The Miami Rail | Issue 17 by The Miami Rail

SUSAN TE KAHURANGI KING / JONAS MEKAS / MATT OLSON / ATHI-PATRA RUGA B E AT R I Z S A N T I A G O M U Ã&#x2018; O Z / T I E R R A D E L F U E G O / R E V I E W S

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OV E R 6 0 B O U T I Q U E S N OW O P E N .

Pictured: City View Garage. Mural by Island Planning Corporation.

OOIEE, Sitting As Seeing and Being In Two Places at Once, 2016. Aluminum angle iron, glass, and mirrored and color acrylic. Prototypes photographed in the OOIEE studio

V I SUA L A RT S 6 TINA KUKIELSKI with Sara Roffino 12 BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ with Rin Johnson 19 THREE PAINTINGS: HELD, TITIAN, TURNER Joan Waltemath, Gaby CollinsFernandez, and Laila Pedro 24 MATT OLSON with Alexandra Cunningham Cameron

LOCA L 30 THE ART OF THE DEAL Jason Katz 33 IS MIAMI THE CARIBBEAN? Jason Fitzroy Jeffers and Nathaniel Sandler 35 AQUAFAIR Drew Lerman

COVER Athi-Patra Ruga, The Future White Woman of Azania 1, 2012. Lightjet print, 80 x 120 cm, edition of 5 + 3 AP. Photo: Hayden Phipps. Image courtesy Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD

A R CH I T E CT UR E 36 A SPECULATIVE STORM: CONTEMPORARY ART AND REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT Evan Moffitt

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EXPRES S 40 ADMIRALTY SOUND EXPEDITION REPORT Christy Gast 44 MĂIASTRA: A HISTORY OF ROMANIAN SCULPTURE IN TWENTY-FOUR PARTS Igor Gyalakuthy

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS 46 A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION: JONAS MEKAS Monica Uszerowicz 50 ATHI-PATRA RUGA with Catherine Annie Hollingsworth

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LITERATURE & POETRY 54 AARON THIER with Andrew Donovan 57 AND JUSTICE FOR ALL Rob Goyanes 59 Elizabeth Scanlon

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PUBLISHER & FOUNDER Nina Johnson-Milewski

EDITOR'S NOTE

MANAGING EDITOR Kara Pickman PROGRAMS MANAGER Michelle Lisa Polissaint DESIGNER Jessalyn Santos-Hall FILM AND PERFORMING ARTS EDITOR Monica Uszerowicz FLORIDA EDITOR Nathaniel Sandler GUEST EDITOR, VISUAL ARTS Jarrett Earnest LITERATURE EDITOR Sarah Trudgeon POETRY EDITOR P. Scott Cunningham INTERNS Kathryn Garcia Ana Paz BOARD Jason Bodnar Phong Bui Lauren Gnazzo Nina Johnson-Milewski Vivian de Kuyper John Joseph Lin Leslie Lott Tommy Pace PRINTER Nupress, Miami SPECIAL THANKS The Brooklyn Rail CONTACT advertising@miamirail.org editor@miamirail.org info@miamirail.org

The editors of the Miami Rail are pleased to welcome back Jarrett Earnest as guest editor of the Visual Arts section for the summer 2016 issue. Jarrett's essays and interviews appear regularly in the Brooklyn Rail, the Village Voice, and Art in America, among other publications, and he served as a guest editor for the Miami Rail in fall 2014. He was recently the spring 2016 critic-in-residence at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Specializing in longform interviews with artists and writers, Jarrett has put together a Visual Arts section featuring candid and insightful interviews with curator Tina Kukielski, designer Matt Olson, and artist Beatriz Santiago MuĂąoz, as well as short critical essays on the singular paintings of Held, Titian, and Turner. The summer 2016 issue also marks my last as Managing Editor. Looking back over the last two years at the Rail, I'm very pleased to see that the masthead has grown substantially with the creation of five section editor positions, and that together we have created a permanent record of local and national happenings in arts and culture, from our own Miami Beach and the Everglades, to Istanbul, Moscow, and beyond. I will continue on as a section editor for the Rail and am looking forward to where we're headed next. Kara Pickman MANAGING EDITOR

The Miami Rail is made possible with the generous support of the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation.

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An excerpt of this interview was published in the Visual Arts section of the Miami Herald on May 29, 2016.

TINA KUKIELSKI with Sara Roffino

New Zealander artist Susan Te Kahurangi King’s debut exhibition in North America opens in July at ICA Miami, curated by Tina Kukielski. Recently appointed to the executive directorship of ART21, an organization specializing in digital media about contemporary art, Kukielski met with Sara Roffino in her New York office to discuss her interest in King’s work, the challenges of curating an exhibition of works by a nonverbal artist, and the next steps for the organization she now leads.

SARA ROFFINO (MIAMI RAIL): In January, you took on the role of executive director of ART21. What do we have to look forward to from the organization? TINA KUKIELSKI: I’m completely indebted to the legacy that has been built here by my predecessor, Susan Sollins, who was the entrepreneur who invented this format around which to talk about the creative process and the ideas embedded in artworks in a unique and necessary way. But I would be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge that the landscape around digital media is changing really rapidly. I believe ART21 sits at the nexus of communication about artists’ ideas and processes vis-à-vis it being a conduit to the artists’ voice. At the same time, we have a lot of catching up to do, partly because of the ways technology has changed. There is still an essential relationship between ART21 and PBS, and yet we’ve grown a lot since the beginning and now produce all kinds of shortform content and we regularly develop

essential education materials alongside these programs. Early next year, we’re relaunching our website to make it a more comfortable, exciting, clean, and engaging home for digital media with advanced mobile streaming capabilities. Since I started, I’ve been having informal conversations with the stakeholders within ART21’s community and those who maybe know a little bit less about ART21, and the refrain I hear again and again is that we’re in a moment where content is king and ART21 is sitting on a mass of incredible content—it’s one of our strongest assets. We are essentially writing the history of contemporary art via the artists themselves. Part of the way ART21 will develop is by allowing our communities better access to that information, whether it’s through building connections to those communities via distribution networks, surveying those communities, or creating more of a dialogue. For example, the art educator community is a very important focus for

us, and because a lot of their programs are centered around professional development, we have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with art educators throughout the United States. We’re also opening our program internationally, at least to Canada and Mexico, because our focus this upcoming season is on North America. Thinking farther afield, we are involved in a translation project that fosters a community of enthusiasts to translate our content into forty languages. This I find amazing. RAIL: In some ways being the executive director of a nonprofit is very different from being a curator; in other ways, not so much. Can you tell me about your decision to make this change? KUKIELSKI: As a curator I would say I’ve had two lives. One was the life I lived in New York at the Whitney, where I was really focused on young emerging artists, mostly working in the centers of Los Angeles and New York. And then I

Susan Te Kahurangi King, Untitled, n.d. Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy the artist

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had an amazing opportunity to co-curate an international biennialâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Carnegie Internationalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that completely blew open the door for me to think about art from a global perspective and to engage with artists who are living in very disparate parts of the world and artists who are distinguishing their practice because of where they come from or where they choose to live. Despite the homogenizing of communication channels, place still is invariably important. That really was

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a transformation for me as a curator to think across all disciplines and to explore a world of art at its outer limits. Also through that process I got much more engaged with technology. After the International, I was a curator for a project called the Hillman Photography Initiative, the mission of which was to investigate the future of the photographic medium. For me, that really meant asking what role technology plays in art. If photography has a future

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as a medium, it has to develop to coincide with technological advances. One part of this project was the production of a series of documentary films. One of which I produced, which was probably the most well-seen project Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever been associated with. Pittsburgh has incredible resources and an incredible community of art enthusiasts and so when I was there I spearheaded this project that recovered some early Andy Warhol works that were made on an Amiga

Susan Te Kahurangi King, Untitled, n.d. Ink and felt pen on paper, 30 x 42.5 cm. Courtesy the artist

computer in 1985. It was a digital conservation project that was a partnership between the Carnegie and the Warhol Museum and a group of retrocomputing specialists out of Carnegie Mellon. It was really a project that an art institution should spearhead, but it fell outside of the programming mission, so there was never an intention to create an exhibition around these artworks—and their state was kind of fugitive and it was unknown whether or not they could be officially established as artworks. But what we could do was make a film about the process. It was a partnership with Cory Arcangel and it was my first foray into making documentary film. It was what got me interested in ideas surrounding art that may not be shared in the physical space of a museum. When ART21 approached me to see if I would be interested in this

opportunity—and it was a very long process of us trying each other out—it felt to me that ART21 was the future of the museum that I was hoping for and that had been incubating in my own mind as a curator. There’s got to be a point where the museum exists beyond the temple for art and beyond the storehouse for art. It’s not to say that I don’t believe that collections need to be preserved and protected and studied, but I was taking a nod from artists like Cory and Hito Steyerl, who I was inspired by intellectually. These artists were already moving into this distributed network of information, the absence of the object was already taking place, and there were many stories to tell about art that can be told through technological means— whether its digital media or film or audio—that can transcend economic and cultural barriers in profound ways. RAIL: There’s really a hybridization of your vision and the preexisting mission of ART21—a real opportunity, it seems. How does the selection process work? KUKIELSKI: It’s myself and the curator on staff, Wes Miller, but we haven’t actually had a conversation about a new group of artists yet, because when I entered we were already committed to sixteen fantastic, talented artists that we’ll be going public with in the next month. Susan and Wes always worked very closely together to explore the field and think very carefully about demographic distribution—we have done practical analysis of the artists that have been in past seasons and we try to be very conscious that there is not one art world, there are so many art worlds. RAIL: Yes, and there are very few places where that’s the case.

Susan Te Kahurangi King, Untitled, ca. 1960. Crayon on paper, 34 x 21 cm framed. Courtesy the artist

KUKIELSKI: I realized that was true working in institutions, especially in New York, where we were all proposing the same shows with the same artists. How can that be when the art world is becoming so expanded, with so many multiplicities? RAIL: The museums are so dependent on the galleries—

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KUKIELSKI: Yeah, and our programming at ART21 isn’t dependent on where someone lives in the commercial hierarchy. I think it is becoming increasingly clear that film is a medium that can tell a story about artists who are engaged in social practice or social justice artworks or projects. Even the digital recovery project I did, which was ephemeral in a way, or is performative or site-specific or based in a community in ways that might not leave a byproduct. Some of our most popular films, like the Thomas Hirschhorn Gramsci Monument project or Tania Bruguera— those are stories that can only be told with film or in a time-based medium. If you weren’t there, you missed it. So it makes sense that our future is about diversification of the art world. RAIL: So you both come together with a list of names? KUKIELSKI: I’m looking all the time. I go see art. I’m still a curator at heart—being in the artists’ studios, being in the exhibition space, and reading about upcoming art projects is still very much a part of my day-to-day and how I work. I want us to be a thought leader around the ideas of art today, so it’s about being responsive in order to be that thought leader. RAIL: And you most recently curated a show by the New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King for ICA Miami. How did this project come together? KUKIELSKI: Before I started at ART21, I was consulting for the ICA, just kind of having regular conversations about art and ideas with Alex Gartenfeld, their chief curator. I helped Alex conceive of the program around this upcoming season and as a byproduct of those conversations we started to talk about artists and ideas that are interesting to us and that felt urgent. I saw two projects of Susan’s that were done by Chris Byrne, who is a curator and artist—a show of her work at Andrew Edlin Gallery, in New York, and a booth of her work at the Outsider Art Fair, both in 2014. It was just on the heels of doing the Carnegie International and I saw her work and was like: “How did I not know about this artist?” She would have been amazing

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for the International because that show explored many things, including art as an articulation of a personal vision, artists’ relationship to place, artists that were engaged with the figure in new ways, and the relationship between insider and outsider positions. I was immediately struck by the vision in the drawings. I was captivated by how it brushes up against narrative in some places—it opened up a lot of questions that I wanted to have answered about that work. Then when I discovered that she is in her sixties, I dug deeper and discovered that she is nonverbal and was eventually diagnosed as being severely autistic although I didn’t know that at the time because it’s only recently come out in some of the conversations around her work. So I presented the idea to Alex and because of the way he sees the ICA as being a kunsthalle for art and being able to give an artist their first museum opportunity, it seemed like an ideal partnership. Without knowing all that much about Susan, the ICA really put their belief behind me and supported the project. RAIL: When did you start working on it?

it that they kept the work and considered it and showed it to people, so I think it was about a lifetime of them coming to understand that this work needed to be seen. I don’t think it was an overnight situation. The grandmother’s records were incredibly well kept, she kept diaries and ledgers, which are basically a record of many of the drawings that Susan made and she was always writing letters to people—to doctors or people she met—people who might have a creative inclination or a visual literacy. This was when Susan was in her teens and twenties. New Zealand is rather remote, so in some ways there weren’t opportunities for her work to be better seen outside of New Zealand. After the documentary team showed up and started to film Susan, there was a transformation in that the family realized that there really is an audience for this work. They also discovered that by starting a Facebook page and growing a following there, too. Both of those things allowed them to embrace the idea of showing her work while not having to let it go. They definitely have ambitions to try to place the work in public collections.

KUKIELSKI: I pitched the idea about a year ago, and Alex responded pretty quickly. Most of Susan’s work is with her family— they protect, preserve, and archive the work for her, because when she makes her drawings she’ll just leave them wherever she made them, she doesn’t arrange her work, she doesn’t present her work in any way. So I knew it would be an ambitious show, but it would also be straightforward because it wasn’t about collecting a bunch of loans, because you could do a retrospective from the works the family has kept.

RAIL: So they are willing to part with it at this point?

RAIL: A documentary about Susan was released in 2012 and it leaves off at a point where her family seems really unsure about how to engage with the art world and how to go about letting the work be seen. I’m curious about how they decided to engage with the art world.

RAIL: She has produced several thousand drawings—what is the focus of the exhibition?

KUKIELSKI: The family is amazing. There were certain members of the family, Susan’s grandmother and her mother, who really understood that she had a unique gift. They were fast enough in recognizing

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KUKIELSKI: Slowly, yes, it will be made available to museum collections. They are less interested in it going into private hands than they are interested in having it be seen and studied. The family is starting a fellowship at the Folk Art Museum in New York, so they are lending some works there and providing a small stipend for an art historian to engage with the work.

KUKIELSKI: There are several bodies of work represented in the show, which is really a survey of her work and the centerpiece of the show are works from the late ’60s throughout the ’70s, when she was in her twenties. These works are quasifigurative, but in their composition and very dense arrangement, they are kind of like abstract landscapes and there

is a real complexity of composition. This is really what I consider to be her most mature work, because of the kind of visual play that exists in the way the figures sit on top of and underneath and in and out of each other simultaneously. And there are also earlier bodies of work such as the studies of Donald Duck, the cartoon character that frequently appeared in comic books around the house and that Susan especially responded to. When you look at the very early work, you begin to see the repetition of the visual motifs of Donald Duck’s sailor suit and red bowtie and his hat and his beak, and his face and eyes, but in completely strange juxtapositions. Oftentimes various parts of his body are truncated or overlapping each other, so you don’t really have a perspective of which way is up and which way is down or right or wrong. Many of these are twosided drawings, just on small pieces scrap paper like a child would draw on. RAIL: Susan didn’t draw for about twenty years and then started again fairly recently. How does the work that she has made since starting to draw again compare to the earlier works? KUKIELSKI: They don’t have any presence of the figure anymore. They’re non-representational, based on pattern, form, line, and color. I definitely see a pretty marked shift in her palette, but it’s hard to know if these are just the markers her family is providing her with or if—I actually have begun to wonder if her vision is changing so that she is more responsive to bold color juxtapositions. It’s hard to know.

places. I didn’t meet her until the third day I was in New Zealand. I was letting the family lead the way and I think it was a way to set up the expectations. RAIL: Have you worked with other artists who have limited communication? KUKIELSKI: No. On some deep psychological level, I knew this would be a challenge, especially at the same time I’m taking over an art organization that is all about the artist’s voice. I thought a lot about what it means for an artist to not have a voice. RAIL: It makes people very hesitant to say anything about the work. How did you deal with this? KUKIELSKI: I’m a little bit in a double bind being a curator of a show like this. I don’t have any doubt in my mind that Susan’s work deserves to be seen and deserves to be appreciated as art, and I do believe that we can glean some ideas about communication from her work. But I am also very sensitive to not assuming my voice to be her voice and I'm trying to be very sensitive to the fact that I’ll never have the answers to certain questions about the work—about what she sees in the work and her experiences of the work personally. At the same time, as a curator and as the author of an exhibition, you have to do your best effort to fill in where you can, so for me it’s about creating a show that can embrace her work and present it with the mastery and attention it deserves while also being sensitive to helping the viewer to understand the artist’s personal experience.

RAIL: What was your relationship like working with her? Was she engaged in any way?

RAIL: How is it different from working with other artists?

KUKIELSKI: She’s surrounded by a very large family and has many siblings and her family has learned to read her in a way. She lives with her sister Wendy, but her sister Petita primarily cares for the archive. Susan is a playful dresser. She rarely makes eye contact. She makes facial expressions, but it’s not the makings of a social interaction when you’re with her. But she will happily participate in the activities of looking, eating, and going

KUKIELSKI: As a curator or as an art historian, it’s about being aware of how you receive information and where that information is coming from. One of the first things I learned from my nineteenth-century photography history professor Geoffrey Batchen is that you can never trust the artist’s voice and what the artist says about their work. This is a position that art historians often assume, because it allows them utter

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freedom to offer an interpretation of an artwork. For me as a curator, though, especially as a curator who has built a career working mostly with living artists, I would never assume that position 100 percent. Working with young artists who are beginning to interpret their work for the first time, I’ve often been in a position where I’m writing the first text on the artist, which carries a lot of responsibility because I know that what I commit to print will be referred to again and again. I always reserve the right to be wrong, I’m OK with that. But if I’m writing on an artist who is verbal, I would conduct an interview and use that as the raw material to begin to analyze or interpret or explain their work further. It interestingly connects to one of the things ART21 does with our videos of artists in terms of getting the artist on record on the camera, but these are edited pieces, so we have an authorial hand in their creation. The videos exist as a pretext; they are a recorded interview that then will lead someone later on to offer a further interpretation. And I think my relationship to Susan sort of exists in that realm. This exhibition is by no means the definitive history of Susan’s work. It’s a first attempt, a pretext. Sara Roffino is a senior editor at Art+Auction and a graduate student in art history at Hunter College.

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Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Black Beach/ Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces, 2016. 16 mm black-and-white film, with sound, 8 min. Courtesy the artist and Galería Agustina Ferreyra

BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ with Rin Johnson

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s films and videos document specific communities, moving slowly through the lives of her subjects, encouraging them to act with her as she blurs reality and fiction. Muñoz explores our connections with time, postulating: How do we replicate the past? How do you we live mindfully in the present? How do we create a future far from the violence implicit in life after colonialism? Pérez Art Museum Miami is currently presenting a selection of her works, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, while Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Song, Strategy, Sign is on view at the New Museum in New York. The latter includes That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops (2015), which takes its themes from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères surrounding the lives of women after a blood battle of the sexes. The video installation weaves in and out of the real lives of a group of women in Puerto Rico. Rin Johnson spoke with the artist at the New Museum.

