a long time to get support mechanisms the Craft my head around Tom of Finland, Prize has given to craftspeople and I think it’s really brought craft too. I remember many years ago into consciousness. Edmund de I bought two drawings that had Waal has done something similar. been a gift from Tom of Finland to the owner of a cinema in GlasI’ve met Edmund several times. gow. They came up at auction. We used to have a store in Ibiza and he did a show at the museum What I found so amazing about there; I also remember that when I them is, he was the most incredible draftsman. If you look at the was at university and was collectlevel of detail in there, those drawing ceramics, across the road from ings are incredible—they come to the British Museum there was a litlife and they’re ultimately about tle ceramics gallery that was selling some of his small, domestic storytelling. When I fall in love pieces. That’s when I first bought with something I get very obsessive about it. One of my all-time his work. Years later he did a talk for us and I could see his contribufavorite historical artists is Paul Thek. I struggle to think how peotions in terms of the ceramics landple like Damien Hirst would exist scape. Now, with Gagosian, he’s without Paul Thek. really transformed craft into conDB Often, for me anyway, legititemporary art. He took a massive mizing fashion in the eyes of constep, and it’s blurred this boundtemporary-art people can be a ary, which I think is good because it’s in the blurring of boundaries daunting process. Does it ever come up in your process, or when that I think you find excitement you’re working? now. A lot of amazing textile artJA Sometimes I do get scared ists have cropped up in the last ten years. that we’re not going to do the art DB It’s nice to see the lines justice, but that’s my only fear. Above: JW Anderson × Tom of Finland tote bag in felt with leather. Photo: courtesy JW Anderson blending, merging, seeping into Over time, I’ve started to develop Below: Jennifer Lee, Pale, Shadowed Speckled Traces, Fading Ellipse, Bronze Specks, Tilted Shelf, each other. a barometer of when is the right 2017, stoneware clay and natural oxides mixed into clay, 6 7⁄ 8 × 6 3 ⁄ 8 × 12 ¼ inches (17.4 × 16 × 31 cm). Photo: courtesy Loewe JA I did a show [in 2017] at the moment and when is the wrong Hepworth Wakefield [museum in moment, because you have to Opposite: Paul Hameline in Loewe shirt featuring David Wojnarowicz artwork. Photo: courtesy Loewe Wakefield, West Yorkshire] called give it space—sometimes it’s better to support an artist than to work Disobedient Bodies, and that was with them. the moment when I started to fall in love with the idea of breaking down DB I don’t know a lot about Paul Thek’s work except this one series barriers between architecture, contemporary art, dance, and theater. I called Diver [1969–70]. tried to put everything onto a creative map with no hierarchies between JA I love that series. It’s all painted on newspapers and then suspended fashion and contemporary art and ceramics. When I did that show, one of between sheets of glass. One of his most famous series is the Meat my all-time favorite ceramicists, Magdalene Odundo, did these incredible Pieces [1963–66], which look like slabs of meat set in tanks—those are vessels. I was obsessed with how they crossed into this bodily form—they what remind me of early Hirst. I’m always looking at precursors. What I look like they’re alive. There’s something about making something with love about the art world is that you’re able to be referential and that’s okay, your hands in coil format. They’re quite physical pieces. But yeah, she is because that’s progress. a hero of mine. DB Is it hard to be referential in DB You’re doing a service to this fashion? art form. JA It’s harder because we havJA A lot of people maybe ten en’t built a culture of reference. I years ago weren’t really thinking think it’s good that Hirst goes back of craft as art, or giving it creative to Thek’s meat idea: when I think of merit. What I hope is that through Thek’s slabs of meat with flies on talking about it more, and with the them, I think of Hirst’s cow head Loewe Craft Prize and what I do with flies, and of the progression with JW Anderson, we’re shining of an established idea with a difa light on it. Tapestry can be as ferent viewpoint. powerful as painting. There was a DB W h e r e a s i n f a s h i o n , i f historical period where tapestries were considered one of the highyou re-create something you’re copying. est and most expensive art forms. JA Look at Andy Warhol reLook at the tapestries Raphael creating the Mona Lisa. And don’t designed for the Sistine Chapel. forget that Robert Rauschenberg DB You’ve been to the Cloisters was screen-printing too. In art, in New York, haven’t you? With all ideas are cumulative, whereas in those great unicorns? fashion I think they can sometimes JA Yes, but not recently. be combative. DB Well, there you go. Nex t DB To be candid with you, before season? I came to the Loewe Craft Prize, I JA Unicorns. Done! 121
LOCKDOWN: HENRI MATISSE’S DOMESTIC INTERIORS John Elderfield reexamines Matisse’s Piano Lesson (1916) and Music Lesson (1917), considering the works’ depictions of domestic space during the tumult of World War I. 122
Those interested in modern art who have been in voluntary isolation with a partner and children since the spring may have wondered: do we have images of what family life was like for the great early modernists? The answer is: at first, yes. As the nineteenth century advanced, it became increasingly common for married bourgeois couples in France to sleep together in double beds, and for much of their private time after marriage to be consumed with children. Greater intimacy between husband and wife, accompanied by closer family relationships generally, meant that paintings abounded of bourgeois parents with their children, including paintings of artists’ families.1 And so it remained through Impressionism. But the sterner modernism that followed was less forgiving of such potentially sentimental subjects, which remained the province of more traditional painters—artists who remained happy to record parents with the children they had begun to call by silly but touching pet names (as they often also did each other), and who posed proudly as families in their overstuffed living rooms. But Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso? Actually, three of Matisse’s most important paintings are of his family: The Painter’s Family, The Piano Lesson, and The Music Lesson.2 What follows concentrates on the last two, especially the third. As will become apparent, their implications bear significantly on our present domestic situations, isolated from the viral chaos around us, and not only because both of them depict home schooling. Two Lessons, Two Styles These two works were painted in the years 1916–17, but in what order is extremely pertinent to their meanings. Before Alfred H. Barr, Jr., The Museum of Modern Art’s founding director, published his great 1951 monograph on Matisse—the first to establish a plausible chronology of the artist’s work—it was not known which canvas came first. As Barr reported, Pierre Matisse, the artist’s younger son, was “quite certain that the more abstract of the two, The Piano Lesson, is the earlier,” while the artist’s wife, Amélie, remembered that “the more abstract canvas was as usual painted after the more realistic one.”3 Had Madame Matisse been correct, the reputation of The Music Lesson would be akin to that of the first, freer versions of other pairs of the artist’s
paintings: though not of the same order as the succeeding, more rigorous composition, it would be seen as an accomplished work. However, as Barr realized, it was Pierre Matisse who was correct. As a result, The Music Lesson has widely been seen as a regression on the artist’s part—a move away from the radical invention of his work of the 1910s, and one leading to the more traditional naturalism that would flourish in the 1920s. So infuriated about this interpretation was the critic Dominique Fourcade that in 1986 he described its proponents as evidencing “satisfaction in letting the artist die in 1916 with La Leçon de piano . . . even if that meant letting him be reborn from nothingness” in the 1930s, to again work “abstractly and without transition, to the cut-outs at the end of his life.”4 I was not alone in thinking that “letting the artist die” was hyperbole on Fourcade’s part, but it proved no exaggeration: a decade or so later, in 1998, art historian Yve-Alain Bois was writing that with The Music Lesson Matisse “takes leave of himself, and of what I have called his system,” by which Bois meant the conception of painting that the artist had formed a decade earlier and employed through the creation of The Piano Lesson.5 Clearly, if Matisse “takes leave of himself, and . . . his system” in The Music Lesson, then, for Bois, he does at that moment die, at least artistically. To compare these two paintings, then, is unlike comparing any other pair of paintings by Matisse: it is to adjudicate a controversy. Family Paintings Let us begin with what the two paintings have in common: size, medium, and subject matter. Both are about eight feet tall by seven feet wide, with The Piano Lesson very slightly the larger of the pair. This makes them the largest paintings Matisse ever made, with the exception of his few imagined compositions: Dance and Music, of 1909–10, and Bathers by a River and The Moroccans, both completed more or less at the same time as The Piano Lesson. Like most of Matisse’s paintings, they were painted in oil on canvas. To turn to subject matter is to open the pages of a very extensive literature, some of which I myself have written and which interested readers can easily find.6 But at least a summary is needed here, for these two paintings are exceptional both in their
particular choice of subject and in their relationship to works on a similar subject. In the latter respect they belong to a long sequence of the artist’s paintings of a privileged interior space, either home or studio or both at the same time. As with some but not all earlier such paintings—the most celebrated example being The Red Studio (1911)—the objects depicted within their interiors have allusive or symbolic qualities, either conventional or original to Matisse. And, like most but not all of the paintings in this subcategory, the manner in which the interior and the objects within it are painted explicitly participates in the shaping of these qualities. To further reduce the field of comparison, these are, as we have heard, family paintings, preceded in this respect by only The Painter’s Family of 1911.7 To be precise, The Piano Lesson shows only one member of the family—Pierre, the artist’s younger son— while The Music Lesson, just like The Painter’s Family, shows all of its members: Matisse’s eldest child, Marguerite, stands beside Pierre at the piano; his older brother, Jean, sits at the left, smoking while reading; the artist’s wife, Amélie, is outside in the garden; and though Matisse himself goes unseen, he is alluded to through a prominent depiction of his violin, which rests on the piano. It is truly a painting of a painter’s family; and Matisse himself titled it La famille. It was renamed The Music Lesson by Albert C. Barnes, never one to shy from taking such liberties, after it entered his collection (now the collection of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) in 1923.8 These paintings, and especially the second, belong to a long tradition of representations of one and usually more members of a family in an explicitly domestic space, and engaged in an activity or activities appropriate to it. The most prominent antecedents are the paintings of, and made for, the comfortable bourgeois households of seventeenth-century Holland. Eugène Fromentin, in his book Les maîtres d’autrefois of 1876, proposed that Dutch art, famous for its domestic interiors, effectively began in 1609, with the beginning of the twelve-year truce in the Eighty Years’ War with Spain.9 Art historian Svetlana Alpers, to whom I owe this observation, points out that wartime paintings of guardrooms and garrisons were the forerunners of these domestic interiors; familial intimacy would have been understood to be the counterpart of martial camaraderie.
Opposite: Henri Matisse, The Music Lesson, 1917, oil on canvas, 96 ½ × 83 inches (245.1 × 210.8 cm), The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Photo: © 2020 The Barnes Foundation This page: Henri Matisse, The Painter’s Family, 1911, oil on canvas, 56 ¼ × 76 3⁄8 inches (143 × 194 cm), The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin For all pages: Artworks by Henri Matisse © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916, oil on canvas, 96 ½ × 83 ¾ inches (245.1 x 212.7 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York
By now, alarm bells should be sounding, at least for those who know that the years 1916 and 1917, when Matisse made these two paintings, were very bad years indeed for France in World War I, with more than half a million dead in 1916 and almost as many the following year. Moreover, these works were painted in the living room of Matisse’s home, looking out onto its back garden, where his studio stood. 10 The house was in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris that had transformed itself into a center for the military aviation industry, producing fighter planes; and the household was impoverished by the war, whose guns could actually be heard from the garden on quiet days—guns, and also massive explosions from military mines, both utterly destructive of the French countryside. The loudest of these—on June 7, 1917, during the Battle of Messines—was the product of 600 tons of explosives that blew off the crest along the entire length of the Messines Ridge; it was heard as far away as Dublin.11 The British general who ordered this offensive famously remarked, “We may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.”12 This was not only a war between nations
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but also had quickly become a war against nature. It was around this time that The Music Lesson was painted, in midsummer 1917. That was also when— as Matisse wrote in a letter to his friend the painter Charles Camoin—“Something important has happened in my house: Jean, my eldest, has left to join the regiment at Dijon.”13 What may at first sight appear to be a scene of cultured and contented domestic harmony, then, was about to shattered. This is not only a family painting; it is also a war painting. Much ha s been w r it ten of t he reduc t ive, “abstract” vocabulary of The Piano Lesson as the result of Cubist geometry, on the one hand, and wartime avoidance of luxury, on the other. These factors may indeed have been sources for Matisse as he painted this picture, but a source may or may not be called into play in the finished form of a work of art.14 As I see it, the war as a source is actually called into play more fully in The Music Lesson than in its predecessor, if less obviously. Knowing that Jean Matisse was headed for guardrooms or garrisons aids a martial association that may have been in his father’s mind, but this is present in the painting only for those who know it as well. In what follows, I
shall propose that the imaging of this sociable canvas itself invites interpretation as describing a family in a moment of lockdown against mindfulness of anything troublingly external, whereas The Piano Lesson pushes out of our minds all but the moment of twilight grace that it represents.
Rooms with a View Let us now look at what the two paintings represent, and how they do so. As we have heard, The Piano Lesson shows solely the artist’s younger son, Pierre. He stares out toward us, even while lost in concentration, practicing on a very bourgeois Pleyel piano beside a French window open to the garden. Pierre was sixteen when the picture was painted but looks much younger. Since he and his father were the musicians of the family, he may be thought to function as a surrogate for the painter. In the bottom-left corner of the painting we see Matisse’s Decorative Figure of 1908, arguably the most sexual of his sculptures. Behind Pierre we may think we see a woman seated on a high stool, a severe, supervisory, arguably maternal presence, but this is actually a painting on the wall, Matisse’s Woman on a High Stool
(Germaine Raynal) of 1914, transformed to convey these qualities.15 On the rose cloth over the piano, a candle and a metronome recapitulate the opposition of vitality and logic that the sculpture and the painting introduce. Together, they also stress the measuring of time, while the carving around the reversed name of the piano on the music stand flows across time and space, like music, through the grillwork of the window. Time has stopped at a moment of fading, late-afternoon light in a dimly illuminated interior. An unseen light to the right traverses the scene, striking the boy’s forehead and shadowing a triangle on his far cheek; brightening the salmon-orange curtain and the pale blue-gray of the partly closed right panel of the window; and illuminating a big triangular patch of lawn outside, the only visible feature of the darkened garden. It is the view of the room that matters. The colors, including that green triangle no more distant than anything else, complement one another in ways that activate the stillness of the scene. The orange converses with the pale blue, and the rose with the green; these are interrupted by a yellow and a black, all of them reconciled by the surrounding soft gray, which they appear to tint. The colors also resist being fully incorporated into the work of objective depiction, largely because they occupy such stark, autonomous shapes. Instead, the strips and shards of color may be imagined as organizing a simulacrum of the spatial experience of such a scene. They alternatively attract and repel each other, as if magnetized, tipping backward and forward in space, even as they shift in position across the plane of the picture. To follow their direction in the means and pace of our attention is to imagine a movement akin to walking through a room and registering the effects of parallax—the apparent displacement of objects in space due to changes in the position of the observer. With The Music Lesson, by contrast, everything appears utterly still, and no one looks out of the room; we are excluded. However, we do now see the garden. More precisely, we are shown a view not into the garden but of it, for Matisse has given it the appearance of a painted screen rolled down at the back of the living room, the gray frame around it containing a scene no more real than that of the woman on a high stool in the ocher-framed painting
beside it. As such, it may be thought to conceal the reality of what is outside. Prominent beyond the pool is a much enlarged reprise of Matisse’s sculpture Reclining Nude I (Aurora) as re-represented in his Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (both 1907), the luxuriant backdrop here substituting for the North African setting of the earlier painting, and similarly enhancing the nude’s sensuality.16 The garden erased by twilight in The Piano Lesson may seem a better response to a war that was more ruthlessly and extensively destructive of landscape than any previous. But as the critic Paul Fussell observed of the literature produced during World War I, “If the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”17 Whereas, in making The Piano Lesson, Matisse condensed, eliminating detail, in The Music Lesson he veiled and washed over drawn detail with thinly applied paint. He had been working like this since making his late, dark-and-sculptural Fauve paintings, such as Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra; and he continued to do so in a less sculptural way, and with a lighter palette, even while making more severe, opaque pictures throughout his so-called “experimental period,” of which The Piano Lesson was a summative work. The manner in which The Music Lesson was painted is less a fall from modernist grace, as many critics have characterized it, than a recovery of that late Fauve manner, but with a more intense, indeed almost hallucinatory palette. Leave-taking Bois said Matisse took leave of a “system” after painting The Piano Lesson. He characterized that system as “an all-over conception of the canvas” that is “the product of a total democracy on the picture plane, of a dispersion of forces: our gaze is forbidden to focus on any particular area of the picture.”18 I agree that that painting’s successor is a leave-taking painting, but not in that sense: I think Bois’s description also applies to The Music Lesson, and that it is as summative in its own way as its predecessor. The two works encapsulate the momentum of preceding domestic and studio interiors in two different keys, the earlier work drawing together the achievements of the four preceding extraordinary years, the later looking back a decade to see what earlier innovations should be preserved. And it is the later work, with its extraordinarily disjointed composition—of
which more in a moment—that shuttles around our gaze the more frenetically. The putative sweetness and naturalism of The Music Lesson may lull us into believing that it is an undemanding work, but it is as undemanding as, say, Watteau’s paintings of disconnected figures, made two centuries earlier, from which it draws inspiration. Barr perceptively described its style as “descriptive rococo.”19 The artist and critic Amédée Ozenfant invoked another eighteenth-century artist when he observed of the Nice-period paintings that followed The Music Lesson, “This hankering for comfort. . . . When I hear him taking this line à la Fragonard, I have the feeling it is a feint.”20 I myself have the feeling that The Music Lesson is a feint, challenging our preconceptions, at the end of Matisse’s most extremist period of modernism, as to what a modern painting can be. I therefore find myself disagreeing not only with Bois, who sees The Music Lesson as Matisse’s leave-taking from his time as a modernist painter,
Left: Henri Matisse, Decorative Figure, 1908, cast 1950, bronze, 283⁄8 × 20 ¼ × 12 ¼ inches (72.1 × 51.4 × 31.1 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 Above: Henri Matisse, Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal), 1914, oil on canvas, 57 7⁄8 × 37 5⁄8 inches (147 × 95.5 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift and bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York
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but also with Fourcade, who wants to see the artist’s career as “an uninterrupted story.”21 Painting his son Jean’s leave-taking, Matisse does paint a leave-taking of his own, a moving on from what he had achieved over the past few years. He was very clear about this, saying, “If I had continued down the . . . road which I knew so well, I would have ended up as a mannerist.”22 What he ends up as— predicated in The Music Lesson—is an artist determined not to be constrained by the universalizing modernism that he had inherited; hence his fascination with the prerevolutionary eighteenth century.23 This led him to develop from previously unexplored features of his post-Fauve paintings a highly self-conscious, even metapictorial, art of spectacle. Whereas the modernism of The Piano Lesson is so tautly drawn that we never think of an actual pianist wedged behind the sheet music, the naturalism of The Music Lesson invites us to imagine the members of the family having taken their places where Matisse shows them. If we do imagine that, we must conclude that all of them are oblivious to what is around them, and to each other—except for the intimate couple at the piano, Marguerite protective of her younger brother, Pierre, since the elder one will soon be leaving. Both Jean and Amélie are alone. If we know of his approaching mobilization, we may guess why. Amélie’s isolation—outside the oasislike part of the garden, with its voluptuous sculpture—leaves little to the imagination. Still, whether paired or alone, the family sit in a cramped, busily claustrophobic space. And whether music-making or reading or whatever it is that Madame Matisse is doing—knitting, perhaps—they are not at work; their occupations are pastimes, ways of passing the time. Yet if the The Piano Lesson evokes time measured, The Music Lesson suggests time paused—whether forever or just momentarily is unclear, but Matisse has certainly hit the pause button, with his family at once busily occupied and locked down in place. Speaking recently of Matisse’s contemporaneous Garden at Issy, art historian T. J. Clark refers to “those pictures—the key pictures, most often, in modernism—where deep inward concentration on means, fierce enclosure in a pictorial world, results in a strength that is not like any kind of pictorial strength we have seen before.”24 The Music Lesson both reflects fierce enclosure and is a picture of one; however, it is a thing of parts and patches less well guarded than The Piano Lesson.
