free

EXHIBITION

A S P EC I A L C U R ATO R I A L P R OJ EC T W I T H
R I R K R I T T I R AVA N I J A :
THE WAY THINGS GO

Arin Rungjang, Golden Teardrop (installation view), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture

O N V I E W F E B 1 3 – M AY 2 4
YBCA .ORG/RIRKRIT

EXHIBITION CONTROL: TECHNOLOGY IN CULTURE

See paintings by many of the greatest artists from the Renaissance to the 20th century—
including El Greco, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Gauguin, and Picasso—in an exclusive
NATE BOYCE:
West Coast presentation of 55 works from the National Galleries of Scotland.
P O LY S C R O L L
MARCH 7–MAY 31, 2015 This exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Galleries of Scotland. Presenting ON VIEW JAN 23–APR 5
Sponsors: Cynthia Fry Gunn and John A. Gunn, and Diane B. Wilsey. Director’s Circle: The Estate of Merrill and Hedy
HERBST EXHIBITION GALLERIES Thruston. President’s Circle: San Francisco Auxiliary of the Fine Arts Museums. Curator’s Circle: The Bernard Osher
[Link]/NATE-BOYCE

de Young
Foundation and the Ednah Root Foundation. Patron’s Circle: Phoebe Cowles and Robert Girard, and George and Marie
Hecksher. Supporter’s Circle: Andy and Carrick McLaughlin and Mrs. George Hopper Fitch. The exhibition is supported
by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. NATE BOYCE, POLYSCROLL II, 2015
HD VIDEO , COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ALTMAN SIEGEL GALLERY

Golden Gate Park • [Link] Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians (detail), 1899. Oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS • [Link] • [Link]
BRUCE CONNER: SOMEBODY ELSE’S PRINTS CROWN POINT PRESS
20 hawthorne Street San Francisco CA 94105 415-974-6273 [Link]
FEBRUARY 7 – MAY 16, 2015

Tom Marioni, Walking Drawing (Drypoint), 2006.

what's in a line?
featuring prints by
richard diebenkorn, Joel fisher, al held, anish kapoor,
bertrand lavier, sol lewitt, tom marioni, Julie mehretu,
dorothy napangardi, nathan oliveira,
markus raetz and pat steir

wayne thiebaud
EIghT NEW ETChINgS

San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints is organized by the Ulrich Museum of Art,
Wichita State University. The ICA presentation is generously supported by Applied in the GalleRY thROUGh MaRCh 6, 2015
560 South First Street Materials Foundation, The Mercy and Roger Smullen Family Trust, John Green and
Martin Fox, and members of the ICA Directors Circle.
San Jose, CA 95113
Bombhead, 2002, Pigmented inkjet print on paper, 32 x 25 inches, Courtesy
408.283.8155, [Link] Magnolia Editions, Oakland, CA ©2014 Conner Family Trust, San Francisco /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Tom Sachs, Model One, 1999. Mixed media. 32 x 41 x 14 inches. Collection of Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons, New York. Image courtesy Tom Sachs Studio.

Also on view at the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria:

Jones Center Betty and Edward Marcus

JJ PEET: BRAIN to HAND to OBJECT_
John Grade: Canopy Tower
700 Congress Avenue Sculpture Park / Laguna Gloria
Austin, Texas 78701 3809 West 35th Street
[Link] Austin, Texas 78703

Tom Sachs Exhibition Support: Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons, Tom Healy and Fred P. Hochberg, Hotel Saint Cecilia, Hotel San Jose, Jeffrey’s, This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic
Nancy and Dr. Robert Magoon, The Moody Foundation, The Nightingale Code Foundation, John and Amy Phelan, Vision Fund Leaders and Contributors Development Department, a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts, and by an award
Museum Support: Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, Bank of America, Oxford Commercial, Pedernales Cellars, Vinson & Elkins LLP from the National Endowment for the Arts. Art Works.
 Jos de Gruyter Harald
Thys gallery,
Nairy Baghramian
“Off Broadway”
. . . & Joan Jonas
still .*

Come see sculptural work of artist

BJ Las Ponas
showing exclusively at Battersea for a limited time
Starting March 20th, 2015

[Link] 1.21/ 2015 – 4.18/ 2015 saN FraNCisCo

415.553.8500 297 KANSAS STREET SAN FRANCISCO, CA [Link]
 SFAQ // TABLE OF CONTENTS // ISSUE 19 // FEBRUARY - APRIL // 2015
COLUMNS FEATURES
An Internet of Wars: Military Networks and Network On The Despised Art Of Thomas Kinkade
Militarization By John Rapko
By Ingrid Burrington 56-57
36-39
Ulay: Act III
WeChat By Leigh Markopoulos
By Ben Valentine 58-65
40-41
Mark McCloud
Where Is The Risk In Digital Art? In Conversation With V. Vale
By Nicholas O’Brien 66-73
42-43
Richard Hell
Eco-Poetics And The Visual Art Of John Cage In Conversation With Dean Dempsey
By John Rapko 74-77
44-45
Bill Daniel
On Point 2.05 // The Hustle Of Language In Conversation With Jocko Weyland
By Mark Van Proyen 78-83
46-47
Petra Collins
Three Perspectives On The Globalization Of The Art In Conversation With Pat McCarthy
Market 84-91
By John Zarobell
48-49 Lee Mingwei: Life, Memories, And The Art Of
Participation
Journeys From & To A Destination Nation By Gianni Simone
By Anthony Choice-Diaz 92-95
50-52
Nicolas Lobo
Your Gaze Hits The Side In Conversation With Courtney Malick
By Jessica Hoffmann 96-99
53-55
Image: Marci Washington, From the Tomb, 2013, watercolor, gouache on paper, 18x13 inches Charles Linder
In Conversation With Paul Karlstrom
100-103

Dave Hickey
MARCI WASHINGTON In Conversation With Jarrett Earnest (Part One)
104-107
SFAQ [PROJECTS] ISSUE 19
at VOLTA NY Tom Sachs Henry Martin
(Pullout poster, for more information visit [Link]) In Conversation With John Held, Jr.
March 5-8, 2015 Amy Franceschini
108-113

Pier 90 (Pullout poster, for more information visit [Link]) Name-Dropping Stories Off The Top Of My Head
By Tom Marioni
Ulay 114-117
(Centerfold, page 64-65)

Zine Reviews
Willa Köerner By Lele Saveri
(Print page 32-33 + online) 118
Kadist Art Foundation + SFAQ
Page 16: (letter from) The Secession Sessions, a project by Eric Baudelaire.

1639 Market Street 415.982.3292 info@[Link] [Link]

 MASTHEAD A Friendly Note From The Publisher:

Publisher & Editor in Chief This April marks the beginning of the 5th year of SFAQ . . . and

CAIO FONSECA
Andrew McClintock
things are about to get weird.
Managing Editor (Print and Online)
Peter Cochrane
Because we are an art magazine we’ve decided to start break-
Editors (Print and Online) ing all the rules we’ve been pretending to follow the last few
Lucy Kasofsky, Peter Dobey, and Lauren Marsden
years. We hope it confuses you, we hope you get scared, we
Editorial Assistants hope we piss some of you off, too. But we think you will be su-
Mario Ayala and Alexandra Toledo
per stoked on what we are about to do. While we don’t really
Staff Writers know what that is, we know we’re going to blow your minds.
Peter Cochrane, Peter Dobey, Jarrett Earnest, John Held, Jr., Lucy Kasofsky

Contributing Writers Equality, change, and understanding are in. Hate is out. So
Ingrid Burrington, Anthony Choice-Diaz, Dean Dempsey, Jarrett Earnest, John Held, Jr., Jessica
Hoffmann, Paul Karlstrom, Courtney Malick, Tom Marioni, Leigh Markopoulos, Pat McCarthy, is Artforum . . . that shit’s boring. I mean, who actually reads it
Nicholas O’Brien, Mark Van Proyen, John Rapko, Lele Saveri, Gianni Simone, V. Vale, Ben Valentine, these days anyway?
Jocko Weyland, John Zarobell

Online Writers Get with it. It’s amazing we can all see each other at all. So why
Lani Asher, Bianca Buillen, Cathy Fairbanks, Gladys-Katherina Hernando, Merideth Hillbrand, Kelly
Inouye, Leora Lutz, Courtney Malick, Shana Beth Mason, Ariel Rosen, Robert Strang, Sarah Thi- not do some good in the world?
bault, Johanna Thompson

Contributing Photographers Let’s get crazy. We out here.

Blaise Adilon, Roberta Bayley, Dean Dempsey, Fabrizio Garghetti, David Godlis, Bob Gruen, Kevin
Ho, Anita Kan, Lee Studio, Lila Lee, Hartmut Rekort, Kate Simon, Berty Skuber, William S. Wilson

Images Courtesy of Andrew McClintock

Petra Collins, Creative Time, Crown Point Press, Bill Daniel, Gallery 16, Gallery Diet, Gallery Wendi
Norris, La Casa del Tunel, Uwe Frank Laysiepen, Nicolas Lobo, Henry Martin, Mark McCloud, Mori
Art Museum, Muistardeaux, the Sparling Family, Ben Valentine Publisher / Editor in Chief, SFAQ
Thanks
Jamie Alexander, Janette Andrews, Paule Anglim, Alexandre Arrechea, Alan Bamberger, Rena
Bransten, SIA Club, David Coffin, Tina Conway, Leigh Cooper, Charles Desmarais, Jeff Gunder-
son, Peter Kirkeby, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Lauren Leasure, Kent Long, Tom Marioni, Pat McCa-
rthy, Jesse McClintock, Carlo McCormick, Barry McGee, Austin McManus, Guy Overfelt, Jo-
seph del Pesco, Max La Rivière-Hedrick, Tom Sachs, Jocko Weyland, SFAQ Contributors, and Supporters:
everyone who supports us through advertising, subscriptions, and donations.
SFAQ Advisors::
We support unions. End U.S. Imperialism and it's never-ending wars. Close Gitmo. Stop the Key- Nion McEvoy , Kevin King, Eric Rodenbeck, John Sanger, Rivkahbeth Medow,
stone XL pipeline. Stop the bailouts of big business and banks. Increase minimum wage. Stop the
Michele Meany
deportation of immigrants. Stop the drone war. End the NSA. End the abuse of our rights by the
FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security. Liberate all oppressed people. Demand equal rights for all wom-
en and minorities. End the Israeli occupation of Palestine. End the war in Syria. End the Russian SFAQ Friends Circle:
occupation of Ukraine and stop the new Cold War with Russia before it begins. Support Edward Sue Kubly, Art Now International, Anonymous, Kadist Art Foundation, Adam Swig
Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and all whistle blowers and political activists that put
their lives at stake for our freedom. Stop Right Wing militant groups in the U.S. Stop police brutality
of minorities and homeless. Stop the Supreme Court from selling our democracy to big business. For information on how to join one of these supporting groups please contact SFAQ.
End the Drug War. Stop ignoring global warming.

This issue is dedicated to everyone that has ever lost their lives to unjust police killings
#handsupdontshoot

CONTACT
Publisher: andrewm@[Link]
Advertising: advertise@[Link]
Listings: listings@[Link]
Distribution: distribution@[Link]

SFAQ LLC
441 O’Farrell St.
San Francisco, CA, 94102, USA
[Link]

All Material © 2015 SFAQ LLC

Printed on 60% post-consumer papers in Hunters Point, SF.
SFAQ uses environmentally friendly soy-based inks.
Designed in the Tenderloin, San Francisco.

Help the good fight: Cover Image:

[Link] Petra Collins photographed
[Link]
[Link]
by Ryan McGinley, 2014. From
[Link] the Yearbook series. Courtesy
[Link] of the artist and Team (Gallery,
Inc.), New York.
2390 C 4th Street, Berkeley Ca. 94710 p. 510-559-2088 [Link] info@[Link]
Caio Fonseca: Ultra Red, Color aquatint and spitbite aquatint etching with chine collé and strings. Paper size: 37 1/2” x 37”
CONTRIBUTORS
Ingrid Burrington works on an island off the coast of Nicholas O’Brien is a net-based artist, curator, and writ- Lele Saveri was born in Rome in 1980. He studied pho-
America. More at [Link]. er. His work has appeared across the U.S. and internation- tography at the University of Greenwich in London. Be-
ally, including venues in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York sides working as a freelance photographer for various
Anthony Choice-Diaz is a San Francisco Bay Ar- City, Mexico, Berlin, London, and Italy. He has also been international magazines such as Vogue, l’Uomo Vogue,
ea-based public intellectual, historical scholar, communi- featured in several publications, including ARTINFO, Art F Rolling Stone, Vice, GQ, I-D, and others, he worked as
ty organizer, and indigenous activist who researches and City, Sculpture Magazine, Dazed Digital, The Creators Proj- photo editor for Vice magazine from 2007 to 2011. Since
writes about social movements in the Americas. ect, DIS, ilikethisart, Frieze d/e, The Brooklyn Rail, and The 2012 he has been running 8-Ball Zine Fair, a biannual fair
New York Times. He is currently living in Brooklyn working dedicated to self-publishing, always happening in differ-
Peter Cochrane values education, particularly of the as a visiting artist professor and gallery director for the ent pool-halls in NYC (and recently also in San Francisco).
public sort, but believes every ideology has its limits. Department of Digital Art at Pratt Institute. More info can Since 2013, Lele has also run and curated Muddguts, a
When you hit that ceiling, break through. Educate your- be found at [Link]. project space in Brooklyn, NY, where he lives and works.
self. Watch Youtube videos. Check out technical manuals
from the library. Get lost in the hyperlink black hole that is Pat McCarthy is a zine maker and sculptor. In Brooklyn, Gianni Simone escaped from his home country in 1992
Wikipedia. Read SFAQ. Never stop learning. Access to in- he keeps and flies pigeons from coops on his studio’s roof. and found refuge in Japan, where he promptly found a
formation must always be free. If the road is blocked, find The adventures of the birds and other projects are articu- job teaching people how to shout HELP! and avoid being
an alternate path. And if you get frustrated, pet a dog for lated in the zines Born to Kill and Skirts. robbed on foreign buses. Since 1997 he has been un-
a while. healthily active in the mail art network, unleashing on the
Leigh Markopoulos is a writer, arts manager, and the unsuspecting public, among other things, the Treatise of
Dean Dempsey is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based chair of the graduate program in curatorial practice at Cal- Pataphysical Anatomy and the international fake political
in New York City. Represented by BOSI Contemporary ifornia College of the Arts. Formerly the director of Rena campaign poster project. He has recently opened the
New York, his paintings, photographs, and videos have Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, Markopoulos came to Stickerman Museum—Tokyo Annex. When not running
been exhibited worldwide, including Germany, Italy, En- San Francisco to take up the position of deputy director after his two kids and from his wife, he is usually busy
gland, Pakistan, and throughout North America. He is in of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Prior making zines, writing for high- and low-brow magazines,
the permanent collections of the Kinsey Institute, En Foco, to that she was exhibition organizer at the Serpentine and exploring Tokyo.
and the Crocker Art Museum. He has also been described Gallery in London and at the Hayward Gallery. She has
as a verbally abusive selfish egotistical drunken maniac, curated numerous exhibitions, including, most recent- Ben Valentine is an independent writer who studies
and in high school was voted most likely to contract a ve- ly, Love is a Stranger at Creative Growth Art Center in how tech, creativity, and politics intersect. Ben works with
nereal disease (citations needed). His debut feature film, Oakland, and has organized over 50 exhibitions ranging The Civic Beat and has written or spoken for SXSW, Salon,
Candy Apple, will be released later this year. from solo shows of the work of Richard Artschwager, Dan Hyperallergic, YBCA, and VICE, to name a few. Ben also
Flavin, and Brice Marden to major group exhibitions such helped organize the World’s First Tumblr Symposium with
Peter Dobey is an artist and Lacanian psychoanalyst as Monuments for the U.S.A. and IRREDUCIBLE: Contem- Hyperallergic, is an Internet Archive’s Tumblr resident, and
raised in the exact epicenter of the Loma Prieta earth- porary Short Form Video. was formerly a Tumblr Fellow for the 2014 Personal De-
quake in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The SFAQ foreign mocracy Forum. Ben travels.
correspondent and editor divides his time between the Paul J. Karlstrom, former west coast regional director
Bay Area, Mexico City, and Paris. of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, is the ed- V. Vale is an editor, writer-interviewer, historian, photog-
itor of On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, rapher, and pianist. He was the publisher-editor of the
Jarrett Earnest is an artist, writer, and co-director of 1900–1950 (UC Press) and a co-editor of Asian American 1977–79 zine SEARCH & DESTROY launched with $100
1:1, a collaborative that took the form of an art space in Art: A History, 1860–1970. He is coauthor of Turning the each from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He writes regularly Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920–1956 and author and published at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
on contemporary art and pursues the interview as a dis- of Raimonds Staprans: Art of Tranquility and Turbulence. For Vale, punk provided a launching pad for cultural-an-
tinct, critical form, publishing long, innovative interviews Most recently Karlstrom wrote Peter Selz, Sketches of a thropological explorations, including industrial/noise mu-
with artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Richard Tuttle, and Life in Art (UC Press). sic, the writings of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs,
Nayland Blake, among others. He is presently at work on feminism, plus “Incredibly Strange” filmmaking and music,
a book of writing and drawing exploring the aesthetics of Willa Köerner is an artist, writer, curator, and creative which he has chronicled with the RE/SEARCH series of
intimacy. All of his disparate projects engage the intersec- strategist working to bring art and technology together publications founded in 1980. The RE/SEARCH series
tions of performance, poetry, the visual arts, and politics. in meaningful ways. Recently, she has worked as a found- have become the equivalent of a countercultural bible:
ing member of Gray Area Art + Technology’s Cultural essential reading not only for punks but artists, musicians,
Jessica Hoffmann is a coeditor/copublisher of make/ Incubator program, and on numerous art-focused, digi- and cultural fire-starters. Vale recently gave a lecture tour
shift. Her writing has appeared in numerous publica- tal engagement projects for organizations such as The in Europe, including a graphic design workshop at Riet-
tions, including ColorLines, the Los Angeles Review of Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Electric veld Academy, which produced a 64-page SEARCH &
Books, GOOD, and The Scholar and the Feminist. Objects, and SFMOMA. In 2014, Willa spoke at SXSW on DESTROY 2014 publication in just 3 days.
the Internet and social media’s affect on curatorial prac-
John Held, Jr. was recently included in the NY MoMA tice, and she looks forward to exploring this field further Jocko Weyland is the author of The Answer is Nev-
exhibition Analog Network, curated exhibitions in San in a new curatorial position at Kickstarter. Willa has writ- er—A Skateboarder’s History of the World (Grove Press,
Francisco and Phoenix, lectured at New York University, ten for Art21, The Creators Project, Complex Magazine, 2002), The Powder (Dashwood Books, 2011) and Eating
traveled to Japan and Italy, published significant essays and SFMOMA’s Open Space, to name a few. Her work Glass, a collection of short stories forthcoming from 1980
on Japanese and Latin American Mail Art, and inter- has been noted in TIME, Mashable, The Creators Project, Editions. He has written for The New York Times, Aparta-
viewed poet and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti. BLOUIN ArtInfo, and beyond. mento, Vice, Cabinet, and other publications. Weyland is
represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York and
Courtney Malick lives in Los Angeles where she works Mark Van Proyen is an artist and art critic based in lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he is curator at the Muse-
as a writer, independent curator, and private art adviser, northern California. His writings have appeared in Art in um of Contemporary Art, Tucson.
focusing on video, sculpture, performance, and installa- America, Art Issues, CAA Reviews, New Art Examiner, Bad
tion. She received her MA from the Center for Curatorial Subjects, Art Practical, and Square Cylinder. John Zarobell is assistant professor of international
Studies at Bard College in 2011. She has curated exhibi- studies and program chair of European studies at the
tions and performances in both New York and San Fran- John Rapko is a Bay Area-based philosopher whose University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the posi-
cisco. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, SFAQ, V work is primarily in the fields of art philosophy, art his- tions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum
Magazine, and is a founding contributor of Dis Magazine. tory, and ethics. He has taught and lectured in several of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia
Malick has also worked as studio manager for photogra- art schools, colleges, and universities in the Bay Area, Museum of Art. He is a regular contributor to periodicals,
pher Jane Wattenberg; curatorial assistant at LACE for including UC Berkeley and Stanford, as well as in South has written for numerous exhibition catalogues, and has
the exhibition L.A. Goes Live, part of the Getty’s Pacific America and Europe. He currently teaches art history at published in Art History, Nineteenth-Century Art World-
Standard Time; assistant director at Broadway 1602 and the College of Marin and ethics and the philosophy of art wide, and the Berkeley Review of Latin-American Studies.
Daniel Reich Gallery; as an archivist at Vito Acconci Stu- at CCA. He has published academic writing in the Journal His first book Empire of Landscape was published in 2010,
dio; and as curatorial assistant to Larry List for the exhi- of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aes- and he is currently working on his next: Art and the Global
bition The Art of Chess at the Reykjavik Museum. In 2013 thetics, and the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Economy.
she was commissioned to write an essay for the scholarly art criticism in Artweek and at [Link]. He disdains
online journal [Link] in association with California In- the haughtiness of the art world, but finds it increasingly
stitute of the Arts, as well as contributing text to the cata- amusing. As for education, he received his Ph.D from the
log for the Palazzo Preckham exhibition at the 55 th Venice University of California, Berkeley, but for his real education
Biennale. he owes his influence to Mark Van Proyen, whose legacy
has helped him to realize that he is not the most cynical
person on Earth.
 BLEED: 13.25”
TRIM: 12.75”

Image: The Armory Show 2015 Commissioned Artist, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Tape Echo (detail), 2013-2014.
APRIL 30–
MAY 3, 2015
FORT MASON
FESTIVAL PAVILION

[Link]
 JANUARY 30–FEBRUARY 28, 2015

M. Lamar
Mapplethorpe’s Whip
From Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche, Part Two, Overseer, 2014
HD video, sound, 10:29 minutes

W A LT E R A N D M c B E A N

[Link]/MLAMAR
GALLERIES
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133 San Francisco Art Institute @sanfranciscoartinstitute @SFAIevents, #SFAI
 David Mitchell: Boundaries
January 29–March 12, 2015

HANG ART
567 Sutter Street | Second Floor | San Francisco | CA | 94102 | 415.434.4234 | [Link]

Jenny E. Balisle, JBD.9.13.22828 (detail), ink on paper, 60” x 44”, 2013

“[Link] not make metaphors, as conventional photographers unavoidably
strives for an impossible transparency... David Mitchell, a photographer
unique among his contemporaries.
— Lyle Rexer
”
critic, curator, & columnist for Photograph Magazine

The Dryansky Gallery

2120 Union Street, San Francisco, CA 94123
(415) 932-9302
[Link] Hello My Name Is Transit Ordering
AB 202, 2014, Archival Pigment Print 48.73 x 40 inches edition of 3 67 x 55 inches edition of 2 Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 11–5pm David DeFelice | David Lippenberger Jenny E. Balisle Fain Hancock | Pablo Manga
Kirsten Tradowsky March 1 - 15 Anthony May | Marcia Stuermer
February 1 - 15 Reception: March 5, 6-8pm April 1 - 15
Reception: February 5, 6-8pm Reception: April 2, 6-8pm
 ALTERNATIVE CONTEMPORANEITY / TAZ
curated by Richard Haden

150
Paintings,
Sculptures
and Museum of Contemporary Art // North Miami
Art Objects March 21, 2015 - July 1 2015
created by [Link]
100
Artists from
31 countries

[Link] IMAGE // Charles Linder, Ghostang, 2005 - Present // Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, SF and La Casa Del Tunel, Tijuana
A PRIVATE COLLECTION AT LAKE TAHOE, NV
 SCENE ONE
Historical Fictions

Paintings and Sculpure by Zachary Roberts

The Vorres Gallery proudly presents the work of artist Zachary Roberts. This collection of original
paintings, mixed-media sculptures and installation will open February 1, 2015 at the Presidio Heights
gallery. Join us for an artist reception February 7, from 5:30 - 8:30 p.m. The exhibition will run
through Saturday, March 7, 2015.

3681 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA 94118

[Link]
MARCH - APRIL
415.423.4345
MARK WOLFE CONTEMPORARY

Mark Benson ≈
It’s about promotion & name recognition
1938
Jan. 16th - Feb. 14th, 2015
TOM MARIONI
SIA
FBI
CIA
KGB
2015
UFO In 1938 the Golden Gate Bridge was built.
In 1938 Flax Artists’ Materials opened its doors.
ART Unlike the bridge, that closed for a weekend this January,
Flax has never been closed.
And that’s our plan for the next 75 years.

EVER GOLD GALLERY // SAN FRANCISCO Work hard and advertise | [Link]
See Off the Top of My Head Born and raised in San Francisco. And here to stay.
MON–SAT 9:30am–7pm 1699 MARKET 415.552.2355
Check out the all new [Link] today
SPECULATIVE FUTURISM belief in the ability of art and design to affect future change. Creativity can empower
us with the tool of speculation—the magical ability to peer into possible alternate re-
alities using the combined forces of critical thinking and imagination. As Dunne and
Speculative Futurism is a creative critical thinking project manifesting in concise
statements of fears and hopes for the future, using the Internet as a tool to catalyze
and propel the conversation.
enlightenment created by a society in which each and every human feels supported
and embraced. In the ideal future, artists are intrinsically valued because their ability
to generate creative ideas sets them apart from machines. Greed is abolished due to
An Experimental + Collaborative Raby write, “Speculating is based on imagination, the ability to literally imagine other an abundance of clean resources. Open-source technologies help us create sustain-
worlds and alternatives.” Using what we know now, we can fly forward, creatively To set this project in motion, I invited a group of creative professionals—artists, able, shared solutions for clean energy, food, medicine, and shelter. When everyone is
SFAQ [Project] By Willa Köerner anticipating what might (or should) come to pass. writers, curators, technologists, publishers, and museum workers—to imagine two well taken care of, fights over power and control dwindle. We create a truly equitable
potential futures. In one, conditions have changed for the worse and our species and sustainable society. Humans and the world thrive.
When we think of the future, it can seem impossibly far away. Looming like a storm Working to articulate our hopes and fears for the future can be an informative and is struggling; in the other, improvements have been made and circumstances are
cloud on the horizon, it rumbles and rolls, anxiously anticipated yet only loosely pre- constructive exercise, especially if these hopes and fears work to catalyze action. generally better than they are now. The original group of participants was invited to While speculating about the future isn’t synonymous with affecting change for the
pared for. What if there was a way to reverse-engineer that daunting cloud, and de- “Probably the purest form of fictional world is the utopia . . . The idea of utopia is far conceptualize these futures in any way that felt natural based on their experienc- future, I’m hopeful that the mere act of pinning down our hopes and fears can be
cide for ourselves which type of sky we might cast overhead? more interesting when used as a stimulus to keep idealism alive, not as something to es, either through the very specific lens of their creative profession, or on a grander empowering and useful. As H.G. Wells is known to have said, “The only true measure
try to make real but as a reminder of the possibility of alternatives, as somewhere to scale that took the entire world into account. They were also invited to think of “the of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have
Since H. G. Wells published Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific aim for rather than build.” According to Dunne and Raby, being idealistic about how future” in whatever way made sense to them, be it a few months from now or a hun- been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made
Progress Upon Human Life and Thought: An Experiment in Prophecy in 1901—and we hope the future could look can help us think concretely about where we should dred years off. Either way, they would need to decide on a timeline and an approach of ourselves on the other.” When we have something to look forward to, perhaps we
probably earlier—humans have been captivated by the desire to anticipate how the be aiming and focusing our efforts in the present. In the same way, imagining the fu- to conceiving of “the future” as something concrete and imaginable rather than fun- will be more motivated to take the necessary steps towards creating a world where
world will look in the future. Emerging as a field of study in the 1960s, “future studies” ture as a derailed, calamitous dystopia can also be useful. If we ignore warning signs damentally abstract. our hopes, rather than our fears, will flourish.
is a branch of research focused on postulating on potential futures and examining and forge ahead without critiquing our existing behaviors in light of how they could
the conditions and mentalities that could affect what comes to pass. Interestingly, evolve and dismantle us, there’s little hope for us as a species. Using their imagined dystopian-ish and utopian-ish futures, each invited participant
future studies (also referred to as futurology and futurism) blurs the lines between created two tweet-sized responses articulating his or her hopes and fears about
In many cases, works of science fiction function in a speculative sense by crafting where we’re heading. As you’ll notice if you read through the nearly 50 responses
art, science, and history, coalescing in the gray area created by the nuances of the
fourth dimension, i.e., the passing of time. distinctive narratives about strange new realities that could believably come to pass. I collected (featured in this spread’s illustration), many of the collected hopes and
PARTICIPATE: How do you see the future unfolding?
The best sci-fi is haunting and thrilling because, while the plots are imaginative, we fears share similar characteristics:
I invite you to add your own HOPES and FEARS tweets to the Speculative Futurism
Futurists of the early 20th century glorified the possibilities of the future as they saw recognize the inherent behaviors and situations as familiar, as possible. While many
project by using the #SpecFuturism hashtag.
the power and speed of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs as invigo- sci-fi stories are created to be consumed as entertainment, it seems there is always We FEAR the effect that technology will have on our creativity, individuality, and over-
rating catapults capable of launching society above and apart from its glum past. To a grain of truth to what they’re depicting—think 1984, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, all humanity. We worry that feelings of apathy will escalate to a point where we’re help-
Visit this project online to see it unfold on Twitter at @SpecFuturism and on Tum-
them, the future was everything. By contrast, today the concept of “the future” has Black Mirror, and even The X-Files. We read and watch and we digest the strange- less to act on a number of issues, from preventing climate change to advocating for
blr at [Link].
almost become cliché. While institutions such as the Long Now Foundation (estab- ness that could come to pass. In some cases we become impervious to these po- social justice and equality. We’re afraid that capitalism may run out of control in a fu-
lished 1996), the Singularity University (founded 2008), and programs such as Cali- tential futures as the initial shock is absorbed and the horror fades to acceptance. ture society where technology has brought us further away from worldwide equality.
Thank you to the invited group of featured Speculative Futurism participants, whose
fornia College for the Arts’s new strategic foresight MBA prove that the future is still But what if we were more accustomed to using fictional stories about the future to We’re fearful of the fate of the arts, and can imagine an unfortunate future where art
HOPES and FEARS are featured in this spread’s illustration:
very much a prominent topic of study and discussion, it seems that we’re no longer catalyze actual debate? To inspire action? To change the evolution of culture? and artists become irrelevant and obsolete. We’re worried that we’re a fundamentally
quite as energized by thoughts of the future. Perhaps we have become exhausted, selfish, lazy, and wasteful species, and that our dependency on technology will cata-
A. Will Brown (@awillbrown), Alex Teplitzky (@alexteplitzky), Anna Muessig (@annabike),
accustomed to our ever-expanding dependency on technologies and acclimatized Inspired by the history of futurism and by a desire to create an antidote to our fu- lyze these characteristics in damning ways. If robots take our jobs and kill us off, we’re Annalee Newitz (@annaleen), Anthony Discenza (@anthonydiscenza), Barry Threw (@bar-
to the contemporary condition of information overload. With so much sensational- ture-focused malaise, I have initiated Speculative Futurism, an experimental project worried that it will still be our fault, too. rythrew), Bean Gilsdorf (@beangilsdorf), Ben Valentine (@bennnyv), Charles Cabbage (@
ization, there’s little left to champion. asking participants to use concrete experiences and existing knowledge to theo- ccabbage2012), Daniel Morgan (@danielmorgan), Dorothy Santos (@deedottiedot), Gregory
rize about what lies ahead. In line with past generations of future speculators, I be- On a lighter note, we have high hopes. We can imagine great possibilities unfolding: Stock (@theradiantbaby), Guinevere de la Mare (@zenguin), Jeff Tidwell (@prepop), Jillian
Recently I’ve pondered how and why we might invigorate our attempts to engineer lieve we can put creative energy to good use by asking ourselves to imagine fiction- Steinhauer (@jilnotjill), Kara Q. Smith (@karaqsmith), Keir Winesmith (@drkeir), Ken Eklund
the future, especially from a cultural perspective. Why do we feel stuck with the way al yet possible alternate futures, as these conjectures then allow us a more tangible, We HOPE that, deep down, we are benevolent creatures who will eventually work (@writerguygames), Man Bartlett (@manbartlett), Morehshin Allahyari (@morehshin), Neal
concrete opportunity to take action in building the world we hope to inhabit. out a way to use technology to solve problems rather than create them. We aspire Stimler (@nealstimler), Olof Mathé (@olofster), Paolo Salvagione (@salvagione), Rachel Craft
things are when there’s so much that could be done? In reading Anthony Dunne and (@rachcraft), Sara Thacher (@thacher), Sarah Bailey Hogarty (@sbhogarty), Sheetal Pra-
Fiona Raby’s excellent book, Speculative Everything, I have been inspired by their to bring access to quality education to everyone, and we can imagine a new era of
japati (@sdp80), Tim Belonax (@timbelonax), and Zoë Salditch (@zoesalditch).
 SFAQ Issue 19 Columns
An Internet Of Wars: On Point 2.05 // The Hustle Of Language
Military Networks And Network Militarization Mark Van Proyen, 46-47
Ingrid Burrington, 36-39
The tale of how dudes making idiots of themselves on Jackass (and laughing all the
Maps and grids unfurl in the mind when attempting to visualize the Internet—the way to the bank) made its impact on performance art might go something like this:
wires that run through tubes underground and undersea and the snaking pathways “I mean, if Chris Burden can get famous by having a guy shoot him in a gallery, then I
from great service hubs dotted around the globe into the walls of our homes. But should be able to get famous by falling off of my skateboard over a bed of hot coals,
our Internet may be very different from their Internet: the streams of data running right?” Theatricality? Absurdist cabaret? The physical incarnation of language?
between governmental bodies and private contractors. What are the implications Using examples set by Michael Peppe and the work of the Muistardeaux Collec-
when one of these service providers, contracted by a military organization, is com- tive, Van Proyen looks at opposing uses of language-as-performance through hy-
plicit in the very real warfare that exists at the long arms of these networks? A distinc- per-constructed, timed, physical and vocal movements and the chaos that ensues
tion can no longer be made between the physical world and the one created by the from manic free association (read: social media). Choreography and spontaneity
Internet. How do we negotiate our involvement in the network of perpetual warfare? may have merged in this age of hyperactivity and the performative state of language
will continually evolve.
WeChat
Ben Valentine, 40-41 Three Perspectives On The Globalization Of The Art Market
John Zarobell, 48-49
Traveling through Asia, Ben Valentine found nearly every person he spoke with
using the Internet in ways the Western world has not much considered. Touted in One word will be etched as the epitaph for the 20th century: “globalization.” Some will
the West as a restrictive and oppressive space throttled by the chokehold of a com- sing its praise and some will denounce it as the keystone for the death of the living
munist government, social media in China has boomed through the use of WeChat. wage, local labor, and the epitome of capitalist greed. As the art world rests on the
Released in 2011, WeChat now boasts over 1.1 billion registered accounts with an shoulders of big business and big money—now inextricably tied to the web of com-
average of 65% of Chinese Internet users communicating through WeChat. An es- merce known as globalization—what aspects of the art market can be considered
timated 3 billion webpages are shared every day, apps and businesses are created good, bad, or ineffable? Who has profited from the meteoric expansion of the mar-
specifically for and within the program, and Tencent’s net profit (the parent company ket? Where would we be without the nearly 200 annual art fairs and 150 biennials
of WeChat) clocked in at 3.7 billion yuan (604 million dollars) in 2014. But governmen- that dot every country on the planet? Whether the status quo is or isn’t working for
tal censorship is still strict: political wordplay has recently been banned, real-name an arts economy, what are artist doing to envision actionable alternatives?
policies akin to Facebook’s have been instated, and any language against the gov-
ernment is strictly forbidden. Are social connections through codified messages Journeys From And To A Destination Nation
merely shouting into the void or building an affirming ecosystem of individuality? Anthony Choice-Diaz, 50-52

Where Is The Risk In Digital Art? Continuing his previous column The Hidden Story In The U.S. Immigration Debate
Nicholas O’Brien, 42-43 found in SFAQ 18, Anthony Choice-Diaz unearths the historical and contemporary
involvement of the United States in the brutality of Latin American wars, puppet gov-
“A work or product that is confronting something contentious in society or culture ernments, and the institutionalized barriers preventing immigration. As the United
can often be considered a risky endeavor for an artist at any level of their career.” States was founded on the principles of Manifest Destiny—that the expansion and
Nicholas O’Brien begins his column on the risks of making art in an economic sys- domination of the country was both inevitable and justified—total conquest took
tem has proven hostile to artists with a career-destroying maxim. Is new abstract 19th-century armies west and south to claim massive swaths of Mexican land by
painting flying off of gallery walls and creating record sales simply because it’s safe? force. For a country forged by the domination of other peoples, it appears a trajec-
As the National Endowment for the Arts revoked individualized funding due to mul- tory of war was laid with its foundation. “Today, some would argue, based upon the
tiple controversies from artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, masses in the streets protesting against the flagrant police murders of the nation’s
general institutional funding has by and large become devastatingly competitive Black population, that things haven’t changed all that much since 1864. I don’t pose
and safe. Even the international superstar Marina Abramović recently turned to this notion here flippantly: to understand the contemporary immigration drama one
Kickstarter to fund her institute for art. Are crowd-funding and venture capital—hot must understand that perpetual war is a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy, which has
words in the start-up tech economy—methods of funding that should apply towards created a de facto refugee crisis continent wide.”
the creation of digital art? Without risk we shift lazily and laterally but never grow.
Your Gaze Hits The Side
Eco-Poetics And The Visual Art Of John Cage Jessica Hoffmann, 53-55
John Rapko, 44-45 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, by way of Beyoncé’s 2014 mega-hit ***Flawless, cut
through the polarized sexes like a hot knife through butter. After Beyoncé tells
During his time lecturing at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, John
us that she’s not “just his little wife” (and to “bow down bitches, bow, bow down
Rapko made penetrating inquiries attempting to understand contemporary art.
bitches”) and before repeating that what-the-fuck-ever she and all women are
These public conversations were collected and recorded into the 2009 book Logro,
Fracaso, Aspiración: Tres Intentos de Entender el Arte Contemporáneo (Achieve- doing is flawless, Adichie ends her 1:24-long spoken clip by defining the most
ment, Failure, Aspiration: Three Attempts to Understand Contemporary Art). Using contentious word to divide contemporary society: “Feminist: the person who
the dogmatism John Cage applied to his sonic masterpieces as a lens to access believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” This is a sim-
and unravel the prints he made for over 20 years at Crown Point Press in San Fran- ple notion. It is an elegant notion. It is firm and decisive and begs that we stand
cisco, Rapko seeks to understand the aspirations of contemporary artists that move together. It asks that you please sit down, shut up, and listen to those who have
them to create, to fail, and to push forward. In his words: “Without an appreciation been and are being marginalized, because inequality is insidious and mercurial. In
of not just Cage’s aims, but also of the motivations for those aims, it would be even 1982 NY MoMA exhibited a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois’s works marking
more difficult to understand why Déreau failed—that is, failed artistically as a satisfy- the first time a woman was permitted such recognition. In 2014 HOWDOYOU-
ing expression of an eco-poetics . . . [t]he value of folding in is honored, but not every- SAYYAMINAFRICAN? pulled their work from the Whitney Biennial “in protest of
thing is ready just yet to be used in some other configuration.” the inclusion of Joe Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford project, which centers around a
fictional black woman artist imagined by Scanlan, a white man.” Tracing the ways
in which art has relied on the existence of a normative center, Jessica Hoffmann
considers 12 ways that women artists continue to exist as “the other.”