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RIN JOHNSON (MIAMI RAIL): I’m curious about the relationships you create for the viewer. Your work feels carefully intimate, and I’m wondering how you understand the relationships you have with your subjects? BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: The thing that most interests me is a kind of unstructured encounter between two people, where each brings their subjectivity and you affect each other and create. I definitely see that I think with somebody else. For example, this woman

here [gestures toward That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops], Eva. She’s a painter who has worked for twenty years with this kind of Plexiglas material and light. One of the things I was trying to work out with her is a new language to be used in battle. And so it’s not just me thinking, but it’s me thinking with her— there is a space for understanding and for misunderstanding, so a lot of interesting things can happen. I’m interested in the idea of shared subjectivity. But I don’t want to present it as a horizontal or equal collaboration, either, because I realize

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there is kind of a push-and-pull in there with many people that I work with, where shared subjectivity is not a tranquil thing, but it is a thing—a tension—that is not entirely understood. RAIL: When did you first encounter Monique Wittig’s novel Les Guérillères? What felt necessary about using it in your work? SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: When I was in college—I think my first encounter was through a friend. It may have been

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ABOVE AND OPPOSITE PAGE Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces, 2016. 16 mm black-and-white film, with sound, 8 min. Courtesy the artist and Galería Agustina Ferreyra

discussed in a feminist theory class I was taking. I was talking to [New Museum curator] Johanna Burton about it, and we both realized that this was an important book in our academic formation, but that it has kind of disappeared from the curriculum, perhaps because it directs you toward a radical feminist moment where all the issues are far from the discussion right now. It is a book that I carried with me psychically because of the very clear idea that in order to get to radical political ideas you need to pass through a radically experimental form and attempt to create a new language, new myths. It’s not a new idea; it’s sort of the basic idea of all sorts of twentieth-century avant-garde work, that there is a relationship between radical politics and radical form. The thing that seemed really clear to me was that it is through the form that you get to a different

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vision. Wittig speaks about the interval— what is not said and not named—which is the inherent contradiction in the creation of a new language. From the beginning, there are spaces that are impossible to name; if named, they become fixed into another system of thought. So I kept going back to this idea. But, I didn’t quite know how to work with the text. My work doesn’t usually start from a fixed text. It usually starts from interest in a person or a group of people and then I write a little bit and then go to the person with my text and then we start messing with it. Wittig was interested in creating this universal female subject, but I, of course, am suspicious of the universal female subject. I was thinking about all these women who are part of my immediate community in Puerto Rico, and if I could take it

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from that very specific place, from these five women—the way they live and their bodies and their material world. What happens when you take Les Guérillères and make it very particular, locating it in a particular place and history? I knew that I had to concentrate on how you hold your body. Wittig sometimes references uniforms or masks or identifying qualities of a group of people, so I also wanted to think about how materials and objects, like masks, create a new identity and how the idea of creating a new identity is a kind of abstraction—a chosen identity, a you/not-you. Those mask-objects in the exhibition are not used in the film yet, but they will be, so this is still the beginning of the process. RAIL: Wittig says, “Whatever…does not appear in the language you speak…this

can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse.” Looking around, I’m thinking about the museum as an institutional space, and while at times it feels like “this is a great place to be getting ideas that are challenging these hierarchies,” at the same time, I don’t know—what do you think? SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: These are the questions that should keep us up until three in the morning, and that I haven’t found a solution to. I mean, my hope for the work is that it does something at one moment and does something else at other moments; so that when I’m shooting with Maria Elaine in the studio and we’re reading the text aloud, something is happening that is a work for me, whether there are two people there or fifteen, it doesn’t matter. It is the work of thinking

about the relationship between form, subjectivity, and politics together. There are certain contexts in which that is understood and contextualized as part of a universe of ideas. Then there are other moments where the work comes into a space like a museum, in which it seems to immediately begin to be part of another conversation, which is the conversation with contemporary art, and another set of ideas. I hope that the work can kind of vibrate in between the two, but I actually don’t know if it can retain its intention in contemporary art spaces. It’s the same thing that happens when showing all the postmilitary cinema work at Pérez Art Museum Miami, and it’s a question that I consistently get when I talk about the work and the work’s intention, because of what happens once it’s decontextualized out of its main thrust. The

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way we are used to thinking about the military landscape is to identify ourselves with that image of domination. So there is work that needs to be done in order to break that identification. So think about the space differently, maybe by breaking the plane of the camera, maybe seeing somebody else that knows the place in a different way, somebody who was kicked out of that land sixty years before. “Let’s try looking this way! Let’s try looking this other way! Let’s try all these different forms!” That is the intention of the work. But once it’s in a museum space, which is aestheticized, its political intention, which comes out of formal experimentation, may just turn into something beautiful—it may just turn into something that speaks to histories of experimental film, but doesn’t speak to the question of how do you see and live and imagine another possibility for a

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postmilitary space? How do you see it not as a ruin or as nostalgia, but as an other thing? How do you create that other? I can see a work that is set in New York or Berlin or London and I am really familiar with the political histories that create the material circumstances (or the visual circumstances) of that work, but the same is not true for viewers from those parts of the world looking at something from other parts of the world. They don’t necessarily know how to understand the visual or material consequences of those histories. Sometimes I wonder: “Is it my role to bring that entire context to bear on the work, so that I can help this viewer who doesn’t have this context?” I don’t think artists can be tasked with correcting those asymmetries in the world, and maybe it is a good thing to not understand for certain viewers, to only be able to get to a certain point and to be repelled. There is something past this repulsion that has to do with understanding the history of the place and the political circumstances that created it. Maybe opacity is a good thing at certain moments, to create another language without being understood. RAIL: This idea of going along with someone, conversing alongside them, but then realizing that there are barriers within your language… SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: Exactly, there are these gaps. I hadn’t thought about that parallel relationship, that there will be gaps of understanding between an audience that is not necessarily familiar with the place, though I think that the New Museum exhibition might be a lot easier, with many more points of contact than the one in Miami, which has so much work that has to do with places that people are not so familiar with in the United States. RAIL: Thinking more about spaces where work can live, I was happily surprised to discover how much of your video work I could find online. I wondered if you make it accessible so that viewers could come back to it or if it’s more just like, “people need to see this so I’ll throw it up there…?” SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: I’m not very precious with the work. I think I saw a lot of things

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that really affected me in shitty resolution, and I always think, “if it doesn’t hold up in shitty resolution, it just doesn’t hold up.” It’s OK—you don’t have to see it in the perfect setting, mostly because I don’t think there is a perfect setting. I always think the perfect setting was when we shot it. RAIL: How do you feel viewers will react to the worlds you’ve created here? SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: These images are very simply thinking about the relationship between signs and naming, and the responsibility of creating new signs and a new language—very simple things about movement, rhythm, light. Those are such simple formal decisions, but they allow us to think about how very simple decisions of language and visual language actually have all sorts of ethical, moral, and political consequences; it was important that the language be very simple because of that. There is an element in the audio when you hear Evalize saying, “Look, I’m holding it like an archer.” She is raising a piece of Plexiglas with a color and, at that moment, she’s saying—look at my position, look at my body in relation to this—and it’s very simple, but this is the work that I’m interested in. From then on, you only hear me saying the things that she says: “she says this, and she says, does it have to be only functional, should it be beautiful?” These are the essential questions for me. What is language for them? What else does it do besides communicate? It does so many things that are not just for naming. I hope that the first thing this work does is to propose the complexity of even the most basic aspects of language, like: How do you name? What do you name? What is naming for? RAIL: Also: Who is allowed to name, and when? SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: Yes. The other thing is that Les Guérillères is so much about the universal female subject, and so then how do you think about the female subject from these very specific places so that it is not the universal European female white subject, so that it is a subject that is crossed by the colonial political histories that are so evident in Puerto Rico. I make work from

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the territory that I live in and I believe that there are things that you can think. RAIL: Moving through the space of the New Museum trying to look at all of Cyclops at the same time is hard to do; the second you pass by one projection panel, it’s like, “Oh, I am seeing the reflection of what I was just watching.” So there is this really fun experience of giving your body over. SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: There are a lot of things happening. I made it, and I am discovering things, but I am one of those people who can stare at lights and shadows for a long time. There is also the matter of the objects. I have shown objects in a couple of shows before, but these are props and masks to be used, and I wanted to know if you can have objects in the space people will think of as active things—will they do some work? The ceramic objects refer to body parts, which refer to moments in the text—images that stay with me from the text that I’ve used without saying it. There’s part of the text where Wittig says the horses came back riderless, and in Vieques there are three thousand wild horses just walking around by themselves. They have a very symbiotic relationship with the people who live there, but they have their own pace, they are horses that don’t move with anybody else. They acknowledge you, but they do something else between each other and you can recognize this other subjectivity that is not human subjectivity. There are also these abstracted body parts that I’m going to use as props, so when the women are carrying bodies back, they aren’t carrying bloody things that look like flesh, just beautiful objects that are heavy and that you need to hold and that make you think about the relationship between one body and another. RAIL: I think of that funeral scene in Les Guérillères—the body they carry around that jingles! SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: Yeah, that’s an image that I’m definitely going to use in the final film, Verano de Mujeres. So these are all objects that are maybe more meaningful to someone who knows the text. Then Vieques is a project that I’m doing in parallel, it’s not

I HOPE THAT THE FIRST THING THIS WORK DOES IS TO PROPOSE THE COMPLEXITY OF EVEN THE MOST BASIC ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE, LIKE: HOW DO YOU NAME? WHAT DO YOU NAME? WHAT IS NAMING FOR?

part of Verano de Mujeres, but I feel like you can see that this other fictional work is also from a very specific place and it is related to, just slightly separated from, reality. RAIL: I’m curious about these imaged ethnographies you create, these nonplaceable, or nonspecific ethnographies that are from a very particular and very specific location and locale. SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: I’ve always been very interested in ethnography and what it is that attracts one to an ethnographic image. What is it that you are actually seeing? Are you seeing the real, a performance of the real, or are you seeing ethnography of the person behind the camera? Because the camera person’s point of view and the way they are looking is more present than what

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops, 2016 (production still). Three-channel digital color video, with sound, 10 min., 11 sec. Courtesy the artist and Galería Agustina Ferreyra

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is happening in front of them, so the idea of any ethnography is a shared ethnography— like a set of decisions taken between the person in front of and behind the camera. So we’re asking ourselves how we really move, how we really think, and what can we do together? This is as real as anything else and that’s the part that I am interested in and it is also a process that is fun and surprising. The last project that I did in Haiti—I knew that I wanted to work in the Marche Salomon after the first time I went there. I was fascinated by [the market], but I also realized you can’t pull out a camera there, it would just be too violent. But I kept also asking: “How would it be possible? How would you do it in a way in which, in the end, the other person said, ‘let’s do this’?” I started first recording sound and in recording the sound I became interested in this idea of the mystical objects. In the end, I learned that Haitians refer to things as a simple object or a not simple object. So a simple object doesn’t have any magical properties, like a bottle, a plastic bottle of water—well, actually a plastic bottle of water is not a simple object [laughs], but not many elements are simple in the world. RAIL: Nothing. SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: So the question really was about transcendence versus immanence which is something that I think about a lot, especially in relationship to Vieques. This is a question that has come up in religion for thousands of years: Is the divine in the objects of the world? Can you find it in material experience? Or is the divine in everything except what is in the world and what can be named? This is actually even related to Les Guérillères, because if you can name it, if you can see it, and you can touch it, then it is of the world and it is not divine, and it doesn’t present this other possibility, so there is always this imagined other space. I was interested in asking this question of the people in the shops or the people that were shopping in the marche, and especially of the people that worked with the meat, who were killing animals and were cleaning the animals and would have to have a relationship with the animal in a way that nobody else does. So just giving an example of one of those

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processes, slowly talking to people so that we understand the ideas first, so the moment when I say—“How about if we shoot this and record this and I have this script and what do you think?”—there is already something like a process established and a certain amount of interest in doing it, as well. RAIL: I teach image literacy and we’ve been going back and forth about images having become like a Rolodex, while simultaneously having this issue when looking at an image and thinking, “I couldn’t say exactly where I’ve seen this before, but I know I’ve seen it one hundred times.” I’m wondering if you’re thinking about these repeating images or working with this at all, or if you find this to be a barrier to this possibility of creating new languages set out by Wittig? SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: I think it’s a common idea to think that there are so many images already created of everything, but I am from a place where it is very clear that there are not enough images—there are only certain ways that certain people and places have been looked at. You can trace this to very concrete things. When the US Navy created the base there (the largest US Navy base outside of the continental US), you couldn’t even see the bombings that took place for sixty years. There were no images of it at all. The only images were the aerial images that they would produce. So the only image of this place, where people knew other kinds of perspectives, uses, skills—all these very material, formal qualities of the way one relates to a place—all of this was replaced with monumental, aerial, rational, mechanic movement, which was aestheticized in a very military way. Even images of the troops were aerial in formation, so the way in which we get used to seeing the landscape and to understanding ourselves within it and the possibilities of the place is within these distant views. There are very clear connections to the ways that the military has seen this place—the landscape and the people—to the way that the service and tourism industry sees the place. The kind of lens you use, the point of view, the way the camera moves, the identification with the drone, the idea of the aerial view, what you can see and what you can’t.

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Sixty years makes a difference in how visual thinking or sensorial or material thinking can contribute to imagining another way in which to live in the place. I mean that very literally, because then the base closes after a period of civil disobedience and the monumental nature of the military base allows for only a certain kind of thinking about the place, so that you think of it as if nothing is happening there. It is a ruin simply because the things that were happening before are not happening, but in fact, many things are happening. Puerto Rico is tropical, and one of the things I learned a few years ago is that in the tropics a secondary forest becomes indistinguishable from a primary forest in sixty years; so it’s already, after being closed for ten years, 1/6th of the way from becoming indistinguishable from a primary forest. When you start listening, there are actually thousands of events happening there, they are very different kinds of events in terms of scale in comparison to a military operation, but they are there, they can be perceived and understood. So yes, I agree we have a certain set of images that allow us to see a certain possibility, that allow us to only identify with certain literal points of view that then have political and ethical points of view attached to them. For me, I like thinking a lot in this very crude way, like I’m not interested in the camera moving like a machine, I’m not interested in an aerial point of view, I’m not going to reproduce this. It may be a very simple way of thinking, but we have to start breaking these formal decisions that we are so used to and that’s in everything. I think for the Verano de Mujeres project I am lost in the process still, where I am asking myself how to create that collective subject in a way that is from a specific subjectivity as opposed to the universal female subject. Like, how does it happen, visually, how do I even look? And those are questions that I am asking myself, but I don’t think yet are beginning to be resolved in the images. I am having fun taking some cues from Les Guérillères. The text is circular, so this is circular…I am really, really trying to force myself to think in circular ways. Rin Johnson is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn.

THREE PAINTINGS:

Held, Titian, Turner B/W XI (1968)

J O A N WA LT E M AT H B/W XI (1968) was recently on view in Al Held: Black and White Paintings at Cheim and Read in New York. Large enough in scale to encompass its viewers, the painting’s black-and-white geometries are striking. Yet its significance lies not only in the stark contrast that lends immediate power to its presence, but also in the subtlety of the oscillating pictorial field, a result of the orthographic projection Held used to construct his forms, which gives the painting duration. At first glance, Held’s early masterpieces seem matter-of-fact. Then, after a few minutes, as you move around them or your eye shifts its focal plane, the geometric forms begin to pop back and forth. Their initially perceived orientations shift—what was projecting forward inverts, a volume morphs into a void. The movement is relative to your point of view, where are you looking, where are you standing, and what elements enter into your peripheral vision to contextualize your reading of the complex compositions. I can only imagine it was a well-considered move for Held to begin to work with orthographic projection, or planar geometric projection, as it is also called. At the time, it must have suited his aspirations and limitations, since illusion as a component of painting had been denigrated in a Platonic move that held “flatness” sacred. In an interview with James F. Walker in Artscribe in July 1977, Held confesses, “it sounds sophomoric now, but violating the flatness of that picture plane was a taboo that I was raised with.” For all its philosophical and conceptual rigor, the radical limits of Greenbergian “flatness” left painters with their hands tied behind their backs. Held’s way out was not only ingenious, but it also moved the perception of geometric form in painting from it’s philosophical home in the realm of the absolute and gave it relativity. A variety of projection systems are standard in architectural rendering, which have an instability that allows their spatial

Al Held, B/W XI, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 304.8 x 349.3 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Reid, New York

orientation to flip-flop because their actual dimensions remain true in scale. A quick look at B/W XI reveals that all sides of the painted cubes are equal—the front to back dimensions are not foreshortened, as in perspective, in which the sides of a cube and its face differ when measured on the picture plane. What is now commonly known as a Necker cube was first developed nearly two thousand years ago by the Chinese with the intent to paint what was “known to be” and not only what could be seen from a single vantage point—such a conceptually based method of construction allowed Held to puncture the flatness of the picture plane without resorting to the illusionism of perspective. It’s a move he could make at the time. In the same 1977 interview, Held clarified that he “wasn’t

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looking for space, but for multiplicity and complexity,” adding that, “the space opened up because it gave me room to put more stuff in.” In a concurrent interview in Art Monthly with Peter Townsend, Held’s statement that “space is really made up of events, energies, marked forms that are relation[al],” points to his interest in the relationships between things as predominating over a focus on things themselves. In all the black-and-white paintings there are forms that undermine and contradict one another as many possible spatial interpretations arise from the vacillations that push form to void, shift cube to polyhedron, or project outward conversely carving a void into the pictorial surface. These shifts can affect the reading of a form’s neighboring geometries, sometimes in ways that are impossible within the terms we understand to operate in three dimensions. The resulting tensions force the reading to shift back to something comprehensible.

Held’s use of simple geometric forms in these black-and-white paintings—forms that in and of themselves are not spectacular, yet whose interactions with one another are—allows for the pictorial focus to reside with these unpredictable movements. Seeing these paintings nearly fifty years after they were made not only underscores their importance in marking a seminal moment in the shift from modernity, but it is also interesting to note that they appear as fresh and affecting today, if not more so, than when they were made. For younger painters whose contact with the taboo of “flatness” is not experiential, the behavior of their artistic predecessors may remain as enigmatic as the movement of Held’s forms before analysis. What remains salient is that in embracing the contradictions of the eternal battle between fixity and flux, Held located not only himself philosophically, but also the Zeitgeist.

The Flaying of Marsyas (1570–76) G A BY C O L L I N S - F E R N A N D E Z

Titian’s version of the flaying of Marsyas is among the least gruesome one can find. A quick online search turns up two of Juan de Ribera’s in which the skin is already peeled off the satyr’s leg; several examples of fully flayed engravings; a drippingly bloody version from Luca Giordano; and countless depictions of Marsyas in various states of musculature show-and-tell, mostly displaying his anguish and the brutality of Apollo’s punishment. Titian ties Marsyas up in velvet bows. The painting’s dominant compositional gesture is not the act of flaying itself, but how Marsyas’s body has been hung, inverted, from a tree. The vertical line made by the tree is reinforced by his torso and anchored where his wrists touch the ground, while his legs are splayed and torqued, creating the painting’s axis and generating its recurring spin. Around Marsyas, various figures assist in the procedure or look at the scene in a way that draws us back to his form. Meanwhile, the flaying in question is performed with unhurried acuity, not because of fetish or uncertainty, but to make a point. Looking at the figure of Marsyas at the Met Breuer with my own head turned upside-down, mimicking his, it seems Apollo’s slowness gives Marsyas time to apprehend the horror of his punishment with clarity—and feel terrified about it—before the sensational clouding of pain. I first met this painting when it and I were both visiting Rome and I was suffering a tender heart. When nothing will make you feel better, you can look at art with your solitude. In this state, without expectation, my eye was carried by the painting’s loose and dense brushwork. The application is exaltedly free, unconcerned with “unifying the surface,” and Titian was as slow as Apollo in making the painting, working on it for the six years leading up to his death. I saw the painted skin of the surface coming apart, and I was moved by this coincidence of form and content: behind the skin there is blood and then guts, and behind represented objects there is paint and then linen.