The vivid coloration of The Music Lesson adds an apparitional, somewhat exotic quality to this family tableau, the pink answering the green, the turquoise the brown, and the gray binding the other colors while also separating out the soon-to-be soldier. Barnes compared its large geometric planes of flat color to those of what he called “Oriental art,” an association also applicable to the garden statue and linking The Music Lesson to The Painter’s Family, which was influenced by Persian miniatures. 25 As in that earlier painting, the planes, piled one above the other, clash dissonantly, and our unified experience of the picture is to be found in our experience of its discord, not in its formal coherence as a decoratively patterned surface.26 Here, the superimposed flickering filaments of overlaid curvilinear drawing, which camouflage the meeting of the planes as they speak to the garden foliage, increase the sense of a composition poised on the brink of decomposition. As art historian Karen K. Butler acutely observes, “Overall, the strong tension between geometry and arabesque, or order and chaos, creates a mesmerizing subliminal stasis.”27 She adds that while The Music Lesson has been associated with nationalistic wartime critiques of avant-garde art in favor of traditional themes—here, “la bonne famille française”— its formal discord is complemented by its “thematic opposition of tropical and sexual luxuriance with bourgeois order.”28 This is not a regressive work, and there is nothing in it of a retour à l’ordre. Certainly the feint that it has seemed to introduce would become a way of disarming an audience hostile to modernism, but this did not prevent the result from being surreptitiously challenging, often melancholic, and affecting as well as sweetly beautiful. And the sweetness and beauty are obviously as much a challenge to modernist taste as their opposites are to antimodernist ones. In the end, though, what is at once most challenging to accommodate in our familiar picture of Matisse, and most familiar in the art that surrounds us now, is the assertion of the viability of aesthetic spectacle—the false scenic magic of what Charles Baudelaire called “favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision.”29 A Man Who Is Not at the Front This said, I must turn in conclusion to a question that readers may have been asking: even if The Piano Lesson and The Music Lesson are war paintings in
the sense that they reflect their creation during wartime—the forces of order and chaos at odds in the family-lockdown canvas especially—they offer no response to the true horrors of the battlefields. In an earlier issue of the Quarterly (Spring 2020) I wrote of how, a half century earlier, the French painter Édouard Manet had faced the question of how to be an activist in his art by vigorously drawing attention to a single indefensible episode of violence, the shocking execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who had been imposed on that country as its ruler through French neocolonialism. What, then, are we to make of Matisse’s silence on the unparalleled slaughter during the years of World War I? The answer has two parts. The first is that Matisse volunteered for military duty, and even purchased boots in anticipation of serving, but was rejected owing to his age (he was forty-four) and weak heart. He was deeply upset—disappointed and I think ashamed—at not directly serving his country, especially since many of his friends and colleagues did serve, including his close friends Camoin and the painter Albert Marquet, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire and Georges Braque, both of whom were badly wounded and returned as war heroes. Others, however, were successful in escaping service, Robert Delaunay fleeing to Switzerland and Marcel Duchamp to the United States, and we must forget the honor claimed by many of those in the United States who refused the draft during the Vietnam War if we are to understand the dishonor assigned to those who did so in France in 1914. For Matisse, that would have been out of the question. Second: Matisse spoke of sharing the sense of helplessness and revulsion that so many were feeling over the war, but he did help in practical ways.30 One of the first results of Germany’s invasion of France, for example, was the occupation of Matisse’s northern hometown of Bohain-en-Vermandois, which meant that the artist’s brother, Auguste, and some 400 other townsmen were deported to a German prison camp, leaving his seventy-year-old mother, Anna, alone and in failing health. Matisse sold prints in order to send 100 kilos of bread each week to these prisoners, who were at risk of dying from hunger.31 (Buying each week what works out to be 500 baguettes was no mean task during wartime.) Yet Matisse clearly felt deeply uncomfortable about the idea of making art that professed to make Left: Henri Matisse, Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, 1907, oil on canvas, 36 ¼ × 55 ¼ inches (92.1 × 140.3 cm), The Baltimore Museum of Art, Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: courtesy The Baltimore Museum of Art Opposite: Jean-Antoine Watteau, Fêtes Vénitiennes, 1718–19, oil on canvas, 26 7⁄8 × 23 ¼ inches (68.2 × 59 cm), National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
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a difference to what was happening on the battlefields. “Waste no sympathy on the idle conversation of a man who is not at the front,” he wrote to a gallerist, “and besides a man not at the front feels good for nothing.”32 It was impossible for Matisse to conceive of making war posters, as Raoul Dufy did; and paintings of battlefields, such as Félix Vallotton made, were obviously out of the question.33 Speaking for himself, he would write in 1951: “Despite pressure from certain conventional quarters, the war did not influence the subject of paintings, for we were no longer merely painting subjects. For those who could work there was only a restriction of means.”34 Matisse’s reaction to the privations of the war took the form of a self-imposed restriction of means, making do with less in his art as well as in his life. This response, which was ethical as well as pictorial, only increased the intensity of what he achieved. He spurned ostentation in both his personal and his public life, including refusing to draw attention to himself by staging solo exhibitions in Paris while his compatriots were in arms. And even as the Cubists, following Matisse’s own earlier lead, were enriching the color of their works in 1914, he refused ostentation in his art, too—then broke free with The Music Lesson to make his perhaps most underestimated major painting.
1. See Anne Martin-Fugier, “Bourgeois Rituals,” in Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 4, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 261–337, esp. “From Marriage to Family,” 321–22. 2. A fourth, lesser painting, Pianist and Checker Players of 1924, is a reprise of The Painter’s Family. Luxe, calme et volupté of 1904–05 is, obliquely, a family painting, albeit not set in an interior. Illustrations of these and other works mentioned but not illustrated in this essay may be easily found in my Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992). The present text is a substantially revised and expanded version of my essay “Un nouveau départ,” in Cécile Debray, Matisse: Paires et séries, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2012), 119–24. 3. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1951), 193. 4. Dominique Fourcade, “An Uninterrupted Story,” in Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916–1930, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1986), 47–48. 5. Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso, exh. cat., Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 29–30. 6. See my essays on The Piano Lesson in Matisse in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 114–16, and in Stephanie D’Alessandro and Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 290–93. The former speaks more of iconography, the latter more of the pictorial process, and both essays contain references to other literature on this painting and The Music Lesson. 7. See note 2 above on one later painting, Pianist and Checker Players. 8. The finest account of this painting is Karen K. Butler, “The Music Lesson,” in Yve-Alain Bois, ed., Matisse in the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation, 2015), 2:214–29. 9. See Svetlana Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 86–90. As Alpers points out, 83–84, Matisse’s Still Life after Jan Davidsz. De Heem’s “La Desserte” (1915) belongs to this discussion; on which see my discussion of this painting in Matisse: Radical Invention, 254–59. 10. Garden at Issy, a painting made in June–October 1917, around the same time as The Painter’s Family, includes a schematic image of the studio. 11. See D’Alessandro, “The Challenge of Painting,” and my “Charting a New Course,” both in Matisse: Radical Invention, respectively 262–69 and 310–19. 12. See Peter Barton, Peter Doyle, and Johan Vandewalle, Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers’ War 1914–1918 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005), 162–83. In Matisse: Radical Invention, 319, I relate this explosion to Matisse’s Shaft of Sunlight, also of summer 1917. 13. The family had been dreading this event, but Jean had volunteered and was therefore able to choose how he wished to serve. Probably on the basis of what he had seen in Issy, he opted to become an airplane mechanic, and soon left, to everyone’s relief, not for the front lines but to begin his mechanic’s training in Dijon. He was disgusted with the job within a fortnight, but at least he was not fighting in the mud of the trenches. See Matisse, letter to Charles Camoin, n.d. [summer 1917], in Claudine Grammont, ed., Correspondance entre Charles Camoin et Henri Matisse (Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1997), 105. 14. See Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–4. 15. Woman on a High Stool is a portrait not of Mme. Matisse but of Germaine Raynal, the then-nineteen-year-old wife of the critic Maurice Raynal, who was closely allied with the Cubists. Here, though, she fulfills a role in the painting, and by extension in the Matisse household, akin to that of the chilly, dignified Mme. Bellelli in Edgar Degas’s Bellelli Family of c. 1860, a figure who, in Martin-Fugier’s description, “accurately portrays the role of the
bourgeois mother.” “Bourgeois Rituals,” 269. 16. Matisse’s The Moroccans, another painting of a North African motif, conceived in 1912, was finally completed in November 1916, between the two family paintings and at a time of increasing concern for African soldiers involved in the war and visible on the streets of Paris. 17. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 231. Fussell continues, “Since war takes place outdoors and always within nature, its symbolic status is that of the ultimate antipastoral.” Matisse’s final two (of six) sessions of work on his Bathers by a River (conceived 1909), which took place in 1916 and 1917, transformed what had begun as a pastoral composition into what is commonly understood to be an antipastoral one. The Piano Lesson and The Music Lesson were among the paintings he made when taking a break from making the critical changes on that enormous canvas. Its six-part development is charted in Matisse: Radical Invention, 88–91, 104–07, 152–57, 174–77, 304–09, 346–49. 18. Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 29–30. 19. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, 194. 20. Amédée Ozenfant, Mémoires, 1886–1962 (Paris: Segher, 1968), 215; quoted here from Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 506. I have discussed this statement previously in Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, 37–41. 21. Fourcade, “An Uninterrupted Story.” 22. Matisse, quoted in Ragnar Hoppe, “På visit hos Matisse,” in Städer och Konstnärer, resebrev och essäer om Konst (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1931), 196, recording a visit to Matisse in 1919. Trans. in Jack Flam, ed., Matisse on Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 75. 23. Edward Said has relevant things to say here in “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” in his On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 25–47. 24. T. J. Clark’s lecture “Attention to What? Matisse’s Garden at Issy, 1917,” which speaks of Garden of Issy as reflecting its wartime creation, was delivered as part of the Glasgow International, March 2020. 25. Albert C. Barnes, The Art in Painting (Merion, PA: The Barnes Foundation Press, 1925), 360. Quoted here from Butler, “The Music Lesson,” 222. 26. I draw here on my remarks on The Painter’s Family in Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, 63. 27. Butler, “The Music Lesson,” 219. 28. Ibid., 227 n. 7, questioning the interpretation in Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 200–203. 29. I observed earlier that the garden in The Music Lesson resembles a painted screen rolled down at the back of the living room; in the passage quoted here, Charles Baudelaire is discussing his admiration for backdrop paintings on the stage. He concludes, “These things, so completely false, are for that very reason much closer to the truth.” Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” discussed in and here quoted from Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in his Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 193. 30. See Matisse, letter to René Jean, October 1, 1915, quoted in my entry on Still Life after Jan Davidsz. De Heem’s “La Desserte”, in Matisse: Radical Invention, 255. 31. See D’Alessandro’s entry on For the Civil Prisoners of Bohain-en Vermandois and her essay “The Challenge of Painting,” both in Matisse: Radical Invention, respectively 249, 264–65. 32. Matisse, letter to Léonce Rosenberg, June 1, 1916, quoted in D’Alessandro, “The Challenge of Painting,” 263. 33. On the activities of French artists during the war, see Silver, Esprit de corps, and Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War, exh. cat. (London: Barbican Art Gallery, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 34. Matisse, in E. Tériade, “Matisse Speaks,” Art News Annual 21 (1952): 40–71, quoted here from Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, 205.
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GREGORY CREWDSON
AN ECLIPSE OF MOTHS
Gregory Crewdson discusses his new work with actress Cate Blanchett.
Opening spread: Gregory Crewdson, Red Star Express, 2018–19, digital pigment print, 56 ¼ × 94 7⁄8 inches (127 × 225.7 cm) Opposite: Gregory Crewdson, Starkfield Lane, 2018–19, digital pigment print, 56 ¼ × 94 7⁄8 inches (127 × 225.7 cm) Following spread: Gregory Crewdson, Redemption Center, 2018–19, digital pigment print, 56 ¼ × 94 7⁄8 inches (127 × 225.7 cm) Artwork © Gregory Crewdson
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CATE BLANCHETT I have to say, without sounding stalker-ish, that I’m a huge admirer of your work. There are a thousand questions I want to ask you. Your works have really affected the way I look at the world, but I suppose specifically how I look at America. I think it’s hard not to find, or to search out, social commentary in art, even at the best of times. Everything seems so resonant to this strange, vertiginous time that we find ourselves in at the moment. And I’m wondering, given that you’re about to unveil a new body of work, how you feel about the way that it might be received? Do you think about your work in a social-commentary way? One work in particular from An Eclipse of Moths really struck me, and that was Red Star Express [2018–19], with the teenagers looking at a truck on fire, each seemingly unaware of their relationship with one another. Where do you sit in terms of social commentary and how the work might be received? GREGORY CREWDSON Well, it’s very interesting to me because I made this series of pictures in 2018 and 2019. And I knew that I was dealing with certain particularly American themes about isolation and a certain kind of brokenness, I would say. But for the most part I was just building on my own iconography, making what I hoped would be beautiful and mysterious pictures. My central intention is to make a picture that feels moving on some level, but also haunting. I’m really interested in what I call the uncanny. That is, I’m trying to explore what, on the surface at least, seems to be everyday life, and trying to find within that some unexpected anxiety, or fear, or wonder, even. In that way the pictures are very much in line with all my previous pictures, but as with anything else, context, the period we’re in, shapes a work of art. The pictures can’t help but take on new meanings as time passes; that’s just part of how art works. I feel that all art functions in reference to other pictures while at the same time referring to your own particular story, you know, the story that we all have within us. And then, finally, it makes some kind of connection to the moment we’re in. So I’m hoping that these pictures, in one way or another, do all those things. CB Speaking of the uncanny, your titles are so enigmatic, unexpected, and often mysterious. I mean, why An Eclipse of Moths? GC Well, it’s an actual term to describe the congregation of moths to a light. I thought that was such a beautiful metaphor on many levels, starting with the fact that I think all my pictures at their foundation are concerned with light. All of the narrative codes in my pictures use light as a way of transforming the subject or making the picture. And then one of the themes that run through the pictures is the streetlamp. It’s in almost every single picture. I’ve thought of the photographs’ lone figures wandering through empty streets in that way: they are drawn to the streetlamp almost as a kind of force, or for some sense of the possibility of redemption. CB A woman walking alone at night thinks of a streetlamp as a place of refuge, but there’s also something sinister and alien about the iconography of the streetlamp. In Starkfield Lane [2018–19] the lamp has actually collapsed—there’s something very vulnerable about the streetlamps in the series, they’re not places of refuge. And the streets themselves seem like the streets of Los Angeles and every major city around America right now [during this lockdown]. It’s almost like you’ve got second sight or something. There’s no comfort in the light, somehow, in the ways there perhaps had been in previous works of yours.