34 [SFAQ Issue 19] 35 [SFAQ Issue 19]

An Internet Of Wars: Military Networks And Network Militarization

Ingrid Burrington The GIG’s networks span a wide spectrum of DoD

agencies. Many of these networks are under the ju-
tails, and how rapidly that infrastructure has grown in
the past fifteen years. One way to get a grasp of the
that they are not responsible for the use of commu-
nications secured to NSA standards. This attitude is
views what we call the open Internet as a weapons
system and/or potential existential threat because
matically shaped over 12 years by a billionaire mayor
who made his fortune on proprietary data services).
risdiction of the Defense Information Systems Agen- scale and scope of the DoD’s network infrastructure alternatively a show of bad faith or displays a horrify- it uses its own networks and systems as a weapons In 2010, New York City paid Northrop Grumman
“There’s no real separation between the real world
cy (DISA), a division of the DoD that began in 1960 as is to search through federal DISA contracts—in ad- ing lack of self-awareness on BT’s part. It also poses system to impose existential threats upon other na- $549 million to build NYCWiN, a citywide public safe-
and the Internet. What we’ve begun to see now is a
the Defense Communications Agency and created dition to cloud infrastructure support and operations the question of how far the line of complicity extends. tions, sectarian groups, and American citizens. ty broadband wireless network (ironically, the NYPD
militarization of that space.” —Jacob Appelbaum, in-
the original (and still in use) hotline system that direct- services, one finds RFPs for pulling fiber and building How much responsibility does any company or indi- has been slow to adopt for its own purposes but it’s
terview with VICE, 6 October 20131 Like the majority of the military-industrial complex,
ly connected the Oval Office to the Kremlin in 1963. submarine cables between military bases. vidual bear for merely laying the cable, merely writing proven pretty useful for other networked projects by
Two of the networks maintained by DISA are NIPR- the protocol, merely making the trains run on time? a lot of the DoD’s network infrastructure is built and the Department of Environmental Protection and the
I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Jacob
Net (Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network) One of those cable contracts was used by human maintained by contractors—not just telecoms like Parks Department). In 2012, the NYPD unveiled the
Appelbaum for a few reasons. One is that it succinctly
and SIPRNet (Secure Internet Protocol Router Net- rights organization Reprieve to argue that the com- And how exactly can any infrastructure provider not BT but also software and security companies. The Domain Awareness System, a massive partnership
acknowledges that the Internet is a spatial construct
work), networks briefly in the news following Chelsea pany British Telecom (BT) essentially facilitated an be complicit when the networks it is building have trope of military contractors diversifying to police with Microsoft that centralized surveillance feeds and
as much as it is a social one. For the past year, I’ve
Manning’s release of thousands of secret documents extrajudicial murder program. The contract, issued in been so explicitly weaponized? In a slide deck from departments became well worn following the mili- other networked services in the name of security. In
been trying to see the Internet—by which I mean
(downloaded from secure government networks, via 2012, is for a cable network connecting RAF Crough- a defense contractor about securing fiber infrastruc- tary drawdowns of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the fo- 2014, the NYPD began a $1.5 million pilot program to
I’ve been trying to find, map, and understand its infra-
SIPRNet) to Wikileaks. SIPRNet, NIPRNet, the Joint ton in the U.K. to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti—a mil- ture, I came across the following quote from a DISA cus is generally on tactical gear and military vehicles, implement ShotSpotter, a controversial networked
structure and, through that infrastructure, understand
Worldwide Intelligence Communications System itary base where the U.S. launched a number of its strategic plan written in 2006 (emphasis mine): “Our not the infrastructure emerging in the wake of net- sensor service that’s supposed to rapidly detect
the institutions and power systems that govern the
(JWICS), and several other secure, acronym-heavy drone strikes in Yemen. The contract specifies use Command & Control Networks are truly being trans- work-centric warfare. The concept of network-cen- gunshots in urban areas (and, as was discovered in
network.
networks make up the DISA’s Defense Information of KG-340 devices, which use NSA-specified en- formed into a weapon system as they get leveraged tric policing has so far been mainly associated with an incident in Massachusetts, can also detect and
Another reason I’ve been thinking about this quote Systems Network (DISN). The GIG connects DISN cryption algorithms. The GIG is the means by which more and more by our soldiers—and as such, need predictive policing research, but its rise has roots in record voices). Most recently, the NYPD has begun
is that I’ve been trying to imagine what a fully milita- to all the other networked systems that the military drones can talk to base stations, satellites, and the to be protected from the increasing focus and efforts both the acceleration of network-centric warfare and to implement pilot programs equipping police offi-
rized network space actually looks like. If an Internet operates—satellites, radios, drones. The GIG is men in distant military bases deciding whether or of our enemies to attack them using any & all means the emergence of the “smart city” paradigm. cers with networked body cameras. The body cam-
of Things is the series of protocols through which network-centric warfare made manifest: a protocol not to fire on civilians. While a lot of networked ob- . . .” This is to say that cyber war’s doctrine isn’t merely era program has its roots in the Floyd v. City of New
that allows for each constituent dataset, weapon, or jects make up the GIG, cables in the ground are the that the network is a means to a weaponized end, but Perhaps few cities were as adept at adopting net- York verdict that mandated dramatic changes to the
networked objects talk to each other, what is the
communications tool to be used as building blocks in backbone of this entire system. Essentially, Reprieve that the DoD apparently views its own networks as a work-centric law enforcement strategies as New York NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, but its implementa-
equivalent for networked defense systems? What
defense systems greater than the sum of their parts. made the argument that by providing that backbone, weapons system. In this context, the hyperbolic rhet- (which makes sense given that the city is basically tion has coincided with increasing demands across
defines an Internet of Wars? While trying to envision
BT was a participant in the maintenance of an illegal, oric of “cyber war” makes a lot more sense. The DoD the birthplace of data-driven policing and was dra- the country for police body cameras in the wake of
this network space, I realized that it technically al-
ready exists. The U.S. Department of Defense has its The idea of a government maintaining a parallel net- extrajudicial killing program. the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
own networks, and its own network of networks. In work for internal communications and documents
doesn’t sound that staggering (banks do this for The British government rejected Reprieve’s official
trying to understand what an Internet of Wars actual-
high-frequency trading, universities do it for research, legal complaint, arguing the contract alone could
ly looks like and how it shapes the Internet, you can’t
cities do it at a much smaller scale) until you realize not “show a specific link between the communica-
do much better than the history and constituent parts
the scale at which a superpower sovereign military tions service provided and the impacts of drone op-
of the Global Information Grid (GIG), the Department
operates, the kind of infrastructure such a scale en- erations.” BT argued that it merely builds the cables;
of Defense’s system that connects all of the military’s
networked systems to each other.

Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). [Link] Courtesy of the Internet.

36 [SFAQ Issue 19] Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). [Link] Courtesy of the Internet.
As more and more police departments rush to equip logging all cell phone data. Assuming the best of Wilson I was shocked at the number of actions that
their officers with body cameras, I think about that law enforcement, those other phones captured by had been happening simultaneously to the march I’d
DISA quote from 2006. The leading proprietor of cop a Stingray are collateral damage. Increasingly, it ap- attended.
body cameras in the United States right now is Tas- pears that they’re being used explicitly for dragnet
er, the company that manufactures the stun guns of surveillance in contexts like mass protests. Being This is where I continue to find hope in the face of an
the same name. When it actually comes to business within the reach of an IMSI catcher becomes enough increasingly militarized Internet—in localized models,
models, Taser’s camera setup is kind of brilliant. Cam- pretext for surveillance. Network-centric policing not in the contingency of emergent systems. The way in
eras are fairly cheap to manufacture and likely to get only militarizes network space, it also reinforces the which activists build and use networks is largely in op-
cheaper, but data storage needs will only metasta- militarization of physical space—and, returning to position to the hyper-centralized, panoptic model of
size. Taser isn’t actually selling cameras so much as Appelbaum’s quote, demonstrates the fallacy of as- network-centric warfare. Part of this is simply a mat-
they’re selling cloud storage for camera data and suming there’s a clear distinction between the two. ter of scale. In the face of an increased militarization,
a platform for accessing that data, rendering what policing, and weaponization of networked space, the
might be commonly seen as an ethical or cultural There is no separation between the real world and act of building an entirely separate, global parallel
problem (i.e., police accountability) into a data stor- the Internet, and there never has been. As the false network requires an act of secession—not merely
age problem, a network infrastructure problem. boundaries between those spaces blur, similarly in a figurative John Perry Barlow sense, but a heavy,
imagined boundaries between state and corporate physical, infrastructural one whose borders, frankly,
Another increasingly popular instrument of net- interests, between infrastructure and weapons sys- will never be legitimized. We can’t just build a “new In-
work-centric policing is not itself infrastructure but tems also reveal themselves to be fictitious. To some ternet” or demand a return to an early 1990s Internet
the impersonation of it. Stingrays, a surveillance tool extent, the emergence of network-centric warfare that never was any more than we can wash our hands
manufactured by military contractor Harris Corpora- and network-centric policing reflects a general shift of or return to a United States of America that’s not in-
tion, capture unique data about cell phones by setting toward a network-centric everything. And to an ex- extricably tied to structural racism. But we can carve
up a fake cell tower that phones connect to while tent, both military and police are correct to perceive out pockets of opposition and contingency within the
searching for a signal. Combined with other technol- the network as a potential existential threat to their networks we have. To conceive of a future beyond a
ogies (also manufactured and sold by Harris), Sting- methods—not only because that’s how they’re us- militarized network, one must remain illegible to it.
rays can be used to eavesdrop on conversations ing networks, but also because networks are being
and text messages. Disclosure about police use of used to circumvent them. One of the reasons that re-
Stingrays has been limited and efforts by groups like cent protests against police violence in cities across
the ACLU to find out more about their use have hit America have so successfully shut down cities
a number of legal roadblocks. Although technically (blockading traffic, interrupting sporting events, dis-
Stingrays are supposedly used in the service of try- rupting shopping centers) is that they have been well
ing to capture and intercept individuals’ communica- networked yet still thoroughly decentralized. March
tions, the devices aren’t designed to capture a single routes are contingent, communicated mostly in the
target—they’re IMSI (International Mobile Subscrib- moment. Every evening I returned home from one of 1) [Link]
er Identity) catchers, indiscriminately accepting and the protests following the non-indictment of Darren baum-utopia-interview

{This page] Slides from PDF presentation by Network Intergrity Systems, Inc. and
Communications Supply Corporation. Courtesy of the Internet.
Computer Weekly, Drone Kill Communications Net Illustrated, [Link] Courtesy of the Internet.
38 [SFAQ Issue 19] 39 [SFAQ Issue 19]
WeChat
Ben Valentine
I’m sitting alone in a crowded station waiting to board
my next train to carry me across the border from
Southern China into Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.
Curious about the sole foreigner in the station, and
wanting to practice her English, the young woman
next to me strikes up a conversation. Before long, it’s
time for me to board and for us to part ways.

“Can you add me on WeChat?” She asks, with a po-

lite shyness, barely masking her excitement when
I agree. I’m the only westerner in the station, and I’m
slowly growing accustomed to being gawked at and
approached by strangers wherever I go. Almost in-
variably anyone with any English asks to add me on
WeChat within a few minutes of talking. She scans
my QR code to add me and we go our separate ways.
For the next two weeks I get an occasional message
from her checking in on my travels.

Many in the West haven’t heard of WeChat, but I bet

they will in the next few years. WeChat—or in Pinyin
Wēixìn, meaning “micro message”—launched in the
start of 2011 and quickly became the largest mes-
saging app in the world. This would come as no sur-
prise if you had been watching Tencent, the company A collection of Shanzhai phones being sold in an underground market in Guilin, China. Courtesy of Ben Valentine.
behind WeChat, which is the fourth largest Internet
company in the world1, after Amazon, Google, and cussing the migration from more public and broad- strict social expectations placed on Chinese youth in
Ebay. In China, a mobile-first country (with well over cast platforms like Sina and Tencent weibo, de Seta the family, their community, and by their peers. Con- Examples of my meme and GIF filled conversations on WeChat while in China. Courtesy of Ben Valentine.
one billion phones in use2), WeChat is experiencing a told me that many users felt that weibo had too much stant public messaging caused a great pressure to
meteoric rise. If WhatsApp is worth $1 billion, WeChat ly is Grass Mud Horse7, said cao ni ma in Mandarin, Wang believes the freedom to explore yourself micro-protest sets or demands a new expectation of
spam, rumors, context collapse, and were subject perform in a specific, less authentic manner. While
is immeasurable. which, with a subtle tonal shift, becomes an expletive in anonymous online spaces can facilitate more interaction if only within a small group of people.
to the the contentious political nature by both online many users de Seta encountered had multiple weibo
against a person’s mother. In this case, “mother” falls authentic expressions of self and stronger social
personalities and crackdowns. Users felt they could accounts for different messaging, WeChat made this
The value, however, of WeChat is not solely in its busi- under Chinese censorship, and the overt political na- bonds. During her research Wang found that even- Unlike mass media, broadcast social media, and of-
better control their audience and be more authentic desire much easier.
ness plan, which is great, but in the kinds of conver- ture of the meme is likely what made the Grass Mud tually, albeit in a very small portion of the population, ten real-name social media like Facebook, WeChat
in smaller groups or one-on-one communication.
sations it allows. The multiplicity of uses allows more Horse the most popular Chinese meme in the West. these bonds can lead to deeper civic engagement. allows for micro-protests to easily form. While I don’t
Government surveillance is considered nearly om-
authentic and free expression—both political and so- However, this notion is heavily debated, especially as believe that the micro-protest will necessarily make
During interviews with de Seta about social media niscient in an unencrypted Chinese Internet, but
cial. At first glance WeChat doesn’t look as powerful Memes are everywhere on the Chinese web, but few China has ramped up censorship, instated real-name a net-positive change, without the freedom to com-
use, many people mentioned a feeling that all pub- nobody seems to mind unless they’re engaging in
as an outspoken critic on weibo, but access to a plat- are as political as the Grass Mud Horse. Much like the policies akin to Facebook’s but for the entire web, and municate in an authentic way where this type of
lic-broadcast social media was becoming boring and conversations or plans to organize against the State.
form for millions to have more authentic, open, and West, most of the memes are childish, funny one-lin- other more punitive Internet policies. micro-protest is allowed, the opportunities for peo-
filled with content that was zhuangbi, which is basical- Everyone I spoke with during my month in China knew
ultimately subversive conversations is more powerful ers, and reaction GIFs. Messaging apps in Asia, the ple-led change remain slim.
ly a poser—someone putting on a show to look good. that there were things they could not say, but rarely
than the loudest broadcast medium. first being Line in Japan, wisely recognized this trend, Jason Q. Ng, a research fellow at the University of To-
Reflecting on weibo’s decline and WeChat’s subse- seemed bothered by such limitations. The web, and
and made stickers—little animated pictures akin to ronto’s Citizen Lab and author of Blocked on Weibo, I do believe WeChat (and the web in general) is build-
quent rise, de Seta writes me over email: especially WeChat, has allowed these networked
I had been introduced to WeChat a year earlier to stay emojis—to be used in messages. WeChat went fur- writes “coded language may offer its users a feeling ing an ecosystem that could unlock the power of
youths to have more social freedom than their par-
in touch with international contacts, so I knew how it ther and allowed users to upload their own stickers of valiantly fighting the system when they are mere- the general public. What we choose to do with that
“These personal walls and comments are never visi- ents and communities had previously allowed—so
worked. Yet as I traveled through China the flexibility and GIFs, letting conversations take on a new form of ly shouting into the void—or, at best, speaking to an ability remains unclear and is likely reliant on even
ble to people outside your friend list, making sharing what if they can’t organize a revolution? This went
and ubiquity of the app was striking. I asked everyone visual and creative dialogue. inner circle that already shares their views.”8 Chinese larger systems such as education and economics.
and commenting relatively closed and ‘safe’ from out- against my strong commitment to free speech, but
who could speak English—which means those more censorship has a powerful grip on social media, Micro-affirmations and protests, privacy (at least to
bursts of trolling, outrage, denunciations, and even was echoed in Seta’s and Wang’s work and by every-
educated and wealthier than average—what the While many rural kids I met in China loved using which has recently expanded to ban political word- your general community if not the State), and more
human flesh searches that traditionally originated on one I spoke with.
most popular social media app is and why they liked emojis and stickers on WeChat, many of the more play.9 free expression and creativity—these are invaluable.
more broadcast-type social media.”
it. WeChat was the top of every list, but the reasoning networked urban youth used these animations at a These wild animated GIFs, shared in private with
One exciting way this new freedom of expression
varied dramatically. dizzying rate. Conversations became a flow of inside An Xiao Mina, co-founder of The Civic Beat (where I strangers or our closest friends, allow us to more fully
Seta’s observations have been echoed in Tricia has been most obviously seen is through memes. As
jokes, emojis (usually in multiples), animated reac- also work), has written that we must understand how explore ourselves.
Wang’s idea of the Elastic Self and Nathan Jurgen- I wrote for VICE6, despite many in the West believing
Some used it to talk with their friends. Some more tion gifs, and stickers all complementing and flowing positive and open expression, online or off, can be
son’s Liquid Self, as I mentioned in an earlier article4 the Chinese web to be a surveilled black hole, I’ve
entrepreneurial kids were starting a business on their around the words. Some I recognized, but many I had understood as internally liberating, even while look-
for SFAQ. Real-name and broadcast platforms elicit found just the opposite to be true. The Chinese web
WeChat, selling makeup and t-shirts with its blogging never seen and could no more decipher alone than ing insignificant in the face of systemic oppression.10
intense social pressure to perform, a problem com- is a vibrant and active space, full of puns, inside-jokes, 1) [Link]
service and micropayment system. Companies and hieroglyphics. Mina believes that these “micro-affirmations” have
pounded in China with government surveillance and and ever-evolving memes that migrate across many ments/[Link]
groups of friends used it for group conversations. become “a key part of building solidarity. The work of
a more proscriptive cultural normativity. In Wang’s social platforms largely unheard of in the West. 2) [Link]
I used it with WiFi to call home for free. A few were The two things that most caught my attention were social change can start with the tiny changes in our
talk5 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, bilesubscribers-idUSL4N0J51ZN20131220
more outspoken and loved to blog and share their the amount of porn passed between users (which is hearts and minds.” State-controlled TV and newspa-
Wang said that, “Access to the Internet enabled them Mandarin allows for fun wordplay in a way English 3) [Link]
lives with everyone who followed them. While Line, largely censored from public web content in China), pers don’t have many micro-affirmations, but WeChat 4) [Link]
[networked youth] to discover and express them- does not. Simple shifts in tone and slight variations
Viber, WhatsApp, and more all have most of these and the use of Chinese politicians in memes. While is full of them. 5) [Link]/events/luncheon/2014/02/wang
selves in ways that were not possible offline.” in written characters can make dramatic differenc-
abilities, WeChat is the leader at putting them all to- I didn’t find many that were overtly political, the very 6) [Link]
es in meaning only noticeable by creative and fluent
gether. In short, WeChat’s success rests in how many act of animating Chairman Mao’s face to make an This gets to an idea I’ll call a micro-protest, a tiny af- tion-113
Wang points out that the Maoist regime broke per- speakers. This, coupled with vast variations between 7) [Link]
different functions and audiences it can serve. awkward smiling GIF was startling. As was repeated front to a cultural norm or law, often at the level of the
sonal trust through a dictatorship fed on informants. local dialects at times only represented in oral com- the-grass-mud-horse-song/
over and over to me, almost everything is allowed on- individual or in communication among a small group.
While this is no longer in practice to such an extent, the munication, makes the audio messaging function 8) [Link]
In Hong Kong I met with Gabriele de Seta3, a Ph.D line, unless it’s organizing against the State. So while
ramifications are still present in contemporary China, even more powerful for native Chinese speakers. minishing-returns-of-tricking-chinas-online-censors/
student at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, State television is still heavily censored and cleaned, The micro-protest is a change in how something is
both online and off. But Wang isn’t only referring to 9) [Link]
who is doing research on digital folklore and media social media platforms like WeChat allow for very dif- discussed; to make a taboo subject become socially na-media-watchdog-bans-wordplay-puns
government surveillance as a barrier to fuller self-ex- However, many Chinese netizens are using WeChat
practices in mainland China to talk about Chinese ferent conversations. acceptable, laughed at, or less serious. While a pro- 10) [Link]
pression. Indeed, de Seta and Wang both stress the not for precise and nuanced local dialects but for cre-
Internet culture and in particular WeChat. When dis- test demands a new law, or that society change, the 3f68a957668e
ative play with the national language. Most infamous-
40 [SFAQ Issue 19] 41 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Where Is The Risk In Digital Art?
Nicholas O’Brien for insurance, or otherwise to maintain and “choose”
the growth rate of production.
crepancy lies in the different ways that businessmen
and artists handle their property. For a start-up, the
intellectual property of a company’s production is
When it comes to the creation of digital art or media, Understanding that growth determines the risk and heavily safeguarded. For an artist, intellectual prop-
risk can be talked about in two different ways. One valuation of a product is often overlooked within the erty often gets absorbed and dissipates at the point
way is to discuss it through the lens of the danger contemporary digital art marketplace. For start-ups of distribution. A start-up can release and sell prod-
of the content. A work or product that is confront- the risk of their company is often offset by invest- ucts over and over while maintaining their intellectu-
ing something contentious in society or culture can ment, but digital artists tend not to get the luxury of al property through end user licensing agreements
often be considered a risky endeavor for an artist at this insurance. Instead, the risk of production is allo- (EULAs). The artist does not have such contracts at
any level of their career. This kind of risk could par- cated to one of two precarious locations: the artist their disposal.
tially be the result of creating something contrary to themselves or their audience.
the rest of an established way of working—for ex- Even if a digital artist adopts copyright regulations or
ample making essayistic videos about war after hav- Contemporary artists have turned to crowd-based releases his or her work through creative commons,
ing been a successful abstract painter. Or this risk philanthropy services like Kickstarter and Indiegogo the way in which that work circulates is often out of
could be a constant pursuit of creative alternative or as a way of generating funds that otherwise would the hands of the producer. The distribution of cultural
subversive artworks that continually challenge the come from traditional patronage. One benefit of products is much more nebulous (and at times more
status quo. these platforms is that they can operate as a way of prolific) than the intellectual property of innovation
gauging interest in production for an artist seeking incubators. Artworks that traverse many networks
However, the content of an artwork is only one pos- new audiences. But because the growth of these often lose their point of origin, and frequently lose
sible way to gauge its risk. The other way is to talk campaigns is still determined by consumers, the risk author citation or accreditation. It goes without say-
about risk from a financial standpoint: evaluating the is never fully redistributed away from the producer ing that the majority of digital art consumed is in fact
worth or value of a work prior to its execution based (as it is with VC funding). Furthermore, when an artist under the thumb of regulatory EULAs enforced by
upon prior success and other market indicators. turns to these platforms (as opposed to a gallery or social media platforms like Tumblr or YouTube. Even
This type of risk has increasingly been discussed state-run granting organizations) they are placing if an artist could accurately oversee and maintain the
with regard to digital art due to the ways in which the burden of risk directly onto their audience. The distribution of their work, finding direct ways to mon-
artists working in this vein (under a loose network decentralized patronage of an artist’s network (or by etize that circulation might go against the EULA of a
of affinities with post-Internet, netart, or new media the sponsorship of strangers) is only a way of creat- social media platform.
communities) have become associated with start- ing temporary insurance against the risk of produc-
up culture or Silicon Valley innovation. Many of the ing a new work. Again, the problem arises that even in rare moments
links between digital art and start-ups are based when an artwork returns a high yield of distribution,
on the similar channels and infrastructure in which Instead of leveraging the power of network technol- the risk of the production of that work remains on the
these systems proliferate and are distributed. Yet ogy to reach new audiences, implementing crowd- artist. Attention economies do not provide insurance
another shared connection between the two com- based funding strategies eventually leaves artists against risk. In some cases it works quite the op-
munities and cultures revolves around an entrepre- in the same precious state from which they started. posite: works that break into mainstream attention
neurial spirit for brand building. The temporary nature of this funding doesn’t inher- economies can work against the growth of an art-
ently provide long-term ways of generating revenue, ist, pigeonholing them into a type of production that Handwritten draft of Artist Contract by Seth Siegelaub. Courtesy of the Internet.
As network technology has become an essential as is the case with start-ups seeking investment. might be less risky but also creatively limiting. The
financial institution for the decentralized distribution Whereas VC funding creates insurance against risk, success of innovative artworks that reach a wide au-
of goods and services (including labor and media), crowd-based funding only further entrenches an dience is no substitute for the ways that VCs helps a
artists and businessmen alike have found ways of artist into a risky position. Part of this has to do with company manage their growth.
working around old-world regulatory bodies to gain the kind of dividends and returns that art production
direct access to consumers and audiences. In other can afford to investors. Part of this also has to do with This being said, the prospect that VCs might be
words, where businessmen are turning away from the responsibility that artists have to their funders. able to help an artist manage his or her intellectual
standard business models, artists are turning away The contract that is formed between artists and property, and as a result assist an artist in choosing
from traditional gallery models. In doing so, both their crowd-funders is one that does not mimic the how they grow, is a problematic assumption. Where
seek to use the Internet as a shortcut to gain direct high-growth return on investment found in start-up VCs find value is not in determining how effectively
access to their “market audience” in order to deliver innovation. To put it another way: an artist’s work on their investment will assist in a product to manage its
content in a more immediate way. Although many Kickstarter will never become an IPO. growth. Instead, valuation of start-ups and their intel-
businesses have thrived in providing more direct lectual property is based on how quickly production
services to their audiences and consumers, many That being said, the other option of acquisition for will return high dividends. Art fundamentally does
artists are still struggling to find a concrete way of return on investment within high-growth/high-risk not work this way. Even if a work or an artist grows
capitalizing on adopting new models. This is where investment is still available. However, the potential quickly, the return on investment is never fully guar-
looking at risk—from a fiscal perspective—can po- for that metaphorical “buyout” does not benefit the anteed, and even if it were that value could be flipped
tentially illuminate the problems of modeling cultural backers of a project or help an artist manage risk. for further profit after acquisition.
production after so-called innovative business strat- For the majority of collectors, an artist’s risk is only
egies. measured at the point of acquisition, since the val- Although the rhetoric of start-up business practices
uation of their asset is based on market demands has taken root in digital art production and distribu-
In an essay entitled Startup = Growth, programmer and its potential for resale. For artists participating tion, their similarities are only skin deep. Looking at
and investor Paul Graham discussed why venture in the marketplace, the prospect of collection often the ways in which risk is measured, mitigated, and
capitalists interested in incubators and innovation becomes the driving force for production. Collection leveraged within a start-up model shows stark dif-
are drawn into these industries. He states that one and acquisition are not insuring the risk or value of ferences between the ways that each industry at-
primary reason is that regardless of high risk in these an artist based on their growth. Instead, they are ex- tempts to generate funds for sustained production.
companies, the potential return of profit or dividends ploiting an artist’s production for personal profit. Where start-ups use funding platforms like venture
can far exceed initial investment. For high-growth capital for insuring the long-term maintenance of
companies like start-ups the return on investment In this way, playing the market or courting collec- growth for a company, artists cannot bank on such
is also becoming easier and easier to guarantee— tors is as equally precarious as adopting innova- models. Instead, artists should reconsider how they
whether that be through an IPO offering or by com- tion-based funding strategies. In each methodology use a term like risk to identify the value, meaning,
pany acquisition. For the producers within these in- the risk for the artist remains high with a low or limit- and impact of their work within culture. Hopefully in
dustries, the risk of their efforts and labor is mitigated ed return on investment for patrons. While the fiscal doing so artists working with digital media will find
by this increasing guarantee. Also, most start-ups rhetoric of start-ups has infiltrated the vocabulary of new sources of investment where the financial risk
seeking funding that utilize their risk are already gen- contemporary digital artists, the reality of co-opting of their work becomes manageable.
erating some kind of profit. According to Graham, these strategies to create financial independence is
the extra funding from venture capitalism is usually still very far off. An underlying problem with this dis- Diagram of various digital capital networks assembled by Luma Partners. Courtesy of the Internet.
42 [SFAQ Issue 19] 43 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Eco-Poetics And The Visual Art Of John Cage