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ABOVE Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Flaying of Marsyas, probably 1570s. Oil on canvas, 220 x 204 cm. Archdiocese Olomouc, Archiepiscopal Palace, Picture Gallery, Kromĕříž OPPOSITE PAGE Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Marsyas, 2016. Digital photocollage

In New York in 2016, my mind is more on politics. The myth is short: Marsyas claims he is as good a musician as Apollo and challenges him to a contest; Apollo bests him and skins him to make an example of his insubordination. Titian’s painting is hard to look at because it depicts the naked exercise of authority as violence, because the subject of that violence is aware of what that means symbolically and actually, and because there’s visually no way out. I am tempted to read The Flaying of Marsyas as a criticism of

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the torture, but I think that’s incorrect.1 Titian probably made the painting in support of authority, which is difficult to swallow today, given its striking resemblance to any number of contemporary instances in which institutional power asserts itself as violence including, but obviously not limited to, the US government’s continued sanctioning of both torture and the death penalty, not to mention extrajudicial police killings of people of color. The strength of Titian’s narrative is in presenting the central characters as complicatedly individual, with particular motivations and attitudes. They also each contribute a different sense of time to the scenario. Apollo’s concentration and self-assurance belies premeditation. Impervious to the flurry of activity around him or to Marsyas’s response, he seems to be enacting the punishment with a pre-existing concept of what it is for, establishing a dominant and timeless value structure in the painting. Marsyas, in his fear, sets a phenomenological stage for a mounting and ultimately unresolvable climax; he maintains the urgent pitch of the painting through anticipation of his own fate. Meanwhile the small dog in the foreground laps up Marsyas’s spilled blood entirely in the present tense, motivated by impulse and comically unaware of the circumstances. And the figure of Midas, the onlooker and judge often seen as Titian’s likeness, bears witness to events as they unfold. Midas’s position in the painting remains the closest to ours, the third-party evaluator stuck to the particular unfolding of the drama, but with an eye toward ethics. In Ovid’s telling of the Marsyas myth, the satyr remains alive for a while once skinned. His “beating surface” is exposed, his transformation into a giant wound lamented by fellow satyrs, humans, and gods alike.2 I like the idea of Midas as the stand-in for communal viewership organized around a wound, and that the painting reenacts the wound over and over again. The wound is made by power, but determining the justice of such is an ultimately civic endeavor. This invites participation as to how we can deal with the aftermath of violence; it requires us to know what happened.

1 In the catalogue essay on the painting from the 2013 Titian retrospective at the Scuderie del Quirinale, where I first saw it, Luisa Attardi gives a condensed history of the varied, sometimes opposing art historical interpretations of the painting. Still, the most common reading is of the triumph of reason and the Apollonian over the chaotic and rash Dionysian. This explains Marsyas’s inversion, as well as the role of music in the work: why his Dionysian pan pipes are strung up with him (as though the instrument also deserves punishment for inciting frenzy), while a figure behind Apollo plays his instrument, the lute, providing the divine, harmonic soundtrack to the occasion. 2 A macabre factoid: in the late sixteenth century, there was also a large interest in musculature and anatomy, especially among painters. In this light, is possible the substantially creepier interpretation is that Titian has Midas look on so intently to demonstrate the value of learning the truth of human composition.

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Sun Setting Over a Lake (ca. 1840) LAILA PEDRO

“Wax red and rise bone white” —Maggie Nelson, “The Latest Winter” The Met Breuer’s inaugural exhibition, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, offers the potential to connect with artists at unexpected moments in their processes. Its subtitle evokes intimacy—a previously unrealized point of access, even communion. The exhibition takes a broad view as to what constitutes “unfinished”: at various points it is taken to mean interrupted, open-ended,

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, Sun Setting over a Lake, ca. 1849. Oil on canvas, 91.1 x 122.6 cm. Tate, Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856

misinterpreted, or interactive. In some cases, works seem shoehorned in to fit the theme, while the strongest selections, such as the paintings in the room dedicated to J. M. W. Turner, offer not only rigorous primary-source art-historical information, but also a wholly fresh experience of an artist whose place in the canon is so established that standard interpretations of his work threaten to spill into cliché. Turner’s impassioned, obsessive looking—inwardness spilled out into light—is distilled in the incomplete works on view here, particularly Sun Setting Over a Lake (ca. 1840). The Turner paintings the Met borrowed from the Tate for the show tend toward the most literal embodiment of “unfinished”—most were found

in his studio after his death, their lack of a signature or other typically accepted mark of acknowledged authorship is taken to mean that this most meticulous of painters did not consider them completed works. Turner is caught in the act, the work frozen in time before he could put the gloss of presentation over his own gestures. In Turner’s completed works, the masterful brushwork has coalesced into a totality of motion and composition— communicating intention, not revealing process. In Sun Setting Over a Lake, we see the mind in the brushwork, and the conceptual ordering of the painting. The broad, nearly smeared slides of white on the right-hand side are big, generous gestures, their sweep drawing us into a tightening spiral that pulls across to the left-hand corner. The setting sun is itself unfinished: a single drip spills over the horizon. It could be the last spill of daylight across the water, an intensively focused stroke whose minuteness belies its centering gravity. Our attention is called to this drip by Turner’s technical construction: the depth perspective begun by the white spiral is fixed by that horizon line, Renaissance-precise behind swirling layers of refracting light. All of it—the sweeping brushwork, the rigorous perspective, the early traces of Turner’s plays with surface in both content and form (see the beginnings of the rippling water in the foreground, just releasing the sun’s illumination)—come together in the emotional depth of his palette. Absent a central subject, the interplay of light and colors generates an unstable notion of a center itself; instead, the formal elements become the primary visual drivers. Rather than a rigid central structure, we glimpse potential in action—an off-center, vaguely delineated sun in the moment just before it disappears. Unmoored, unanchored, a rush of white sliding into deep orange and pale gold draws our eye inexorably into its own: that stubborn, retreating, singular sun.

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Installation view: There’s No Separation, Aspen Art Museum, February 6, 2016. A 9-x-14-foot textile piece with an image of the Aspen sky printed on it covers sculptural works by Ryan Gander and a “wearable” is worn by a participant

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MATT OLSON with Alexandra Cunningham Cameron

Matt Olson makes work—and life—that is actively undefineable, malleable, trusting, and open. He is inspired and inspiring. Formerly of the Minneapolis-based design, art, and landscape collective RO/LU, Matt has recently begun the Office of Int.\ Est.\ Ext. (OOIEE), a practice founded with the mission of intensive open collaboration across disciplines. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron spoke with Olson, and tried to get to the bottom of how this works, if you work it.

ALEXANDRA CUNNINGHAM CAMERON (MIAMI RAIL): Matt, I’ve been wanting to speak with you since Patrick Parrish told me that you were initiating a new practice. Aren’t these transitional moments the perfect time to discuss manifestos and practice and politics and everything that’s driving us? MATT OLSON: It’s funny because I was just talking about you at a studio visit last week. I was mentioning my affinity for saying “I will never be the same” without even a hint of hyperbole. In fact, it could be a good mantra for me. I remembered the Rauschenberg Residency piece I did for the Design Miami/ website, because it was around that time I really started embracing the concept. When I turned it in, you said you got a little teary after reading it, but also said you were pregnant—which I took to mean that you

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thought maybe it was hormonal—but I decided to trust your reaction anyway. RAIL: I like to think that hormone surges reveal the feelings and intuitions that we’ve lost touch with as we overdevelop self-awareness. So I always trust the hormones. “I will never be the same” means so much to me. Because we are never the same. From one second to the next. It’s beautiful to recognize, without any irony, those moments that make us realize that we’ve grown. Right? OLSON: They bring out the best in us! I love the concept of “bringing out the best” in someone. There’s something there that has a great poetic depth to it, but I hadn’t quite noticed it in that phrase before. I love it when that happens . . . when something you think you understand suddenly has a deep end available. And yes! I trust the hormones, too! I try to trust everything. Even the bad. Didn’t the buddha say “enlightenment is when you love even the bad”? It seems like time has a way of sorting things out. Maybe, ultimately, I trust time. RAIL: Today I came across the New York Times “By the Book” piece with Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame. His outlook reminded me of yours. So open. So generous. Within his inspiring list of literary recommendations, he weaves these beautiful little comments about empathy. Years ago, I read an interview with you that made an impression. At some point deep in, the journalist stated, “Matt loves people,” or at least that’s how I remember it. OLSON: Openness, generosity, humility, love, honesty, empathy, vulnerability . . . these are the real goals. That’s the real work. I’m not very good at any of it, but just the effort seems to provide some form of contentment. I’ve always tried to develop a habit of paying attention to these things. A daily practice. And I do love people! There’s a moment in the recent HBO documentary about Susan Sontag where she is saying, deeply—emphatically—how much she loves being alive, with such a serious earnestness and genuine depth. Like it’s the most important thing she’ll ever say. That’s where I try to get. Ultimately, a large part of it is a choice. It’s available.

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RAIL: And I love being alive, like Susan. Should we discuss your relationship status? Your recent shift from band member to solo artist? I’m curious to know why you made the change to your new practice, OOIEE? OLSON: I totally understand the “band”/ "going solo” metaphor, but that’s not what I’m doing at all. I don’t think there’s any such thing as “solo,” either. In my mind, that’s a trick we play on ourselves with the thoughts we’ve learned or have memorized. To me, it seems like the notion of individual authorship comes to life in the realm of either ego or capitalism. In the same way that words are made from other words, I believe we are made of each other. OOIEE is pronounced “we” (and “oui”), as a spiritually lighthearted attempt to point toward this attitude. Creatively, the studio is an extension of what I began with RO/ LU, but the possibilities around materials— and thus, approaches—are much expanded because fabrication is open now, and that is super exciting! So, if anything, I’m expanding the amount of people I’m working with, not lessening. The end of RO/LU was sort of like the experience I have with the work I’ve been involved with, in the deepest sense, it just emerged or unfolded. It was organic and intuitive and only partly a decision. It was time. The whole thing was such a great experience and I am so grateful to have had a journey that allowed me to work with and encounter so many amazing people— from the first hire to the last client and all the people in between—truly, it was great. RAIL: I’m wondering if this evolution is somehow representative of a larger movement in design practices? OLSON: It’s probably worth mentioning that I don’t really think of myself as a designer—I don't mean that in a silly/ difficult way, it’s more of a practical thing. I always say I like to work on projects related to contemporary art and design. I want to be involved with work that is smarter than me, bigger than me, and if I use words that create a more fixed sense of identity to attempt to describe what I do, I worry that I’ll get in my own way. I think the stories we tell—both to

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ourselves and to each other—are very important. RAIL: Well, disciplines seem dramatically blurred at the moment. Group practices like Assemble, Collective, or Design Displacement Group, which have large and diverse collective structures—artists, engineers, designers, writers—are being idealized for equitable collaboration on mostly self-initiated, clientless experiments. OLSON: It seems like there’s something in the air, for sure. Like things are opening up. I love that more studios and young people in general are interested in expansiveness and fewer boundaries. I’ve always aspired to what I call an “open practice.” For the last couple of years, I’ve been teaching a class I created called Towards a Cross-Disciplinary and Open Practice at the University of Minnesota in the School of Architecture. It’s been really interesting to encounter a vast system that inherently subscribes to the notion of an actual answer, when that’s really contrary to what my experience has been. The questions I’m interested in don’t really have answers, they open up to spaces that are meant to be lived. And I’ve pondered the difference between self-initiated projects and client projects a fair amount. I want to resist the temptation to assign a hierarchy. Like, there’s a better or worse to it? I’d rather just see them as different. Ultimately, whether there is a client or not, I believe the work is living a life of its own, becoming and growing into itself as time passes. And the object or project or design collaborates with all of us and builds over and beyond itself, becoming what it wants to become, more than what we want it to be. When working with a client, honesty and courage can be very important as sometimes capitalism has a way of editing situations based on momentary fears about money and expectations. RAIL: It’s intriguing that your response isn’t about the physical, but about works continuing to participate in the world far beyond the expectations of the maker. From a design perspective, the significance of provenance stories and Proust’s idea of involuntary memory—the understanding that objects carry stories and trigger experiences

TO ME, IT SEEMS LIKE THE NOTION OF INDIVIDUAL AUTHORSHIP COMES TO LIFE IN THE REALM OF EITHER EGO OR CAPITALISM. IN THE SAME WAY THAT WORDS ARE MADE FROM OTHER WORDS, I BELIEVE WE ARE MADE OF EACH OTHER.

throughout their existence—is something that has always fascinated me. When you’re making furniture or objects, are you thinking of their lifespan and the intimate roles they will play in people’s lives? OLSON: Absolutely! The least important part of the situation is what I want in the moment. It’s always more interesting to see what happens. And that’s very related to what I understand of Proust’s involuntary memory. And the objects speak to us through other people, as well. I just had a complete revision of the understanding of a piece because of what someone else shared about their experience with it. And I think that’s why I’m so interested in photography as a part of the exploration. After finding my way through the various stages of ideation, and then there’s a physical object present, the photography is often the first place where I feel like I start to get to know the object in a deeper way and start to see what it is. Exhibitions can be like this, too. When work is installed, it feels like you’re meeting it again for the first time. RAIL: Do you differentiate between physical versus non-physical creation? Thing-making versus idea-making?

OOIEE, Sitting As Seeing and Being In Two Places at Once, 2016. Aluminum angle iron, glass, and mirrored and color acrylic. Prototypes photographed in the OOIEE studio

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OLSON: For me, over time, there’s really no separation. Projects live both as ideas and as things. You might be able to make distinctions in the moment, but it’s never been very productive for me to do that. I’m interested in the way we think about experiences being either interior and exterior . . . but I think that’s actually an illusion over time, too, as consciousness isn’t something we do, it’s literally what we are. I’m not sure how that happens in a logical or language-based sense structurally, but I’ve definitely lived it. It might be productive to think about a musical performer and a score or an athlete and a play . . . they bring each other to life. Language is much more involved in the ideation process. Maybe like language as seeing or something. And then presentation as performance. Then making as thinking. Finally, it will become a living space. The work is still going to be mysterious in its essence, but there is a necessity to allow it to live in a way that

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Installation view: There’s No Separation, Aspen Art Museum, February 6, 2016. A 9-x-14-foot textile piece with an image of the Aspen sky printed on it covers sculptural work by Roelof Louw and a "wearable" is worn by a participant

can feel more tangible to a group. At least for a while, until it’s built. I like the notion of performing a design. Standing in for the living idea and acting it out as a group. RAIL: Tell me more about the teaching and speaking you’ve been doing. Has this part of your work increased since you established OOIEE? OLSON: My course at the university is an attempt to share some of the Black Mountain College energy I picked up while doing the Rauschenberg Residency in 2013. I’d always known of it and its legendary history, but knowing that Bob had, in part, set up the residency as an homage to the experience he had there allowed me to understand it differently. I’ve also been doing more visiting artist/ scholar stints lately at schools and that’s been awesome. I never saw it coming as

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something I’d do and love. I did a workshop and Knoll Public Lecture at Cranbrook as my first OOIEE action, which seemed fitting. I was on a panel at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago last spring, listening to architecture thesis presentations, and that was a super interesting experience. Very difficult in some ways, and yet very productive for me. It’s good to be in situations where I don’t really have a concrete idea about my identity. Where I’m not sure how I’m supposed to be. It all feels very alive. I also use it as an opportunity to introduce the students to the notion of love in work. That love is the momentary collapse of the edges of self and that when we allow it to become what we are, something wonderful can emerge. It feels like most of the students haven’t been exposed to this at all. To the notion that a way of being is more important than a style of working. I think it’s the Internet

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that’s helping us along with this new openness. I read an essay recently that was organized around two terms I really like: “slow criticism” and “post-judgment.” I encounter terms like these and they just open a world up. I can usually identify it when it’s about to happen. I can feel it. It happens with many things . . . nature, music, and so on. I can sense the vastness of something that is pulling me forward into a new place. RAIL: It makes me happy that you’re spending time working through ideas with students. What you’re saying about Black Mountain, your own process, and the “open practice” class reminds me of what Li Edelkoort is doing at Parsons with her hybrid design program—hoping to break down the walls between disciplines and more honestly and effectively create pathways of exchange for students.

Responding to the way people communicate and create in the twenty-first century, rather than prescribing it. Personally, I’m not quite sure why all universities aren’t terrified of becoming irrelevant in the next twenty years. Or perhaps they are? OLSON: We definitely need to change. But humans sure seem bad at change. We tend to exist in the arc of the addict and only a seismic event seems to collectively wake us up. The academy is probably similar to everything that seems to be dying right now. It has to do with capitalism, ego, and fear, for sure. But to zoom out a bit, I think it’s also in the stories we’ve all told ourselves about our values…it will be very interesting to see how things unfold in the next decades. It seems like we’re definitely moving toward some sort of a standoff between who we actually are and who we collectively pretend we are. RAIL: You are not pretending. You have a deep awareness of the significance of an openhearted exploration of people and experiences. Your shift to OOIEE feels ethical. Since you are a recognized figure in the art and design world, it’s difficult not to consider your way of working as a value proposition. OLSON: Even if I was pretending, it would still be happening, I think. Pretending can be good! There’s a quote I like, “the apparent is the bridge to the real.” I attempt to stay fluid in the hopes I won’t suffer from the illusion of an “arrival” that makes me think I have a “right answer,” so I want to be really careful responding here. There’s a part of my mind—probably ego—that is really attracted to a romanticized view of intellectual certainty, clarity, and rigor. It’s sort of macho and silly. Somewhere, somehow it got written into my mind that that’s what design and architecture and art are supposed to be like. But in my heart, I’m much more interested in not deciding things, staying in the not-knowing. In a messy way—I don’t mean sloppy, more like a messy sky. Uncertainty and the acceptance of constant change as a goal. RAIL: You’re speaking to a student of French post-structural theory. I can’t help but find the idea of certainty or legitimacy

to be deeply troublesome. But preaching and practicing are two very different things. Does OOIEE invite people to reconsider how they are living? OLSON: If it could have that effect, I’d be really happy about it, but it seems like a stretch. That said, I would personally like to invite all people to reconsider how they are living! [Laughs.] Every single day. There’s a book I’m trying to absorb called You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk. It has come to mind a few times during our conversation. It’s about a practice-based life. And on the subject of French post-structural theory, I’ve read the first few pages of Barthes’ Camera Lucida, but always get so excited about how weird his experience is with the photo of Napoleon’s brother that I can’t go on. I just stop reading. I have a bunch of books like that…The Book of Tea is that way, too. I can’t finish them. I hope I never do. It’s much more exciting this way. RAIL: You make not separating life and work look really good. Do you think it’s something that’s achievable for everyone? OLSON: I feel so grateful to live the life I live. I truly can’t believe it sometimes. And as much as I believe the way we perceive our life is a choice, I’m not sure what’s achievable or right for anyone else. I didn’t really choose my life. In the same way that I don’t really choose my thoughts, they just appear. Maybe you can make a choice about how you perceive your life and what you decide to make of your days, but, ultimately, it seems like without something of a surrender or giving in, things are sort of limited. A few heroes—Brian Eno and Ken Kellogg talking about Robert Rauschenberg—have talked about the surfer this way. That the surfer can choose the board, the wetsuit, the beach, and the day, but, ultimately, they have to surrender to the wave to actually surf. I like that. RAIL: Your open invitation for collaboration might be submission to the wave. Who has responded? Has it already changed the way you’re approached to do work and the diversity of your projects?