One of my primary interests in these pictures was the theme of emptiness. Where a lot of my previous work was more predetermined in terms of the story lines, I wanted these to feel open-ended and unresolved in terms of what’s happening, what happened before, and what will happen after. I’m really hoping these pictures feel somewhat outside of time, and yet, almost paradoxically, relevant to the moment we’re in. If you notice, there are no signs of contemporary life in the pictures. There are no cell phones. There are no new cars. I want everything in the pictures to feel both nondescript and slightly worn, slightly broken. So I look for locations that can accommodate that narrative or that state, and we put in our own prop cars and our own street signs, and we work closely with the city to make sure that no streets are paved and that all the grass remains unmowed. We want the feeling of a place that’s been somewhat forgotten and neglected. We change out all the streetlamps—we actually put different bulbs into the streetlamps, and we work with the fire department to wet down all the streets, and we use fog machines. All this is part of an effort to create a world that feels both familiar and enchanting at the same time. So if the pictures have a social commentary, it’s elliptical. It doesn’t reveal itself overtly; it should remain a mystery. All photographs do that in a way— no still photograph can fully reveal its meaning, it’s always left as a question. That’s part of why I respond to photography in the way I do, unlike other narrative forms like movies or literature. CB I find myself returning continually to works of yours, and it’s really interesting that the meaning and the reference points resonate with different pockets of my life. In both theater and film, when the set designer or the director prepares a mood board, there’s so often a Gregory Crewdson photo on it to say “We want this type of atmosphere.” Your images are so loaded with atmosphere that you can place your own reference points on top. Do the concepts crystallize as images for you in an almost dreamlike moment? Where do they begin? GC The process always begins with location. I drive around endlessly—I think being removed from the place, slightly detached, is important, and through that process of returning over and over to a place, an image will come to mind. And usually a quite simple one. I work early to write descriptions with Juliane [Hiam]. We write a one-page description of what’s happening in that picture. That becomes the guidepost for the process. Then I work very closely with my director of photography, Rick Sands, whom I’ve worked with for many years. Slowly but surely, through a long process of preproduction and then production and postproduction, we build up to the making of the picture. CB I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but being Australian, when I drive long distances there’s this strange vertiginous thing that happens: even though the steering wheel is here, it could be seven or eight meters away. I often get that vertiginous relationship with your work, too—I’m only arrested from completely falling in by the players, the personas who are in there. And it’s interesting, in this new body of work, the players seem dwarfed by the environment—they seem more inconsequential than they’ve ever been in your photographs. Why is that? GC I really wanted the pictures to be first and foremost about place. These figures exist in a place that feels meaningful and specific and particular. The figures are centrally important, but it’s their scale GC
A limited-edition book with a text by Jeff Tweedy, published in a series of 750 signed copies, will be released by Aperture to coincide with the exhibition of An Eclipse of Moths at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, in the fall.
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in relationship to the larger world that really establishes those themes of dislocation and isolation: the figure gets lost in an expanse of the larger world, or figures are isolated from each other. That dynamic of social distance exists in all of the pictures. CB In some of your earlier work, the figures somehow seem to be experiencing entrapment. But there’s a slightly different quality here: they’re at bus stops, they’re on doorsteps, they’re on stoops. It’s not being trapped, it’s a profound sense of waiting. Maybe I feel that acutely because of the state we’re finding ourselves in globally, but I found that really resonant in the images. GC You named something I’m maybe not even conscious of but I think is absolutely correct—that moment of deliberation or waiting. I think that’s key to the work, that psychological paralysis of some sort. It wasn’t something I was really conscious of when I was making the pictures, but looking back at it now, I see a connection of sorts to a series of health issues I was facing. Onto all of my pictures, as all artists do, I project whatever fears or anxieties I’m having. It’s not conscious. Maybe part of what I was looking for in these figures is some version of myself: on some basic level I feel my pictures are revealing of my persona, my character, my biography. CB There’s a strong relationship in your work between the inside and the outside. Is there a moment in your childhood or early on that you now look back on and think, “That was when I started to form a sense of myself in relation to my aesthetic, in relation to the outside world”? GC Well, my father was a very powerful figure for me. He was a psychoanalyst, and when I was growing up, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, he had his office in the basement of our home, underneath the living room. CB Oh, okay. You could hear the screams and the cries [laughs]. GC That was defining for me on many different levels. One of my earliest memories is of watching patients come up the street and go through the basement door, and then there’d be these sessions happening underneath our living room floor. We had to be very quiet during those times, and I remember I used to put my ear to the floorboards and try to overhear the sessions. I never was really able to do that, but that image of lying on the living room floor, trying to hear my father’s sessions with his patients, I think is defining for me: it’s trying to look in everyday life and search beneath the surface for a secret, something forbidden, you know, and trying to project an image in my head of what that might be. That runs through absolutely every one of my pictures, and I think I’ve carried it with me throughout my life—searching for meaning, searching for secrets, searching for mystery within everyday life from a certain distance. Like all photographers, I think, in one way or another I have a relationship to voyeurism. Photography gives you access to worlds that you wouldn’t ordinarily have. It gives you a license, an alibi, in a certain way. CB It’s like a child’s knowledge that there’s a parallel reality that you can’t name, you don’t have the language to participate in, but you can start to visualize. And it makes me think of Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, those great North American storywriters, and how the work understands and harnesses the banality in which the child lives, but the child understands the cataclysmic, you know? The narratives that you capture and create—do they form between your present and that past? Do you feel there’s always an interplay between your memory and your present state?
Any readings I can make of the pictures usually happen retrospectively. I wasn’t even aware when I was making those pictures that maybe they had to do with either some sort of larger social issue or something about my past or present concerns. I had no idea. It’s only now, when I look back at them, that I’m like, Oh yeah, I never really noticed these themes emerging, you know? Because I’m entirely invested in the singular moment, and I look at it so myopically, like my obsession with getting every blade of grass correct. I don’t really have the luxury, in a way, of looking on a larger scale and figuring out for myself what the pictures are about. Even now, I could hazard a guess, but I don’t think I’d really be interested in the pictures if I knew precisely what they were about. Ultimately, the picture has to lead to the next picture. It’s always a search to try to find something that’s continually slightly outside your grasp. CB There’s a writer, Michael Chekhov, who writes about acting and atmosphere, and in one story he describes a group of revelers coming into a haunted house, and either the atmosphere of the haunted house will gradually subdue the revelers or the revelers will change the atmosphere of the haunted house. There seems to be the same tension between your version of the revelers and the atmospheres that they find themselves in. And I’m wondering, sometimes you place professional actors inside your frames and other times the people are less well-known, almost found faces who are more incidental to the frame. The atmosphere has overwhelmed them. How do you talk to the people who populate your pictures? How do you lead them to understand the world they’re in and their part within it? GC Well, in this series, all the figures are from the area. We sometimes cast them hours before the picture, or we’d find someone on the street who I thought would be perfect, or I noticed them while we were location scouting a week before. They’re primarily people who live in these areas. We give them a description, and by the time they come on set, I know exactly how they’re going to be positioned. I know exactly what they’re going to be wearing and their gesture, it’s all in my head. I know exactly what I want from the figures and it’s usually almost nothing in terms of a gesture. I want less. I want a moment that feels almost emptied out. CB We were talking before about the notion of inside and outside. To go at it another way, I always think about the sublime when I look at your work, because there’s something about the towns always bordering the natural world. The relationship to nature that the towns have—towns are built to eradicate nature, but then we see nature’s coming back in. Particularly when the figures are either in the ground or in the water or by the water, they seem almost like fish out of water, returning to something but not knowing how to return. That relationship with nature is really powerful, and I wonder if it links for you to dormant, recessed, deep images from childhood. GC I’m so glad you mentioned the theme of nature because it’s central to the work. These pictures were made during the height of summer, which is critical. The relationship between these industrial landscapes and impinging nature— there’s a certain underlying suggestion of anxiety in that. But in the end it’s about renewal, and I think that’s really key: nature persists. I do think that ultimately the photographs offer some sense of hope, or beauty, or even redemption. GC
Today’s is a new world, forever changed by the spread of a novel coronavirus. When I began writing this essay over the December 2019 holiday break, the idea was to walk readers through my thinking (hence the title) and to trace the evolution of my work from early projects to recent paintings. I was writing both to contextualize my practice relative to the shifting media landscape that had inspired it—the previous “new world ”—and to punctuate a decade of artistic production. While I wasn’t able to finish the text in time for distribution at my London opening in January, as I’d hoped, I continued to write in the new year, finally finding the hours to hone and polish during the first weeks of quarantine. But since then, in just a matter of months, everything has shifted in ways that we are all still processing. While it’s hard to know wh a t to s a y o r t h i n k about this moment, suddenly, almost magically, the previous one appears clearer than ever in my rearview mirror. What used to resemble a living, breathing ecosystem now feels like a time capsule, and whether what happens next is a new chapter, a new book, or (perhaps most likely) a new l a n g u a ge altoge t he r, one thing’s for sure: it’s happening.
Saint Joan My l i fe c h a nge d on a Black Fr iday. T hat sounds a lot more ominous than it actually was—in fact, at the time it all felt rather benign. It was 2011, I was in Los Angeles, and just two days before the biggest shopping day of t he year I had attended a live conversation with Joan Didion at Sa int Vibiana’s Cathedral. T he night replays in memor y with cr ystal clarity—parking was a nightmare and the church was packed—but my friends got there early and saved me a seat so I could stop at home on my way downtown to pick up my copy of Play It As It Lays in the hope that Joan might sign it for me. This isn’t an essay about Didion or how much her writing influenced me in the decade after college, when I returned to Los Angeles, the city where I was born and raised and which I had already identified as the prime subject for my work. But it very well could be. After all, I’m a millennial, and at some point during the past decade Joan became one of my generation’s patron saints. For me, her work unlocks an acute understanding of modern California’s mythical history and culture while simultaneously providing a path to a better 136
understanding of my parents’ generation. In 2010–11 I was working on a project (As It Lays) I had titled after the novel I hoped she might inscribe at Saint Vibiana’s, and her work was top of mind. Once the program ended, my friends and I waited in line, inching our way down the nave before finally making it up onto the chancel to catch a closer glimpse of Joan’s fragile frame. There she was, poking out of a lavender pashmina and barely supporting her oversized glasses and a Sharpie. As she dedicated my book, I took a photo on my iPhone. Two days later I woke up with a fridge full of
always on my mind Alex Israel
Thanksgiving leftovers, oblivious to how much my life and art were both about to change. I’d be lying if I said I remembered the time of day, but at some point I picked up my phone, played with an app my friend Edison had just told me about, and posted that image of Joan, signing my book, into a feed. Like Baby Moses in a basket on a calm bank of the Nile, I sent my little square image off to live a life of its own in a foreign new land called Instagram. Maybe it was the famous old photos of Didion with her Corvette Stingray, or the Céline ad shot by Juergen Teller that debuted in January 2015, but whatever it was, in just a short time Joan’s presence across millennial consciousness was ubiquitous: her iconicity was cemented “on
the ’gram,” her saint status secure. Joan, avocado toast, the mannequin challenge. Before I knew it, that gently flowing river had transformed into a gushing waterfall of images and videos as Instagram grew to a scale beyond anything I could ever have imagined.
Finale I’m flashing even further back, to July 13, 2010. Where were you? I was home in bed watching budding lovers Kristin Cavallari and Brody Jenner bid farewell on a palm-tree-lined street, probably in West Hollywood, just a stone’s t h row f rom where I now live. Like many of the pivotal moments of my favor ite re a lity TV soap, The Hills, this scene was bathed in magic hour’s golden glow. As t he ca mera pulled back on the final shot of the series, however, something surreal happened: a wider view revealed that we weren’t with our stars on a real road in front of real palm trees. In fact, we were on a Hollywood backlot where an artificial mise-enscène, complete with backdrop and theatrical lighting, had been constructed to appear nonfictional—the implication being, as the show ended, t hat perhaps none of its “reality” had ever been real at all. Now, I wasn’t born yesterday (that was in Oc tober 1982), a nd I think most of us who watched t he show had enough imagination or insight to know that there was likely always a producer or t wo just of f-c a mera, g u id i n g t he s how ’s stars through the series of highly constructed and produced situations that would come to define their real on-screen lives. And yes, certainly the show had its emotional moments that couldn’t have been acted more brilliantly by Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis, because, put simply, these stars weren’t acting (Heidi Montag’s plastic-surgery reveal, also in the show’s sixth and final season, was certainly no farce). Some of it was all too real. But the show creators’ admission, in that final scene, that some of it wasn’t, seemed at the time like a faith-restoring gesture with the audience, a breach in MTV’s fourth wall that let us know that we were all suspending our disbelief together. So, for multiple reasons, my relationship to popular culture, media, and celebrity reached a
turning point around 2010–11. In the decade prior, scripted television had given way to a rise in reality TV. Then, seemingly all of a sudden, social media provided the logical next step in a systematic peeling back of the curtain that had, for so long, stood as a barrier between the audience and its favorite entertainment content. Ashton Kutcher’s first tweet, dropped in 2009, marked a change in tide wherein Hollywood soon felt closer to home than I’d ever thought possible. My favorite stars and creators were now providing endless behind-the-scenes scoop while surfing the same feeds populated by our collective crazy aunts, our oversharing coworkers, and ourselves. In 2011, in an oft-referenced essay spurred by the public unravel ing of sitcom k ing Cha rl ie Sheen (u lt imately replaced on his TV show by Kutcher), Bret Easton Ellis recognized these symptoms as feeding into a larger cultural shift from an “Empire” era to the one we’re muddling through now.
