Blind Cut

I, too, wondered if I could sell something and succeed in life. For quite a while I had been good for nothing. I am forty years old‌ The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work at once.

- Marcel Broodthaers

I don’t feel bad for Modigliani. I feel good for me.

-Elmyr de Hory

Blind Cut Curated by Jonah Freeman and Vera Neykov

January 19 - February 18, 2012

MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA 545 West 25th Street • New York, New York 10001 • (212) 463-8634 marlboroughchelsea.com

Blind Cut Fiction, Deception, Fabrication, Deceit, Fake, Duplicity, Fantasy; these are some words to describe the approach to the collection of works in Blind Cut. None are meant in the pejorative sense. This is, if anything, a celebration of the complexity of our culture, and the artists who take it on in a myriad of subversive ways. For us, it started with the Orson Welles 1974 film F for Fake, in which the famous hoaxster presents a kaleidoscope of charlatanism. The cast of characters includes: an art forger, a fake biographer, a con artist and Welles himself. He acts as storyteller, documentarian, essayist and trickster. In what was typical of Welles throughout his career, he broke all the rules and reinvented the cinematic form through a mix of genres and techniques. It is this approach that inspired our organization of this exhibition and its catalogue.

Over the past year, this exhibition has meandered and expanded through several generations, genres and cultural spheres. The work of Marcel Broodthaers was among the first to be discussed. His practice, which used fiction as its principle medium, became the anchor for a spiraling outward that grew to include such diverse figures as Kurt Schwitters and J.T. Leroy. We wanted it to be the kind of dinner party, per se where Abbie Hoffman might be seated between Henry Kissinger and Madonna; a mise-en-scène where each figure is as original and deceptive as the next. And who would all most likely argue and charm each other at the same time...

J O N A H F R E E M A N & V E R A N E Y KO V LO S A N G E L E S , 2 0 1 2

Table Of Contents

6

Alex Waterman: Anna Magdalena Bach, the True Author of The Suites for Unaccompanied Cello

13

François Aubart: The Clifford Irving Show

16

Interview with authors of Autobiography of Any One Being Including Everyone Before.

22

Extra-Ordinary, Richard Prince Talks to J.G. Ballard, 1967

27

Kurt Schwitters: To Anna Blume, a poem

28-84

Artist works

85

John Fare Estate

97

Roe Ethridge by Vera Neykov

101

James Frey by Jonah Freeman

106

Mark Flood: Primal Screen: A Fake Art Movement

108

The Annabel Vale Archive

110

Pierre Huyghe / Philippe Parreno: No Ghost Just a Shell

112

Jeffrey Vallance: Blinky Statement

114

Laura Albert/J.T. LeRoy

by Vera Neykov and Jonah Freeman

124

Alan Smithee by Alex Israel

126

Julieta Aranda: Meanwhile in Nigeria / Again in the Backwoods

128

Marcel Broodthaers Interview with Jürgen Harten and Katharina Schmidt, 1972

130

Alex Waterman: SHOOT THE PLAYER PIANO!

140

Index

143

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

DICKINSON SCAN

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Waterman

Anna Magdalena Bach, the True Author of the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello B Y A L E X WAT E R M A N

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deed, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

These words have been made famous three times. First sounded by Miguel Cervantes in his novel Don Quixote, relived and written anew in the words of Pierre Menard, and told through the hand of Borges in his story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The author of the historical tract on Menard (Borges’ narrator) takes us through a list of known works and a genealogy of the author’s thought and genius before positing that Menard was the true author of the Don Quixote by way that he re-lived the life of Cervantes and rewrote the exact words from another time and space but through the lived experience of Cervantes’s life.

This double life brought forth a much richer and truer rendering of the original. This was therefore not a copy but the missing original!

We “witness the past” through deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution, or so Borges would like his reader to think. Truth is created by history.

The copy may render similitude (still holding remnants of the inexact or the mistake) or the copy may be “exact”—a forgery in search of an owner. A reiteration is ambiguously identical. It has a way of lying on the page.

The word “copy” is imbued with the Middle English conception of the act of transcribing—meaning literally to “write across.” The word itself sounds most like—and is indeed linked to—the Latin word “copia,” meaning “plenty” or “abundance.”

In “writing across,” we enter the place where words and music reside inside the memory. This is the double act of mimetic production, sound impression and the pressing of the pen to page; the inscription of an internal resonance. This resonance becomes printed once more on the limbs of the performer as they study the work in preparation for performance. So to this resonance that happens between the covers of the book, becomes imprinted into the somatic life of the reader as they layer story upon story into the fabric of their fictional and real lives simultaneously.

In approaching another copyist in the historical/fictional time continuum—Anna Magdalena Bach (AMB)—I wished to read her copy with the idea that it had returned the original as something “ambiguously identical.”

Her copies had been erroneously attributed at times, attributed as erroneous at others, and at best simply viewed as a copy that could be used to reflect off of other sources and compile the truest version from (write the Urtext and create history). All of these issues seemed to avert the questions that I wished to ask about the author herself, and about the genius of her marks.

Is the copy made with the idea that it will be different? Is it made in order to be two?1 Have the copy and copyist both been assigned an unreality and invisibility? Has AMB herself been rendered unhuman in the process? And how have her marks created a room of her own, a voice that sings as its reads...?

1. Luce Irigaray, To Be Two Waterman

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How have her marks on the page, so ambiguously identical as to be nearly indistinguishable from the master’s hand, been deemed incorrect when it comes to the question of the small curved lines hovering above the notes? What happens to the phrase markings at that altitude? What is it about that empty space above that could make Anna’s hand get lost? Or do they in fact trace another way of reading, thinking, singing? Do they undo the original?

And finally, to ask the most preposterous of questions, is this why there is no longer an extant original? Has Anna Magdalena’s breath brought to life a work that can no longer return to the hands of the man who molded it?2 Or was there ever such a mold in the first place? ...to be called unreal, and to have that call, as it were, institutionalized as a form of differential treatment, is to become the other against which the human is made. It is the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality. To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human.3 Anna Magdalena has lived an unlivable life even posthumously. Her life has not yet been returned to her.

She has been inscribed in Esther Meynell’s book, as dumb and afraid except when performing. She gave birth to thirteen children, seven of which died at an early age. Her life been written as a producer copies of Bach, but not yet as a life of her own. She is a copy who produced copies (bodies of work and human bodies). There is, according to Butler not yet even the chance that she could be considered oppressed and thereby emancipated from her state of being. She is and was unreal.

Living through a text lends to us the feeling of (a) time, a gaze into the past, the ability to re-live and to embody/write the text of another life—returning it, reclaiming it, reciting it. Are Pierre Menard and Anna Magdalena the readers par excellence that Barthes later cites in his essay, The Death of the Author, as the necessary replacements for the Author? “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing,”4 writes Barthes.

But if the Author is a copy, does he/she furnish the text with a final signifier? If the work is in translation is it too furnished with a final signifier? At what point can we take Barthes’ construction and apply it? If the life writing the work is unreal can it hold within itself an end? Isn’t the premise of a life—that which contains death within itself ?

If this is true, then the conclusion to Barthes’ argument can never be afforded to someone like Anna Magdalena. She can not ever really be an Author because she can never die in order to make a reading possible, or rather to allow the continuation of writing to be possible!

Let us look- keeping in mind the body of Anna Magdalena the mother-copyist—at the final line of Barthes: We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.5 2. A reference to the figure in Jewish mysticism known as the golem. A clay figurine that when inscribed with an Aleph would come to life. This letter, seen as the first exhalation symbolized breath. The mystic could therefore create life, like G-d herself.

3.Judith Butler “The Question of Social Transformation,” from Undoing Gender (NY+London: Routledge, 2004), p. 30.

4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” from Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

5. Ibid, p. 148.

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What kind of life can “give birth to” but cannot die? Is this perhaps the true definition of the copy? Has Bach’s original which has, remember, been presumed lost(!) died precisely because it had a life? Or did the hand of Anna Magdalena give its life to it and her death was died 6 through it?

Judith Butler proposes a radical program for political change wherein fantasy proposes both a pragmatic yet radical, and real challenge to the normative presumptions not only about gender, but what is considered to be real. She employs “drag” as a readymade functioning already as a model of transformation, transgression, and performativity. Butler confesses in her writing, that watching drag queens “playing” women on stage often surpasses her own femininity or even as she implies, her possibilities to be a woman.

Drag challenges how performances of gender could be considered authentic in one situation and false in another. It questions who and what is considered real. Butler starts however from the position that “What operates at the level of cultural fantasy is not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is organized.”7 This concept of drag, I would argue, not only could be applied to the copied score or writing, but also could apply to challenging how a whole creative class, gender, and artistic practice could be written out of history.

The Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach Anna Magdalena was a professional musician and colleague of her husband as well as a singer, above and beyond her role of copyist.8 In a book that has possibly done more of a disservice than a kindness to its subject, Esther Meynell’s The Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, the story is recounted of AMB meeting J.S. Bach for the first time and AMB singing for him: As for me, I was dumb enough. I made him a courtesy and did not open my mouth till he put some music on the clavier, sat down himself at the instrument and asked me to sing the aria. Happily, when I sing I am not afraid, and when I had finished my father cried, “Good!” with a real pleasure in his face. Master Bach just looked at me very steadily for a moment and said, “Thy voice is pure, and thou canst sing.” And I—I wanted to say “And how thou canst play!” but I did not dare.

Note AMB’s stutter: And I-I 9 [does the copy always trip up on the first person singular?] wanted to say “And how thou canst play!” but I did not dare.

6. To use this as verbal form here recalls the dying of fabric. Ink on the page (often composed of cotton or skin, is analogous to cloth that has been dyed by colors.) The analogy doesn’t go far because dying and inscribing are at best only linked by the act of impressing a mark or a symbol on a surface.

7. Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 214.

8. As we know, the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, have no original manuscript—no fair copy or autograph score as they say. In its absence we find an exuberance of copies which originate from around the time of AMB’s copy and continue through till the first printed publication in France in the 19th century, from that point on they multiply and are very fruitful until our present moment when Urtext editions are still published with clockwork predictability every decade or so. The copy by Anna Magdalena Bach (AMB), originated sometime between 1727 and 1731.

9. The repetition of “I” is in the original. The stutter is incredibly revealing in this case. Where does the “I” reside? Even Anna Magdalena struggles to find solid ground in her personhood and the “I” is copied (repeated) as a defect in speech.

Waterman

9

In this early passage, Meynell gives us the clues that we need. Meynell inscribes her own Victorian values onto AMB in order to project her understanding onto the context of AMB’s 18th century world. However, I think that Meynell was not only writing from her own time period’s moral and cultural norms, but writing in the only language which had been given her to use as a biographer at that time. Through writing about AMB she had to assign her as the biographer of Sebastian. This attribution means that her own life as copyist and musician and mother of 13 children has been repurposed as transmitter of this story. Let’s return to the language for a moment: As for me, I was dumb enough. I made him a courtesy and did not open my mouth till he put some music on the clavier, sat down himself at the instrument and asked me to sing the aria.

Her dumbness was “enough.” She could be present yet unheard, she could be supportive and yet attentive.

She only opens her mouth when music is given to her, and her seduction by J.S. is portrayed as being a musical one. The music (courting her with court music—she makes him a courtesy—the language is full of architectural and material significance) is of such seductive power that her father is the first to yell out his approval and express his pleasure. This vocal approval is perhaps a clue that Meynell gives us as to how this marriage was constructed and quite possibly framed by this performative moment.

When Anna sang she was “unafraid.” When she was not performing, she perhaps had to live with stage fright and “dumbness” in her daily life. Were her performances and her copying the real life that Anna Magdalena lived? Had we not however concluded that this is not a life?

Esther Meynell’s book leaves us with little more than a set of initials (AMB). The real story is that of J.S. Bach told in an adoring feminine voice. How can we even be sure that the voice itself is not just a narrator in drag? Upon what are we claiming its authenticity?

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach The film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach by Jean Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, is again not so much about Anna Magdalena as her husband. As Danielle Huillet said in an interview, it is a “film about death.” But there was only one death that the film can depict: Johann Sebastian’s. Anna Magdalena, whose voice narrates the film, can only exist in the limbo of disembodied voice. She will neither truly live nor die, but we will accept Bach’s death as an authentic death after all.

Then we cut the last reel, where the vertigo started again, as if it were a film in itself. Then it fit together and we noticed that we had won a victory...That is also one of the novelistic aspects of the film, that it tells of a life that burns like a candle. I think a novel recounts a life; the novels of the nineteenth century, the novels of Dostoyevsky and Balzac recounted a destiny. And here one has, perhaps for the first time, a destiny on the screen...The last reel of the film is the proof, that death is the most unnatural thing—I mean that literally—in the world. The last reel gets faster and faster: it is a race, a wager against time. And suddenly it is completed, burned up.

This quote by Danielle Huillet speaks to the ways that film, like historiography, has the power to inscribe life and death. When recounting a life we take on the responsibility of how to let (our subjects) live and perhaps even more importantly we let (them) die. The frontispiece to the film is written in the hand of Pierre Straub and reads:

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... to have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and thus to be known and perceived by you as a completion of your own essence and as a necessary part of your self, and to know myself confirmed in both your thinking and in your love... Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our essence would shine unto itself. 10 Her copy is a transcription of her “sung reading.” What we see on the page are the marks that lay deep in the page as imprints of the internal sound of her mind—her mind humming the notes to her fingers. The phrasings are her breath and her temper; they are her makeup and her composition. They are her voice.

Anna Magdalena Bach is the True Author of the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Her copy is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, her detractors will say—but ambiguity is richness.) 11 I want to make a statement about her articulation and phrasing, to say that the marks above the note-heads are the very things that give presence to Anna Magdalena. I want to assert that they are traces, scars, breath, or perhaps gasps for air. I am aware that in speaking about her articulation, I am facing head-on, an issue of normativity. It is a political position to side with Anna. As a performer and interpreter, it is the position that I defend with all my skills as a trained musical reader.

I refute the idea that Anna Magdalena was sloppy, tired, burdened, or otherwise incapable of drawing slurs correctly. Everything about the page, the copy and its richness, the quality of its notes, the care with which it was written and the completeness of the page (in all likelihood the number of bars per line match those of its original (the autograph) as they do in the copy she made of the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin) are substantial evidence with which to dispute the claim that a curved line was hard for her to either draw.

What do her curved lines do? Or rather, what do they undo?

To say that the phrasing affects time, throws the musical flow into another direction, upsets the careful balance of groupings, are all understatements. Her “careless slurs” which often veer to the right, often hover in another space above the notes that appears to not be connected to any particular note, suggest something altogether more poignant. It suggests that the time and space, or rather the room that AMB occupied was entirely another. It was a room of her own, one that she wished to draw for us the reader.

10. The quote is actually by Karl Marx, quoted in Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Daniele Huillet and Jean Marie Straub (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) p. 69.

11. These words are a continuation of the “borrowing” from Borges. They are his exact words. [“Pierre Menard, Autor del Quixote,” Sur, 1939] Waterman 11

6 / Suites a / Violoncello Solo / senza / Basso / composeés / par / Sr. J.S. Bach / Maitre de Capelle / écrite par son epouse /Anna Magdalena Bach The confusions of language on the frontispiece are perhaps a final clue and epitaph for Anna Magdalena. Did Georg Heinrich Schwanberg, the court violinist in residence in Leipzig from 1727-1728, know all this when he wrote that cryptic paragraph that tells us that this copy was indeed written by her? Why write it in two languages? Why incorrectly? Was it an allusion to the what Margaret Homans quoted in Carolyn Heilbrun’s book, Writing a Woman’s Life, refers to as the “premise that language and experience are coextensive...” and that it is understood that language is “a male construct whose operation depends on women’s silence and absence, so that when women write they do not represent themselves as women.”

Is that why Bach himself becomes Snr. Bach, a German composer who writes in a pidgin of Italian and French? Is this a clue left for us the reader? Is this a mirroring of the author through a mirror that returns language as two distinct yet uncomplimentary halves? Is this a little joke or perhaps an “othering” of Bach as the author? Is this why the last line reads, ecrite par son epouse? Her breath, her life, and our reading is returned as richer and more “ambiguously identical” as a result of her not-yet-dying and notyet-living. I hope that in reading and performing her work that the woman who was “dumb enough” yet unafraid to sing, will always be becoming (again and again, phrase by phrase). Her voice singing to us, re-minding us of another musical time and space outside of any time that ever existed before.

APPENDIX (DOUBLE CODA) From Webster, 1913 Anna \An”na\, n. [Hindi [=a]n[=a].]

An East Indian money of account, the sixteenth of a rupee, or about 2 cents.

----------------From Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary: Anna - grace, an aged widow, the daughter of Phanuel. She was a “Prophetess,” like Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah (2 Chr. 34:22). After seven years of married life her husband died, and during her long widowhood she daily attended the temple services. When she was eighty-four years old, she entered the temple at the moment when the aged Simeon uttered his memorable words of praise and thanks to God that he had fulfilled his ancient promise in sending his Son into the world (Luke 2:36, 37).

----------------From Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary (late 1800’s): Anna, gracious; one who gives Magdalenian |ˌˈmøgdəˌliniən| adj. Archaeology of, relating to, or denoting the final Paleolithic culture in Europe, following the Solutrean and dated to about 17,000– 11,500 years ago. It is characterized by a range of bone and horn tools, and by highly developed cave art.

• [as n. ] ( the Magdalenian) the Magdalenian culture or period.

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ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French Magdalénien ‘from La Madeleine,’ a site in the Dordogne, France, where objects from this culture were found.

-If spelled with an ‘e’ at the end, Magdalene is 1.the, MARY MAGDALENE. 2. (l.c.) a reformed prostitute.

-If spelled with an ‘a’ she becomes a river that flows N into the Caribbean. For 1061 miles she flows until becoming unsound, pulled apart by warmer waters and joined together into sea.

Was it not a Madeleine that Proust was eating at the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past? Does it not launch him into the flow of memories? .

To be Magdalenian, she paints on walls and tells stories in artifacts that are left for archaeologists to piece together into stories. .

In the musical flow, can one isolate one ‘anna’ if you will, in order to reconstruct, like some Magdalenian leftovers; a sense of the work’s logic? Is its copy, its return, its travels from the bounds of the score outwards, floating phrase marks flowing river-like out into a sea of listeners- a bridge between the writer(s) and the listeners? Are the Suites then, in fact, written not by one but by two? How can I play them in order to be two?

The Clifford Irving Show

A variety show at the Ciné 13 and Objectif Exhibition B Y F R A N Ç O I S A U B A R T ( T R A N S L AT E D F R O M F R E N C H )

Certain texts are able, without our expecting it, to tell stories even while there is nothing a priori fictional about them. This is the case for the book that made Clifford Irving famous. It consists of a fake biography of Howard Hughes, the lavishly rich film producer and aviator with a considerable economic and political influence, born in 1905. For a combination of reasons including paranoia, illness, drug abuse and eccentricity, he began to withdraw from the world starting in 1958 and lived from 1968 up until his death, in 1976, shut away in a Los Angeles hotel, refusing all contact with the outside world. He was surrounded by Mormon nurses and he conducted his affairs by telex and telephone. In 1970, considering the possibilities offered by what he believed to be an immutable silence, Clifford Irving had fake letters by Hughes made that attested to several conversations between them and authorised Irving to write his biography.

In a certain way, Clifford Irving thus achieved what many desired: to make the hermit speak. But he did so by turning to a silence that left an opening for anyone to speak in his place. Irving did not transform the millionaire into a character in a novel; he acted as a ventriloquist for the actual person. In fact, Irving made the true Hughes into an actor in real life. In writing a role for him, Irving forced this man who was distancing himself from reality to return in a fictional form.