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OLSON: I feel like everything is totally collaborative at its essence. OOIEE did a project with the Aspen Art Museum recently called There’s No Separation. Nine-by-fourteen-foot textile pieces with a photo of the Aspen sky printed on them were used to cover or merge with works by Ryan Gander, Robert Breer, Diana Thater, and Anna Sew Hoy. A textile was used in a performance by Flora Wiegmann and Anna Sew Hoy and museum visitors were invited to wear the fabric both in and outside the museum. It was an attempt to place something uncertain in between as many things as possible. It wasn’t part of an exhibition, so to speak, it was among or in the midst of an exhibition. It’s crazy when I think of all the different levels that I consider collaborative…the staff at the museum, the artists whose works were involved, the people who participated with the wearables, Print All Over Me, who helped to make the giant textile prints. And those are just the things I know of. What about all the things that went into the work that I didn’t recognize, or that I’ve forgotten? What about all the things that happened to people who left the museum wearing a piece? The book for this exhibition is coming out in June and the image of the Aspen sky that became There’s No Separation will be on the cover, so it will continue to travel and become. And all the projects are like this. When I really think about it, it makes me question the whole concept of attribution. I’ve almost always signed off e-mails with people I like saying “we should work on something sometime.” I’ve always been more interested in what might happen than what I want to happen. RAIL: Matt! You’ve woven into this conversation the words and works of so many inspiring people. It’s become a jumping-off point for some profound lines of inquiry. You are the master collaborator. OLSON: That’s very nice of you to say. It will all just change over time. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron is a curator and consultant specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary design. She lives in New York with her boys.

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THE

ART OF THE

DEAL JA SO N K AT Z

Four young men and a kid strolled into Victor Pianos and Organs one evening just before closing. They needed a piano delivered to the Deauville Hotel on Miami Beach immediately for a show they were playing there that night. The store owner got the piano there on time, as advertised. It would be a waste of his $20,000/month advertising budget if he hadn’t. Especially for the Jackson Five. His store was the only place in town to get a piano, organ, or accordion back then. Almost sixty years later, the song is the same. Today Victor Tibaldeo Sr. sits above Miami’s lush Upper East Side in his high-rise condo, watching a Fox News bit about Donald Trump, perched amid a grove of medical equipment. I ask him about the view, spectacular as it is, and it’s as though I’ve put a coin in a jukebox and selected the track where Victor tells the building’s story. “There was a lady named Dinkler, I believe. She built this place, it was a hotel back then. She said she did it because everything was always done for the poor and nothing was ever done for the rich.” His ol’ blue eyes gleam with a reverence for her irony. That lady was Connie Dinkler of the Palm Bay Yacht Club, just one of a cast of well-known characters who has come in and out of Victor’s crowd over the course of his ninety-two years. Other names you might know, like Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jackie Gleason. But you probably don’t recognize Victor’s name. Like a jukebox, he is a relic. An industrialist the likes of Ford and Flagler, but on a different scale. His business, Victor Pianos and Organs, remains at 310 NW 54th Street in Little Haiti, the last of a seven-building family. “There was a beautiful house on the lot where I am now,” Victor said. “I tore it down to build what’s there today.” The house

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must not have been beautiful enough. Victor is like the Trump on the TV. For him it’s still all about the Art of the Deal. Even as he sits today, immobile. His fingers, bloated with age, haven’t touched a piano in years. He used to play accordion on TV three times a day. Once in the morning on the children’s television show Howdy Doody, at lunchtime for an Italian cooking show, and in the evening he played for the fledgling Channel 10 News out of their first home, an abandoned slaughterhouse. “I can’t play anymore. I just listen. I got a free Sinatra station on my Direct TV,” he says, seemingly unfazed by his inability to do the thing that formed the basis of his livelihood—unfazed by anything at all really. Victor is just happy to be alive and to have Direct TV. I stick another coin in the jukebox, and his eyes light up at the prospect of playing me a song, a diddy of his deals past. And when a businessman like Victor—who’s been doing it for seventy-five years strong—plays, you listen. The tune goes like this:

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SMALL DEALS Kosher supermarket: “On Washington Avenue they had these Kosher supermarkets. The best deal in town. They would advertise Romanian Steaks. No such thing as those, of course. It’s just steak! I ate there all the time.” Italy: “My favorite country is Italy. Because I’m Italian. My parents were born in Piedmont. In every province the food is different. And it’s cheap! Now you got Armani and Gucci and all that. Too expensive.” Reader’s Digest: “When I was a kid in the thirties, Reader’s Digest had a deal where if you paid twenty-five dollars, you got it for life. I still get it today.” National Geographic: “Same with National Geographic. I paid them two-hundred dollars and have gotten them for life.” Eastern Airlines: “Eastern Airlines had a deal. If you paid three thousand dollars, they gave you a booklet with coupons for unlimited first class flights. I traveled to all the Caribbean Islands, Stockholm, Norway. All over the world.”

BIG DEALS Jackie Gleason: “I used to advertise that you could play the organ with one finger. Jackie Gleason came in one day to see what that was all about. I showed him. He bought a ten-thousand-dollar organ right there on the spot. He would come in regularly. He’d park his pink limousine right out front and get one piano, ten pianos, twenty pianos, all for his show.” Francis Ford Coppola: “He looked like a street person. I sold him a piano for his resort in Belize. The hotel was doing badly, so he bought it. Coppola was like that. He took opportunities. He invited me out to his estate in Rutherford, in California, and I sat with him on the day of his daughter’s wedding.” (I made a joke about the irony of Victor seeing Coppola on the day of his daughter’s wedding. But Victor has bad ears, and didn’t seem to hear.)

THE BIGGEST DEAL OF ALL Victor Pianos and Organs: “I used to come down to Miami every year. In 1958, I met a guy with a piano shop. Somebody came in looking to buy an organ, but the guy didn’t even know how to play. I did. The customer bought the organ. So the guy turns to me and asks me why I don’t buy the place. I says to him, ‘I will and I’ll

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pay cash.’ I go back to New Haven and tell my family that we’re moving to Miami in ninety days. I had two brand new ‘57 Cadillacs with the big fins on the back. We got in the cars and came down.” When the deals are off the table, Victor’s tune becomes one of family business. In his marketing package (tear-away sheets so dense with words the page looks gray, crowded with piano-shaped borders containing spaceless paragraphs), he advertises that at least two of the six Victor family members are on duty seven days a week. One son, Alan T., is a nightlife fixture in places like Club Space, carrying on the family’s musical legacy in his own way. A granddaughter successfully prosecuted the conspirators of an illegal horse meat trade. One daughter made an appearance alongside Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry. His son-in-law, Louis, is the former Hot Dog King of America and will be making his comeback in a year when his non-compete agreement is up. Another daughter, Lisa, minds the store occasionally. “The business is not as big as it used to be,” Victor said. “None of ‘em are. Pianos will never die, though. My children can have a business for life if they want. Small, quiet, but profitable. Pianos increase in value. A better investment than a condo.” Always selling. I wandered into the store a few weeks ago, as many have before, looking to buy a piano. The walls are covered in accolades and photos with celebrities. Victor’s first accordion, handmade in 1934 by his father with wood from the family dining table. A photo of the Yale graduate alongside a photo of classmate George H. W. Bush. A plastic Fleetwood Mac tambourine. Lisa directed me to some of her favorite models, taking digs at others for their loud tone. After finding one I liked, she asked if I wanted to put down a deposit to hold it. Not because she was hard-selling, but because she thought I’d regret not doing it. I thought I’d try being a dealmaker myself and wait it out a little bit. Let the price drop. A few days later, the piano sold to an overseas buyer. Statistics show that my experience was a unique one. According to the Blue Book of Pianos, sales of all piano types decreased 10 percent each year since 1978, when the number of pianos sold was nearly 300,000 across the United States. The only other period of time when pianos sold more was during the industrial revolution. Acoustic guitar sales revenue has grown in the last ten years by 20 percent, while piano sales revenue has decreased by 42 percent, according to the National Association of Music Merchants. But don’t feel bad for Victor and his family. A Google search of piano stores in Miami shows only Victor Pianos and Organs and a misnomer, the Loro Piana store in Bal Harbour—a luxury clothing retailer. In one day, a piano sale can net the family ten thousand dollars. That’d be a couple of Loro Piana sweaters. “I had one competitor,” Victor said. “A guy named Bill. Don’t remember his last name. He got run over while riding his bicycle.” Victor is a deal maker. A good deal maker identifies a niche in the market, and plays it until it’s over. That’s the Art of the Deal. Jason Katz is neither an attorney nor a cardiologist.

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Is Miami the Caribbean? JASO N F ITZ ROY JEF F ER S A ND N ATHAN IEL SAN DL ER

“We do not dare admit that we like hurricanes. They bring us so much. The periodic shudder originating out there in the sea, the announcement that follows that we’re an official ‘disaster area.’” —ÉDOUARD GLISSANT The Caribbean takes its name from the Caribs, a tribe of indigenous people who lived in the Lesser Antilles, a group of islands that sits between the Greater Antilles and South America. The original inhabitants of the southeastern parts of present-day Florida, including Miami, were the Tequesta. Different people altogether. As the maps are drawn, Florida is considered the northern border of the Caribbean, not geographically a part of the region itself. If you don’t trust cartographers and want to dig a little deeper, the Caribbean tectonic plate encompasses most of the islands in the region, and sits just south of the North American plate, which Florida is a part of. The islands of the Caribbean were colonized by the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French, whereas the United States as we know it was founded by runaway Brits. While Florida was only under British rule for twenty years, all these lands were tainted by the abominable history of slavery—and still suffer from its poisonous legacy. However, the Caribbean islands suffer from a different colonial hangover that doesn’t stretch

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this far north. Most of the islands only grasped for their independence in the last sixty years, plunging deep into the murk of post colonialism to confront issues of identity and the responsibility of nationhood, a proud yet insidiously messy process that’s still unfolding today. For all these reasons, Miami is not the Caribbean. Yet Miami feels like the Caribbean. Not Lincoln Road at noon on a Saturday, but in the way the air hangs heavy and still whenever there’s an approaching storm. What passes for winter here rolls right into the brain-boiling heat of summer, skipping spring. As of just over five years ago, Florida was home to 40 percent of the Caribbean immigrants in this country. According to a report from the Migration Policy Institute created in 2011, nearly four out of ten immigrants in Florida were born in the Caribbean. Think of Pembroke Pines, Miramar, and Little Haiti, Little Havana, Lauderhill, and Puerto Rican Wynwood before the art galleries moved in. Which Miami you choose to live in becomes an incorporeal, if tropical, decision. In Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, there are twenty districts. However, Miami is often referred to as “Kingston 21,” the honorary twenty-first district where those who were able to snag a green card come to live the “good life” in the suburbs. It’s as if Miami is a Caribbean suburb itself. In the Barbados of the 1980s, you’d hear of lucky friends who went with their families on shopping trips to Miami, buying G.I. Joes and skateboards and coming home flashing L.A. Gear shoes with neon laces as if all of Miami was some exclusive shopping district uptown. The Omni International Mall in downtown Miami was spoken of in reverential tones on playgrounds from island to island, lighting up the eyes of little boys and girls who’d never once stepped foot on US soil. Consider the fact that so many of the first black settlers in this city were Bahamian, shaping the untouched land and doing much of work the white “pioneers” thought was beneath them. Consider that the last four mayors of Miami—Suárez, Carollo, Diaz, Regalado—were all born in Cuba. Consider the potion-lined shelves of dusty botanicas and hand-painted supermarket signs. The Caribbean has always coursed through the veins of this city, much like the canals that ferret out of the Everglades and right into Dade and Broward County. That said, it seems it’s only become fashionable to refer to Miami as a Caribbean city in the last five to ten years. Why? Does it add to the allure of Miami as America’s most “exotic” city? Would someone who’s never left Guyana or St. Kitts or Martinique consider Miami a Caribbean

city and does this designation benefit them? Here comes that increasingly dreaded word—appropriation—sailing into the conversation big, slow and mighty like a colonial clipper ship on the horizon. Or a cruise ship. Or a private plane. But who’s steering? Does this mean it’s wrong to refer to Miami as Caribbean? Not necessarily, but maybe it should inspire stronger bridge-building between the two places, as if the Caribbean proper and Miami are lost siblings with a heartwarming story to fulfill once they really get to know each other. Tourists typically experience both Miami and the Caribbean the same way, through abject alcohol use and a general sense that their surroundings aren’t real. Through sunburned eyelids, they look upon the locals not as equals, but as people who can’t possibly be of substance. Time in both places moves as if sedated, as if the hands of the clock are covered in the salty muck of the land. And the muck of both places has been greedily tainted by what St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott calls the “bitter history of sugar.” Industrialists and colonialists are woven from the same loom. We are the “brutal emergence” of Glissant because both histories do not stick to a narrative accepted as canon and only live in independence for approximately a hundred years. One colonial, the other not patriotic enough. And the fragility of both landscapes remains omnipresent. Perhaps we are bound by our fates and the encroaching Atlantic. Martinican Poet poet Aimé Césaire’s writings on the Caribbean’s environment could be read as Miami’s, or any of the islands: At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future—the volcanoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked at by sea birds—the beach of dreams and the insane awakening. And our nature, our environment, is fragile together. Aerial images of the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas show the uniform navy of the Atlantic meeting the sandy turquoise of the Caribbean Sea. The two ying and yang on either side of the island and it’s amazing the symbolic weight doesn’t cause the island to turn a different color altogether. What color would we be? How should our salt mix? Do we wait until we sink, and those blues are forced together? Where the fuck is the bridge? Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is from Barbados. Nathaniel Sandler is from Miami.

AQUAFAIR DREW LERMAN — Tourist season has arrived in South Florida, but Lafe and Mr. Rooks just can’t seem to get rid of their new competitor across the street. In our last issue, Lafe shot the cantankerous newcomer in the leg, but lost Aquafair’s beloved alligator Nelly in the process. Undeterred, their adversary pressed on in his mission. Now, the moment of the new park’s opening has arrived . . .

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A SPECULATIVE STORM: Contemporary Art and Real Estate Development EVAN M O F F ITT

Tour the chateaus and palazzos of Europe and you’ll witness a procession of the finest art: the paintings of the Fontainebleau school, named for the castle outside Paris they decorated, or the sumptuous marbles of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in situ at Rome’s Villa Borghese. Art has always been a feature of the most lavish residences; patrons begat patrimony wherever they made their beds. Its ability to signify landed, aristocratic power was a chief reason why art became a favorite tool of revolutionary bourgeois propagandists. We haven’t entirely escaped that age—Donald Trump is currently touring his bronze likeness through primary voting states before its installation at his midtown Manhattan tower—but these days, money isn’t so rooted to the soil. An increasingly

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globalized economy, a revolution in communication and transportation, and a complicated international network of banks and tax loopholes has produced a radically dispersed oligarchy. The wealthy may never live with the art or in the homes they buy. A Russian gas magnate may buy a work by a Brazilian painter for his island home in Greece and have it stored permanently in Singapore, all arranged by phone from his compound in Vladivostok. Real estate and art are becoming more like the stockpiled loot that pirates buried on deserted islands—left alone until the day they’re cashed in. In her influential 2014 book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Keller Easterling examines the reproducible nature of global infrastructure—from housing stock to telecommunications—as an effect of “multiple, overlapping, or nested forms of sovereignty” that harness the power of the globalized economy.1 1 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso Books, 2014), 15.

In aesthetic terms, this means that a “familiar confetti of brightly colored boxes nestling in black asphalt and bright green grass” visually links the capitols (and capital hubs) of resource-rich, developing nations like China or the United Arab Emirates to “first world” tax haven resort metropolises like Miami.2 Such aesthetic uniformity is incentivized by tax schemes collectively categorized under the UN-administered label “free zone,” which promises foreign corporations cheap labor and utilities, as well as environmental and labor regulation exemptions, in the hopes that foreign investment will jump-start the host country’s economy. But as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development charged in 2010, free zones are “sub-optimal” economic catalysts, more often exploiting day laborers while fattening the wallets of the already über-rich. “The world has become addicted to incentivized urbanism,” writes Easterling, “and it is the site of headquartering and sheltering for most global 2

ARCHITECTURE

Ibid., 12.

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NO SIMPLE COMMODITY, ART IS OFTEN INSTRUMENTALIZED FOR PROFIT DUE TO THE CULTURAL CAPITAL IT ACCRUES BY ASSOCIATION. AS MARTHA ROSLER NOTES IN HER E-FLUX JOURNAL CULTURE CLASS, CITIES’ DECISION TO LABEL DEPRESSED AREAS “ARTS DISTRICTS” IS OFTEN AN ATTEMPT TO ACCELERATE GENTRIFICATION BY HARNESSING THE BOHEMIAN APPEAL OF THE ARTISTS WHO WORK AND LIVE THERE IN LARGE, AFFORDABLE SPACES.

power players. So contagious is this spatial technology that every country in the world wants its own free zone skyline.”3 Abu Dhabi, with its six free zones, has taken notes from Western cities like Miami and Berlin. Miami has informed its vast new swaths of gleaming white luxury high-rises, and its sprawling suburban tracts of faux-Mediterranean villas on palm-lined avenues. Berlin has informed its dense concentration of cultural destinations. Abu Dhabi is currently constructing its own Museumsinsel on Saadiyat Island, with outposts of Western museums like the Louvre and the Guggenheim built by Western architects (Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, and Jean Nouvel) famous for flashy, placeless architecture that attracts cultural and economic capital (the so-called Bilbao effect). The UAE government is betting that its speculative investment in lavish real estate developments will pay off when international tourists flock to its newest art institutions—products of a simultaneous speculative investment in high culture. With its own Pérez Art Museum Miami, designed by starchitects Herzog & de Meuron—across from Zaha Hadid’s voluptuous residential high-rise 1000 Museum Tower—Miami is no stranger to the unholy marriage of real estate and art world speculation. The city’s newest cultural institution, the Latin American Art Museum, is the latest example of this union. An 3

Ibid., 16.