transgender life by immeasurable strides. And of course they’re hilarious to watch and remind me to take comfort in knowing that all families are complicated, not just mine. W hen I recently inter viewed Kardashian mother hen Kris Jenner for the second season of my ongoing video project As It Lays, she showed up to my studio with a cameraman and a release form, which I willingly (excitedly!) signed, hoping that our meeting might make the cut for the next season on E! But the fate of the show remains unsealed: now in its seventeenth season, KUWTK premiered this past fall to a modest (if not lackluster) one mil-
Kardashians clearly demonstrate how social media not only put the nail in the coffin of magazine culture as we once knew it but also began to replace TV culture as well. Television didn’t die—in fact, many say it’s in a golden age. It evolved into binge-worthy marquee content available 24/7 on streaming platforms, which have to a large extent replaced the culture’s need for movies. But movies haven’t died, either; they’ve morphed into tentpole events, mostly brought to us by Disney, that you go to see on holidays in IMAX 3D. And events—conventions, conferences, festivals—have filled the need for public human interaction that’s been markedly reduced in the era of persona l computers, advanced mobile devices, dating apps, and Netf lix-and-chillin’ (see the Forbes article “Millennials Gone Mild”). Coming full circle, events also provide the content to post on the social media apps that all but eliminated the need for in-person human interaction to begin with. #Coachella, #BurningMan, #Comic Con , # N Y F W, #ArtBaselMiamiBeach. You Can’t Put How each of these the Genie Back f o r m a t s f u l f i l l s (o r do e sn’t) my ne e d s in the Bottle and expectations has shifted over time. All I Before joining the secever wanted from lifeond season of The Hills st yle magazines and a s it s re sident su r fold television shows, er-heartthrob, Brody and from reality TV— Jenner had made his escapist pop distract ion—is now simpler re a l it y T V de but i n a nd easier to access The Princes of Malibu and digest across social on the Fox network in 2005. That series lasted media plat for ms: on only six episodes before my i P hone’s t ouc hthe network moved on screen I can double tap to like all the Kardashito kissing other frogs, ans. I can watch their but it did pave the way for Jenner’s father (then lives unfolding in real Br uce, now Ca it lin), time, and I don’t have to sit through commerhis sisters (Kylie and Kendall), and their siscials or wait a week for Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (Arcade), after @lilmiquela, 2018–19, acrylic and bonds on fiberglass, 96 × 84 × 4 inches (243.8 × 213.4 × 10.2 cm) © Alex Israel. Photo: Lucy Dawkins ters (Kim and Kourtthe next episode (or a ney Kardashian, who month for a new issue). made a cameo on Princes, and Khloe, who did lion viewers. While the televisual arm of the Jen- Additionally, I can tell them what I think in the not) to launch a celeb-reality vehicle of their own ner/Kardashian dynasty may be waning, the fam- comments and let them (and everyone else followon E! in 2007. Keeping Up with the Kardashians ily’s media influence and product lines continue to ing them) know that I’m there. I’m so much more (KUWTK) began as a Calabasas twist on The Brady grow and thrive. Today, both Kim and her young- enfranchised in their world. Bunch and has been the linchpin in the seemingly est sister—beauty mogul and direct-to-consumer endless growth of the controversial family’s power pioneer Kylie Jenner—hold two of Instagram’s top and influence ever since. ten most influential user spots, with a combined I’d like to take a moment to defend the Kar- total of more than three hundred million follow- City of Angelynes dashians. It’s not that I think they’re perfect, or ers. What the Kardashians learned from reality that I’m of the mindset that everyone should make TV (and what Kim learned during her prior stint Before the rise of reality TV and social media, for a sex tape. What I love about their family is this: as Paris Hilton’s protégée) they applied to social as long as I can remember, Angelyne (née Ronia They value family. They promote an expanded media. In fact, they doubled down, edited their Tamar Goldberg) has been a reliable presence in idea of female beauty. They embrace interracial lives, made themselves more digestible, focused my life. The Barbie-doll blonde cruises the canyons love. They work hard—American Dream hard—yet on producing self-mythologizing images and and highways of Los Angeles in a bubblegum-pink never complain about the workload or take their video clips, and broke the Internet, in the process Corvette, publicizing her name and image on billmany opportunities for granted. Through Caitlin’s cannibalizing the success of their own show and boards across the city for no apparent reason other story they have advanced the conversation around changing the world for the blingier. I love that the than the goal of fame itself. Before Kim, before 137
Paris, Angelyne achieved fame through ground- truly crystallized. In 2011 the hashtag #selfie first getting it nonetheless: Who are Emma Chamberbreakingly shameless self-promotion. appeared on Instagram. At the end of 2012 Time lain, Cameron Dallas, and Lil Miquela, and why do Cultural critic Sean Monahan has a theory magazine declared “selfie” one of the year’s top they have millions of followers? Just what is it that about why Los Angeles embraced social media so ten buzzwords. By 2013 it had been added to the makes them so different, so appealing? wholeheartedly: because it’s not a place that’s try- Oxford English Dictionary. Little by little, selfSocial media disrupted the Empire-era fame ing to change the world. Unlike New York and ies became the building blocks of a whole new hierarchy as visibility came to replace traditional San Francisco, he asserts, “LA doesn’t presume language that defines how millennials live their notions of “talent.” One no longer had to be a great to be building the future, merely inhabiting it.” lives: through self-branding. With Instagram fil- singer, dancer, actor, musician, athlete, writer, It’s an amazing point that I had never considered, ters, iPhone’s portrait mode, and the Facetune app comedian, painter, etc., to gain cultural inf lubut there are also a few other reasons LA may at one’s fingertips, achieving the highly produced ence. One just had to be good at self-promotion. have adapted so well to the new MO. For start- look of advertising was suddenly easy. In a couple I’d go so far as to say that the concepts of “talers, the foundation built ent” and “self-promotion” have become almost by mainstream Hollywood—from movies to interchangeable. To be television to reality TV— fair, self-promotion isn’t and its periphery (e.g., as simple or straightforward a proposition as one Angelyne) was already might initially think: I well established here in Southern California. Los wouldn’t dare try to keep Angeles had the stars, the up with the Kardashians. would-be stars, and both And I wouldn’t presume the infrastructure and to know what may or may not go viral. Fame works the mindset to produce in mercurial ways. new stars out of regular people fresh off the GreyOn October 8, 2019, hound bus. The star sysjust t h is past fa ll, t he tem was ready and waitNew York Post published ing to evolve into its next an article covering twenincarnation. t y-t wo-ye a r-old M a lAs twenty-first-cencolm Abbott’s reaction t u r y sc re en s b e c a me to the sentencing of his smaller and smaller and wealthy parents, Gregu s er- c re a te d c ontent ory and Marcia, to one exploded, social media’s month of imprisonment, savviest students could 250 hours of community service, and $90,000 in e mu l a t e t he pro duc t ion va lue of f r ic t ioncombined fines for their less Hollywood fantasy role in the infamous col(now reality TV fantasy) lege admissions scanwith little more than an dal. The press had a field HD digital camera, userday over the trials, which friendly software, and gave new irony to two decent natural light. To of the famous defendants’ show titles, Desperentice an audience and ate Housewives and Full c or ra l i n f luenc e , t he House. One detail not content simply ha s to linked to either Felicity be sticky. Thanks to the Huffman or Lori Loughef for t s of Empi re-era l i n pique d my c u r iHollywood, many users already understood LA’s osit y—a nd yes, it’s a ll psychedelic sunsets, perabout Malcolm. The Post fect human bodies, suncaught up with the aspirshine, palm trees, welling rapper, who grew up ne ss obse ssion s, a nd between New York and designer pets (RIP TinkAspen and goes by the erbell). LA was already alias “Billa,” while he was sticky, and at the onset of smoking a blunt on Fifth the past decade’s social Avenue and acting notably blasé about the situme d ia gold r u sh , t he ation at home. An Instacity’s users had a running-head-start advangram-related detail from Above: Kris Jenner and Alex Israel on the set of As It Lays, 2019. Photo: Sarah Bradham Below: Angelyne on her pink Corvette, Los Angeles, 1992. Photo: Barry King/WireImage/courtesy Getty Images tage. As successful piothe article stuck with me: neers can attest, aspiring “[Billa] was ecstatic to get influencers had to understand just three things: 1) of taps and clicks, anyone could become a brand, his blue-checkmark verification on the app last visibility is currency, 2) repetition is key, and 3) sell themselves, sell products directly to consum- night.” The media circus surrounding his famthere is no risk of overexposure. ers, and amass fame, fortune, and influence with ily had its silver lining for the young MC: he had no more hardware than a smartphone in their attained coveted verification status on Instagram pocket, working at the speed of swipe. and was one small step further along on his path As Instagram took the world by storm, yes, toward celebrity and influence. Love Thy Neighbor and Her Selfie of course, the Justins and Beyoncés shot up the social media food chain in rapid measure, as was Kim’s first Instagram post arrived in 2012. It was, to be expected. But there was also an entirely new you guessed it, a selfie. It was around the selfie crop of stars who couldn’t have sold out Madison that the concept of visibility as currency, for me, Square Garden but were vying for attention and 138
Fifteen Minutes
impact through my art, but until now I haven’t had the time or focus to synthesize the data and experiences as text. For whatever reason—maybe it’s the ten-year mark—2020 feels like the perfect time to finally write. Ultimately, I’m not a punk. I’ve passively ridden the corporate-fueled wave of new technology since welcoming the Internet into my life as a high-school student, and to a large extent I’ve become complacent about much of what it offers: I’ve embraced its platforms, accepted its algorithms, and watched myself develop in its ethos. It might seem strange— and I get this—to have spent so much time thinking and making art about, for example, the evolution of reality TV and social media instead of, say, the politics and policies that are displacing so many at our nation’s borders and around the world today. But in Los Angeles, entertainment and politics have been inextricably linked since before my birth. From Reagan’s rise to the presidency to Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing on The Arsenio Hall Show (which inspired my fourthgrade self to take lessons) to the Governator—
thinking about and processing of all the data that glides across my screens. I try to make sense of the world I know, to absorb it and translate it both visually, through the making of objects, and personally, through the actions of my daily life. When David Byrne’s voice rhetorically asked “How did I get here?” over the car radio this morning, I could take an ounce of comfort in knowing that, for me, much of the answer to that has now been captured in this text.
The history of regular people achieving far-reaching renown in Southern California runs deeper than Angelyne—the Louds of the 1973 PBS docuseries An American Family were from Santa Barbara. But in the 1960s in New York City, there was an even earlier maker of amateur superstars, a prophet who understood the future of fame better than anyone. He absorbed the changing new world around him in order to reflect it back to all of us, like a mirror, through his art. “Mind you, I’m not saying that Andy Warhol Profile Pic doesn’t have any talent, because obviously he My self-portrait was first rendered digitally in 2011 has some; he has to. But I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that he’s talented at, except that as the logo for As It Lays, my DIY online talk show he’s a genius as a self-publicist.” (a.k.a. user-generated content). In homage to Alfred I urge you to reread the above quotation substiHitchcock Presents, the self-portrait logo appears tuting Donald Trump’s or Kim Kardashian’s name in a morphing dissolve over video footage of my for Warhol’s (and using the appropriate pronoun actual head in the opening-credits sequence of as needed). You might notice how the quote rings each episode. as true as it did when it was originally published, When I made As It Lays, I was determined that in 1982. The words are it live both in the physical spaces of the art Truman Capote’s, and world and also online, when I c a me ac ross where a nyone could t hem i n Jea n Stei n’s oral history/biography f i nd it . I re me m b e r Edie: Ame r ican Girl, being a student, readi ng about v ideo a r t , they zapped me with and never being able a white-hot reminder to watch more than a of just how advanced brief clip of an imporA ndy’s methods and tant piece here or there at t it ude s re a l ly had on YouTube or on the been, and how much they had contributed to rudimentary website of the fame-defining logissome faraway museum I tics of my generation. couldn’t visit in person. I think of A ndy I n c onju nc t ion w it h a s t he ult imate conthe work’s premiere at sumer. All the things Reena Spaulings Fine he could buy ended up Art in New York in Febright there in his work: ruary 2012, I decided to tomato soup, soda pop, release the first thirty Br illo pads, f lowers, episodes over t he Hollywood stars, and course of that winter/ Alex Israel, Self-Portrait, 2013, Sunset Strip Billboard, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood even t he news (bad, spring season on Yousensationalist, tabloid, Tube, on a lifestyle blog advertisements, comics, etc.). After the war, with for as long as I can remember, it has seemed to me called Purple Diary, and on the proprietary webthe country in boom and New York City his oys- that fans are voters and vice versa. The current site asitlays.com. It was important to me that the ter, so much of what Andy did was both strikingly president of the United States was once a prime- work be accessible, seen, and not precious. novel and refreshingly democratic. He brilliantly time reality TV star, and his go-to form of commuAs the project entered the world and momenoutlined the evenhandedness of American con- nication is the tweet. We must not forget that pop- tum slowly built around it, I couldn’t shake the sumerism in that famous quote about how every- ular culture and media are key to understanding logo from my mind. Soon, I made it my Facebook one, rich or poor, drinks the same Coke. Today, political developments in our sometimes hard-to- profile picture. Despite the embarrassment I felt our most novel, democratic objects of consump- swallow late-capitalist society. about putting myself in the work as well as transtion are each other. We consume each other and With as much information as I could gather lating my head into a would-be emoji, I remained sell ourselves on social media, paying in follows about the energies unfolding around me, with fully committed to doing so because, somehow, and likes to grant everyone the same chance at my intuition and the winds of youthful optimism intuitively, I felt a change in tide. A wave of selfies, going viral and gaining influence, which can then in my sails, I began to show what I would con- self-branding, and visibility was just appearing be capitalized on ad infinitum. We are the brands, sider my first fully formed works of art in 2010. In on the horizon, and I (convinced that an insistthe products, the Campbell’s Soups and Marilyn January of that year I was preparing my gradu- ence on myself, on my image, was urgent) decided Monroes of 2020. ate-school thesis exhibition; planning the launch to surf it. I embraced the logo as a symbol for my of a line of sunglasses, Freeway Eyewear; and work, embraced myself as a brand, and ultimately building the website for an accompanying web brought Self-Portrait into the world as an art object series (and product-placement vehicle), Rough and also as a sticker, a billboard, a mural, a postWinds. Ten years later, it’s January 2020 and I’m card, a pin, a keychain, and a luggage tag. Kanye 2024 making the final preparations for an exhibition As a physical artwork, I wanted my Self-PorAs we enter this new decade, a logical juncture for of new Self-Portraits that opens midmonth at trait to look and feel like Los Angeles. I chose to self-reflection, I’ve worked here to describe and Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, my first solo produce it in fiberglass and acrylic paint—materials analyze the ever-changing entertainment culture show in the United Kingdom. used to make surfboards, custom cars, and movie I inherited as a young artist on the brink of my proWhen it comes to deciding what to do or to sets—to connect it to the aesthetic history of Southfessional life. I’ve been closely observing, partic- make, I lean on everything: my continuing edu- ern California. I scaled the object to my height: ipating in, and digesting it and its wide-reaching cation, my observations and conversations, my sixty-nine inches. The graphic logo is framed 139
by a bright-white bullnosed border to give it the look and feel of my favorite products designed in Cupertino by Apple—a nod to the hardware that services the digital realm from which the logo was originally born. Once the object’s physicality had been determined, it was time to repeat, permute, combine, and imply an expanding, unstoppable visibility. I sourced colorways from images of tropical fish and flowers, from the 2009 film Avatar, and from the works of David Hockney, Ken Price, and others. For the first exhibition of these works, in 2013, I produced twenty uniquely colored examples. For a follow-up, I hung five not on walls but on metal wires, stacked and floating in space, like the virtual record covers one could once flip through on an iPod when looking for the perfect song to play next.
Big Heads
lens, painterly evidence becomes difficult, if not impossible, to detect. Technology shifts, the world changes, and painting’s obsolescence is always on the table. Still, for reasons outside art history’s constant warning that painting is dying or dead (namely, advancements in special effects and backdrop-scale digital printing), the scenic-painting department at Warner Bros. was on its last legs when I discovered it online and made my first visit there in the fall of 2010. I wanted to commission a painted backdrop for the set of As It Lays, and Warner Bros. was the last major studio that still had an on-site department—namely, Pike—to handle analog requests such as mine. As my relationship with the studio progressed, the backdrop I commissioned for As It Lays was followed by the development and production of my Sky Backdrops, Flats, Tiled Flats, and finally Self-Portraits (and later my collaborative Text Paintings and Waves). I became a studio regular. I’d bring people to visit and learn about my production process, always explaining that I never wanted to be an artist standing on the perimeter,
as inviting as a vintage Polaroid. I remember first hearing Lana Del Rey’s haunting, timeless voice laid over a hip-hop beat and realizing that I was drawn to her sound precisely because it was both familiar and new at the same time. As a foil, the Old Hollywood nostalgia of scenic art folds perfectly into my thinking about cultural evolution, digitization, and the future of entertainment. While I’ve adapted and committed myself to the digital experience of art on a screen, I remain equally committed to the experience of art IRL. As an expression of labor and time so foreign to the speed of Insta, a photorealistic painting in a contemporary art gallery is a rarer and stranger sight today than ever before. A printed Self-Portrait might translate no differently in person than it does across a screen, but a hand-painted one most certainly does. And if that hand-painted image is disguised as Instagram-ready content—a glossy selfie or a filtered landscape—then the overall effect of the work could be ever more surreal for a viewer standing before it, having to reconcile qualities both analog and digital, old and new.