The prestidigitation required to make an individual into a character is only possible by switching registers of utterance. To transfer codes of narration to real life or to represent a person as an actor makes it necessary to blur the distinction between real facts and fictional facts. This is the great success of this fake biography.

It cost Irving to be labeled a crook and to spend seventeen months in prison after Hughes, in 1972, unexpectedly quit his silence to declare that he in no way knew Irving. This fake biography also allowed for Irving to be recognized by Orson Welles in F for Fake, a 1975 film blending reality with fiction, original with copy, account with fantasy, in which the director speaks in the first person about his own sleights of hand and attempts to unveil those of the painting forger Elmyr de Hory, for whom Clifford Irving is the biographer.

It is through this film that Raimundas Malašauskas became aware of Clifford Irving’s hoax and decided to apply the mechanism to the life of its inventor by very simply commissioning a ghost writer to produce a fake biography of Clifford Irving. Entitled Phantom Rosebuds, it was published by New Langton Arts and Dexter Sinister in 2008.1 From it we are purported to learn how and why Irving wrote the story of Howard Hughes, for which he confesses “I believed I knew his life better than any biographer because I had imagined it.”2 He likewise shares with us the caprices of his personal story from his birth up through the present day, retracing such moments as his childhood in the kibbutz during the 1950s, the loss of his first wife or his life in prison. We also learn how the fiction that he created for Howard Hughes plunged his own existence into something of a real detective novel. For his fake biography does not merely plug the hole of Howard Hughes’s silence. It puts a finger on Hughes’s connection to politics and notably to Richard Nixon. In effect, even before the work’s release, the White House had been concerned about the proximity between the fiction of his book and the reality of the monetary loans granted by the businessman to the American president. Clifford Irving is thus propelled into a whole other story written about him by the secret service on the basis of some speculations.

Meanwhile, in his life, Irving negotiates a fiction produced by the reactions to a reality disrupted by his fabrication.

Amongst numerous other adventures, we witness him being pursued by the mysterious Lewis Hyde Penrose, deadset on tracking him down beyond his prison sentence and well after the death of Hughes to make him pay with his life for writing this fable. In 1984, after escaping a few set-ups and other murder attempts, Irving meets Richard Nixon himself who confides that they both have a common problem: Penrose. When Penrose passes away years Aubart

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later, our author feels a great sadness. He has lost the shadow that accompanied and haunted him through his fabulous life as a forger, his nemesis and counterpart in this strange reality. A friend, Julie, then tries to distract him and proposes to accompany him to a preview in San Francisco. This invitation is the threshold for another passage between fiction and reality. Because, having arrived on the scene, they learn that another gallery on Folsom Street is planning a screening of F for Fake. They attend the event, but what Irving witnesses is not a mere showing of the film. There are performances and magic tricks, a troubling ambiance that cause him to question the reality of his surroundings. And for good reason! In fact, while he seems to be unaware and makes no mention of it, there is every indication that he has found himself at New Langton Arts during the release of Phantom Rosebuds.

It is thus inside a fake autobiography of Clifford Irving that the spectacle set to henceforth carry his name first took place. For this event that he describes as “hallucinogenic” had very well been organized on April 11th, 2008 by Raimundas Malašauskas.3 Following this, on June 18th, 2009, another occurrence of the Clifford Irving Show was staged in Paris. It took place on the scene of Ciné 13, a theatre with black curtains and red copper armchairs, where the air-conditioning, out of order that day, lent the air of 1920s cabaret to the spectacle. Classed under the auspice of the question “where do the authors go when the characters interrupt the story?”, the performances did not all have direct links to Clifford Irving, fables or magic. Indeed a prodigious memory trick was performed by the illusionist Benoît Rosemont, invited by Aurélien Froment, who demonstrated his ability to remember a huge amount of information. There were also some references to fake Modigliani works or to the musical theme from the original soundtrack to F for Fake composed by Michel Legrand. But most notably there were jokes told by Gabriel Lester, the host of the soirée, or by Nicolas Matranga, attempts by Audrey Cottin and then Alex Cecchetti and Mark Geffriaud to make a sculpture appear on the stage and a dance by Adva Zakai made of repetitive motions lightly modified according to the music that accompanied each sequence.

In all, the burlesque and absurd spirit of the show itself was occasionally more interesting than the spectacles taken on their own. Affirming a penchant for performances at times without threads, that avoid the punch line through incoherent flashes of wit, this project disregards the enunciative and problematized ambition that one generally expects from an exposition. But this is perhaps due to a lack of appreciation for the ins and outs of this spectacle.

Because, if the people on stage are artists and if the one organizing the event is the curator of the exposition, we must not lose sight of the source of this project, Clifford Irving. Moreover, it was just after this event that he made a new crossing from fiction toward the real. Having caught wind of this Parisian soirée, he contacted Raimundas Malašauskas. The writer and the curator of the exposition attempted to meet, but their rendezvous never took place. Nevertheless, Malašauskas learned in the course of some exchanges with Irving that he was currently painting and that he continued to write, notably screenplays.

On December 4th, 2010, Raimundas Malašauskas organized a new Clifford Irving Show in Anvers, at the Objectif Exhibition. This time, once again, there was a stage. Less defined than at the Ciné 13, this “stage” was a mere empty space around which little round tables circled by chairs had been set up. Altogether the staging was that of a gala dinner. Some paintings hung on the wall, purported to be those of Clifford Irving. Not surprisingly, these were fakes. They were in fact paintings found at the flea market or made by artists, among whom we count Elise Berkvens, Steven Baelen, Pierre Bismuth, Adam Leech, Snowden Snowden or Simon Leibovitz-Grzeszczak.4 The soirée was the occasion for a succession of all sorts of acts. Once again, the one-man-show went side by side with comedy and performance. The fables and the paradoxical space-times were evoked through a performance by Benjamin Seror, who made us discover the existence, in the basement of the gallery, of a world parallel to our own.

Clifford Irving was evoked indirectly when Michael Portnoy had professional comedians act out selections from the scripts of the films Manhattan’s Serenade and Neighbor’s Wife which, unlike with his paintings, he had gladly entrusted to Malašauskas. Once again, the ambiance was reminiscent of a meeting between friends who share a taste for the irrational and gathered for the sake of doing some test-runs or to present their works in progress as Gabriel Lester had done. Having discovered a woman’s scream pre-recorded for the cinema, Lester played films one after the

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Aubart

other, produced between the 1960s and today, for which this exclamation of terror was used in different contexts.

Certainly odd and fascinating, the exercise appeared nevertheless to be a blatantly ever-fallow study.

But it is probably not so much the acts themselves or their ultimate presentations which created the allure for the Clifford Irving Show. It is rather that unreal sensation of finding oneself in an environment where rational logic has evaporated. In order to penetrate this haze of confusion it is necessary to remember that prior to taking place, the Clifford Irving Show had been described in the fake autobiography of Clifford Irving. What took place afterward at New Langton Arts, at Ciné 13 or at Objectif Exhibition was merely the emanation of a fiction. For, by taking on the techniques of the forger, Raimundas Malašauskas likewise cultivated the effects that these produced on reality. By writing the fable of a link between Hughes and Nixon, it is taken as a revelation by those individuals who retaliated.

It is thus logical that, when in another layer of fiction, upon learning of the end of his ordeals, Clifford Irving goes to a party where he discovers magicians, a film by Méliès, a musician playing an air of a mantra sort or even a four armed Orson Welles levitating between the legs of Oja Kodar, this description has repercussions in reality. Because what Clifford has demonstrated and experienced is that a biography is not merely the documenting of facts.

The writing itself produces and determines a life according to the technical requirements implied by the given medium.5 The writing of a story has an influence on this. Now, if we agree to consider that a biography has effects, we can envision the Clifford Irving Show as one of them. It would seem then that the analysis of this phenomenon must be done by taking its origin into account. A real occurrence issued out of a succession of layers of fiction overlapping and connecting one with the other, this experience rejects interpretation. For it imposes the two coexisting layers of explanation and reading, one subjective, the other objective, both mutually exclusive and contradictory. Come face to face with this narrative, which endlessly leaves its referent and in which the psychological world becomes externalized in order to reappear under the form of simulacra, the critical appraisal finds itself disoriented. Moreover it is probably this state of suspension that allows for the full appreciation of the activities that took place in an environment that one could envision to be the real emanation of a short chapter from a fictive autobiography. ..........................................................................................................................................................................................

Footnotes 1. Clifford Irving, Phantom Rosebuds, San Francisco: New Langton Arts and New York: Dexter Sinister, 2008.

2. “I believed I knew his life better than any biographer because I had imagined it.” Ibid., p.10.

3. “The event itself seemed hallucinogenic enough for me.” Ibid., p.31.

4. Having asked about these fakes, Raimundas Malašauskas told me that Clifford Irving was painting well but did not feel ready yet to exhibit his work. He then sent an email which was attached a series of photographs of paintings he claims to be those of Clifford Irving.

5. See: Vivian Rehberg, An open letter to Clifford Irving, www.e-flux.com/journal/view/135

..........................................................................................................................................................................................

INFOS ANNEXES : The Clifford Irving Show Au Ciné 13, Paris Le 18 juin 2009.

Commissaire : Raimundas Malašauskas.

Avec: Ayreen Anastas, Rachelle Bonders, Goda Budvytyte, Geoffrey Carey, Alex Cecchetti, Audrey Cottin, Gintaras Didziapetris, Mai Abu Eldahab, Benjamin Esdraffo, Aurélien Froment, Rene Gabri, Dora Garcia, Mark Geffriaud, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, William Holden, Will Holder, Byung Chul Kim,

Gabriel Lester, Kobe Matthys, Nicholas Matranga, Alain Rondest, Benoît Rosemont, Ellen LeBlond Schrader, Benjamin Seror, Snowden Snowden, Lee Welch, Adva Zakai. À Objectif Exhibition, Anvers Le 4 décembre 2010. www.objectif-exhibitions.org Commissaire : Raimundas Malašauskas.

Avec: Ayreen Anastas et Rene Gabri, Steven Baelen, Marco Belfiore, Elise Berkvens, Pierre Bismuth, Goda Budvytyte, André Catalão, Mariana Castillo

Deball, Celine Butaye, Audrey Cottin, Alexandre Desiree, Chris Evans, Mario Garcia Torres, Malak Helmy, Will Holder, Clifford Irving, Kevin Killian, Bitsy Knox, Adam Leech, Gabriel Lester, David Marcel Levine, Nicholas Matranga, John Menick, Elena Narbutaite, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Michael Portnoy, Vivian Rehberg, Carson Salter, Aaron Schuster, Benjamin Seror, Snowden Snowden, Lauren von Gogh and Adva Zakai.

Aubart

15

Interview with authors of Autobiography of Any One Being Including Everyone Before.

Conducted on the occasion of the Clifford Irving Show and the release of the new autobiography of Clifford Irving at Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp

C, when and where were you writing this? I’m interested in knowing the period of time during which you made this text, the duration, the sites and locations in which you wrote.

Was it made in one sitting, indoors, or did it piece together in transit?

A It would probably be more interesting to hear what made you ask this question, because it is perceptive, but perceptive of what? I suppose the text is about a kind of movement or flow, between bodies, places, and times. But it would be unsuitable to say we wrote the text in libraries, coffee shops, bookstores, parks, public spaces, and some times our apartment. It wrote itself, and we merely arranged, cut, edited, selected, conducted, or choreographed in such spaces. Maybe this choreography is what you perceive as a kind of movement or transitional quality and not the actual locations in which they came together.

C, was there a logbook around its writing and physical movements. I am curious to learn of the events unfolding around you. What is the general mood and atmosphere? I imagine you wrote this last year in the midst of a meltdown—a full-fledged economic crisis. A good time to be embodying a master hoax?

A I try to avoid any sentence that employs the word always. Because always is a kind of impossibility and a lie. So I will just say often. Often, I find that there is a work, beside the work, we could call it the parawork, which is as interesting, if not more interesting than the work itself. Sometimes, that work is the life beside the work. Hence, this para-work is impossible to contain, to write down, to record, to transcribe, to photograph, to document. And any attempt to record it, note it, is inutile, or futile, because even if we were to write this logbook, a para-work would emerge beside it, and immediately more interesting. It is the uncontainable aspects of an experience or a process, a life lived, versus the one written or contained.

Maybe the text is in some respect responding to this. And possibly, the text is a kind of machine meant to animate, accelerate or open the space for this para-work.

B This book wrote itself in a time when the biggest fiction of all, the fiction of capital, was being exposed.

That fiction is still being told, but the ‘experts’ of this story simply showed their incompetence to hold the story together. Their expertise, their management of statistics, their science, their schools, their pragmatism, all undone by the delirium. This was one of the initial connections between Clifford Irving and the process we embarked on. You see, F for Fake as well as the gesture of Irving, are tied to this question of competence, of questioning the figure of the expert. In an age of technocrats and economists who tell governors what to do, such a gesture, such a critique is a necessary one. Our question was what that gesture could mean today and what it could become, if put into play, and engaged with the precise moment in which it came together.

A Yes, ultimately, maybe we are ill equipped to tell the story of our lives and every autobiography is a kind of hoax.

B The meaning we try to attribute to life, to locate an experience, and then this immanent aspect, which cannot be grasped or held, cannot belong to anyone. The book is a kind of confrontation between the life and a life.

16

A, B, C

C, there is a regularity in the reading time you lend to each character you speak through.

It seems very egalitarian and democratic this balanced chance for each to have a voice.

This is curious to me that while you inhabit different characters, you also do it within certain limits—with a certain regard for them how much time you occupy them. Or is it the reverse? Perhaps you are taking care of your self by defining a limit to how much others can occupy your thoughts in order to maintain your individual mind’s integrity, if possible—is it possible? Or are these continuous switches and short occupations your mechanism for movement and transformation; is it that if you stayed with one person too long you’d risk being contained in them and their time-space forever? I noticed your visits with some characters recur and I wonder why they are given that privilege. Is it that you had a closer affinity to them, or that they allowed for a specifically comfortable kind of travel?

B Each name hides a tribe, a multiplicity of forces and tremors. Some of these forces are more intense, some last longer, others are nearly imperceptible.

A But yes, the hope was not to necessarily channel different voices or modes of writing, as much remain open to the ruptures or excesses of any attempt to give an account of oneself. And so each gap is as important as each movement, and those gaps are the most regular intervals. This is probably what Michel Foucault meant when he suggested that “The trace of the writer is found only in the singularity of his absence.” Or as Agamben para-phrases, writing is “not so much the expression of a subject as the opening of a space in which the writing subject does not cease to disappear.”

C, you make me think of chronotopes, they say “the image of a man is always intrinsically chronotopic”. C, you make me think of corridors, halls and squares—they say that such thresholds are where events and crises occur to or around characters, where they experience a renewal, resurrection or epiphany­—a decision that determines the life of man. C, they say that in the chronotopes of thresholds time is instantaneous, has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time. C, it interests me that your text and the characters in it are always on a threshold—each paragraph of each character tips on the edge of a blank interval. Is it because of this location on the structure of the page that they are in a constant state of transformation into someone else?

A The best interviews or conversations become a kind of collaborative process of thinking and writing and losing the self.

B Yes, it is said that each thing has its own duration, the tick, the dog, the rock, the universe. But what can we say of immanent processes?

C, It is interesting to me that while there is a collapsed time in the text—a past present, multiplicity of spaces in one, a consistent intersubjectivity- that still there is a particularity maintained in how each person speaks—the particular chronotopes within each anyone’s manner of speaking is still recognizable. There are internal structures of each autobiography’s writing that you leave traces of. Is that where the grand forgery is, in an ability to feign a certain tradition?

A In any conversation or movement between individuals or particles, there are also instants of dis-accord, dis-attraction, dis-junction.

A, B, C

17

B “A” means to say that, maybe for us, if we can speak of the tribe, we discovered that the forgery, if we can speak of forgery, is an everyday type. You see, to forge has a double resonance. On the one hand, it could be to make or shape something and on the other, it could be to copy or deceive. Besides getting into a debate about the fact that it could mean something else altogether, if we would want it to.

A Maybe with a life, we are simply always doing both, and the one is always in relation to the other. And particularly when we are writing or attempting to represent it, there is an intrinsic incapacity or incompetence, but also deception. But here the deception is neither intentional or unintentional, it is simply a part of this crazy assemblage of enunciations, including recollection, forgetting, fabulation, language, which we call auto-biography.

B We are all forgers.

C, do you think the structure and speed of your total text are conditional of what was in the ink, the air and the heads in the physical space around you at that time? In a sense I ask if you were being authored to write in a certain manner as opposed to choosing to construct this kind of collective non-authorship. So maybe the hoax was on you? Does this matter to you, C, does it shift power?

A The written conversation can also confront this asynchronous moment, when it appears that a response precedes the question.

B What “A” means to say is that deception was our medium.

C, I’d like to know more about the layout structure and images.

A Sometimes the less you know, the more interesting and productive.

B I disagree.

C, in a context of such surplus of text, commentary, and reviews is there no value in footnotes and citations, for sourcing of an idea or thought, for giving a reader a possibility to trace a genealogy? Is there value more in designing these different voices and thoughts together? What kind of value is it? What is produced?

B Well, maybe it is the archeological you are invoking. The genealogical moment for me or her or him is the moment something dug up, is put into play, or put into relations, made contemporary.

A But there was a question whether all of these separate voices needed names. And we tried to organize a meeting together, not any one showed up. So we thought that the author and the title should be the same, as can be standard practice with autobiographies. And this title reflected not just any one but every one.

C, I heard you say once that intellectuality and thought prevent the separation of naked life from its form. That is to say that gesture and action, or a word and its performance are kept in sync through the process of thought. I assume you are saying this in the context of thought as a mental faculty and the action as a physical faculty in physical space.

But what if you do not have the luxury of moving or performing in physical space and are bound to being a textual character on a page, your gestures and actions limited to a textual realm, that it is the site of production and the site of being? How then would that statement you made apply?

18

A, B, C

A This question of gesture is central, but it does not necessarily oppose itself to action. It is distinguished from production or action in that it is a process in which something is put into play, or endured.

B And if we could be said to perform in, through, with, language, one could equally say that language performs us, produces a subject. We give the name gesture to the sphere of life that is neither belonging to the writing subject nor to the one written down.

A The intellectuality that B is speaking of is not one necessarily found in the academy, and it is definitively not the kind of thought which is instrumentalized toward the interests of capital, or the perpetual 3% growth, or figuring out how to reinvest the surplus toward greater profits, nor even toward how to write some thing to impress some one, to publish some where, to get some job. So this idea of intellectuality is antagonistic to these processes, in which means and ends are separated, and life is separated from life in every sphere. Thought thus acts as a unitary power here, but oddly enough, if he includes corporeal processes or habitual ways of life, within this thought, it is a very different conception or use of this word.

C, at moments I think of the Autobiography of Everyone as part of the production of a Theban play in the sense that Theban plays were often made in tetraologies that began with the death of the main character and developed as a web-like narrative of events that unravel around and beyond that moment—think of how in the wake of Oedipus’ death tales of Agamemnon, Antigone, Electra and so on sprang forth. This occurred to me recently when I had asked D how a trial for the kind of mass forgery committed in this text would function. D responded by saying that perhaps this could be considered in psychoanalytic terms, as an Oedipal offspring to a father who cheated. I started to think of this text as a little later in the production, that the Oedipal offspring was in the Clifford Irving shows and this as the stage for the characters that proliferate and come forth beyond the moment of the protagonist’s death. What are your thoughts on the trial of a mass forgery, the Oedipal reaction to an inherited hoax and the characterization of your text as a Theban play?