John Rapko sheer occurrence, as well as their placement. Now

this, I suggest, is what one cannot gain from the per-
formed results of chance procedures in music. For in
the unfolding of a piece of music, the occurrence of
The following is an excerpt from the third and final an element, a sound event, is fused with the moment
chapter of my book Logro, Fracaso, Aspiración: Tres of its occurrence: it is this-sound-at-this-time. Sound
Intentos de Entender el Arte Contemporáneo (2014). and moment form a qualitative unity. And this is part
The book is based on three lectures I gave at the of the point of the use of chance procedures in music:
Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in the spring of to defeat the listener’s sense of expectation, that one
2009. A major part of the project of the lectures was event or kind of event will follow another or another
to sketch some considerations concerning distinctive kind, in order to make the listener’s mind “susceptible
characteristics of achievement and failure in contem- to divine influences.”
porary art. In the last lecture I turned to the question of
what one might hope for from contemporary art, and But the viewer (as opposed to a listener) of a series
how the aspiration adopted by an artist shapes and of works resulting from chance techniques can scan
places stringencies upon his or her work. The central the works, which involves operations of noticing, itself
analysis I gave was of some of the late work of John presupposing the operation of short-term memory
Cage, in particular the stunning prints he made yearly in noting identities, resemblances, etc. But then the
at Crown Point Press in San Francisco from the late mind of the viewer cannot be thought of as whol-
1970s until his death in 1992. ly attuned to a (simple) moment. And in a way only
perhaps loosely analogous with this, once one no-
I conceived of this selection, and the book generally, tices the difference of order between elements and
as an instance of philosophy whose chief character- support, one grasps that the looking solicited by the
istics are diagnostic and aspirational. By “diagnostic” I visual artworks is one that is indefinitely extended
mean something like what the philosopher Hans Slu- temporally, as it involves the perceptual and imagi-
ga has recently put forth with regard to political phi- native exploration of relations among elements and
losophy: the work begins with a sense of unease and their support, in addition to viewing across works. In
aims to characterize the source of that unease. No at- the visual works a perceptual sense of contingency is
tempt is made to be comprehensive, nor to produce realized, but not, in contrast to the musical works, one
anything relating to alleged timeless or eternally valid John Cage, Dereau #3, 1982. One from 38 related color etchings with aquatint, engraving, photoetching and drypoint. 18½ x 24½ in.
Published by Crown Point Press. which supports the fantasy of an “immediate” or sim-
aspects of the subject. By “aspirational” I mean that ple present. And this recognition reflects back upon
the analysis is oriented to suggest a sense of possibil- the musical works, wherein the use of chance tech-
ity, of how the existing state of affairs might be opened its current use; it can be folded into a future use, or re- would also be keeping his promise to Schoenberg.
cycled; (iii) making and/or appreciating the work have These same techniques would be the use of chance niques is revealed as presupposing a similar hidden
up, re-thought, re-worked, and re-oriented towards heterogeneity: between the activity of deciding upon
worthwhile ideals. In line with these two characteris- a custodial sense, or conserve something valuable in selecting the elements and their arrangement in
or precious; (e) that the guiding spirit of these works, his visual works. Brown has provided detailed ac- the time-space continuum which will count as (the
tics, I tried to show how Cage’s visual works revealed container of) the work, and the phenomenal events
to Cage himself a kind of dogmatism within his earlier insofar as they arise in Western culture, is Orpheus counts of Cage’s experimenting with etching and
(as in Rilke’s “it’s Orpheus when there’s music”), and printmaking, and has suggested that the culmina- that make up the perceptually available elements of
celebrated and notorious musical composition, one the piece, and which arise out of the application of im-
wherein he had incorporated a poetics still expres- not Prometheus; (f) and that the fundamental aim of tion and greatest achievement of his first five years
these works is to initiate, foster, maintain, etc., the spir- at Crown Point is the series Déreau, a portmanteau personal chance mechanisms.
sive of productivist metaphors and conceptions; in
response, and through great personal difficulty, he it of “place,” where place is opposed to space, a kind title from “derive” and “Thoreau.” But Brown has also
of homogenous continuum of extension. So the func- described how the year after Cage made the Déreau Some of you will find this account fanciful. But it helps
was able to invent a new conception of an ecological explain two points that are unintelligible on Brown’s
art. Both characteristics of this philosophy, the diag- tion of the model is aspirational: works made in ac- series, when he returned to Crown Point Press, he
cordance with it aim to provide the viewer or partici- abandoned the ways in which he had worked, and interpretation: why did Cage say in despair that his
nosis and the sense of possibility, are shown to also whole life’s work was a mistake (and not just that he
be aspects of a contemporary art practice: pant an experiential sense of what it is like to inhabit began over with different techniques. He began with
a place, and to foster the sorts of virtuous responses attempts to work the paper directly, and in ways that couldn’t make satisfactory visual works), and why did
that would be part of the habitual responses of those were suggestive of violence: he crumpled it, stained he abandon the conception that resulted in Déreau
One of the most recent and most insistent demands and immediately begin by working the support with
that has arisen within the arts is the demand for a who live in “places,” as opposed to “spaces” . . . it with tea and coffee, even ran over it (perhaps a
reminiscence of the work he had done with Raus- elemental forces and with a vehemence that sug-
“green” art, which also goes by the name of environ- gests violence upon the support? What is distinctive
mental or ecological art. What is distinctive about John Cage was one of the very greatest artists of chenberg in the early 1950s). Cage fell into despair,
recent times to have confronted these questions characterized by a lengthy depression in which he about the works Cage made, the Smoked series,
this art, which I shall call “ecological”? It seems that a is that it is the very same elemental force, heat, that
conception of such art has arisen in recent decades [surrounding the nature of ecological art]. Or so I shall claimed that his entire life’s work was a failure. Finally, John Cage, Eninka #42, 1986. One from a series of 50 smoked paper monotypes with branding on gampi paper chine collé.
claim. Cage is usually thought of as an experimental he treated the paper with fire, smoking it and burning marks the paper from within or from underneath, 24½ x 18½ in. Published by Crown Point Press.
and become stabilized. Such an art would (a) involve causing it to blossom, and from without or above,
primarily “local” materials, where local means some- composer, though he preferred to be thought of as it, and applied heated circular brands from salvaged
an inventor, and one might add an inventor of genius. car parts. He declared himself satisfied, his depres- leaving the circular brands. The use of the same force
thing like what is available without strenuous use of unifies the treatment of the surface and the applica-
He is of course best known as the “inventor” of tech- sion lifted, and for the rest of his life enjoyed his yearly Without an appreciation of not just Cage’s aims, ing both within and without the paper relieves some
advanced technologies within an ecological region, tion of marks, and so lessens the sense that two sep-
niques for the use of chance in musical composition. trips to the Press . . . but also of the motivations for those aims, it would of the threat of violence. The work seems to have
or a “place” defined by what is regularly perceived of arate orders are coming into contact with each other,
In the late 1970s, around the age of 65, he was invited be even more difficult to understand why Déreau survived something, and what is left is something that
and used by those who have lived there for more than and in a way that does not allow them to interpene-
by Kathan Brown, the director of Crown Point Press, In viewing the complete set of Cage’s Déreau a num- failed—that is, failed artistically as a satisfying ex- has to that extent passed a test; a test of such severity
a generation; (b) the work must be in some sense a trate or to share the same substance. Here, then, as
to visit the press and use their printmaking facilities ber of times in early 2001 at the Legion of Honor in pression of an eco-poetics. In the later work Cage has that it threatened to consume it. A final thought, and
response to the place, and to what is distinctive about [the social philosopher Theodor] Adorno might have
to make visual artworks. Cage, recalling one of a San Francisco, I was struck by a certain fantasy: that resolved in practice one part of the tension implicit in one which not everyone will be prepared to follow, is
the place; (c) that the work would thereby carry a put it, is an artwork that non-violently unifies a sensu-
few dozen autobiographical stories he used count- the elements of the work, the various bits of drawing the multi-faceted model of an eco-poetics. The resul- that what has survived has shown itself to be valu-
symbolic meaning, one of a piece with the sense that ous manifold. And, finally, in a further series, Ryoan-
less times to render his artistic intentions intelligible, taken from the notebooks of Thoreau, seemed to tant works are certainly expressive of ephemerality able, and therefore worthy of loving custodial care. So
it is part of a kind of production or culture that offers ji, where Cage uses a brush to outline stones, the
claims to have hesitated to accept, because in his slide across the paper, as if flowing from upper left and fragility. The artist and viewer share the stance what remains is not (yet) to be recycled. The value of
an alternative to those kinds of production and cul- sense that application of the paint and its inherence
early twenties he had promised Arnold Schoenberg to lower right. As one scans the works one notices of a custodian of the moment. But what of the other folding in is honored, but not everything is ready just
ture expressive of capitalism’s sublime powers of in the support are of distinct orders has subsided. It
that he would dedicate his life to music if Schoenberg the recurrence of elements (the little waterbug is characteristic of a highly marked temporality, the yet to be used in some other configuration.
destruction, or of the project of mastering nature; (d) is worth noting that Cage, in his late music of the so-
would teach him composition. But he also recalled particularly striking) and registers quickly their dif- sense that the work has a future of being folded in
the work, as well as the activities involved in making called number pieces, directs that the sounds seem
his great regret at having turned down an invitation ferent placements, colors, and saturations of color. or recycled? Here one must search. It is hard to see At a very general level, we might expect the ambition
and appreciating the work, must have one or more of “brushed” into existence. The metaphor forged in
in the late 1940s from Rita Sarabhai to trek northern One senses that the elements and the paper are how the custodial model could be reconciled with of an eco-poetics to be the great demand regulating
a certain highly marked temporal character: (i) some- the resolution of the fantasy of violence in the visual
India and Nepal. So he decided that he would accept of two different pictorial orders (foreground versus folding in. But perhaps one has to look more broadly. art in the 21st century, as the great demand in the 20th
thing suggestive of evanescence or ephemerality, works is applied now mutatis mutandis to the musical
Brown’s invitation, and that if he made visual works background and/or support). One thereby gains One highly marked aspect of the appearance of the century was for political art.
and often carrying a further quality of fragility; (ii) a works.
with the same techniques he used to compose, he a vivid sense of the contingency of the elements’ works is that they have, after all, been subjected to
sense that the artifact has so to speak a future after
some great force, even if the sense of the force work-
44 [SFAQ Issue 19] 45 [SFAQ Issue 19]
On Point 2.05 // The Hustle Of Language advents of communications technology expand
the horizons of subsequent centuries. As Marshall
McLuhan famously reminded us, the technology
The ironic fact is that a more circumspect Peppe
may well have been deservedly recognized as one
of the most important performance artists to ever to
It might be best to think of these polylogical dialogs
as exemplifying a reversal of Socratic process that is
both sinister and elegant. Whereas the ancient phi-
of movable type printing drastically enhanced the work on the west coast. Certainly, his work was far losopher used the dialogic method to arrive at the
availability of knowledge, toppling theocratic monop- and away the most sophisticated, but sophistication core truth of a given topic, the Muistardeaux Collec-
olies on consciousness. Following from McLuhan’s and performance art have always been somewhat tive uses the same process to flee from topic to top-
insight, we can note similar effects issuing from the at odds with each other, because the art world feels ic, sometimes lapsing into willful misunderstanding,
advents of photography, cinema, and Marconi’s radio, far more comfortable with clowns than with real pi- outright bickering, or abrupt changes of momentary
followed by broadcast television, the Internet, and oneers. Peppe’s Behaviourmusik was premised on topic. Each makes knowing asides to the audience
social media. In each of these instances, the mecha- the idea that all aspects of human behavior could be about the other, and there is no way for the audience
nisms that delivered content became more and more scored in a manner similar to how the specifics of mu- to tell when something is choreographed and when it
important in relation to the content that was delivered sical performance might be scripted by a composer. is spontaneous. If it is spontaneous, then I say kudos,
by them, which was and still is bad news for artists—a Thus, to see one of Peppe’s scores from his early because we have not seen that level of linguistic im-
condition made all the worse by the fact that artists 1980s heyday is to see parallel registers of specific provisation since the days of Tristan Tzara.
still seem to think that anything they decide to desig- indications for vocalization and bodily movement,
nate as a work of art is so simply because they can each subjected to a scored time signature, and each Muistardeaux keeps their performances congenial
Muistardeaux, 1800SLEEPLQ, 2008. Queens Nails Annex, A Jackass performance. Courtesy of the Internet. Wayne Coyne and Miley Cyrus during Art Basel, Miami claim the right to call themselves artists. This Du- given a set of para-pictographic prompts for specific and folksy, but make no mistake about the sophisti-
San Francisco. Courtesy of the artists. Beach, 2014. Courtesy of the Internet. champ-derived theorem was the original recipe for performative action to be enacted for a specified du- cation of what they are up to: it has everything to do
the dilution of artistic content to the status of reliquary ration. Early on (at the very beginning of the availabil- with the Tower of Babel effect that is bred by social
artifact, pulling proxy duty for narcissistic pretense, ity of personal computers), he made use of multiple media—at once sad, absurd, and all too close to the

Mark Van Proyen bespeaks the somewhat romantic idea that there is
some special importance to the way that we under-
only partially successful, simply because the task of
pinpointing the real to which realism aspired to realis-
leading up to the zombie plague that now calls itself
contemporary art. My day-trading friends call this pe-
typefaces to indicate his cast of close to a hundred in-
trasubjective characters, facilitating the performative
everyday experience of depthless content running
horribly awry. One might detect a similar, hyper-so-
stand the body-as-object as opposed to how we tically represent was and no doubt still is impossible. culiar phenomenon “a crowded trade,” which is one channeling of them as one might channel surf a late phisticated congeniality in the novels of David Foster
Performance art is getting some attention as of late, understand the body-as-vessel-for-the-subject, and That impossibility may in fact be the only “reality” that of their code words that means “sell everything now.” night television menu of pathetic possibility. Wallace—a congeniality that is laced with a canny
but maybe not the kind of attention that it needs. it reaches back to the idea of performance art evolv- something purporting to be “realistic” might aspire to. understanding of theory and philosophy, locating
What it is getting is a lot of rah rah chatty chat, and ing out of sculpture—think of the work of the Vienna But I digress. The happy news is that the 20th century Peppe’s most ambitious performance project was a practical applications of both in an absurd and giddy
what it is not getting is the kind of historically informed Action Group, Fluxist concerts, or the early works Literary scholars tend to work with one definition of has given us a rich tradition of performative language work from 1984–85 titled Actmusikspectakle V, which moment of post-historical consciousness that still
analysis that might challenge it to move in a direction created by the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop realism, while art historians work with several. The projects that work both with and against techno-bu- took Peppe close to an hour to perform. The effect longs for a lost historical authority. When this longing
of real risk and real accomplishment. This is especial- under the direction of Anna Halprin. From the vantage former see realism as having to do with an unvar- reaucratic consolidation, ranging from symbolist po- produced by the work was both exhilarating and adopts its more self-infatuated guise, we get some-
ly important because of the ephemeral nature of the of the first generation of performance artists, theatri- nished view of the sheer topicality of contemporary etry to surrealist language games to deconstructive spellbinding, seeming as if half a dozen lunatics had thing that looks very much like a TED talk that ex-
beast, which lives and then disappears into a haze of cality was the enemy (even as they created a kind of life somehow separated from any metaphysical ide- textual analysis; this lineage also includes things such taken over the performer’s personality to compete for horts its listeners to the banal trough of undeserved
documentation, commentary and reliquary memora- art world theater out of their avoidance of theatrical- alism shrouded in history, presumably leading to a as Charles Olsen’s Theory of Projective Verse and the right to stylize a prolonged epileptic seizure. De- self-esteem. When it falls into hands of master iro-
bilia. In recent years, these things have grown expo- ity) because, in that early era of mass-mediatization, clearer view of the linkage between material relations the chidings of vernacular street poetry. It is always spite the length of the performance, it was flawlessly nists like Muistardeaux, we see the landscape of dis-
nentially hazier because of the sheer deluge of such bodies-in-space started to take on their own uncan- and ideology. There is less of a consensus amongst worth remembering that the one thing that we always executed in a state of breakneck velocity, suggesting course for what it is: a heap of distractions that reveal
material on YouTube, where it is impossible not to ny dimension. art historians on this point, and when it falls into the ask from the artistic imagination is the evocation of the possibility that the early Futurist Sestini might their sad truths through laying bare the strategies of
look like you are doing some kind of performance art, hands of art critics such as myself, riots and sheer a world somehow different from the everyday world have influenced Peppe’s thoughts about language intentionally failed concealment. It is like a radical re-
however unfortunate such a look might be. But by the end of the 1970s, theatricality was no lon- chaos ensue. For art historians, the point of distinc- that we inhabit. It is always best to make lemonade and performance. Indeed, language as subject, top- versal of the Freudian idea of parapraxis (“Freudian
ger seen in such a negative light, because by that tion tends to see realism in contrast to naturalism, but when we are pelted with lemons, and we always can ic, and instrument at the core of Actmusikspectakle slips”), which turn out to be every bit as revealing (and
And if this was not bad enough, we have the related time, even performance art could be easily docu- even here there is still a lot of definitional dissonance, point out how this has been accomplished in the past. V, in many ways the work was about how a broadly a bit more frightening) than their opposite numbers.
phenomena of Jackass. I heard somewhere that it mented and exchanged (originally by way of cheaply because naturalism itself is a term that is also very But we can also point to the work of artists in the pres- defined notion of speech-act could repeatedly fold
started as a skit in a Toy Machine skateboarding vid- produced and distributed VHS tapes, forcing perfor- hard to pin down. ent who do this by performing spell-binding works back upon those aspects and then out again in the It seems that the “reality effect” that Barthes wrote
eo, but I only know the movies featuring antics and mance art back to its Futurist, Dadist, and Surrealist that interrogate the fungible materiality of language manner of a necktie knot. For example, in one part of about almost fifty years ago has been turned upside
shenanigans played out as a kind of frat boy blood roots as absurdist cabaret). That moment (and nearly But the effort continued to be made, over and over, in uniquely imaginative ways that are all true to the it called Information Whiteout, the phrase “why what is down and inside out, and those turns may in fact be
sport. These things start to loom large in the popular the twenty years that followed) was well document- and language had to be perpetually reformulated to performative disassociation that is built into language is why what is is,” folds in and out of the work’s deluge the only things that we have left to us that can still be
imagination, and in so doing they foreclose the other ed in the pages of High Performance Magazine, a make good on this quest. Witness the primary role itself. of elaborate gesticulation and vocalization, vividly trusted as the kind of “reality” that something pur-
ways in which we might think of performance art as a southern California-based journal that was edited by that language-as-language plays in such diverse in- dramatizing the collapse of faith between linguistic porting to be “realistic” might use as a touchstone. Of
historical continuum of artistic activities moving from Linda Frye Burnham between 1978 and 1997. From a tellectual enterprises as Lacanian psychoanalysis Two vivid examples come to mind, both more-or- references and those things to which they might refer. course, this may have been the subtle point of Bar-
past to present. In this regard, performance art shares re-reading of its pages, it became clear that the work or analytic philosophy. As Ludwig Wittgenstein fa- less based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first of thes’s essay, and I cannot help but noting that it orig-
something with abstract painting; In both cases, artis- of the second generation performance art evolved mously wrote at the conclusion of his Tractatus-Log- these is the work of Michael Peppe, who presented The second example that I want to call attention to is inally appeared at the same time as Jack Burnham’s
tic accomplishment is understood in relation to how from and into a great many things, and language, or to ico-Philosophicus, “What cannot be spoken of must performance works in an idiom that he called Behav- the work of the Muistardeaux Collective, that being a book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1969). Along with
any given work self-consciously positions itself in re- be more precise, the materiality of language is one of be passed over in silence,” thereby emphasizing the iormusik throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (note collaborative group comprised of Tom Borden, Eric Lawrence Alloway, Burnham was the most forward
lation to the known history of its respective subgenre, those things, and over time it may have become the point of privilege to be conferred to what J. L. Aus- here that the Germanic “k” at the end of Behavior- Gibbons, and the fictitious Khyssup Muistardeaux thinking art critic of his time, and in the aforemen-
and the tropes and idioms that are associated with most important of those things. tin has called “the constitutive” aspect of language, musik is a nod to the work of the German avant-garde who is occasionally played by an actor. The Muis- tioned book, he concludes with a prophetic medita-
it. The Jackass phenomenon seeks to erase these which is where “truth-value” was supposed to reside. composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who much later tardeaux Collective has engaged a vast variety of tion on the way that networks will have to become
kinds of positionings by resorting to acts that appear And so, my title: The Hustle of Language. It is a pun, However, this emphasis on truth-value was only im- became globally famous for proclaiming the 9/11 ter- media, and have released over a dozen recorded al- understandable as objects, something that rings
as gestures of sheer audacity. “I mean, if Chris Bur- no doubt a bad one. It alludes to a 1986 book by portant because it invited corroboration and verifica- rorist attacks as “the greatest work of art that exists bums from since 2007. Indeed, they do perform mu- even more true today than it did 45 years ago. The
den can get famous by having a guy shoot him in a Roland Barthes titled The Rustle of Language (Le tion, and those things are oftentimes moored in the for the whole Cosmos.”) At this point in time, Peppe sic, and in a manner similar to Peppe’s work, they do performance artists whose work I have called atten-
gallery, then I should be able to get famous by falling Bruissement de Langue), that being a collection of 45 shifting sands of epistemology rather than the hard may well be better known as the author of two essays incorporate music into their performances, but these tion to here differ greatly, but what they both have in
off of my skateboard over a bed of hot coals, right?” for-the most-part short, “occasional” essays written granite of physical science. Austin himself seemed that were originally published in High Performance performances often tend to be much more about the common is the recognition that getting to the truth of
Once again, subtlety and sophistication lose out, and between 1967 and 1980. One of the earliest and most aware of this, so he also articulated the countervail- Magazine, the first titled “Why Performance Art is So radical unscripting of language than its hyper-orga- the moment means fleeing from what it is supposed
bozohood reigns supreme, or almost so. To provide well known of the essays contained in this volume ing claim on behalf of four “performative” aspects of Bad” (1982), and the second “Why Our Art is So Bad” nized opposite. A typical Muistardeaux performance to be, and in so doing they transform language from
a counter-narrative to the recent Jackassification was titled The Reality Effect (1968), and even though language that he called the explicit, implicit, primi- (1983).1 features Borden and Gibbons standing next to each an instrument of communication to the state of being
of performance art, I am here offering an abridged it harks back to a structuralist mode of analysis that tive, and inexplicit. None of these aspects gestured other in front of an audience, launching into an ami- an objectified network of possibilities seeking actual-
version of a conference paper that I presented back has fallen out of favor in our post-post-structuralist toward what he called “truth-value claiming,” but in- Both essays are masterpieces of rhapsodic invective, able and chatty conversation that harks back to ization.
in April (2014). The theme of the conference was Au- moment, it still bears a belated re-reading amid the stead seek to leverage and elaborate on ambiguity hilarious and insightful in equal measure, and both are 1960s comedy duos such as Rowan and Martin or
thorship, Citation, and Collaboration in Contemporary newer context of the ways that technology has af- and paradox, thereby evading, stalling, and perhaps world-class examples of career suicide taken to the- the Smothers Brothers. But in a few short minutes,
Bay Area Performance, and I chose to take it literally fected art and indeed, all communication during the even undermining the consolidating imperatives of atrical extreme. No one bothered to rebut the essay’s these conversations start to run awry and off of the
by focusing my remarks on the work of some San past four decades—scratch that, for the past 14 de- constitutive language practices. Left unchallenged, many fine points in the open court of public debate, rails, verging into outright manias of free association
Francisco Bay Area-based performance artists who cades. Barthes’s self-assigned task was to account constitutive language practices will always default but suddenly doors started slamming in his face be- delivered in a state of fevered one-upmanship. They
make uncanny use of language as the primary mate- for the role that descriptive ornamentation played in to the safe shores of the bureaucratic and the pseu- cause one of the targets of Peppe’s grandiloquent call these performances Tikalba and link the term to
rial of their work. relationship to literary texts that purport to participate do-scientific: in short, to the mechanical translation of literary wrath was the shabby influence-peddling the idea of an exposition about a topic based on very
in something called realism. The essay struggled with precedent into policy. that, in those days, operated as “public arts funding,” little knowledge about it—a comic mimic of what
Authorship, citation, and collaboration: these struck its topic, and it never really got to the point of articu- which in Peppe’s view was nothing more than a scam happens in that surrealist gesamtkunstwerk that we
me as a set of deviant terms, insofar as they run lating how some kinds of descriptive specification Enter technology. Just as maritime colonialism of mutual self-entitlement enacted by those who had call “social media.” 1) The essay was reprinted several times. See Michael
counter to the dominant cliché of West Coast per- contribute to the creation of a realistic effect, while radically expanded the horizons of 17th-century art “friends on grant committees.” When I first met Peppe Peppe, “Why Our Art is So Bad,” in Sumner, Burch and
formance art being about isolated non-verbal bodies others were said to gratuitously distract the reader beyond what could be shoehorned into a perspec- many years ago, his reputation had preceded him, Sumner (eds.), The Guests Go Into Supper (Oakland, Burn-
gesticulating in para-allegorical spaces. This cliché from it. For this and other reasons, the essay was tival picture plane, so too did the many leapfrogging and I asked, “Are you the guy who destroyed perfor- ing Books, 1986). 342-361.
mance art?” His answer spoke volumes: “I wish.”
46 [SFAQ Issue 19] 47 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Three Perspectives On The Globalization Of The Art Market

John Zarobell low-wage environments and dealers sell their works

to urban elites in global financial centers. The expan-
ists of the 21st century are attempting to intervene in
the economy.
sion of the art world under this version of globalization
The term “globalization” is ubiquitous and imprecise. means that freedom of expression among artists is To be fair to all these positions, the transformation
Nonetheless, it is high time to think about what it compromised under the pressure to conform to the we are currently witnessing represents a shift from a
means for the art market and the broader sphere of market in order to succeed financially focus on advanced industrial society and its numer-
artistic production. I will venture not just one, but three ous ills, to a recognition that such a concept is not
possible responses to this question: the Good, the The Ineffable: Globalization could also be described universal, but an ideological construct. What we now
Bad, and the Ineffable. as the mash-up of all cultures and forms of eco- perceive to be universal is our ability to exchange,
nomic activity from high-tech industrial production or what Adam Smith called our inherent proclivity to
The Good: Globalization equals cross-border ex- to spear fishing, which together generate the global “truck and barter.” Since Smith recorded these re-
change of value-added economic activity. What’s not economy. Every region is connected through trans- flections in the 18th-century opus Wealth of Nations,
to like? Goods and services change hands across portation and information systems and distribution is it is hardly accurate to claim that the market is a new
land and sea and people make money as a result; more global all the time, so products like art that were model for the 21st, but under the terms of globalization
the number attached to the global art market is only once regionally specific are now universally available. we can see just how important exchange is. It starts
$60 billion so it is a paltry fraction of the economy but Global integration presents a series of conflicts be- to seem universal because only the abstraction of
it has grown considerably. Clare McAndrew reports tween creators with widely divergent ideas of what the market can hold all the various participants in the
that global imports of art grew 280% in the 25 years constitutes art; nevertheless, globalization allows global economy in a single conceptual apparatus.
between 1986 and 2011 and, in the same period, ex- one to see them as forming a kind of continuum. In Thus, the market may be the only thing we all have in
perts grew by 500% worldwide.1 In the art world, this context, globalization is the abstraction through common and is therefore our most valued metaphor
one could hardly have a contemporary art exhibition which we come to envision what artistic production for how all the people on the planet are part of the
these days without the cross-border exchange of all over the world at the same time might look like. same game. Whether we are discussing the manu-
goods and services that stimulates several industries We can imagine all the artists of the world somehow facture of heavy machinery or the production of in-
(shipping, security, artistic production, etc.) and yields working together to produce the art of the present: stallation art, the economy could be the only way that
immediate and tangible benefits to artists, curators, contemporary art. As any biennial visitor knows, art divergent approaches and results can be reconciled
dealers, critics, and even the general public. For art world globalization does not really add up to any im- and compared. It is of no surprise that artists have be-
fairs and biennials, now cornerstones of artistic dis- age but is a shifting mass of aspirations, materials, come more concerned with the economy. And if you
tribution and consumption, globalization is the lingua confrontations, limitations, and regards croisés. The have a pile of student debt from attending art school,
franca. In fact, as globalization has increased, so have art market we have today is incredibly diverse but it is hardly brazen to think about the ways that you
the manifestations of such events. A level estimate highly decentralized. It is lumpy and bumpy and not might make a profitable living by selling your art.
is that there are now around 200 art fairs and 150 coordinated or controlled by any one entity, be it auc-
biennials globally. Surely this has led to some fatigue tion house, gallery franchise, or museum brand. This The real question is: does this mean that artistic work
among jet-setting curators, dealers, and artists, but ineffable globalization is both process and metaphor, is now alienated labor? In other words, to shift from
who are they to complain? They benefit enormously but its end result is ever changing and its meaning is Smith to Marx: who owns the current economy, and,
from this expansion of the artistic distribution mecha- ever receding. Impossible to master, it may be just as more to the point, who owns your work? There is a
nism and visitors from all over the world flock to their difficult to grasp. double entendre here too obvious not to point out
local biennial or art fair to absorb the currency of con- because, of course, every artist wants their work to
temporary art. This is all for the better: more artists are Whether you perceive globalization as good, bad, or be owned by collectors who have paid for it and who
getting paid to make art, more visitors are having the ineffable may be based upon whether you are profit- value it. This is how professional artists pay the bills as
opportunity to experience art from around the globe ing thereby, but it is important to consider that one’s artists, but this is also the validation of artistic practice.
in person, and more money is changing hands. The conceptions are informed by what sociologists like to Success means your work is desirable to others who
art world expands; the market for contemporary art call embedded processes. If you went to art school will pay money, who will even bid against others, in or-
grows. 20 to 40 years ago in the U.S., you have had the op- der to own it. On another level, an artist’s work must
portunity to learn multiple art making strategies and remain her own because her creative vision brought
The Bad: Globalization is a game for the winners be- approaches to media for producing a coherent body it to being and its significance and value rest upon the
cause as multinational corporations and other non- of work. You rightly think of yourself as the actor who salience of that vision, its ability to connect to a tradi-
state actors steer the expansion of the global econ- Designed by Eva Krchova.
is uniquely responsible for the development of the tion of art making, and it’s representation of the mo-
omy, the less fortunate are left to fend for themselves, work and you recognize that while the best artists are ment of it’s creation. This might sound like an obser-
with little support from the state whose role has his- not always the most successful, they stand by what vation, or even a statement of fact, but it is what social
torically been to defend the interests of its citizens. they have done and do not pander to a market. If, on scientists call a normative claim and this particular
Instead, states support the interest and expansion the other hand, you studied during those years in a one is key because it undergirds the entire market ap-
of the market and those who profit thereby. Paradox- country with a strong academy system, from France paratus. In other words, for art to be valuable it must
ically, this new role expands these states’ own fragility to Mexico to Pakistan, you may have only been in- be supported by the assertion that artistic work is not of levels from divergent points on the globe, the con- differing levels of authority and significance come to grand art distribution machine, it also means that we
to market pressures, making them even less able to troduced to traditional means of making artworks alienated labor, that the art is not made to cater to the versation shifts and the norms are not so normal any- engage in a similar, if not singular, domain. are less alienated from other similar workers (artists,
control their own destinies. Corporations move all of and then had to learn all the radical alternatives on market, and that it is unique and the product of an ar- more. When the embedded positions multiply and re- curators, dealers, etc.) because globalization fosters
their production facilities to the most advantageous your own, finding ways to subtly bring them into your tistic process if not a struggle of some sort. To say as produce, what can we agree on? I would assert that it Economic questions, including but not limited to those international communication and exchange of ideas,
domain to lower labor costs and tax burdens. As more work. If you graduated from art school in the last 10 much might sound cliché. Most normative claims are is impossible to say what the normative claim for the concerning the market for art, change the way that as well as products. Our embedded perspectives
individuals enter the workforce globally, working con- years, the market—whether the market for art or clichés; they are clichés because everyone accepts contemporary art world is, given the intersection of we consider the meaning of art, especially contem- may be very distinct indeed, but the terms of our glob-
ditions deteriorate overall and sweatshops and oth- for attention—is the arbiter of all and you know you them—if not as truth, exactly, at least as gospel. This interests and values that now compose its domain. porary art. This means that the art world is changing al conversation are dynamic and are right now being
er slave-like work environments become more the need to find the means to embrace it in such a way principle protects every participant in the art world While art centers still exist—and even continue to and the normative claims of the modernist avant-gar- reinvented by artists everywhere.
norm. In this picture, the arts play a subsidiary role to as it embraces you in return. Each of these positions because it allows us all to believe that we are really dominate certain dimensions of the market—they are de, for example, do not operate as they once did. Art
shore up the legitimacy of the elite who accrue exten- represents an embedded perspective because it is generating an alternative to the rough-and-tumble now part of a decentralized world in which decisions and money have always fit hand-in-glove, so it is not
sive capital through such unseemly means. Thus, the informed by the entire social apparatus of art educa- world of business. It provides our raison d’être even if are made and reputations solidified based on het- new that dealers, artists, and even curators have
art market is a way to normalize relations between the tion in your location at the moment you attended. The we do not believe it entirely. erogeneous networks of actors whose understand- self-interests within to the public sphere of art. What
patrons and the workers, allowing a handful of artists question of how artists make the most important work ing of fundamental artistic and art market concepts is different is that those of us in the art world can no
and dealers to prosper enormously at the expense of is now very similar to how to make the most valuable Can such a normative claim hold given the nuance may indeed be incompatible. Globalization allows longer allow ourselves to believe that we dictate the
the masses of artists who toil with little opportunity of 1) Clare McAndrew, The International Art Market in 2011. Ob-
work. It is no longer only a question of artistic creation and complexity of a global artistic workforce and dis- us to conceptualize this, to package it, and to explain terms of our own productions. This complicates the servations on the Art Trade over 25 Years (Maastricht: The
compensation. Furthermore, creative content is out- but of market innovation. If radical artists of the 1960s tribution system? As more artists, dealers, curators, away some of the fundamental disagreements. It is a question of alienated labor. While we may be alien- European Fine Art Foundation, 2011), p. 139.
sourced from global contemporary artists working in attempted to intervene in society, path-breaking art- and critics enter the world art mechanism at a variety vast, decentralized structure in which participants of ated from the means of production as cogs in some
48 [SFAQ Issue 19] 49 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Journeys From And To A Destination Nation

Anthony Choice-Diaz
(Part Two)
On November 20th, 2014, Barack Obama, the 44th
President of the United States, gave what was tout-
ed as his long overdue speech on immigration. In
the typical myth-making of a master rhetorician, the
president sought to create an image of a pro-im-
migration nation at the expense of fact. Beginning
his speech by espousing a supposed 200-year-old
tradition of “welcoming immigrants from around the
world,” Obama sought to reframe the discussion just
in time for an all-American family chitchat over the na-
tion’s Thanksgiving meal. But as was explained in part
one of this column, U.S. policy has been anything but
welcoming. It has been highly selective, prejudicial,
and used as a mechanism of empire-building both
at home and abroad. It has to be understood that the
U.S. was and is a settler-colonial nation built upon the
displacement and murder of the continent’s indige-
Children caught in the middle of the immigration crisis. Courtesy of the Internet. An El-Salvadorian prison gang. Courtesy of the Internet.
nous population through famine, pestilence, slavery,
and war. Manifest Destiny found its underlying foun- emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in vio- By 1986 these “definitive” elaborations had grown Forces, Black Carib trackers, and two teams from
dations in an ever-expanding war policies and legal lent ‘accidents.’ And if by chance the jackals fail, as even more murky and all-encompassing: [his] Delta Force troop’ that trapped the guerrillas
slavery. Army Col. Guy A. LeMire(left), Marine Gen. John F. Kelly (center) and Army Col. Thomas D. Boccardi (right) inspect soldiers in formation they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the old mod- atop a jungle mountain. The CIA had pushed hard
during the change of command ceremony at Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras, June 20, 2013. Courtesy of the Internet. els resurface. When the jackals fail, young Americans “Low-intensity conflict is not an operation or an activ- for the infiltrators to be killed, explicitly the guerrilla
Today, some would argue, based upon the masses are sent in to kill and to die . . . [I]f the jackal fails, then ity that one or more of the departments of the United leader . . . [Haney] dropped him with a rifle bullet to the
in the streets protesting against the flagrant police the job falls to the military.” States government can conduct. Rather, it is, first, an neck. As the U.S. operators finished off the work and
murders of the nation’s Black population, that things environment in which conflict occurs and, second, rolled over that still-warm body, they recognized the
haven’t changed all that much since 1864. I don’t pose The example of organized crime seems to offer a a series of diverse civil-military activities and opera- dead man as Arturo Baez Cruz of [the] United States
famed Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler “Contras,” paid counter revolutionaries funded by the
this notion here flippantly: to understand the contem- metaphor. Mafia bosses often start out as street tions which are conducted in that environment. While Special Forces, Haney’s roommate at Delta Force
deemed his tenure during this period accordingly as exchange of arms, drugs, and money—all of which
porary immigration drama one must understand that thugs. But over time, the ones who make it to the top low-intensity conflict may be ambiguous, the specific selection only four years earlier. The idiocy remains
he later titled his book War is a Racket: were conveniently facilitated and enabled by the U.S.
perpetual war is a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy, transform their appearance. They take to wearing activities are not. Despite their diversity, these ac- unexplained . . . as Haney concludes, yet another CIA
Central Intelligence Agency and its regional proxies.
which has created a de facto refugee crisis continent impeccably tailored suits, owning legitimate busi- tivities, which fall outside the realm of conventional scheme gone awry.”
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military Low-intensity warfare, however, wasn’t the only game
wide. nesses, and wrapping themselves in the cloak of conflict, share significant commonalities in their op-
service and during that period I spent most of my time in town. As popular activist author Arundhati Roy
as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall once put it, “these days politics is just as easily done upstanding society. They support local charities and erational environment,” from the final report Army-Air Chomsky puts to us the architecture of why “we,” the
U.S interventionism has been a part of wartime through the checkbook as it is the cruise missile.”1 Or are respected by their communities. They are quick Force Joint Low-Intensity Conflict Project. U.S., are there in the first place:
Street, and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a
posturing throughout the American hemisphere better yet, the con job. to lend money to those in desperate straits. Like the
gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and
from gunboat diplomacy to banana republics of the John Perkins resume, these men appear to be mod- Which is to say, in short, We don’t exactly know what “[I]n Latin America . . . there are very good reasons for
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in
1800s—a response to a period in which independent el citizens. However, beneath this patina is a trail of we’re doing, but we’re doing it anyway, and because we it. The commitment to these doctrines is inconsis-
1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place Cronyism and clientelism, put into motion by the eco-
democratic republics arose throughout the region. blood. When the debtors cannot pay, hit men move in don’t know what we’re doing, we’re doing everything, tent with the use of harsh measures to maintain the
for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues nomic hitmen of American corporations, created po-
This informal disposition on the use of American mili- to demand their pound of flesh. If this is not granted, but because we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re disparity, to ensure our control . . . and our exploitation
in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central Amer- litical dynamics in which the banana republic became
tary power/force abroad was best encapsulated and the jackals close in with baseball bats. Finally, as a last not going to tell you what we’re doing. Therefore, you of the world. In short, [to insure] what we might call
ican republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped an all-too-active monster on steroids, a junkie fueled
typified in policy form as the Monroe Doctrine (1823). resort, out come the guns. should just trust that we know what we’re doing. The the ‘fifth freedom’: the freedom to rob. That’s really
purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House by structural adjustment programs, maquiladoras,
This was a standing document that made U.S. inter- only problem with these scenarios is that real people the only one that counts; the others were mostly for
of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the no-bid contracts, sweetheart deals, corruption,
vention mandatory should any foreign or sovereign EHMs, jackals, and armies flourish for as long as have to deal with the consequences, and though this show. And in order to maintain the freedom to rob and
Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests bribery, and graft. Violence under these conditions
power tinker and dawdle within the Latin American their activities can be shown to generate economic may seem far from the immigration debate, the two exploit, we do have to consistently oppose democ-
in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the Ameri- becomes a blunted and messy tool that more often
hemisphere, the doctrine legalized war and indem- growth—and they almost always demonstrate such are directly related. So when two scholars as far afield ratization, the raising of living standards, and human
can fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped than not interferes with the ability to keep the dollars
nified U.S. aggression against any form of petulant growth. Thanks to the biased ‘sciences’ of forecast- as Noam Chomsky, one of America’s premier public rights. And we do consistently oppose them; that, of
see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolest- flowing smoothly. Seemingly, the goals of low-inten-
autonomy should sovereign nations try and seek in- ing, econometrics, and statistics, if you bomb a city intellectuals and “the most cited living author” (1992) course, is in the real world.
ed. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone sity warfare (destabilization) and structural readjust-
dependence, liberty, or self-determination anywhere and then re-build it, the data shows a huge spike in on the planet, and the Georgetown University Profes-
a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his ment (stabilization) would seem not only at odds with
on the continent. economic growth . . . The real story is that we are living sor in Foreign Policy and Director of the (U.S.) Army
racket in three districts. I operated on three conti- one another but counterintuitive. Here is where John [O]ne of the main concerns of U.S. policy is the ‘pro-
nents.” Perkins, self-confessed whistleblower on the role of a lie.”2 Historical Foundation, Derek Leebaert align, we need tection of our raw materials.’ Who must we protect
By 1848, half of Mexico had been conquered and economic hitmen, becomes that much more cogent: to be paying attention. Leebaert anecdotally relates our materials from? Well, primarily, the domestic pop-
claimed through open conquest, diplomatic duplici- Low-intensity warfare, more often than not referred the following in his To Dare and to Conquer: Special ulations, the indigenous population, which may have
This may seem disconnected from a present in which
ty, and clandestine military operations into sovereign to simply as “conflict,” today’s insurgency/counter Operations and the Destiny of Nations, from Achilles ideas of their own about raising the living standards,
news stories about half-starved, abandoned children “Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid profes-
territory in which American citizens were the “illegals” insurgency, began its journey to formalization in the to Al Qaeda (2006): democratization, and human rights.
and raped/brutalized women show up at the bor- sionals who cheat countries around the globe out of
taking up space and expropriating land from the local late ‘70s, and early ‘80s, following the lessons learned
ders in need of saving by the Red, White, and Blue, trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World
population. Or perhaps it was the adventurist foreign in Vietnam. In 1985, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff au- “In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, howev-
but these children are children of broken revolutions Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development The people who are committed to these dangerous
excursions at the cusp of the new century and the thored the following definition: er, it was most of all a case of back the bad against
and a doctrine of U.S. experimentation in low-inten- (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into heresies, such as using their resources for their own
Spanish-American War that solidified the imperialist the worse . . . serving as a sour metaphor for the arc
sity warfare throughout the continent. If it wasn’t a the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of purposes or believing that the government is commit-
ambitions of a nation trying to become a global su- of U.S. third world involvements . . . Green Beret and
CIA-led Operation Condor or PBSUCCESS (1954) a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natu- “Low-intensity conflict is a limited politico-military ted to the welfare of its own people, may not be [part
perpower. In short order, major military operations Delta commandos were offering counterinsurgency
to overthrow democratically elected presidents, it ral resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial struggle to achieve political, social, economic, or psy- of a ‘monolithic and ruthless conspiracy’ by the ‘ene-
resulted in the U.S. claim over Puerto Rico, Cuba, training to regimes unsurpassed in the noncommu-
was assassinations and the disappearing of key pop- reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and chological objectives. It is often protracted and rang- mies of freedom’] to begin with and, in fact, quite regu-
Guam, and the Philippines to name but a few. This nist world at slaughtering peasants . . . In that terrible
ular movement leaders such as Archbishop Óscar murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one es from diplomatic, economic, and psycho-social larly are not. In Latin America they are often members
laid the foundations for the so-called Banana Wars morass, it fit . . . Washington, during early 1983, to as-
Romero (1980), the use and sponsorship of both that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions . . . pressures through terrorism and insurgency. Low-in- . . . of Bible study groups . . . self-help groups, of church
(1898-1934) that additionally took U.S. military inter- sign a Delta-led mission to hunt down≈ and erase a
private and state-sanctioned terrorism, false flag [I]f we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones tensity conflict is generally confined to a geographic organizations, peasant organizations, and so on and
ventionism into Panama, Honduras, Haiti, Domini- particular, newly formed guerrilla unit that had slipped
operations, pseudo gangs, and paramilitary death we EHMs refer to as the jackals, men who trace their area and is often characterized by constraints on the so forth. But by the time we get through with them
can Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico at the behest across the Honduran border from Sandinista-dom-
squads like Mano Blanca (Guatemala), Sombra Ne- heritage directly to those earlier empires. The jackals weaponry, tactics, and level of violence” [emphasis they will be . . . they will have nowhere else to turn for
of U.S. corporate monopolies over an agribusiness inated Nicaragua. Command Sergeant Major Eric
gra (El Salvador), Battalion 3-16 (Honduras), or the are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they mine]. any minimal form of protection against the terror and
kept afloat through real or virtual slave labor. The Haney [headed] ‘a mixed unit of Honduran Special the violence that we regularly unleash against them if
50 [SFAQ Issue 19] 51 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 Your Gaze Hits The Side

Jessica Hoffmann
1.