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animated rendering in a promotional video released by the site’s developer—which could have been edited by the same production team that produces marketing videos for global free zones—shows two residential high-rises towering above a smooth Hadid-esque, deconstructivist building, its cantilevered floors like a series of stacked lily petals. (The museum was designed by Fernando Romero Enterprise, the same team of architects behind Museo Soumaya, Carlos Slim’s lambasted Mexico City treasure chest.) Occupying prime real estate on Biscayne Boulevard, next to Hadid’s high-rise and the iconic Schultze & Weaver–designed Freedom Tower, the project aims to bring expensive art and expensive housing to an area replete with both. Though little has been announced about the towers, it’s clear that the project’s developer, Gary Nader, is imitating the Museum of Modern Art, whose cash cow Museum Tower apartments in Manhattan rake in exorbitant rents for their proximity to the greatest modern art collection in the world. Of course, certain philanthropic enterprises should be unburdened by journalistic cynicism, such as free, public museums that deliver great art to diverse local audiences. (Billionaire real estate developer Eli Broad was not free of criticism when he built his private museum on land purchased from the City of Los Angeles for a symbolic single dollar.) But the buck does not always stop there. No simple commodity, art is often instrumentalized for profit due to the cultural capital it accrues by

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VISITING WRITER

association. As Martha Rosler notes in her e-flux journal Culture Class, cities’ decision to label depressed areas “arts districts” is often an attempt to accelerate gentrification by harnessing the bohemian appeal of the artists who work and live there in large, affordable spaces. In Los Angeles, just half-dozen years after a dangerous and depressed industrial neighborhood east of downtown was named the city’s “arts district,” the area is now home to overpriced cafes and juice bars, luxury condos, and the largest gallery complex in the world, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, which is complete with a farm-to-table restaurant and dog park. Artists have fled east of the L.A. River, south of the freeway, or to other parts of the city. The downtown Los Angeles Arts District was dead on arrival—but then the city government was never interested in preserving a viable creative life for local artists. The housing crisis of 2008 began at the margins: banks sold off subprime mortgage loans to aspirant homeowners looking to settle in the suburbs. Now, real estate speculation appears greater at the center, as luxury apartments proliferate in the inner city and skylines fill in with homogenous glass and steel towers. (Most notably, in Manhattan, Rafael Viñoly’s supertall 432 Park Avenue recalls the tower of J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise, a luxury Babel from which the rich survey the poor with an air of excessive hubris.) The structural and aesthetic DNA of these spaces has proliferated in tax havens like a viral code. Culturally and geographically disparate cities like Miami and Dubai have begun to look the same, filled with gleaming residential skyscrapers whose undulating steel facades rise haphazardly next to vacant, unkempt plots of land. Even New York’s historically dense waterfronts have been transformed by ambitious rezoning schemes under the last two mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg; Williamsburg is now blandly unrecognizable from across the East River, and new luxury condos in Long Island City feed off the presence of MoMA PS1. Despite the shortage of “available,” market-listed real estate in New York, many of these properties remain empty. The “window test” in Manhattan will tell you that, based on alwaysdark apartments in the city’s residential skyscrapers, one in twenty-five are occupied for less than two months of the year; according to the New York Times, more than half the apartments between East 53rd and East 59th Streets are perpetually vacant, their owners live in Riyadh, Caracas, or Saint Petersburg.4 Perhaps the common property of luxury condos and trendy artworks is that both have become objects of speculation, new chips on the felt tabletop of international finance. (The gambling metaphor would be less transparent if the art world didn’t already mirror banking’s use of it.) Many of the industrialists who profit from global “extrastatecraft” also collect art, and so it is only natural that they stockpile their collections in taxfree, offshore storage facilities and residences in cities whose booming real estate markets promise net profits for property

sales. Craftier collectors have taken to buying contemporary art, which, if acquired with sufficient market knowledge, can offer staggering returns on investment at relatively low cost to the buyer. Blue chip art, like blue chip stocks, remains stable in value—making it a safe and reliable bet for museums eager to establish their own institutional legitimacy—while a painting by a young New York hotshot can turn over 3,000 percent at auction just a few months after being purchased, as Lucien Smith’s Hobbes, The Rain Man, and My Friend Barney/Under the Sycamore Tree (2011) did at Sotheby’s in 2013. Is it possible to determine aesthetic criteria that apply to both real estate properties and contemporary artworks that circulate in this speculative market? Clean lines, shiny white finishes, and sculptural surfaces that privilege a stunned, totalizing form of vision—even these resonances would only be conjectural. But it is undeniable that abstract painting and sculpture have long been favored for office and hotel lobby decor, their safe and sanguine subjects free of Marxist critiques or religious and political commentary that might offend the capitalists passing by. Inoffensive architecture craves an inoffensive art. (Dee Wedemeyer might have levied the harshest criticism of Frank Stella, a master in his own right, when she called his colorful Protractor series “the developer’s choice” in a 1985 New York Times editorial, because their scale and color livened up blocky granite reception desks.5) The recent abstract painting phenomenon known as “zombie formalism” was fueled by speculative auction sales of such blandly salable works, which spent short terms in high-security airport storage facilities in Switzerland or Singapore before swiftly changing ownership. Smith’s own paintings, made with a fire extinguisher, appeal simultaneously to a desire for inoffensive luxury interior backdrops and the bad-boy mythology of the downtown avant-garde, with its notion of original style (perhaps not unlike developers’ pitches for “artsy loft living” to young urban “creatives” who make their livings in finance and tech). Though it’s not always clear who owns such paintings, it is clear that they are more at home behind a Philippe Starck dining table than on the whitewashed walls of a museum. Globalization now informs the art market just as much as it does finance and real estate. Architectural homogeneity in new urban enclaves is now mirrored by crippling consistencies in new art. Art fairs and auctions too often showcase an appalling lack of aesthetic diversity. As the international levers of money and power come to understand the economic potential of high culture, art’s complicity in rapacious development schemes will grow ever greater. The future of our cities and the integrity of our culture are at stake in this brewing storm of speculation. Evan Moffitt is a New York–based writer and critic, and the assistant editor of Frieze.

4 Sam Roberts, “Homes Dark and Lifeless, Kept by Out-of-Towners,” New York Times, July 6, 2011.

5 Dee Wedemeyer, “Lobbies with Stellas: The Developer’s Choice,” New York Times, May 12, 1985.

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Admiralty Sound Expedition Report

CHRISTY GAST

Christy Gast, ¿’Onde va la lancha?, 2016. Video still

I have been working in Tierra del Fuego for five years as part of the research collective Ensayos, which brings an international group of artists and social scientists together with ecologists and locals to think through environmental and sustainability questions in the region. Ensayos is more focused on process than outcome, although we have made exhibitions, films, experiments, and even perfumes, combining our knowledge and work styles in a way that goes beyond “interdisciplinary.” Often, the work we do together feels undisciplined—artists conduct field research, scientists practice aesthetics in galleries and museums, and disciplines begin to unravel as we seek new approaches to ecological and social questions that have a global resonance. In Tierra del Fuego, where the Atlantic meets the Pacific, land

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and sea are not so much interwoven as fractured—splintered and shattered. At the southern terminus of the Andes, it is as if the mountains are using the remainder of their geological force to dive out of the deep and frigid sea. This is the water that surrounded me this past February, when I was invited to join an expedition of marine biologists and veterinarians as they navigated through the Fuegian fjords in a creaky fishing boat, studying the elephant seals and albatross that live there. It was the Wildlife Conservation Society’s 7th Marine Expedition to the Admiralty Sound, and I was to be the expedition’s artist in residence. Bárbara Saavedra, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Chile and an Ensayos collaborator, offers the concept of a niche as a metaphor for how we work together. In an ecosystem,

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each organism has its niche, the particular set of resources that support its life. Although we share part of our resources with other organisms, no two lives share exactly the same niche. Here, I offer excerpts from the journal I kept on that expedition, a view of my own niche (and its intersections).

February 8, 2016 Today at 8:15 am, promptly, a crew of scientists and park rangers from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Punta Arenas office picked me up to embark on the expedition to Bahía Jackson. The night passed with a lot of wind, which put me in an anxious state of mind regarding the twenty hours we’d be navigating through the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego. But the morning proved to be warm, dry, and sunny. We loaded our gear into two trucks and headed west toward Bahía Mansa, a very small port that serves as the home base for a fleet of artisanal fishing boats. There we met Hugo, captain of the Marypaz II, a 38-meter boat of wood and Fiberglas made in Chiloé. Bahía Mansa is small and sheltered; the water was calm and clear. It was a rare windless day. We loaded our gear and then ourselves into a small inflatable Zodiac, which ferried us from shore to the boat that would be our home and field station for the next ten days. There is no dock at Bahía Mansa, so the fifty or so boats harbored there are tethered together snugly side by side, and moored to three points on the shore via long ropes suspended in the surf. The bay was glassy as the sailors rolled in the anchors, cutting away long clumps of kelp from the rope with a gleaming knife. We exited the quiet bay and encountered the rolling waves, shifting currents, and strong winds of the Strait of Magellan. As our craft proceeded slowly forward at about eight knots, it seemed we were always heading toward a cacophony of animals just at the edge of the horizon—whales, sea loins, and dolphins in the company of gulls, cormorants, and terns looping in and out of one anothers’ worlds as they rounded up a school of bait fish. Two Antarctic terns swept past the boat, their flight so balletic that my stomach lurched, not from seasickness but from a wall of emotion elicited by their dizzying movement through the airspace. Our boat labored through the waves, but the terns breezed by in the blink of an eye. We navigated through the tight, deep Canal San Gabriel behind Isla Dawson, keeping its thrusting mountains between ourselves and Tierra del Fuego’s Isla Grande in order to avoid the punishing winds off its western coast.

February 9, 2016 We cruised through rough seas until late last night. Some time after everyone was lulled to sleep by the boat’s rhythmic creaking—we sleep shoehorned into wooden bunks below deck—I awoke to a commotion and went up to investigate. The water in the small bay where we sheltered for the night was placid, and even under cloudy skies it emitted a milky turquoise glow, the moonlight reflected in the suspended mineral particles released by slowly melting glaciers. The sailors were tethering a smaller fishing boat to ours. Yesterday we saw many of these small vessels, heading to the same fjords as us to collect ostione, a local variety of scallop. Since the fishery was legally opened last year, men—always men—free dive in thick neoprene wetsuits as deep as twenty meters into the frigid water to collect this culinary delicacy with gloved hands. Back on deck, they warm up next to wood stoves in the homemade crafts’ tiny cabins. My own contact with the water is mediated. I have brought along a small submergible video camera that is attached to a twometer-long pole, which I hold over the side of the boat to film at the surface of the water and below, allowing it be consumed by waves and spray. A few weeks ago, a bit farther north, I used it to film a pod of humpback whales. The cetologist I was sailing with at that time, Juan Capella of Whale Sound, studies that pod both in their breeding waters off Colombia’s Pacific coast, and at their summer feeding home here in Tierra del Fuego. Each year the whales sing a new song, which Juan calls their “disco hit.” During breeding season, individual whales begin to sing strains of songs remembered from years past, building into longer compositions until one takes precedence. When this tune catches on, it is learned by all of the whales and sung for the rest of the season. Low oohs and high squeaks alternate with moos and crackles, making distinct A, B, and C parts that remind me of sea chanteys passed on through oral tradition. This morning on the Marypaz II, Héctor, one of our expert mariners, burst into the cabin singing a folk song from Chiloé. He called, “¿’Onde va la lancha?” Without missing a beat, his cousin Oscar bellowed, “¡A Quehui va!” Men from the Chilean Pacific island of Chiloé captain and crew most of the boats here. Chilotes make up one of several settler diasporas in Tierra del Fuego, including Spanish, English, and Croatian populations. They were first drawn here by a gold rush and a developing sheep ranching economy a little over a century ago. This tide of settlers, with an explorer’s thirst to exploit “virgin” territory, wreaked havoc on the Selk’nam, Yámana, and other semi-nomadic ethnic groups who inhabited the archipelago for ten thousand years. Through corporate- and government-sanctioned extermination and forced relocation, the Selk’nam were largely disappeared from the Isla Grande of Tierra del Fuego by 1930. I remember Cecilia Vicuña’s poem “Lolaá,” an ode to Lola Keipjá, the last Selk’nam shaman, who died in 1966. Lola took with her songs that carried the power of invisible arrows, capable of beaching whales, providers of months of sustenance. In contrast to what I see today, the waters of Tierra del Fuego were once the domain of women. Yámana women, who lived for months at a time in open wooden canoes with their families, navigating through the channels, learned to swim and dive at a young age. Instead of neoprene, a layer of whale fat applied to the

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skin insulated them from the cold as they collected the same ostione that we bought from the boat tethered to ours. Like these divers, they kept fires burning in their open boats. The sea was too rough for us to reach Bahía Jackson today. Instead, we anchored at Caleta Toto, again with fishermen, who dove into the water and swam to the beach with their anchor lines, where they tied their boats to trees. We spent the afternoon preparing the scientists’ equipment for the next few days’ work. We uncoiled and assembled plastic tubing, containers, filters, and hypodermic needles, which will be used to collect the scat, blood, and whiskers of elephant seals and albatross. On deck, the sailors are shucking ostione in preparation for dinner. We have our own means and reasons for getting close to animals.

February 10, 2016 We passed the night here with ten small fishing boats bumping against one another to our left and right. After a quick breakfast, we took advantage of the calm sea to head to Bahía Jackson and begin fieldwork. The sun was just rising behind the mountains of Karukinka, bathing the fjord in a heavenly light. We knew that when we left our sheltered bay, the waves of the Admiralty Sound would increase in size. I was sitting with Marcela and Cati, two of the expedition’s veterinarians, on top of the main cabin on the boat’s highest deck as we made that transition. When the waves began to roll, our bench snapped and we sprawled gracelessly across the deck. Unlike the terns, the whales, and the divers, our bodies feel illsuited to the sea’s unpredictability. Later I filmed during a squall as we passed by a small island. Its cliffs were battered by waves. The captain steered us up and down the whitecaps, as deliberately as when I steer the 4-wheel-drive pickup truck through rivers and up rutted coastal roads on land. I was alone in the bow, gripping my camera’s pole with arms stretched Christy Gast, ¿’Onde va la lancha?, 2016. Video still overboard, balancing my body on the deck as I allowed the camera to rise and the storm, its glaciers releasing cascades that trace brilliant white fall with the boat. This moment must have something to do with tendrils to the sea. But this beast of an island is associated with Turner’s desire to be lashed to the bow of the ship during a storm, Tierra del Fuego’s invisible, brutal histories. I can hardly look at it; but my experience of the sublime is tinged with a visceral layer I feel ashamed by its beauty. This is where the Selk’nam who had of disgust. Isla Dawson still hulks to our port side, gorgeous in

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survived the bounty hunters were interred after being herded to the Isla Grande’s west coast and shipped across the channel. On the Isla Grande, their human bodies were replaced with those of cattle and sheep. Later the Salesian order of missionaries attempted to assimilate the indigenous captives on Dawson, building a replica village (I say “replica” because they were not free—the island was a prison) complete with a church, school, and farm. In the Maggiorino Borgatello Salesian Museum in Punta Arenas, there is a life-size diorama of the room where Selk’nam and Yagan women learned to spin, weave, and knit the wool from Tierra del Fuego’s newest immigrants, the sheep that are so ubiquitous today. The women on display are so degraded that they seem to match Darwin’s doubt of their humanity. Clothed in Victorian castoffs, they are hunched over their work, a nun and priest towering over them. These are caricatures. I think the scene actually depicts the erasure of millennia of knowledge of a world that I myself, as I slip and stumble across the boat’s deck, struggle to grasp.

February 11, 2016 Yesterday we finally arrived at Bahía Jackson, passing Islote Albatross as we neared the terminus of Admiralty Sound. Alejandro Villa, the expedition’s lead scientist, pointed out hundreds of the enormous seabirds’ bowl-shaped mud nests, stacked in nooks and platforms on the island’s northern cliff face. The albatross above us barely moved their enormous wings in flight. They remained impossibly still as they rode the stiff wind above the sea. Héctor and Oscar moored the Marypaz II to a wind-bent tree reaching out from the rock face of a tiny island, and soon we were aboard the Zodiac with a lot of gear, zooming across the waves to survey a colony of elephant seals. Alejandro and Marcela Uhart, a veterinarian, lead the team that will tranquilize two elephant seals and affix satellite transponders to their heads. We disembarked and carried our gear along the beach toward the seals, crossing a massive band of tangled driftwood that had been pushed ashore by a storm. We made the day’s basecamp under a large erratic boulder, shoving our slickers and life jackets under its base so they wouldn’t be blown away. Alejandro and Marcela went ahead to survey the terrain and identify the elephants to be tagged. The most striking aspect of this landscape is the marine plastic. Shredded blue and white ribbons cling to every driftwood log and thorny calafate bush like zombie rags. I have heard of the garbage patches, swirling gyres of plastic in the open ocean, and I imagine a fragment replacing the lone, dancing strand of kelp I filmed under water yesterday. The camera caught the sun streaming through its ridges and through the ripples of the crystal clear water, which distorted the trees on the cliff above. By 2050, there will be more plastic than life in the world’s oceans. I film the zombie ribbons flapping in the stiff wind, and double-check the settings on my audio recorder to make sure the microphone level is right for the wind. As a sculptor, I look for metaphors in objects. Filming the plastic zombie rags, I think of Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade, a reference I borrow from my collaborator Denise Milstein, a writer and sociologist. The windblown, sun-bleached geometry book, suspended by a string, was installed on a balcony in Buenos Aires

in 1919. A few weeks ago, seventy miles up the coast from here, Denise remade this piece, suspending her PhD thesis from a cattle fence on a beach across the channel from Isla Dawson. Denise’s thesis is about popular music, counterculture, and authoritarianism in Brazil and Uruguay in the 1960s and ‘70s. During Chile’s authoritarian Pinochet regime, Isla Dawson was again a brutal prison, holding political activists. As the pages of her thesis flapped wildly in the wind, fragments of songs and quotes from musicians came briefly into view, animated against the backdrop of Dawson. The sound of those pages’ staccato slapping and crackling, a ream’s worth of paper propelled rapidly by the ceaseless Fuegian wind, is impossible to replicate. Even with the fuzziest wind muff on my microphone, its sensor was thrown off and my recording was silent. I though of that impossible silence, which echoes the haunted feeling I get from Isla Dawson, as I recorded the flapping plastic. From my boat mates, I learned that the shredded blue and white bags are associated with the region’s fishing industries. Bearing the mark of the multinational conglomerate Cargill, they were used to transport bait for king crab traps and salmon farms. Among the driftwood I also see men’s shaving razors, wrappers for the same types of food we eat on the boat, the mesh bags and nets used to carry ostiones, and motor oil jugs. These are artifacts of men’s work. I imagine how easily they are tossed by wind and waves off the decks of these small boats, and wonder how many tons have landed on this beach. I remember the enormous number of puppies clumped at the teats of one small mama dog at Bahía Mansa. They romped and played in trash that looked much the same as what I see here, blown from two lidless dumpsters sitting next to the spot where we first loaded our gear into the Zodiac. When Alejandro and Marcela returned we all headed through the scrubland toward the seals, crossing a river of glacial meltwater barefoot because it was higher than our rubber boots. On the other side, a group of twenty young male seals were piled atop each other, resembling blobs of clay but with the squishy consistency of marshmallows. Framing them through the lens of my camera felt like an exercise in abstraction, gently rolling shapes and gradients occasionally rocked by a burst of testosterone—guttural snorts and trumpet brays—an animated Lee Bontecou relief. Marcela explained that, once the transponders are affixed to the seals’ heads, their movements will trace a map through the fjords. Those maps will be used to make a case for policy change, for a new Marine Protected Area to be created in the Admiralty Sound with limits on fishing and tourism. I think of those seals joining the riot of animals we saw on the horizon our first day at sea, their antennas sending a signal to satellites above. The seals’ whiskers also contain data—DNA impressions of the fish they’ve eaten. I ask Marcela if we humans, too, become the food we eat, if the ostiones will be detectable in my DNA. I have looped into this world, its life has mixed with mine. When I return to my studio with all that I have written and recorded here, how will that mixture evolve? Christy Gast is an artist based in New York. Ensayos is a nomadic research program based in Tierra del Fuego. It was founded by Camila Marambio in 2011.