B The problem with Freud and the Psychoanalytic framework is that it does not know how to separate an anus from a delirium. It falls into a paranoid regime of signs which is incessantly looking for the meaning behind everything and not surprisingly always finding the same milieu or usual suspects, the family, the father, the mother, the phallus, castration, etc… It is not disconnected to the network composing the apparatus of the sexes, the apparatus of identity: a white wall, with a black hole, which is ascribed a name, and filled with various contents, fantasies, wishes, secrets, and covered up with a face. Irving is neither our father, nor the main figure in play in this text. Rather Irving is a name, a persona, who is part of a social field, and we return him, his gesture, his hoax, his autobiography there, in that field. So this book is not about a psychoanalytic chain of father-child-father-child-father-child, a chain of infinite regression or progression. It is a mutant or abstract line we are channeling.

A Maybe it is the autobiography itself which could be said to be on trial, the life accounted for in the autobiography and the deceptions inherent in that process. But here, we hope to turn that inherent deception or incompetence in every one’s favor.

B Within this social field, you have this massive investment in the production of faces, names, biographies, which temporarily occupy the stage of history. That mediatized images today are mistaken for being this ‘stage where history unfolds’ is a subject for another conversation. Two anchors for us to consider: In the midst of the production of these names, personalities, and faces is an apparent faceless and nameless multitude (always aspiring for a name and a face?). And on the other, what accompanies all, named or unnamed, the immanent life and death anticipating everyone.

A, B, C

19

A This absurd over-investment in the production of an identity, of a name, “their loves,” “their traumas,” “their greed,” “their egos,” “their doubts,” “doom,” “heroic ascents” and “tragic falls” ...

B And what remains, what survives of this life, once the subject is no more, and the testimony we are left with, inadequate, incomplete, errant, forged, …?

A Maybe we can speak about desire. Desire as the constituent force of history, which comes from and returns to the outside, from the social, artificial and natural world and back. History as the result of a multiplicity of forces which collide with, escape from, alloy themselves to, attempt to recuperate, dance with, manipulate, shift, displace, overcome, betray, act and react to one another.

B This is the absurdity with these figures and charts, which also comprise the book. Since today, it is not clear, which figures are the dominant paradigm of a force of history. The figure as the subject or the figure as financial charts, economic rules and laws, inflation and deflation, a capitalist economic historical determinism.

Are we to reassert the subject in the face of these nameless and indeterminate game of numbers? Are we to regroup ourselves under molar identities of nation, religion, race, etc… ?

A But in the book, both types of figures appear disrobed of any specific context or history, and are returned back, hopefully to an indeterminate field of forces from which they emerge. So maybe instead of saying we are left with a strange account of desire, we can also speak of the traces of gestures in which the writing subject, rather than becoming subjectivated by language, consistently creates a space in which to disappear or withdraw. And in putting her or himself into play, reveals the impossibility of being contained in this text.

And it is only in this sense that the double meaning of forgery can come to light.

B Each work, accompanied by a para-work, or what we could simply call, a life, or a form of life.

20

A, B, C

Extra-Ordinary

Richard Prince Talks to J.G. Ballard, August 1967 J.G. BALLARD: You were born in the Panama Canal Zone?

RICHARD PRINCE: Yes. In 1949.

JGB: Panaman? Panamerican?

RP: Yes. Something like that? I left with my mother and sister after my father had been detentioned for presumably stockpiling arms and munitions for what I imagined was the 19th nervous breakdown of Cuba.

This was in 1956. He was later released, moved to Hawaii and from there has been moving to and from the city of Saigon (what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City).

JGB: Aren’t children born in the Canal Zone called Zonians?

RP: Yes. The Canal Zone has represented for some time the concept of unlimited possibility.

RP: This year, eleven years after I left Panama, I tried to return to Panama.

JGB: You’re eighteen?

RP: Yes. JGB: The newspapers said your flight to Panama originated from Hawaii. How did that happen?

RP: I’ve been living with my father in Honolulu all summer. Blonde on Blonde, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors.

There’s an aesthetic revolution going on. Class systems have seemed to disappear. Things are opening up. I’m sure the liberation will be brief. My father has become involved in introducing a defoliant in Vietnam. Someone wants the jungles to disappear so U.S. soldiers can see the enemy. The death of affect I think they call it.

JGB: Your father sounds like someone who guarantees hostility and incomprehension. A jungle is a hard thing to get rid of.

RP: He would say something like he’s interested in the hard light of contemporary reality. He’d say his task is to invent reality, not fiction. He talks like that. What some people dream of and write about, he actually does. He loves Vietnam. He loves Vietnam women. I remember him saying something about how he works with a group that call themselves Team Strange.

JGB: Why return to Panama?

RP: I was about to turn eighteen. I have a choice, by law, to become either a Panamanian or an American or both. My father still has contacts with government officials in Panama, and we thought it might be smart, for the future, to secure a dual citizenship. The security required me to show up in person. He put me on a PBY B-Moth. I landed in Panama three days before my eighteenth birthday. I was following in my father’s footsteps.

JGB: I read in the paper that your troubles started with improper, or I think it was, “the lack of sufficient papers or identity.”

22

Prince / Ballard

RP: It was really stupid. I didn’t have a photograph of myself in my passport. Somehow the photograph that had been in my passport became unglued and fell out somewhere. I don’t know how it happened. All I know is when I opened my passport in Customs I found it was gone. The agents there just looked at me and started shaking their heads.

JGB: Your father?

RP: I don’t know.

JGB: They kept you there for four days?

RP: Five. At the airport.

JGB: They treat you okay?

RP: Psychic Jujitsu. That’s all.

JGB: Then what?

RP: I became a citizen of British Airways.

JGB: What I read in the newspapers sounded like you were living inside an enormous novel.

RP: I’ve spent the last three weeks on a jumbo jet crisscrossing the Caribbean and Atlantic five times because no country will admit me.

JGB: British immigration officials finally admitted you and held you in custody while trying to arrange admission back to the U.S.?

RP: Yes, British Airways has spent more than $13,500 feeding and flying me around. I’ve racked up about 20,000 miles in eight consecutive days of jetting back and firth between London, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas.

JGB: According to immigration authorities, the Panamanians flew you to the Bahamas Aug. 8, but then you were detained twelve days and put on a British Airways flight to London.

RP: Yes. I was never clear why I was sent to the Bahamas from Panama. I have my own ideas. My own suspicions. But someone’s orders put me on a plane from the Bahamas to London, and when London wouldn’t admit me, they sent me to Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica refused me entry and sent me back to London. London again turned me back to Kingston, which promptly flew me to London again. En route I was refused entry in Bermuda. On Wednesday I landed here for the third time and was allowed to remain in detention on British soil.

JGB: You’re still in detention?

RP: Yes. But I don’t know for how long. My father tells me he’s flying in in a couple of days. I talked to him three nights ago. He sounded uncharacteristically light. Almost amused. He said he was close to the bottom of it. He said something about wanting the exact details, hard information, everything. My father likes to know what Charlie Manson has for breakfast. That’s why I emphasize everything.

JGB: Earlier you said, “your own ideas”— what do you mean, “your own ideas”?

Prince / Ballard

23

RP: I’m not sure. At first I thought my return trip to Panama backfired. Something like someone couldn’t get to my father so they got to his son. That kind of thing. My father’s one of those imaginative criminals who wakes up in the morning and almost makes a resolution to perform some sort of deviant or antisocial act, even if it’s just sort of kicking the dog. He says he does this to establish his own freedom. What can I say? He’s got a lot of enemies.

JGB: What do you think it is your father really does?

RP: He’s interested in applying the physical facts of the environment on people. What he calls the third revolution. The “facts” he says are the things that have come after the consumerism of the postindustrial revolution.

JGB: In other words?

RP: He invades people’s lives with the very products they produce.

JGB: He modifies the behavior of a particular group of people by what they consume?

RP: Exactly. He uses things like TVs, microchips, computers, chemicals, tape recorders, cameras. He’s very advanced at how to undermine your situation with what you think you already own and what you think you might control.

JGB: Like say, the film in your camera?

RP: Yes. Something as ordinary as a roll of Tri-X. He can very easily dismantle the convention of getting back your snapshots by infusing those snapshots with the element of imagination and thus destabilize what was expected to be everyday pedestrian reality. Serious illness and trauma could result upon opening what was hoped to be pictures of your sweetheart or pictures of the family barbecue. Once a friend of his told me how he planned to somehow prescribe a type of contact lens for Castro, a kind that would produce dystopia. Imagine Castro putting on a shirt and thinking the shirt was alive. Sometimes his ideas are outlandishly absurd. Really funny. Some of them sound like a joke. Never knowing when to take him seriously is part of his design.

JGB: The joke, as you call it, is not far from the joke British Airways is pulling on you right now. It’s almost as if your present citizenship is a direct result of one of your father’s extreme hypotheses. What you find yourself in is a type of religion offered up and advanced by British Airways: an open-ended confession where the moral and psychological conclusions have yet to be proven. They have this person, you, and they’re looking at you and asking themselves who is he, what is he; they’re treating your existence as if it were a huge invention.

RP: It’s true. They’re not taking me at face value. And that’s what surprises me. Maybe it’s a conspiracy. I mean I know who I am is an enormous accident, but I never thought they did. My father taught me that the position of the observer itself affects the behavior of electrons or the fundamental particles that are being observed. And I accept that. My identity is a complete billion-to-one chance. But at the same time totally real. It’s a paradox we all have to live with, he says. But I’m beginning to see my situation is too ideal for accidents.

RP: In a way my situation for the last three weeks has been classic. It’s true. Something you read about in the newspapers. And if I can make any sense out of these weeks in the air, they won’t seem so random and meaningless as I first thought they were. That’s what I am trying to do now. Make sense.

24

Prince / Ballard

JGB: It’s almost like you’ve been in an atrocity exhibition. British Airways represents itself as another perfectable, meaningful world. You find yourself enshrined in this Homeric journey, having to test yourself against vast scientific and technological systems that began to unwind the moment you were born, and here you are trying to unwind them even more.

RP: Over-determination. I should feel strange. Pissed off or something. But I don’t. You know, if I think about my situation, it’s just another conventionalized reality. What’s happening to me is probably normal. Or going to be. A look at things to come perhaps. The people who have been flying me around haven’t exactly acted surprised. I guess this is why I didn’t get it, but am beginning to get it now. I’m beginning to get the sense that it’s the sensation of normality that might be the most extreme conclusion to the hypothesis.

JGB: Normality as the next special effect?

RP: Something like that.

JGB: How do you approximate the idea of sacrifice on British Airways? What do you do? What would your father do? Kill the stewardess?

RP: My father?—he’d cut off her nipples and feed the steward his penis.

JGB: What would you do?

RP: I don’t know. British Airways is far too powerful to commit a genuinely evil or morally repugnant act. I simply lack the ability to impose myself to that extent on such an environment. I don’t think my being a monster would have any direct consequences on British Airways.

JGB: Do you think your father stole your photograph? Did he set up some kind of initiation rite for you? Father to son? A coming of age: a sort of test, pass or fail—a ritual?

RP: My father is a psychopath. Everybody knows, or maybe they don’t, but psychopaths never go out of fashion.

That’s what I know. And I’m beginning to know that my last three weeks was maybe a birthday present. Love Dad. You know, a birthday present from Dad? And if that’s true, I guess I’ll just have to thank him in some totally convincing style. *Originally published under the title “Extra-ordinary,” Punch magazine, September 1967, by J.G. Ballard, author of Crash, High-rise, Concrete Island. This version, published for the first time in ZG, was transcribed by Richard Prince from J.G. Ballard’s notes taken in an August ’67 conversation between J.G. Ballard and Richard Prince. Appeared in Spiritual America: Richard Prince, a catalogue for IVAM, the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, in 1989; page 8. Published by Apeture.

Prince / Ballard

25

Kurt Schwitters, Anna Blume: Dichtungen, Hanover: Paul Steegemann, 1919. 1st printing (Erstes bid f端nftes Tausend) (cover) Courtesy of International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries 26

Schwitters

To Anna Blume B Y K U R T S C H W I T T E R S ( T R A N S L AT E D F R O M G E R M A N )

You, oh you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me.

- Us? This (incidentally) does not belong here.

Who are you, countless woman? You are - are you? - People say you are - let them say it, they don't know where the steeple is.

You wear a hat on your feet and stand on your hands, on your hands you walk.

Hello, your red clothes, sawed into white pleats.

Red I love, Anna Blume, red I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us? That (incidentally) belongs in the cold embers.

Red flower, red Anna Blume, what are people saying?

Prize question: 1. Anna Blume has a bird.

2. Anna Blume is red.

3. What color is the bird?

Blue is the color of your yellow hair.

Red is the cooing of your green bird.

You plain girl in an everyday dress, you dear green animal, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me - us?

That (incidentally) belongs in the ember box.

Anna Blume! Anna, a-n-n-a, I am dripping your name. Your name drips like soft suet.

Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?

You can also be read from back to front, and you, you most marvelous creature of them all, you are from the back as you are from the front: Âťa-n-n-a.ÂŤ Suet drips caress my back.

Anna Blume, you droppy animal, I love ya!

Schwitters

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J U L I E TA A R A N DA ( B . 1 9 7 5 )

Aranda

29

F I A B AC K ST R ร M ( B . 1 970 )

30

Backstrรถm

Backstrรถm

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S E B AST I A N B L AC K ( B . 1 9 8 5 )

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Black

LUIS BUÑUEL (1900-1983)

Buñuel

33

M A R C E L B R O O DT H A E R S ( 1 9 2 4 - 1 9 7 6 )

MARCEL BROODTHAERS MUSEUM PICTURE

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Broodthaers

Broodthaers

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GUY DE COINTET (1934-1983)

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de Cointet

de Cointet

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ANNE COLLIER (B. 1970)

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Collier

Collier

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JOHN DOGG (B. 1949)

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Dogg

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Fontaine

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D E R DA DA ( 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 2 0 )

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der Dada

PHILLIP GABRIEL (B. 1983)

Gabriel

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M A R K F LO O D ( B . 1 9 57 )

Mark Flood

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Flood

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R YA N G A N D E R ( B . 1 9 7 6 )

Gander

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J O H N C . FA R E ( 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 6 8 )

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Fare

Fare

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OTO G I L L E N ( B . 1 9 8 4 )

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Gillen

GEORGE GROSZ (1893-1959)

Grosz

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L OT H A R H E M P E L ( B . 1 9 6 6 )

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Hempel

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P I E R R E H U YG H E ( B . 1 9 6 2 )

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Huyghe

ASGER JORN (1914-1973)

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Johnson

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C R A I G K A L PA K J I A N ( B . 1 9 6 1 )

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Kalpakjian

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MIKE KELLEY (B. 1954)

Kelley

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ROBERT LAZZARINI (B. 1965)

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Lefcourt

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FRANCIS PICABIA (1879-1953)

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PHILLIP PIERCE (1918-1984)

Pierce

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A N D R E A L O N G A C R E - W H I T E ( B .1 9 8 0 )

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Longacre-White

A DA M M C E W E N ( B . 1 9 6 5 )

McEwen

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GABRIEL LESTER (B. 1972)

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Lester

ADINA POPESCU (B. 1975)

Popescu

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EILEEN QUINLAN (B. 1972)

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Quinlan

Quinlan

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ED RUSCHA (B. 1937)

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J . S T. B E R N A R D

(1956-2003)

St. Bernard

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KURT SCHWITTERS (1887-1948)

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C I N DY S H E R M A N ( B . 1 9 5 4 )

Sherman

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SUPERSTUDIO (1966-1978)

SUPERSTUDIO

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Superstudio

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GIBB SLIFE (B. 1975)

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ALAN SMITHEE (B. 1937)

Smithee

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Spengemann

A N N A B E L VA L E A R C H I V E ( 1 9 5 6 - 1 9 8 3 )

ANABEL VALE ARCHIVE

Annabel Vale Archive

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A N T E K WA L C Z A K ( B . 1 9 6 8 )

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Yonemoto

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JEFFREY VALLANCE

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Logo design: Povilas Utovka

Drop it Like it is Hot (time and again), 2007, by Gabriel Lester and Raimundas Malasauskas The Last Piece by John Fare at gb-agency, Paris (2007) Something 86

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above: invitation image The Last Piece by John Fare at gb-angency, Paris 2007 90 below:Something Tony Clifton Jacket by Gabriel Lester (2007) / John Fare’s Finger Snapping by Mario Garcia-Torres (2007)

above: Bratz, 2007, by Juozas Laivys SomethingMonk 91 below: Rue John Fare, 2007, by Jonathan

Above, one of a series of slides attributed to John Fare, 1968

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Roe Ethridge

by Vera Neykov

November 17, 2011, Los Angeles, CA In 2000, photographer Roe Ethridge was asked by Peter Halley and Index Magazine to photograph author J.T. LeRoy in San Francisco. When Ethridge traveled to the West Coast from New York, what he encountered was a complicated, convoluted and enigmatic scene. The photos that were published are different from the one printed here. Originally, Peter Halley had told me this story and peaked my curiosity. Later, I contacted Roe to see if he would want to share it for the context of this catalogue. ___ VERA NEYKOV: When did the project take place and how did it come about?

ROE ETHRIDGE: It was 2000…. I’m pretty sure. Peter (Halley) asked me to go to San Francisco to photograph the supposed author J.T. LeRoy for Index magazine. Before, he gave me The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things… a pre copy to read, and I did, and thought this is fucked up, this is really intense.

This person that I was preparing to deal with was really damaged, and the book was so wild. Anyway, I got J.T. Leroy’s (his or her) number and called before to introduce myself. At that time, I didn’t have an agent, there was no “production,” it was just two people, and so I didn’t know I was talking to Roe Ethridge for Index magazine, 2004 JT Leroy, courtesy of the artist. someone named Laura [Albert]. So I called, and was very nice and in my idea of professional about it. After our first conversation, for about the next week, I would get random phone calls late at night saying “Hi, it’s me, J.T. …” and I remember one time I was at The Abbey on Driggs… and I said “Hi, hold on, it’s really noisy, let me go outside.” And she said, “The reason my voice sounds like this is because I’m taking so many female hormones and it’s really affecting me and me and my friends…” and she would tell me these very long, intense stories and hold me hostage on the phone. I remember thinking wow, this is so interesting, super compelling and I was completely fascinated.

VN: Was it an instance where Peter said, “I want to do this story, you figure it out…” or did the magazine set everything up?

RE: It wasn’t so much like you figure it out, but more like we’re going to book you a ticket and get you a hotel, but you talk to her about where and when you’re going to do this shoot. So, over the course of a couple of weeks we set up the meeting, and I called when I got to San Francisco, and she said “Ok, here’s the deal, you’re going to meet me at this address in SF (this was probably the second time I had been there, so I had no idea what was going on), but before you go to the house where we are going to do Ethridge / Neykov

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the pictures, I need you go to this restaurant and get me…” it was some sort of pressed sandwich. And I remember asking, “You want me to get a sandwich?” I was like ok…assuming that this was professional, getting someone sandwiches for their shoot. Something was suspicious, but I went.

VN: Had you been talking to the same person the whole time?