“In 1982, Louise Bourgeois became the first woman

to be celebrated by a retrospective at the MoMA, and
now at the age of 96, is clearly one of the most sig-
nificant artists, gender notwithstanding, alive today,”
wrote Art Observed in 2008,1 to encouraging readers
to go see the major Bourgeois show then at the Gug-
genheim in New York. A few months later, MOCA in
Los Angeles promoted its big Bourgeois show with
copy that began,

“This comprehensive exhibition is the first major sur-

vey of American artist Louise Bourgeois’s (b. 1911,
Paris, France) work in more than a decade. Bour-
geois’s long and distinguished career reveals a vast
oeuvre in dialogue with most of the major internation-
al avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th centu-
ry—from surrealism to conceptual art—but always
remaining distinctively separate, as an inventive fore-
runner.”2

Unmentioned among the “major international

avant-garde3 artistic movements of the 20th centu-
ry,” of which Bourgeois was an inventive forerunner,
is feminist art, which would provoke a seismic shift
in art discourse starting in the 1970s, a couple of de-
Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014. Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Courtesy of Creative Time.
cades into Bourgeois’s career; which established the
context in which Bourgeois became the first woman
to get a major retrospective at MoMA; and many of In the 300-plus-page catalogue for the MOCA show, art and its history. But the composition on display is
the concerns Bourgeois was already exploring in the the topic of feminism is addressed in a six-page es- . . . Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), an
1940s. say entitled “Is She? Or isn’t She?” that documents image of a woman’s body so sexualized that it is still
The dead, shot by federal soldiers, are laid out on the sanctuary floor of the San Salvador Metro Cathedral after they were dragged inside the sanctuary from the steps of the church where they were shot. Bourgeois’s shifting and fruitfully complicated (and able to shock today, nearly 150 years after the fact. If
Bourgeois’s paintings and drawings of the late ’40s relational) identification with the term “feminist” as it wasn’t so depressing, the institution’s reluctance to
of naked bodies with houses for heads do of course well as some of the many feminist concerns in her tackle the obvious questions Levine is defying us to
they undertake programs of the kind described.”3 ditional oligarchy to a military oligarchy of extraordi- filling streets with violence throughout the region by bear a visual and conceptual relationship to surre- work, but ends up feeling—because of the title and consider—how the charged space of women’s sex-
nary brutality and corruption.”4 flooding Latin America with waves of gang-initiat- alism. That they are women’s bodies under the title the minor amount of space it occupies in the book— uality mutates depending on the creator’s gendered
So what do these kind of terrors look like, and what ed deportees recently graduated from the harshest Femme-maison (housewoman) struck me immedi- like a perfunctory nod to “the feminists.” Even more gaze, how commercial production exploits and ban-
do they produce as a result? Chomsky further elabo- The civilian victims and the military men and women ghettos and penitentiaries the U.S. has to offer. Fol- ately upon first viewing them at MOCA as clear evi- dismissively, the Centre Pompidou assured viewers alizes women’s bodies, how large-scale reproduction
rates in his descriptions of events in Honduras and El pay the deepest price of the so-called “inconsequen- lowing coups and yet another ever-ready supply of dence of Bourgeois’s feminist concerns, whether in of the Femme-maison images in its Bourgeois show confronts and exposes these specific ideas—would
Salvador, citing articles from the Sunday Times (Lon- tial” effects of such irresponsible meddling. The grav- guns, drugs, and money, places like San Pedro Sula, the simple sense that there is a major and obvious that year: “More than mere feminist propaganda de- be laughable.”
don) and the periodical Foreign Policy (1981): ity of such activities is anything but lost on them, and Honduras have topped the world’s most dangerous gaze and subjectivity shift embedded in the repre- nouncing the overwhelming burden of the home in a
it is to this that General Butler was referring. The CIA city list three years running, putting forth an annual sentation of women’s bodies by women in the con- housewife’s life, as the titles might lead us to believe, At about the same time, on the other side of the coun-
has another term for when things go sour in their af- homicide rate of 187 per 100,00 people, second only text of an art history centered around the represen- here we find an immense nucleus of inspiration. The try, LACMA presented In Wonderland: The Surrealist
“[Reporter] David Blundy . . . spent ten days in the
termath: “blowback”—the unintended, harmful con- to cities outside of a war zone. The Honduran capital tation of women’s bodies by male “masters,” or in a house is the ideal receptacle for all memories and, Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the Unit-
border area . . . interviewing doctors, priests, Hondu-
sequences of a covert (or not so covert) operation city of Tegucigalpa, parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, more complicated sense. Maybe she was getting into in particular, those of childhood.”4 Those apparently ed States. It could have been a perspective-altering
ran soldiers, Salvadoran refugees, and members of
that are suffered by the aggressor. Cumulatively the and the Cartel-controlled narco corridors of Mexico something about the relationship between women’s un-feminist, universal concerns. show, given surrealism’s overwhelmingly male gaze
church aid groups, who ‘provided overwhelming ev-
“war is hell” metaphor then gives way to a far more apt are not far behind. The fleeing peasant populace is prescribed intellectual or perceptual purview and and abundant use of women’s bodies as symbols.
idence of atrocities of increasing brutality and repres-
military term: FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recogni- seeking respite in an American Dream by trying to their traditional location in the home, and maybe be- In a 2012 essay called “Feminism in the Man’s Mu- Instead, the exhibition text put forth “feminism” as a
sion by the Honduran army as well as the Salvador-
tion). Which is of course to say it’s all just a SNAFU escape the American Nightmare. tween that and how women’s bodies in western cul- seum,”5 the critic Rebecca Park argues that, though straightforward colonial narrative:
ans.’ The Salvadoran army is carrying out what can
(situation normal—all fucked up). tures are always/everywhere as if naked, or maybe feminist artists are occupying ever more space in ma-
only be described as mass extermination of thou-
(sometimes the figure is on all-fours or on her back jor museums, overall the institutions “still don’t know “North America represented a place free from Euro-
sands of peasants living in the area where the guer-
and there is not just a house but an entire tenement how to deal with” them. Park points to Musée Guim- pean traditions for women Surrealists . . . North Amer-
rillas are based in a ‘co-ordinated military campaign The non-rhetorical effects of this are where the mar-
building covering her head) there is something about et’s 2011 Rina Banerjee show and the Whitney’s 2011 ica offered [women artists] the opportunity for rein-
by the Salvadoran military, assisted by the Honduran riage between low-intensity war as destabilization
class or, in that visually new yet emotionally familiar Sherrie Levine exhibition as examples of shows by vention and individual expression, a place where they
army with the support of the United States.’ Blundy or “opportunity making” and structural readjustment
combination of naked hips, thighs, and pussy and artists whose work has clearly feminist content and could attain their full potential and independence.”
reports refugee accounts of bombing, napalm at- or “profit maintenance” creates the cyclical immi-
un-see-able, surrounded head, something about yet in the institutions’ framing (exhibition catalogues,
tacks, destruction of villages, massacres, rape, tor- gration crisis we’re seeing today. The fact is these
so-called public and private spheres and just the promotional and wall text, etc.), there is no feminist North America: a free new world for white women to
ture by the Salvadoran and Honduran army, stories U.S.-backed antics, not just in Central America but
whole complicated set of questions about female analysis. About the framing of the Levine show, Park shake off the oppressive traditions of European art
of ‘an existence of almost incomprehensible brutality.’ throughout Latin America, are both ongoing and
1) Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, subjectivity and social/structural relationships that writes, history, whimsically plucking and dropping into their
generations old. Butler spoke about his time circa
2004. South End Press. Bourgeois seemed to be getting at a few decades work sacred indigenous and Mexican signs and sym-
[T]he brutal killings by the army ‘have succeeded in the turn of the century, while Chomsky and Lee-
2) John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, ahead of the intrusion of feminist analysis on the art “[T]he Whitney sidestepped Levine’s sociopolitical bols.
traumatizing the Salvadoran people in fearful pas- baert are talking about incidences that happened 2004. Barrett-Koehler Publishers.
world, and right around the time du Beauvoir would commentary to such an extent that it was nearly
sivity.’ The army ‘is held together by a vast network only a generation and a half ago that continued well 3) Noam Chomsky, Intervention in Vietnam and Central
have been writing The Second Sex—but before I had comical. Take After Courbet (2009) as an example. Unsurprising, then, that Frida Kahlo’s images—more
of corruption. The vast majority of killings occur in into the 1990s. But as with all generations prior, or- America: Parallels and Differences, 1985.
a chance to really think through what might be going The work, a gridlike display of eighteen postcards famous than any of the others’—were the primary
sweeps of the countryside by the armed forces or by phaned children and refugees must eventually grow 4) Noam Chomsky, El Salvador, 1982, citing “The Innocents
on in those images, I was quickly corrected, a little box of the same mid-nineteenth-century painting, is marketing tools of the show although most of the art-
death squads operating under the formal direction or up. Today’s refugees and surplus children are born Caught in Lempa River Massacre,” Sunday Times (London),
April 26, 1981 by David Blundy and “El Salvador: The Current placed over my head. approached in the same manner as the entirety of ists were white and American or European and, in the
informal sanction of regional military commanders.’ out of scenarios straight out of Lord of the Flies that
Danger: American Myths,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1981 by her oeuvre: challenges to notions of originality and overcrowded exhibition, there was no real space or
The general picture is of a shift of power from the tra- have taken over urban neighborhoods and prisons,
Leonel Gomez and Bruce Cameron. reproduction, generally limited to our experience of invitation to reflect on the complex content of Kahlo’s
52 [SFAQ Issue 19] 53 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 3. disorienting, sometimes repellent phenomenon for him instead of acting “like a refugee.” News outlets’
known as outsider art . . . best defined as art produced preoccupation with the “violence” or lack thereof of a
Twenty minutes into an OK Cupid date with a white by those, who if not officially classed as ‘insane’ or in- social movement aimed at ending hundreds of years
guy a few years older than me, he gets onto The New stitutionalised, are in some way mentally or socially of systematic murders of Black bodies.
Yorker and casually says he wishes the fiction writers estranged from, well . . . the rest of us. Yes, to speak
in the magazine with “foreign” names would write colloquially, I mean the mad—the nutty, the unhinged, 11.
more “universal” stories—“like James Baldwin,” he the non compos mentis, the permanently unrespon-
adds, referring to a writer I’d mentioned in my profile. sive, the people known, more politely, as having psy- While it’s not important to me to claim Louise Bour-
I leave when it’s polite to and still find myself con- chological ‘deficits’.” geois (or anyone else) for feminism, it feels important
cerned about his feelings when, next day, I decline his to notice the lack of integration of basic feminist anal-
invitation for a second date. I mentioned some things about Castle’s identity as ysis (as just one example) in the main stream of art
reminders of some key insights of feminist thought: discourse. Incursions are made, conversations are
(Look at this womanly thing I am doing, bringing in a women, or gay people, or people of any particular expanded, and still centers are held. I am interested
personal scene when I’m meant to be saying some- marginalized identity category, are not essentially in the ways a normative gaze is maintained in a field
thing about public discourse. / I trust you know how free of a violent or normalizing gaze; identity is inter- that is concerned with looking. The ways the outside
absurd it was to have invoked Baldwin like that.) sectional, meaning that one’s whiteness or class po- or other gets ignored or included or looked at by a
sition intersect with one’s experience of gender (for non-porous or absorbing gaze. The ways that cannot
4. example). stop the “invisible” from being there, hanging on the
wall, saying the strange thing. The richness that spills
I think violence stems from, or at least is enabled by, Also to say: feminist content is not inherent in wom- outside “universal.”
the failure to register another as real. I think love is the en’s work, and work that is made by someone who
opposite of that—it entails seeing another as whole does not identify as a feminist might bear fruit under 12.
and as real. feminist analysis or even expand feminist discourse,
and those whose identity has been constructed as I have no control over what you register.
5. normal or universal might see through a feminist or
other non-normative lens. Seeing against the grain
Art can and should do a lot of different things. One Virginia Woolf, circa 1912. of normal/universal is not a simple matter of identity. It
I’ll mention in the context of this discussion is to find is sometimes a matter of life experience, sometimes
or offer a different way of seeing from the usual or a matter of analysis, sometimes a matter of listening,
one’s own way. I have doubts about whether simple inist, but only if we define “feminism as the love of or looking with openness, to receive something one
representation or inclusion have material impact reading,” ha ha. might not have noticed or thought about before.
on social systems or people’s lives, especially in the
context of neoliberalism, which absorbs and thwarts 8. Art can be an opening—to fundamental questions
any real challenge to the dominant order, but when I about the nature of existence, to new ways of expe-
have some space to hope it does seem that narrative “A feminist art practice . . . is not a term designating a riencing a thought or a mood, to beauty, to visionary
and image and shifts of gaze have crucial potential to homogeneous group (i.e., the disenfranchised) or a possibilities, to reworkings of a symbolic or other
increase empathy. Even if compassion and under- fixed site (the margin) but rather an agency of inter- order. Not-seeing the other, whether by consuming
standing are not systemic change, and even if art has vention—an ongoing activity of pluralizing, destabiliz- the other for their very other-ness, as in Castle’s ap-
many purposes and it’s arguable whether contrib- ing, baffling any centered discourse. This work, like all proach to outsider art, or by erasing other-ness by
Louise Bourgeois photographed with her Fillette by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982. uting to human connection or reckoning with reality feminist activity, is a calculated optimistic gesture.”— seeing only what matches one’s own reflection and
should be or are among them, representation and Jo Anna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art. thereby reifying the “universal” or “normal,” is a fore-
work. On a wall of artists’ bios, the photographic por- “There is a specter here that haunts this space. It has shifting (or sharing) subjectivity and communication closing. That constriction both reflects the limitations
just might have some role to play in countering actual, 9. of the viewer’s gaze and, cumulatively, affects the
trait of Kahlo was the only one in which the artist was multiple faces. We’ll call one white supremacy: the be-
nude. It’s a beautiful image that I have found strong lief in the universal, a pure idea arrived at by a series of daily violence or creating a world less rife with it. social context we are all living in—art, then, both re-
“Outsider art.” Art by the “insane,” the “raw,” the flects and plays its part in the various violences of an
and sexy in many other contexts, but on this wall white men who have combed through culture and cu-
6. “brute,” the “untrained,” and the “uneducated.” enforced social norm or center.
of portraits of clothed white artists, it told me more rated its worth. Another face we’ll call visual oppres-
about the curatorial and presumed audience gaze sion. We’ll call it passing. We’ll call it presence without
Here’s Claudia Rankine on Kara Walker in a recent in- These are words art-historically (and otherwise) Steeped in feminist analysis, it is quite clear to me how
than about Frida Kahlo or hers. provocation. We’ll call it just enough black faces to Barbara Kruger, Your gaze hits the side of my face, 1981.
terview by Lauren Berlant in BOMB.7 applied to women, Black people, poor people, indig- the idea of “outsider art” relies on a normative center
assuage liberal guilt without the discomfort of chal-
enous people, queer people. These are words cul- whose borders are policed by identifying slippages
2. lenging anything. We’ll call it the fantasy of postracial
“In a sense, the scandal of Walker’s A Subtlety . . . is its turally close to hysterical, primitive, exotic, wild, unruly, of the “universal,” and is connected to discourses that
America. We’ll call it visible invisibility.”6
refusal to contextualize or educate beyond what can deviant. other, exclude, and seek to control women, queer
When millions of people took to U.S. streets demand-
ing justice for immigrants on May Day 2006, En- In their coverage of the current mass movement pro- be seen. If you can’t or won’t do the math, then the people, people of color, poor people, and people per-
space must hold your reactions too. I struggle with The category of “outsider” presumes an “inside” and ceived as “having psychological ‘deficits’” in relation
glish-language news outlets reported with surprise at testing systemic police violence against Black Amer-
wanting to reroute the content I am living, and often reifies the colonial/patriarchal canon of properly to a patriarchal, white-supremacist notion of psy-
the hugeness of this previously “invisible” movement. icans, many media outlets are addressing the prob-
its supremacist frame is pushing back, pushing back trained “masters” or elites at the center. Outsider art is chological health and perception of reality. “Outsider
That they, and most white citizens of this country, had lem of “Why It’s So Hard for Whites to Understand
hard.” art “created outside the boundaries of official culture,” art” defines the center while attempting to grasp (or
not previously noticed the millions of immigrant work- Ferguson” (to borrow a headline from The Atlantic)
Wikipedia says.8 determine whether one “likes”) some peripheral ab- 1) [Link]
ers in their midst who were building toward that mo- by reporting on a 2013 study by the Public Religion
ment does not mean that those people or that move- Research Institute that found that the close social and erration. geois-at-guggenheim-new-york/#[Link]
I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the most fa- 2) [Link]
ment were ever “invisible.” It means that some people networks—the circle with whom people discuss im-
“I sometimes wonder if Walker’s intention is to redi- mous “outsider artists” (e.g., Henry Darger) are white 10. php?id=412
did not see them. portant matters in their lives—of white Americans 3) If by avant-garde I can mean what a standard dictionary
rect the black gaze away from the pieces themselves men. White men whose strangeness, whose wild-
are on average 91 percent white. Robert P. Jones, the says it means (“those who create, produce, or apply new,
and onto their white consumption?” ness, whose insanity, whose unpredictability plac- These are some things that seem to me to reflect a
That a person who, in Claudia Rankine’s words in writer of the Atlantic article and the CEO of the Public original, or experimental ideas” and “a group [as of writers and
es them in the company of women, people of color, strange perception of reality:
Citizen, “has perhaps never seen anyone who is not Religion Research Institute, reflects, “For me, a white artists] that is unorthodox and untraditional in its approach;
7. queer people . . .
a reflection of himself” fails to perceive an other does man, hearing accounts of how black parents teach sometimes: such a group that is extremist, bizarre, or arty and
not render the other invisible. It says something, rath- their sons to deal with police is difficult to grasp as Joe Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford project. The unim- affected”), and not what it has often meant in practice: a group
There is the persistent problem of what can possibly I don’t know, but I can tell you that Terry Castle, a white peded trajectory of Carl Andre’s career after Ana of dudes jerking each other off and announcing how not polit-
er, about the one who is doing the gazing—and about reality.”
be received or understood in a neoliberal context in lesbian, once described by another white lesbian, Su- Mendieta fell out of the apartment they shared in the ical their project is.
the social context in which some people are able to
which all subversive or disruptive meaning is assim- san Sontag, as “the most expressive, most enlighten- midst of an argument (people gossiped that she was 4) [Link]
live without ever having “seen anyone who is not a re- The HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? collective rces/ens-bourgeois-en/[Link]
ilated and undermined—a context in which it often ing literary critic at large today,” aptly titled a fetishiz- “fiery”, i.e., the crazy one). The celebration of artists
flection of himself.” (Seeing being a layered verb not pulled their work out of the 2014 Whitney Biennial 5) Rebecca Park, “Feminism in the Man’s Museum,” make/
feels like nothing means anything anymore. Of what ing 2011 article on so-called outsider art in the London who draw racist caricatures as free-speech heroes
limited to physical sight.) in protest of the inclusion of Joe Scanlan’s Donelle shift no. 12
can be received by a viewer whose gaze is circum- Review of Books “Do I Like It?”9 while Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are
Woolford project, which centers around a fictional 6) [Link]
In “The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women,” written black woman artist imagined by Scanlan, a white scribed by the violent construction of its supposed criminalized for disseminating classified information al-for-angry-women/
but unreal universality. After listing a series of “street encounters with luna- about the violence of the democratic state of which 7) [Link]
in response to the 2014 biennial, Eunsong Kim and man.
tics” that she has had (“like most people who live in they are citizens. A song that has been played on the kine
Maya Isabella Mackrandilal define “(White)spatiality”:
Here’s how canon-keeper Harold Bloom dealt with cities”), Castle goes on to describe her “latest intel- radio for decades now in which an American rock 8) [Link]
Virginia Woolf’s feminism: okay, fine, she was a fem- lectual [and collecting] obsession—the gorgeous, star tells an abuse survivor to chill out and open wide 9) [Link]

54 [SFAQ Issue 19] 55 [SFAQ Issue 19]

On The Despised Art Of Thomas Kinkade

John Rapko
The painting shows a cottage, every window brightly lit from an otherwise unde-
picted interior. Smoke curls from the chimney. A storm runs by, roughly paralleled
by an irregular path. The cottage is set near a grove of an oddly mixed species of
trees. The path disappears into the trees, and beyond them mountains, only lightly
barely indistinct from atmospheric perspective, fill in some of the canvas. All beings
may safely graze. Any student of art history can recite precedents from among the
masters of pre-twentieth-century European painting for every aspect of the com-
position, handling, and contents of the picture. The technical ability displayed here
forces the word “competent” to one’s lips. How can such a work induce any strong
response, indeed the universal scorn of the art world?

Nearly 50 years ago the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that a culture can
be fruitfully studied by considering how it polices its boundaries. At the edge of a
culture stands an indeterminately vast array of monsters: the beings who embody
what we don’t do, don’t say, don’t eat, or don’t touch. Monsters at the boundaries
arouse disgust in those within the culture. One of Douglas’s distinctive claims is that
a monster is something that exhibits a cognitive dissonance, in that the monsters Thomas Kinkade, Cobblestone Village, 1998. Courtesy of the Internet.
seem simultaneously to exemplify for a culture categories that ought to be kept
separate. Douglas’s most spectacular analysis illuminates the system of classifica- the days of modernism when Oscar Wilde lambasted sentimentality as trafficking in
tions that underlie the seemingly arbitrary catalog of abominations in Leviticus; for unearned affect, and Hermann Broch and Clement Greenberg treated the latter as
example, the snake is an abomination because that which is on land should walk on the mark of ersatz and cliché-ridden cultural products. It is with these abominations
legs, not crawl or slither, which are the characteristics of the beasts of the sea. that the monster Kinkade is kept outside the gates, and simultaneously the senti-
mental and the kitschy provide what little there is in contemporary art as consensual
Besides illuminating something of the classificatory structure of a society, the con- marks of failure.
sideration of monsters reveals something about the society’s relative willingness
or resistance to re-structuring itself by its attitude towards cognitive dissonance. A further and less secure part of the social myth of Kinkade is that he was Ameri-
Douglas extends this kind of analysis into modern institutions, such as the army, ca’s “most controversial” artist. One is supposed to think that Kinkade’s work is the
which are partially characterized by the degree of internal structuring, hierarchy, very icon of the yearning masses, hungry for beauty, meaning, and solace, and that
and relative porosity of their boundaries. As Douglas later summarized the analy- the power of this work presents a challenge to art world orthodoxy. Now the fact, if
ses, “each tribe actively construes its particular universe in the course of an internal it is one, that many people have bought and adore Kinkade’s products (not just or Thomas Kinkade, Walk of Faith, 2011. Courtesy of the Internet.
dialogue about law and order.”1 even primarily paintings, but prints, and then endless products festooned with the
images or Kinkade’s name: the expected gewgaws, plates, and teapots, but also of the face of Jesus and painted it in His guise as Man of Peace. The resultant work sublime mode to block the viewer’s imagined physical access to the far planes; the
On first thought the art world might not seem amenable to such an approach. Even paddles and watches) might be thought no more of a challenge to the discourse of looks like a student’s fumbling reminiscence of Titian’s Ecce Homo. The narrative pointless meanders of the path give out in some middle-distance hedge or copse.
if one can speak of our diffuse, polycentric, and global art world as an institution, its art than the widespread consumption of fast food is to the practice of cooking. But staging of the revelation is more telling in its near-repetition of a founding moment Kinkade’s space is not fundamentally traversable, but rather inhabitable, and this
self-conception and the characterization of its contents, structure, and modes of the works do provide the opportunity for reflecting on the limits of seriousness in of contemporary art, when in the late 1940s the student painter Robert Rauschen- within strict boundaries.
authority would appear peculiarly impervious to analysis; allegedly anything can contemporary art, and whether too there might be elements in Kinkade’s work that berg turned from a model and covered a canvas with numbers smudged with a
be a work of art, anyone can make an artwork, and evaluations are individual and could be taken up and put to uses other than Kinkade’s. dirty white. Leo Steinberg famously diagnosed Rauschenberg’s gesture as part of What finally makes the Kinkades so objectionable, so unredeemable for the con-
ineliminably subjective. Lacking even the most porous boundaries, the art world the beginning of a shift away from the deep-seated conception of a picture-plane temporary art world is first of all this compositional strategy that sacrifices every-
would also lack the motivation to engage in an internal dialogue about its limits. It is startling to learn that as a teenager Kinkade apprenticed himself to his next-door as an analogue to the visual field, and towards that of the picture as a kind of work thing suggestive of exploration, anti-rationalism, contingency, and multiple per-
But there is one great monster among recent artists, someone whose work seems neighbor Glenn Wessels, a former student of Hans Hofmann’s who regaled him with surface, hung vertically but worked horizontally, the “flat-bed” picture plane.2 Instead spectives. Then the choice of elements is governed by the implacable criterion that
outside of what anyone inside the art world can treat as even a candidate for seri- stories of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound from days of modernist yore. Around the of this typical postmodern and contemporary conception, Kinkade developed a each bit can be seen as exhibiting the Deus sive Natura as radiant light, while con-
ousness: the self-described “painter of light,” Thomas Kinkade, whose works, such age of twenty, while attending art school in Pasadena, Kinkade rejected modernism, conception of the picture plane as what he called “the envelope.” In this concep- tributing seamlessly to the overall envelope. Despite the Christian context, even the
as the one described above, have allegedly graced one in twenty American homes or at least one of its most objectionable yet durable inheritances from romanticism tion the canvas is treated in the all-over manner descended from Monet: no bit is most austere presentation from Paul of the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and char-
in the past two decades. No obituary by a prominent art critic following Kinkade’s that survives until today as a kind of artistic common sense—namely the idea that left unworked, and each part seems to have received precisely the same effort of ity is here mutilated into a placid faith that is indistinguishable from self-satisfaction.
alcohol-and-drug-induced death two years ago suggested the possibility of a post- a work of art is first of all an instance of an artist’s self-expression, particularly of her Kinkade’s attention. The envelope provides both the impression of an overall uni- Perhaps the alleged attraction of all this for the audience untouched by the art world
humous re-evaluation and rehabilitation of Kinkade’s work, even to the small extent mental states, attitudes, moods, and emotions. What replaced this was a conception ty, and the even-treatment of details conveys something of sense that God is in all arises from the induced desire to enter the painting. The Claudian scheme provides
that Norman Rockwell’s has recently undergone. Instead, facts are recited, with the of art as a “service” to its audience. Kinkade seemed to conceptualize the audience things, from the major motifs to the details. multiple points of entry, and the density of detail provides numerous halting points
combination of repetition, lack of explication, and lack of evidence suggestive of a and its needs and interests in ways that largely overlap Immanuel Kant’s views of the for the gaze. The lack of elements bridging from detail to envelope discourages the
social myth being rehearsed: Kinkade was the “most popular” artist of recent time; moral situation of the run of humanity in the famous opening chapter of Groundwork On the evidence of the major catalog of a retrospective of Kinkade’s work3, gaze from moving and comparing. This is bound to the insistence that all windows
his work was loved by the common folk; many collectors began and ended their to the Metaphysics of Morals. Both think ordinary people are decent, possessed of a Kinkade’s distinctive conception seems to have been in place by the late 1980s, with be brightly lit: looking at one is just as rewarding as looking at another, and one is not
days with a good look at a Kinkade; rejecting modernism and “ugliness,” Kinkade secure sense of right and wrong, and have some access to the source and principle refinements into a fully achieved state by the late 1990s. Moonlit Village of (1989) dis- meant to wonder what sort of life requires such unrelieved illumination.
wished to provide beauty and solace. On the other hand the art world condemned of moral values. For both something like the characteristics of modern life trouble, plays the “envelope” in its plausible rendering of a bright moon casting shadows on
the work as either sentimental or kitsch. Perhaps as important as these particular but do not destroy, the moral orientation of ordinary people. For Kant, drawing upon the snow, but bizarrely shows the sky a pale blue that reaches towards Tiepolo. The If this be sentimentality and kitsch, can the art world re-structure itself so as to incor-
admonitions is the qualification that the works are pure: “pure” kitsch, that is. What Rousseau’s account of amour-propre, the problem was the tendency to overrate windows on the church’s spire are a-characteristically unlit, a pre-stylistic holdover porate something of its attractiveness to those immune to the main lines of contem-
one does not find, then or before, is any account of Kinkade’s work as art. It is neither “his majesty the ego,” and to be tempted to except oneself from the demands of suggesting spiritual emptiness, and which as such will be eliminated in succeeding porary art? The finer analysis of the elements of sentimentality and kitsch is beyond
clear what particular qualities are being grouped under these negative terms, nor morality. The appropriate philosophical response to the temptation was to show works. In a typical later piece, Twilight Cottage (1997), the small patch of bluish sky my scope here, but it is interesting that a number of artists have given students the
is there any reflection on why sentimentality and kitsch are uniquely problematic in that such self-exemption was unsustainable, and that the desire to avoid morality shows a crescent moon and an impossible ten stars of at least second-magnitude, assignment of altering a Kinkade. The painter Chester Arnold told me that he has
contemporary art. duties could be checked by the sublime view of oneself as the very author of the while the ambient light easily distinguishes the blues, reds, purples, and lavenders tasked students with setting the Kinkade cottages ablaze. Others have stuck in fig-
moral demands that one considered avoiding. For Kinkade, modern life introduced of flowers. The peculiar mixture of cues indicating direction and intensity of light ures, monsters in the trees or ghouls peeking out the window. I imagine an added
There is a history of vices and so too of what counts as monstrous. A central vice a chaos of ugliness into the world; the remedy would be an art of solace, one which is matched by the mixture of traditional landscape composition on the model of figure representing something of the mood of the poet Georg Trakl’s A Winter Eve-
in modernist painting was “the decorative.” A painting might be condemned as at each point offered the viewer a path out of modern life into a world saturated with Claude with some whiffs of a tamed sublime. The landscapes of Claude typically ning: “Wanderer, step silently inside;/pain has petrified the threshold./There in pure
decorative either by failing to generate a sufficient rich meaningfulness (a constant the source of goodness. In a venerable Christian tradition stretching back at least to have framing elements of hills, buildings, or especially trees, between which alter- radiance/Bread and wine glow upon the table.”4
worry of Kandinsky’s with his abstract painting), or by ‘merely’ illustrating some Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the early seventh century, Kinkade identified nating light and dark planes organize spatial recession to a distant horizon or light
text, and gaining its meaning only via relations external to the painting. The wither- the source of goodness as God, and the this-worldly and visible expression of this source. The distance between foreground and the most distant background is tra- 1) Mary Douglas (1975), Implicit Meanings, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 5, summarizing
ing and near-extinction in contemporary art of the term “decorative” as a negative goodness as light. The demand for a contemporary painter of light was born out of versed by a path, through which the viewer gains imaginative access to the con- (1966), Purity and Danger, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
term would then be the result of the developments out of minimalism that treat the an insight into the emptiness of a central modernist myth. 2) Leo Steinberg (1972), Other Criteria, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and (2000).
tents of the painting. The Claudian space is fundamentally intelligible and made for
external condition of an art work—the architectural environment, the activity of the 3) Encounters with Rauschenberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
human exploration. In the sublime paintings of Salvator Rosa the path is broken or 4) Jeffrey Vallance (2004), Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth, Santa Ana: Grand Central
viewer, the institutional structure, the ideological framing—as constitutive elements Part of the social myth of Kinkade connects the rejection of self-expression in art to eliminated, and the viewer is confronted with something mightier than herself. With- Press
of a work. By contrast the terms “sentimental” and “kitsch” maintain their sting from a religious vision. While in class with a nude model, Kinkade was struck by a vision in a fundamentally Claudian conception, Kinkade introduces just enough of the Translation by Jim Doss and Werner Schmidt.
56 [SFAQ Issue 19] 57 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Ulay Act III

Leigh Markopoulos
Uwe Frank Laysiepen, known as Ulay, is unarguably one of the foremost photogra-
phers and performance artists of our time. However, although critically acclaimed,
until recently his pioneering work has remained largely unknown; his forty-five year
contribution to art history often reduced to a focused period during which he fa-
mously collaborated with Marina Abramović. Today his oeuvre seems finally to be
on the verge of garnering more universal recognition with a comprehensive mono-
graph just published1, his first gallery representation, and a recently premiered, and
highly lauded, documentary2 of his successful battle against cancer making the
rounds of the independent film circuits.