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MĂIASTRA:

A History of Romanian Sculpture in Twenty-Four Parts Maiastra: A History of Romanian PART VI: YGGDRASIL Sculpture in Twenty-Four Parts by Igor Gyalakuthy

[Note: not every generation shown, mostly just the artists. Names on same level might not be in same age group.]

Part VI: Yggdrasil B.P. Hasdeu *

Iulia Hasdeu Constantin Baraschi * [Note: see Part I]

Petre Carp ※ (1837-1919)

Twice Prime Minister of Romania. Cofounder of conservative literary group Junimea.

Constantin Carp (1902-1980)

Siblings: Married: Divorced: Sculpted/Painted: Taught:

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Ion Georgescu

Iulia Hasdeu

[Note: see Part II]

Legend:

IGO R GYAL AKUTHY

Carol Storck (1854-1926)

Sculptor. Worked closely with his father, studied in Italy and achieved decent renown in his own right. Half brother of Frederic.

Manya Goldman (1896-1971)

Talented pianist and music teacher. Second wife of Jean Bart.

Eugeniu Botez *⚓︎ (1877-1933) Important Romanian writer and naval ofÞcer who wrote Europolis under the pen name Jean Bart. Noteworthy eyebrows.

Calin-Adam Botez ⚓︎ (1909-1962)

Navy man and author like his father. Imprisoned by Communist regime for six years.

Karl Storck (1826-1887)

German born sculptor and Þrst professor of Þne arts in Bucharest. Father of Romanian sculpture.

Frederic Storck ⍭ (1872-1942)

Brilliant “wandering rock” sculptor, his father’s son. Cofounded Tinerimea Artistica. Like all great Romanian men, married his better.

Cecilia (Lita) Storck-Botez (1915-1977)

Painter and ceramicist who “developed over time a very personal and abstract expression in her use of glazes.”

Ada Botez (1918-2009)

Sculptor. Knockout. Apprenticed under Brancusi in his Paris atelier. [Note: Ada remarried a British military man named Miller and had one son, who I’m told married a Þgurative painter.]

[Note: the brothers Botez are currently embroiled in a legal battle over the sale of Started an art gallery in Oslo BrancusiÕs Mlle. Pogany, which was given with his son Timon. Named it to their grandparents by the artist himself. Storck. It seems the brothers sold the bronze, valued in the tens of millions euros, to two separate entities. The Madmoiselle is not the only Brancusi to be mired in judicial Timon Botez pergatory: the state is currently raising (b. 1973) funds to buy back his ÒWisdom of the Sound artist and Earth,Ó in one of the more fascinating sculptor living in episodes of corruption and bureaucracy to Oslo. date.]

Alexandru Botez

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Carol Popp de Szathmary (1812-1887)

[Note: the ancesty of the great Cecilia Cutescu is so exasperatingly complex and difÞcult to unearth that weÕll leave it at this: she didn't come from nowhere.]

Considered Þrst war photographer in history for his documentation of the Crimean War. Shown alongside Karl Storck at Bucharest’s inaugural Exhibition of Living Artists in 1865.

Theodor Aman *

Cecilia Cutescu-Storck (1879-1969)

⍭♞♀

Inßuential painter with ties to the European elite. First female professor of art in Europe. Founded the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Made a Knight of the French Legion dÕhonneur in 1933.

Gabriela Storck Architect. Curated the Cutescu-Storck museum housed in her childhood home in Bucharest.

Alvaro Botez (b.1944) Material-based sculptor. Lives in Paris

Romulus Kunzer Dashing violinist. Folly of Cecilia’s youth. The two had one son, Romeo, before divorcing after just three years.

Ortansa Satmari ♀ Noted suffragette. Key member of the National Council of Romanian Women, lead by Calypso Botez (no apparent relation).

Julieta Orasanu (1896-?)

Romeo Kunzer Storck ⍭ (1903-1991)

Cubist painter inspired by Andre Lhote and his mother Cecilia. Adopted brother of Lita and Ella Storck.

Fauvist painter. Half sister of Cecilia Cutescu and collaborator with her nephew Romeo.

Constantin Brancusi *⍭

Oscar Han ⍭ [Note: the branches of the Yggdrasil tree, which unites the worlds of Norse mythology, actually served as the noose by which Odin sacriÞced himself. A warning worth noting.]

Alexandru Satmari (1872-1933)

Landscape painter and photographer. Progenitor of the movement of painters to Balchik in the 1920’s.

[Note: an extrapolation of JulietaÕs descendants reveals, through a confounding network of pathways, both V.G. Paleolog, the famous art writer and Brancusi biographer, and Constantin Carp, through a later marriage of his to the illustrious Filotti family, thereby growing a forest from a tree.

Tinerimea:

⍭

Junimea: ※ Legion d’honneur:

♞

Naval OfÞcer: ⚓︎ National Council of Women: ♀

Dr. Igor Gyalakuthy is a professor emeritus at the Universitatea Nationala de Arte in Bucharest. In 1993, he received the national medal for achievement in the Þeld of art history. He lives in Cluj- Napoca with his Lakeland terrier Bausa.

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A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION:

JONAS MEKAS M O N ICA USZ EROW ICZ

“Coming back to New York by train, the train always pulls in at sunrise. There is always a good feeling, coming back to New York. Those are the only times when you see the sunrise. The sun never rises in New York.” The quote above is from Walden, poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas’s seminal diary film. By the time Walden was released in 1969, the Lithuanian-born Mekas had already made several films and founded the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, which would

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grow into the Anthology Film Archives, perhaps the world’s largest archive of avant-garde film. He’d arrived in New York with his brother Adolfas at the age of twenty-seven, after being imprisoned by the Nazis, spending time in a displaced persons camp, and later studying philosophy. Throughout his youth, he’d been guided by what he has referred to as “the muse,” viewing the world through his own singular lens. Mekas has long been associated with contemporaries and friends like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, but at ninety-three years old and prolific as

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OPPOSITE PAGE Jonas Mekas, To New York with Love, 2009, four-color offset lithographs ABOVE Installation view: Jonas Mekas: Let Me Introduce Myself

ever—his website is updated daily with videos—he feels peerless and unprecedented, his poems and work becoming increasingly more beautiful over time. That bit about the sun never rising—it’s spoken over shots from the train window, the sun bright like a flowering fruit, and it crystallizes the spirit of Walden and of Mekas himself, simplistically alluding to a kind of grandeur. In an ode to Mekas and the film, given its reputation as a gateway to the rest of his oeuvre, Obsolete Media Miami and Ground Control Miami presented a screening of Walden at the Design District’s Palm Court on its six original reels. The screening was planned in conjunction with Let Me Introduce Myself, an exhibition at Gallery Diet featuring Mekas’s work, both early and recent. At Diet, The Destruction Quartet (2006), a four-channel video installation, showcases the destruction of September 11th, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, a fire sculpture by Danius Kesminas, and Nam June Paik destroying a piano, respectively. It’s easy to watch these instances of devastation—one heartbreaking, one healing, two creative—as tributes to the inextricable connection between destruction and creation. It is easier to feel this

way when Mekas himself says to you (as he did to me), “Not all destruction is negative.” There is destruction of a different sort, a slow, sad fade, in the images of Elvis displayed nearby, taken at Madison Square Garden during his famed 1972 performance. We see him with a multitude of expressions—Mekas was up close— and for a moment, if we suspend disbelief, it’s unclear if we’re looking at a falling or rising star. Chairs designed by Aranda\ Lasch, from their Railing series, dot the space. Though their form is abstract, made up of one line curling itself into something resembling a seat, they feel sturdy. The romance of Mekas’s work lends the chairs a kind of intrigue that might be reaching otherwise: look, they’re all one loop, like little films. On the other side of Diet, there are two more photo series: This Side of Paradise, which features the Kennedy family on vacation in Montauk, and To New York With Love. The Kennedy series is showcased as C-prints, each appearing to have been taken from film reels (the image appears multiple times along a negative, as if scooped from the cutting room floor). We see the children cloaked in red towels along the beach, in profile with sand-colored skin and windblown hair, roughhousing in the grass. In To New York

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With Love, there’s a pinkish self-portrait of a young Mekas, figures in the snow, the profile of a girl who might appear in Walden, too. “The show is called Let Me Introduce Myself,” Mekas explained to me. “So here I am, introducing myself.” The screening of Walden might’ve easily been titled Let Me Introduce Myself, as well. Operated by artist William Keddell, a Bolex camera—the same camera used to shoot the film—captured guests posing and dancing in front of a curtain, a delightful little novelty. For all his accomplishments as a master of the American avant-garde (not excluding becoming synonymous with the genre itself), Mekas seems decidedly, unabashedly without motive, and Walden, free as it is from the restraints of formal narrative, is replete with the director’s assertions throughout: “They tell me I should always be searching, but I’m only celebrating what I see.” In one scene, in response to a request to film an underground movie, Mekas and Adolfas head to the woods, where Mekas screams, “Underground movie!” with the Bolex pointed at the forest floor. During a post-screening Q & A session, when asked about different categories of film, Mekas replied, “‘Low-budget,’ ‘underground,’ ‘experimental’—it’s meaningless. ‘Independent?’ Spielberg is more independent than Brakhage. Spielberg can do whatever he wants. I’m not independent. I depend on so many things: what I eat, what I see, all my friends. I depend.” In three hours, Walden captures everything upon which Mekas depends, in mostly short snippets, though they are sometimes elongated to whole chapters. At the time of its release, this free-flowing style was groundbreaking in form, but there was no point established in its content other than, perhaps, beauty, or that life is often beautiful. His camera pans— sometimes lovingly, other times in bursts of frenetic, inebriated energy—over boats in a harbor, a cat eating his breakfast croissant, a passerby in a blizzard, John Lennon and Yoko Ono enacting their famous bed-in. Prior to the screening, Mekas prepared us: “No tragedy, no suspense. Just images…. It’s a diaristic form of cinema. It’s also a narrative. Any life is a narrative. Day after day, you meet different people.

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Jonas Mekas: Let Me Introduce Myself, installation view, with seating by Aranda\Lasch

MEKAS’S CAMERA SEEMS AT ONCE QUIETLY OBSERVATIONAL AND IN AWE OF THE BLOSSOMING LIFE AROUND HIM, ITS UNWITTING FLOURISHES AND GENTLE SIMPLICITIES, ITS NOISE AND STILLNESS. SUMMER 2016

Usually there is no reason. I constructed reality according to my temperament.” There’s the rub: any life is a narrative, and it’s not so important—and every life is a narrative, so it’s deeply important. (Or not.) The original reels were quite noisy which, as Mekas explained, “was part of the process of projecting. We did not hide the sound.” They mirrored Walden’s soundtrack, an aural landscape of subway clack-clacketing and Mekas’s accordions. Mekas’s camera seems at once quietly observational and in awe of the blossoming life around him, its unwitting flourishes and gentle simplicities, its noise and stillness. A Velvet Underground show—reportedly their first—is filmed in a whoosh. Brakhage wanders through a park. Scenes of a friend’s children at breakfast are overlaid with images of flowers, as if the babies, too, are in bloom. Walden is kaleidoscopic, sometimes quite literally. One segment, captioned “Wendy’s Wedding,” features a wedding reception punctuated by a dizzying strobe light. Wendy’s lace dress is illuminated. I spoke to Bruce Posner, an archivist and filmmaker who curated The Unseen Cinema, a four-part program showcasing American experimental films, pre-1940s. Mekas allowed Posner to scour his own archives for these works. While attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Brakhage, one of Posner’s professors, screened Walden. “Chicago was really depressing,

especially in the winter,” he explains. “I was watching Walden, and all of a sudden, there’s my best friend at Wendy’s wedding.” The friend is Marilyn Gottlieb, an artist who moved in the same circle as Posner. (In a fortuitous twist, the wedding took place at 80 Wooster Street, which would later become the Anthology’s first location.) In the dead of winter, Posner was warmed by Walden. “Proust has his cookie, and Jonas has New York City,” he says. “He forces you to see it right in the moment. Not as it’s happening, but as he sees it.” It’s true: we’re right there with Mekas—but we trust and indulge in his vision. It’s difficult to explain why snippets of another person’s life feel so poignant to the viewer. Perhaps it speaks to the innate empathy of documenting humanity with such blithe tenderness. During the Q & A, one gentleman politely asked, “Why is it important to document life?” Mekas responded to this (and all the questions), in a manner similar to Walden’s movement: terse and then warm, short and then, after a pause, meandering. “It is not important at all to document life,” he said abruptly. And then: “But we do that. It’s obsession. It’s magnificent obsession. In a moment, everything we went through falls into dust.” Life is meaningful—until, of course, it isn’t. Monica Uszerowicz is a writer, photographer, and the film and performing arts editor for the Miami Rail.

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ATHI-PATRA RUGA with Catherine Annie Hollingsworth

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South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s work lies somewhere between fashion, street performance, and high art, never landing in one zone alone. His signature figures, balloon bodies with legs and high heels, tell an ongoing fictional saga in his series The Future White Women of Azania (2010– ongoing) against a backdrop of luscious sculptural and filmic visuals. Azania is an imaginary utopia not of Ruga’s own invention. It is an idea that links to the history of the South African liberation movement and still farther back in history. Over time, the idea of Azania has provided Ruga with a platform to explore the intersection of personal and political identities, nations acting on bodies, and human behavior. Recently, he was invited to Miami for the Bass Museum’s bassX series. Curated by José Carlos Diaz, bassX is an ongoing set of unconventional projects held outside the museum during its renovation. Ruga’s performance, constructed with local performers for the Miami Beach Public Library, was an iteration of The Future White Women of Azania. Catherine Annie Hollingsworth spoke with him a few weeks later to find out what fuels his eclectic creativity. HOLLINGSWORTH (MIAMI RAIL): You started out in fashion, right? RUGA: I studied fashion from 2002 until 2004 and did one or two collections. At the same time, I was performing in downtown Johannesburg in drag with a club kid crew. There was a movement between drag, clothes that I would make, and critical questions around the role of the fashion designer. The role of the fashion designer is that of entrenching gender behaviors and, at the same time, that of the social engineer. It somehow teaches one to parody the construct of femininity. All of this becomes a beautiful primordial soup that gives birth to my work. RAIL: Can you describe the story you are creating with The Future White Women of Azania? RUGA: At the end of 2009, I started doing processions. I’ve always found them powerful as an art medium, because they involve walking down the street with a mass of people with the same goals and pains as you. It’s this nonverbal yet powerful communication, saying, “We’re all together, going to the same space together.” And for me, being an urbanite, as someone who lives

in chat rooms and on the Internet, I find that there isn’t much inter-human empathy. I also went back to the idea of parodying femininity. I created the characters with those balloons because I wanted to put a question or hypothesis in someone’s mind. The word “Azania” was used by postcolonial liberation movements to represent a utopian, decolonized Africa. I use the body of the white women to enter that future space and see what happens. At the same time, I wanted to raise the forgotten history of the word “Azania.” Azania is first mentioned in written form with Pliny the Elder around about 40 AD, in a travelogue called The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. It was really interesting to know that my history did not start with slavery, colonialism, or the end of apartheid, because history books are always written by the victor and somehow negate what happens before. Precolonial history became something about rocks and all of that, rather than the existence of people. The big storyline that I’m working with is that of a nation. I’m starting my own cardboard or balloon soldier nation of these characters that go through the catharsis of popping. They reveal themselves as both male, female, everything

Athi-Patra Ruga, The Future White Woman of Azania 1, 2012. Lightjet print, 80 x 120 cm, edition of 5 + 3 AP. Photo: Hayden Phipps. Image courtesy Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD

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Athi-Patra Ruga, The Elder of Azania, 2016. Performance still, Bass Museum of Art, AthiPatra Ruga at bassX. Image courtesy AthiPatra Ruga and Jorge Grouper

they are under those balloons. In the beginning, I used to put liquid in the balloons. And this would weigh a person down. Someone on the outside is looking at the fanfare, the flourish of balloons. Inside, the actual performer is struggling with this identity. So the performance itself is about embodiment, really. RAIL: So Azania is a concept that you grew up with, as part of the national conversation? RUGA: Yes, it was part of the revolutionary conversation, because my parents were the generation of Soweto 1976 [the Soweto uprising], a young generation that wanted to change things. The word “Azania” was used in this utopian sense: let’s return to this precolonial, beautiful place where freedom reigns, where we are not touched by colonialism and subjugation. I’ve grown up always knowing that my parents, and the parents before that, worked toward that idea. We are the people eating that fruit. However, there are hypocrisies that come with the generations that are eating the fruits of freedom. Nobody gave us a manual for it; trust me. RAIL: Most of the characters you create are political figures of some form or another. Who is your most recent character?

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RUGA: I’ve started assuming the character of The Elder, the narrator. In this population of women, I’m the only male. I’ve been held hostage so that I can carry old and new stories. I can create this new government from exile with the Future White Women. It’s me finding the art-historical purpose of the male always making himself the elder or the narrator. On one side, I’m perpetuating something, but on the other side, I’m parodying it to bring attention to art history, how it’s relayed—and the power within that.

RAIL: So you’re going right into the land of the colonizers.

RAIL: What new projects are coming up for you?

RAIL: Race is a huge issue right now in the US, and it seems largely to be an identity crisis.

RUGA: I will be in New York [at Performa] for a very cool performance, and then in Denmark I’ll be performing the next progression from The Elder. The Decimation is our next step of the nation-building thing, whereby we are killing ten people and hanging them from trees—ten balloon characters that look like piñatas. We invite the audience to beat the piñatas open. It starts out fun, but once you realize it’s looking like you are beating up people because the balloons are popping, you hope that the audience throws away their canes and goes, “Aaah! I’ve just committed genocide!” Or something.

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RUGA: I call it counter-penetration; I’m very aware of that. I’m aware of the fact that I’m coming in as a way of reflecting these stories of belonging and movement and not belonging. I know that Europe at the moment is faced with its humanity. I think all these countries are being faced with who belongs where, and what belongs where, and who defines themselves as what.