RE: Yes, definitely. I went and I began thinking, “I wonder if this J.T. LeRoy lives somewhere around here and is checking me out before we do the shoot. Anyway, I followed through, I got the sandwich and I drove in my rental car to the address I needed to. When I arrived, it was obviously a writer’s house…or studio… no one lived there, but you could tell someone worked there. So I get there and there is a girl that is sort of the “handler” for the J.T. LeRoy person. And I say, “ I got the food” and she’s quizzical, “what food?” “ You know the food that J.T. wanted,” and she answers, “Oh oh, well you can just leave this here.” And then she opened it up and started eating it! After that, the J.T. LeRoy person shows up… has an obvious wig on and this bone that’s supposedly a raccoon penis bone [necklace], and is kind of short and very feminine in physique but is wearing boy’s thrift store clothes. And I say, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and respect all of the anonymity issues that were required.

I say, “Why don’t you lay down on that bed over there, maybe we can do something where you are covering you face…” and she’s walking over and I looked and thought to myself, that is not a boy’s butt… It was a girl’s butt. I’m from Atlanta; I know what a butt looks like.

Anyway, it kept adding to the suspicion that this person was not who they said they were. The person who was playing J.T. LeRoy wouldn’t really speak to me very much. It was mostly spoken through the handler. We took some pictures…it was kind of uneventful in a way. And then the person who was playing J.T. LeRoy, she had this purple wig on and she disappeared and I was with the handler.

VN: What did the handler look like?

RE: She was kind of overweight, chubby, sweetheart…and we sort of wrapped up and that was it. Later that afternoon, I had time to kill in San Francisco, and the phone person called me and was like, “Hey what’s up?” inviting me to get together with him. her. thing. I was really tempted… I really thought to myself was it going to be the same person? It was one of those things that were so amazingly vague the entire time. I was super curious, but my Southern Christian upbringing didn’t allow me to go to give into the morbid, curious person. So I never met up with the person who was on the other side of the phone… who I assume, think was Laura.

VN: When you did the photo shoot, at what point was it in the timeline, not at the height, right?

RE: There had already been other pictures taken of this person who played J.T. LeRoy…and unfortunately, I can’t remember about when it came out, it was more like, “Yeah, I knew it,” but I wasn’t upset about it because I kind of knew. There was no way... it never seemed right.

VN: There was no small talk during your shoot?

RE: No, and it was very protected and I was probably being overly respectful of that person’s desire to be protected or exposed. But clearly, Laura was like “Come on!” sort of egging me on... she really wanted to meet. But whom was I going to meet? I don’t know.

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Oh, I forgot something that I have to tell you! When I arrived there, I think it was the night that I arrived she asked where I was staying and I answered… (I can’t remember the name of the hotel) and she was like “I’m with my friends—Joe, Bozo, whatever, and one of them is addicted to speed, can you please bring me French milled soap from the hotel?” So I had to bring soap and this fucking sandwich.

The point is the writing was compelling and it would have remained so even if you never found out who the person is…

VN: So when you went back to Peter, you told him the story?

RE: Yeah, I think everybody at that point was …I don’t remember any conclusive thing, but I remember wondering is that …that can’t really be J.T. LeRoy, even though I had an image in my mind. Dennis Cooper was involved with this person and he was such a legitimating force, no matter how radical, he was an authority at that time on anything really…so this picture that was on the cover of J.T, LeRoy’s book was sort of this image of …that’s a picture of J.T. Leroy as a boy, but maybe it’s not, maybe it’s Dennis Cooper. So there are always these little seeds of doubt, or ways to walk that line between suspension of disbelief and complete “there’s no way.” But there were all these names and stories attached...like Michael Pitt is the bisexual lover of J.T. Leroy, and Winona Ryder, all because there were these affirmations of who this person was it was even more fascinating.

It was a girl in those corduroy pants! I know it!

So I guess in a way we were all complicit in it… but at the same time, I never really felt, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to get fooled, I kind of liked the person that I imagined, the projection of J.T. Leroy was enough for me, but complicit in the “furthering of the enigmatic,” even that I was happy to be a part of it, but I never felt any betrayal because it wasn’t the person. You know I brought the food and I told the J.T. LeRoy person that “I brought your food” and she had no idea what I was talking about. So I know it wasn’t her that ordered the food, or wanted the French milled soap. It was Laura and she had a super compelling phone voice. I was always on the hook.

I’m fine with what it was… it is a bit rich to expect people to not be flipped out, but for me, it was what I said, in observance of decorum I was doing the best I could, and even then I couldn’t fool myself a hundred percent that that was J.T. LeRoy and it was a real person, even with my best effort. So I guess what I’m saying is if you were truly fooled, then you get what you deserve.

Ethridge / Neykov

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Michael Phelan, Champ, 1998, Golden Retriever and sheepskin, 42 in x 31 in x 11.5 in.

100 Something

James Frey

by Jonah Freeman In 2003, James Frey, published his now infamous memoir entitled, A Million Little Pieces. During the early years of its release, it was met with positive reviews, in 2005, even making it onto the coveted New York Times Best Seller List. Three years later, the web-source, The Smoking Gun, a site dedicated to unearthing falsification of information, proved the memoir to be half-truthful and half-fiction, shocking millions of Americans, the majority of whom felt very deceived. The following is an interview conducted by Jonah Freeman and James Frey discussing the controversy and future of such writing styles. __ JONAH FREEMAN: I thought we could start out talking a bit about Los Angeles, which is the setting of your novel Bright Shining Morning and could also be said to be the central character. It is a totally amazing book.

It is kind of heartbreaking. I understand you lived there for many years, correct?

JAMES FREY: I did, I lived there for eight years. I still kind of live there. My residence is in New York, but I’m in L.A. all the time. And I think of L.A. as home, much more so than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.

When I die, I want my ashes dumped there. Right on a highway.

FREEMAN: Were you involved in show business?

FREY: I was, I still am, I’ve been working show business since 1994 doing all sorts of shit, I’ve written movies, produced movies, I’ve directed movies, written TV shows, produced TV shows, all kinds of things. I dig it. It’s fun and sometimes awful and weird and sometimes a disaster. Keeps life interesting. Definitely more interesting than sitting alone in a room for a year writing a book.

FREEMAN: Did you move to L.A. to do that?

FREY: I did. I moved to L.A. to make money and I believed I could do it in entertainment, in Hollywood.

I had been in art school for a year, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I was trying to teach myself how to write. I went to art school to teach myself how to think, and then I had to learn how to

write. I got sick of having shitty jobs, working in bars and clothing stores; my last job I worked at kennel cleaning cages and picking up dogshit, and I thought, “You know what, I can write a dumb movie. I can write a dumb movie as well as anybody can.” So, I wrote literally the most commercial thing I could possibly think of, which was romantic comedy, and I sold it a couple months after I moved to LA and it got made a year and a half later.

FREEMAN: In Bright Shining Morning, a major theme is the masses of people coming to Los Angeles to chase a dream and reinvent them. The city as a beacon of light. A place to make it big. And, in the book at least, it is largely about how they fail.

FREY: Yeah. I think of Los Angeles as the greatest contemporary embodiment of the American Dream.

Everyone thinks of New York as this beacon of immigration, but it’s really not, it’s Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the most diverse city in the country. It’s got the most domestic and foreign immigration of any city in America and everybody moves there to make some dream come true. They move there to get a job, or a green card, or find a better place to live, or a better life, or they move there to be a movie star, or a famous director, or whatever, but everybody moves there chasing a dream. Whatever that dream is, the simple base reality is that 95 % of those people fail and their dreams go unfulfilled and I didn’t want to write a book that was a bunch of happy fucking endings. In what I do, in the writing I do or whatever it is that I do, there has to be some basis in reality but, there has to be some fakeness too. There’s nowhere more than LA that that kind of fakeness exists in such an open way, it exists there in a way that it doesn’t in any other city in the world. Everybody moves there to be someone they are not, and the books tried to reflect that. Some of the book is fake, some of the book is real, some characters are fake, some are real, and hopefully no one can tell the difference.

FREEMAN: I like the mix of the matter of fact historical information with very naturalistic portraits of characters. Are people like Esperanza, Dylan and Maddie and Old Man Joe based on people that you’ve encountered?

FREY: Some cases, yes, they’re based on real people, in other cases not. And all the historical, statistical and demographic information, some of that is real, and some is not. I would say probably 30-40% of the Frey / Freeman 101

history is fabricated and probably 50/50 in the book, the people are real or the people are not.

FREEMAN: I love the chapters that get into the historical evolution of the city. Some of it seems bizarre to the point of unreality. For instance the link between Red Light District of the 19th and early 20th century, which you portray as far more decadent than anything that exists now and the fashion district which replaced it in the same area of downtown. How one evolved into another. Is that real?

FREY: Yeah, that’s real. The section on downtown LA is real. I think, or maybe not. Doesn’t matter really.

One thing I tried to deliberately do was make up a lot of the most mundane, most boring, most clinical information in the book, whether historical or statistical or demographic information, and a lot of the most ridiculous for factual historical information is the real stuff. Its fun playing these games, you know?

I guess ultimately the point for me is that it doesn’t matter; it’s about creating something greater than the individual parts. We live in this world now where there’s no media outlet that’s trustworthy. Not a single fucking one. If you read the paper—if you watch the news in the morning, and you watch Fox, you watch CNN, and you watch MSNBC, and you watch stories on the same thing on all three of the networks, you’re going to see very very different things and get very very different information. There is no such thing as hard news, or factual news. It’s just opinion. We live in this world where there’s reality TV, that’s not really real at all. We live in a world were documentary films aren’t really documenting anything; they’re just filmmakers with a thesis who are going to manipulate information and manipulate the subjects of the documentaries in order to prove their thesis. There’s no such thing as fact or fiction, there’s just subjective subjectivity. There’s just perspective…

FREEMAN: I think it’s always been that way. But it seems now with the way information is disseminated the idea of objective truth is being called into serious question if not thrown out the window all together.

The veil has been lifted.

FREY: I think the idea of truth very much exists. I just don’t think truth and fact is the same thing at all.

The idea of fact is going out the window; the idea of fact is gone. I’m this very famous liar but, I’m more honest, in terms of the facts, I present more honest facts to the public than any politician in the 102 Frey / Freeman

United States does. Maybe the veil has been lifted in some cases but, I also think that with the amount of information and the ease in which information can be created and distributed, everything—the idea of fact is being destroyed, it probably has been destroyed.

Just that it’s not even the veil has been lifted, the shit’s all just gone. If you talk to a Republican or Democrat about something, they are going to have very different facts that are absolutely in conflict with each other and probably neither are actually facts, just their opinion. The most amusing thing is the way people, especially in the media or in publishing, cling to the idea there are somehow facts, that they are somehow telling the truth. Truth is something we all create for ourselves, it’s not created by Fox News or The New York Times, or a shelf at a bookstore or TV talk show host. It’s created by an individual and I think as individuals, we have the right to create it anyway we want. As artists, we absolutely do.

FREEMAN: What’s interesting about the A Million Little Pieces scandal was the publishing world appeared very upset about you presenting a misleading autobiography. Which seems odd and almost hypocritical because a large section of their business is hawking fiction and fantasy.

FREY: Nobody was shocked in publishing—any memoir you read, I mean it isn’t said too publicly, but any memoir you read is as much bullshit as my book was, and the irony of my book is that I didn’t want it to be a memoir. I didn’t write it to be a memoir and I didn’t sell it to the publisher as memoir. I wrote it with the idea that it wasn’t fact and it wasn’t fiction and then we presented it to publisher as a novel and they decided that they wanted to publish it as a memoir because they thought it would sell more copies and I went along with it. The idea that any memoir is fact is nonsense. All those fuckers do what I do, it’s just I became public enemy number one in publishing.

They didn’t want to associate themselves with me, which was fine with me.

FREEMAN: And now your involvement in the art world seems to make a lot of sense because it is sector of culture where appropriation, questions of authenticity and the veracity of facts are very much accepted, if not applauded. Richard Prince being the most famous example at the moment. But aspects exist in a lot of the important art of the last 100 or so years. From Duchamp to Rauschenberg to Warhol to Koons to

our current crop of contemporary artists who take on these ideas in a wide variety ways.

FREY: I came at writing from an art world perceptive. I didn’t go to writing school; I don’t have a degree in writing. I loved art always as a kid; I loved art because of the way it could make me feel. I knew I would never be a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, I knew I was obsessed with words, and books, so I decided to figure out how to write books the way an artist makes art, where there are no rules, or categories I have to adhere to. An example I use is that A Million Little Pieces, is a self portrait but, I didn’t feel like I had to do a self portrait for The New York Times or The New Yorker. I could do a self portrait however I wanted to do it. When you look at a Picasso or a Van Gogh self portrait it’s not like those are a perfect, photo-realist self portraits. They are subjective, manipulated, highly doctored pieces of work, and that was always the intention with A Million Little Pieces and it was interesting when that shit went down and I was thrown out of publishing. Richard Prince became a very close friend of mine. Art world people, I think, understand the games I play because the making of art isn’t a black or white thing. It’s whatever you want it to be and that’s how I approach my books.

FREEMAN: Now with publishing you’ve been brought back in. The controversy has blown over to a certain degree.

FREY: I feel like I’m in this lucky position where I can do whatever I want. I can publish a book with a major publisher if I want to or I can publish a book with Gagosian if I want. My last two books, one was published by Harper Collins and it had a first printing of 350,000 copies and it was a number one best seller.

The book after that was published by Gagosian and it was a highly produced, limited edition, with only 10,000 copies that will ever be made. I can go back and forth and do whatever I want and call things what I want, or call things nothing, or lie about what they are and call them things they might not be. The last two books I have, I very deliberately did not call them anything; they’re just books. They’re not fiction, they’re not non-fiction, they’re not novels, and they’re not memoirs, just books. I think of what I do in the same way a painter puts paint on a canvas, and a sculptor uses whatever material, and a photographer uses a camera. I just use words.

FREEMAN: What is the book you published with Gagosian?

FREY: The book’s called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. We printed 10,000 copies, I wanted a closed edition of it. I think those are all gone, well I know they are all gone. In the beginning of that book I said, “this book was written after extensive interviews and with the cooperation of the family, friends and followers of Ben Zion Abraham, also known as Ben Jones, also know as The Prophet, also known as The Son, also known as The Messiah, also known as The Lord God.” I laid in fictional names and mixed character names from the book with real people’s names in the acknowledgments. Basically I said the entire book was based on a real person and real events even though not a single bit of it was. A Million Little Pieces was kind of the same thing, a deliberate mind fuck except the publisher wanted to publish it as memoir, and I went along with it.

FREEMAN: Do you see this book as way to challenge the genre compartmentalization of publishing? The idea that a book has to fit into a very narrow accepted form.

FREY: Yes, absolutely. I think the genres are stupid and unnecessary. Books can be whatever we want them to be. Writers should be shattering the rules, not following them.

FREEMAN: This seems apropos to the current situation in almost all sectors of culture where digital distribution is turning everything completely upside down.

FREY: Yeah, I love the digital transformation. My company was the first to create a book with a soundtrack, a synchronized soundtrack. We were the first people to do a book that was linked to a video game and released on the same day. I’m doing a book right now where I won’t use words at all, just pictures.

We’re doing books with video, animation, books that are games that have puzzles built into them. I am all for the digital. I think the system is going to break down in how it exists now both practically, in that there are publishers who control the output of literature in this country, but it’s also going to be broken down conceptually in that fact and fiction are going to cease to matter and people are going to realize that all of these things are just books. It’s all, everything, just a subjective presentation of a story.

FREEMAN: Which brings me to a question about the Full Fathom Five Project, which proposes to create Frey / Freeman 103

literary content through a group of writers as opposed to the single solitary figure. This calls into question a fundamental expectation of writers and literature.

That they are the rugged individual, the solitary genius. You are taking what seems to be an almost Warholian approach to the making of a book. I’m not sure has that ever been done before.

FREY: No one is really doing it the way I’m doing it. I’m applying an artist’s studio model to the word based story so, in an artists studio, there is one person who controls and conceives the creating output of a whole bunch of other people and that’s what I do. I come up with ideas for books or movies or TV shows or video games and I have other people write them for me and then we sell them. We use all sorts of fake names.

We make up authors. We sell shit anonymously. To me, the author doesn’t matter. My name is never on any of the books, even though they are all my ideas and I’m controlling them in some way. In many cases the authors are just these entirely fictional people.

Our most successful book is theoretically written by a 10,000 year-old alien war lord living and hiding somewhere on Earth. In reality, on each of those three books there have been at least three writers. Its part of this whole greater game that I’m just playing about fiction, non-fiction, authorship, does any of it matter?

To me, none of it does matter. It doesn’t matter one fucking bit.

FREEMAN: Are you finding that you are getting any resistance to this project? Are there people who are like, “This is insincere, this is not right”?

FREY: Yeah, there is a ton of resistance of it in publishing.

I’m rejecting the idea that you have to sit alone in a room for two or three or ten years and struggle to produce your book, I’m saying that in many ways that’s nonsense. We can come up with an idea; I can roll the ideas out to the writers and literally have a book published in three months. It doesn’t really matter who wrote it. All that really matters is, is it cool? Is it fun, is it worth it—was it worth doing, do people dig it? That’s the only thing that matters to me really, that and the fact that I get to do it now, that I get to do whatever I feel like doing, that any crackpot idea I have can become a reality in a relatively quick period of time. And also, I like that there’s blowback. I like that I am despised in the hollowed halls of literature; that almost everything I do is considered a bastardization of form or is met

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with great resistance. Whether it’s writing a book that doesn’t fit into a format, whether it’s publishing a book with an art gallery instead of with a publisher, whether it’s creating this sort of “studio model” where I can produce 20 or 50 or 60 or 100 books a year, I love that. It’s all being met with resistance. The old world of publishing needs to be destroyed. The rules all need to be fucking forgotten. If I can be one of the people who destroys it, and sends the rulebook to the dumpster, that’d be a good thing.

FREEMAN: How is the Full Fathom Five in relation to the James Frey practice? Are you still maintaining the books you write on your own?

FREY: I’m still doing books on my own, though I doubt I’ll ever actually write one again. At least in the old way, where I just sit there and write for a year. A lot of what I’m doing in my own name, moving forward is, again, taking art world ideas and transferring them into the world of words. My next big project under my own name is a large scale appropriation project. The scale of which has never been tackled in literature.

We are going to produce 12 books—I’m not going to get into the details too much, but I’m producing 12 books that have been entirely appropriated from other sources. I’m putting my name on them. Claiming them as mine the way some artists have done in other mediums, but which is a profound crime in the world of literature. Changing the context in which they’re presented and produced. And they will be mine, even though I didn’t write them. In anything and everything I do, I’m going to push the envelope in literature as long and as far I can, via writing, via production, via appropriation, via everything…

Michael Phelan, Bel-Auqua Deluxe, 1998 Styrofoam, synthetic resin, stainless steel tubing, 96 in x 64 in x 26 in.

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Mark Flood Primal Screen: A Fake Art Movement In late 1989 Mark Flood organized Primal Screen: A Fake Art Movement, an exhibition held in the cavernous upper dining room of a Houston restaurant called Treebeard’s.

The actual participants—Flood, Randy Cole, Ramona Fabregas, Jeff Cowie, Joel K. Orr, Kevin Bakos, and John Kaiser—were chosen because each was an artist familiar with the silkscreen medium. The Fake Movement’s art was to have a superficial visual coherence because all the works were to be paintings done with silkscreen. The roster listed on the invitation included several names not actually involved in the show, including Mel Chin, the Art Guys, and a local man recently arrested for stealing gold objects from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

A four page handout was distributed at the exhibit. The first page was a detournement of the Preface to the catalog of the MFAH’s Fresh Paint: The Houston School exhibit, a survey of Houston art curated by Barbara Rose and Susie Kalil in 1985. The rest of the handout contained fake reviews of the show by Art in America, Artforum, ArtScribe, the Italian edition of Flash Art and the Houston Post. Each of these reviews was carefully typeset to resemble an actual clipping from their respective source. The handout duplicated the look of the xeroxed press kits generally made available at exhibits in that era. Each participant made two silkscreen paintings for the show, one 60 x 60 inches, and one 60 x 96 inches. All collaborated on a group work that was 60 x 192 inches.