In this documentary Dutch curator Ann Demeester refers to a film by contempo-

rary Norwegian artist Lene Berg, in which the protagonist mispronounces the word
charismatic as “charis-mythic,” a term she in turn uses to characterize Ulay. Cer-
tainly it relays both his undeniable charm and the many striking turns in his life story,
beginning with his birth. Ulay was born in a bomb shelter during a 1943 air raid on
the steel-manufacturing town of Solingen, in the populous German region of North-
Rhine Westphalia. His father, an officer in the Wehrmacht, served in and survived
both world wars, brutally compromising his health and dying prematurely in 1956,
when his son was thirteen. Unable to cope with this loss, Ulay’s mother for all intents
and purposes abandoned him two years later, effectively orphaning the teenag-
er. Ulay has subsequently claimed this moment was “liberating,” and despite the
deeper traces it undoubtedly left, he went on to succeed in his early years, starting
a profitable commercial photography lab. At age twenty-one he found himself with
a wife and a child, living proof of the German “Wiederaufbau” (or post-war economic
boom)—a successful entrepreneur, but not a particularly happy one.

In 1994, Thomas McEvilley published Ulay: The First Act / Der Erste Akt—an extend- S-he, 1973-74. Auto polaroid. Courtesy of the artist.
ed conversation with the artist interspersed by the author’s own musings about
and interpretations of Ulay’s solo work to date. His subject’s career as an artist had
in fact begun twenty-six years earlier in Amsterdam in 1969 to be precise. A visit than props to catalyze an alternate reality. They appeal because they convincingly
there in 1968 had sign-posted a different kind of “liberation.” The city pulsed with the seem to represent facets of the artist’s personality, documenting them for analysis
possibility for radical change, fueled by the counter-cultural energy of the Provos at a later stage. They are both mirror and reflection.
and student protests and an active red-light district and drug trade. Unsettled and
electrified, Ulay cut the ties to his family and relocated to the Netherlands. Beyond Less easy to behold are the photographs that show him cutting, pinning, pulling, and
escaping from the suffocation of the bourgeois norms of German society, he was in scraping his body mercilessly. Self-mutilation, drunkenness, and hints of bondage
search of self-knowledge. He began by taking up the camera3, which allowed him characterize the bleaker images and hint at real-life rather than constructed situa-
to document and access his new environment, its architecture and inhabitants. The tions. Bene Agere (In Her Shoes)(1974), for example, shows Ulay processing the de-
pictures he took are remarkable. At the time, much of Amsterdam’s life seemed to parture of a lover by literally trying to put himself in her shoes. Using a utility knife he
be conducted on the streets, and Ulay was there to photograph the students, pro- traces a bloody outline of her ankle boot onto his foot. Another even more disturbing
testers, sex workers, drag queens, and others who made up its diverse demograph- work is [Link] ULTIMA RATIO (1972), which documents the excision of a
ic. His portraits and crowd shots exude excitement and empathy, solidarity, and tattooed square of skin from the artist’s forearm, and its replacement with skin graft- There is a Criminal Touch to Art, 1976. Film still from the Berlin action. Courtesy of the artist.
amazement. His architectural images have the determination and ambition of the ed from his thigh. Recalling Orlan, and later Stelarc, the gesture most clearly por-
Bechers’ serial project, but their protagonists—the city’s grimy terraces and dwell- tended an ambivalent relationship with pain. Overall these photographs document
ings—glower and throb with the intensity of Kippenberger’s Psychobuildings. and establish the terms of use for his body as a medium as well as a vocabulary of
endurance and self-exposure. gy, but the images are not tampered with; the model was anorexic, the bruises on Maria Rus Bojan have persuaded him otherwise and the images have once again
both bodies real. Occasionally accused of trickery, Ulay is keen to underscore that started, thankfully, circulating through his monograph.)
Ulay also turned the camera on himself, authoring a complex autobiographical visu-
Individually and in their totality, the images are perplexing; theatrical, yet convincing; his effects may be achieved through process, but never post-production manipu-
al essay titled Renais sense (re birth). World War II and its aftermath had shattered
tormented, yet uplifting; sexually provocative, yet guileless. Their urgency is con- lation. Wrestling with his public presence and artistic career, Ulay became involved with
any sense of German national identity. The revelations of Nazi atrocities, as well as
veyed in their volume and their immediacy enhanced by the use of Polaroid. Their the newly established De Appel. Founded in 1975 by Wies Smalls (collector and
the urban destruction and post-war occupation by the Allied Forces, inflicted griev-
formats reflect destabilization; many are collages or composites, while some are Performance curator RoseLee Goldberg has retroactively coined the term “per- owner of Seriaale), the organization set out to offer a platform for the research and
ous psychological damage on individuals, coloring every aspect of the country’s so-
further fragmented through the use of mirrors and reflections. Although sharing the formative photography” to classify Ulay’s photos from this period, acknowledging presentation of contemporary art. Realizing that if he could not dictate the reception
cio-political and cultural life. Enmeshed from birth in this destructive narrative, and
prevalent anti-aesthetic approach to photography, formally and conceptually Ulay’s his creation of a new category. The term distinguishes them from documents of of difficult work he could at least influence its framing and promotion, Ulay became
unmoored by the dispersal of his family, Ulay’s quest for rebirth was both personal
work was quite unlike anything else that was being attempted at the time, a fact of performance—itself then in its infancy. This distinction is important: Ulay does not active as a board member and program consultant for the organization. It was at
and political. But, it was played out at a remove and in private, in an extraordinarily
which he was unaware. However, he had by now realized that he identified as an art- consider himself a photographer, but rather an artist who employs photography as his suggestion, then, that Marina Abramović was invited to appear at De Appel in
fertile period of production during the years 1969 to 1975.
ist. a medium. December of 1975.
The numerous discrete series that comprise this extensive body of work depict the
At an earlier stage when he had felt the need for further theoretical and historical At the time, however, the images were misunderstood. Or at least, that is how Ulay Although Ulay had followed Abramović’s career from afar, the artists met in person
artist in a dizzying variety of situations and scenarios. They can be divided rough-
education he had followed his friend, German artist Jürgen Klauke, to Cologne’s experienced the response to his first exhibition of the “personal” Polaroids at Gal- for the first time at the Amsterdam airport in 1975. It was a determining moment for
ly into two genres: in one, Ulay uses props to stage situations; in the other, it is his
Kunstakademie.4 It was during his art school years that he began signing himself erie Seriaale in Amsterdam in 1974. The installation Ulay conceived for The Artist is both of them. Captivated by Abramović’s vitality, Ulay was entranced by her re-per-
body that becomes a prop on which situations are staged. At times an energetic
Ulay, as shorthand for his lengthy name. The moniker stuck. (Interestingly, and Present made use of large metal sheets to line the wall of the gallery. Framed and formance of Thomas Lips in front of a shaken audience on December 5, 1975. De-
cross-dresser capering on the beach (Dunes, 1973), at others a Nijinsky-like faun
pleasingly to the artist, “ulay” is the Hebrew word for “perhaps.”) At the same time as mounted sequentially, Polaroid after Polaroid lined the slabs creating a storyboard- vised for Galerie Krinzinger in Austria earlier that year, this performance has now
writhing through the woods (Elf, 1974), Ulay exudes a sensual, saturnine delight
naming his artistic persona, he began laying the groundwork for collaborative prac- ed narrative that mimicked the frames in a reel of film. This conceit gave the images been performed three times by Abramović and is considered one of her seminal
throughout most of the former category. He is perhaps at his most beguiling and dis-
tice. Although he remained the photographer and more often than not the director, substance at the same time as the slabs provided both armor and support for the works. The artist eats a kilo of honey, drinks a liter of wine, carves a five-point star on
quieting in the images from the series S/he (1973–74). Often borrowing techniques
he shared the stage with Klauke, as well as a number of other friends and lovers. A artist’s revelations. Unfortunately, display and content proved too sensational to al- her stomach, and flagellates herself as a prelude to crucifixion on ice. Documenting
and tropes from Amsterdam’s transvestite community, Ulay presents himself here
photo project from 1975 (Retouching Bruises) alternately pictures Ulay and his ema- low deeper consideration about artistic intent. Disappointed by the responses he Abramović’s progress through this inventory of masochism, Ulay realized that he
as a vertically divided persona: half bewigged and in drag; half louche and stubbly
ciated lover, bruises marking their bodies, and purple thumbprints highlighting the received, Ulay vowed never to exhibit these particular works again. (A promise he had found the personification of the female other, or anima, he had been exploring in
male. Throughout the staggering variety of transformations he remains recogniz-
injuries on the prints themselves. The wordplay draws on photographic terminolo- maintained for many years, although in recent times persistent curators such as his photographs. The twin-like nature of their physical appearance was further en-
ably himself. The characters he presents are expressions of an interior truth, rather
58 [SFAQ Issue 19] 59 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Fototot 1, 1976. Performance documentation from De Appel. Courtesy of the artist. Fototot 1, 1976. Performance documentation from De Appel. Courtesy of the artist.

hanced by the discovery that they were born on the same day, November 30, albeit denial of the rights of its immigrant labor force, this symbolic and actual violation of
three years apart. the boundaries of the art institution, art, and politics set the scene for the period of
collaboration with Abramović—or Act II.
By all accounts, the meeting was significant for both artists and the times that fol-
lowed were happy, intense, and productive. Before they could collaborate artistical- Despite the hardships that they endured due to their uncompromising pursuit of an
ly, however, both had to consider the implications for their solo careers. Ulay had a ethical performative and collaborative practice, and their bitter break up, the years
number of public performances he wanted to undertake, one a series signaling the together are remembered fondly by both artists. The details of their peripatetic life-
(as it turned out, temporary) end to his photographic work, and the other a dramatic style during the early days are by now familiar—the five years spent living and trav-
intervention. Recently re-performed5, Fototot (“photo-death”) was a radical tri-par- eling in a customized, but ultimately small, van, the struggles for survival: Abramović
tite action, one of the first to underscore the ephemerality of photography as a me- cooking, knitting, and selling sweaters to make money; Ulay managing mechanical
dium. For the first part, audiences were invited into the darkened space of De Appel. repairs, their accounts, and bookings; and the performances in small venues for
The lights were turned on revealing nine large photographic portraits of a veiled fig- small fees and audiences. Their existence blurred the boundaries between art and
ure receding up a road. Unfixed and mounted high on the gallery walls, the photos life, and their practice drew on this ambiguity. The manifesto they devised early on
started fading to black 30 seconds after being exposed to the light. The variously to structure their collaboration enshrined this paradox. Titled “Art Vital,” it espoused:
bemused and anxious responses to this disappearance were photographed by
Ulay and formed the subject of the second part. Entering the same space at a later No fixed living-space
Diamond Plane, 1974. Auto polaroid. Courtesy of the artist.
date, visitors were confronted by a folder, invitingly placed on a table lit by a desk- Permanent movement
lamp. As soon as it was opened, the contents of this folder, unfixed images of the Direct contact
first event, also evanesced. For the final part, staged at Beyer Galerie, in Wuppertal, Local relation
Germany, Ulay kitted himself out with a crash helmet and strapped a large mirror Self-selection by both in 1999 allows for works from 1976–80 to be credited Ulay/Abramović, preserve the films. (The idea came to him after reading about Chaplin’s successful
to his front. Video documentation of the performance shows him swaying slightly Passing limitations whereas those from 1981–88 are credited Abramović/Ulay. The distinction is signifi- preservation of his film reels.) Thus it was Ulay who orchestrated how these works
under the weight of the glass pane, before kipping forward. The mirror shatters and Taking risks cant, if not always observed. It is true also that the later performances relied increas- were to live on in our imaginations.
the audience gasps. Ulay, however, is miraculously unharmed. Frustrating audience Mobile energy ingly on the use of props and costumes (rather than nudity or everyday clothing)
expectation, denying photography’s claim to memorialize, or even to reflect accu- No rehearsal and on one occasion even took the form of an ensemble performance at a theater. It was also Ulay who scored the performance instructions. “We are standing naked
rately the present, with this work Ulay signaled a new chapter in his practice. Photo No predicted end in the entrance of the Museum . . .” begins the score for Imponderabilia, evincing an
was dead, long live the artist. No repetition Much remains by way of documentation of the Relation Works, as the performances economy of words worthy of Beckett. It was Abramović, however, who resuscitated
that the artists undertook during this time are collectively known. The early works them, negating the terms of Art Vital (“no repetition”) by adapting and re-performing
Once extricated from the shards, he was able to turn his attention to his final solo “Permanent movement” and “taking risks” alone meant a continuous raising of the in particular are indelibly etched in the performance canon. They have been hand- them as part of her personal repertoire. Originally taking place in off-beat locations
undertaking for a while—Action in 14 Predetermined Sequences: There is a Criminal stakes. And while their ideas did not develop in a vacuum—Ulay cites in particular ed down to us as a series of photographic vignettes—Ulay and Marina colliding (from Galerie H-Humanic in Graz to the Studenski Kulturni Center in Belgrade) in
Touch to Art. This stupendously daring and outrageously provocative action sur- the works of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Gina Pane as inspiration6—they did re- headlong into each other (Relation in Space, 1976), or flanking a narrow doorway front of small audiences, it was shocking to see the works included in her 2010 ret-
vives as a documentary film (viewable on [Link]). As described in the scripted tain a discipline and specificity to their relationship that was compelling. Undeniably through which embarrassed visitors squeeze (Imponderabilia, 1977), or locked in an rospective at MoMA, New York. Decontextualized (no “local relation”) and institu-
instructions that are part of the piece, in December 1976 the artist entered the Neue their chemistry was part of the draw. embrace, breathing each other’s exhalations to the point of collapse (Breathing In/ tionalized, their simple, potent directives were fulfilled by anonymous youths trained
Nationalgalerie in Berlin, removed Carl Spitzweg’s painting Der Arme Poet (The Breathing Out, 1977). Abstracted from their contexts, these images function as pow- by Abramović (“no rehearsal”). For many, Ulay was present retroactively, through
Poor Poet, 1839) from the gallery walls, and, clutching it under his arm, sprinted out As word spread of their performances, invitations to present their work multiplied. erful, absurdist metaphors for gender and relationship stereotypes. What is missing his communion with Abramović during her performance The Artist is Present (a title
of a fire exit with the security guards in pursuit. The theft of this national treasure was Their travel itinerary also intensified and they traveled increasingly farther afield. A of course is everything else that made them so compelling as performances: audi- that could be considered an ironic homage in light of Ulay’s 1974 solo show). At the
not staged; it was as much a surprise to Ulay as to the guards that it succeeded. The disorienting but formative trip to the Australian outback lasted for longer than an- ence, environment, energy, anticipation, the element of surprise, contemporaneity. time of writing, a 3:38 minute video excerpt of the encounter posted on YouTube a
work was destined for the wall of a Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest worker) family, in the ticipated; Ulay wanted to stay, Abramović to return. Ultimately, their expectations year ago has garnered 8,825,342 views. Though one could attribute the numbers to
city’s Kreuzberg district. After successfully hanging it there, Ulay called the gallery’s proved irreconcilable and a work that was initially supposed to signal their perma- Both documents and the repertoire of the performances raise a number of issues Abramović’s publicity machinery, undoubtedly part of the appeal resides in the pal-
director to confess and let him know where he could find the painting. Outraged nent union instead marked its end. Taking place in 1988, The Great Wall Walk in- related to ownership and (re)presentation. To quote Abramović, “Each of us brought pable tension and emotion flowing between the two artists, a warmer echo of Night
national media responses and a trial followed, but Ulay again emerged unscathed, volved Ulay and Abramović starting at the east and west ends, respectively, of this a certain luggage—I brought a suitcase of performance, in his suitcase was pho- Sea Crossing (1981–87), one of their seminal durational performances.
despite a court summons and a mild sentence (36 days in prison, which he never monumental structure and walking its length. They met in the middle, on June 28, tography.”7 The photographs, accordingly, were generated by Ulay, although they
served, instead paying a small fine). The grainy black and white documentation of after three months of arduous trekking, with the sad realization that their partner- are infrequently credited to him. Using a tripod camera taped in place, a fixed angle, It’s a problem raised not only by this partnership, or by these performances. We can
this action—a composite that includes film from a small handheld—is lent menace ship had run its course. and focus all determined in advance, Ulay relied on an assistant to actually click the think of the implications of exhibiting or recreating Fluxus scores, for example, or
and a sense of inevitability by the accompanying sound of an unplugged amp. The shutter at regular intervals. He art directed these shots, even if he did not physical- Kaprow’s Happenings, or even the bloody antics of the Vienna Actionists. We imag-
insistent, low, rhythmic hum heightens the tension and romance of this quixotic While it might not seem productive to attribute responsibility for either the break or ly take them himself.8 It was Ulay also who preserved the archive of these images, ine the shock value of a headless chicken running across the floor being endured by
gesture. At once personal manifesto and political commentary on Germany’s willful the performances to one or other of the partners, it is true that an agreement signed customizing a freezer box and filing cabinet to the interior of their van, for example, to audiences similarly tolerant and educated in performance norms, but in fact these

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Retouching bruises, 1975. Polaroid. Courtesy of the artist.

events were often spontaneous, random, and sparsely attended. Audience re-
sponses ranged from boredom to aggression and even on occasion to intervention,
changing the nature of the event. If a performance is understood as the synthesis of
a number of factors—biography, personality, time, place, audience—then a reen-
actment can never be anything but an emulation, however distinct or a/effective it
becomes in its own right.

While Ulay never completely retired his camera, he began using it again for artistic Bene Agere [In Her Shoes], 1974. Auto polaroid. Courtesy of the artist.
ends in 1984, co-producing with Abramović parallel bodies of photographic work.
These were for the most part staged, individual portraits of the two artists. Appear-
ing as silhouettes, shadows, or even marionette-like figures, they are ciphers rather
than believable characters. It doesn’t take too great a leap of the imagination to see
these as attempts to gain distance and reflect on the disconnect between self and
artistic persona, as well as perhaps the status of this self within their artistic relation-
ship. age and postwar art. He also instructed them in basic photography, set up a studio the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Undoubtedly these factors will bring changes.
with a digital camera on a tripod and a variety of props (objects, clothing etc.), and It’s to be hoped, however, that the punk side of Ulay’s nature which has brought him
It’s perhaps no surprise that the break up in 1988 was followed by a period of ten invited patients to create their own environment and take their own portraits over a this far, will never allow him to stop pushing the boundaries of his mediums, whether
years in which neither artist had contact with the other. The beginning of Act III had Molotov cocktail, 1992. Cant beat the Feeling, polaroid/polacolor, Boston. Courtesy of the artist.
three-week period. Sixteen participants contributed 260 moving and surreal imag- photography, the body, or life itself.
to be marked by a hiatus. In Ulay’s case, equilibrium was provided by another rela- es to the resulting book I Am Other. The Delusion: An Event About Art and Psychiatry
tionship, marriage, and the birth of a daughter. For four years he focused on his new (2002). One can see this project as an example of Ulay offering a personal set of
family. An invitation from the Polaroid headquarters in Boston, MA to work with their for the Dead, 1992, for instance, the light reflecting from a variety of glass containers tools for establishing identity to his subjects. In this way, and others, many of his proj-
giant-format (80” x 40”) Polagram camera catalyzed the next phase of his career. If is impressed on polagram prints. More recently, in 2010, cell-phone imagery from a ects remain collaborative keeping the boundaries between art and life, Ulay and his
his earliest photos could be said to be self-portraits, and his subsequent ones por- trek in Patagonia documents a search for water sources. Ulay has even founded an subjects, porous.
traits of a relationship, then the more recent ones can be understood as portrait of institute called Nastati in Ljubljana with Slovenian graphic designer Lena Pislak (his
society, or of life in general, as viewed through the literal and personal lens of the art- partner for a number of years and wife since 2012). This is a self-styled “private insti- An appealing example of this blurring can be found in his educational strategies
ist. In this way, Ulay’s expansive, ongoing inquiry resembles Sigmar Polke’s (an artist tute for art projects and creative solutions” with the grand ambition of providing “lo- during his years as a professor of new media at the Hochschule für Gestaltung,
he admires greatly) project to reflect life. Indeed, Ulay is insistent that art must derive cal solutions to global problems,” developing a “universal language,” and providing a Karslruhe in Germany (1998–2004). The “pedo-patetic” seminars he pioneered
from life, that it gains immediacy and authority purely from engaging with proximate 1) Maria Rus Bojan and Alessandro Cassin, Whispers: Ulay on Ulay, (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2014).
platform for ideas and education. Whether or not it is able to succeed in its ambitions there may have been modeled somewhat on Plato’s academy, but owed more to 2) Project Cancer, 2013, directed by Damjan Kozole.
and urgent issues, rather than constructed situations. It’s worth considering in this remains to be seen; its existence, however, underscores his belief in the ability of art his experience of Australian Aboriginal walkabouts and his belief in discipline and 3) Ulay’s preferred camera remains the polaroid 980. His preference for Polaroid dating from
context that he has never had a studio, and that he continues to seek out his subject and artists to effect change. endurance. In search of self-knowledge, students and teacher would head off to the his commercial laboratory days in Germany, resulted in an invitation from the company to
material in situ, whether out on the street or in the desert. Black Forest for a week with nothing other than the clothes on their back, hunting for function as one of their artists-at-large. This enlightened gesture on the company’s part ex-
Ulay’s oft-quoted maxim, “art without ethics is cosmetics,” is literalized in photo- food and sleeping rough. tended to a number of artists who were given equipment and film to test and report back on, in
An unwavering political and ethical commitment and a keen sense of social justice graphic projects from the nineties until today that continue to push the boundaries exchange for a certain number of images and collaboration on projects (in Ulay’s case, a book
inform this perspective. Espousing a multiplicity of causes, Ulay has used his art to of both medium and content. His subjects primarily comprise the disenfranchised of photographs of four cities: Amsterdam, London, New York and Berlin).
Act III, scene I saw Ulay reestablishing the terms of his personal practice. Scene II
help campaign for women’s rights in Morocco, to advocate for clean water in Ra- 5) November 21, 2012. Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
and marginalized, whether the homeless, the aged, African Americans, immigrant found him struggling against lymphoma. What happens in scene III, now that he’s
mallah, and to help save the elephants in Sri Lanka. An interest in the conservation 6) In conversation with the author, Amsterdam, June 8, 2014.
groups, the Australian aboriginals, or the mentally ill. To commemorate their cen- back, remains to be seen. It’s clear that a determining factor will be the overtures that 7) Project Cancer, 2013
and preservation of the world’s water supplies runs like a stream through the last tennial, the Vincent Van Gogh Institute for Psychiatry in Venray, the Netherlands, the art establishment is making to him—exhibition offers, gallery shows, an art mar- 8) It is necessary to add that certain aspects of some works were restaged post-event if they
twenty years of his practice, expressing itself in numerous bodies of work. In Water commissioned Ulay, who worked with patients to give workshops on photo report- ket presence. In 2015 he plans to take up performance again, with an appearance at were unsuccessfully documentation failed the first time around.
62 [SFAQ Issue 19] 63 [SFAQ Issue 19]
S-he, 1973-74. Auto polaroid. Courtesy of the artist. SFAQ[Project] by Ulay
Mark McCloud
In Conversation With V. Vale For sure. That’s it. It becomes a matter of style—the way you conduct your inves-
tigation here is entirely up to that. So it is very important, the style you settle on, or
choose.
San Francisco Bay Area, the Mediterranean of the West, has nurtured
its own world-changing cultural renaissance always placing a premi- Although that can change. Okay, let’s go back to Mark McCloud, the
um on imagination, ideas, innovation, and risk-taking, with practicality, artist. Here’s my perception of you: I don’t think anybody is without a
business development, and publicity/marketing/branding left to the context. Everybody is attached to some kind of so-called aesthetic tra-
likes of New York and London. So it should come as no surprise that ditions, even if they’re more rebellious and lesser-known ones. I only
the birthplace of the countercultural sixties, San Francisco, has for knew you as an artist in two realms. I thought you could be a great ac-
years boasted the world’s first (yet little-known) LSD museum dedi- tor and comedian, but at least we got some really nice pictures of you
cated to archiving any and all material evidences of the effects of this in the tabloid RE/Search Number One, in which you’re acting a role.
vision-inducing chemical on cultural production. The visionary behind That’s funny! I always tell everyone I’m a reclining comedian. That I’m too laid back
this “Institute of Illegal Images” is one Mark McCloud, a photographer, to do standup!
sculptor, painter, art teacher, amateur comedian, and the preeminent
collector of LSD blotter paper art (he owns an estimated 33,000 sheets They should just bring a psychiatrist couch on stage and then you
of paper bearing miniature artworks). His archive also includes a col- should do it.
lection of LSD license plates (!), rare periodicals, and books having to That’s it! I looked into the reclining Buddha thing a little bit.
do with psychedelia, surgical instruments, apothecary bottles, paint-
ings, posters, antiques—the list goes on and on. He has had several art You could be the first psychiatrist on stage. Hire some straight man to
shows of his LSD blotter art, most recently at Ever Gold Gallery in San play psychiatrist while you’re free-associating on a couch.
Francisco. Sadly, Mr. McCloud has twice (1993, 2001) had to prove to a Yeah, a lot of us are frustrated musicians and stuff, but I’m definitely a frustrated co-
judge and jury that he collects and makes art, not LSD. median. I really did have that role in school. I was always the class clown. And I spent
time working at it. The sense of humor that my mom passed on to me—my dad
Mark McCloud recently talked to V. Vale, publisher of Search & De- didn’t have much of one, but mom really has a great sense of humor. I think that’s the
stroy (1977–79) and RE/Search (1980–present). In 1980 Vale featured stylistic aid that’s been most important. Especially when you have problems with the
Mr. McCloud in a photo spread for RE/Search #1, shot on the roof of State. If you don’t have a sense of humor you’re never going to get out of there. So I
Vale’s North Beach apartment building, and he also featured Mr. Mc- always retain that. Your sense of humor they can’t really take from you.
Cloud in RE/Search #11: Pranks! Visitors come from around the world
to visit the LSD museum (email mark@[Link]. No cost; seri- [Sings] “They can’t take that away from you.”
ous inquiries only). Mark McCloud has a complexly humorous conver- Yeah, but you know how hard it is: when you finally have to accept the term, and it’s
sational style filled with oblique puns, references, and lateral detours, very open-ended, when you become an artist you declare yourself an artist, and you
which makes for a challenging interview. Join us for the ride! may not really fit the bill. But it’s the closest word we have for that social role. And I’m
very much into the Aristotelian view of art, because I like that arrangement—with
So let’s focus on our goal. My goal is to bring maximum respect—that’s a group, with a society, of being a type of pioneer that’s on the outer edge of the
the first goal of the piece. society, and your responsibility is to get way, way out there. And then to meet the
I’m ready for tar and feathers! I’ve seen it come up every which way! requirements of the group you show them what you’re up to every once in a while.
That clears your social debt. I think that’s a very good arrangement; I’ve never had
Well, there are probably three parts to everything in life, and one is the a problem with that. I think the less socially tied an artist is, the better his ability to
unknown background that brought you to where you are now, i.e., the employ his aesthetic, maybe. Mark McCloud in Paris, early 1970s. Courtesy of the artist.
bothersome details of geography and academic institutions.
Still baffling! That’s where the adventure is: it’s on the borderland.
Right, but the artist’s responsibility to the group is very uncertain nowadays. Usually that involves some speaking, let’s face it. Not Peter Selz—
Anyway, I know what people want to know about. Yeah, but very little. I was always amazed by the lack of written requirements at Da- No. You know that Gabrielle, his daughter, has written a book that became a best
That’s good, Vale, because I sure don’t! What happened to me is pretty standard. It’s always Hegelian too sort of—you and I are talking now in just word vis, but if you wanted a degree from Harvard or Yale you had to mostly write your seller? Did you know her? She was around for a while, a very interesting person, but
Not standard in that it happens to everyone, but every once in a while someone falls languages, but there are other languages, all kinds of languages. And dissertation and not paint it or sculpt it. But at Davis you could be deaf or mute as she’s grown up the daughter of Peter, in quite unusual circumstances, and she wrote
through the cracks and has a rapturous moment. That’s all that happened to me: artists, I think, expand visual languages or symbolic languages. But long as you were “producing” and you passed the evaluations. If they liked what you a good book. She was here about a year ago doing a reading. We all bought the
your typical everyday rapture! It took me away from wherever I was headed and then the only way we can process that, or one of the main ways, is were doing, it didn’t matter if you could read or write—it really didn’t. The great Bob book to see if we were mentioned. Thank God she spared us. But very interesting
pointed me in the direction that I’m in now. That’s a very complicated thing because through words. And words are always reductionist, and they never to- Arneson, when given a couple of pages of his retrospective at the Museum of Mod- people. Peter’s big artists were the beautiful Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely.
it’s so fashioned for you alone. And no one goes collectively to rapture. It’s always a tally “nail” anything. ern Art—they held the publication up as long as they could—when he finally turned
naked proposition, like you showed up naked and you go naked. The dream that life No. That’s the gentlemen’s agreement that makes the place a good place to meet. in his words it just said, “Words.” And they had to put that in two pages of the catalog. Tinguely is huge in my world.
becomes is pointed out to you as you’re going along. I think that that was the big- And I like the parameters that we’ve all agreed upon to use here. If we don’t have a The aesthetics that I liked a lot were like Henry Moore where he says, “The talk I put Me too. When in Basel a few years ago at Albert Hoffman’s hundredth birthday, on
gest influence in my life: having a death/rebirth experience that led to rapture. Not an name for the thing we’ll draw a line around it and give it a name, or try to come close into the piece, rather than talk it.” So he puts the effort of socializing the artwork right my day off that’s what I did: I went to Jean’s museum and hung out.
easy thing to recommend, since you have to die to have a death/rebirth experience! to it. into the artwork, and doesn’t have time to talk about it. And I thought: “That’s a very
I was lucky. refreshing idea.” I went there too.
That’s why I liked when conceptual art happened. It was kind of a Oh, good, Vale, what a great place. I bribed the guard and he let me sit in that Formu-
Luck is very important in life. Luck and chance, I’m convinced. cop-out in a way that it said—well as I understood it—you don’t have to I guess I don’t truly understand what you just said. la One car they had. It was a Formula One Lotus that I guess he owned. They had it
Absolutely. And I think we all picked the right motive to “volunteer” for coming here, make any “real” art anymore, you can just speak an idea. Henry Moore wasn’t a big talker about his sculpture. Whenever someone asked at the museum and I got to sit in it.
and then we have problems processing it. And it’s about getting over those prob- And I was definitely in a place where Nauman went, and he wasn’t there when I about his work he would say, “Well, the effort I would put into talking about it I have al-
lems and processing them that makes you either a happy, fulfilled person or a frus- showed up, but his trail was very, very evident. ready put into the piece.” I thought that’s really great. You know the difference. That’s Something symbolic there—
trated, unhappy person. why Bob Arneson sending in . . . what’s he trying to do with Words? The words have All his friends were Formula One racers, his best friends. He was definitely into that.
What was that trail? I don’t know much about it. very little to do with it other than the title. At one point funk art relied upon these com- But I love the Jean Tinguely museum, that whole attitude toward the social group,
I always said everyone is an artist, everyone is a writer, and everyone is Just the Bruce Nauman conceptual art approach, that Leo Castelli put forward. It ical titles that were usually puns, thus earning the term “funk.” That term came out where you’re blacklisted by society for the de Gaulle funeral piece. When de Gaulle
a musician, and all that— was never Bruce Nauman alone. Bruce Nauman always showed with Stephen of the Deaf Club; as it turns out, Joan Brown, and our beautiful Bruce Conner, and died they hired Jean Tinguely to do the Charles de Gaulle funeral piece outside of
Because that’s really the only interplay in the Deus ex machina; the thing is so well Kaltenbach, and Stephen Kaltenbach would do a conceptual group of works and Manuel Neri came up with the term one night at the old Deaf Club [1979-1980, San Notre Dame Cathedral. Inside was the Shah of Iran with Dick Nixon, and Kissinger,
designed that the only interplay is the aesthetic. You can get the engine to hum bet- then Bruce would do a conceptual group of works, and Castelli would show them Francisco punk rock venue], back in the ‘50s, and they decided to call it funk art, and and everybody mourning Charles, and Tinguely set up a huge monument outside
ter if your aesthetics are applied, but that seems to be the only interplay there is. both together. People retained Bruce Nauman’s name in the registry much more Kienholz and all those people were involved. And a lot of the conceptual work I was with the covering on, and as the sun set they pulled off the covering and it was this
than they did Kaltenbach’s. But when you go to UC Davis [where Nauman and inundated with in graduate school was mostly about the titles . . . of Bruce Nauman’s enormous penis that spewed fireworks and self-incinerated. Of course he was
I would say that I started my publishing with one simple goal: to fight Kaltenbach both received master’s degrees] and you get your MFA at Davis, the From Hand to Mouth casting. A resin casting of his mouth leading down to his hand. blackballed by all after that, and no one touched him until Disney hired him to do
the control process. But I think that we’re actually controlled most by people that have come there before you leave a strong impression. So when I got to A lot of it was based on that—very, very small-word associations to the object. I for- these fountains at Disneyworld in the ‘70s. But for many years Jean Tinguely was
our aesthetic. Davis it was all about conceptual art. You didn’t need to speak or draw. If you could get the beautiful guy running UC Berkeley at the time— blacklisted by all society for this funeral piece. I’ll show it to you when I visit. I’ve got a
conceptualize you were “in.” very rare book with it in there, this awesome piece.

66 [SFAQ Issue 19] 67 [SFAQ Issue 19]

 Gorby, circa 1988. Courtesy of the artist.

Japanese Crests, circa 1982. Courtesy of the artist.

68 [SFAQ Issue 19] 69 [SFAQ Issue 19]

 George Segal, I suddenly thought of. I don’t know whether I’d call him Very funny. You mean Sky Saxon? I thought you were his patron.
part of funk art. I was his patron and hugest fan, for sure.
Right, well there is that definite funky side to his work, especially when you look at
someone with a sculpture like Manuel Neri whose main body was in plaster and I thought you let him live at your house.
wood and string and materials that were often discarded and not considered art. Yes, of course. Just such a great artist, incredible person. But also the type of artist
Then I think Segal fits that bill at least. Aesthetically, partially. who wouldn’t really see himself as an artist, but truly is an exceptional artist and an
outstanding person. I still go see Roky . . . huge fan still.
I never thought of looking at artists as compared to the materials they
pioneered using. Roky Erickson. And Arthur Lee you were a fan of.
Sure. David Ireland, the beautiful, local, truth-to-materials artist who in a minimalist Just tremendous, tremendous fan of Arthur’s, and so sad to see him die the way he
approach made it more about the materials themselves. So we’re the lucky ones for did, but I always was interested in what Arthur was writing and performing. The psy-
getting to come here during a renaissance, and the psychedelics definitely caused chedelics have truly caused a renaissance, something we won’t be able to measure
a renaissance in the arts. One that you are a big part of, Vale. properly until we’re much farther away from it.