RUGA: In my personal experience, xenophobia is growing in Europe. It’s xenophobia, but it’s racism. South Africa experiences a lot of xenophobic attacks against our brothers who come in from various spaces, from Zimbabwe or from Zambia, because we’re the land of milk and honey for the south. So I always see how belonging and not belonging work in all the centers that I go to. And it always comes to one story. That’s why the universality will always be there. The purpose of art, for me, is to make people feel that it’s okay to feel the emotions of not belonging—hence the characters

are very freakish-looking—and to come to terms with the idea that utopia really doesn’t exist. The only way I can say that is not by standing on a soapbox and shouting it. I have to do it in a very accessible, Trojan-horse kind of way. RAIL: What kind of performers did you work with in Miami? RUGA: There were professionals, novices, high sorts of Pavlovas, and performance artists. Aside from the high discipline, you get performance artists who attack movement from a political position and are open to a subversive play, a chain reaction to the classical guys. And then it also moves down to the novices, mimes, people who can use their hands, work with another kind of registry, and continue the story. I love confusing highbrow and lowbrow. This is also a subversive nod to the sort of old, white, educational men who want to write art history and who I feel I’m in a very heated conversation with—with my body and the performers’ bodies. RAIL: It’s perfect that your Miami performance took place in the library, which is a very open place. RUGA: I started out with that, you see? In the club kid scene, you’re performing for people in the street, so they don’t eat you up on the way home. You’re performing for mere survival. The library offered me a place where everybody could come in. I was really surprised about how welcoming it is to people in the streets, even just on the basic sanitary level. I was so pleased to be performing in a space that doesn’t have a velvet rope. Because whether it’s queer politics or black politics or woman politics, they aren’t supposed to be put out to an audience that just nods, "oh great," and then moves on to their canapés. It’s for people who are going to be haunted, and who are going to relate to the stories. Catherine Annie Hollingsworth is a Miami-based dance and performance writer.

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AARON THIER with Andrew Donovan

Aaron Thier’s most recent novel, Mr. Eternity, opens in present-day Key West, where two young filmmakers are making a documentary about a 560-year-old sailor named Daniel Defoe. The novel follows Old Dan’s adventures over a millennium, picking up in the sixteenth century in the Viceroyalty of New Granada and continuing into the twentysixth, where, in the Democratic Federation of Mississippi States, Dan serves as advisor to the King of St. Louis. Andrew Donovan sat down with Thier, a novelist, critic, and sometimes Miami resident, to talk about Mr. Eternity, climate change, and Florida, where much of the novel takes place.

ANDREW DONOVAN (MIAMI RAIL): Why have Old Dan end up in Key West, of all places?

historical Daniel Defoe, was a mysterious character—just passing through, you feel, on the way from the past to the future.

AARON THIER: Because the Keys are fragile—in two hundred years, they won’t exist—and the book is obsessed with disappearing things. And this is a place Dan’s been before—he has a sentimental attachment to Key West. My sense is also that a lot of marginal people end up in the Keys without knowing how they got there, like they were drunk on a bus and missed their stop or something. It seemed natural enough.

RAIL: The novel is told in five sections of different time periods, 1560, 1750, 2016, 2200, and 2500, each with its own narrator. The narrators are all young people in existential crisis, and Old Dan appears in each section. What were you hoping to achieve by covering such an extended time period?

RAIL: Why is his name Daniel Defoe? THIER: The true reason is that there is no reason, but the first fake reason is that I wanted to suggest a connection with Robinson Crusoe without being too pointed about it, and the second fake reason is that Daniel Defoe, the real or

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THIER: Well, I think of the Keys again. The issue for me is not so much that they’ll disappear as that it will be like they never existed, because no one will be left to remember them. And this is always true. To me, it’s striking and beautiful to think of my world—I’m talking about the real world, not my invented world—becoming a part of some future person’s imagination. That’s what the book is about. Our life becomes a dream

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someone dreams two or ten or fifty centuries from now. To get that effect, you need a lot of time to pass, but you need big intervals of darkness and quiet in between, so that you can hear the echo. RAIL: And why young people in existential crisis? THIER: Because young people don’t understand yet how time works! They live in the moment, or they spend all their time pining away for some other moment, an imaginary moment, which amounts to the same thing. A novel that slips so easily from one century to another needs people like that to give it texture, the way oatmeal needs fruit or nuts or something. Otherwise, how do you know you’re chewing? At the same time, these are people who are just starting out, so they’re just starting to wonder how they’re going to live in the world they live in. They ask the questions the novel wants to ask.

RAIL: Your last novel, The Ghost Apple, was also told in many different sections and in many different voices. Why have this chorus? THIER: The other day we were out at a restaurant and I ordered a dessert that turned out to have peanuts on it. I’m allergic to peanuts, but I wanted to eat it anyway. I was sitting there saying to myself, “Okay, Thier, this is an easy one. If you eat it, you’ll be sick for weeks.” And the thing is, who was I talking to? Who is “Thier?” Who are all these people in our heads? Why should it be hard not to eat poison? To me, this way of writing, all these voices, seems perfectly reasonable and straightforward, like nature writing. That’s what being a person is like. All kinds of discordant voices, inside and out. I think the real absurdity is the omniscient third-person narrator who tells you that so-and-so thought this-or-that. “Jack thought about crab cakes. Jack went outside. Jack decided to drink some cough medicine and vandalize a mailbox.” In what sense did “he” decide, you know? RAIL: The other character who shows up in more than one section is Quaco, Dan’s sometime companion and mastermind of various schemes. What’s the story with Quaco? THIER: Quaco is the secret hero. RAIL: You wouldn’t want to give it away, huh? THIER: I guess the important thing about him is his mysterious larger purpose. What’s he after? He is a shaman, a freed slave, and as old as Dan or older, but he always seems to be taking part in some other, larger story. He’s a secret in that his interest in what’s going on is always in question. He’s a hero in that he’s ultimately the person who’s out for justice. RAIL: You say you were in Florida when the idea for Mr. Eternity first started to take shape. What about it was inspiring to you? THIER: We lived next to an old zoo in Miami, and all the old enclosures were

still there, but they were covered in bright tropical vegetation and full of iguanas and peacocks. In a warm, sunny place, ruins are beautiful! I had this vision of Florida’s tropical plants escaping their confinement and marching north with the warming

likely than it did. A bad thought. There are lots of tools online that show you what five or ten or twenty meters of sea-level rise would look like. Some of them are amazingly detailed—street level, neighborhood by neighborhood. I used the one on Geology.com. RAIL: The 2200 sections are interesting because the narrator relates the story in run-on sentences and the past tense has seen a dramatic evolution (or is it a breakdown?). For example, “I was so happy” becomes “I were so happy.” How did you formulate this futuristic linguistic tick?

climate. Coconut palms in the Carolina piedmont, banana trees in Washington D.C. It was a beautiful vision, which is the central paradox of the book. Everything is fucked and it’s still a beautiful world. And it’s still just life. RAIL: It’s fucked, but not for the flora. THIER: Not for all the flora. Or fauna, ultimately. And of course humans are diabolically clever and we will find a way to survive and flourish, to the awful detriment of everything else. RAIL: Climate change is an even bigger consideration when you’re looking into the 2500s. How did you come up with the level of seawater rise you describe in that section, where Florida and most of Louisiana and Mississippi are underwater? THIER: Well, I looked at various journal articles and got fixated on the worst-case scenario, but now, a year or two later, that worst-case scenario looks a lot more

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THIER: How do you find a voice for a character who lives in the future? The problem with inventing slang is that slang sounds stupid if it isn’t your own slang, and in any case, invented slang has a way of becoming dated even more quickly than real slang. So I wanted to avoid that. I wanted one small thing that would suggest a deep foreignness. Padgett Powell has this rule about writing dialect: you don’t change much. One word in ten. Or maybe one word per sentence. In any case, you leave things mostly as they are and let the reader fill in the rest. Make too many changes and the fact of the changes drowns the effect. RAIL: So, you weren’t worried about creating some Tolkein-esque language for elves or space marines or some shit…. That leads me to wonder what you would say to someone who wanted to classify Mr. Eternity as science fiction, post-apocalyptic, or fantasy. THIER: Genre fiction works by mobilizing a preexisting set of expectations. The reader picks up his vampire novel and he knows beforehand what books of that kind are like. The author accepts these expectations and works within them. Vampire novels have certain elements, I imagine, and if they lack those elements—if they have no vampires in them—then they are not vampire novels. Mr. Eternity is what we call literary fiction, which means that it’s interested in being different from other books, it attempts to generate fresh expectations, it tries to surprise, it resists generic definition. More importantly, it wants to

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represent the inner life of human beings. If we could figure out how to say what science fiction is, we’d probably want to say that a lot of science fiction is actually literary fiction. RAIL: The 1560 section takes place in South America, as Dan and the main character of that part, Maria, travel from the Caribbean coast across the isthmus of Panama, down to Peru, up the Andes, and into the Amazon basin. How did you come up with an idea of what these places would have been like in 1560? THIER: The conquistadors wrote accounts of their various campaigns, but their narratives tend to have a summary flavor—a run-down of events rather than a representation of life. When I needed to know what daily life was like in a colonial Spanish town, I read inquisition documents from New Spain. That’s where you learn what people were actually doing. And I also read a very strange document called The First New Chronicle and Good Government, by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. He was half-Inca, half-European, or we think he was. He was trying to get to grips with the way things were changing, trying to write Christianity into the history of the Incas, and you get a sense of the awful fluidity and strangeness of that moment. We tend to see the conquest from the perspective of the Spaniards, but here it’s something that’s happening to everyone, an inexplicable thing that has to be explained, and it radically destabilizes the worldview of everyone who’s involved. RAIL: Was there a kind of Big Idea you wanted to get across with the novel? I particularly enjoyed the exchange in 2016 between the filmmakers and Dan about present-day objects he would like to bring back to the 1700s. His initial reply is surprisingly practical—he would take back a cotton T-shirt. I thought this was a brilliant choice, given that much of the thorny, global history that wills a contemporary, mass-produced cotton T-shirt into existence is forgotten by the time someone puts it on.

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THIER: A Big Small Idea, I think: the idea that our experience of the world is conditioned by our expectations. We think of the future and it’s terrible because maybe we won’t be able to charge our iPads, but the people who live in the future will have different expectations. If they don’t have iPads, they won’t miss them, except in some abstract sense. They won’t expect to have them. They’ll just go about their lives. They’ll kill themselves or make the best of things, just like we do. Dan understands that because he’s lived it. So they ask him this question and they expect some big thoughtful answer, and what they get is a trivial answer that has everything to do with real life, daily life, which is the only kind of life there is. RAIL: What informs Dan’s answers to the filmmakers’ question? Is it awe of the T-shirt, or does he just wish he had it sooner? THIER: He’s just a guy! For some reason he thinks that T-shirts are neat. I guess they are. Or maybe he hasn’t thought hard about the question. His experience of immortality has not disposed him to grandiose meditation, in any case. I guess that’s the thing about him. He doesn’t really know what the fuck is going on. Or rather, he knows that there isn’t anything to know. Or that you can’t ever figure out the stuff you really want to figure out. RAIL: Would you also bring a T-shirt? THIER: I’d bring the modern medicine. As much as I could carry. Andrew Donovan is a poet residing in Gainesville, FL. His work has most recently appeared in the Mondegreen, Cartridge Lit, and the New Republic.

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AND JUSTICE FOR ALL ROB G OYAN E S

Risen from rented rooms, old ghosts Come back to haunt our parks by day, They crept up Fifth Street through the crowd, Unseeing and almost unseen, Halting before the shops for breath, Still proud, pretending to admire The fat hens dressed and hung for flies There, or perhaps the lone, dead fern Dressing the window of a small Hotel. —FROM “A WINTER ODE TO THE OLD MEN OF LUMMUS PARK, MIAMI, FLORIDA”

Not only is Donald Justice a “poet’s poet,” as the Poetry Foundation puts it, he’s also Miami’s poet, though much of the city doesn’t know it. This summer that may change, when O, Miami hosts a one-day celebration of his life and work, And Justice for All, on August 20. Born in Miami in 1925, Justice completed his undergraduate education at the University of Miami in 1945. He went on to study under the large, brilliant, morose shadow of John Berryman at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “There's a great anecdote about Justice bringing his sonnet ‘The Wall’ into his graduate seminar at Iowa,” says P. Scott Cunningham, poet and founder of O, Miami. “Berryman was notoriously tough on his students, never praising anything, no matter how good. Apparently, Justice read it aloud and Berryman just said, ‘No student should be able to write a poem that good,’ and moved on.” Justice’s poetry—modern, formalist, and somehow tender and sentimental while remaining private—deftly balances light and dark, a mix of Berryman’s confessionalism and the Miami sun. His work won institutional validation from the likes of Pulitzer, Bollingen, and Guggenheim, but what’s more important is that Justice could write poems that were able to shake people and stick with them. Justice became a teacher at the University of Iowa and brought many influential writers under his tutelage, including Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, and John Irving. With his focus on language’s capacity for exactitude, Justice always asked his students to consider how a poem could be better, even if it was already great. His national influence is so deep, you’d think Miami would have more of a clue about this major figure of its literary history. The reasons for the city not knowing more about its own legendary bard is perhaps fourfold: a. Miami may not know poetry too well b. Miami may not know history too well c. People everywhere, generally speaking—even smart people—don’t know poetry too well, and history only a little better d. Justice was pretty Anglo, and came from a more rural Miami before its transformation into a northernmost Latin and Caribbean metropolis. Justice himself, who hated easy answers, might acknowledge that there’s a grain of truth in each of these assertions, while at the same time, they are also all a little bit wrong. Cunningham thinks that the reason is something like this: “Miami likes to pretend that it has no history, in order to hype the future. That's the downside to our eternal optimism.” Today, poetry is a relatively obscure form compared to other media, and Miami is especially

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known to appreciate the flashier arts, and Justice, the ‘poet’s poet,’ had a reputation of being especially stereotypically quiet and private, even among other, similarly-tempered poet- and writer-species.” It’s funny that poets are thought to be quiet, since the quietness is a front for a factory of thoughts and sounds churning in their minds. The poet is always working:

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work. One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar. Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good. And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed. —FROM “THERE IS A GOLD LIGHT IN CERTAIN OLD PAINTINGS”

In the short memoir Piano Lessons: Notes on a Provincial Culture, Justice recalls his time as a kid getting piano lessons in Depression-era Miami, when it was not nearly so developed and cosmopolitan—though some of the city’s eternal qualities were, of course, present: “Afternoons with them I remember now as always hot and summerlike, time going by at a slow pace, drawn out toward dusk like a long ritardando. This was in Miami, and even in the winter months the electric fan might be set on the floor beside us, where it turned with a click like a metronome’s.” “He was a part of a Coconut Grove-based literati crowd,” says Cunningham, “back when the Grove was a very Bohemian place, and though he never lived in Miami full-time after his early twenties, he retained many connections to people here up until his death in 2004.” The themes of music and Miami reappear throughout Justice’s work. “Music was Justice's first love,” Cunningham continues, “and he studied composition with Carl Ruggles, who was indisputably one of the best composers in America in the twentieth century.” Though Justice graduated from UM with a degree in English literature, there’s no denying the roles of tempo, color, and timbre in his poetry. His work was often about musicians, his musical upbringing, and the sensate experience of music itself, and one might be tempted to draw a direct line between his music and his poetry, but Justice would resist such a simple reading. “It's clear that he didn't like anyone trying to peg him down,” Cunningham told me. “When Dana Gioia asks him what kind of influence studying music has on the way he writes poetry, he emphatically denies any connection between music and poetry whatsoever. I think his argument is very interesting, but the forcefulness in the way he responds says more about his personality: don't diagnose me. Don't think you've figured anything out by taking this one detail from my childhood and extrapolating it. That's one reason I love him as a Miami figure. People love to stick to easy narratives about Miami.” Justice was an experimentalist throughout his life. Known as a master of many poetic forms, he had a soft spot for villanelles (pastoral, nineteen-line poems with lines repeating in a

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fixed pattern) and sestinas (six stanzas of six lines each, with six rotating end-words, followed by an envoi)—but he also worked in free verse and nonce forms he created himself. Beyond superior technical control, his poems have a way of conveying the chorus of joy and sadness and the dance of loss and memory in a way that is bittersweetly succinct. Justice also wrote criticism and short stories. “The Artificial Moonlight” is a story that takes place in Coconut Grove and recounts a party where a group of friends has gathered to see off a friend named Jack, who’s moving to Europe. “The heat was spoiling the party,” Justice writes. The host of the party, Hal, suggests flirtatiously to his friend, “Of course we could always go out to Fox’s for more. More vodka.” Though dour, the party is saved when Jack and some friends decide to drunkenly steal a dinghy and row to an island in the bay. After falling asleep on the island, Jack awakens and finds that his friends have left him behind. At first he is angry, yelling their names, but then: “In any case, he would have forgiven them a great deal—laughter, humiliation, even perhaps betrayal—as they would forgive him practically anything. He saw all that now. Well, it was a sentimental time of night—the very end of it—and he had had a lot to drink, but he was willing to believe that the future would indeed be bleak and awful without such friends, willing to take their chance with you, ready even to abandon you on a chunk of sand at four a.m. for nothing but the sheer hell of it. And he was, for a moment, remarkably contented.” Miamians who haven’t read or even heard of Justice will recognize these words. Perhaps now the ghost of Donald Justice might be seen henceforth, on humid summer nights, quietly sitting on a bench in Lummus Park, almost unseen, ever working.

The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad. One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours. And the grass burns terribly in the sun, The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots. Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty, The sky looks vast and empty. Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues. Nor does memory sleep; it goes on. —FROM “PSALM AND LAMENT”

Rob Goyanes is a writer and musician from Miami.

SUMMER 2016

ELIZABETH SCANLON

TFW

“TFW,” which takes its title from the internet abbreviation, is a poem that considers the shortcomings of language.

to the suburbs

The short lines in “TFW” are searching, wanting to assemble the pieces of the puzzle—or rather, are the pieces of the puzzle, variables in an equation. They’re not long, elegant thoughts; they’re taking one thing at a time. I remember reading Jacques Prévert’s poems when I was really young, maybe in seventh-grade French class. Those hushed little scenes, like in “Déjeuner du matin,” made a big impression on me—“Il a mis le café/ Dans la tasse/ Il a mis le lait/ Dans la tasse de café.” Grammatically, there’s nothing simpler. But the mood they create is palpable.

to see your son's doctor

That feeling when waiting for the train

The stanza breaks in “TFW” matter because the pause between each verse creates a little alone-ness. The stanza break is like waking in the middle of the night to a sound and straining your ears to try to figure out what it was that woke you—what was that? Equally alert and

in the middle of the day

and the stilled train across three desolate platforms bears the numbers of his birthday

That feeling when you know the idiom in which you are writing is soon to be an obsolete meme

The weirdness of meme being something ordinary idiots talk about, not just grad school art theory idiots

That feeling when the softness at the end of the record holds the needle

adrift in that moment.

for two minutes longer

—

Elizabeth Scanlon is the editor of the American Poetry Review. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Brain Is Not the United States/The Brain Is the Ocean (The Head & The Hand Press, 2016) and Odd Regard (Ixnay Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, and others.