Technology evolved, and so did my work. In 2012, it s popu la r it y su rging, Instag ram was acquired by Facebook. The Audience Is T he fol low i ng ye a r, Listening to compete w it h t he launch of the Vine app A few years ago I was (and its video-driven i nv ited to at tend a n i nt i mate c on ferenc e feed), Instagram introin Moscow that coind u c e d v i d e o s h a ring. Sponsored posts cided with the opening of t he Garage (advertisements) and Museum of Contemdirect messaging (to p or a r y A r t . G e orge compete with the popLuc a s, a lso a g ue st , ular messaging feature raised his hand duron Snapchat) soon followed. Social media’s ing a Q&A to express a c ompla i nt: he just capacity for commucouldn’t understand nication was expandwhy so ma ny you ng ing, and stor y telling people at concerts feel soon became key (even the need to watch and before the “Story” feaAlex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Feeling Awesome, 2015, acrylic and UV ink printed on canvas © Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis. Photo: Jeff McLane record large portions ture launched on Insof t he show t hrough t a g ra m i n 2016). A s everyone’s content became more confessional pointing a critical finger at the Hollywood sys- their smartphones. He was noticeably agitated and diaristic, like the narrative-driven content tem to expose how entertainment manipulates by this notion, despite the fact that he, a major of the reality TV shows it was replacing, I soon us. I’d share my impression that, post-Empire, we force in the advancement of audio and visual felt compelled, in my work, to move beyond the all already knew that every picture of Kim Kar- effects, bears a large share of responsibility for color-blocked graphic logo and into my headspace dashian was photoshopped, that Justin Bieber’s the hypersensory experience of modern enteritself. I began to source imagery from the stream- voice was auto-tuned, and that reality TV was (as tainment and desensitization of our culture to real ing thoughts that made up the story of my life. The Hills had admitted) maybe more production life (e.g., live performance). My initial thought Each new work could now be self-promotional and than reality. The reason I chose to make my work upon hearing his remark was: why is he so conbrand-reinforcing and provide a window onto my on the lot, I’d explain, was to be as close to the Hol- cerned? And then: maybe because he knows he’s #currentmood. lywood system as possible, in the hope that some partially to blame? And finally, I was compelled Making the “Big Heads”—as we started calling of its stardust—that magical, metaphysical ingredi- to think about the nature of this phenomenon, these new, photorealistic Self-Portraits around the ent that incites our basic human desire to suspend and whether or not it’s in fact related to collective studio—begins with photographs. The photos are disbelief—might rub off on my art. overstimulation. edited and composited in Photoshop until a final The decision to paint (rather than print) my I take videos at concerts all the time, and it’s defimock-up is ready to be painted. The mocked-up color-blocked Self-Portraits and photographic “Big nitely safe to say that most of that footage never sees image is emailed to Warner Bros., the movie stu- Heads” was organic. At this point, aside from my the light of day. For me, holding up my phone to dio, where it is printed at full scale to be pounced work, there’s little else keeping the Warner Bros. watch and record a live show isn’t just about makwith charcoal dust onto one of my larger (now scenic-painting department alive. Through my ing memories or culling clips to post on social eight-feet-tall) profile-shaped fiberglass panels, relationship with Warner Bros., I feel a connection media. I find that condensing a massive spectaalso built on the Warner Bros. backlot. Finally, to a piece of Los Angeles’s unique aesthetic his- cle to the space of a five-inch screen can make my Andrew Pike, the studio’s last remaining full- tory. Nostalgia plays a large role in my work—as it real-time viewing experience much more effective: time scenic artist, paints the image on the panel in might for any artist who deals in personal history, watching through my phone allows for closer lookacrylic, using both brush and airbrush in a tradi- the place of their upbringing, and the culture that’s ing and listening in an otherwise sensory-overtional Hollywood technique. The combination of shaped their life. While it sometimes stings like a loaded environment. What Lucas might be missing airbrush spray and hand brushwork approximates cipher of regression, nostalgia can also be useful is the relationship this phenomenon has to paintthe more time-consuming efforts of blending oil as a bridge to the new. I think about the many fil- ing. The human need to shrink the experiences of paint. Seen from a distance, or through a camera’s ters on Instagram that make an iPhone photo look life into the space of a rectangle—moving or still, 140
digital or handmade—isn’t breaking news. What’s the moral of the story? Well, I believe that technology forces us to examine the world anew, but it also reminds us that some stories are simply retold over and over, again and again, so that a live pop concert seen through an iPhone or a Renaissance portrait hung in a palazzo might equally inspire a deeper consideration or fuller examination of our world.
Deep Impact In 2005 t he f irst user-generated v ideo was uploaded to YouTube. In 2009 David Robbins’s seminal essay “High Entertainment” heralded an era wherein everyone with a computer and web access, now able to create their own quality content, could also access a worldwide distribution network that couldn’t be easier to plug into. Robbins presaged a tearing down of the long-existing wall between art and entertainment, suggesting that a creative middle ground fueled by “independent imaginations” could now emerge and triumph. When I was a g r a du ate s t udent , reading “High Entertainment” gave me the confidence to continue pursuing a path toward making products and publishing videos (and eventually a film) online, some of which I didn’t and don’t define as ar t. It also helped me to think outside the binary structures the Empire-era art world seemed to impose on young and impressionable talent: the idea that the marketplace (galler ies, auc t ions, and private collections) and the critical establishment (museums, scholarly publications, and academia) are the only two viable contexts for art, and that one must choose to align with either the market or the symbolic value system. In 2016, when I began to consider the options for distributing my film SPF-18, I worked with talent agents and met with executives at Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon as well as a couple of smaller streaming start-ups. I was planning a tour of American high schools to share the film with students but also looking for a partner to stream it online. I’d made a small, quirky, independent art-movie-witha-message for teens (about how creativity can help us find our voices), and neither financial remuneration nor critical acclaim was ever the point. As I attempted to explain this to an executive on a fateful conference call, fumbling and failing to describe both my motivations and the experimental nature of the piece, he gently interrupted to say that he completely understood my position and that it sounded like the goal of the project was, simply put, impact. If Robbins’s phrase “high entertainment” was a way to define content made somewhere between art and entertainment, and the
“independent imagination” was his moniker for the creator of such content, then “impact” was, for me, a perfect way to describe the potentially nonbinary goals of such pursuits. We hear it all the time in other fields—impact investing, impact advertising, and so on—but it had never fully occurred to me that “impact” could be the goal of an artwork until that call. The idea of creating impact through visual art aligns perfectly with the technology of social media and the Internet, the fluidity they have afforded our culture, and the desire to gain traction, friction, and visibility in the rush of the feed.
Thank You, Next Thursday morning, October 5, 2017, I pulled into the parking lot of Hendersonville High in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. The redbrick-clad school’s welcoming art teacher (the epitome of Southern hospitality) had arranged for me to present my film and speak with the students about being an art-
Noah Centineo on the set of SPF-18 (2015). Photo: Rachel Chandler
ist. The auditorium, full of giggles and hormones as the opening credits rolled, sported an AV kit so advanced that it was only logical to later learn that the equipment had been donated to her alma mater by “Miss Americana” Taylor Swift herself. Everything was going smoothly—laughter at all the right moments—until just under twenty minutes in, when one character, Penny, broaches the subject of sex with her cousin, Camilla. As if she’d been tricked (she hadn’t, she’d even been sent an advance copy!), that welcoming art teacher’s temperament quickly soured, and to the boos of her students and the shock of my tour manager and me, she turned off the film in the middle of the special assembly “in the name of abstinence!” SPF-18 had landed on Netf lix just one week prior (with what I think was an overly conservative PG-13 rating), and as I predicted, it received no rave reviews and made not a dime of profit. In fact, except for my favorite Bible Belt art teacher’s, there was disappointingly little reaction to take in. However, all that changed one year later when cast member Noah Centineo, an unknown
eighteen-year-old actor when he had auditioned for me a couple of years earlier, broke through. As a result of Netflix’s algorithm, my film was suddenly being suggested to everyone who enjoyed Centineo’s viral star-turning vehicle, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and after resting dormant for a year, SPF-18 was suddenly trending and fan DMs were rolling in. However far it may have reached, however many teens may have watched (Netflix doesn’t reveal its analytics), the film had found its audience and gotten its shot at making an impact. The ways and habits of millennials are by now old news. Gen Z, having recently nominated the first in what will surely be a string of politicized young heroes (see Emma Gonzalez and Greta Thunberg) and entertainment stars (Billie Eilish, Zendaya, and even Centineo), has emerged and stepped up to the plate. It’s fun to think about where these Internet and touch-screen natives will take us—many predict that key millennial ideologies that came to fore during this past decade will not be passed down. Working with Snapchat to create a series of augmented-reality lenses for a project last year, I learned that the app has been more successful than Instagram in commanding Gen Z’s free time. Snapchat offers an ephemeral and creative way to communicate with friends, as opposed to the launchpad, soapb ox , a n d a r c h i v i n g structures that define its status-obsessed competitors—evidence that the visibility/self-branding industrial complex is already cracking at its foundation. Maybe not ever ybody needs to be a brand, and maybe the old binaries of Empire will finally fail for good, too, to make way for an even more f luid, more impact-oriented world like the one teenagers everywhere are already seeming to define (see the widely circulated trend report “GenExit” by K-HOLE). So much has been said about the relationships between technology and art, entertainment and politics, politics and fashion, and of course there’s Robbins’s essay on art and entertainment . . . I could go on. As these various fields continue to overlap and meld, is it possible that eventually we’ll let go of such categories altogether? The answer is: probably not. Art doesn’t seem to want to die, no matter how hard artists and others have tried to kill it. But isn’t it those efforts and attempts to destroy it that somehow push it forward and reinforce its power, all at once? How Gen Z will ultimately challenge and change the creative landscape is hard to predict, but I’m genuinely excited to see what they make of it all and what they make to post on TikTok. So, right now, I’m at home in my slippers under coronavirus quarantine, watching the world change again, watching the kids dance for their lives, and reminding myself that the future’s as sublime as ever. Originally published on garage.vice.com, May 10, 2020
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IN CONVERSATION
Lars Ulrich is best known as a cofounder of the heavy metal band Metallica. But after tracking down an Andy Warhol painting that his parents owned when he was a kid, he amassed— and sold—an incredible collection of contemporary art. Derek Blasberg met the drummer in his adopted hometown, San Francisco, and talked to him about the unexpected similarities between collecting art and playing metal.
142
Derek Blasberg: Is it true
fit in with that crowd. Also,
that you first came to the
when I was growing up, a lot
United States to be a tennis
of the musicians of the ’60s
player?
and ’70s would hang out at our house in Copenhagen.
Lars Ulrich: Yes. My dad
On my mom’s side there
and his brother were Danish
was a lot of theater, so I
tennis champions and their
was constantly surrounded
dad was a Danish champion
by artists, writers,
too. I guess I’m the first
performers.
one to screw that lineage! After I finished school in
DB: How have you seen
Denmark, I spent a year in
San Francisco change since
Florida with a tennis coach,
the ’80s?
and then we ended up in Newport Beach, California.
LU: This is where all the
When tennis didn’t work out
great rock stars of the world
for me, I met [Metallica
are now. . . . They just don’t
cofounder] James Hetfield
play music! The future is
and thought, “Let’s start a
being invented here. I also
band.”
love the fact that there’s something incredibly small-
DB: In Los Angeles, right?
town-like about it. There’s no place in America where
LU: Yes, but I hated being
I feel more at home, and
in LA. I didn’t fit in at
nowhere I’d rather be in
all. Too much bullshit in
terms of energy. Culturally,
the Hollywood scene. Because
politically, and socially,
we were such outcasts—
it’s super progressive.
real loners and weirdos—we didn’t belong to anything.
DB: How does a famous rock
We started playing shows in
drummer get turned on to the
San Francisco in ’83, and we
contemporary art space?
just loved the city. We felt a sense of belonging here, a
LU: My parents were well off
sense of kinship and feeling
when I was growing up, but
accepted. San Francisco
they weren’t, like, “art
has always been a place for
collectors.” Occasionally on
people who never felt like
trips they’d acquire works
they really fit in anywhere
that they liked. When we
else, like the Beat poets of
moved to Newport Beach, they
the ’50s.
acquired a Warhol painting of three apples, which I
DB: You’ve been here since
remember hanging over our
’83? I just assumed if you
dining room table. Eventually
were in a rock band you had to
they split up, and then
be in New York or London or—
Metallica sort of took off, and all this stuff started
LU: I live five minutes
happening, and the painting
from this restaurant. This
was sold. A few years later,
is my local lunch spot. San
maybe eight years, I started
Francisco has been home for
making a little bit of money
thirty-five years.
and for some reason I decided I needed to track down the
DB: Was your family
Warhol that used to hang over
disappointed when you put
the dining room. It took a
the racket down and picked
little bit of tenacity, a
up drumsticks?
little bit of will—I can be very driven—but I found it
LU: My dad has a very zen
and I bought it back. That
approach to life. He’s a
was really the beginning of
practicing Buddhist and he
it. This was maybe ’89 or
was always very open-minded.
’90. I liked the idea of the
Also, tennis may have been
journey.
his day job but music was his passion. He used to write
DB: That’s an awesome story.
a lot about music when he traveled around America:
LU: Yeah. I still have
he’d go see John Coltrane and
that painting. It still
Dexter Gordon and hang out in
hangs over the dining room
jazz circles. If you look at
table! I liked being in that
pictures of him in the ’60s
world. There are a lot of
and ’70s, he had long hair, a
stereotypes in hard rock,
long beard, and he definitely
so in the art world I was
143
freer. Does that make sense?
were part of his school.” I
DB: There’s a great story
In music I was very much the
engulfed myself in the whole
about you hunting down a
guy from Metallica; in the
lifestyle. It definitely
Jean-Michel Basquiat.
art world I was just Lars.
inspired me to bring certain
James and I started Metallica
creative elements of that
LU: After I became consumed
when I was seventeen, and
back to my music world and
with specific pieces, I’d
we grew up in the band: it
back to Metallica.
say, “Let’s figure out who
consumed every minute of my
owns this piece.” I’d hear
life and it became this gang
DB: When you researched the
that a Norwegian oil guy who
mentality—everything we did,
lives of these artists,
lived in Scotland had this
it was always all of us, the
was it similar to the lives
piece, and then six months
gang, the collective, the
of musicians? What are the
later I’d find myself on a
group. Your self-identity
similarities between someone
flight to London and driving
becomes associated with a
who paints and someone who
to a farmhouse in the middle
gang. When I started going
plays an instrument?
of nowhere. It became almost
into the art world ten years
like exploration. There was
later, it felt like the first
LU: That’s a great question.
a Basquiat called Profit
time I was doing something on
It all starts with curiosity,
I [1982], which along with
my own.
wonder, a desire to express
Peter Brant’s Boy and Dog
oneself. Ultimately, whether
in a Johnnypump [1982] is
remember is around 1992.
it’s music, or art, or
considered the greatest
Kirk Hammett, our guitar
poetry, or film, it’s about
Basquiat. I asked, “How
player, had an incredible
connecting to other people.
do we get to this?” Three
collection of movie posters
I was an only child, so for
months later I’m sitting
and memorabilia. He started
me music was the connection
in Switzerland with Bruno
getting the Sotheby’s and
to other people I never had
Bischofberger, like, “This
Christie’s catalogues and one
growing up. I think when you
particular painting. . . . ”
day on a plane he was sitting
throw yourself into the arts,
You learn to not ask too
and flipping through them and
it’s really about sharing an
many questions. It’s never
I said, “Let me have a look.”
experience with other people.
like, “I own it, he owns it,
I started seeing all these
You bring another side into it
this guy owns it.” It’s more
images and all these pieces,
and all of a sudden we have a
like, “We can get you to this
and it really got me going.
connection at a deeper level.
if you really want to.” It
The next thing I clearly
Over the next few years I
becomes this James Bond–level
A lot of the painters
started getting into Karel
I was interested in were
crazy stuff. But I ended up
Appel, [Pierre] Alechinsky,
self-taught, and a lot of
acquiring it through a lot of
[Jean] Dubuffet, Asger Jorn,
the musicians I was into
patience and due diligence.
and Pierre Soulages. By 1994
obviously didn’t go to the
I’d acquired around twenty
Berklee College of Music.
DB: Is that part of the
pieces, including a small
Most of the rock ’n’ roll
thrill? The courtship of
Willem de Kooning.
guys were also self-taught.
it all?
For example, Dubuffet: DB: What were you looking
I was gravitating to an
LU: I loved that energy.
for? Something specific?
understanding of how he was
But I also appreciated the
championing outsider art and
juxtaposition to everything
LU: A feeling. At that time
raw art. To me that meant
I did in Metallica. Whatever
it was just my eyes. Nobody
people who didn’t have formal
we did in the band was
talked to me about values.
art education, and I can
scrutinized, written about,
Nobody talked about trophies.
see the lineage to things
judged. We couldn’t make
You never heard the word
like the CoBrA movement.
any moves in the music world
“investment.” I was just
CoBrA—short for Copenhagen,
without feeling like we were
buying things that turned me
Brussels, Amsterdam—was
in the spotlight. But for
on. I realized I had a lot
all these self-taught post–
me, in art, I felt a freedom.
of connections from not just
World War II artists like
I could hover without being
European aesthetics but also
Alechinsky and Jorn and
the Metallica guy. It was
Scandinavian aesthetics,
Appel. Their whole mission
almost a place where I took
which took me back to who I
statement was to not have
shelter or refuge. There were
am, who I was as a child, and
formal training. I was turned
all those types of things.
on by that type of stuff.
As things progressed, I got really into learning
DB: Were you as sucked into
about the artists. So it
the art world as you were
wasn’t just like “Here’s a
into the music world?
Dubuffet.” If I really liked the Dubuffet, I wanted to
LU: For the next eight years
learn about him. I would sit
or so, it was basically my
and read half a dozen books
life. It got to a point where
on Dubuffet and I would
I was like, “Whoa, this is
understand who he was. I’d
consuming me.” When I’m into
think, “Okay, he went here
something, really into it,
and did this. And then he
I’ll sit and read and learn
was thinking this. And then
and fully envelop myself, and
this happened. And all the
the next thing I know it’ll
guys that he did this with
be ten years later.