The show was financed by the sale of advertising space on the paintings to local advertisers. Purchasers included hairdressers, discos, record stores and other small businesses. For a fee, their ads were silkscreened on at least half of the works in the show, where they would be seen by the crowds expected to attend Primal Screen.

Crowds were predictable because Flood’s previous two shows had been mobbed, due to the local media’s coverage of the confiscation of his art by the Houston Police Department. That art was seized during a highly publicized drug bust in 1988 and, despite Flood’s denials, was considered evidence of Satanic cult practices by those arrested.

Each of the Primal Screen participants’s works included space where 5-10 ads could be placed. Several other paintings made by Flood were displayed that consisted of only ads, arranged in a grid. Additionally, large blank paintings were shown with ad space indicated by boxes that read YOUR AD HERE- NEXT EXHIBIT SPRING 1990. These were intended to promote planned future shows.

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108 Annabel Vale Archive

The Annabel Vale Archive Between 1956 and 1983, Los Angeles socialite Annabel Vale amassed a vast archive of material focused on a network of subcultures and secret societies scattered throughout California history. Vale’s collection was housed within the Limbourg Arms, a large hotel located at 550 South Flower Street in downtown Los Angeles. Annabel’s husband, Isaac Vale, had purchased the hotel in the 1930s and had designed the space to cater to the set of aristocratic bohemians that were migrating from Western Europe during the rise of Fascism. One of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles, it had at one point in the late nineteenth century housed French social utopian Etienne Cabet and Icaria, the first urban commune. In the 1920s its bar, The Limbourg Inn, was a popular Hollywood watering hole and in the 1940s it became a meeting point for intellectuals such as Theodore Adorno, Max Ernst, and Thomas Mann. Over the years, Isaac Vale accumulated artifacts from a variety of contemporary California subcultures, ranging from Theosophy to Pachucos. The hotel became a sort of ephemeral gallery for his discoveries, curated by Vale himself. Vale died mysteriously at the height of McCarthyism, a time when the culture of the Limbourg became shrouded in paranoia and secrecy. Saddled with an estate of dizzying magnitude, Annabel Vale set forth to make sense of the web of material.

Annabel saw the archive as a body of conflicting symbols, one that involved both a strong countercultural impulse along with an affirmation of the glory of the western empire. As she poured through the material she began to sense that various artifacts were speaking to one another, forming an overarching narrative of the subterranean history of California.

Annabel used the hotel as a place to expand on what her late husband had built and, with feverish intent, attempted to fill the gaps of the nascent picture. In the 1960s, buoyed by the various discussions of conspiracy that were inseparable to the era, she began collecting far more aggressively. Entire rooms of the hotel were taken over for showcasing and storing the archive. Upon her death in 1983 the archive had grown twenty-three times in size and existed as a largely unorganized mass of cultural detritus. Artifacts ranged from countercultural literary magazines to plans for the coming mega-cities of southern California to rare plant/mineral hybrids.

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Contract, page 2 of 5, 2002 110 Something

Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno, No Ghost Just A Shell, 2000, 3 color silkscreened poster, 69 1/3 x 47 1/5 in., 120 x176 cm, Unlimited edition, Courtesy mmparis.com and Air de Paris, Paris

Blinky Statement B Y J E F F R E Y VA L L A N C E

Blinky the Friendly Hen In 1978 when I was 23 years old, I had a job restoring antique penny arcade machines from the early nineteen-hundreds till the nineteen-fifties. For the first time in my life I had money in my bank account—five-thousand dollars to be exact. I decided to spend the entire amount on an art piece, so I self-published the story of Blinky the Friendly Hen. Blinky was a piece of meat (chicken) that I purchased at a local supermarket. (Blinky was so named due to of the chicken’s peculiar cockeyed gaze.) I took Blinky to the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery to see if they would bury a piece of meat—if I had the cash.

They did. What followed was the entire burial ritual for a dead pet.

The Blinky piece was originally a prank—just to see what I could get away with. I thought it had no meaning at all. But I soon realized that Blinky was a stand-in for us. In that way, I could go through all of society’s death rituals without having to produce a “real” dead body. At the time of the Blinky piece, I was a vegetarian so the piece has an underlying vegan statement as well.

Over time I came to believe that Blinky was an archetype of sacrifice. I saw serious correlations between Blinky’s sacrifice, suffering, death, burial, exhumation, and cultification, to the story of Christ’s Passion. It was as if this story (without any specific symbols) is written in our heads. Culturally we inject familiar signs into the story to give it meaning—The Meaning of Life. Take the Friendly Hen for example: Blinky was born from an egg: the Easter symbol of birth and life, the chicken and the cock are symbols of virility and sexuality, they also signify sacrifice and redemption, and ultimately the rooster is the emblem of resurrection—the cock crowing three times at the Dawn of Salvation.

Like no other work, the Blinky piece has caught the public’s imagination. Blinky is listed in several California travel guides and there are manifold references to the Friendly Hen on the internet. The Blinky saga has become akin to an urban legend, with even the pet cemetery workers embellishing the story of the funeral service to include “hooded chanting mourners holding candles.” On Blinky’s grave, I often find strange votive offerings left by cemetery visitors.

Blinky is now like a cult thing. I have to be very careful in exhibiting Blinky Relics as they are the pieces most frequently stolen from museums (for who knows what diabolical purpose).

Blinky the Friendly Hen 30th Anniversary On April 27, 1978, I went to the meat department of Ralphs supermarket and looked at chickens in plastic bags. I picked out a nice one and named it Blinky. Then I drove to the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery to bury Blinky. I ordered the complete funeral service—a lot, interment, flower vase, blue plastic coffin with pink satin lining, viewing room and grave marker. The major first-class relics of Blinky are preserved in the collection of Barry Sloane, Los Angeles.

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Ten years later, I arranged for the remains of Blinky to be exhumed, and hired a lawyer, a doctor and a scientist to determine the cause of Blinky’s death. Blinky’s bones were sifted through an archeological screen, her remains autopsied and her bones analyzed by a computer. Blinky’s bones were then reburied, except for a few bits that I saved as relics. I collaborated with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto on a video documenting the Blinky exhumation process.

On the 20th Anniversary of Blinky’s burial, I was scheduled to do a lecture at a Blinky Festival to be held at a major American university, when, by some trick of fate, I contracted chicken pox. I had to cancel my appearance. When I called the university and explained what had happened, they thought I was pulling some kind of performance prank; but, sadly, it was true.

Here, presented for the 30th Anniversary of Blinky the Friendly Hen exhibition, are a selection of works from the extensive Barry Sloane Collection as well as some relics and bone fragments never seen before.

Authentic Chicken Relics In the Middle Ages, the forging of relics became such a major industry that St. Augustine, in his book The Works of Monks, warned monks not to peddle in false relics. Over the centuries, many unscrupulous charlatans have trafficked in forged relics. In the study of relics, chicken bones have become synonymous with fakery. International relic expert and founder of the Los Angeles–based International Crusade for Holy Relics, Thomas Serafin, laments, “If Internet sales continue, eventually you’ll have some nut cutting up chicken bones and putting them up for sale.” I believe Serafin was waxing prophetic here, as that is exactly what I am doing in this project, except the chicken bones are authentic performance relics from the 1978 burial and 1988 exhumation of Blinky the Friendly Hen. In the 1960s the Mafia faked hundreds of yards of blood-soaked bandages which they claimed were from the stigmata stains of St. Padre Pio. When newspapers reported on the results of scientific tests that confirmed that the stains were actually chicken blood, sales did not slacken. When the tomb of St. Peter was unearthed in the Vatican grotto, the crypt held not only the Great Apostle’s remains but also the bones of various domestic animals, mouse bones and chicken bones—possibly the relics of the Cock that Crowed Thrice. I remember my father telling a humorous story about a hawker selling chicken bones to pilgrims in Rome, saying that they were from that legendary cock. In the peddler’s box were enough bones to resurrect a sizable flock of chickens.

New Christian Symbol I would like to put forward the Chicken as a new symbol for Christ, to complement the traditional lamb, dove, lion and fish. In the Bible, Christ compared Himself to a hen, saying, “How often I wanted to gather your children together the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings!” (Luke 13:34)

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114 Albert / Neykov / Freeman

Laura Albert / J.T. LeRoy

by Vera Neykov and Jonah Freeman It’s true that the world seems smaller than ever and technology is allowing us to find and connect to people easier than ever; that’s sort of how this interview came about.

J.T. LeRoy was one of those names on our list of potential catalogue contributors that we had no idea how to find, or what we would really say if we did find her. After some diligent internet research, and ultimately a hunt on facebook, I found Laura Albert, the writer and creator of J.T. LeRoy. Laura swiftly returned my message and was interested in hearing our idea for this exhibition. Jonah and I were able to begin talking with her over the phone in late summer. From our first (unrecorded) conversation, we decided that an interview about her experience, in her own words would be far more remarkable than telling a simple story…as it is anything but that. The ephemera presented in this interview is from Laura’s archives directly. The story of J.T. LeRoy is long, dense and intense, but ultimately a sensitive, personal and honest one.

This interview took place over the phone on December 9, 2011 between Los Angeles and San Francisco (where Albert lives). __ VERA NEYKOV: Where did you get the idea and why did you decide to write under a pseudonym? Furthermore where did the idea come from to get someone else to play the persona of the author?

LAURA ALBERT: That was never a question I asked, there was never an idea to use a pseudonym, I always had a split, I think that every artist every writer kind of stands in an emotional double-ness to his or her culture or society and that’s to be both inside and out. If you’re a schizophrenic, then it’s a walk in the park. If you don’t have a big stake in the reality of things, you know, you are more hospitable to playing, to reconstruction, deconstruction, to recombining of things. For me, that definitely was true. I always lived in the duality of having an emotional split of things, my feeling in what I could talk about. I split off into a character. The way you know an artist submits to a different spirit or different state when their working is like a transmigration of spirit. And your perspective of self is lifted, because you’re giving to whatever the situation and the character is.

For me, that was done out of necessity. Creating an “other” was a stabilizing influence. So in other words, when I was a kid I would call hotlines as a boy, because that was the only way I could express my pain. They say that some artists will create what they don’t see represented, you want to see yourself represented. There is such a profound moment when you see a piece of art and it represents something you never told anyone. The culture wasn’t talking about sexual abuse or child abuse and when they did, it was under very prescribed circumstances. The character looked a certain way: it was always a blond hair, blue eye-ed cute little boy…

VN: Right.

LA: …And so, for me, what was communicated was that in order to express my pain, I needed to look this way.

VN: What was the reason, and was it the same reason to develop this character so you didn’t have to stand in the spotlight and someone else could do it or you?

LA: Yeah, I think it was all of that. First of all, it gave me phenomenal freedom. I was free from having any of the responsibility to owning any of it…

VN: Right.

LA:…So, in other words… hold on I have to close my door for a minute, I don’t know who’s home.

[Discussion.] So, whatever he needed to say he could say, so the self-censoring part wasn’t there. I also protected my family, too. In our culture we always want for the work to somehow relate to the person.

We feel we have a right to know everything about the creator; I was able to create the story, and also the character that matched the story and give myself over to that. Which protected me on so many levels, it protected me from me. Because when I was making hotline calls, I wasn’t worried about what the public at large was going to think.

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VN: Right, but in the case of being an author, you were potentially going to be in some sort of spotlight.

LA: Well that happened very accidentally and, it happened… nobody could have planned it or seen it coming. I mean, I never would have. But a lot of art, a lot of artists create out of suffering. Some people start with the idea of fame, I was a musician and when I was doing that, I was very focused on being famous and being seen. I wanted to share my work, and I wanted to share my art, but I really wanted recognition. As I started to gain recognition in that field and, being on stage, it really started to become clear to me that it was a very unhealthy thing, and that it was the opposite of what I really wanted or needed and was engaging my sickness. I withdrew from doing that, I quit that.

VN: What was living with J.T. Leroy during J.T. Leroy like? Was there fear that you would get caught? Was that a question? Was it more of a pleasure that you didn’t have to be in that spotlight? Or was it freeing because you could have this sort of alter ego do everything that you wanted to or didn’t want to?

How do you reflect on it, how did you deal with it?

LA: Well there were all these different levels going on.

And I mean for me, people at the time of the “reveal” looked upon it like it was the Taj Mahal.

But for me it was built popsicle stick by popsicle stick, and while I was in it, it was very much putting the popsicle stick on. I was so involved building the next of it. And it was relieving to me because I didn’t while I kept doing it I didn’t have to… it worked on a number of different levels. One, I was doing kind of self-therapy. For me he (J.T.) changed, at first he was Terminator and then he became Jeremiah then he became J.T. Leroy. They were different, they were segmented beings. When other people embodied him.

When the final person took over…

VN: So what amount of time is…?

LA: Ten years, it was a ten-year period.

LA: Yeah, Interview magazine wanted to run a piece and needed a photo, so I went out on the street to find the person that would be J.T.. You know, if you ever hear about someone or you recognize someone on the street from a dream or someone who looks like a relative, a dead relative or a lover and you know it’s an archetypical story, you know someone falls in love with someone who looks like someone from a dream right away, for me you see some people and I 116 Albert / Neykov / Freeman

would recognize them as looking like J.T. or Jeremy or Terminator. And when the final person, when… he wanted his own body. If he could have lived in my body that would have been great, but he’s very angry that my body didn’t match his body. So it was that very liberating to me when he entered into somebody else’s. And it was complex, it was like, you know the Walt Whitman quote: “Do I contradict myself ?

Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, and I contain multitudes.” It was when he was in Savannah that I saw J.T., I really saw him. It was at the same time I understood, it’s like, uh, when they do brain surgery on you and you’re awake with your brains open…ok…

LA: …I had to be beholden to, I understood that she was hosting him, she allowed him to move in and there wasn’t a feeling of, uh, “Oh, we’re going to put this on.” It was understood. If you want to call it a lie agreed upon, it was, it was something that, uh… but not just me and her, but by the culture in general.

Because I mean, it was, people always talk about the gap. That it was, that something, it just always felt weird and this and that everyone talked about that, right?

VN: Right.

LA: Even during the time when he walked amongst us.

Right? But it was OK, because the purpose he served was needed, it was like the cloud was so… say the cloud was formed so people could populate the cloud; it had chairs, furniture, it had details. It wasn’t until someone blew the whistle and said, “Hey, you’re sitting on a cloud.” That everyone started to fall through it.

JONAH FREEMAN: I understand the personal necessity to create this other identity, but when you keep talking about the culture at large, did you feel that when you were doing it there was a critique of these perceptions of abuse, and these identities, and that in some way your gesture was puncturing holes in what the expected identities of writers and artists and the abused and all that?

LA: When I was creating the work, I mean, I just said what I felt I needed to say. And I was very pissed off at all the abuse kind of lit. The books where you have these supposed abused children writing—and I don’t care, I do not care who wrote the books, I don’t care if there was a zebra, I don’t care if it was the most abused child in the world. It, I wanted to beat the child’s head in, you know, the survivor’s head in,

after it was, it just seemed like bullshit, whoever wrote it. And it just seemed it kind of like fetishized. A fetishistic approach to the abused child, which is like it demonized the abuser, made the abused child a saint.

And it really wasn’t true to my experience. Where it was like an abused child learns how to manipulate, they learn how to survive and when, we as a culture encounter that kin, we usually prefer for that child to be dead, because then we can cry, put teddy bears on the stoop and then call for the parents to be locked up in jail but the truth is the statistics, the abused child who grows up with intervention more likely grows up to be the abusive parent. Ok.

VN: Removed from it.

JF: Removed from it. You are not in the center of the spotlight, this sort of fictional persona is. It would seem—

LA: Yeah, yeah!

JF: My initial reading of it, when I heard about it, seemed much more subversive and fascinating.

LA: Well, it was an illusion agreed upon. It was an illusion agreed upon. And, for me, I needed that illusion in order to come in safe. It’s always great if you can come in safe to the process of creating, and I have been so hurt and so broken down that the only way that I can be in communion with the spirits, to come in safe and be asked to be willing, was in order was to put on an asbestos suit, a full body suit. And it was slow, it gave me practice, I was able to practice more and more, like it, letting go more and more.

And I would tell people; it was like I was asking to be busted…

JF: Right.

LA: Right, so if we don’t stop the cycle somewhere it goes on and on and on. And when we encounter that teenage kid or even younger, who fuck up our property and fuck up our kids, we want them locked up and put in jail, OK? We don’t have these sweet compassionate feelings for them. So I wanted—and again, it was not conscious—it was very much like you know when you see someone on a surfboard and they are riding an impossible wave, I’ve seen video of them slowed down and you can see they are doing very careful, very unconscious maneuvering. Like they’re just balancing; they’re doing things like adjusting their foot, like minutia, to stay above the wave, they just become one. It was like that for me. I adjusted completely to the environment and understood what I needed to do stay on top of the wave. Now that was not in order to meet Madonna that was in the articulation in the media.

VN: Right.

JF: Yeah.

LA: What for me, my intention and what was my goal was very different than what was…

VN: Ultimately…

LA: …ultimately said you know they never asked me why.

They did the diagnosis. They looked at this and that, said, “Oh you did it for this,” because that’s all they could fuckin’ imagine, because in their mind, the end goal is to meet Madonna, is for money, is for like going to Studio 54 [laughs] kind of shit. But it’s like you don’t even know.

JF: But isn’t there kind of like a kind of irony there?

Because it’s like the actor meets Madonna, so it’s kind of like where it would seem like not the actual goal.

Well, you know, the fact that if the goal were to be famous, that would be counterintuitive to the whole project because you are…

VN: Oh, really?

LA: And a lot of people knew. A lot of people knew and they didn’t give a shit. It was like a bass player who needs to wear lacy panties in order to win the pennant.

VN: So you’re saying that you would tell people that, that…

LA: Yeah, I’d tell people all the time, some believed me, and some didn’t.

And a lot of people became active participants.

Winona Rider added to the story, she made up the whole long where she met J.T.. on the street, on her own accord. She didn’t even know, but she started making this whole on her own. Billy Corgan knew and started collaborating with me while telling everyone else that there was “J.T.” and knowing full well and so all these people were actively participating in it.

JF: So what about the Argento film, was she actively involved in that or did she…

LA: No, no… she didn’t know. Which was funny because all the conversations when we were there were with me. I was on the set doing line readings and, going over the script, and fighting with people over not Albert / Neykov / Freeman 117

118 Albert / Neykov / Freeman

changing language and arguing for why. I mean it was pretty hilarious. But you have issue of substance abuse, you know, she was pretty high for most of the time period when we were dealing, so she was in her own illusion, she was attracted to the work because she was working out her own stuff. So who I was it really didn’t matter. It had no impact on anything, really.

JF: And you said, so, Winona Rider was privy to the information or just sort of like…

LA: No, no, no, she wasn’t, she— VN: she decided to make her own…

LA: …yeah, she just added to it. It was kind of like a leanto house, you know, where everyone starts building on it. It was like that. We’d have people come up and be like, “Oh I knew you,” or “I slept with you,” blah, blah, blah. My feeling was just like, “Come on in and add to the house.” J.T. was an illusion agreed upon. He was in the center, it was an organizing principle where people could just liberate energy, and it was new archetype. So my feeling was like, join in!