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Àsdís Sif Gunnarsdottir: Object Perception, Bed & Breakfast, Miami, March 19, 2016

Àsdís Sif Gunnarsdottir: Object Perception BED & BREAKFAST MARCH 19, 2016

MONICA U S Z E R OW I C Z In Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Kafka—the narrator—asks Oshima, a friend to whom he’s become close, “‘Tell me, when you’re alone do you sometimes think about your partner and feel sad?’” Oshima does indeed, and gives his now oft-quoted and

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exquisitely touching reasoning: “‘Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.’” It’s true—we are often drawn to partners who seem to encompass something that feels close to our inner truth. It requires poor logic, to try to find yourself in another—unwittingly or not— but love and perception are faulty beasts. With Object Perception, her first solo exhibition in Miami, multimedia artist Àsdís

SUMMER 2016

Sif Gunnarsdottir examined, for one fleeting evening, the nature of categorizing household items according to our specific relationships with them—and the ways in which such an innate habit mirrors our understanding of the ones we love. (“The image we form of significant others is often an image of what we wish them to be . . . . We struggle to prevent ourselves from becoming demonic and hostile in character when we find this image to be untrue,” reads the show’s press release.) We do not see items, nor lovers, as they are, but rather as projections of our needs, desires, expectations, and perceptions. They’re our

reflection, or missing piece, the kind that leads to a strange melancholy that’s constant but inexplicable (unless you’re Oshima). Taken to its extreme, this partner-as-projection-ofself issue presents further questions for the philosophical problem of other minds. And Object Perception did feel like home and like love, like a longing whose reasoning is difficult to pinpoint. Gunnarsdottir transformed the actual bedroom of the space known as Bed & Breakfast, utilizing a largescale projection of a smooching, silhouetted couple. It followed a Rube Goldberg– machine trajectory, shining through flowers and colored perfume bottles, onto a wall, the floor, and then over the human lovers (one of whom was curator Jacqueline Falcone), who lay sleeping in bed. The two appeared to dream of their shadowy selves, their kiss dancing along the wall in a display of meta-conscious reality, harp music on loop. It was a noisy reception; you had to shut the door to absorb the piece, then ignore the feeling that you were being intrusive. Gunnarsdottir passed out hand-written poems to each guest, which I did not realize until the end of the night. I asked politely if I, too, could have one. “But of course!” She used my pen and folded the paper into a soft envelope, which I opened later as I climbed into my own bed. Her cursive writing looked like wisps of smoke on the page: Loskins matast skuggarnur okkarí vid erum umkringd vatri…kyrrt…Kyrd Kyrru vatri Finally our shadows merge We are surrounded by water…still water The sleeping lovers might’ve been dreaming of nothing, if they were sleeping at all.

Susan Lee-Chun: It’s a pleasure (not) to meet you Jillian Mayer: Day Off DAVID CASTILLO GALLERY APRIL 14–MAY 31, 2016

CATHY BY R D It’s a pleasure (not) to meet you by Susan Lee-Chun and Day Off by Jillian Mayer are

Jillian Mayer, DAY OFF 2, 2016. HD video, 1 min., 40 sec., edition of 5. Courtesy David Castillo Gallery

side-by-side solo exhibitions that channel and critique our material world through sculpture, video, and photography. I’ve followed both of these Miami-based artists for years. Never has their work felt more fresh or more relevant. Lee-Chun pursues her interest in race and identity politics with a heightened sense of purpose. This time, she displays sculptures inside glass vitrines, transforming them into a collection of desirable objects. As viewers become window shoppers, the artist seems to feed the hunger of the consumer culture she critiques. Her brilliant soap figurines— knockoffs of Bruce Lee, complete with nunchucks—are as irresistible as the vintage stereotype of Asian masculinity they represent. Who doesn’t adore the cheerful Kung Fu fighter? With similar guile, Lee-Chun invites us to love the ethnic slurs inscribed in the XXL bling things that she has cast in aluminum and enamel. A massive, gold four-finger ring intones “GIBBERISH.” The words “La Chinita” flourish across a gilded hoop earring that could fit around my neck. Beautifully rendered, the work embodies and exaggerates the Korean-born artist’s personal and cultural signifiers. Lee-Chun glams up her social commentary and delivers it with a big wink. Mayer shares her droll sensibilities in new video and photo works that play at dissolving the fragile membrane that separates the real from the imaginary in contemporary culture. Appropriating the latest trends in technology, she dives into other worlds while acting out in ours. Whether nude or

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clothed, she is inseparable from her clumsy virtual reality headset. Here, wearing only the headset, she lies meditating in a great green field. There, she’s on the virtual lookout, perched atop a chain-link fence. Her summer frock and bare legs pay no heed to the snow that surrounds her. In the video Day Off displayed on a flat screen, Mayer falls, naked, out of a trashcan at the edge of a snowy street in a nondescript neighborhood. We watch her adjust her headgear, stand, and face a virtual onslaught of unseen forces. In what unfolds as a comical pantomime, she defends herself and narrowly escapes harm. Portraying a present tense that might portend our future, she communicates a notion that’s at once nonsensical and unsettling. The idea that virtual realities might completely eclipse our experience of real life is not exactly impossible in this post-Internet universe. Mayer’s Slumpies, installed adjacent to her videos, make a compelling statement all their own. Acknowledging our attachment to handheld devices, the lumpy, life-size sculptures offer a real space where we can relax our digital posture. They invite us to lean over and fall into their clumsy embrace. You might say that Lee-Chun and Mayer are clairvoyants. These clever artists reveal the invisible imaginaries that control our thoughts and actions almost every minute of almost every day in the twenty-first century. Making the oddest fashion statements ever, they feminize our blind and thoughtless urges. Lee-Chun suggests that no matter how much we seem to evolve, our behavior

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remains predictably biased. Mayer shows how technology reinforces our tendency to ignore realities we don’t want to face. What, then, do we hope for?

Cara Despain: Slow Burn SPINELLO PROJECTS MARCH 16–APRIL 23, 2016

ERIN TH U R LOW Entering Cara Despain’s recent show at Spinello Projects, before the eyes have a chance to adjust, felt like walking out of the glare of the afternoon sun and into a matinee. A theater light created a spot on a clay horse head lying on the floor. But everything else was black. The spot that bends from the floor formed a half-circle of setting sun on the wall. In its glare, the unpainted ceramic

decapitation looked like the sun-bleached remains of an anonymous massacre. It was also an immediately recognizable allusion to The Godfather (and American marquee movies!). By framing the head in the spotlight, the elements of Francis Ford Coppola’s immigrant epic are condensed into a singular conflation of the entire movie: the opera stage, the nightclub singer, and the death sentence of the Mafia’s internecine struggles, a good old spoiled American dream. No surprise then that in the next room there was another allusion to another pillar of American cinema, the Western. Each wall of this gallery became a screen filled with a projection, creating an immersive, fractured panorama: three stunning views of a desert valley and an appropriately dilapidated structure, an old trading post or a mining colony. All the views were static. The only movement was the sputtering end of a lit fuse crawling across the foreground, left to right, slowly

Cara Despain, Slow Burn, 2016. Four-channel video installation, dimensions variable

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making its way across all four walls, “reading” the landscape, as the viewer waits for the big bang. Eventually, however, the fuse simply repeats its cycle, in an infinite loop. While Despain’s video installation recalls a familiar trope from so many Hollywood cliffhangers (and Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner!), it also postulates the cinematic opposite of the literally explosive ending of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), another movie set in another dessert in the American West, this one by an Italian that could be considered Coppola’s cinematic uncle. While Antonioni gave us the apocalypse we’d been yearning for all along, Despain shows how that release can be forestalled, keeping us trapped in an oh-so-American, permanent state of desire. Despain explores the American landscape through its cinematic double. Just as Hollywood cinema is the product of the American West, “the West” is a product of Hollywood.

Lina Bo Bardi: Together MIAMI CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN MAY 12–JULY 29, 2016

ERICA AN D O Italian-born Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) has been called the “most Brazilian” of Brazil’s twentieth-century architects. A foreigner in the country she called home, Lina (as she is affectionately called) absorbed the cultural traditions of her adoptive Brazil and championed the past as an alive, historical present. Her criticism of European-imported modernism could not have been more different from the attitudes of Brazilian architectural titans Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, planners of the utopian, but deathly antiseptic capital city of Brasília. By the time Lina moved to Brazil after World War II with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, she had been deputy director of Domus magazine and had taken part in efforts to reconstruct war-torn Italy. Between 1958 and 1964, she lived in Salvador de Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, which was regarded as a poor, underdeveloped part of the country. There she encountered an unindustrialized culture with a strong presence of African descendants and learned “a lesson of popular experience, not as a folkloric romanticism but as an experiment in simplification.” In her design for Solar do Unhão (1959), in Salvador, she used local building materials as well as construction techniques learned from local craftsmen to convert a former sugar mill into Bahia’s art and craft museum. Less a survey of Lina’s work and more a tribute to its context and impact, Lina Bo Bardi: Together features works mostly made by others. The exhibition, curated by Noemí Blager, includes a film installation by Tapio Snellman, an art installation by Madelon Vriesendorp, objects from the markets of Salvador de Bahia, and Ioana Marinescu’s photographs of Lina’s Glass House in Morumbi, outside São Paulo. All these elements are exhibited together, without hierarchy, embodying the fluidity of Lina’s polymathic practice and her seamless embrace of both traditional culture and modernism. A time line tracks Lina’s achievements alongside major political,

Installation view: Lina Bo Bardi: Together, Miami Center for Architecture & Design

cultural, and architectural events in Brazil and Italy. Three of Lina’s famous Bowl Chairs casually dot the exhibition. These disparate reflections on Lina’s work are poetic rather than explanatory, drawing out the soul of her practice rather than its forms. Snellman’s seven-part film installation documents Lina’s architectural projects, particularly her SESC Pompéia (1982), a huge recreational complex on the outskirts of São Paulo. The film focuses on the people in and around the building— their movements and energy—to show they are Lina’s partners in both the concept and life of the building. Vriesendorp’s multipart installation includes objects made by local residents and children at workshops the artist conducted at Solar do Unhão. These objects, based on traditional artifacts, and Vriesendorp’s own cardboard figures of Exu, an Afro-Brazilian deity, are placed throughout the exhibition. Vriesendorp’s contribution also includes paper hands that point to small cards featuring quotes by Lina. Many of these words come from her abundant theoretical writings that argue for an architecture free from cultural, political, and aesthetic boundaries. Displays of simple toys and ceremonial objects refer to Lina’s commitment to children and the exhibitions about Brazilian popular culture she curated at SESC Pompéia.

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Public architecture, the exhibition reminds us, never exists outside the realm of community. In speaking about SESC Pompéia, Lina remarked, “Architecture for me is to see an old man or child with a full plate of food walking elegantly across our restaurant, looking for a place to sit at a communal table.”

Ceci n’est pas une peinture (This is not a painting) ART LEXÏNG MAY 9–JUNE 20, 2016

SAN TIN O SIN I Art Lexïng in Miami Ironside is framed by tall, thin cypress trees. A bocce court of gray stones and a perimeter of pink, curvilinear seating can be found just outside in the courtyard. Ceci n’est pas une peinture (This is not a painting) is a small, deceptive collection of works. Viewers are presented with objects from the Tokyo design studio YOY, the Paris fashion house Maison Margiela, and artists Quentin Shih, Ye Hongxing, and Zheng Jiang. According to curator Lexing Zhang, this collection largely points toward trompe l’oeil. In doing so, each piece offers a duplicity in function or facade.

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The objects by YOY and Maison Margiela are purposeful, in the utilitarian sense, in that they function as simple household items, though mockingly so. Stretched across a tilted canvas, YOY’s printed image of a Victorian parlor settee seems to be only a visual play, but in fact effectively bends to the sitter’s rump, warping from two-dimensional to three-dimensional object when put to use. Equally deceptive are Maison Margiela’s smaller pieces, displayed on shelves perched atop the wall like flown-away papers. A doorstop shaped as an egg, a notebook spirally bound at both ends like an asylum inmate, a “travel candlestick” that is framed by mirrors, multiplying in the grasp of the handler. The accompanying artists carry out their own deceptions. Zheng Jiang’s Dusk (date?) wears the colors of a falling sun, a large tempera painting of short, pretty strokes, arranged within a likeness to the

flowering apple of Chinese patterned glass. Quentin Shih’s manipulated photography imposes a contrast of European fashion models within a bleak palette and surreal setting. The subjects’ relation to the background and viewer is both distant and rigid, yet, in the artist’s manipulation, there also exists a playful and soft air. Perhaps most eye-catching are the brightly colored collages by Ye Hongxing, composed of the kind of stickers sold in sheets at bodegas and dollar stores. The arrangements are sugary and tightly packed at close range; from afar, they form traditional, floral guises. In the presence of so much double-sidedness, and faced with the shifty characters of very regal faux doors (Maison Margiela’s Hausmannian door), it is nice to sit and rest—unexpectedly engulfed in a two-dimensional chair like the onset of a time warp.

Installation view: Ceci n’est pas une peinture (This is not a painting), Art Lexïng

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A Midsummer Night's Dream MIAMI CITY BALLET MARCH 18–APRIL 10, 2016

KARA P ICKM AN As part of the company's 30th-anniversary season, the Miami City Ballet debuted its distinct reimagining of George Balanchine's 1962 two-act A Midsummer Night's Dream, the choreographer's first original full-length ballet. Interestingly, Balanchine created the main role of Oberon for Edward Villella, the Miami City Ballet's founding artistic director. Under the leadership of current artistic director Lourdes Lopez and with dramatic direction by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the spare staging brings Oberon, Hippolyta, Puck, and the rest of the Athenians and fairies out of the woodland and underwater. This concept, and the scenery and

Miami City Ballet dancers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust. Photo © Gene Schiavone

costume design, are brought to life by artist Michele Oka Doner. While New York– based, Oka Doner is a Miami Beach native, and her work—concurrently on view in the exhibition Michele Oka Doner: How I Caught a Swallow in Midair at Pérez Art Museum Miami—tends to return to the flora and fauna of her native Florida. When approached by Lopez about the A Midsummer Night's Dream collaboration, Oka Doner made a connection between the ballet and her recent research at the Rosenstiel School of Marine Biology at the Univerisity of Miami, where she was able to comb through their unique collection of nearly one million marine life species that can be found in South Florida's tropical waters. Many such specimens are translated to the stage in this new production, to alternatingly humorous and lustrous effect: the donkey Bottom (Didier Bramaz) becomes a large-headed manatee, Puck (Shimon Ito)—still traditionally impish and delightful—wears what appears to be woven strands of seaweed, and Hippolyta's (Jordan Elizabeth Long) hounds are transformed into seahorses. While these underwater themes, the subdued, shimmering pallete, and the Coral Castle–like architecture of Act II may resonate with Miamians, undoubtedly the dancers retain their place at the center of this ballet's universe—be it of the woods or of the sea. In fact, the nautical staging works to lighten the traditional wooded setting, so that less attention is placed on the dancers' surroundings and, instead, due emphasis is placed on the dancers themselves. The subdued lyracism of Oka Doner's designs plays off the dancers' own, creating an unparalleled production of a classical work that, in this iteration, is truly Miami's own.

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BOOK REVIEW Earth Science SARAH GREEN 421 ATLANTA, 78 PP.

C L A I R E EDER Wary Exuberance: Sarah Green’s Earth Science One time, I got into a debate with another writer over whether or not spring was an asshole. In Appalachian Ohio, the dogwoods were blooming uproariously, the ground was carpeted with flowering moss, and the robins were plump and scuffling with one another. I was getting tired of being jerked around and falling in and out of love, always this time of year, when the earth wouldn’t sit still anymore. I quoted Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Spring”: To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. …………………………………………… It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. The writer said, “But at least spring’s sincere, isn’t it? It doesn't know any better. How can you not be taken in by it?” Can spring still be an asshole even if it doesn’t mean to be one—if it’s propelled by forces larger than itself? I ask this question about some of the people I know. Sometimes I ask it about myself. Sarah Green, like me, is wary of spring. Her poem “I Can’t Stop It” begins: That jonquil spray: notes from a bird lilac and soil I can’t stop it from reaching me Invisible staff clef thrusting its pistil melody due to some genes It can’t stop it either As other poems in Earth Science, Green’s first book, reveal, she is wary of many things, like time, memory, joy, and her own gorgeous images. Green is wary in the way I think all poets should be wary: always questioning her own representation of experience. She owns that poetry deals in the manipulation of emotions. She’s got a conscience, she worries about manipulating people, but of course she knows that readers want and expect to be manipulated, to be transported. She urges us to stay awake, to not get had:

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Why aren’t we all a little more anxious re: beauty re: Helen launching our ship continually whether our ship’s ready or not Beauty is always making us do things, feel stuff. It’s exhausting, and how can we say that we have any choice in how our lives turn out? The poems in Earth Science grapple with the forces underneath that which we see as the self, an event, or a memory. How to narrate one’s life if the self is a hodgepodge of influences, manipulated at every turn, constantly transforming? We can’t stop smelling the flowers. In addition to being standoffish about beauty, Green has a habit of stepping outside of her memories because she wants to know the absolute truth of what happened to her, and she can’t, and it’s driving her crazy. She begins a poem about being chased by a donkey in rural Burgundy: “That donkey— / there’s so much I don’t know about my life.” Was the donkey an adolescent or fully grown? Was he charging because he was a serious guard donkey or because he was a jokester, just trying to psych her out? How can she tell the story—and it’s such a good story!—if she really has no handle on the truth of that donkey’s existence and of her own brief intersection with it? But the unknowable is Green’s lodestar. She describes two ex-lovers avoiding each other at a party as

then a hedgehog with spikes engaged, then a snarling jaguar. The poems in Earth Science succeed because they acknowledge their own impossibility. Like Millay, Green knows that “Beauty is not enough”—it must be interrogated. Helen may keep launching our ship, but we should at least break our own bottles over the hull. Another night soon after our debate about spring, I saw the writer strolling under the flowering trees lining our small town’s main road, clutching a magnolia blossom to his nose—really, burying his nose in it. From across the street, I first took it for a wad of tissue. Allergies, I figured. Spring, that asshole. The cool night air tried to charm me with its green scent, and I tried to stand off, but the writer was correct, spring didn’t know any better, and I marveled at him and his acceptance of all that reckless beauty. He was grasping the change, and he was holding on to it. Claire Eder’s poems and translations have appeared in [PANK], Midwestern Gothic, the Common, and Guernica, among other publications. She graduated from the University of Florida’s MFA program and is currently pursuing a PhD in poetry at Ohio University.

Constellations, I think—one law keeps us from moving closer. Another says we have to share a hemisphere. We’re not famous, though. We don’t have real names. Try to see us, we’re hidden by clouds. In the attempt to narrate the self, experience is always fixed yet moving, shining yet obscured. The dilemma and the blessing is that change happens so quickly: we pass between versions of self in the blink of an eye. In “There’s Been a Miscommunication about My Past Snake Skins,” Green writes, I didn’t intend them for the town archive. They don’t apply, now, to this me. I intended to slip away and down a riverbank and through a log, or a tire. Some reeds— I left so many skins. Don’t gather them. Don’t come looking. I’m in a field, feeling ready to be a different snake. Snake 17. Gathering the skins—connecting points in time like stars in a constellation—is impossible. We can attempt to interpret our experience and claim memory as truth, but we are always already in the midst of becoming a new snake. A poem tries to hold on while the Protean self turns first into an electric eel,

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Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

Summer Exhibitions 2016

I C A ≤≥ MIAMI

LAURA LIMA IDA APPLEBROOG RENAUD JEREZ SUSAN TE KAHURANGI KING Free Admission! icamiami.org

ICA Miami Summer Exhibitions are funded through the Knight Contemporary Art Fund at The Miami Foundation