But we’re talking about you, though. And I don’t know how you even got I’m trying to think of other artists that were associated with that, like
the idea to make art out of blotter acid packaging—what do you call it? Peter Max.
It’s from being raised in Argentina. You remember that humanity forgot how to make Yeah, and Isaac Abrams is still with us, and Peter is still alive, who put the vision on
toys right after the Second World War? You know this very well that the toys were the Slurpee cup. That’s what Peter did—he put the psychedelic vision on the 7-11
thin after the Second World War. We didn’t get any good toys until they remembered, cup. He’s the guy that brought it down to the street level.
“Hey! We used to make toys!” One of the first little things that caught my attention
were these books you would get at the local grocery store. There were these empty Who is Isaac?
books, and then you would buy these gum pieces that came with these pogs. They Isaac Abrams, a beautiful painter who did the cover of that book, the Masters and
were like little printed circles of paper or little rectangles and they’d have a general Houston’s book Psychedelic Art, when they dosed those hundred artists and stud-
theme to the book like Weaponry of the Second World War. And you’d buy the gum ied their paintings. Isaac is still painting in Woodstock and you see his work every-
and fill the book with these pogs, and if you were able to complete the whole book where, on album covers mostly, like Mati Klarwein, the father of psychedelic art.
you would win the bicycle! So then after a few months of filling your book you real-
ized that they had only made three of the German submarine pogs, and that that’s Mati Klarwein is? Is he really?
the one you needed to complete your book, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, and Mati’s church is the church that inspired Alex to make his
church, Alex Gray. So it’s really Mati who was the Castalia foundation in Mexico, trip-
They rigged the game. What did you call them? ping heavily on the mushrooms and painting, and also at Millbrook. He followed the
Pogs. It’s a term my kid taught me; when they started using them they called them muse around and was there painting it. He’s really the first guy to take it—other than
pogs. But we called them fioritas [sic] when I grew up, and you could gamble with like people like Henri Michaux who did mescaline investigation artistically.
them, you could come to school with your extra ones and then we would stand in
front of a wall and, by putting the pog between our top digits, then flick the pog to- Yeah, that book Miserable Miracle got reissued recently.
ward the wall. Whichever pog got closest to the wall got all the pogs. It was like the Yeah, I’m so glad, it was so hard to get and Miserable Miracle is such a masterpiece.
first gambling. It was all about these little pogs. There was no art and everything was Our views of mysticism are very, very secluded in our society. The Pope having
dried blood and gray after the Second World War, and then the first colored little bought all the evidence and holding it close to his chest in the Vatican. And so then a
things I saw were these pogs. If you completed the collection you got the bicycle! lot of the mysticism due to our generation has been selected to not be shown to us.
The promise of this vehicle that could take you far! Anyway, that’s what happened The prohibiting of the portrayal of Adam and Eve under the amanita muscaria mush-
to me. From collecting these little pogs when I first came to California and started room, as always was portrayed, became illegal in the late 17th century. Punishable by
seeing first the window pane and then later that developed into blotter—when I saw death or excommunication. And the tango wasn’t legal in the U.S. until 1932, Vale.
the first blotters I realized, “Now these are the pogs of our psychedelic group, and if VEE, 1985. Luster , glaze, clay 15 inches x 13 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
you complete the book you win the bicycle!” But that’s really all it was. In my death/ That’s amazing.
rebirth experience, part of the vision was that I was in the environment, kind of like So the role of society in the arts is something that’s always the pull and tug.
So you collected this art; you didn’t make it.
Earth, you know, and I was being observed by Apollo and the rest of the celestial
No—François Truffaut and the other art critic who worked for Cahiers du Cinéma
magistrates, and they were commenting on me, saying what I was doing. And part So we have to bring things back to your wonderful psychedelic art ca-
for André Bazin: Godard, yeah, and they were both art critics who after a few years,
of it was that: about the search for the elements that constituted the total unity of all reer.
he said to them, “You know, the good art critics make movies.” And he forced them
things. That pattern. You hope to get your volunteering cause done, even though it’s probably impossi-
to make movies. And so then that’s what happened to me: after collecting avidly for
ble, and you try to work on your project, whatever it is you’ve come to do, but if you’re
fifteen years, I decided to learn more by making some. And then one thing led to
Or at least metaphors for “the unity of all things.” rewarded on top of that with a rapturous experience then wow—you’re very grate-
another.
And the overlaying pattern that entails that. Because when you see the total unity of ful. So that’s the big change in my life that led me toward the arts. I was lost and then
Timothy Leary and Mark McCloud, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. all things visually it makes metaphysical and mathematical sense. They’re aligned I was found. And I think all “found” people are artists.
And you got some notoriety, fame, whatever the word is, and that
properly, and that’s why the conceptualists, or Castelli, had the vision of containing
brought the attention of the flics [French slang for policemen].
Bruce Nauman by showing him with Steve Kaltenbach, because Steve Kaltenbach They say you find yourself by making art.
It’s funny because you gave me one of your psychedelic, super bright, Les gendarmes. But no, the first blotter show at the Art Institute was also attended
went on to become one of the best psychedelic landscape painters ever. He saw a That’s it. What better way? You can commit every mistake that leads you to not mak-
Day-Glo-colored sculptures that I called a turtle, and we had a green by the FBI. They showed up and they said, “Can we photograph this?” And I said,
pattern on nature that he’s been trying to paint for many, many years. It’s very hard ing mistakes without hurting anybody, in the arts.
plant-like sort of Ballardian Drowned World sculpture in the corner for “Sure, this is for you guys, more so than anyone else,” I told them. Because they were
to see his paintings because you can’t buy a Steve Kaltenbach. You can only trade
a while that was five feet tall. It was green like some tropical plant, and the last whores who came to the party!
time to a blind institution and earn one. He’s one of my favorite living artists. Mistakes into art, often.
in my own mind, since I’m of limited knowledge, I had already associat-
For sure. That’s really what the blotter collection is. One bad idea leads to another!
ed you with the funk art movement, as well as an odd mutant strain of Whores?
That’s weird. He’s still alive?
psychedelia, because I don’t know—most of the psychedelia, when you Yeah, the acid party; they’re still trying to arrest us. So I told them, when they showed
Very much alive, and he’s been teaching art for 40 years at Sacramento State Col- Are you saying you didn’t make the actual physical art that constitutes
think of art you think mostly of those posters that do tricks with your up in ‘87 at the Art Institute, I said, “Yeah, of course you can photograph it. You’re the
lege. This incredibly cool artist. He did lots of time pieces that got buried in buildings. the blotter acid art that’s in the frames?
eyes. I don’t think so much of any painters or sculptors when I think of guys that don’t understand it yet.” And really, that’s what’s going on. The fliic is tor-
He is a very dynamic artist, check him out. The Art Institute brings him in about once It’s nothing that Duchamp hadn’t taught us. Marcel’s found objects. To me it’s just
the psychedelic hippie era. But still, it seems if you’re looking for a cul- mented by his own demented fears.
every ten years for a lecture. He’s a very humble— that. I’ve put the found object in a frame.
tural continuum, you’re coming out of those and now you’re telling me
that in person. Bruce Conner too was tied in with funk art. I remember Yeah, I suppose so.
SFAI brings him in— And then if you sign it, it’s yours. Duchamp taught us that.
seeing a show so long ago at SFMOMA. That’s why they’re so against it, they think—yeah, and it’s still not over yet. It’s incred-
We get to see him locally a little, but he’s one of my heroes artistically and personally. That’s true. Tim offered to sign it all; as Tim was dying and he told me he would take
Yeah, and the beauty of Bruce is incredible. The range of vision he had. I was always ible to me: the persistence of erroneous information.
I got to spend a couple years with him, tripping with him and studying his views. Very, the blame for all of it if I wanted to lighten my load!
amazed by the quality of the artwork. He was like Oracle-tied also, so he couldn’t
very interesting, beautiful artist.
help but have a huge psychedelic side to his work. I think even one of the most cher- They didn’t understand art; you had to educate the jury and everybody
Oh, nice.
ished acid test publications is one of Bruce’s from like ‘65. And Bruce has this tre- on art.
Up in Davis? Anyway, but yeah, I love that type of artwork, but it’s really that. I was into numis-
mendous influence on funk art, on Kienholz, and that’s really the art we associate It’s not an easy one. My poor attorney, you know? My poor, poor attorney.
Up in Sacramento, Davis area. matists also—you know, a coin collector. So I was used to looking at small detailed
with the Beats. You know, other than Bucket of Blood. [Roger Corman film satirizing
things and appreciating the way they were made. As the blotter got better I took
a Beat “artist.”] But even Bucket of Blood has that little tinge of Conner in it! Or Kien- You said that one of your attorneys demonstrated to the jury that a lot
Your so-called mentors— more notice. Beautiful Nick West, who you will remember, put some hits in Sluggo
holz, at least. And you know, artists, when asked what sense they would last give up, of money had been made, and that impressed people: “Oh, it must be
Fewer and fewer are alive. Sky dying and then Arthur Lee. All I’ve got left is Vale and Number Three and I thought that was such a brilliant move that he also inspired me
I think all agree that their vision, it’s the one they’d hang on ‘til the end. art if it makes money.”
Roky. greatly to collect.
Yeah, they had followed $24,000 into the house. There’s no illegality of receiving
money in the mail, and someone had sent me $24,000 cash. They taped it into a
70 [SFAQ Issue 19] 71 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 super bright dayglo colored sculpture things you made, but what hap-
pened to them all? Where are they?
You show up naked, and you split naked, and that’s pretty much all you get, Vale.

But at least they were made.

That’s it. To be or not to be remains the question.

Well, you made sculptures—we know you did that.

Yeah, and I recommend that if you’re very intellectual and you’re thinking about your
stills from movies all the time, that you get a job, a physical job, like sculpture! You will
come home exhausted every night.

It’s physical too.

And I love sculpture for that reason.

Yeah, not verbal.

It’s just so physical. You’ve got to try it at least while you’re in your body.

Okay, everyone: sculpture must be made by all, is our lesson.

Absolutely.

Okay, let’s go back and tell me all the forbidden stuff you never tell
anyone, like where were you born?
I was born in Gross Pointe, Michigan. My dad had a really good insurance program
at the time that allowed them to move from Detroit, where they lived, to Gross Pointe.
So I was born in the hospital in Gross Pointe.

Traveling Pig, circa 1990. Courtesy of the artist.

Albert Hofmann blotter artwork. Courtesy of the artist. Wait a minute, I thought your parents were Argentinians.
No, no, they were sent there after the Second World War by Edgar Kaiser to put to-
magazine and mailed it here. So the DA had opened the packet before it got to me, troduced us at our trial. They had thrown me together on conspiracy charges with gether a car company. But my mom is an Oklahoma Cherokee girl, and my dad is a
and they recorded the money, and then sent it in. They couldn’t keep it because it this man, not knowing how “close” they were, because this is the man who made the Golden Glover [boxing prize] from San Francisco. Dad got the golden gloves here
was legal. When they got here the next morning they wanted to know where the LSD that flipped me, back then, into the collector. in 1941 at the armory there on Mission Street! That’s where they gave you the gloves
$24,000 was. Of course, it wasn’t here; I had already given it to Timmy’s leg oper- in those days.
ation—from Uncle Scrooge. You know, Uncle Scrooge is mean to the workers and You got to meet him thirty years later.
one of them is a father who has a little paraplegic boy and he’s trying to save enough And be his co-defendant at the trial where we were both facing two consecutive life And your mom?
money to get Timmy’s leg operated on. So the money always goes to Timmy’s leg sentences! Good way to meet your hero! Yeah, really tough. That’s how life is: it’s full A Cherokee princess from Oklahoma. They met during the war effort out here at
operation, I say! Like when people worry about the future, I always say, “Can we save of meaning and irony. the shipyard. So then I was raised in Argentina, but I returned here because it is my
Weena from the Morlock menu?” Because in The Time Machine Weena is served home, just one generation kind of separate.
up to the Morlocks as dinner—Dante’s fascination of the future. That’s her name, the How do you spell Sand?
Eloi girl that the Time Machine driver falls in love with. S-a-n-d, Nicholas Sand. He’s a beautiful man, very beautiful guy. Still alive. Okay, you said you returned to America at age 12. Now did you ever live
in Switzerland?
How do you spell that? He must be 80 or 90. No, but [I was there] for a little intermittent while, not just in 2006 when I went to Al- Exhibition announcement, Cure of Souls, curated by Mark McClound, 1988.
W-e-e-n-a. They only have one name in the future. Like a great artist. When an artist No, he’s a kid. Like you, he’s still a kid, Vale! Like you. True, true, wonderful psychedelic bert’s 100th birthday party. [Also] as a student in Paris in the early ‘70s I got around a Psychedelic Solution Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist.
signs his work with one name, like “Rene”—I think: he must be a great artist to go pioneer and gentleman. Huge force in the movement, and one of my most admired little—the dream of all artists.
by one name! But a lot of people here, you know—we’re dead guys. We’re what’s friends. But he was at Millbrook, he’s self-educated, and he was at the Castalia foun-
happening now so we must already be over. dation in Mexico before the LSD, and then he was also at Millbrook with the LSD. Yeah, it is, to go study in Paris.
In those days it was all about Paris. I really wanted to see the real item, so I signed up
So how many shows of blotter acid art were you involved in? Wow, okay, so then you had two trials in Kansas City. at that museum there, École du Louvre, which was just outstanding, and very price-
As many as possible. But really not all of them were received as graciously as in San No, one trial, but facing two life sentences. I was going to kill myself the first night in less. The tuition was $20 per year. And it’s one of the finest art history schools in the
Francisco! prison and start my second sentence right away. I mean it! You think I’m kidding. I world; it’s where I decided to do all my art history. Yeah, really great. So I had a pass
mean it. So it was an “all or nothing” kind of proposition. I’m just glad that the Kansas that got me into every museum in Europe for free, but also allowed me 24-hour ac-
SFAI especially. City people didn’t buy it. cess to the Louvre. So I could spend the night in there! And often did. That was the
Yeah, that was the perfect place to unveil it; it’s an understanding audience. best thing, was to go there, study film, and study the Italian Renaissance, which was
The lawyer also must have— my area of interest, Giorgioni being my favorite. And actually spending time with the
So the powers that be budgeted a surveillance of you from two apart- He’s the golden one, and his name is Gold, Doran. Doran is the Golden One. If ever in real thing—the actual item. That’s magic.
ments for a year and a half. Then they swooped in for the kill after they trouble call him and be totally honest and he might take you.
thought they had enough evidence. Wow, I’ll say.
They didn’t understand that the C&H sugar cube guy had had the same problem But I thought you told me last time that one of the things that got you I insist on that now: the real thing, seeing the actual item, and what that does for you.
for years before me! And at my first trial I was wondering where the C&H guy was, off was the fact that you made a bunch of money as an artist. me into the arts—my first love was photography. I never thought of art or anything
because it was a chicken-and-egg kind of defense I had. My defense was, “Hey, I Well, yeah, we had to answer the DA’s claim that they had followed this $24,000 into Wow, so actually I should have asked you before: surely as a child you like that. It was more that I had a job to do with this project. I only learned about art
raise eggs, okay, some of them grow up to be bad chickens, you know? But I’m just the building. And Doran had put the agent in charge at the post office that was in drew and— when I left high school and entered college. I took a course from the beautiful Paul
dealing eggs!” And it was really that: I just made the paper. And I didn’t use Albert charge of the package [on the stand]: “Is there any law against getting paid in the No. I was a photographer and I was into very little things and close-ups, because ev- Kos called Conceptual Sculpture as a premed student in Santa Clara, and it real-
Speer’s slave labor in making the paper. No LSD zombies were used in making the mail?” And the guy said no. So the jury thought, “Hey cool! This artist does okay.” erything in Argentina was atrocious then. Every time I looked beyond the immediate ly changed my life. But that’s also when I had my death/rebirth experience, show-
paper! And so then my argument was that: “Hey listen, I’m just the art, you know, art periphery or anything further than twelve inches I saw some atrocious thing. I’ll tell ing me that what I thought was called psychology was really called art. So I had to
is not LSD, LSD is added later to the art!” And so that’s what the good jury of Kansas Oh! He must be a real artist. you, I was driving in a car as a young guy and when I finally got over the window level change then.
City, Missouri understood. If they were trying to prove I did the acid they hadn’t done Right. My father didn’t like me being an artist until I got my second National Endow- and could see over the window I remember seeing—it was like early in the morning
that. That wasn’t enough of a defense to really satisfy my attorney, but that’s all I gave ment grant from Ron Reagan—then Dad started to brag about it. That’s how artists and we were out in the country, and we drove by this lake, it’s pretty cold out, and I don’t think you’ve told me about the death/rebirth experience before.
him. You have to give your attorney your defense. I told him it’s really a chicken-and- are viewed. You don’t want to be an artist ‘cuz you starve to death, but if you make we drove by a corner where unbeknownst to me there was a bus stop, but instead Yeah, you don’t sit down with buddies and really chew that one out unless it’s called
egg problem. The C&H guy should be here with me because he certainly made the money then they brag about you. But I’m just glad that the artwork has continued to of a bus stop I just saw this line of people lined up, all wearing clothes that didn’t fit for—and it’s a very intricate thing that involves an infinite amount of time because
sugar cubes that later got— plow forward, even though our archaic government keeps hanging on to rules that them—all dressed at gunpoint obviously—and I didn’t know they were waiting for that’s how long it takes for a dumbass to learn what’s going on. And then when it’s
they know are not intelligent. something. I could just tell that none of the clothes fit them and that if they swapped over it was actually a quarter of a second. But no, that’s really what happened to me.
He should have been a co-defendant. clothes they would be better off, and that things were really bad. So I kept things real- So then on that December night in 1971 where by all intents and purposes I fell out
My only co-defendant was Nicholas Sand. Nick Sand had made the Orange Sun- So let’s go back to your art history, so to speak. We all know that there’s ly close up as a kid. I was very ill and sickly and feverish, and I was really into the little of a window onto my kisser, I really fell into what we call the State of Oneness. And
shine that thirty years before had saved my life, because that’s what I was on was no separation between your art and your life, we’re post-Duchampian smudge spot that my head left on everything, and that kind of scale. So I had an ant there’s nothing like being One with Everything and the understanding that that gives
the Orange Sunshine when I had my death/rebirth. And then thirty years later I end in that way, but I’m trying to be an archaeologist here. You’ve left be- farm, and I wanted to photograph the eight ants, because I knew them personally you!
up in court with this man I’d never met. Because I didn’t know Nick until the DA in- hind photos. I don’t know how many of those crazy, wild psychedelic, so well, I could tell their personalities apart, and I wanted to show that. And that got

72 [SFAQ Issue 19] 73 [SFAQ Issue 19]

Richard Hell
In Conversation With Dean Dempsey ter. As I said, my father had died just months after it occurred, so there was no way to
confirm exactly what happened. For almost everything in the book I have some way
of confirming, somebody else I could consult. But I had no way of checking this story.
I stop into a morning bar to kill time before meeting with Richard Hell My wife teased me about it, that I was making it all up, and the way I remembered
at his East Village apartment. I have a couple whiskeys trying to un- it was probably wrong. But my mother keeps everything and I happened to come
wind after having spent the previous day rereading his autobiography, across this story I wrote for school two months after this runaway happened. It told
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, in preparation to interview him. the whole sequence of events. I was able to confirm that the way I remembered it
It’s pouring rain, and by 11:45 a.m. I walk a few blocks to meet him at actually was correct. And it was really a triumph. The story was called “Runaway
his place. Boy.” I had turned eight by the time I wrote it, and it recounts what happened that
night and how the runaway feels and having to return home and go to sleep; the
He’s on the phone and I wait for him in the living room. I snap a few last sentence of the eight-year-old’s story of how he had run away a couple months
secret photos of his black cat and his apartment that I can best term before was how he returned home, went to bed, “and I dreamed I was a very clean
kooky. It’s a classic Lower East Side flat, with slanting walls, high ceil- tramp.” So that’s where the title comes from.
ings, a bathtub in the kitchen, and a palpable feeling of home. His walls
are adorned with shelves of books and artwork, and I try and wrap my At the end of your autobiography, you write that one of the reasons
head around living in the same place since 1975. But this is New York: why you wrote the book was that you wanted a say in your own repu-
when you get something nice you hold on to it. tation.
That’s interesting, nobody has ever quite put it that way. Well, but that’s not in the
Throughout his music career he pioneered a sound that I describe as context of why I’m writing the book, that’s in the context of the book being really
incendiary, sharp, and fucking sexy all at once, and not just because a frank. Even when it reflects badly on me.
high school girlfriend and I used to jerk each other off to “I’m Your Man”
or “Love Comes in Spurts.” His image was innovative and vociferous, You write, “My life only comes into being by having been written here.”
his lyrics forward and imaginative. The music he produced has had an Basically, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does
immeasurable influence on rock and roll’s legacy, offering a no-bullshit it make a sound?
sensibility that rivaled the pompous arena rock of that era and contin- Yeah, but it’s not even that, because there’s a lot on record about things I’ve been
ues to rouse musicians today. involved with because it’s been written about and stuff. You could draw conclusions
about certain stuff I’ve been involved in because there’s a record, whether it’s books
Richard Hell moved to New York City at the age of 17 in 1966 to become I’ve written or records I’ve made or stories that have been told about that era in New
a poet with ex-band mate Tom Verlaine before being sidetracked by York or whatever, but the point of that sentence in the book was that a lot of my mo-
their musical collaborations, Television and Neon Boys. After Hell left tivation in writing the book was to try to grasp what the fuck happened. What it all
Television he was the vocalist, bassist, and lyricist to The Heartbreak- added up to. I wanted to embody it in this object, which is a book, in order for me to
ers with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. try to have some understanding of it.
With the exception of a brief musical project called Dim Stars in the It’s all so amorphous. You never really have a reality in a certain way. You’re always
early ‘90s, Hell left music for good in 1984 after the release of his sec- just part of a flux. And you might have a memory for a second, you might have a plan,
ond and final studio album, Destiny Street, as Richard Hell and the Voi- or you’re just reacting to some kind of stimulation you’re getting, but it’s all just sort of
doids. The Voidoids’s 1977 debut album, Blank Generation, is widely chaos. It’s funny, I also realized that in the writing of the book—there were a few peo-
considered a punk classic, and its title track the anthem of that decade. ple, a few reviewers, who made comments in a kind of skeptical way about how here
and there I quoted people from decades and decades ago, or described something Richard Hell in his New York City apartment, 2014. Photograph by Dean Dempsey. Richard Hell in his New York City apartment, 1982. Photograph by Roberta Bayley.
Since leaving the stage Richard Hell has devoted himself almost entire- in great detail, and they wondered whether I actually could put in quotes faithfully,
ly to writing, including two novels, Go Now (1996) and Godlike (2005), reliably, two sentences that somebody said to me in 1969—but the fact is, I only ever
and a collection of short writings and drawings entitled Hot and Cold did that, and the only way that I was capable of doing that was because I kept jour- I wanted the clothes to be consistent with how I wanted to be perceived. I was aware So many people that you worked with in music or that you were friends
(2001). Most recently published was his autobiography, two years ago. nals at that time. Those were all things that I actually noted as they happened. Which that people chose what they wore and that I wanted to dress in a way that created with have died, many from overdose. Did you ever imagine that you’d
is another example of the thing I’m talking about, because I wrote it down and I was the effects that I wanted to create. But then once I started a rock and roll band, it all make it this far? Do you ever look back and say, wow, I really dodged
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is an unforgivingly honest ac- able to keep it, and that’s also true for me, having a life period. It really only comes into sort of blossomed because I became aware right away, and it really turned me on. that bullet?
count of his life from boyhood in Lexington, Kentucky up through when being by having been evoked in concrete detail, and just material form. Otherwise, It really excited me and it was really fun—this realization that with a band there’re all Well, I feel lucky in certain ways. I’m glad I’ve lived this long, but I’m kind of getting a lit-
he quit music in the 1980s. From having been a pivotal engineer of it didn’t even happen! these means of communication besides the songs. And I never really consciously tle bit tired of it! You know, it’s always seemed to me that I had a little advantage over
punk and the downtown rock and roll scene to his very descriptive and, thought of that before. I knew it, but it wasn’t conscious, that in a way a band is like a people in music who would find themselves kind of at a dead end because they had
well, provocative depictions of his sexual encounters with . . . a lot of That’s also the nature of being an artist for so long and living and work- whole subculture—I mean, in itself, when it’s done right, when it really exploits all the no other options. And there’s a lot about rock and roll that is dangerous. It’s all kind
women. Hell is unapologetically a man who knows how to use his love ing as an artist. You’re constantly, even subconsciously, planting seeds possibilities. It’s a subculture that’s expressed in the graphics of their posters and al- of about pure self-indulgence and never growing up, and that covers it pretty much.
muscle, and that essence of shamelessness, authenticity, and candor for future projects. So things are always in the archives. It might be in bum covers, in their hairdos, in their clothes, in the things they say in their interviews, Never growing up and self-indulgence. You can’t stay a teenager for your whole life,
extends into his music and writings. the form of journals or in drawings, sketches, and other materials. Even in the way they behave on stage. All of those things are means for communicating and if you try to you’re going to start having psychological problems. And the whole
if you’re not using it now, you might pick it up again one or ten years what you want to be saying, how you want to affect the world. So the whole issue of self-indulgence thing, which includes drugs, is also really risky. I kind of had other
SPOILER ALERT: He doesn’t die in the end. later; it’s always in the bank, so to speak. So in that sense you have how you dress took on this new force once I started thinking that way conscious- options and interests, but you know, at the same time, I OD’d a few times—I mean,
these journals you can go through. ly. It’s not just me on whatever kind of relatively mundane level wondering if I wear woke up in the hospital without any knowledge of what happened and immediate-
I love the story behind the title, so I ask him to remind you readers Yeah, I really did feel like if I wanted to have had a life, it needed to be written. I mean, madras or not. Without any censorship or convention or hesitation or inhibition, I ly said, “I want some more of that! That was really good!” So a lot of it is just pure
where he got it. for me, in a certain way books are more real than people anyway! want the clothes to say the same—to sort of represent on the outside the way I feel chance. I never had such a death wish that I actually assumed that I was going to die
I’m a little bit ambivalent about that title. Sometimes it really seems stupid to me. But I inside, you know? And all of the sort of things we were trying to do in the band that before I was 30 or 40 or whatever. I wonder if you did some kind of statistical study
usually like it a lot, and in context I really like it. The context you’re talking about, which They have a better smell. were different from what was popular and acceptable and conventional at that time that you’d find the life expectancy is a lot less for the rock and roll demographic. I
is where I got it from, how it arose and arrived, is the story of when I was a kid and I You never actually know what’s going on with somebody else. But in a book you can could have an equivalent in the way we appeared. So I sort of methodically thought wonder. I’m not actually sure. A lot of people have lived, too.
just loved to run away from home. It was my favorite thing to do. It was always the really study it and it doesn’t change. You change and so you might be able to derive through what I could do that would represent what I felt like inside. That was about
most exciting possibility, and not because I had some horrible childhood or terrible something new from the book because of some way in which you developed. And the raggedy, patchy hair and the torn-up clothes with writing on them. I just thought What are your thoughts on contemporary rock and roll? Obviously it
home life, not at all, it was very comfortable. But I was just thrilled by the idea of going so, yeah, I wanted to have a life, so I wrote a book! through what means I could come up with to have the clothes be consistent with has changed a lot, but is there anything that stands out now?
some place unknown and being someone that wasn’t known to anyone and having everything I wanted to be throwing at the world. You know, I’m not hooked into it. Back in those days rock and roll was everything.
adventures. Anyway, it’s common among kids and I tell a couple of stories about run- in your earlier bands, from the Neon Boys to Television to The Heart- It was life and death. My impression now is that it’s so diffused because of the ad-
away experiences in the book. I did it almost annually until I finally succeeded when breakers to The Voidoids, how big a part did the way you dressed and Do you feel like there is still a conscious decision as to how you pres- vent of digital recording and the web where anybody can disseminate anything and
I was 17. presented yourself play in your life and music? You write, “[We] were ent yourself? everything is basically free. It’s just become kind of Balkanized, all these hundreds
the positive standards of being, rather than examples of failure, de- Well, that’s definitely built into me but I don’t give it anything like that kind of attention and thousands of little pockets. I really just don’t know enough. When I try to keep
My father died when I was seven and one of these stories of running away hap- pravity, criminality, and ugliness. . . . The traits and signs of what came anymore. In a way it was almost like an art project. up, it’s too overwhelming. Every once in awhile somebody recommends something
pened just a month or so before he died. He played a big role in this anecdote about to be called punk were the ways that we’d systematically invented or you know, and I’ll listen to something, and sometimes I find something that I like, but I
running away. And as it turned out, this specific memory I had of running away, which discovered as means for displaying on the outside what was inside us.” have no idea really what all is out there.
was really significant to me, wasn’t remembered at all by either my mother or my sis-
74 [SFAQ Issue 19] 75 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Yeah. I don’t either! So you’ve done acting before. It seems like you What was the last movie you watched that you enjoyed?
haven’t acted much since the ‘90s. The new Jean-Luc Godard 3D movie, Goodbye To Language. He’s over 80 years old
Yeah, I never was serious about acting. I was basically living hand to mouth and now and has been really prolific. This is my favorite period of his, the last ten years or
sometimes every once in a while somebody would ask me to do something in a so. I’ve always loved him, he’s just amazingly fertile; he keeps going new places and
movie and if they would pay me I would do it. It was never something I pursued and I he’s brilliant. He uses different types of cameras, like the cheapest possible $200
don’t really feel cut out for it, frankly. digital video camera you can buy, up to 35 mm; I’m not sure what he used on this par-
ticular film, but different kinds of technologies. If I’m not mistaken, he actually even
Is there a film that you acted in that you liked more than the others? created his 3D camera just by taping together two cameras himself. But it’s really
That was good? Well, by far the best and my most successful attempt to have a role effective. It’s really good, and it’s an amazing movie. I can definitely recommend that.
in a movie was in Smithereens, Susan Seidelman’s first movie. But I didn’t do very
many, only four or five. What is this performance series you’re doing, Night Out with Richard
Hell?
So you didn’t enjoy Ulli Lommel’s Blank Generation? Well, this agency approached me back in the summer asking me if I would be inter-
That movie just repels me and makes me shudder and vomit. But the fun thing about ested in curating a series of performances at this uptown venue called Symphony
that was when they recently re-released it on DVD and they asked me to contribute Space. The concept was that I would interview the performer and they would do
in bonus interviews at the end of the film and I had them agree in advance I could say their act. I didn’t even understand what they were proposing at first. I thought they
what I want. I got to spend 45 minutes completely trashing the movie! were just asking me to do one in a series, but it turned out they wanted me to do five
of them across the winter. They were looking to get young musicians. They thought
You’ve been in New York for almost 50 years. In what ways do you feel I could bring in who I thought was interesting to do stuff in New York now. But I don’t
like it’s changed, and what keeps you here? really keep up, I didn’t really have five young musicians, and I didn’t really relish the
There’s really no vestige of the New York of my youth anymore. New York is a theme prospect of having to go out and cruise nightclubs. So I asked if they would let me
park for the smug and arrogant wealthy. But it’s kind of been convenient that I aged present performers in other media, and they agreed. It was really fun and I didn’t
as that sort of thing developed because I don’t play rock and roll anymore, I don’t do know what to expect. I’d never done anything like it. Four or five people came to mind
drugs anymore—all I need from New York are movies and museums and art gal- that worked in completely different areas who were relatively unknown. There were
leries, the things that still thrive here. I cannot stand going out on weekends when two bands, a poet, a filmmaker, and then an artist who made his original reputation
the streets are mobbed with rich people barhopping, Wall Street types and college on YouTube. I’m interested in painting and art, and I have a lot of friends who are art-
kids and shit. But I still have my apartment, I’m very lucky. So yeah, I feel for anybody ists and I love going to galleries. It was kind of frustrating that I wasn’t going to be able
who’s like me at that time, now. to include a visual artist in the series. What was he going to do for his performance?
Stand up there and paint something? Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation, 1977. Photograph by Roberta Bayley.
That whole culture—it was crime ridden and dirty and there was a lot that was
ugly about it in certain ways, but also you had nothing to lose and apartments were It’s a little bit stressful, but it’s kind of a challenge and an adventure and I’m really get-
cheap; jobs were plentiful. The fact that it was like the Wild West also brought a cer- ting off on it. I am pleased with the lineup that we’ve got together. The first one is a
tain freedom to it. 22-year-old Cow Punk. Did you ever hear that? I hadn’t. She’s like a country musi-
cian, but she comes from a background where she’s sort of liberated by what punk
New York leads the country in both homelessness and luxury rentals. music was doing. It’s very aggressive and frank, and she’s a wild child. Her name is
All around my neighborhood these generic posh condominium are Lydia Loveless; she was the first one. The second one is a poet named Ariana Rein-
popping up, and under their construction scaffolds are almost always es, who’s this funny picture of sort of bag lady and extremely sophisticated intellec-
five to ten homeless people living in boxes. The rate of poverty and tual. She’s a genius poet, the real thing—it’s like you’re talking to Gérard de Nerval
the influx of the wealthy moving in is nuts. It’s becoming a third-world or François Villon or something. She lives it. And then in December was Kelly Re-
country. You’re very poor or you’re very rich. But anyway, that’s my ichardt, a filmmaker. I interviewed her and then screened her movie. In February will Richard Hell and the Voidoids, 1978. CBGB, NYC. Photograph by David Godlis.
rant. So you were working on a movie in 2007—where is that? be Donald Cumming who has this band called The Virgins, but it’s no longer, and
This kid came to me at a reading of mine with a DVD where he shot a chapter of my his new record is a solo record, but he also has this real interesting history being
first novel, and he had done a really good job with it. He put himself at my disposal. a street kid junkie who fell in with Ryan McGinley and was opened up to things by
He was a film student and just near graduation and he could handle all aspects of that whole experience, and ended up having a career because he made this little
making a film. He had a camera and editing software and he just asked me if it was home-recorded set of five songs he had written that he put on CDs for just a few
anything I’d like to do. I couldn’t resist, so I started toying with this plan for a movie and friends. Then within a few months there was a bidding frenzy for them and he found
shot this little experimental piece to see what it would look like. I had some experi- his way into the music business. He’s really a talented and interesting guy.
ence messing around with writing film scripts, trying to get something done in the
past, and I realized the single-mindedness and persistence and sacrifice it takes to Then the final evening is this artist Jayson Musson, who shows with Salon 94. He’s
get a first feature made. I mean, you have to do nothing else for like five years. It takes a commenter on the state of the art world. The videos he made for YouTube were
all of your energy and all of your focus, and it’s a horrible struggle. And all this money. wildly popular and funny; really comic and insightful about art making. He did that
under the assumed name of Hennessy Youngman. He made this series of videos
So I basically gave up on this years ago, but then this kid came up and I thought why where he adopted this kind of rock star persona and dissed the art world. They’re
not give it a shot because things had become easier due to digital film making, so I really hilarious. But this guy is the one person who I hadn’t known about before I took
did play around with this thing and shot a few minutes and put it up on YouTube. It ex- on the assignment of doing this series, and he was perfect because he had done
posed how thin my commitment to doing it was because I knew how backbreaking this multimedia stuff.
it is. We were shooting in available light, and he told me that it was going to be plenty
for the equipment he was using, but it turned out really dark and it wasn’t something So yeah, it’s funny to move from artist to artist like that and have this whole intense
that would have been usable. That was enough to say, okay, never mind, I’m moving relationship going on in sequence with these very different people. It’s edifying and
on! it’s stimulating. They’re all different personalities and all work in different areas, and
it requires me to do a lot of research because I have to get familiar with what they
Is it on the back burner or are you just going to move on from it? have done. It feeds me, I like it. I mean, it is hard work, and I should be writing a book
It’s completely set aside. instead.

Do you ever consider acting again? What’s next?

No. Every once in awhile I get some kind of little something about doing something, Well, the main thing is a new book. I’m still not sure if I have the stamina, but what I’m
but I’ve had no trouble resisting. I’m just not cut out for it. I don’t like the experience. I trying my hand at is a cold-ass noir novel.
liked doing it for a clip I put up on YouTube in 2007.

Which one?
It’s called Melinda’s Neck. I was in my element so it was comfortable. I wasn’t having
to contort myself into somebody’s idea of a role. I really can’t do that, I don’t have
the acting chops. I’m too self-conscious. I can only be confident when I’m actually
relating with somebody, and that’s the way we made that movie. We were kind of
more or less improvising, and we were just relating to each other. We weren’t trying
to fit into roles.