144
Growing up in the circles that I grew up in, this sense of creative adventure has always been in m y blood a nd it’s probably more of m y tr ue self.
some exciting times. Listen, you’re in your thirties, you’re full of spunk, and we were working hard, but this is what I did with the fruits of the labor. DB: Was there ever a painting that got away? LU: There was a smaller auction house in Copenhagen called Bruun Rasmussen. Anything that came out of Denmark or CoBrA went to that auction house. There was a painting of Asger Jorn’s
from his first creative
DB: Was it hard to let some
period, which ended in the
of your collection go?
late ’40s. The star piece of that first period, The
LU: I don’t own art. You
Blue Picture [1945], was
don’t own art. They don’t
up for auction. I was like,
own art. We’re simply the
“I’m going after this. I’m
custodians of it. We’re
getting this.” I got into a
fortunate to hold onto it
bidding war with one other
for a while, we take care of
collector and together we
it for a while, and then I
were going way, way, way
think our job is to pass it
past the estimate. It was
on. All art at the level I was
just an ego pissing contest.
collecting should be shared,
It went on for minutes and
and should not be hoarded,
minutes and finally it was so
and should not be for seven
far out of the stratosphere
people at my house at a
I finally said “Fuck it,”
dinner party.
and he walked away with it. Of course, afterward I was
DB: Or, worse, kept in
just like, “Why did you do
storage.
that? Why did you stop?” I
We could n’t ma ke a n y moves in the music world without feeling like we were in the spotlight. But for me, in art, I felt a freedom. I could hover without being the Metallica g uy.
to the hard-rock community so many times, they’ve started getting annoyed with me because they think I’m disrespecting them, but I didn’t really have time for the lifestyle. Being Danish and growing up in the circles that I grew up in, this sense of creative adventure has always been in my blood and it’s probably more of my true self. DB: Last question: Have you regretted selling or trading anything? LU: I don’t look in the rearview mirror all that often. One of my favorite
spent the next month making
LU: Exactly. Some collectors
quotes is from David Lee
offers. I’d say, ”If he paid
have entire warehouses in
Roth: “If you’re busy looking
x, I’ll offer him x + 10
Geneva or Zurich or Basel,
in the rearview mirror and
percent.” I was negotiating
or whatever it is, of art
thinking about it as it goes
through the auction house
that just sits there and
by, you’re not following
and they thought we were
either collects dust or rots
the hood ornament. I figure
all crazy. The bidding went
away. I think art should be
the rearview mirror is just
on for another month and we
shared. I ended up selling a
so you can see how good you
still couldn’t get a deal.
lot of things and I started
look while you’re getting
What’s cool now, though, is
getting into design. I
somewhere.” I’ve never looked
that the collector donated
started buying furniture.
in the rearview mirror that
that painting and a few
much, but obviously, over the
other paintings, including
DB: Copenhagen’s a great
years, if you look at what’s
some that I owned and then
place for that.
happened to the Basquiat
sold over the years, to
market in the last ten years,
the Louisiana Museum of
LU: Absolutely. I started
it’s a whole new world. When
Modern Art, just north of
getting into midcentury-
I sold Profit I, it was at a
Copenhagen. Now I can go
modern design. Arne Jacobsen
then world-record price of
and see it whenever I’m
did these pieces for the
$5.5 million. People were
in Denmark. Though when I
SAS Hotel in Copenhagen:
like, “Oh my god, a Basquiat
see it, I’m reminded that
there are twelve of those
sold for $5.5 million.”
I was the underbidder, and
chairs and I found three of
Fifteen years later,
it brings me back into that
them. I’ll always be turned
Basquiats regularly go for
fight in the mid-’90s, which
on by great art, from film
over $100 million. But for
is kind of fun too.
to poetry to furniture
me, it was time to pass it on.
to painting to music to
All good.
DB: That’s the thrill of
whatever. I like to get
auctions! That passion!
close to the things that
DB: I guess your Danish
turn me on.
stoicism comes in handy
LU: Totally. I had to sort of
there.
take a break from it because
DB: I don’t mean this as
it became so emotional.
an insult, but would you
LU: It is what it is. I have
I sold a lot of big pieces
agree that most people don’t
no regrets. I still enjoy
in ’03 and ’04, and took
associate heavy metal music
the pieces I have. I still
some time off. One thing
with contemporary art?
enjoy the friendships. In
that changed for me after
life, don’t you want to be
ten years on the front lines
LU: Of course! I’ve had
able to sit and think of the
of the art world: I woke up
this conversation a thousand
memories and the experiences?
one morning and felt like
times. A lot of people don’t
And all the crazy things
I was becoming the things in
accuse hard-rock musicians
that happened to you in life?
the art world that I didn’t
of having taste. I love the
What are you going to do
like. Which was all about
contrary energies. I got
with a big pile of money in
amassing stuff. I didn’t want
into hard rock because of
a bank account? What are you
to get into this thing about
the energy of it; I didn’t
going to do with sixty-seven
becoming the trophy hunter.
get into it because of the
canvases sitting in storage
I knew in my heart that I’d
lifestyle, or some of these
in Geneva? As you’re drifting
never made one purchase for
sorcery elements, or demons,
out of this life into
investment. I’d never done
or religious artifacts,
wherever we’re going next,
anything for any economic
or whatever. None of that
if you can replay all those
gain or any of that kind of
stuff spoke to me. I was into
experiences in your head and
stuff. It was all about the
the sense of belonging to
go out with a smile on your
heart and about the eyes and
something and the energy of
face: how cool is that?
about the instincts.
the music. I’ve said this 145
THE BIGGER PICTURE
ARTIST PERSECUTION AND PROTECTION
Gillian Jakab explores some of the history of the persecution of artists and looks at individuals and organizations that have taken up their cause. Through interviews with groups serving artists at risk today, she illuminates pressing questions of refuge in the age of digital media, autocratic nationalism, and pandemic.
146
Socrates would not have thought of himself as an artist, but his dialectic practice in the streets and squares of ancient Athens shared something with the spoken-word street artists of today: wordsmithing, provoking, speaking truth to power. Socrates evidently did too much of it, and maybe on the wrong streets, because the Athenian powers-thatwere indicted him. In Plato’s account of his trial, in 399 bce, Socrates spoke of himself as a “gadfly” pestering the state into action.1 His exquisitely designed expressions of social and cultural critique goaded even free-speech-loving Athens to silence him. By plying his craft, at least in part, as public performance, Socrates blurred the line between art and philosophy, and one could argue that his trial stands as the best-known case of artist-intellectual persecution in the classical Western canon. In the East, ancient China saw a cycle of artist persecution that coincided with revolutions in local or dynastic rule: a new regime would try to purge the teachings of its predecessor. Writers, as a result, would take to more and more allegorical or poetic expression to elude direct conflict with authorities, their work transitioning from essay or treatise into art. The persecution of these scholar artists, to the point of execution and death, is known as wenziyu, variously translated but fairly meaning “cultural inquisition.” The best-known case of wenziyu was an event that has come to be called “the burning of books and the burying of scholars,” when the emperor
Qin Shi Huang, in 213–12 bce, attempted a purge of the principally Confucian culture preceding his reign. According to an account (believed by some to exaggerate) from the following dynasty, the Han, over 460 poets and scholars were investigated and buried alive.2 Dissident artists and their maltreatment occasionally dot the pages of ancient and medieval history, but perhaps because artists in those eras tended to be members of, or controlled by, the ruling elite, these cases, or at least accounts of them, are not terribly frequent. It wasn’t until modernity, and the ascendance of the patronless artist, that the phenomenon of subversive political artistic expression emerged as a social force. As these artists grew increasingly effective, it was not long before they drew persecution from their targets. “If you look at closed societies, restrictive governments go after journalists, they go after human rights activists, they go after artists,” I was told by Miriam Mahlow of Human Rights Watch.3 Alas, there was no one to save Socrates or the Confucian scholars. But today, individuals and organizations have arisen to aid “threatened artists.” This term, along with “artists at risk” and “displaced artists,” has become an established category for those working at the intersection of art and human rights, and encompasses a range of situations. Artists may be targeted by a ruling class objecting to the form or content of their work, or they may be oppressed by systemic inequities based on race, ethnicity, gender, or other identity traits. An example of this systemic kind of oppression is the persistent racism, of which the United States has been unable to rid itself, that has driven so many Black artists and writers to flee for Europe. Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Sidney Bechet, Harold Cousins, Dexter Gordon, Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Richard Wright—the list goes on. In a joint interview with Baldwin conducted by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Baker reflected, “One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white
people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States. . . . A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn’t stand it anymore. . . . I felt liberated in Paris.” 4 Describing his emigration, years after Baker’s, to the same storied city, Baldwin posed the decision as one intertwined with his art: “I left because I was a writer. I had discovered writing and I had a family to save. I had only one weapon to save them, my writing. And I couldn’t write in the United States.”5 Baker moved to Paris in 1925, Baldwin in 1948. Between those years, in 1938, a woman escaping a different kind of oppression found a haven in Paris— for a while. Lisa Fittko, born Eckstein Erzsébet in 1909, hailed from an artistic Jewish family in Austria-Hungary and grew up in Budapest, Vienna, and eventually Berlin. There she became involved in antifascist activities that got the attention of the Gestapo, and in 1933 she fled, passing through Prague, Basel, and Amsterdam before eventually reaching Paris. En route she met the man who would become her husband, Hans Fittko, a man of kindred political convictions, and in Paris the couple began to work to assist fellow refugees. Two years into her life there, the Germans invaded France and detained her in a concentration camp for women for some months. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, a friend of Fittko’s, was sent there too, and eventually, with a group of fellow prisoners, the two managed to escape. Once out, Fittko made her way from town to town until she reunited with her husband in the South of France.6 There, instead of taking the opportunity to escape themselves, the couple stayed to become legendary saviors of artists and others trying to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Through 1940 and 1941 they guided hundreds of refugees to safe passage along the mountain routes across the Pyrenees to Spain. In the first group was the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who, after being turned back by Spanish border authorities on the pretense of a new visa policy, took his own life in a hotel in the border village of Portbou. The Fittkos then joined forces with Varian Fry, an American editor and journalist who had
written early news reports on Nazi Germany and had returned home horrified, urging his country to act. When little was done, he gathered university presidents, museum curators, artists, journalists, and prominent Jewish refugees in a meeting at the Hotel Commodore, New York, in 1940, during which the group founded the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to help refugees escape occupied France.7 With this network behind him, Fry volunteered to go back to Europe to carry out the committee’s mission. Among the 2,000 Jews and anti-Nazi activists he aided were noted artists and intellectuals including André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Arthur Koestler, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ophüls, and many others. Fry had had an early inclination toward the arts; as a classics student at Harvard he had cofounded the literary magazine Hound and Horn, along with Lincoln Kirstein, who, with George Balanchine, would go on to found the New York City Ballet. Fry harnessed his own cultural sensibility and that of those around him to gain the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, then the first lady; with the support of Congress but without much help from her husband the president, Eleanor secured visas and asylum protections for the endangered artists and intellectuals Fry set off to rescue. While providing on-theground aid in France, he teamed up with art historian and scholar Marga Barr, wife of Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to assist the museum’s efforts to communicate with artists and facilitate their passage to the United States.8 Fry’s mission also intersected with the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Scholars, founded in 1933 by the Institute of International Education (IIE), New York, and active until the end of the war, in 1945. It is widely acknowledged that the path toward creating international networks to support artists at risk was paved by such ventures as this in the scholarly and literary worlds, with what is today called pen International leading the way. Founded in London in 1921, pen (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) set out to foster fellowship among writers of many kinds across Opposite: Jacqueline Breton, André Masson, André Breton, and Varian Fry at the Villa Air-Bel, near Marseille, France, 1941. Photo: United Archives GmbH/ Alamy This page: Poster for Josephine Baker’s review Paris mes amours at the Olympia on the rue de Sèvres, Paris, 1959. Photo: Roger Viollet via Getty Images Following spread, left: James Baldwin in Paris. Photo: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images Following spread, top right: Artists at Risk campaign for Sweden to grant asylum to Pussy Riot members Lusine Dzjanyan and Alexey Knedlyakovsky, Sweden, 2019. Artwork: Lusine Dzjanyan Following spread, bottom right: Rashwan Abdelbaki, Number 7, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 31 ½ × 61 inches (80 × 155 cm)
147
ARTISTS AT RISK Est. 2013. artistsatrisk.org
ARTISTS AT RISK CONNECTION Est. 2017. A program of pen America artistsatriskconnection.org
ARTISTIC FREEDOM INITIATIVE Est. 2015. artisticfreedominitiative.org
ARTIST PROTECTION FUND
An initiative of the Institute of International Education (IIE). Est. 2015. iie.org/programs/artist-protection-fund
FREEMUSE Est. 1998. freemuse.org
PEN INTERNATIONAL Est. 1921. pen-international.org
TAMIZDAT Est. 1998. tamizdat.org
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nations and ethnicities. Over time, the mission evolved to address an array of human-rights concerns facing the writing community. In the run-up to World War II, pen led advocacy campaigns on behalf of writers persecuted by fascist governments, such as the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler, imprisoned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Institutional efforts like these—the ERC, IIE, and pen—make up the ancestral DNA of today’s aid organizations on behalf of threatened artists. Later in the century, in 1987, pen created a database of “writers at risk,” marking the 1980s and ’90s as a period when public support grew for freedom-ofspeech issues. This work gained international attention in 1989 when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s ruling theocracy, issued a fatwa calling for the death of the novelist Salman Rushdie for the supposed insult to Islam contained in his book The Satanic Verses. The Rushdie affair spurred the formation of other nongovernmental bodies dedicated to the cause. In 1993, Rushdie himself served as the first president of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW), formed in part in response to the assassination of writers in Algeria. The organization created a network of twenty-five cities that would give writers safe haven to continue working. In 1998, following the first World Conference on Music and Censorship, Freemuse emerged as a similar organization devoted specifically to musicians. As the threshold of the new millennium receded, a shift took place: new organizations popped up to support creative voices across media and disciplines. The IPW dissolved in 2005; a year later it was replaced by icorn (International Cities of Refuge Network), which worked in cooperation with pen International. In 2014, pen expanded its scope to include visual artists and musicians; meanwhile, in 2011, Freemuse too had expanded its scope beyond music to include all art forms. That same year, Chinese visual artist and activist Ai Weiwei was arrested and detained for eighty-one days. His confinement only helped him to become one of the world’s most universally celebrated cultural critics, stimulating support for threatened-artist aid organizations. In 2013, Marita Muukkonen and Ivor Stodolsky, curators with a background in the visual arts,
founded Artists at Risk to fill a gap in support for threatened visual artists, broadly defined: the plastic arts, performance, film, digital media, and more all came under their umbrella. “The twentieth century was a century of poets and novelists and writers in general,” Stodolsky told me. “Salman Rushdie bridges the millennium. But we now find ourselves in a very visual culture—that’s Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei, and so on.”9 Necessity was the mother of Artists at Risk. In 2011, as part of a curatorial series featuring artists involved in protests and uprisings around the world, Muukkonen and Stodolsky had organized a project in one of the main squares in Helsinki, where the organization is based. The Egyptian revolution had begun earlier that year and the pair invited many of its leading cultural figures to participate, including the street artist Ganzeer and the musician Ramy Essam. At that point, under Egypt’s transitional leadership, artists were still able to travel, but once Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power, in July 2013, the regime cracked down and restricted their mobility. Jail and worse loomed. Muukkonen and Stodolsky were successful in facilitating visas and organizing safe havens for these artists in the form of residencies in Helsinki. Their work served as the prototype for Artists at Risk, which today runs an international network of residencies, programs, and other services. Among these is Safe Haven Provence, known as the “resistance residency” to honor the legacy of Lisa Fittko on the French Mediterranean coast, a site of today’s ongoing refugee crisis. Artists at Risk also undertakes global advocacy campaigns on behalf of threatened artists—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the Russian performance-art group Pussy Riot, for example, when she was jailed in Moscow in 2013. When the Egyptian filmmaker Shady Habash died in an Egyptian prison earlier this year, Artists at Risk pressed for an investigation. Back in 2002, IIE established the Scholar Rescue Fund, a reincarnation of its Emergency Committee and earlier crisis-specific rescue efforts. In 2015, after finding itself unable to aid or provide support for artists who applied with needs distinct from those of scholars, IIE established a separate program, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, called the Artist Protection Fund (APF). “APF supports artists across métier and practice,” says Alison Russo, the program’s director. “The design of our year-long fellowship provides funding, mentoring, and a comprehensive artistic and social network. We place each APF Fellow within the host institution that is best situated to support their individual needs.” This entails a nimble dance in response to changes in local artistic resources and shifting political tides. Indeed, APF came into existence the year before Donald Trump was elected US president, and had to be quick on its feet in navigating the various iterations of his Muslim travel ban and other xenophobic policies. One of the fund’s first fellows, the painter Rashwan Abdelbaki, stands as the only Syrian artist it has been able to host in the United States; the organization has opted instead to place such artists in countries with more welcoming visa processes. Abdelbaki dispels stereotypical images of war and destruction by painting his home country as the fraught but rich and layered culture that it is. That work takes time and persistence. While fellowships like APF’s don’t last forever, they open many doors. “Many organizations look at APF Fellows and know the rigorous selection process—validating the quality of the artistic practice and the severity of threat—and understand why they’re most deserving of an APF award, and we hope that
their fellowship year can also be a bridge to additional support elsewhere,” Russo said. And that’s what happened with Abdelbaki, who in 2018 earned a New York City Artist Safe Haven residency, the result of a partnership among four different agencies—ArtistSafety.net, Westbeth Artists Housing, Residency Unlimited, and Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI). According to Ashley Tucker, program director of AFI, which entered the scene in 2015, “The needs and challenges of an at-risk artist are complex; it is not likely that any single organization is capable of accommodating all of those needs and helping them to meet all of those challenges.”10 But while one organization cannot support an artist indefinitely, the growing network of players in the field is collectively developing the ability to augment the types and durations of its resources. AFI’s unique contribution is the set of pro bono legal services offered by its team of immigration and human-rights attorneys, including Tucker’s former law professor Dinesh Khosla and other colleagues. In AFI’s role in the residency collaboration, it most recently teamed up with Tamizdat, a Brooklyn nonprofit that began working with Eastern European touring musicians in the 1990s and has since expanded to support and advocate for the mobility of all performing artists. With support from New York City Artist Safe Haven Residency Program partner organizations, Tamizdat and AFI host and support threatened musicians at the Westbeth residency. In 2017, in an apparent response to the proliferation of organizations recognizing and catering to threatened artists in all disciplines (can you keep all the acronyms straight?), pen America created the program Artists at Risk Connection (ARC). Headed by Julie Trébault, with APF’s Russo on the advisory board, ARC serves as an outreach and networking platform, connecting artists with resources and service organizations. Its emergence brings us full circle, in a sense, to pen’s initial role in paving the path for the protection of creative voices. And while the world faces the rise of nationalism and rides the waves of the covid-19 pandemic, these types of resources become all the more crucial. Some organizations are planning for the longterm future while others work to supply immediate aid. Artists at Risk whipped up its covid-19 Emergency Fund to address the double threat faced by threatened artists during the pandemic: “On the one hand you’re persecuted or followed; on the other,
you’re a sitting duck—you can’t move,” Stodolsky explains. The fund either assists with relocation to a safer place within an artist’s country or helps with the basic needs required to stay put. In addition to issues of loss of employment, or of visas required for emigration, organizations are addressing other unique needs of this moment, such as legal assistance—whether with the rights on all the virtual programming artists are producing now that we can no longer gather in person (Tamizdat) or for immigrant artists arrested in Black Lives Matter protests (AFI). Even if we take the global experience of the coronavirus out of the equation, artists are still at risk all over the world—even in countries that were once safe havens. AFI is currently at work examining the suppression of artistic expression in Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. More hushed examples exist, Stodolsky told me, such as that of political prisoners in Spain, a topic that scratched the surface of public consciousness in 2018 with the removal of a work by artist Santiago Sierra from the art fair arco Madrid. The piece, Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain, comprised images of the deposed
Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras and other figures imprisoned or charged for their roles in the Catalan independence movement. Artists at Risk has also received applications from artists living in the United States. The current capacities and funding rubrics of these organizations cannot accommodate artists at risk of economic precarity alone. But it’s worth considering who can survive as an artist in our societies, and how we can advocate for their rights, intervene in their struggles, and broadcast their voices. The work of these organizations saves lives in many senses. Both Stodolsky of Artists at Risk and Matthew Covey of Tamizdat recalled the case and viewpoint of Essam, the singer widely considered the voice of the Egyptian revolution—and who, like Baldwin, fled his country for the sake of his craft. Essam embarked on a decade-long exile to avoid the threat not only of physical death but also of an artistic one. It was his art that put him in danger, but with the support of a global network, it is his art that paves a path toward freedom. 1. “I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill such a function that I believe the god has placed me in the city.” Plato, Apology 30e, Five Dialogues, second ed., trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. J. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 35. 2. See Lois Mai Chan, “The Burning of the Books in China, 213 B.C.,” The Journal of Library History (1966–1972) 7, no. 2 (April 1972): 101–08. 3. Miriam Mahlow, in an interview with the author, May 26, 2020. Human Rights Watch began in 1978 with a group of writers and lawyers who published written testimonials to human-rights abuses. Since then, the organization has embraced forms of expression in a variety of media, first with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, staged in a number of cities in North America and Europe, and now with plans for a new artists’ and activists’ program in the near future. 4. Josephine Baker, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “An Interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin,” 1973, in Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 263. 5. Ibid., 264. 6. See testimony of Lisa Fittko, 1999, USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Available online at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VtRzJ7T7WbE (accessed July 28, 2020). See also https:// collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/vha48643. 7. See, e.g., encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/varian-fry (accessed July 24, 2020). 8. See, e.g., www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2016/06/22/insearch-of-momas-lost-history-uncovering-efforts-to-rescue-artistsand-their-patrons/ (accessed July 24, 2020). 9. Ivor Stodolsky, in an interview with the author, May 14, 2020. 10. Ashley Tucker, in an interview with the author, June 23, 2020.