That’s why, if you go back, so many people played Terminator, J.T.. I had people come up to me, “Oh, I was J.T..” There’s an Asian woman, she was J.T., right…

VN: So it wouldn’t necessarily be you contacting this person and orchestrating what they did or didn’t do, it was people taking on the role themselves as well, independently?

LA: No, like, say somebody wanted to go to a show or something, I’d say, “Just go up and tell them you’re J.T..” It became more of an idea, of a concept than… you know, there was time when I held it very tightly, when I was very emotionally involved and I just guarded it. And then I got that it really wasn’t about me and it really didn’t matter. It was kind of like, you know the Peter Sellers’ movie, Being There?

Where anything he says took on meaning way beyond what he was actually talking about. And it was like that. The person playing J.T. could say the most stupid, idiotic things and it became this pearl of wisdom. She once said that she was from South Virginia, OK? There is no South Virginia, as far as I know. And nobody called her on it.

LA: No. And I had my way of covering it up, “Oh, that J.T. loves to joke, ha ha ha!” And what I would often do is point the mistakes out because I found that it was a way to diffuse it, but then I realized that I didn’t even have to do anything. It didn’t matter. I mean, she could have her tits out. One night she got her period. Nobody saw it, blood on white pants. People had sex with her, so I would change her gender “Oh, he’s a boy.” “Oh, no, he’s not, she’s a female.” It really didn’t fucking matter. And that was the funniest thing when I got it. And that’s why… she went to Brazil, he went without me. I didn’t go on tour. And it’s funny because I just met with the Brazilian publisher they said, “You know, we don’t understand why everyone is so upset, everyone here loves the work.” And they said, “Yeah, lots of thing did not make sense when she was there.” Nothing made sense, but nobody gave a shit. And they want to put the books out, repackage them, under my name and they’re like, “Would you finally come?”

VN: It’s funny, because that makes it even sort of easier to have it be a liberating experience, in that you realize that all these things that may have mattered at some point are so miniscule, are so easily accepted by people. And it is also equally depressing because it puts some of…

LA: What’s easy to lose sight of is was about the art, the book. The book was the concrete and there was the actual craft. After the reveal people were having opinions and they hadn’t even read the books, you know?

VN: I remember, in our last conversation, you pointed out that there were two routes that people went, either stand by J.T. Leroy or go against and crucify. We wanted to touch upon that and how that worked out and played out.

LA: At the time of the reveal, people were basically told they were lied to. You know, The New York Times…

VN: Questioned it.

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what you have to understand, at the time, there was a perfect storm: you had Jason Blair and Glass and then you had the weapons of mass destruction. And The New York Times was facing questions of their credibility at such a heightened level that when I came along, it was like, you had The Washington Post saying, “Ha ha ha, you were made a fool of ! She punked you, ha ha.” And so the reporter, Warren St. John, had done a glowing story about J.T. Leroy, it was on the cover of the Style section. And he called me up after the reveal and he said, “I’m gonna get you.”

JF: Oh, really?

LA: Oh, completely. And if you read his language, he never stepped back and got his ego out of the way. You know, because you had The Washington Post calling him out by name, calling him an idiot, right? And he couldn’t step back and say, “Well, why would someone do this?”

It’s not like I was making it easy, I was holding on for dear life because my feeling was, “If you take him (J.T.), I’ll die.” I couldn’t imagine living without him.

It’s not like all their “fake memoirists” when they get called out. You know, “Oh, you’re not really a Pygmy from Antarctica.” You know, they call press conference and they say, “Excuse me, I made a mistake.” I went the opposite, he went the opposite, and it really was he went the opposite. It was like, “No, no, no, you’re not getting me alive.” The language was very rageful, it was like, The New York Times, “perpetrator,” “culprit,” “come clean,” “the jig is up.” And the middle age, my age was spoken about with such disgust. Any time they had a chance to talk shit, even when they were reviewing the movie, the reporter attacked me, even though I had nothing to do with the movie, right? It was based on the book, it’s like one line in the movies review, “based on the book,” right? The reporter, whatever her name is, Dargolis, whatever the fuck?

JF: Manohla Dargis?

LA: Yeah, she wrote that I should get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness from Dennis—I don’t even want to say this person’s name. It was like, what the fuck is this? Are you out of your fucking mind? A movie review and you’re telling me that I should get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness?

monster. It’s Laura Albert and Hitler, I’m telling you, man. Versus The New York Times, we didn’t stand a chance.” So, you know, that’s pretty powerful fucking press to come against. So, it really took someone special or someone who was trained differently—and I mean trained differently to the cultural noise—because once The New York Times brands you with something, it just goes into an echo chamber, right? So I would start hearing from people who could step outside. The self-authenticity of the work was more important, for them, was more important than what they were being told, “You’ve been punked, and you’ve been lied to.”

It’s like weapons of mass destruction, I mean, it felt emotionally good to go bomb the fuck out of Iraq because we’re seeing these planes slam in again and again and again. There weren’t that many people who could step back and out of the emotional heightened hysteria and say, “This does not feel right, this feels like a lie.” And so there were a lot of people who had come to J.T. for a lot of different reasons and their response was very telling. It revealed more about the culture than it did me. And the smartest thing that I could do was shut the fuck up. I mean I had people telling me…

I had agents screaming at me, saying, “You know, I can get you a book deal now, no one is gonna care about you in seven months.” And my feeling was, nobody cared about me seven months ago why do I care if they don’t care about me in seven months? Your agenda is different than mine. It’s not like you’re stealing the spotlight from me, I never asked for the spotlight, I hid from the spotlight. But it was painful when you had all these people trying to portray me. I went to federal court because a movies company said, “We’re gonna make a movie about you.” And I said, “Well, you don’t have my life rights.” And we went to Federal court.

And they had spent two million dollars for their right to tell my story.

JF: What, did they think you were public domain, or something?

LA: Well, yes, basically what they said, after this man, Stephen Chamber, had optioned my rights... he had optioned Sarah, ok? Not my rights. He had optioned Sarah after Gus Van Sant had Sarah, and instead we did Elephant.

VN: Right.

VN: Right.

LA: It’s like, whoa! They called me a fake fiction writer.

LA: And it was optioned as a novel, right? He didn’t ask

LA: They had to portray me as like a fake Svengali. “You know what, maybe Glass got us, maybe Jason Blair did, but, man, you didn’t stand a chance. You fucking 120 Albert / Neykov / Freeman

for J.T.’s life, he actually said he wanted to do the opposite of Gus, which is not go into, you know, not over involvement with J.T., do his own thing.

And when he found out—he had optioned it for three years—when he found out I was J.T. Leroy, his response was, “That’s great, I want to combine your story with Sarah and go back-and-forth, like Being John Malkovich, American Splendor.” He, you know, was like, “I’ll get Charlie Kaufman to write it!” And I said, “Well, that’s really interesting, but you need to tell me what you want to do.” And that was where the record scratches, the needle went “errrrrrr!” He was like, “No, no, that’s not the way I work. I tell you what I want, I own your life.” And it’s like, “No you don’t. You have Sarah, but my life is different and I’m just figuring it out. I can’t even say why I did it. So how can you tell me?” So, he had made... his parents owned an art gallery or something, and they owned Diane Arbus photos so he felt very entitled.

And he would talk about how he was making this movie about Diane Arbus and how he understood her because he grew up with these photos of her. Well, he turned her into... the representation disgusted her family. You know, she ends up being this woman who wants to get butt-fucked, you know? It’s like, fuck you, it’s not up to you to define me. And some of the shit that came out in depositions that they were going to do. And that, and that was funny me to me, I have to say.

you’ll see a picture of J.T. Leroy credited to like 50 different people.

Background: [LAUGHTER]

LA: And he said, “Oh, okay” VN: [LAUGHTER] JF: Wow. LA: Artwork is unique in the sense of it... we can just enjoy it for the sake of art. It doesn’t have to do anything but just be beautiful. But it also has the possibility to save the fucking world.

VN: Where did the idea for the Deitch Projects show to come from? Was that Jeffrey’s idea?

LA: How did it happen?

VN: Yes. LA: It’s fucking great. You know, it’s like I didn’t play by any of the rules. Like so there are all these rules that I just totally disregarded. Because the thing is, like my paradigm was the punk paradigm and of course at the end, you had these white men of privilege looking at it and they put their paradigm and they couldn’t imagine that mine was complete inverse. We met all of these kids that wanted to be photographers and my feeling was you send the elevator back down. You know from the punk days you get as many people through the door as you can. And so you’d have a magazine that needed a picture of J.T. Leroy. I would say look, I’d say to one of these kids, “I’ll take the picture and you write to the magazine, we’ll arrange with the magazine that you took the photo. Keep the money, take the credit and build up your fucking portfolio,” because they treat the photographer kids like shit. You know, paying shit. So I didn’t need the credit. And I figured fuck it they can take the $25 bucks the $50 bucks that they paid me. So that’s why

One of the things we did this book called Herald’s End and I found this photographer, this painter, I found her, it was like a whole other fucking amazing story. But she was amazing and I said to her...and she didn’t know, but I said to her, “Where do you want to show? Let’s do a show.” and she was like, “Oohhh... uuuuhhh... I’ve never been in a show before. I don’t know?”and I was like, “What’s your... what’s your wet dream?” and she goes “Well you know, there’s the Deitch Gallery, but they’re not going to take me. I’m just, you know, an Aussie...blah blah...” I say “No, no I’ll call them.” [She says,] “Oh no, that’s not how it works and like...” and I’m like, “You know what...”

So J.T. called up Deitch and said, “Hey, let’s put on a show.”

That the abstract killing in Africa, all of a sudden you see a photo, you read an account that is done.

That humanizes the person and then all of a sudden they’re not just a crazy darky in some other country.

All of a sudden they’re... wow... they actually feel like you and me.

VN: Right.

LA: Art can change the fucking world. So that’s what I mean. Any means necessary. And what? I did something... not really... but I kind of did something new. Right? So of course, you know, when you do.. when you’re the groundbreaker when you fucking change the rules of the game they didn’t see me coming. David Milch said to me, “When you sneak past the Keepers of the Gate, the Bastions of Hip, they will sting with the fury of wasps.” And that’s why Lou Reed had to fucking attack me. Because he had to introduce himself to every new motherfucker; because he’s afraid he’s not relevant anymore.

Anytime there’s a new band or somebody cool, he fucking throws a lasso around them and goes, “I’m Lou Reed.”

Albert / Neykov / Freeman 121

VN: [giggles]

speaking in tongues. It was having a direct link to the subconscious. When people are like, “You pulled this off and I’m gonna do the same thing,” all I can say is, “Good fucking luck.” You know, they ask me, “How did you do it?” It’s a recipe, that cake’s so fucking simple, but it has bazillion ingredients? It’s like, you really, really want to know? No, you don’t. You don’t.

You just really want to think that you put on wigs and sunglasses.

LA: And he attached himself to J.T. and as soon as the fucking curtain went up, he’s like, “Oh my god! I don’t know how to accommodate this!” And I sent him an email, reminding him of those lines, songs from Drusilla: “People recognized my name but they don’t recognize the state.” He couldn’t even fucking recognize his own fucking words.

VN: Right.

JF: I have to say it seems like from talking to you, the real

LA: And revealed more about them than it ever does

honesty of it is what helped this be pulled off, in a way.

about me. And I was just riding the surfboard.

JF: Yea.

LA: Well, also, again, I’ll bring you back to the books. You have to remember that the work was phenomenally reviewed. Sarah got great fucking reviews. It went around the world, we traveled, and we wrote for The New York Times, you know, I was writing for all these magazines. I wrote the Citibank catalogue for Jurgen Teller, and after, I did this Venice Museum thing. But, I mean, the writing really moved people. That was the sense of authenticity, it’s not... there’s been other performance art things where people like, even Lynn Hershman, she did [the] Roberta [Breitmore series].

If I did what she did back then—I guess it was the early 80s—I would have gone to jail. She had a credit history for a whole fake persona. She had a house, credit cards, and it was like a big performance art and she even had a funeral for this other being. The difference is that I created a body of work that I do believe will stand the test of time. And it’s ironic, but when they sued me they called what they wanted “Sarah plus” and in a way it fits, you know, there is Sarah the book plus…

LA: Part of the reason why I created J.T. is because I don’t know how to filter myself. I’m either on or I’m off. I really, I have a problem with this in my life—and I’ve gotten better at it—if I think it, I say it. So, J.T. was a great filter for me.

VN: I think it’s really clear and it makes sense in the way that you explain it. In discussing this “character” with other people, they don’t look down on it and they don’t understand and ask, “What’s wrong with it?”

And I think it’s exactly the way you say it, it’s a way of expressing yourself. And if someone gets cranky about it, it’s on them; it’s not on you. And I think the way this conversation has come about, it makes sense within the project. It puts it in this area of fiction and deception, but then the reasons are so clear and so honest, that I think it will really pose an interesting question. Hopefully that’s what we’re doing with the whole of the show, is posing those questions.

LA: You know, I will tell you one thing. When I was on a telephone conversation where I was being Terminator/Jeremy/J.T., and I would glance and see a reflection of myself in a computer screen, a television screen, I felt such a feeling of surprise and unrecogintion, and I would have to cover the screen or turn away, because I felt him in my body. Just the way when an actor takes on a role, they stay in character, they don’t break character?

VN: Yeah, yeah.

LA: It was like that for me. My body would change, my movements—no one’s watching me in the room, and I didn’t let anybody see me. Because I was aware, I have that duality. And I was so present; I embodied not only the character, but also the moment. It was a kind of a religious experience, in that sense, to be so available to my subconscious, right? It was like 122 Albert / Neykov / Freeman

It never ends. And what is interesting to me is you can keep peeling the layers and layers and layers and you know... Kekulé, the guy who discovered the benzene ring? He said, “Visions come to prepared spirits.”

Right? He had been trying to solve the problem of the benzene ring and he went to sleep and he had a dream of a snake swallowing its tail and he woke up and he knew he had solved the mathematical problem. And they asked him, “How’d you do it?”

After 20 years of studying. And he said, “Visions come to prepared spirits.” And I think that prepared spirits understood this naturally. If they are also on the surfboard, they understood this and were able to keep surfing.

Alan Smithee interviewed by Alex Israel Alan Smithee is one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors.

His credits include dozens of feature length films, television shows, music videos and shorts. Since the late 1960’s he has tackled nearly every cinematic genre. Los Angeles-based artist Alex Israel caught up with Smithee for twenty questions over lunch at Hamburger Hamlet on the Sunset Strip.

AS: Scott Disick. Does he count? If not him, I’d say Khloe.

AI: Have you ever interacted with a Robot?

AS: My friend is a computer programmer, and he says that all of the spam e-mail I get comes from robots.

AI: Do you believe in karma?

__

AS: No.

ALEX ISRAEL: What do you like on your burger?

AI: Do you have a t-shirt that you’ll never give away?

ALAN SMITHEE: Iceberg lettuce, fresh tomato slices, grilled onions, and thousand island dressing. Oh, and cheese, cheddar usually.

AS: I have several. An old tie-dyed one, and a bunch of concert shirts, and a few that are memorabilia from my films. One is splattered with fake blood.

AI: As a child, did you partake in any competitive athletic leagues or school teams?

AI: What’s the last thing you do before going to bed?

AS: Growing up, I was always really good at tennis, although I simply played with other kids over at the tennis courts in the park. I still play whenever I can find the time.

AI: What’s your preferred brand of bottled water?

AS: I usually order tap water, but when I buy bottled I stick to Evian.

AI: Do you wear sunscreen regularly?

AS: No. I should.

AI: What’s the worst thing about going to the dentist?

AS: I smoke medical marijuana before bed, so I guess the last thing would be putting out the joint.

AI: Do you ever feel like getting in your car and driving off into the sunset?

AS: No, that kind of romantic urge has always been satisfied by the films I make—the characters get to do that as the closing credits roll and I live that moment vicariously through them.

AI: Do you have any pets?

AS: No. I have too many allergies.

AI: Can you recall a powerful religious experience?

AS: Arriving on time, and then having to wait fortyfive minutes to see the guy.

AS: I once had a powerful architectural experience at Chartres Cathedral.

AI: Who is your favorite Kardashian?

AI: Would you consider yourself to have an adventurous spirit?

124 Smithee / Israel

AS: It’s funny because, well, yes, but this spirit has definitely shifted over the course of my life.

When I was younger, I would say my adventurous spirit manifested physically, and with a kind of youthful passion: I’d be out there on a motorcycle or sailboat, and was willing to hop on a plane for a location scout at the last minute.

And I was outspoken, which I think relates to the idea of adventure, in a way. Today, I’m still passionate, but my adventures are quieter: I like to try all kinds of exotic things when I go for sushi, and I’ve gotten really interested in underground music. I enjoy seeking out off-the-beaten-path music venues that, in some cases, have felt a little bit dangerous.

AI: Have you ever been on a cruise?

AS: Not yet.

AI: Are you a patient customer?

AS: I try to be.

AI: What are your thoughts on social networking?

AS: I don’t do it, so that’s a hard question for me to answer. I suppose I should try it. I heard that there are a few fake Alan Smithees on Facebook.

AI: Were you an angsty teen?

AS: I had my moments.

AI: Ice cream or frozen yogurt?

AS: Sorbet.

AI: What do you want the world to know about Alan Smithee?

AS: Nothing.

Smithee / Israel 125

Julieta Aranda, Meanwhile in Nigeria (detail), 2011, mixed media (aluminum, plexiglass, newpsaper, c-prints), 8 x 7 feet 126 Aranda

Aranda 127

Marcel Broodthaers Interview with Jürgen Harten and Katharina Schmidt, 1972 […]

JÜRGEN HARTEN: How do you view the relationship between your Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), founded in 1968, and a traditional Museum?

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: I’ll see this relationship more clearly when the enterprise has drawn to a close; at the moment it’s still very much alive. I have my ideas, without doubt, on this subject but they are still not altogether clear because the experience is not over. Nevertheless, it’s not difficult for me to situate this relationship. In the first place it concerns a close affinity—because the invention of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (at the outset a simple arrangement of crates, postcards and inscriptions: three times nothing) was tied up with the event of 1968, that is to say the political events which occurred at that moment in every country.

JG: What does this imply?

MB: One must picture to oneself a great alteration of consciousness, above all among young people, and this transformation inevitably also extended into the realm of art. A new question sprang up: What is art? What role does the artist play in society? I had already taken one step further by posing the question: What limits are there to the role of that which represents artistic life; that is to say: what is the role of the museum? This points, in the first place, to making a survey of the situation. And these arrangements of which I have spoken were for me a place for discussion and exchange of ideas. But while the undertaking has evolved rapidly and disengaged itself from the immediate, or rather, sociological, context and begun to take on a life of its own. In short, this is the classic phenomenon of art. You conceive something, which you believe is intimately connected with a determined event that has taken place in society, and then this thing all of a sudden starts to live its own life, to grow and to produce cells. At that moment a kind of biology is born out of art, over which the artist himself has practically no control. After this I think that the artist will only be able to control this process for a short time and, moreover, only in a very general way. Then, he loses his hold. The ideas begin to multiply themselves like living cells. The ‘fiction’ aspect, the fictive, has detached itself in a very particular fashion from the enterprise bearing the name Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. The unreal side, the arrangement, which was nothing more at the beginning than a simple décor, progressively instituted itself in my eyes, and those of my immediate circle. This museum became reality for my Brussels acquaintances, my friends, people concerned with art—and then people who came from abroad to see, because they had heard talk of it. Thus despite its fugitive character there germinated around the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles an entirely new system of relationships. The arrangement ceased to have a framing function; it became the symbol of a fictional museum, that is to say the postcards took on a symbolic value precisely through their relationship with this special

128 Broodthaers / Harten / Schmidt

situation. As regards the question that arises in connection with what concerns us, the eagles: there, it was a kind of chance that intervened! I’ve spoken of a fiction based on the symbolism of the crates, and of which the point of view was rendered by the postcards. Now I speak of fiction in connection with the eagles that I exhibit under the same label, Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. What’s going on? It seems that when all’s said and done the eagle is itself, from the beginning a fiction… a fiction of which the sociological and political content is more and more difficult to understand, as one gradually remounts into the past. How can one fully explain the birth of the symbol and myth of the eagle without the archaeological knowledge we have of the subject? I believe that this exhibition can make understandable that the eagle, and the way in which it is represented, rests on fiction. Two fictions will be opposed here, certainly with provocative effect. It is essential for this exhibition that we acquire, thanks to this confrontation of fictions, a more vigorous consciousness of reality; the reality of an idea, naturally.