76 [SFAQ Issue 19] The Heartbreakers, 1975. Photograph by Bob Gruen. Richard Hell, 1977. Photograph by Kate Simon.
Bill Daniel Every Train Calls Your Name

Bill Daniel [left] and Jocko Weyland [right] in Tucson, AZ, Dec. 2014. Photograph by Lila Lee. Tony Offender and H. R., Bad Brains, Esther’s Pool, Austin, Texas, April 6th, 1982. Courtesy of the artist.

In Conversation With Jocko Weyland Starting here, at the Chaffin Diner in Tucson, let’s begin in the present.
This tour, the Tri-X Noise tour, you woke up one day and wanted to get
Tell me about the logistics. The term has been drained of meaning, but
it certainly is the definition of DIY.
So now you have the pickup truck. You built the walls, the display
device—they go on the roof—and the prints are packed up in the bed
on the road again? How long had it been since you’d done that? Well the logistics is really the art of it. You know, if you’re poor you wash your own of the truck. It’s a lot of work and I suppose sometimes you might want
Incisively and poetically documenting the crooks and crannies of Once I landed in LA in 2011 that was the end of a phase of a lot of touring, though I clothes, or mow your own yard, or change your own oil. You could aestheticize it if to just have them put up on a wall in a gallery and get a check in the
the American cultural periphery, and tenaciously taking what he has went out with Ralph White earlier this year for a couple of weeks; a regional thing. you want to but it’s really a matter of organization. Certainly all visual artists have mail?
found and crafted out on the road, Bill Daniel has three decades of Really me just providing A/V backup for my friend Ralph, him playing his tunes, music that guides them—or most do. With this tour specifically I am trying to do Well the artwork would be better if I didn’t spend ninety percent of my time on
remarkable creation to show for his tireless efforts. His vivid chronicles freak folk legend. A quickie. But this is a last minute thing, too, waking up about six that. At each spot, I am finding somebody local to share the gig, which is the punk logistics. Of course, everybody has the same complaint. But when the amount
of the fevered punk scene in early 1980s Austin, Texas is where it weeks ago and going, “God damn, nothing is happening,” feeling like it’s been a year DIY touring model that makes sense and continues to work. On the other hand of effort and time that you put into the artwork is about five percent of your total
all began, with indelible photographs of everyone from the Butthole banging my head against the wall trying to get The Texas Punk Problem published. it’s experiential. When I look at a picture, I’ve got some music in my head. There’s economic output, it’s like, wow man, if I could only work at ten percent. An hour and a
Surfers to the Stinky Shits to Toxic Shock featured in the incomparable I’ve travelled with a lot of these photos before, this checkerboard wall thing. The first a soundtrack I’m thinking of or feeling, or using as compositional form, so why not half a day instead of forty-five minutes.
hand-sewn The Western Roundup. Consequently, he segued into an time I used that was in 1995 and some of the older prints I’ve got are the ones from have that when people are looking at the pictures live? And why not have that be
exploration of the then-disappearing railroad hobo world, the heirs to then. You can tell because they’re really beat-up, but they’re going to have to go on different every night? But how you present it and take it on the road has become inextricably
the denizens of Jack Black’s You Can’t Win, resulting in Who is Bozo the wall because Tri-X Noise needs one hundred and twenty-eight photographs. A linked with the work. Is that a trap? Would you rather be sitting poolside
Texino?, which is justifiably known as “the greatest hobo graffiti film photo show with live performance. A lot of the recent tours have had photo as one Which vehicle is it on this tour? The van you were driving in 2010? sipping margaritas?
ever made.” A cultural anthropologist of the elusive underside of our part of their components. The Sonic Orphans tour in 2010 had 16mm films of lost No, that was my dear Toyota four-wheel drive. And then the E350 Diesel just No! Absolutely not. I’d just like to put more time into the work. But showing it this way
times who employs a hauntingly evocative black and white aesthetic, and found music films, and I had these prints, so I put them up too. became too much to repair. is part of it, and I believe that how you show it is part of the work.
his accomplishment lies in recorded facts presented with an almost
mystical ambiguity. To quote, in his own words, “No matter what the The one I saw in Detroit? The day we went to the Packard Plant, with That’s the one you drove from Braddock (Pennsylvania) to Danny’s Lot And the transition to the white cube can come with a whole new set
disappointment might be in finding the lonely reality behind a particular the films of the Avengers and Boy Problems? in Brooklyn to do the show at the dumpster pools in 2009? of problems and nuanced contradictions in the commercial sphere. If
myth or graffiti, there is a mystery, or truth, that will always evade the Yeah, an early Raul’s (Austin) era band, early 1980s. Billy Pringle’s first band. As far The diesel was the one I was going to drive, but it blew out the water pump the you were to show in that kind of environment, would you want it to be
documentarian and the audience.” He has carved out an unmistakable as the name Tri-X Noise, it could be, “Bill, I thought it was a website, I thought it was a moment I got on the freeway. So I had to double back and get the orange van, which presented in a very clean, orderly fashion, prints framed on the wall
domain including his own films, salvaged cinematic artifacts presented Big Cartel store,” but it’s just a catchall name. The title can apply to a lot of different I hadn’t driven in months and had rust in the tank that clogged the fuel filter on the just so, or replicate what you are doing out on the road?
in unusual locations (junkyards) projected on unlikely surfaces (sails), projects. Sunset Scavenger was the same way; I find a title I like and it represents a way. It was leaking oil and when I hit the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel they signaled I like both things. For me the work has to be viable in both contexts. The idea for next
and with printed matter, including Mostly True, The Zone System, group of ideas, not necessarily a specific configuration. me over to the bomb squad area and those guys were just like, “Are you kidding? year is to take this thing around to cleaner art spaces, but it comes with the same
and Tri-X-Noise, Volume One coming out on Radio Raheem in the spring No way! You’re not getting in the tunnel with this thing, it’s going to blow up.” It was extension cords. No museum extension cords, you know? No museum lights, no
of 2015. If that wasn’t enough, it’s Daniel’s gung-ho determination to Is Tri-X Noise all Austin punk pictures? leaking a lot of oil. wall labels. It comes whole.
take his artwork to the people—crisscrossing the nation, showing in No, but we sell the punk, because people want to see pictures of The Misfits, though
often off-the-beaten-path and sometimes-improbable venues—that when they show up they get to see pictures of a house show in Shreveport and that But you made it to Brooklyn eventually. Tell me about Garry Winogrand and Texas punk.
consolidates his achievement into a singular and all-encompassing sneaks into the viewer’s consciousness. But it’s really The Misfits that draw. They’re Late, but I did. I had to. I have a theory that goes like this: Texas punk was informed by the presence of
work of art and life. at the top of the marquee. Garry Winogrand in the art department at the University of Texas in Austin in the
78 [SFAQ Issue 19] 79 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 No. I never saw any. But in the last twenty years there have been multiple new It devalues the individual photo, obviously, in the digital platforms
waves. The initial thing started in the early ‘90s. we’re talking about. You see it in a moment, but then it moves down the
line and is gone. Do you find yourself out of sync, or think you have to
Where’d that come from? adapt?
It was a cultural inevitability. The trains are there and they beg to be ridden and Well, they’re kind of gratifying, putting them up in a way, but really it’s a task I have to
certain people are begging to get out of the house and not sleep inside. Especially in do for marketing purposes. It’s kind of fun, but I’d rather not do it. It’s time consuming
this country, driving east to west, every motel backs up to the train tracks and every and distracting. Really, I have to learn another app? Another password? Is it the right
train calls your name. All of it is a continuation and every step along the way is equally amount of time that’s gone by for me to put up another Instagram picture? No, I’m
legit but also equally legit is building on this falsified myth, and it has been since the about three days behind on posting. That’s commercial suicide, and I’m trying to
get-go. You know, at the turn of the century it was a really popular subject and there make a living. So to make a living I have to put up an Instagram every day. It’s kind
was all this mainstream pulp literature about it and it was in the vernacular. But this of fun, but I don’t have to time to fool around with it. Of all the things to do with the
mechanism of exploitation is part of it. day, that’s one that’s way low on the list. It’s absurd that’s what it requires, but I have
to do it.
What about in practical terms? There are a lot fewer wooden boxcars
now and there has been the rise of containerization. Back to the antediluvian age, were the first pictures you took at Raul’s?
That’s true, but that turns out to be the least of it. Really the problem is the security 1981, then 1982 at The Ritz on Sixth Street.
state. That’s not only a problem for riding trains but for everything. You used to wave
at people at crossings and they’d either wave back or shake their fists at you, though Why are people so interested in that time now, over thirty years later,
they couldn’t do anything about it. But now they call on their cell phone or whatever. including many people that weren’t alive then?
And once those buildings in New York went down, everybody, citizen and cop alike, Well, one answer to that is it’s really sad. “What happened? Why aren’t people doing
Twist, Ozol, California, April, 1994. Courtesy of the artist.
wanted to be a hero. Poor rail fans couldn’t take pictures of bridges anymore. things?” It was an interesting time, sure, but where is the next thing? A lot of stuff did
happen after, and I think the most interesting and crucial is the radical environmental
Ok, you’re a salvage ethnologist, you’ve got folk art, and then you’ve, movement, and punk/traveler types, and the whole W.T.O., and Occupy, and all of
got in the last fifteen years the ascent of what is most often called that comes out of the same impetus of the ‘80s punk thing did. But the punk thing
“street art.” Do these two things have anything to do with each other? was rock and roll, and rock and roll is inherently sexy and fun, not so much do-
Monikers and street art? gooderism. In some ways punk carried a positive activist message, but essentially
it was rock and roll. So what we don’t have now is a rock and roll version of fuck the
Yes, graffiti going back to Lascaux, and on trains in New York in the state, fuck capital. Fuck capital now seems like a more serious undertaking and it’s
1970s, and the whole train, ship, or even on a tree kind of expression. not as fun.
On the other end, recently, something else cluttering up the streets,
an overabundance of not only illegal but also sanctioned “street” art. But those movements don’t have a soundtrack. And Occupy didn’t
In some districts. Where I live in Pasadena, Texas, there is zero graffiti. I found one, come up with a cultural effusion or produce something like punk and it
well, some, under a bridge, some swastikas and penises. didn’t even have much of a “look.”
Which is probably a good thing.
Back to the basics.
These kids do not get Juxtapoz magazine, but if they get a can of paint, and they get The encrustation is strange to me, the sixteen year-old kid dressed up
under a bridge, you know what comes out. in the Crass uniform of thirty years ago, to a T, sartorially immaculate
but historically and contextually unmoored.
What I’m talking about is validated graffiti vs. renegade graffiti. Are That’s just where we are evolutionarily as a species. Our media culture just exploded
they related? Does one come out of another? You’ve got monikers, at that point and the whole thing became much more complex. Before, there was a
and, here I’m quoting from the editorial at the beginning of Mostly True, monolith of corporate rock and that was smashed, in a way, though the power is still
you’ve got “put-ons and art scene fakery.” there. Culturally, things became much more atomized, which is a good thing. Now it’s
Well, you know, that’s the “editor.” That wasn’t me. I was in the role of the editor. And I difficult to know what to rally around; then it seemed like a simple us vs. them. You’re
Reminisce and environment, SOMA, SF, circa 1993. Courtesy of the artist. Bill Daniel Installing Tri-X-Noise, Fort Houston, Nashville, TN, December, 2014. Photograph by
Lila Lee. Courtesy of the artist. like that guy, and I mostly agree with him. But yeah, for sure. a punk, I’m a punk, and we’re on the same team. Now there are a million teams.

So where does genuine, for lack of a better word, mark making and You can be a punk one day, a raver the next, then rockabilly on Friday.
late 1970s, where a whole bunch of the kids were starting bands and studying with Speaking of that era, describe what was going on at the Pflugerville
monikering fall in that huge art-money-sanctioned, public projects It’s odd, at the very least, this institutionalization of the punk look
him. Tim Kerr (later of The Big Boys), Steve Marsh (who formed Terminal Mind), Tom [skating] ditch circa 1980.
world out there? Or where doesn’t it? broken down into highly specific subsets. Crusty jugglers. Why do they
Huckabee (the drummer of The Huns), and others. I’ve got a pet curatorial project Pflugerville was the spot. It was an example of public infrastructure that was there
That’s the swastikas and penises I found under that bridge in Pasadena. It’s going all have dogs, Bill? That’s what I want to know.
that is the work of the students of Garry Winogrand from when he taught at U.T.: for the taking where you were going to create your whole deal around it and not be
to come out, and when it comes out in a complete vacuum it’s probably more ‘Cuz it helps you spange.
painters, photographers, script writers. Tom Huckabee became a great storyteller bothered and live as if the ditch was made specifically for you. Generally no hassles.
interesting and a pure impulse. A destructive, juvenile impulse.
and filmmaker who teaches script writing in Fort Worth. Like The Huns’ bust at It was out in the country then, but now Dell Computers is there and it’s really built
I heard you say the other night that you’ve gone back to being interested
Raul’s. up and the ditch is under dirt. We think that they just filled it up and that it’s still there.
To cite the eminently quotable editor again, “But we have since found in figures—figures in motion. In the photos of skating and punk from
ourselves in an era of such suffocating media saturation and heretofore the early ‘80s that’s very much there, but now?
What was The Huns’ bust? Like the Buena Vista pool near Santa Cruz that has been filled in with
unmatched mindless rapidity of communication that the aggregate Yes. Skateboarding is just a way of creating figurative gestures, and I love board
That was the big bang in the universe of Texas punk. The Huns were arrested dirt and dug out multiple times over the years. So, where do you get
effect of the once generous act of information sharing has become like dynamics, too—how boards work mechanically and the physics of skating and the
onstage at Raul’s by officer Steve Bridgewater who, we find out years later, was your Tri-X film?
the wind—a hurricane to take refuge from.” interaction with the human body. You could say that skating is a kind of choreography
actually a closeted aspiring actor. Tom, a few months before the bust, was making Freestyle Photographic Supplies in LA. Kodak reformulated it about twenty years
Instagram, Facebook, exactly. Too many pictures, make it stop. that is performed to be photographed.
a film called The Death of Jim Morrison and they were filming down on Sixth Street, ago and maybe took some chromium out, so possibly it looks a little bit different, but
just running with no permits or anything. A cop came up and said, “What the hell are it still acts like it’s supposed to.
But you can’t. With skating you have published a number of bail shots, which are
you doing,” and they said, “We’re shooting a film, the guy in the gutter is not really
Well actually my phone got swamped at what I call Cell Phone Beach at the ship usually verboten.
dead, he’s supposed to be Jim Morrison. And we need a cop in the shot, so could You started documenting the hobo graffiti train scene more than
channel, so I didn’t have a cell phone for two weeks, and it was fantastic! I saw a lot Well, partly, I have a lot of bail shots because people were bailing a lot. And bailing
you stand over here?” He played along and was in the movie. So at The Huns’ show twenty years ago?
less images in those two weeks and the image processors in my brain finally got a shots are the ones that started to look more like the slam dancing pictures.
when the same officer Steve Bridgewater walked into Raul’s Club, on some level he Well Bozo Texino started as a still project in 1983, and then I started shooting film in
break.
recognized that this was a performance he was in, and performed the arresting cop ‘88.
Like when you first saw the back cover photo by Ed Colver on Wasted
role.
There are a billion more every day. How do you make one image that Youth’s Reagan’s In LP with the guy flipping off the speakers upside
Going back that far, was part of the impetus to record a subculture that
stands out? Actually, it’s more about the dissemination. That’s what down with Vans on, and it was totally skating. It was a skate trick. Are
What was the supposed crime The Huns were perpetrating? was disappearing?
has changed. Garry Winogrand took as many pictures as someone on you taking pictures of skaters now?
Might have been a noise complaint but really the Austin police were gunning for Salvage ethnography, that’s what I’d call it. What’s great about the whole subject of
Instagram today, but he didn’t print them, or even develop them all. It’s No, but about six years ago I started shooting 35mm stills again and got a Nikon with
Raul’s because of full-male nudity on posters on the drag [Guadalupe Street] for American hoboing is that it’s a giant plastic myth that you can attach yourself to and
not so much that it wasn’t possible to take so many pictures before, it’s a 28mm lens and a Sunpak flash, which was basically the same thing I was using in
punk shows there. I’m sure once they walked in and saw what was going on they spin it out for whatever story you need to tell.
that the one-to-one relationship—a zine, a print, or even the one-to- ’82—same film stock, same developer, same 72-degree water with the film sitting
thought, “We’ve got a big fish here, we’re going to land this.” If you’re a cop, and it’s
one of a few of emails—has been supplanted by the one-to-the-rest- there for eleven minutes. It’s amazing how things can still be the same even though
just boredom, boredom, boredom, and then you get to bust up a punk show, it’s like, There’s a whole new crop of people interested in that, a younger
of-the-world. Do you have anything profound to say about that? technology has changed so much. Like charcoal and a piece of paper. I wanted to
“This is heroics, this is a poetic moment in which we can live out our role.” Not just generation of train hoppers, like Brad Westcott, who makes the zine
All day long, when I’m driving, to myself. Sure I think about that and ask hard get back to that, to shooting some art events, some music shows, but, you know,
stopping kids from driving too fast but really getting to the core. Never Heard of It, or Mike Brodie, to use a more notorious example,
questions, like why would I burden the world with another picture? Does the world really unlikely music shows.
who are interested in this folkloric tradition. When you started, were
want another picture? No. I think long and hard about that: am I going to ask people
there many young guys or girls riding trains?
to look at another picture?
80 [SFAQ Issue 19] 81 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 Singalong during a performance by The Mel Coolies, Liberty Hall, Dallas, February 26th, 1984.
Kenny Peyton, Flowmotion Skatepark, South Austin, Texas, 1981. Courtesy of the artist.

As opposed to the likely shows in the likely venues. It’s also strange to Who you know from living in San Francisco through his film series Point taken, though there’s still a contradiction inherent in your work. A You’re immersed in the practical side of your craft, the lenses, the
me how you go to these places, like this show at a squat I went to in Other Cinema. You worked on his films? good one that shows there’s this wasteful advanced capitalist society cameras . . .
Switzerland back in April, and it was packed in this basement and really Tribulation 99—that was the first film I worked on with Craig, and it takes the form and, on the other hand, your tools—the camera and the truck—are part I know, it’s horrendously unfashionable, and I think it’s important to recognize that. I
jolly and there was a band with a good girl singer screaming, but it was of a right-wing paranoid rant, a tract, and a lot of Craig’s films are built on an inverted of that. mean, look what’s in the art world.
like, where’s the danger? Everyone is hugging. What’s up with that? metaphor. They’re falling into the ventriloquism of a counter-side. Like, he would tell That they’re part of civilization? Of course they are. And Al Gore flies in Learjets and
Everyone’s all friends. There wasn’t going to be a fight. the history of American interventionism in Central America from a crazy right-wing lives in giant mansions with climate control. Well there’s that. But the cameras, the trucks, the vans, there’s a very
Well if you want fights there are plenty of opportunities at the liquor store right perspective rather than from a liberal one. You can take a style from an object, and nuts-and-bolts gearhead side to what you do, but it’s superlative as
around the corner or on the streets of downtown Tucson. Half the people there will it’s also—looking for a voice. The editorial voice of Mostly True is a funny guy with a That’s more problematic than you driving a four-cylinder truck. art because that’s all there but it’s not about the zone system or like
oblige you. pipe. It’s like, “I know that guy!” Maybe. a Hollywood movie in which the CGI wows you but it’s empty. I don’t
see your photographs and think about what lens you used, though
True. So, in The Western Roundup, the zine you made in the early Who did all the ads, the make-believe ones? There are levels, degrees involved. obviously that’s critical. Is it important to you that the viewer in the end
1980s, and much more recently in the Mostly True book, there is a very All of us. The design team was Gary Fogelson, Phil Lubliner, and Rich McIsaac, all Yeah, like driving here with a headwind, and the fastest I could go is 62 miles per hour is not aware of the how it was made? Or should they be aware of the
distinct reliance and incorporation of historical graphic motifs. in Brooklyn. There was a fortunate like-mindedness at work. Everybody got it and because my truck has roughly the engine displacement of a motorcycle. technical prowess?
That all comes from Mike Nott, who was the designer for The Western Roundup. everybody shared in making the voice feel right. The second edition also had some No, the most important thing is that they should stand in front of it and fall into it and
They were my photos, but Mike was the designer. He was a great poster designer design help from Eric Kneeland and Mike Enron. There’s a very substantial technical foundation to your photography, in we just see their feet disappear into the picture.
too. He’d write “NOXX” on them instead of “Nott.” the old-fashioned sense. Is that aspect not necessarily something you
All right, so you’re stranded on a desert island and you can only bring want to trumpet?
They’re almost seamless. The Western Roundup looks like it could be a one movie. Is it Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer’s Energy and How to Oh, no, I’ll talk all day long about that. But it’s both photo technical and just pictorial.
real 1950s dude ranch pamphlet, albeit with pictures of the Bad Brains, Get It, or Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams? And it’s crucial that it’s both. In the content-and-form-relationship, the form is made
and Mostly True really does look like it could have been published in For that it might be something with fewer words involved—Bergman or something. with something, and that form is an output of a tool. Photography is of course super
1908. Something that would take on a religious deal. But Burden of Dreams, that’s geeky and a lot of people in photography are obsessed with just the tools. And that’s
It’s a form of mimicry, but the point is to get an object-metaphor to work from. something I could watch over and over. groovy, I love the tools. But what do they make? Certain tools make certain things
It’s not supposed to be a replication of the original but I have to have a visualization and then it’s about what these things embody. I feel like tools with a high degree of
to attach things to; a template. The style came from Mike. We were all on board, for You are obviously interested in peak oil and its aftermath, the Sausalito automation make work that feels disembodied.
sure, but that was his deal. I can tell you who else I learned how to operate an object houseboat scene, the coming breakdown, but at the same time you’re
metaphor from, and that’s Craig Baldwin. driving a truck and putting gas in it. To speak plainly, there’s often form with no content.
It’s a four-cylinder. I’m no less obsessed with my tonal scale than Ansel Adams was. I hope at some
point to do an interview in which I only talk about the grayscale.

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Petra Collins

Jacqueline (Macbook), 2014. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Hands (Pink Bathroom), 2010. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

In Conversation With Pat McCarthy You’ve had a super crazy year. At the beginning of the year you curated
the PussyPat show at Muddguts, and that’s where I (and lots of other
How has shooting commercial and fashion work challenged your pho-
tography? Like a studio photo shoot for instance?
He’s overwhelmingly pretty so that probably eases the transition.
Yeah, he’s insane looking. I met him when I went on Ryan McGinley’s road trip with
Petra Collins is committed and crushing it. In 2014 she staged solo ex- people in New York) really first saw the scale of your vision. It felt like a Something I love to do, but I’ve always—I mean, I just have to do it for money to live. my other best friend, which is cool.
hibitions of photographs and sculptures, routinely curated all-female whole scene really declared itself. You organized 24 artists, you had a But I don’t know, I’m really lucky now I’m at this point, and I think I was lucky in the
group shows, put out major editorial and commercial projects, made manifesto, and it seemed like from the onset the community has been beginning, where my creative direction wasn’t really challenged, and I do have more Yeah. You seemingly earned your education through old-fashioned ap-
a monograph, and recently began making her first short films. At 22 an integral ingredient in your work. I’m wondering if that was deliber- space to do what I want. Every kind of job that I’ve done I’ve sort of had that, which prenticeship as opposed to art college. Do you feel that kind of men-
years old, this manic output demands recognition as a leader among a ately cultivated, or did it happen more by circumstance? is cool, which is kind of rare. So I guess I have kind of a unique experience doing it, tor/protégé style of learning has been crucial to your fast and super
generation of young artists who are socially minded and comfortable I guess it was deliberate because that’s kind of what I’ve been doing my whole life. I but even when I do fashion editorial work, it’s really on my own terms. I just did this prolific output?
creating across many platforms at once. Like Kern she attacks present guess when I started off really creating, doing photography, and other—I was danc- shoot in i-D a couple issues ago that I really love which was just of my two of my I mean—I don’t know—I did go to school for two years, which cost a lot, but I didn’t
taboos. Like McGinley her work is candid and fantastic. And like Rihan- ing and did video and stuff before that, but I kind of, like, didn’t really see a place or best friends who did this really awesome clothing line and I shot a bunch of best really go for photography. I have been making art since I was little; it’s just something
na, if she ain’t feelin’ it, she ain’t doin’ it. platform for my work so I just kind of wanted to create that for other young—not friends. But it was girls ranging from every different kind of look and size and shape I need to do, so nothing ever really stopped me. Having mentors or people to work
even young, but other talented female artists like myself. I guess just doing that show and whatever, and so I’m lucky that I get to do that as opposed to having to stick to with is really helpful for me, because working with people is kind of the only way I
I have like a dozen questions, or something. And also thank you for was a natural progression. I actually did one before that in September. I forget what normal commercial work. Sometimes it is draining, but then I just have to remember can do things. I’m really happy that I did get an education. I would love to go back
doing this and stuff. Have you read SFAQ? month PussyPat was. March or something? the money goes to making more artwork. So it’s totally cool, fine for me. to school; I just don’t have time or money. It’s unfortunate that school is so expen-
I was just about to do it, yeah. sive, especially in the U.S. I’m from Canada—it’s cheaper there—but it’s so expen-
March, around the same time you did your solo show at Capricious 88. Does being put into that situation bring out unexpected directions in sive here that I just, I don’t know. And I think it’s doing apprenticeships and stuff is
It’s really the best. It’s published in San Francisco, it’s completely free, Yeah, yeah, March. But I did this show in September actually. I don’t know if you saw your work? the route that some people have to take, but I think learning from other people and
and it goes to like a hundred cities in the world. Yeah, and I’m not really it. It was called Gynolandscape. Along with my photography, curating is really im- Yeah, usually I barely shoot in the studio. When I shot Tavi for the cover of Nylon, I working with other people is really important. Does that answer your question kind
a journalist. portant to me, and actually I went to school for two years for criticism in curatorial got to buy backdrops, which I wouldn’t normally buy for myself. I don’t know—I don’t of?
I know, it’s really weird interviewing people. I just did it for the first time recently. practice, and I guess in my practice I find it really important to collaborate. It’s just shoot studio and I also wouldn’t spend the extra money on it, but I kind of realized
something I love to do. a new work I wanted to do out of it, so I used it as a resource to try out new things. Totally. Richard Kern and Ryan McGinley are really known for working
Who did you interview? Someone you knew? in the field, like endless travel and constantly working in new locations.
I spent like ten days traveling around the U.S. and shot a little documentary about I think the Muddguts show seemed more impactful because it was at An obvious change in the commercial work is you’re shooting some Has that strongly influenced your development of a practice?
girls who practice dance. My sister and I were interviewing girls, but it was my first an underground gallery, more like a show for our immediate generation boys as subjects. Yeah. I first modeled for Ryan 2 years ago in May 2013.
time doing that. It was so cool. I did something else like that before on video, so I just and artists our age. I haven’t shot too many boys.
started interviewing. Yeah, totally, yeah. I always think that’s super important to do, because as an artist Where did you guys go?
you’re always kind of preaching to the choir, so I find it important to do. Also, working But you have lots of photos of that really dreamy boy, Michael [Bai- We went from New York to Oklahoma. We drove through the Appalachians and
Are you super used to being interviewed yourself at this point? with brands and doing more mainstream things is necessary if you really want to ley-Gates]. down the east coast. But I mean, it was really important for me to experience that
Yeah, I am. I used to get super nervous, but now I’m used to it. I also really like talking, change things, because if you just stay in your little art world bubble you’re just going Oh yeah, Mike. Mike’s a really good friend of mine, and he’s also a super talented art- kind of work ethic and lifestyle. He’s so lucky to be able to do that—to just do what
so it’s easy for me. to, like . . . you’re only going to reach wealthy art people. You’re not going to reach ist, so I guess I don’t even think of—I don’t know—I love him so much as a person he loves every single day. And when I came back I was like, that’s what I need to do
the public, who my art is actually for. Yeah, doing it at Muddguts was super cool, and that I totally overlooked that, but yeah, I shot Mike a bunch of times. I guess it’s the and what I would love to do. And I actually kind of just did that. I was away for a month.
those are venues I really like working with. same as shooting any girl! Because I’m so close to him—it’s natural for me. I went on a little road trip from New Orleans to Las Vegas.
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India Drive at Night, 2014. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Jacqueline Text, 2014. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

How did you travel? Okay, there is this one Ira Glass quote that I really like that goes something like: “It’s think a lot of feminism has gone into the mainstream, and I think that’s why we see it Yeah, I definitely want to do more of that. I have always been a multimedia artist. Pho-
We drove. I didn’t drive because I don’t have my license, but my sister and I are doing easy to give up, but don’t give up after your first try.” so much in art. I don’t know, I think it’s really exciting, and I think a lot of girls are getting tography was just the thing that I just did most, so now I’m finally getting a chance to
a little documentary about young girls in dance. She is practicing as a dance teacher a chance to do what they want. So this year has been kind of crazy for that. move back into doing more. It has to do with time and space and money to be able
and I used to—before I did photography I was set on being a dancer, it’s what I want- Like, don’t give up after failing? to create sculpture. Photography was definitely the easiest and fastest and needed
ed to do. But I had a really bad injury and have weird things with my kneecaps so I Yeah! Yeah, don’t give up after failing. Because failing is the most important thing. Do you see yourself as part of or as contributing to the lineage of fem- the least amount of space to do. But yeah, I love neon because it’s such a weird old
had to stop dancing, but it wasn’t my choice. I was told by doctors to stop dancing, How you act after you fail for the first time is what determines what your career will inism? medium, and it’s usually used to sell things, which is interesting. Neon for me is the
which was really intense for me, and I didn’t realize how intense until this trip. So I had be like. If you stop doing what you do . . . I don’t know, you can’t give up. But that’s kind Oh yeah, I think I grew up in this fourth wave. And my approach, and others’ like Tavi, store signs or signs for strip clubs or whatever, and what I really like is taking that me-
a film crew filming and I was also taking photos and we were both interviewing girls of cheesy. Do what you want to do! And keep doing it until you can do it for the rest have a different approach than third-wave feminism, so I think it’s just natural for that dium and putting my sort of 21st century girl experience into it. For me it creates this
and it was really amazing. To travel and work is what I love to do. of your life, yeah. It’s always weird for me to talk about this because I’ve been making to happen. Yeah, I think so. I also grew up with the Internet and all these different weird, confusing thing when I put a really sad text message or certain Rihanna lyrics
art since I was really young, so it’s hard for me to put in words—it’s something that I tools, so I think it’s definitely a fourth wave, for sure, and I think I’m part of it. into this medium that already has so much meaning behind it. Neon is super weird
It seems apprenticing with two artists who are real-deal directors must physically need to do, and I feel like that’s what it’s like for a lot of people. It’s hard for and romantic. So it’s exciting to put my own things in it. I guess it has a lot to do with
have rubbed off on you. Is how to be a director not taught in school? me to separate it as something that you really try to do, but I guess that goes with not Do you see your work exploring feminist issues politically, socially, seeing myself in a landscape, or seeing other girls. I always think of this one—I refer
Yeah, it’s cool to see, I mean, it’s so important to learn how to be in charge of a team. stopping, and also not letting things stop you. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money, so aesthetically, or culturally? to this so much, but it was just the most impactful for me—this Virginia Woolf essay
I got a job, I got this shitty retail job, and I spent all my money on film and developing. I It’s all kind of one big thing. I mean my work just comes from—I guess the way I see called The Three Guineas, where—have you read it?
Leader. did it all the time, until now, where I’m privileged enough to do it as my career. the world is through a feminist lens so whatever I shoot has that. But it doesn’t mean
Yeah, to be the leader. I just shot the documentary, but before that I shot this little I’m always thinking of what radical art thing can I do to make something crazy; it’s just No, I haven’t.
art film for Dazed that is—I don’t know if I can talk about it, but I think it’s coming out Do you feel like you have more control or choice over what the direc- the way I think normally. I totally forgot what the question was! Well, the essay is about this soldier, this man, who’s writing to a woman—I don’t know
soon. Basically. Aaron Rose was chosen to shoot something about the New York tion of your art is now? if it’s necessarily Virginia Woolf—and he’s asking her why we have war and what he
art scene and I was chosen to shoot something about the LA art scene. I don’t know Yeah, for sure. I definitely do. Yeah, I think I always have because it’s just so much a It was if any one of these things are more important in your work— can do to stop war. He doesn’t understand the purpose of it, and I read this so long
if I’m allowed to talk about it yet—when does this interview come out? part of me that it just has to—if it’s not my choice then it’s not me and then it totally dealing with the issues politically or socially . . . ago, but maybe he also felt, like, what can women do? The thing that stuck out most
defeats the purpose. So I think I have total control, yeah. Yeah, it’s just like all one big thing. in my mind is when she explains that women don’t create war because they were
I think kind of super soon. never part of that landscape. They could never vote and they never had human
Okay, maybe not. What do you think about the evolution of feminism in art and where do So much of your subject matter has to do with a young/teenage aes- rights or a public voice, so they don’t have this nationalistic view of things. There’s
you see it standing now? thetic. As you become more of a woman and less of a teen has it this other quote that I really love, it’s from a documentary called Miss Representation,
You’ll totally see it before it comes out. I think this year has been really awesome. There’s also been a lot of shitty things, but changed your ideas or perspective about the subject matter? which is from four years ago about women in the media, and this one woman says
Oh, yeah. So I went from that and then straight into ten days of shooting this docu- it’s been a big year for feminism and civil rights, and I think while filming this, the doc- It totally has, I can see it. I just put out a book of the past years of photography after in it that “you can’t be what you can’t see.” But anyway, back to the neon, and back
mentary and I guess I really—with my photography I’m not always having to boss a umentary I just shot—I always knew there was change in the air from all the things I my first show and I could really see the progression of my work. I don’t know what to creating movies and stuff. It’s exciting to see myself in these old things that I would
big crew around or whatever, because it’s just usually me and the model. This was saw—we met with a bunch of girls from all over, from different socioeconomic back- that will hold for the future, but I just know as I grow I have a better perspective. I look never be a part of. I mean, I kind of did the same thing when I was shooting this doc-
kind of the first time where I really had to be in charge and seeing Ryan and Richard grounds, from whatever, and girls that have different awareness of things. Some back on my life and look back on what I was thinking at the time and the work I was umentary. I would always show the girls the monitor to show them what the footage
do it kind of helped with that. girls had no idea who I was and were so removed from art, but the thing that all of creating. But I don’t know what will happen in the future. Is that okay? looked like because it’s really amazing to see yourself in this medium that you don’t
them had in common was how empowered they were, which was really cool, and really see people like yourself in. Because we shot it with an amazing camera, it was
Because you very quickly went from being an apprentice to a men- which totally changed the direction of the questions that my sister and I were ask- And you’ve been making sculpture and curating performance. Do you movie quality and whatever. But yeah, long answer for a short question about sculp-
tor. Now you’re a big figure to many artists, especially young women. ing, because my sister and I grew up overthinking our bodies and ultimately hating see yourself doing more of these? And also, what attracts you to neon ture and stuff.
What’s the most fundamental advice you hope to pass on to younger ourselves and whatever, and seeing all these girls speak so positively about them- lights?
kids who are around shooting and creating? selves and about other girls just made me realize that things have changed. And I
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 Talvi Bra, 2011. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Sad Sunset (Anna), 2013. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

Those are the best answers. Yeah, all of your work—the photos, ev- girls are making that have come up in the past year. I think it’s all this—not net art, but
erything—has a really cinematic vision to it. Last night I was o.d.-ing girls putting their work out on Tumblr and whatever. It’s really exciting because it’s
on your photos and in the middle of this really big collection from the this new platform and stage that doesn’t necessarily have to be in big money-driven
first Rookie Yearbook, there was a series of these portraits of a super galleries. So I think that’s the most important thing.
melancholic girl with pink hair. It must be from four or five years ago,
but some of the photos were subtitled and the subtitles really revealed Do you have anything you want to add on your own? Any questions I
these narratives in the photographs that maybe were hinted at, but should have asked?
were nowhere near as clear without. Do you often have a bigger ficti- I don’t know, I think you covered it pretty well, and I’m glad you didn’t ask all the ques-
tious story running through your mind when you’re shooting? tions I always get asked.
Not really, but I approach composing the image in a cinematic way. Before I did pho-
tography I really wanted to do film, but that’s something that, for a young person, is What are those?
really hard to do because of time and budget and crew. No, no, no. I know, we always talk about the future.