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I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: ALLEN MIDGETTE Raymond Foye speaks with the actor who impersonated Andy Warhol during the great Warhol lecture hoax in the late 1960s. The two also discuss Midgette’s earlier film career in Italy and the difficulty of performing in a Warhol film.
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In 1967, when Andy Warhol hired the actor Allen Midgette to impersonate him on a lecture tour of America, he effectuated one of the great Dadaist acts of the twentieth century. It remains a captivating gesture to this day, an enduring work of performance art that engaged so many potent subjects in Warhol’s life and art: identity, fame, originality, artifice. An exquisitely subversive maneuver that played upon the public’s projections and expectations, it also reinforced the long-held popular view of modern art as a swindle and a hoax. Art historians and critics have endlessly analyzed the implications of this act.1 Indeed, one of the keys to Warhol’s artistic longevity is his skill in conjuring ideas and images that remain open to a wide range of interpretations and debate. Ambivalence and ambiguity are built into his work from the start, and we are always left with far more questions than answers. For Warhol, the creative image did not stop at the edge of the canvas. It extended into the public sphere through media of all sorts, and one can see the lecture hoax as one more aspect of that concept. Perhaps critic Wayne Koestenbaum went farthest when he wrote, “Warhol savored the sexual dimensions of substitutions: casting Allen Midgette’s body in the Andy role, and watching the replacement occur, was . . . an erotic act.”2 As we will see in this interview, that interpretation may not be as far-fetched as it seems. When eventually found out, Warhol’s act met great hostility, with audience members and venues demanding refunds. Despite these threats, though, none of the institutions pursued legal action in the end, and no refunds were given. One official from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, traveled to New York to meet Warhol for a scheduled appointment, but the artist did not show up. When finally confronted by the Utah press, Warhol remarked, “Because I really don’t have that much to say, he was better than I am. He was what people expected.”3 Warhol’s assistant Paul Morrissey told the same reporter, “Andy Warhol thought that his substitute would be better for public consumption. Like a person that was younger and better looking and better spoken. He used the medium of the lecture circuit you might say, in an original way.”4 Rather than assuaging the wounds, these remarks only further galled. Not since Baudelaire had creative irony been so wickedly employed against the public. It was a put-on—that classic product of 1960s culture, a tool for dividing hip from square. Figures such as Warhol and Bob Dylan carried it to a level of fine art, as evidenced in D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back (1967), where the Dylan of 1965 surgically dismembers reporters looking to promulgate stereotypes.5 Warhol’s method with the press was more passive aggressive, with the favored mode being an arch ennui. But the results are the same in both cases: exposing the media’s games of manipulation and commodification, and their penchant for slapping simplistic labels on new and complex ideas. Before performing in a dozen or more Warhol films, including The Nude Restaurant (1967), **** (Four Stars) (1967), and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), Midgette appeared in numerous classic Italian films, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Ricotta (1963) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Grim Reaper (1962) and Before the Revolution (1964). In the 1970s he continued to work in Europe, with Bertolucci in The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) and 1900 (1976) and with Jean-Luc Godard in Le vent d’est (1970). But his impersonation of Warhol on the 1967 lecture tour was surely his strangest role. Although this tour has been frequently discussed, the story has seldom been told by its major participant. Now eighty-two, Midgette lives in a second-floor apartment/workshop in the village of Woodstock, New York, which he has hand-painted from floor to ceiling. The space is filled with his leatherwork, original T-shirts, and jewelry designs.
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RAYMOND FOYE Explain to me how this caper began.
It was one of those things that nobody was totally responsible for, in terms of knowing where it would go or what it would do in the culture. It was just a normal evening, me going into Max’s Kansas City late at night, looking for something to do. I ran into Paul Morrissey and he invited me to have a drink, which was highly unusual because we weren’t friends—we weren’t enemies, we worked together at the Factory where I was in films, but we were not close buddies. Now Paul was not somebody to throw down money for drinks for drug trash, which is what he called me and the other actors. Also I knew something was weird because he had this black leather jacket with him. We got the drinks and he said, “Do you want to go to Rochester tomorrow to impersonate Andy?” And I said, “No, why would I?” He said, “You get paid.” It was about $600, which was a lot of money for me in those days. He said I’d be showing a movie. I knew Andy well enough to know I didn’t have to worry about talking too much, because he didn’t. And I knew I could deal with people much more easily than he could, because I did. RF That’s what Andy said when he got caught: ALLEN MIDGETTE
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“I knew he’d be much better at being me than I would.” AM T hat was the way I felt. Any way it was decided that I would do it. So Paul asked me to spend the night at his house because he was afraid I wouldn’t get up in the morning. We went to his house on 10th Street and I slept in the living room. I woke up before dawn when I heard a knock on the door. They say, “Hey Paul, it’s your friends.” Now, that’s the kind of thing you don’t hear in New York, ever. People don’t say that, and it didn’t sound very friendly. So I thought, It’s not my house, I’m not answering. I saw Paul stumble out of his bedroom with his eyes half shut. He opens the door and these three guys walk in who are obviously narcs, and they want to talk. I pretend I’m still sleeping and suddenly they’re shaking me and shining a flashlight in my face and saying, “Wake up! Have you ever taken LSD?” And I said, “No sir, and neither has my friend Paul.” I knew Paul never took drugs so I was relaxed about that. The narcs go around the apartment and come up empty handed. Finally they find a Velvet Underground album and they find the song called “Heroin” and they’re pointing to it, saying, “Look at this!” I said, “Yeah,
but it’s just a song.” I think they came there because Paul had had to go downtown to bail so many of the performers in Andy’s films out of jail. Probably they thought he was the dealer. Finally they left. It gave me pause for a minute: should I do what I’m doing, is this an omen? I decided to throw the I Ching and it said something like, “Everything acts to further.” I wasn’t sure what that meant but I decided to go ahead. The next thing I know we’re in a taxi. First to the Factory to pick up the film. RF At this point you had to be thinking about the role a little bit? AM Mostly I was thinking I needed makeup. We stopped at a pharmacy and I bought a compact with a little mirror, and I started doing the makeup thing in the back of the taxi. I wanted to make my skin look much lighter. I also bought silver spray and talcum powder for my hair. We got to the Factory and we woke up Billy Name. I was wearing the black leather jacket, black jeans, sunglasses: for a minute he thought I was Andy. That was funny, and encouraging—I realized this might actually work. Then we got to the airport and nobody wanted to get near me, and in those days the stewardesses were usually very friendly. I was wearing a huge amount
Previous spread: Allen Midgette in front of the Chelsea Hotel, New York, 2000. Photo: Rita Barros Opposite: Allen Midgette in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964). Photo: Cineriz/Iride/Kobul/ Shutterstock This page: Allen Midgette and Viva in Andy Warhol’s The Nude Restaurant (1967). Photo: Billy Name
of patchouli oil, purposely to throw people off. It was all about confusing people. I chewed gum, for instance, because it also doesn’t let people see you for yourself, you’re just a person chewing gum. I did whatever I could think of like that—that’s how you work as an actor, you use whatever’s available to you. Eventually we got to the Rochester Institute of Technology and even there, people were still staying away. It was what I was hoping for. I put them on guard, which Andy really did—that was his passive-aggressive nature. And let’s face it, it’s easy to forget that back then, Andy was a really strange-looking dude. I think most people saw him as a very unattractive person. It’s funny what fame does to people, it makes it harder to imagine the real person. I don’t like to get too psychological, but what I did get to see was what it’s like to be someone important, because that person wasn’t me at all. I got to see other people’s behavior, because I was wearing dark glasses, too, so I could look at them. RF Paul Morrissey was with you the whole time? AM He had to be. He was the straight man and he had to show the film. He had his job, to be sure, which was to legitimize why we were even there. Because if they spoke to me, I couldn’t have told them anything. I really didn’t know what was happening and I didn’t really care. We finally arrived at the gym where we were going to do the event. Paul set up the projector to show the movie first, and I realized I didn’t have to be there, so I went to the other side of the screen and sat in a chair with my back to the audience, because it kept me from being involved with them. RF What was the movie? AM It was a commercial for Bufferin, an aspirin product. What I was told was, the Grey Advertising agency gave different artists money to make a film to see if it could use one of them, which of course it couldn’t. So this was the one Andy made, with all these people talking about Bufferin, saying things like “I smoked Bufferin for quite a few years,” or whatever kind of thing they said in those movies. So I’m seeing the film for the first time from behind the screen and trying to figure out what I’m going to be talking about with all these people. I thought, “Hmm, this is interesting … ” RF Then you took questions from the audience. How did that go?