JG: It’s a question, finally, of a relationship between our modified consciousness and objects which really exist. If one looks at these objects with this modified consciousness, one has the impression that they change nature, but considered as objects they lead an autonomous existence. For example, the Sumerian and medieval objects were exhibited next to each other with the museum as context. This context nevertheless changed it sociological significance, and I believe that thanks to your method—the ‘fiction method’—we are now becoming conscious of this process.

MB: You speak of method. I would perhaps prefer to base myself in the situation that I’ve created.

The impetus for transformation which emanates perhaps equally, from this exhibition of eagles comes from this ‘fiction situation’ rather than from a fixed method.

JG: In concrete terms: you’re still waiting to see how the exhibition presents itself.

MB: Incidentally, I’m not at all sure of the result. Still I’ve asserted that one arrives there at a confrontation of fictions. For the moment, this is no more than a mode of representing things.

KATHARINA SCHMIDT: In any case, do you see this exhibition [Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1972] as a locus of discussion, just as it was previously, when you founded the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles [in Brussels in 1968]?

MB: Yes, but a discussion with a totally different character. In the sense that this time the debate cannot develop in complete freedom. The visitor is summoned with a question but does not take part directly in the discussion. Accordingly, this doesn’t correspond to what we hear through discussion. When there is discussion, everyone participates, intervenes, advances arguments. To be precise then: this exhibition is a proposition for discussion. As I think of these things, I’m disquieted at the idea that my invitation could be interpreted as taking a position. __ “Entretien de Jürgen Harten et Katharina Schmidt avec Marcel Broodthaers,” dossier de presse de l’exposition Section des Figures (Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute) (Dusseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 16 May-9 July 1972); reprinted in Marcel Broodthaers par lui-même, ed. Anna Hakkens (Gent: Luidon/Paris: Flammarion, 1998) 80-83. Translated by Ian Farr with the collaboration of Maria Gilissen, 2006.

Broodthaers / Harten / Schmidt 129

DICKINSON SCAN

130 Waterman

SHOOT THE PLAYER PIANO! B Y A L E X W AT E R M A N

Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee such a tender voice, making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee: Doctor Wilmut made thee, Doctor Ian Wilmut cloned thee outside Edinburgh, Scotland, a product of the imitative arts that Plato banished…

-William Gaddis, Agape Agape; page 25 …Glenn destroyed our piano virtuosity at a time when we still firmly believed in our piano virtuosity. -Thomas Bernhard, The Loser; page 15 This is the story of the piano player and the player piano. It’s also the story of two of the great piano players of the 20th century, Glenn Gould and David Tudor— their careers as virtuosos, and their relationship to technology and reproduction.

In technology they found a solution that allowed them to let go of their anxiety ridden performance careers as concert pianists and settle into their more desired roles as interpreter and composer. In technology they found an answer to their anxiety-ridden performance careers as concert pianists as they settled into their new roles respectively as composers. Gould and Tudor represented very different fields of production, aesthetic sensibility, taste, repertoire, and performance style however they both astonished audiences with their brilliance of technique and unconventional approaches.

The 19th century invention, the player piano—besides being a mass market product that could reproduce high art and popular songs for the consumers in their own home—was the precursor to the punch tape roll that later would be the method for programming computers. This early analog computer was a funny mix of cutting edge technology and staple bourgeois furniture. The later development of the Personal Computer—with its reference to the typewriter and the television—was similarly an embodiment and fusing (literally) of “home” and “office.” Ironically the Player Piano and its temporary “standing in” for the concert pianist did not offer a way out of the concretizing that invoked terror and disgust in both Tudor and Gould.

Glenn Gould

David Tudor

Their story will be told with the help of two novels: The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, and Agape Agape by William Gaddis. These novels provide a fictional lens through which to read the life of “the virtuoso” as a prototype of the artist and his struggle for autonomy in the age of reproduction. Gaddis’s book results from a failure to produce his lifetime work (of the same title) on the history of the player piano.

Through the history of this instrument Gaddis could propose a theory about Waterman 131

mechanization and reproduction in the arts that was similar in nature to that of the argument but antithetical to Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 essay in its conclusion.1 Gaddis was highly pessimistic about what copying would do to the artist’s “craft.” It’s almost unbelievable after reading Agape Agape, but Gaddis claimed to be unaware of Benjamin’s essay when he started his work and in his ignorance created its antipodal point in the world of art.

William Gaddis

In Bernhard’s novel the virtuoso takes on the aspect of reproducer who is so perfect, and so ingenious that he obliterates the need for other. The genius however, disrupts the flow of life and cannot uphold the false tranquility of the bourgeois home. He (Glenn Gould et al.) catapults onto stage and displays radical notions of how to re-write societal norms and yet becomes himself destroyed by the audience’s expectations of him/her and ends up affirming the theatricality of his/her own absurd rejection of the aristocratic and middle class morality.

“I detest audiences...I think they are a force of evil…” Glenn Gould in a television interview in the early sixties

Thomas Bernhard

Tudor and Gould gave up performing on the piano in public, in early to midcareer. In the case of Gould it enabled him to pursue his ideal of performance and interpretation in the recording studio, and for Tudor it meant building new instruments and shedding his role of interpreter for that of composer.

There is copious documentation of their extremely physical and sensual performance styles alongside the less documented but rumored impotence and asexuality resulting in failure in their sexual relationships. Their individual physical bodies went through physical declines, and as they became more flaccid and fragile their escape from the body that had been so revered as virtuosic was completed. David Tudor and Glenn Gould succumbed to strokes—Gould dying from a stroke at the age of 50, and Tudor was blinded by his stroke before finally passing on at the age of 70.

Gould saw the future of music as absolutely dependent upon the advancement of recording techniques and recording as an art form in and of itself. The possibilities for generating ever more interpretive possibilities, and constructing performances that would be virtually impossible in a live concert were the motivations behind his extremely prolific recorded output. Glenn Gould’s retirement from public performance allowed him to communicate on an even deeper level with his audiencean idealized audience that did not reflect that of the concert hall that he so despised.

David Tudor had emerged as a great virtuoso championing avant-garde music on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1950s. Post-war music in America and in the avant-garde German and French music worlds in particular was indebted by Tudor’s performances. The numbers of works dedicated to Tudor in the 50s and 60s are a testament to his indispensability as an interpreter. David Tudor finally wore down from all of the demands and constant flow of music from young composers wanting him to perform their works. The drive to perform evanesced and he became more and more distanced from the piano, ultimately abandoning it.

1. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 132 Waterman

The piano in the living room In a concept, albeit a fictional one, that William Gaddis borrows from Bernhard’s novel, The Loser, Glenn (Gould) wanted to become the piano. He didn’t want anything to come between him and the music, between him and Bach. If he became the Steinway then there would be nothing between them.

The piano is furniture, totem, trophy, object of devotion and mystical transportation device for elevating and enlightening the listener through the medium of its already enlightened disciple and channel: the performer. The piano in Thomas Bernhard’s novel is depicted as the enemy of the two main characters. Only Glenn Gould could manage to supplicate to the machine and produce his divine music. This idealization of the pianist and his control of the instrument, again we find with David Tudor- the interpreter and handmaiden to the work of so many composers.

Glenn Gould’s piano and chair

So the narrator of The Loser commences the story. The main character, Wertheimer (the “loser”), commits suicide naming the piano virtuosity of Glenn Gould, and more particularly—the way in which he (Glenn Gould) played the Goldberg Variations as the cause of his self-murder. This story is paralleled with the stories of the banal aristocratic upbringing of the narrator and a fictionalized version of Gould as the gregarious Canadian-American genius who isolated himself in order to perfect his craft.

…Perhaps for this reason, composers always spoke of Tudor as an “instrument”...

The narrator tells the story of their school days together in the class of Horowitz at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where he and Wertheimer were the most talented students, until they were overshadowed by the genius of Glenn Gould. They abandon their careers because Glenn destroys their will to become concert virtuosos. Wertheimer goes on to pursue the human sciences (Bernhard’s italicsusually a way of sardonically emphasizing words, professions, philosophical attitudes or mores) and he eventually isolates himself from the world after the second great tragedy of his life occurs, his sister’s “abandonment” of him, when she marries a Swiss businessman. The narrator likewise withdraws from the life of the virtuoso by giving his Steinway to a music teacher’s daughter, not as a selfless act, but because he knows that she will destroy the piano with her complete lack of talent! He then moves to Madrid in order to work on his book called About Glenn Gould, which never comes to anything, and instead we end up with the present story of these three victims of the cruel piano.

We look at people and we see only cripples, Glenn once said to us, physical or mental and physical, there are no others, I thought. The longer we look at someone the more crippled he appears to us…(Page 32)

From David Tudor’s Corporeal Imagination

by Tamara Levitz

Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought.

No spontaneous act of desperation.

The characters are likewise “cripples.” There’s the “subject” of the novel, Wertheimer—the megalomaniacal and depressed control freak who jealously guards and abuses his sister for years until she finally escapes. Then there is

Waterman 133

the narrator—whose pursuit of a career as a pianist erupted from his hatred of the family piano. In this case the piano in the family’s music room- a mediocre piano (an Ehrbar) that purely symbolized the function of music as an ordering and distinguishing social signifier for the family’s respectability and class. In a self-conscious radical act against his family our narrator purchases a Steinway and implants it into the family home. The Steinway can only be used for “artistic purposes” he insists and thus must transcend its function as furniture and trophy. 2 These pathetic characters are personifications of a slice of society and simultaneously bearers of the weight of Bernhard’s vicious attacks against Austria and the culture industry. His depictions of class and nations are incredibly acerbic but devastatingly funny. In thinking about Wertheimer’s sister’s “abandonment” of his friend, he postulates, But Switzerland turns into a deadly prison for all of them, little by little they choke on Switzerland in Switzerland, he could see it, Zizers will kill her, her Swiss husband will kill her, Switzerland will kill her, so he said, I thought. “…so he said, I thought” is one of the narrative phrases that Bernhard employs so often; the enclosure of the voice of another character inside the narrator’s head—as he thinks about them “saying their thought”—as we read the narrator’s writing.

This, and the repetitions and variations of sameness inside of the story line make for some incredibly circuitous but really musical phrasing.

The Interpreter in the Box or the Spirit in the Machine “It’s a very arbitrary thing to do, but it works!”3 -Glenn Gould Glenn Gould’s interpretations required a distance from the piano. As he would describe: The secret is that you must never move your fingers. If you do so, you will automatically reflect your most recent tactile configurations that you’ve been exposed to… and later…I was far from being a slave of the instrument. I tended to learn the score away from the piano. I would learn it completely by memory first… 4 The divorce of tactility from interpretive ideal and how to transport his perfect conception of the piece from his memory to the piano became the problem. He practiced less and less in later life, and though it was almost impossible to notice a physical change in his amazing technical capabilities, he suffered from cramps

2. A discussion of the brand names of pianos is of played up importance in the book. In real life, the industry of classical music treats the piano and its label as not only a sign of quality, but also a symbol of sponsorship and the corporate interest in the arts. Fetish still surrounds the old models however; stereotypes such as the “intellectual Bosendorfer” and the “Steinway—the virtuoso’s instrument” are common trade slogans and accepted folklore for the aristocratic audience.

3. Gould in a television interview describing why playing a Mozart adagio at double speed is necessary to awaken a public from its sleep due to the jaded interpretations of classical works by most performers.

4. Jonathan Cott, Conversations with Glenn Gould, University of Chicago Press; 1984.

134 Waterman

and numerous other physical conditions that he controlled through various means.

His early practice of putting his hands in extremely hot water before playing was a ritual where he could bring his body to the point of physicality where it could interact with his mind, and his on-stage rituals likewise enabled him to overcome the terror of performing in front of a public. Later on the rituals would include trips to several different doctors to receive medications from each, each prescribing for the side effects of the other’s prescription. Gould would notate obsessively his eating, sleeping, and temperature patterns as well as his blood pressure and other pathological data.

His early onstage rituals included always bringing his own chair and spending time to adjust it before sitting down to play, gesticulating and conducting himself, singing along with his playing, and hovering just inches away from the keyboard watching his fingers as they seemed to miraculously embody his ideas. These extra musical features were criticized and applauded alike, but caused no shortage of fetish appeal for an audience more than willing to buy into the genius myth. The majority of his public life was spent in front of either a camera or a microphone.

His narcissism was a side effect of his virtuosity and genius and yet he admittedly had immense terror and disgust whilst performing. To watch with distance allows us now the privilege to admire the genius he was. All of the extra-musical gestures and theatricality now seems to fit so perfectly into his vision of a confluence of ideation and realization. There appears to be a mechanical congruity wherein one sees his thought in motion. As Wertheimer would say: “(Glenn) is an art machine.”

Norbert Wiener’s description of the digital computer as the “all-or-nothing machine” reflects the self-fulfillment that the performance of the virtuoso provides to the public as a product. Glenn’s becoming the Steinway is his way of providing the “spirit inside the machine” for the viewing pleasure of the public.

The narrator in Gaddis’s novel keeps returning to the idea of the detachable self, the self that can be extrapolated from the body of the narrator in order to see and describe what the reader then can observe. This notion of detachable self is taken from Pythagoras’ mystical visions, which later became developed in the esoteric writings of the golden seal. The self that can become memory is one of Pythagoras’ ideas. The practice of memory as an act wherein once perfected, one can remember the past before existing and the future beyond death.

In an example of interpretive esotericism, Gould practiced this principle of detachment in order to connect two different interpretations from different days, of the same piece of music. The one thing they shared was tempo, which allowed them to temporally be connected whilst remaining forever disjunctive in its historical manifestation. The practice of the mimetic arts allows the meeting of two different points in space and time in the fourth dimension in one moment forever documented on an analogue disc (to be digitally rendered and re-mastered years later).

In discussing the fine line between interpreter and composer in the indeterminate and graphically notated scores of Cage and others, Tudor didn’t concede that he had in fact composed, but that he had been a “faithful interpreter”—who was prepared to go to whatever lengths, even composition—in order to fulfill this role.

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… I always wanted to be a faithful interpreter and my whole early training was for absolute realization of a score, which is a very complicated proposition. For instance, nowadays, I feel that many people don’t read John Cage’s score in the sense that they don’t realize why the instructions are difficult to understand. Now, when you look at a score that somebody presents to you and you see that you are following the instructions and the way they are laid down, you are the composer’s helper. If you have to select a medium for yourself in which to realize those materials, then you have to think about how far you have to go in order to realize it…5 “Notation is an evil separating musicians from music.” The closer the interpreter can come to feeling that the music is channeled from him/her directly, or that they really own the piece, the better (Busoni’s quote above was well-known to Tudor). To upset the balance between composer and interpreter however, is not the position that the extremely creative act of interpreting—copying the score into the memory or onto the page, and ultimately engraving on disc or on collective memory of the audience—is about. …if he could be the Steinway he wouldn’t need Glenn Gould he’d be the other.

Returning to that fragment from Bernhard/Gaddis, the piano becomes the mechanical embodiment of the interpreter’s internal voice. Through the act of pushing out the notes, the more curvilinear thought process becomes angular and active. The illusion of curve is enacted through the piano’s pedals—adding sustain and softening the attack. For every vocally imagined phrase, there is a mechanical equivalent. In becoming the piano, the terror and the ritual, the hot water and the cold sweat no longer have to be part of the experience of enacting a performance.

A diagram of the mechanism from the maintenance manual

The reproducibility of the performance and the performer literally becoming the piano was already possible before Glenn Gould was even born.

The Welte-Mignon piano had the ability to reproduce with incredible accuracy the “recordings” of various virtuoso pianists. It had a patented system for recording to a high degree of sensitivity the “touch” and articulation of the pianist. (See diagram, left) The player piano was the completion of an idea to fuse art and industry. It was, like the virtuoso, a selffulfilling embodiment of the suppression of failure.

Using the instrument itself as the reproducer of a performance was a major step towards dislocating the performer from having to be physically present, however as the 20th century has continually taught us, technology acts as a prosthetic add-on but not always as a replacement. It becomes another limb on our body—a corporeal appendage for our intellects.

5. Quoted from an interview contained in the article by Ron Kuivila, “Open Sources: Words, Circuits and the Notation-Realization Relation in the Music of David Tudor;” Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 14, pp.17-25, 2004.

136 Waterman

In the case of the great American composer, Conlon Nancarrow—who lived in exile in Mexico City after being blacklisted as a communist in America—the absence of any performers in one’s immediate environment was not enough of a setback to prevent one from writing “piano” music. Nancarrow used the technology of the Player Piano to his advantage in order to work out highly complex and mathematically based canonical writing for the piano (that was impossible for a pianist no matter how virtuoso, to be able to perform).

Conlon Nancarrow

Nancarrow returned to the performer later in life when his music gained more audience, and virtuoso performers attempted to play his music or commissioned it.

This reversal of paradigm is an extremely interesting tangent in which to take the present article, but for reasons of space must be omitted at this time.

In Agape Agape, Gaddis focuses on the technolog y of the piano and its ability to elevate the mass consumer on its own terms. The player piano is produced en masse to appear in the center of the bourgeois household and produce virtuosic masterpieces and popular favorites at the touch of its owner’s feet (pumping the pneumatic mechanism that would bring it to life). Nancarrow’s player piano is his orchestra and performer. The microphone and the mimetic device is for Gould the instrument that finally enables him to relay his newest and “freshest” interpretation.

For Tudor, amplifiers, tape machines, and homemade electronics would create a universe of possibilities wherein the interpretation and the composition could evolve simultaneously in design and in performance. It’s reiteration and revision was a constant embellishment of its form and/or more succinct expression of its concept.

Tudor could likewise find a way to create a system of electronic composition wherein the system he would set up could almost run itself, based on its “organic” nature.

The human element was there to service the machine, tweaking it and coaxing it through the performance, but the main intervention was pre-performative. The installation and sound check were the main parts of the composition. Tudor’s work can be re-created to this day, due to the care he took to document how the set-ups worked and not to control too much the sound result, but allow the process to be open to the performers in enough ways.6

“The Reflection of Genius”

In his later years, his interest in electronic circuitry and instrument building was paralleled by his love of cooking. The suitcase that he traveled with from performance to performance was full of all of his gadgets and cables in addition to a collection of spices that he always carried with him: the nomadic aesthetic.

As Matt Rogalsky writes on the website where David Tudor’s cookbook exists in electronic facsimile: In 1995, among David Tudor’s numerous cookbooks in his Stony Point kitchen, I came across a tiny handwritten book of favourite recipes. A pocket looseleaf-paper memo book, 102 tiny pages long, with a black leather cover. When I brought it to the house at Tomkins Cove where Tudor 6. See Rainforest by David Tudor, this piece went through multiple versions and is still performed. For an article on the various versions of this piece, see “David Tudor’s Rainforest: An Evolving Exploration of Resonance,” by John Driscoll and Matt Rogalsky; Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 14.