The first question was “Mr. Warhol, why do you wear so much makeup?” And I said, “Oh, I have a skin condition.” And the next question was “Mr. Warhol, are you gay?” And I just said no. It came out so easy because in that respect I didn’t want to speak for anyone, and it was perfect because the whole audience went silent for a minute. Then somebody asked me about my formal training and I had no idea. Fortunately the young man from the school standing onstage with me, directing who could ask questions from the audience, said, “Oh don’t ask that, that’s on the brochure.” So he saved my ass on that one. The one thing I knew about Andy was, you could answer any question anyway you liked and it would be fine. It might not have been the same thing he would say, but it would make as much sense. I think they gave us $1,200 for the event. We went back to New York the same day. That was the most normal of the events. Later on things got a lot stranger and people got testy. RF When you got back to New York, did Andy ask you how it went? AM No, we never spoke about it, ever. RF Never? AM Never. I thought that was the end of it. It was 1967, the Summer of Love—I wanted to get out of New York and go to Haight-Ashbury. I got there and loved it, I lived on the streets for a few months, and then the scene started changing, heroin started moving in and things got weird. I wanted to get out of there and come back to New York, so I called up the Factory to see if they could send me a ticket, which I usually didn’t ask for. Paul Morrissey answered the phone and said, “I can’t believe it, we were just talking about you. We want you to go out on a tour of three more colleges.” So I said fine and they sent me the ticket. This time it was all planned out: first it was Salt Lake City, then Eugene, Oregon, then Bozeman, Montana. The events were in the evenings and I wouldn’t go out in the daytime. Also I was carrying grass all the time, if I’d gotten busted I’d have been sent to prison for twenty years. In Salt Lake City it was a huge crowd in a large theater, not a gym. They used a Nico recording to lead into the whole thing. The film may have changed, I can’t remember—I think we were showing some reels from Twenty-Four-Hour Movie [**** (Four Stars)]. For the Q&A I could always just fall AM
back on being as silly as Andy was. You could tell from the questions they didn’t really know who he was, all their information was wrong. RF I recall Henry Geldzahler once telling me that his brother David went to the event in Salt Lake City. He was a lawyer and he had helped Andy buy his first studio in New York, a firehouse. He called Henry in New York from a pay phone in the theater all upset, saying, “There’s a guy here who’s saying he’s Andy Warhol!” And Henry said, “We know, we know, be quiet!” AM That’s funny, I never knew that. This all became about identity. A lot of people like to pretend that Andy and I were doppelgängers; no, it’s about acting. In Eugene I met someone who knew Andy and had been to the Factory a couple of times, but he didn’t get it either. It made me realize how, in life, people just presume a lot of things. Just because you’ve met Andy twice, does it mean you remember exactly how he looked, and how he would look under different circumstances? If you’re being told it’s Andy and everyone else is accepting it, you’ll go along with that. It shows you how people just aren’t very curious about what’s in front of them. And the fact that you’re a famous person means they don’t really see you, they’re just seeing their own projection of you. At one point I was herded in and trapped in a corridor with about twenty people wanting to get to me to get an autograph. It was strange to see what it was like to be famous. And Andy wasn’t that famous back then, I don’t think—he was famous in the art world, but that was a very small world. You couldn’t mention his name in Sheboygan. Nobody in Tampa would know him. He wasn’t known in your family. Now, even people who don’t know Andy Warhol know Andy Warhol—the fact that he’s famous, that’s enough for them. By Eugene, Oregon, I’d loosened up a bit more. I remember going to a party and signing a lot of draft cards; the students liked me. I would talk about weird things like astrology. I don’t think people had a grasp on Andy yet, in terms of his art—I’m sure there were some students who got him but it was more about the feeling of notoriety. Word was out that Andy was kooky, that was expected. In Bozeman I got along really well with the students. They took me around and showed me apartments and studio spaces, they wanted me to move 153
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there. Can you imagine, Andy moving to Bozeman in 1967? It was so unreal. But see, this is the difference: Andy would never have gotten that reaction from anybody. They might have liked him but they wouldn’t have felt friendly toward him. He wouldn’t have known how to put them at ease at all. I was more like them already. I really think Andy sent me out for that reason. I don’t think Andy could give a lecture, do you? RF No, absolutely not. Prior to Andy you’d been directed by Pasolini and Bertolucci and you were an extra in the film West Side Story [1961]. How did the movie experience with Andy differ? AM I didn’t even know what the movies were after I worked for Andy Warhol. I gave up on the very idea after that. RF They were largely improvised? AM You couldn’t even call it improvisation. There was no theme whatsoever in those films, they were just reactive. Improvisation involves an agreement between all players, it isn’t something where each person is improvising on their own, that doesn’t work. You have to improvise together or you’re not improvising, you’re just competing, you see what I mean? And that’s what I found was happening at the Factory. People did a lot of drugs, heavy-duty drugs. Some of the people you had to perform with were interested in performing but not in the normal sense of performing. And they were usually angry with each other about something that happened the day before, like some drug deal gone bad, and suddenly I’m the middle of it. It was like improvising in a jail cell, there was only so far you could go. Also, they were all deeply involved in the scene already, and I always considered myself an outsider at the Factory. Do you know how I actually met Andy? RF No, I would love to know. AM That’s an important part of this whole mad saga of the lecture tour, this absurdity. Before the Revolution came out in 1964 and by early 1965 I was
back in Los Angeles, looking for acting work. But in LA, I always give up the idea of being an actor, there’s something about that place that just does that to me. So I got back to New York, I needed a job, and some friend of mine—maybe Johnny Nicholson from Café Nicholson, or it could have been Jerome Robbins—they told me that I could go interview for a job at the discotheque Arthur. It was run by Richard Burton’s ex-wife Sybil Christopher and her husband Jordan Christopher, the lead singer in the band the Wild Ones. I interviewed for a waiter’s job, which was a good gig—you could make as much as $400 a night, and that was good pay in those days. But you had to be on spot. There was a dancing thing where you had to move to the music when you weren’t waiting on tables, which was fine. So anyway I started working there. I didn’t really like it, to be honest. I liked the idea that I was working and making money to pay bills, but it wasn’t really a scene I wanted to be involved with. Then this guy David Croland—later he was Robert Mapplethorpe’s boyfriend but at the time he was going out with a model named Susan Bottomly, who went by the name of International Velvet in Andy’s films—and he brought her to Arthur. She was about seventeen and a very beautiful girl, she’d already been on the cover of Mademoiselle, and she really liked me. We danced together and she said, “You have to come meet Andy Warhol, he would love you and you could be in his movies.” And I said, “Oh, that’s all right,” because I had friends who had worked with Andy who weren’t so keen on him. Andy wasn’t the kind of person I was anxious to hang with. I might also have been overserious about being an actor, but that’s the way I was then. One day I get to work in the late afternoon, the place is empty, and my boss comes up to me and says, “Andy’s here and he wants to talk to you.” So I go over and Andy is sitting by himself—and I never saw Andy by himself again, but there he was, sitting alone, like some strange painting in the corner. I walk over and he
immediately says, “Oh you’re so fabulous, blah blah blah, we’d like you to be in our movies.” And I said, “I’m really not interested in movies right now.” I told him my idea of making movies would be, you get a group of people together and you make a bond between all of you to stay together for ten years and you very slowly just get used to being in front of the camera, you don’t even try to do anything else, you just get used to being in front of the damn camera and you slowly build up this rapport. And Andy said, “Oh, that’s what we’re trying to do,” but I knew he was bullshitting me. RF Where did you get that concept from, the theater? AM That style of working is what I saw on set with Pasolini. The novelist Elsa Morante was my best friend in Rome. She introduced me to everyone—Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luigi Comencini, Damiano Damiani, the whole scene. And Pasolini definitely had the best directing style I’d ever seen. First of all, like Robert Bresson, he didn’t use professional actors. That’s a big plus right away, because professional actors do too much acting. With Pasolini, everyone had their job to do and everyone made a contribution, it was like a big family. RF Had Andy seen you in films? AM I don’t know. When I met Henry Geldzahler the first thing he said to me was “I’ve seen Before the Revolution thirty-five times.” I knew he hadn’t seen it that many times, but he’d seen it a lot, so I assume Andy had too. To be honest, one thing I always wondered about was the way my character looked in that film and the style Andy came to adopt. Bertolucci blew my hair out and dyed it silver—if you look at a film still the resemblance is uncanny. Anyway, I left Andy kind of not knowing. I didn’t say I was interested but I didn’t say I wasn’t. He gave me his telephone number. RF Then what happened? AM Well, first he invited me out on what I later
Opposite: Allen Midgette and Susan Bottomly in **** (Four Stars) (1967). Photo: Billy Name This page: Allen Midgette, Elsa Morante, and Bill Morrow, Rome, 1963
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realized was probably a failed attempt to go on a date. This was probably 1966. He took me to see Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, which had just come out. When I look back on it and consider what happened later, with my role of impersonating Andy, it seemed like a weird foreshadowing of events, because Persona is all about the exchange of identities between two people who actually merge at the end of the film, and Bergman himself as the director seems to be implicated in the manipulation. In fact, at the end, one doesn’t know if it’s a film or real life. Our second “date” was quite a bit different: he took me to see Wilson Pickett, just the two of us. RF What was the first film you appeared in for Andy? AM It started right away. It was probably a combination of boredom and a sense that something had to happen that made me call up Andy. Right away he said, “Oh, we’re just leaving for Philadelphia, why don’t you come with us and you can be in this movie.” So I get to the Factory and it’s Ivy Nicholson, Mary Woronov, Ultra Violet, and Gerard Malanga. We get into the limousine and we go to Henry McIlhenny’s house on Rittenhouse Square. You can see in a way why it was destiny for me: it wasn’t all about Andy Warhol movies, it was about the continuation of my education, and the adventure of my life, in a sense. Henry had a great Toulouse-Lautrec painting, an Edgar Degas statue of a dancer, five floors of antique furniture with beautiful plants, and only Irish servants. So what’s not to like? And actually I found him to be a very nice man. T he f irst day I don’t think we did anything. The next day we made a movie at the Penn Museum. I decided to take LSD that morning, so I took a little acid and we arrived at the museum. It was a Sunday and they were closed. I think because Henry McIlhenny had called, they allowed Andy to come in and shoot this movie. We go into this
big hall on the second floor, and all I remember is an enormous Egyptian lion sphinx up on a pedestal. Andy does his usual thing: “Well, Ivy is going to direct the movie.” And I thought, Oh yeah, two sheets to the wind, whatever goes down goes down. Call it improvisation, call it what you like—I see what’s happening and I decided I’m just going to do what I’m going to do. I’m on acid so I don’t give a shit anyway. And Ivy gives me a tiny piece of cloth to wear. That’s gonna be my costume. I’m standing there stoned out of my head and I notice there’s only one guard there and he doesn’t seem to be very with it. He’s accepting the fact that Andy’s an OK person; he doesn’t realize that everybody’s completely out of their minds, and dangerous people, you might say. If he’d had a clue, he wouldn’t have been so easy on any of us. I look at this sphinx and some voice tells me, Boy, I’d love to be on top of that thing and I will never have this chance again. Suddenly I’m climbing up until I’m on top of it, I’m straddling this sphinx on acid, in a loincloth, and I’m getting vibes, let me tell you. I can see Andy and he’s not terribly excited to get his camera up there, but he wants to get the picture, and now he’s getting the three ladies in front of the sphinx and he says to Ultra, “Say something,” and Ultra starts to describe what she had for breakfast that morning. And Ivy and Mary are smoking cigarettes. So that was that movie. I never went out to the cinema to see any of these movies, but I saw some of them at the Factory when Andy threw them together. There was never any editing. I can understand the possibilities available there, but wouldn’t it be more interesting if the people in front of the camera had some kind of communication with each other? It doesn’t have to make sense, but maybe more art, less gossipy? Whatever. Then there was another movie we shot that weekend at the house of a collector who had
bought one of Andy’s paintings. I don’t remember who they were—they had this penthouse apartment and Andy went there to deliver a painting they had purchased. I remember him opening the trunk of the car and taking out the canvas and stretcher. He also had a staple gun, and he actually stretched the painting on the street just before going up there. Then we were invited up to the collector’s penthouse, they had a pool and a sauna, and Andy says, “Oh, we can all take a sauna?” I knew that he just wanted to have everybody take their clothes off so he could sit and check it all out. RF It must strike you as weird that people now have all these elaborate theories about what Warhol was doing as a filmmaker? AM It struck me as weird even then. At the Salt Lake City appearance I was invited to meet with the underground filmmaking department. I didn’t know that a college could have an underground filmmaking department, it surprised me. I sat down and somebody asked, “In a few words, how would you describe underground film?” And I said, “Black and white and very cheap.” Don’t ask me where any of this came from. What were they hoping to get from Andy? What kind of knowledge could he have given them that would have helped them? I don’t think anything, to be honest. And that’s not a putdown of anybody; it’s just weird to apply concepts of learning or teaching to such things as art or underground film. They were trying to fit something into their understanding that just wouldn’t fit. Just learn from life—it’s always in front of you, just allow it to be strange. RF Maybe Andy taught them all something after all. What did it all mean to you in the end? AM What did it mean to me? I guess I would say it was about something . . . philosophical. And it was about fame, the absurdity of it. Allen Midgette, 2020. Photo: Matt Jones
1. See, e.g., Scotti Hill, “The Artist Is Not Present: Andy Warhol’s 1967 Utah ‘Hoax’ as Performance and Self-Portraiture,” MA art history thesis, University of Utah, 2011. I am indebted to Hill’s essay for parts of the research in this introduction. 2. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Penguin Lives, 2001), 131. 3. Kay Israel and Angelyn Nelson, “Warhol Hoax Confirmed,” Daily Utah Chronicle, February 8, 1968. Quoted here from Hill, “The Artist Is Not Present,” 13. 4. Ibid. 5. To this list I would add Marlon Brando’s brief but brilliant deconstruction of media manipulation as he delightfully deflates the press in the Maysles Brothers documentary Meet Marlon Brando (1965).
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GAME CHANGER MERCEDES MATTER
Lauren Mahony and Michael Tcheyan pay homage to the founder of the New York Studio School. Mercedes Matter’s devotion to art and artists, manifest in her founding of the New York Studio School, was instilled in her early on. Born Jeanne Carles in Philadelphia in 1913, the future artist, writer, and educator was the daughter of Mercedes de Cordoba, a former model for Edward Steichen and other members of the Photo-Secession, and Arthur B. Carles, an American painter who studied the art of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse in Paris in the 1910s. This early and persistent exposure to modern art led Matter herself to begin painting at the age of six. After living in Italy and France, she began to study art, first at Bennett College, to the north of New York City, and then, in the early 1930s, with the artist Hans Hofmann. This German-born painter is of course famous for teaching the concepts of abstract painting that would define the New York School: the “push-pull” approach to composition and the focus on the picture plane. He also insisted on sustained looking and time in the studio to develop ideas. Matter’s upbringing and education would define not only her own approach to art making but her career as an educator carrying these philosophies to new generations. As the art historian Ellen G. Landau has written, “The Studio School offered an atelier curriculum that perfectly reflected (perhaps even more than her own work) Mercedes Matter’s deep-seated belief in the transcendent powers of art making.”1 During the Depression, Matter worked for the Works Progress Administration alongside Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Lee Krasner. The project she and de Kooning collaborated on was directed by Fernand Léger, for whom she served as a translator. Two years later, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Léger introduced her to her future husband, the Swiss photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter (some of Herbert’s best-known photographs show a nude Mercedes on the beach at Provincetown). Following a brief period in Los Angeles, the Matters returned to New York after World War II to find that the nascent artistic community of the WPA years was now running at full force. In the early 1950s, Mercedes was among the first female members of the Club, an organization of downtown artists that held frequent discussion evenings; she was also a regular at the Cedar Tavern.2 For Mercedes, “The Club was marvelous. It brought together in one place, at one time, the greatest diversity of artists—as nothing had done before or has since. . . . The end of that marvelous time came when American art became big business.”3 In 1953, while remaining an artist and writer, Matter began her career as an educator, teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art, New York University, and Pratt Institute. Ten years later she grew troubled by trends she noticed in institutional curricula that seemed increasingly at odds with the lessons of her youth. At Pratt, students completed a first-year foundation course and then painters majored in Art Education and sculptors in Industrial Design, taking drawing and painting classes just once a week, respectively. The rest of the curriculum was geared toward accreditation requirements, and there was no emphasis on studio time 166
or on instruction from working artists, factors Matter believed crucial to an artist’s development. She accordingly began to hold an off-campus drawing class for students craving more such teaching. (The period coincided with the early years of ’60s student activism; in 1963, a number of Pratt students barricaded themselves in the painting studio, demanding to design their own curriculum.) Matter’s drawing classes served as a laboratory in which she could refine her ideas about art education. Putting these concerns on paper, in September 1963 she published her article “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?,” writing, “Instruction no longer punctuates the student’s work, it replaces it.” Decrying the tendency toward “easier, ready-made results,” she made her philosophy clear: “Strip away everything but . . . basic, serious components: drawing, painting, sculpture, history of art.”4
Mercedes Matter with students at the New York Studio School. Photo: Herbert Matter, courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
Many young art students read Matter’s article as a call to arms. Several responded by entreating her to help them start an art school, and in September 1964, the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture was born.5 Initially housed in a 5,000-square-foot loft on lower Broadway, the school soon moved to the original home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, on West 8th Street. Matter was a natural leader, not only in personality and passion but because so many people in the art world loved and supported her. The school was dedicated to the principle that an art student’s education should mirror the life of an actual artist, the life the student would lead upon graduation. Its program called for long uninterrupted periods in the studio, plus critiques from artists and mentors farther along in their professional careers. The founding manifesto was signed by de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, and others; early faculty included Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Milton Resnick, and Meyer Schapiro.6 A school that ignored two essential reasons for going to college in this period—a degree that would
lead to a job and a deferment from the military draft (this during the Vietnam War)—appealed only to the most serious and committed. And while the concept of drawing from life may now seem conservative, the school’s approaches to traditional subject matter were true to Hofmann’s philosophies, and the principle of collaboration between students and instructors was radical. The diversity of the school’s graduates also shows its success in training artists not to make traditional art but to develop original ideas and approaches. For David Reed, for example, a student at the school in 1966–67, his time there provided an important link to earlier generations of the New York School. He recalls, [Matter’s] philosophy of art education and being an artist inspired me. Her friends and colleagues were involved with the School and were my introduction to New York painting culture. I always volunteered to deliver her manifestos and petitions to be signed—in this way I was able to briefly meet Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, and have a longer conversation with Mark Rothko in his uptown studio on 69th Street. Mercedes took a group of us to Elaine de Kooning’s studio and brought Philip Guston and Milton Resnick in to teach. The composer Morton Feldman was the dean of the school and convinced Willem de Kooning to come back with him after lunch one day and they spoke with students together in the library. These experiences formed me as an artist.7 The school’s approach continues to affect graduates in their mature work. Christopher Wool, who shared a studio there with Joyce Pensato in the 1970s, recalls, “I’m still kind of amazed that Joyce and I . . . have both continued to work in similar veins related to the Studio School, and in retrospect we both feel greatly indebted to Mercedes for her support and influence.” Wool has connected the “Studio School ideal” to his own discovery that “the process of finding the geometry was part of the process of painting.”8 Today, Matter’s vision for the Studio School—which continues to evolve under the direction of the current dean, Graham Nickson— remains a major turning point in arts education in the United States. 1. Ellen G. Landau, “To Be an Artist Is to Embrace the World in One Kiss,” in Landau, Sandra Kraskin, Phyllis Braff, et al., Mercedes Matter, exh. cat. (New York: MB Art Publishing Co., 2009), 14. 2. Landau, “To Be an Artist,” 47. Elaine de Kooning was another early member. See Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 289. 3. Matter, quoted in Landau, “To Be an Artist,” 49. 4. Matter, “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?,” Artnews 62, no. 9 (September 1963): 40, 41. 5. Among these students were Chuck O’Connor and Marc Zimetbaum. The authors are grateful to O’Connor for sharing his recollections of the School’s founding. 6. The manifesto can be found in the archives of the Alumni Association of the New York Studio School. See 2019 Alumni Invitational, exh. cat. (New York: New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, 2019), 65. 7. David Reed, e-mail conversation with the authors, June 3, 2020. 8. Christopher Wool, in “Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool in Conversation Part 2,” in Siegel and Wool, eds., Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian, 2017), 144, 145, and e-mail conversation with the authors, July 11, 2020.
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