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was living, he was excited: it contained the recipe for his favourite triple-seed cake, along with that for its fruit juice glaze, as well as dozens of other enticing items. Most of the recipes are for Indian dishes, the rest are an eclectic international mix. Tudor said it was written out in one sitting.

His reputation as a cook, especially of Indian food, is legendary. Stories abound of intricately prepared dinners, several days in the making, served to large gatherings of friends at the Stony Point house during the 1970s. I thought, when I saw the tiny cookbook, that it deserved to be published in a facsimile edition. It would be a perfect homage to this aspect of Tudor’s creative and social life, reflecting also on his musical practice which he also conducted in the manner of a master chef, with expert combination of sweet, sour and pungent ingredients. The word started to get around that this concise recipe collection of Tudor’s existed; the little book was photocopied several times by friends.

Tudor’s chutney

Tudor’s suitcase and Gould’s chair are the banal everyday symbols of work and containment, and yet they are also objects in continual movement.

They carry and substantiate the work. The chair supports the body. The disconnected and as yet disembodied parts of an organic whole (the electronics in the suitcase) are contained in the luggage. These objects accompanied every public appearance of Glenn Gould and David Tudor; which is significant, if only to locate how we transport ourselves, and our idea of a work of art, until it can finally be transmitted to the audience.

Agape Agape finally…

Gould’s chair

In Gaddis’s final novel, he manages to find a concise mode of expression in order to state finally his ideas about the necessity of failure in art, and how mechanical reproduction strips the artist of this most human of possibilities. The novel he ended up with however, is a story of an aged and dying writer trying to finish his life work whilst the process of both physically dying and legally dying (distributing his estate and property as well as intellectual property in the form of a will) is holding him up from finishing.

The effects of medication on his writing is played with stylistically in the novel, and mirrors not only the fact that both Gaddis and Bernhard were prescribed the same medication, but reflects how it affected their moods and working process. William Gaddis discovered in Bernhard a voice that he could identify with, and in his novel is enclosed not only his life work and the voices of Wittgenstein and other philosophers, but also the novel by Bernhard that also features in this article, The Loser, is treated as fact by the narrator whilst enclosed in its fictional environment (the novel itself).

A Player Piano roll imprint

138 Waterman

If Gaddis’s grieving for the disappearance of failure in the art world, likewise ended up in a failure—which was the transformation of his life research into a novel—his ideal of

Agape has not become any less potent for us now. As Joseph Tabbi writes: Agape-the community of brotherly love celebrated by early Christian writers—has come apart (agape) through mechanization and a technological democracy that reduces art to the level of entertainment, a spectacle for the masses.

A capacity for imaginative projection into the life and thought, and language of another person, whether living or dead, through music, literature, the visual arts, a conversation, this is the ethical burden of agape in the arts.

If mass production did indeed free the work of art from its parasitical dependence to the ritual, as Benjamin posited, then what was lost in that de-ritualization and yearns to be re-claimed, is storytelling and collective sense experience. The novels of Thomas Bernhard and William Gaddis—like the work of David Tudor and Glenn Gould—bring us closer to the question of how we can project our imagination and thoughts into the lives of others. If this is not an ethical choice that we make, then the fusing of virtuosity and technology can claim, as does Wertheimer, that: We aren’t people after all, we are art products… …………………………………………………………………………………………...

CODA: Glenn Gould’s famous chair, in addition to his piano, and a large assortment of objects including his collection of keys to hotels, black pens, pairs of glasses and his fanatical hourly notated journal accounts of his temperature readings, pharmaceutical intake, weather reports and blood pressure, all are archived in a museum in Toronto. The chair, which he carried with him on tour, like Tudor’s suitcase, had so many stories around it and so much wear, that it is amongst the most treasured and often visited of the items in the collection.

Last year, Sony BMG, recorded a performance of Glenn Gould’s 1955 performance of the Goldberg Variations in front of a live audience. Yamaha had created a special version of their Diskclavier (a kind of digital player piano) called Zenph™ that could recreate the touch, tempos, dynamics, basically everything except the singing along that Gould was also famous for, and program the entire recording into the piano. The performance took place in the Glenn Gould Studios in Toronto in front of a packed audience. There was a standing ovation for the piano that played “Glenn.” The re-recording is available for purchase from your favorite record store.

http://www.zenph.com/glenn-gould-bach-thegoldberg-variations

* “SHOOT THE PLAYER PIANO!” first appeared in another version in DOT DOT DOT 14 (2007).

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index with page numbers

28 Julieta Aranda, A Machine of Perpetual Possibility (detail), 2008, perspex, laquered wood, computerized air compressor, pulverized vintage science-fiction novels with a story line set on a date prior to 2007, edition of 3 + 2AP, 51 1/8 x 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in., 130 x 50 x 50 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist 30 Fia Backström, (two pages) Post-Sensitive Rhetorics, 2011, dye-sublimation on aluminum, each: 10 x 12 1/2 in., 25.4 x 31.8 cm, Images courtesy of the Artist 32 Sebastian Black, (left) La Patte 1, 2011, oil on linen, 9 x 12 in., 22.9 x 30.5 cm; (right) Untitled (Puppy), 2011, oil on linen, 9 x 12 in., 22.9 x 30.5 cm; Images courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Matthew Watson 33 Luis Buñuel, still from Land Without Bread, 1933, black and white film, 28 minutes, Image courtesy of International Historic Films, Inc. 34 Marcel Broodthaers, Département des Aigles (installation), Section XIXème, Brussels, 1968, Image courtesy of the Estate of Marcel Broodthaers 35 Marcel Broodthaers, Département des Aigles (detail), Section XIXème, Brussels, 1968, Image courtesy of the Estate of Marcel Broodthaers 36 Guy De Cointet, Toc tic tic tac, c.1980, ink and pencil on Canson Mongolfier paper, 19 3/4 x 25 1/2 in., 50.2 x 64.8 cm, Image courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York and The Estate of Guy de Cointet/Air de Paris, Paris, Photography by Marc Domage 37 Guy De Cointet, A Page from my Intimate Journal, 1974, screenprint, 30 x 22 in., 76.2 x 55.9 cm, edition of 50, Image courtesy of Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles 38 Anne Collier, Man With A Camera (Telephoto), 2011, C Print, 47 1/8 x 46 1/2 in., 121.6 x 118.1 cm (framed), Image courtesy of the Artist, Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Covi Mora, London; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

140 Index

39 Anne Collier, Zoom (Jerome Ducrot), 2011, C Print, 41 x 50 1/2 in., 104.1 x 128.3 cm (framed), Image courtesy of the Artist, Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Covi Mora, London; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles 40 John Dogg, Untitled (tire), 1986, rubber tire and continental kit, 30 x 30 x 10 in., 76.2 x 76.2 x 25.4 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Robert Mckeever, Gagosian Gallery 41 Claire Fontaine, Gateway to Freedom, 2005, two modified twenty-five cent coins, box cutter blades and rivets, edition of 1 + 1AP, Image courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York 42 Der Dada, Edited by Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, and George Grosz, 1919 – 1920.

No. 3 (cover), Image courtesy of International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries 43 Phillip Gabriel, Untitled [BCKofHD10-2], 2011, graphite on paper, 60 x 40 in., 152.4 x 101.6 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Oto Gillen 44 Mark Flood, Primal Screen: A Fake Art Movement, painting by Ramona Fabregas, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 60 in., 228.6 x 152.4 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Zach Feuer Gallery, New York 45 Ryan Gander, Matthew Young falls from the 1985 into

a white room (Maybe this is that way it is supposed to happen), 2009, mixed media, edition of 3 + 1AP, dimensions variable, Image courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery, London 46 (two pages) Attributed to John C. Fare, Performance Intro No. 1, ca 1958, 2 color slides (illustrated, of 4), edition of 3 + 1AP, Images courtesy of the Archives of Mario Garcia Torres 48 Oto Gillen, Versailles 3 (blue), 2011, pastel on paper, 38 x 44 in., 96.5 x 111.8 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist 49 George Grosz, Mit Pinsel und Schere: 7 Materialisationen, Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1922. (p. 5), Image courtesy of International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

50 Lothar Hempel, Sketch for Die Wespenfabrik (The Wasp Factory), 2012, Image courtesy of the Artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York 51 Lothar Hempel, Spiegel (Natura Morta), 2010, silkscreen on polished steel, 35 1/2 x 47 1/4 in., 90.2 x 120 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York 52 Pierre Huyghe, De Hory Modigliani, 2007, 35 x 25 in., 88.9 x 63.5 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist 53 Asger Jorn, La joconde admirable, 1958, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in., 100 x 81 cm, Image courtesy of Galerie Boulakia, Paris 54 Billy Jacobs, Ft. Knox, KY, 2011, oil on linen, 14 x 14 in., 35.6 x 35.6 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist, Photography by James Dee 55 Matt Johnson, Matruschka, 2008, carved walnut wood, edition of 3, Six parts, 3 x 3 5/8 x 2 1/2 in., 7.6 x 9.2 x 6.4 cm assembled, Separate parts: 3 x 3 5/8 x 2 1/2, 2 1/2 x 1 7/8 x 1 7/8, 1 1/2 x 1 3/8 x 1 3/8, 1 1/8 x 1 x 7/8, 3/4 x 5/8 x 3/4, 1/2 x 1/2 x 3/8 in., 7.6 x 9.2 x 6.4, 6.4 x 4.8 x 4.8, 3.8 x 3.5 x 3.5, 2.9 x 2.5 x 2.2, 1.9 x 1.6 x 1.9, 1.3 x 1.3 x 1 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 56 Craig Kalpakjian, HVAC, 1999, cibachrome on aluminum, edition of 6 + 2AP, 30 x 40 in, 76.2 x 101.6 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist 57 Craig Kalpakjian, Monitor, 1998, cibachrome on aluminum, edition of 3, 36 x 48 in., 91.4 x 121.9 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist 59 Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #29 (Mule Rider), 2004-2005, piezo print on rag paper (black and white) and chromogenic print (color), edition of 5, 30 x 17 in., 76.2 x 43.2 cm (each image), Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery 60 Robert Lazzarini, safe, 2011, metal, paint, edition of 3 + 1AP, body: 51 x 27 x 29 in. / 129.5 x 68.6 x 73.7 cm, door: 8 x 28 x 66 in. / 20.3 x 71.1 x 167.6 cm, Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York, Photography by Bill Orcutt

61 Daniel Lefcourt, Passive Surplus II, 2011, sawdust, cement, MDF, projector, 80 x 60 in., 203.2 x 152.7 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Jamie Alvarez 62 Francis Picabia, Apollo, 1928-30, oil on wood, 59 x 13 5/8 in., 150 x 34.5 cm, Image courtesy of Galerie 1900-2000, Paris 63 Annabel Vale Portrait no. 2, 1946, by Phillip Pierce, 2011, oil on linen, 40 x 30 in., 101.6 x 76.2 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Country Club, Los Angeles 64 Andrea Longacre-White, Ceiling, 2011, archival ink jet print, edition of 3 + 1AP, dimensions variable, Image courtesy of the Artist 65 Adam McEwen, Untitled (Bret), 2011, C print, 52 3/4 x 37 in., 134 x 94 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Art Concept, Paris 66 Adam McEwen, Untitled, 2011, graphite, 40 in. diameter x 1 1/8 in. depth (101.6 x 2.9 cm), Image courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Art Concept, Paris 67 Adam McEwen, Untitled (Suu Kyi), 2011, C print, 52 3/4 x 37 in., 134 x 94 cm, Image courtesy the Artist and Galerie Art Concept, Paris 68 Gabriel Lester, still from The Big One, 2011, HDVloop, edition of 3 + 1AP, duration: 14 min 42 sec, Image courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, Photography by Sal Kroonenberg 69 Adina Popescu, still from Jeremiah, 2011, HD, edition of 5 + 2AP, duration: 10 min, Image courtesy of the Artist 70 Eileen Quinlan, For Grievous, 2011, chromogenic print mounted on plexiglass, 24 x 20 in., 61 x 50.8 cm, edition of 3 + 2AP, Image courtesy the Artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York 71 Eileen Quinlan, Smoke & Mirrors #23, 2005, C-print mounted on sintra, 24 x 20 in., 61 x 50.8 cm, Image courtesy of Campoli Presti

Index 141

72 Ed Ruscha, SUDDEN SPURT OF ACTIVITY, 1972, gunpowder on paper, 11 1/2 x 29 in., 29.2 x 73.7 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Gagosian Gallery

82 Antek Walczak, still from Dynasty, 1998, video on DVD, duration: 49 min. 52 seconds, Image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

73 J. St. Bernard, Untitled (Ben Gazzara), 1990, enamel on plexiglas, 48 x 96 in., 121.9 x 243.8 cm, Image courtesy of The Estate of Colin de Land

83 Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, still from Spalding Gray’s Map of L.A., 1984, video on DVD, duration: 27 min. 40 seconds, Image courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

74 Kurt Schwitters, Für Hartmann, 1922, paper collage, colored pencil and stamping ink on paper, 7 1/2 x 6 1/8 in., 19.2 x 15.7 cm, Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York 75 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1980, black and white photograph, 30 x 40 in., 76.2 x 101.6 cm, exhibition print, Image courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York 76 Superstudio, Antologia, 1972, poster, 18 x 23 in., 45.7 x 58.4 cm, Image courtesy of the private collection of William Menking, New York, Photography by Bill Orcutt 77 Superstudio, Cerimonia (il grande pellegrinaggio), 1972, Photolithograph, Signed and inscribed no. 81/100, 39 3/8 x 27 ½ in., 100 x 69.9 cm, Image courtesy of the private collection of William Menking, New York, Photography by Bill Orcutt 78 Gibb Slife, Kissinger Dress, 2011, cotton and fiberglass mannequin, 72 in. high, 182.9 cm; No More Bullshit!, 2011, oil on linen and silver knitting needle, 20 x 20 in., 50.8 x 50.8 cm, Images courtesy of the Artist and Fitzroy Gallery, New York 79 Alan Smithee, Wish you weren’t here!, 2011, Hollywood Blvd. souvenir postcard with hand-written text, reproduced for publication, Image courtesy of the Artist 80 Christof Spengemann, Die Wahrheit über Anna Blume:

Kritik der Kunst, Kritik der Kritik, Kritik der Zeit, Hanover: Zweeman, 1920. (cover), Courtesy of International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries 81 Annabel Vale Archive, Artichoke Underground #10 The

Patricia Highsmith Travel Issue (You Can’t Eat an Air Conditioner), 1975

142 Index

84 Jeffrey Vallance, Blinky Casket (Carcass and Sarcophagus), 2008, wood pet coffin, brass hardware, cloth, plastic, acrylic, lacquer, 14 ¼ x 12 ¾ x 9 in., 36.2 x 32.4 x 22.9 cm, Image courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

* Inside front and back cover, pages 2, 21, 123 all from the series: Jonah Freeman, F for Fake (Panasonic lumix. Portrait. Jan. 5 2012), Images courtesy of the Artist

Acknowledgements We want to express the deepest gratitude to all of those who have helped put this exhibition together, to those who led us to new discoveries by sharing stories, experiences, as well as their knowledge.

Thank you to the following for all the help, constant encouragement, and brainstorming over the past year (in no particular order): Zlatka Paneva, Drew Heitzler, Nick Poe, Darren Bader, George Neykov, Simone Manwarring, Sarah Watson, Robin Willis, David Quadrini, Liz Goldwyn, Arifa Boehler, George Freeman, Justin Lowe, Jhordan Dahl, Carol Green, Christian Strike, Alex Tuttle, Marie-Puck Broodthaers, Richard Prince, Pierre Huyghe, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Daniel McDonald, Cecelia Stucker, as well as Max Levai and Pierre Levai.

An additional immense thank you is due to everyone from Marlborough Chelsea whose tireless efforts helped organize this exhibition; with special acknowledgments to Maeve O’Regan, Elizabeth Bower, and Cynthia Garvey.

We would like to thank all of the artists and contributors for participating and the lenders who helped us, including: Greene Naftali, Marian Goodman, Cirrus Gallery, Country Club Projects, Zach Feuer, Lisson Gallery, Anton Kern, Blum & Poe, Galerie Fons Welters, Metro Pictures, Gagosian Gallery, Fitzroy Gallery, Timothy Shipe, Kristin Baum, University of Iowa, The Estate of Colin de Land, Tanya Bonakdar, Bernier / Eliades, Galerie Boulakia, Galerie 1900-2000, Miguel Abreu, Electronic Arts Intermix, and William Menking.

J O N A H F R E E M A N & V E R A N E Y KO V

Acknowledgements

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//

Maeve O’Regan E D I TO R S / Jonah Freeman, Vera Neykov P R O D U C T I O N / Elizabeth Bower, Jacqueline Mabey, Daniel McCann, Annie Rochfort, Andrew Wingert DESIGN /

P R I N T E D I N A N E D I T I O N O F 1 5 0 0 , I N N E W YO R K , B Y P R O J E C T

© 2012 Marlborough Gallery, Inc. ISBN 978-0-89797-430-1

This catalogue has been printed on the occasion of the exhibition

BLIND CUT edited by

Jonah Freeman / Vera Neykov January 19th - February 18th, 2012 MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA 545 West 25th Street New York, New York 10001 (212) 463-8634 marlboroughchelsea.com

Printed in New York by Project © 2012 Marlborough Gallery, Inc. ISBN 978-0-89797-430-1

Front cover: Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures, Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1972, Copyright Estate Marcel Broodthaers Back cover: Robert Lazzarini, safe, 2011, metal, paint, body: 51 x 27 x 29 in., 129.5 x 68.6 x 73.7 cm, door: 8 x 28 x 66 in., 20.3 x 71.1 x 167.6 cm, edition of 3

JULIETA ARANDA FIA BACKSTRÖM DARREN BADER SEBASTIAN BLACK MARCEL BROODTHAERS LUIS BUÑUEL GUY de COINTET ANNE COLLIER DER DADA JOHN DOGG MARK FLOOD CLAIRE FONTAINE PHILLIP GABRIEL RYAN GANDER MARIO GARCIA TORRES OTO GILLEN GEORGE GROSZ LOTHAR HEMPEL PIERRE HUYGHE ALEX ISRAEL BILLY JACOBS MATT JOHNSON ASGER JORN CRAIG KALPAKJIAN MIKE KELLEY ROBERT LAZZARINI DANIEL LEFCOURT GABRIEL LESTER SHERRIE LEVINE ANDREA LONGACRE-WHITE ADAM McEWEN FRANCIS PICABIA PHILLIP PIERCE ADINA POPESCU EILEEN QUINLAN ED RUSCHA KURT SCHWITTERS CINDY SHERMAN GIBB SLIFE CHRISTOF SPENGEMANN SUPERSTUDIO J. ST. BERNARD JEFFREY VALLANCE ANNABEL VALE ARCHIVE ANTEK WALCZAK BRUCE + NORMAN YONEMOTO

Catalogue Contributors François Aubart J.G. BALLARD Anna Blume ROE ETHRIDGE JOHN FARE JAMES FREY PIERRE HUYGHE ELMYR DE HORY CLIFFORD IRVING J.T. LeROY raimundas malasauskas PHILIPPE PARRENO MICHAEL PHELAN RICHARD PRINCE ALEX WATERMAN

MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA 9 780897 974301