It’s the ultimate art. What does your future look like?
Totally, so I guess my approach for each photo is to get the most feeling and emotion Sometimes I get asked what I think about nudity or what I think about this or that.
and everything in this one take. I don’t necessarily have this other fictitious tale, but I Such tired, stupid subjects.
really put into them a lot of whatever emotion is in the room, or is in my subject, or is
in me, and it really comes out in the photo, and I think it really tells whatever is going Maybe ‘cause we’re sorta close in age so we have similar perspectives.
on at that time. Yeah, I think so. The difference between people who are older who interview me and
the things that they pick up is so funny. We’re all over nudity and over all of it, it’s like
What shows or artworks do you feel marked this past year? Were you not a second thought. But yeah, it’s really funny.
in Miami a couple weeks ago?
Yeah, I was in Miami. Actually, this is so crazy—I didn’t see anything there. I didn’t see It’s life after Ryan McGinley.
any of the artworks because I was working the whole time, and I was kind of stuck Yeah, exactly. I don’t think twice about a naked body, it’s just normal. I mean, espe-
where I was! I’m just going to be vague here because I can’t think of anything spe- cially since I spent three weeks, exclusively being naked doing this—sitting in a car
cific, but I think the most important thing in art this year was the DIY movement from naked, or like playing, I don’t know, whatever, Clue, naked. I don’t really care about it
young female artists. There are so many collectives and shows and art that all these at all.
Selfie (Aly), 2014. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Selfie #1, 2014. Digital archival photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Lee Mingwei Life, Memories, And The Art Of Participation

The Mending Project, 2009. Installation view, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York. In the collection of Rudy Tseng, Taipei. Photograph byAnita Kan. Courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Japan. The Living Room, 2000. Installation view, A Quartet and A Living Room. Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, U.K., 2013. Photograph by Kevin Ho. Courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Japan.

By Gianni Simone The Mending Project the community, goes back to before 9/11 to when I was a weaver at California Col-
lege of the Arts. I truly believe that all my projects, and especially this one, are a way
The Sleeping Project

In the ancient Chinese creation myth, for example, Nüwa is the goddess who mend- to weave human psychology, social relationship, and memory together. The seed for this idea came when I was travelling between Paris and Prague after
The essence of Lee Mingwei’s art lies in the relationships between ed the sky when it was in danger of collapse. This said, mending for me is also a graduating from high school. I was sharing my sleeper-car train compartment with
people—family, friends, and complete strangers. Many of his works in- very personal thing because in Taiwan in the 1960s, the country was very poor so The Dining Project an elderly gentleman, and he was telling me about his family. They were all put into a
vite the viewer to take part by following simple instructions. Acts like we usually didn’t replace worn-out things with new ones: we used to repair them. concentration camp, including him, and after three years, when the survivors were
“giving” and “exchange” give rise to a relation centered on something This gesture of mending, and the fact that my mother would do it for me, brings me This project began when I was studying at Yale for my graduate program. When I liberated, he was the only one left. He told me about his life in the camp and his re-
invisible, prompting us to think about “trust” between ourselves and something emotionally satisfying. first arrived I felt kind of lost as I didn’t know anybody. I was both excited and anx- lationship with other people who were there. After a while he said he was tired and
another person. Indeed, Lee insists on not considering people or things ious about my new experience. I put out this message all over the campus inviting went to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep at all because of what I’d heard. I’d never heard
as individual, independent entities, calling instead attention to the lim- When you think about it, cloth is like a second skin for us, and even if you mend people to my place in order to have a conversation over a meal. At the end of the anything like that. That was the seed of the Sleeping Project. When I conceived the
inal space where they are intricately interconnected. Many of Lee’s something for a stranger, this is a kind of experience that is understood across the day I had about 45 calls on my machine asking me what it was all about. I ended up project in 2000, I wanted to create an environment that would be conducive to the
works make us rethink everyday activities like “walking,” “eating,” and border and naturally creates a human bond that transcends cultural barriers. It is cooking quite a few meals that year. I think every other day I had someone at my same kind of intimacy and human connection I had felt on that train many years be-
“sleeping.” Zen philosophy, which Lee encountered in his childhood, about care and giving a gift to somebody. So I was carrying all these feelings and place and my guests were all strangers. It worked this way: I would call these peo- fore. When installed, I requested that the museum design the sleeping space and
emphasizes being in the “here and now,” rather than being bound by memories and ideas inside myself that were just waiting to be used somehow, and ple ask about their dietary preferences, then go to the supermarket to get the fresh the furniture in such a way that the environment would be very comfortable, sooth-
doctrines and theories. It involves questioning our awareness of the the spark that gave me the final inspiration for the project was 9/11. My friend John’s ingredients I needed. By the time this person arrived, the meal would be ready and ing, and relaxing. One person is chosen, again through a lottery, and invited to share
minor actions and actual experiences that make up our daily lives. The office was in one of the towers and all 400 of his colleagues died. Luckily for him he we would share it together. When I moved this experience to a gallery environment, a “bedroom” with me for one night. The person will come around 9:00 pm and, once
Taiwan-born artist was in Tokyo for a big retrospective exhibition at was a little late that day and missed the destruction by just a few minutes. When he I took something that is familiar and put it into an unusual context that became a the gallery door closes, it is interesting to see how two strangers “dance through the
the Mori Art Museum, and he was kind enough to share his thoughts returned home he collected a few people while walking to 72nd Street. There were frame to re-examine this experience of dining. The way to participate is to fill out a night.” Of course, it’s important that there’s no sexual tension in this experience. This
on his art practice. Lee’s family history has been linked to Japan since so many people out in the street, looking completely lost, so he invited some of them lottery card with your name and phone number so we can contact you. If your card experience is not documented, which means the content of the conversations that
the 1920s when this country ruled over Taiwan, during which time his to stay with us. I remember that evening I did two very unusual things: I went to the is picked, all you have to do is arrive at the appointed time and be prepared to enjoy unfold are not be recorded or made public, but I ask each person in advance to bring
grandfather studied law at Meiji University in Tokyo while his grand- supermarket and bought all the cakes I could find and I started mending all the piec- the meal. I know that many people are going to ask if this can be called art and this something personal that they keep next to their bed; something like the books they
mother learned Western medicine at Tokyo Women’s Medical School. es of cloth that I always wanted to mend but never found the time to do. It took me is exactly what I want everybody to do with my work; to start questioning the idea are reading or the glass they are using for water, and leave this object with us for the
eight years to turn this experience into a project. I realized I could do this mending of art itself. There isn’t any documentation as I feel that any would pollute the expe- duration of the show.
The essence of my practice is very simple. It’s based on the idea of hospitality and for myself and for strangers. So this is the origin of the Mending Project. When you rience, so it’s a very ephemeral project. But it’s extremely important that it is a one-
trust, particularly between strangers. When people come to my exhibitions, they get come to the gallery, you should bring a piece of clothing that you want repaired. You on-one experience with a stranger. Imagine if I cook a meal for someone I know. The The Moving Garden
personally involved in my projects. So it’s not just looking at paintings or sculptures will find me or another person sitting at a table. We will ask your permission to bor- dynamic is going to be quite different.
or something else you can’t interact with. Many of my projects are based on your row it for the duration of the show because the piece of thread we will use will remain The Moving Garden was originally commissioned for the Lyon Biennale in 2009. It
kindness and understanding. Without your participation my works are meaningless. attached to the clothing on one side and the yarn wall on the other . Eventually, all was the first time I went to Lyon. When I travel I often take two books with me: one
these threads are going to create a big web. This connectivity, or connection with is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and the other one is the Japanese classic The Pillow Book

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by Sei Shōnagon. I was so fascinated with Hyde’s idea of gift-giving. I think it’s the stool. The second phase begins around the seventh week of the exhibition. At sun-
whole core of my practice. Hyde describes artists as individuals blessed with a gift rise I start working on the unfinished part. Then one person from the audience will
from heaven who in turn give gifts in the form of experiences that move people. Even be allowed to walk onto the sand painting. You can see the dynamic between the
before him, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who was active from the end of the person who is finishing up the work and the person who is walking on it. I try not to
19th century to the middle of the 20th, had been interested in the rituals of gift-giving define who is making and who is destroying because, in a sense, we are both doing
and exchange in ancient civilizations and indigenous cultures that set them apart each. After the first person is done, a second person is allowed to walk on the sand,
from the market economies that prioritize competition and profit. and then a third one, and so on. At the end of the day I stop the person who happens
to be walking on the painting at that time. Each of us takes a broom and brushes
Back in Lyon, I remember sitting and reading The Gift along the Rhône River, and I all the sand toward the middle of the painting. That’s the third and final stage of the
saw hundreds of flowers coming from upstream. The river was just filled with flow- project.
ers. This poetic image, along with Hyde’s ideas about gift-giving that I was reading in
that moment, gave me the idea for this project. For The Moving Garden set up a very This is by far the most performative of all my projects and also a very intense ex-
long granite table with a sort of channel in the middle filled with hundreds of fresh perience for me. The first time I did it in London, when the first person walked on to
flowers. When you leave the venue, I would like you to do two things, for me and for the sand painting, I could just not stop from crying. It was an emotional experience
yourself. First, you should make a detour from the museum to your next destination, seeing the painting stepped on after spending all those hours creating the work
following a route different from the one you took to arrive. The second and more im- with my assistants. Then you think about the reason why Picasso originally created
portant thing is that along the detour you give the flower to a complete stranger, as this painting; his reaction to the carpet bombing that obliterated the city killing thou-
a gift. For me, this is a mutual process. On one side, you are the gift giver. But on the sands of people in one day.
other side, when this person accepts your gift, he or she is giving you a gift as well. In
this sense it’s extremely important that you give the flower to a complete stranger. The Living Room
Not your mother, your lover, or your friend, because it would be too easy, but some-
one you have just met in the street. There is a huge crossing into another realm that This project was originally created for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Bos-
you need to do. Imagine: when you have this flower in your hand, you already look ton after my residency in 1999. Upon receipt, I was invited to go through the Gardner
different from the rest of the crowd. That flower in your hand gives you a special priv- collection so that I could get a few ideas for my project. I was very naïve because I
ilege. Other people are going to perceive you quite differently. Should I give it to this had just started my practice in 1997 after graduating from Yale and this was my first
gentleman, or maybe to this young lady? Or this child? This way, by giving the flow- residency. I thought I could go there, come up with a quick idea, and then spend one
ers you have received from me to a stranger, each visitor contributes to extending a month playing around, but all I was able to come up with was a half-baked proposal.
beautiful chain of gifts across the city. But they were very kind to me and told me to take my time. Unfortunately, Ms. Gard-
ner wasn’t there at the time, but after one week I noticed that all the people who were
Fabric of Memory working in the museum had all these stories about Ms. Gardner and her collection. I
decided to create a living room with a host who would tell people stories about their
This project was commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial in 2008, but it was born out own collection. For instance, every two days we had a volunteer show his or her
of not one but two seeds that were planted in me rather unknowingly. One of them personal collection. We all collect things and each of these objects say much about
was an image of my mother holding my hand. I was four years old; it was the first who we are and how we relate to the world. I did this again in Tokyo, though this time
day of kindergarten and I didn’t want to go. So my mom made a set of new clothes around all of the hosts were people who have lived or are still living in Roppongi [the
for me to wear that day and she said, “If you feel sad, think that mom made these district where the Mori Art Museum is located], and have witnessed how the area
clothes for you and it’s like she’s hugging you.” As for the second, years ago I went to has changed and developed, in some cases going back as far as WWII. The col-
see an exhibition of 5000-year-old objects from Xinjiang province in western China, lections they showed visitors were made all the more important by their personal
which is more of a Turkish Muslim area. Among the displays there was a piece of a memory of things past.
Guernica in Sand, 2007. Performance view of Impermanence. Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago . Photograph by Anita Kan. Courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Japan.
child’s clothing that caught my attention, and the description said that the mother
and the child had been buried in the same space. I put these two things together
and shaped them into something that could acquire universal meaning. I designed
a stage and put a number of boxes on this platform that look like gift packages. Visi-
tors have to take off their shoes, get onto the platform, and open up these boxes that
have been wrapped with a ribbon. When you open one of the boxes you’ll find the
object and, underneath the lid, the story of both the gift giver and the receiver. Each
box is a very private little world that deserves respect created by generous people.

The Letter Writing Project

This project was part of my first museum show at the Whitney in New York in 1998,
though it really began with my own experience of writing a letter to my grandmother
after she died. She is the person who, more than anybody else, has influenced me
spiritually, and in this letter I wrote the feelings of gratitude I wished I had expressed
to her before she passed away. The project itself is based on a very simple idea in-
volving letter-writing booths. There are three letter-writing booths. Each one refers
to a different posture of meditation in Chinese Buddhist practice: one is standing,
one is sitting, and one is kneeling. In each, is paper and pencils with which you can
hopefully write a letter of gratitude, forgiveness, or an apology that you were previ-
ously not able to express to someone. Once you are finished you have to put it into
an envelope that you are free to seal or leave open so that other people can read
it. Then you must leave it on the rack inside the booth. You may also want to add
the address of the person to whom you have written the letter, in which case we put
a stamp on and mail it for you. I’m providing an opportunity to change the relation
between you and the letter receiver, but more importantly the relationship between
you and yourself.

Guernica in Sand

This project deals mainly with the idea of impermanence. My partner and I took a
very long trip to Bolivia, and while we were travelling on a highland desert we were
suddenly caught in a sand storm that almost engulfed our car. I then realized that
though sand is so small, it comes from huge rocks and is a great medium to talk
about impermanence. This project is divided into three stages. In the first stage,
people can see this very large sand rendition of Picasso’s painting Guernica. I use
this painting and title because it is an iconic painting in Western art history that has The Moving Garden, 2009. Installation view of The 10th Lyon Biennale, Museum of Contem-
so much political weight. There is a tiny area with sand buckets and an unfinished porary Art, Lyon, France. In the collection of Amy & Leo Shih, Taichung. Photograph by Blaise
Adilon. Courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Japan. The Dining Project, 1997. Installation view of Duologue. Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan, 2007. Collection of JUT Museum Pre-Opening Office, Taiwan.
94 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Photograph by Lee Studio. Courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Japan.
Nicolas Lobo
In Conversation With Courtney Malick products and imagery. Is this something that you have also detected
as becoming more prevalent in art and discourse, and can you discuss
your own reasons for beginning this pursuit or why you feel it is be-
coming more of a “hot topic,” so to speak?
Nicolas Lobo is a Miami-based sculptor and installation artist who has Maybe it has to do with the rapid transmission of complex physical qualities. Zoloft
been working on conceptual, sometimes site-specific projects since and antifreeze: an emotional panacea; Neutrogena skin cream and generic nutri-
2006. Recently, however, he has been taking his sensory-imbued prac- tional supplement powder: a body-image crisis, etc. Although materials like these
tice to new depths by creating work that not only engages in a conver- are having a moment I think they really have a lineage that supports their use in his-
sation with itself through its construction, but also relates directly to torical tradition. I’m thinking of Sigmar Polke, Dieter Roth, and Paul McCarthy, for ex-
industries and economies parallel to art discourse that rarely enter into ample. When I look at it this way, the idea of an apocryphal material as a conceptual
it so distinctly. In his two-week solo exhibition at Gallery Diet in Miami container is more present in culture as a whole. Maybe this works in counterpoint to
in March 2014, Bad Soda / Soft Drunk, Lobo juxtaposed a grouping the virtual, post-Internet idea that has also been circulating recently; a vague notion
of what one might at first glance consider to be relatively formal, even caused by viral brand awareness, industrial agriculture, pharmaceutical marketing,
classically contemporary bulbous sculptures that evoke Chinese schol- and so on that the non-virtual is still here, but it’s getting kind of complicated.
ar’s stones with a precarious floor installation that created an entirely
new “floor” for the space. Installation shots of the show hardly begin to Right, and seemingly that complication is at least in part because they
convey the story that is being told within. The lumpy, dimply sculptures are somehow blending, or the differentiation between the non-virtual
that awkwardly rest atop subtly patterned square columns are in fact and the virtual is narrowing significantly. With Bad Soda / Soft Drunk,
created through the process of making napalm. Perhaps even more you filled a Miami gallery with thousands of old, dead stock bottles of
alarming is the relatively simple process through which such a devas- Nexcite and created a sculptural “floor” upon which viewers had to
tating material is conjured, by pouring gasoline over blocks of polysty- carefully walk. You also included sculptures created by making your
rene, a common plastic used for mass-product packaging. To further own DIY napalm, some of which were then colored with the blue Nex-
complicate things, these forms that result in the burning away of plas- cite. I am wondering if this process in and of itself was meant in some
tic are then set with one of the most innocent of children’s delights: way to serve as a kind of narrative that the show as a whole projects?
Play-Doh, a staple in family homes since the 1950s. The contradictions Process as narrative is something that I’m okay with. There are so many phases to
set into motion by the marriage of these products, repurposed as ar- any presentation it would be a shame to underplay the importance of the process.
tistic materials, brings back those unforgettable words of Marshall Mc- In fact, I’m working on an upcoming project in which the process is even more fore-
Luhan. It seems as though whether or not the medium here truly is the grounded. I think in terms of exhibitions as temporary breaks in ongoing activities.
message, or is at least one of several messages, it is impossible not to
consider it as both the forefront and the backbone of such a seemingly When I was making the Bad Soda / Soft Drunk show I was seeing the elements as
unthreatening sculpture. temporary states, agglomerations of products designed for the skin, tools for tactile
contemplation, extreme physical violence, and sensual awareness. When com-
The newly fabricated floor of the gallery likewise brings ingestible and bined they inform each other but also call attention to the idea that they are made of
common yet chemically based products into question—or perhaps an other products, which are in turn made from other products. Napalm is gasoline and
odd celebration. From wall to wall the floor of the gallery was filled with polystyrene—gasoline is refined petroleum, and polystyrene is a collection of var-
unopened, plastic-wrapped, dead-stock 24-packs of a little-known ious engineered molecules in the styrene family. As you start to look further down
Swedish energy drink called Nexcite that boasts the bonus property the chain these things start to change shape pretty aggressively. I’m thinking of the
of also being an aphrodisiac, particularly for women. It is also notable human body as a kind of hub through which these various commodities pass before
that Nexcite was originally named Niagara to rhyme with Viagra, which moving on to other forms, states, and effects.
later lead to a lawsuit. Nexcite’s notably Windex-blue coloring warns
that there is obviously no telling what has been put into the drink to Yes, certainly it is clear that a lineage of some kind is being either Niagara, 2014. Stop motion animation and digital file. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Diet.
make you not only energized but exceptionally horny! Visitors had to formed or followed, or in some way is doing both at once. Since there
walk on top of this “flooring” to get from sculpture to sculpture, while is a drastic dichotomy at the crux of this body of work that simultane-
in an adjoining minimal room plays a video titled Niagara (2014) of Nex- ously produces playful, colorful sculptures that are made up of toxic,
cite being poured on the sculptures, coloring them that bright, artificial chemically modified products that are manufactured for less-than-
blue hue. The absurdity and happenstance that Lobo had even found That’s a good point, It’s rare to get outside of existing ideas and meanings. Especial- exotic new ones for fractions of a second. Of course the new elements are impracti-
playful, innocent purposes, I am curious as to what story, if any, the
such a large quantity of Nexcite sitting in a warehouse in an industrial ly in a knowledge-economy where everything is named, categorized, and photo- cal because of their extremely short duration. Similar to when something complete-
marriage of these two extremes may tell?
area of Miami is prologue enough to begin the complex and infectious graphed. What do you think about gravitating towards liminal materials? When I say ly unfamiliar is apprehended, language rushes up to envelop it and fill the void. It’s a
When I choose to use napalm, I am interested in it because most people know what
ways that this set of works come together to create this particular and liminal materials I mean things that are on the fringe of collective knowledge—exotic funny thing, by trying to escape language we are generating it.
it is but very few have experienced it first hand. It’s a mythologized material de-
aptly short-lived installation. and obscure things. By starting towards the edge is it more possible to slip over from
signed for the skin, but it also represents certain political agendas. The failed Swed-
time? While the liminal materials I like to use do have meanings and associations That is certainly true. This attempt to move away from verbal respons-
ish aphrodisiac drink has some opposing qualities: it’s essentially sugar water—a
Your recent work has utilized materials like cough syrup, perfume, they are more tenuously attached as opposed to the connections of Coca-Cola or es or configure new ways of using language to discuss the meaning of
placebo—but it has a very specific mythology ascribed to it in which physiological
self-made napalm, an outdated Swedish energy/aphrodisiac drink, and Vaseline, for example. It’s always a game of trial and error, right? a work of art also makes me think of something you said in an interview
changes are supposed to take place.
Play-Doh, all of which seem to point to an overarching interest in the in Blouin from December 2011, which was, “I think obsolescence is the
sensorial—products of various kinds that are made to be ingested or Yes, I would think so. I also liked what you said about the third, lovechild- format of progress.” I would often tend to agree, but I am curious if you
Setting up a dichotomy is very useful since it creates a third field that holds the part
directly engaged with in tactile ways. Do you feel that an investigation like field of thought and representation that comes out of a framework can expand upon how the idea of the obsolete actually begins to gen-
I think of as the artwork. I’m interested in finding ways to move outside of language.
of such matter is an underlying aspect of your practice overall or is it rooted in a blatant dichotomy. I sense that that may very well be where erate what we would consider to be new ideas or at least contexts in
I try to think in terms of creating displays that elicit non-verbal responses. The blind
something you are just currently interested in? this new mode of language that you mentioned is generated. which to discuss contemporary art. It reminds me of another quote by
finger-poke texture and the absurdity of the forms perched on small concrete
My interest in those materials has been ongoing. In the last few years I started to Yes, the third place could be some kind of temporary truth-state where one’s inter- fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto that I recently read that said, “To be
plinths come from a place of hyper-dumbness that hopefully leads to a state for
think more exclusively about economies radiating from the human body—seeing pretations are not distorted by the ambiguity of language. The two opposing per- modern is to tear the soul out of everything.” Does that resonate with
which language has to be invented rather than chosen.
the body as the fundamental unit of currency, from which all other human econo- ceptions wrapped in language are set into motion and with some luck they arrive at you on a similar level?
mies derived. I think making an object can bring radical awareness of the body. a momentary state of perceptual “truth” in which there is no linguistic buffer to cloud It’s interesting that you bring up fashion where the “new” is so highly codified through
I definitely like the idea of artwork that demands a new kind of lan-
Working through the very old idea that sculpture provides a kind of uncanny physi- the experience. I like the term “lovechild-like field of thought.” Being that you work a seasonal mechanism. I was not aware of those words from Mr. Yamamoto but I
guage in order to accurately or appropriately discuss it, rather than
cal experience, as opposed to painting, for example, where you might create an op- with language often, is this an idea you have encountered in the past? would not disagree with him. I cannot say that I know what it means to be mod-
sort of mad-libbing of concepts that have already been applied to other
portunity to reflect on the ways images are constructed. ern as I am from a different generation. I don’t even think I know much about being
types of work. Nonetheless, many of these kinds of ingestible materials
Not exactly, I don’t think I have ever phrased it quite like that, but so post-modern. I hesitate to identify something as new or original. I think it’s one of the
that we are discussing, as you said, already have a whole mythology,
Yes, I have also often used the form and reality of the human body as many of the most intriguing concepts and works of art represent an central contradictions of this thing we are participating in—this tradition. One idea
and therefore a history embedded into them, particularly the politics of
a productive foil for larger systems at play. Lately I have been noticing inherent kind of hybridity, so I guess that quality is like a lovechild. does stick with me and it is that what we do must be disruptive, not only outward-
napalm. How do you approach the challenge of utilizing such products
more and more contemporary art that takes up materials related to I think of the particle accelerators. Giant, highway-sized circular pathways in which ly but inwardly as well. The work I admire and am interested in doing is always de-
to say something else?
these kinds of sentient ideas in similar ways, particularly food-related existing elements are smashed together at great speed to occasionally produce signed for its own eventual failure.
96 [SFAQ Issue 19] 97 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 Carbon T-shirt Panel 4, 2014. Carbon fiber, Kevlar thread, t-Shirt, resin, perfume packaging, Carbon T-shirt Panel 5, 2014. Carbon fiber, Kevlar thread, t-Shirt, resin, perfume packaging,
Velcro. 50 x 36 in. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris​, San Francisco. Velcro. 50 x 36 in. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris​, San Francisco.

Napalm Stone (Graphite Version #1), 2014. Napalm, play-dough, powdered graphite,
Bad soda/Soft drunk, 2014 . Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Diet. Napalm Stone (Bronzer Version #1), 2014. Napalm, play-dough, spray bronzer, terrazzo.
terrazzo. 67 x 30 x 22 in. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
69 x 30 x 22 in. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris​, San Francisco.
Charles Linder
In Conversation With Paul Karlstrom Would you say your real art education began in Los Angeles?
Yeah. I was shunning what I thought was painting—representational art, the
making of objects presumably for sale or on commission—for a life of unpaid
experimentation and adventure. And that’s what I think I’ve done essentially ever
Well, Charles, here we go. We’ve known one another pretty well for since. After moving north I found what I had perceived the San Francisco scene to
quite a while. be. The undeniable freedom from the sixties, the sense that anything is possible—
For almost 20 years, going back to around ’94 when your Stanford buddy, Michael Tom being one of the first persons I bumped into. That cult of individuality.
Moore, had a show at Refusalon on Natoma Street.
Tom Marioni?
It’s a long time that we’ve interacted in the local art world—we agreed Tom Marioni. And then performative rituals that created a kind of conceptual art cult
that our theme is being an artist in San Francisco and what that means. here, if you will. Those were influences on some of the things I did when I first moved
The term I would use to introduce you and your artistic identity is here. I think what I’ve done is different than what those predecessors did, but no
conceptualism. We’ll talk about that. But to start out, why don’t you doubt influenced by them. Some of the first works were Refusalon and the gallery
begin with the early events and people in your life that were influential projects through the nineties.
in shaping who and what you have become as man and artist.
I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1967 and really grew up in the south, But you talk about this process of becoming an artist, especially the LA
primarily in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, until I was a teenager. I finished high school and time, and the influence of the poets and what you admired about them.
moved to California in ’85, to Los Angeles. I spent a few years there working, going And that seems to me a romantic notion of living the art life, of being an
to school—and loving life in LA at the time. artist, which often appears to be mostly self-focused.
I think ultimately art is the most indulgent personal activity one can possibly
Do you remember when you first became interested in art? pursue—really. Does it cross the gap to communicate with people? I don’t know. I
My mom and dad met at art school in Pittsburg. So I think I’m their biological admit to being readily absorbed in my personal pursuits. I think occasionally people
sculpture—and apparently that’s about all they have to show for art school. get my work. I like to think I’m holding up a mirror, but I realize it’s a very narcissistic
pursuit. I get better at trying to be on the outside of the bubble so that in a way you’re
Did they encourage you? looking in. But you’re also able to look outside the bubble. That’s what I would hope
I feel really lucky in that. We still look at art together. They helped push me to where I is my basic position as an artist.
am—specifically my mom.
I’m a little puzzled by a position that is so self-absorbed and insular but
Do you remember when you first became aware of art as something takes place within a community that tends to be self-congratulatory.
other than illustrations in magazines? Does it get to that point where if you live the art life, no matter what
Yes, I do. Mom was a good representational painter who trained me how to paint like you make or what you do, it’s really all about yourself and your friends?
John Singer Sargent—or, at least I thought I could. But my mom was far better at it In that respect, I would have to respond again that it is a private activity. I tried to do
than I ever was. In fact, that created kind of a schism between what I thought was a gallery for years and really enjoyed that public activity, but now I’m in a position
art and what she was doing. One of the first art things I remember took place when where I feel like my work is very private. I like working from that position rather than
I was only 15. We used to camp out in this old grain silo along the railroad tracks with having my doors open to an ostensible public that didn’t get what I was trying to offer
oval windows all the way up the side. One afternoon we lit a fire and then backed anyway. And so I feel like now I can select my audience more. I think the breakthrough
up about 100 yards and took a photo at sunset. It was this internally lit cement silo, comes when you meet that occasional individual who gets the big picture and
a beautiful image—I realized where my work was headed, towards ephemeral realizes it isn’t just about a single painting on the wall or one you might be working on
events. I look back on that as one of the first real pieces of art that I made. My friend that day—being able to give a walk-through of the studio where somebody really
that camped with me that night, she and I realized it was a great fleeting moment. We gets the big picture of lifestyle and art. I feel great if I can be a conduit, reaching out to
got that one picture to take away from the event, and sometimes that’s all you have. others who live similarly or who see art similarly.
Go west, young man. Somehow you got that message. As did earlier Well, I know you get that kind of feedback, which suggests you’re
Southern Tier artists such as Ed Ruscha—who famously chose LA. successful.
Why for you the allure of Los Angeles rather than San Francisco? Success. I don’t know what that is. I certainly couldn’t claim to have had much
My brother moved there after college, and we both wanted to start a new life. I knew commercial success. I think success is happiness and whether or not it’s working Ghostang ( at Weldon ), 2005 - present. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco and La Casa del Tunel, Tijuana.
I had to leave Alabama. It’s hard to describe why, but I just knew that I couldn’t get for you in the big picture. I’ve got a system that works for me, and I think that the
what I needed. I couldn’t become what I was trying to become at that time. One of product is trying to stay happy, trying to stay positive about what I’m doing. That’s
the first things that I did when I moved to Los Angeles was work in a machine shop. I guess that’s true. I mean, one can’t derive support entirely from no echo. I think of I was humbled to do the show there. When you’re offered a show you want to
the work, and I think I’ve got to keep it positive to keep doing it. It’s not always easy.
I lived in the back of the shop for two and a half months before I found a place, and it one artist, an Israeli artist I worked with who spent time in the Bay Area, who after his produce something for the audience that represents you but from a position that
But I would agree I make art for myself—100 percent. I don’t do this for the market. I
was an incredible welcome to what LA really was—this international community of show came back to me and said, “Charles, I just don’t feel like there was any echo offers an access point. I felt like I did that for the TJ show. It came from many visits
don’t do it for girlfriends.
people working, pursuing hybrid dreams. I lived with a handful of illegal workers who here in the Bay Area.” And I’ve heard that from many artists, especially ones not from there trying to figure out who the audience was, the people that would see it, and
were doing just about anything they could to create a new life for themselves. Most here. And I wonder if that is a plague on our scene and our work. You mentioned the whittling away at the elements in the story to include only what was necessary. That
When I say success, I mean successful in terms of communicating.
of them were from Mexico and Central America. For me, as an 18-year-old, it was possibility that I’m just talking to myself—is it all just about me? I think the Mudslinger was tough.
You’re a social person, and art is a way of communicating. Most of the
about pursuing a life of exploration and adventure. That was what art was to me and book was a good example of collaborative art making because Griff Williams gave
artists I know who really are serious about their art—that’s important
I think still is. Moving to LA was the adventure of the unknown, of the west. That was me some ribbing in a way, not unlike what you’re doing. He said, “Hey, who does this How did you make that decision? Select what was necessary for
to them.
a great time—the three years before I moved to San Francisco set the tone for my reach, or who are you trying to talk to with this?” One of the images in the book was Tijuana?
I know I reach them, but I’m not preoccupied with it. I think there are people out there
art making in California. the lid from a soda cup with two straws in it. It’s in the middle of the book. Griff just Well, the main piece was the bullet-riddled car, the Ghostang sculpture, which has
who get my work. I don’t claim to do it for them, by any means. That would be really
goes, “What the hell is this, what’s going on with this? You’ve got to tell me about this.” gone on many different voyages and seen many different moments and events.
narcissistic. But I think admitting that I do it for myself is an honest beginning. When
That was 1985, correct? And there was quite an active art scene. You The piece had been in Tijuana for a couple years—that was the main way that I
people tell me they get it, I feel like that’s a great sense of acknowledgment. I don’t
haven’t said anything that suggests you knew what was special about Remember, people have to bother to try to understand you. They have was known in Tijuana, as the guy of the Ghostang. And we tried to use Ghostang,
do it for them. But it’s sometimes heartening to know that people do like the look,
LA or San Francisco—either one. Is that true? to think it’s worthwhile. And many artists say, “Oh, well, the work takes as a point of departure throughout the book Mudslinger as a kind of touchstone or
like the feel, or get the pathos of the project, if you will. In Mudslinger, for instance—
Well, I’ve got to admit to being largely naïve about what LA held in the arts. At that care of that.” Isn’t that something of a modernist romantic notion? hallmark over the years in my work—and a way to approach Tijuana as a border
which was like an adventure handbook of my life in a funny way, a recent art book I
time I didn’t think I was pursuing any kind of art career. I thought I was becoming an The book is really all about relationships, and specifically my relationship with culture. I don’t know how successful it was, but the two night events were great, and
did for my Tijuana show—I felt really good about that piece, but it was a reflection of
artist, but I can’t even say that I knew much about contemporary art at that time. I adventure, sometimes involving girlfriends. There are a number of friends in the I felt like the people that showed up did get it.
my travels and times and the ephemera of my work.
remember seeing a show at L.A. Louver that was a stunner: a whole environment by book. So the relationship between word, image, and the overall feel that comes from
Ed Kienholz that was like an old bar that you could walk through, that really impacted their combination, I think that’s what we tried to wrench out in that book. Something What happened in these events?
But you say that you don’t particularly care. Making things is the source
me. Seeing the scale of shows that were being put on in Los Angeles impacted me, about relationships and how the image reaches its intended audience or . . . It came out of this pig roast obsession of mine. My host there, Luis Ituarte, said, “Hey,
of happiness—this, again, I guess is one way to look at an activity. But
too. I saw the video, why don’t you do one of those here?” I thought this was great and it
on the other hand, I know enough about you to say that you are pretty
Well, what is its intended audience? An intended audience presupposes gave me a chance to invite my chef collaborator to come down from Oakland, and
disappointed when people don’t seem to be paying attention or making
caring about being understood, having you and your work—and their then also a band that showed up. So it ended up being a multi-ring affair. It wasn’t just
the effort to understand you.
relationship—understood. Even appreciated. What about Tijuana? my work. It was a community event ultimately. Being able to serve them wild boar
100 [SFAQ Issue 19] 101 [SFAQ Issue 19]
 As you say, you look at least foolish—if not stupid—if you think that it
all started with you and that your work is somehow . . . uniquely original.
I think it touches on what is a culture of privilege, a culture of elitism that art
precipitates—and I embrace that. I do believe it’s a very personal, selfish path. And I
think what I got from Tony, Wally Hedrick, Jason Rhoades—or the tradition of the Art
Institute—was kind of a culture of truth, seeking the individual path at the expense
of everything else . . . I look back on that time at SFAI as one of the richest of my
life, just in terms of experimenting and meeting other artists, the youthful embracing
of this ephemeral little scene we had. I think that’s what it was really all about—that
tradition of the Art Institute. The calling card has perhaps little other value, but it’s an
elitist cult that those who have been there really identify with and are proud to be
part of. I know I am.

You mentioned “truths” several times, and I think it’s fair to examine
the words we use—you know, the judgment that art is or isn’t true in a
“culture of truth.” What does that mean in the art context?
It just speaks again to whether or not I should have moved to Los Angeles after
graduate school like, say, Mark Grotjahn, whose paintings now sell for over a million
dollars. Did I do the wrong thing in staying here? I don’t think I did. It was a lifestyle
choice. But that came at the expense of perhaps selling paintings. Was it worth
it? Yes. I guess for me, the pursuit of truth is in knowing and sticking with the path
Sounder of wild pigs at Las Viboras, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and the Sparling Family. Holding an Anna’s, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco. versus being distracted by the temptation of a career, maybe a teaching job, maybe
a stable job at the post office. The truth was sticking with the path. There isn’t any
tacos in Tijuana was just nothing short of . . . Anyway, I came back from Tijuana with with it until ’99 when I essentially turned over the reins to my then co-conspirator, marked path to follow, to find your way. You have to make it all up. When you start
an incredible respect for that culture. Shmulik Krampf, and he took over the project, bringing to it his own idea of what it working in some revisionist way it’s usually pretty evident, and you think, “Oh, I don’t
was as a temporal, conceptual work. I said, “Hey, I see this as a gift. You’ve got to want to do that because so-and-so may have already done that.” That pushes you
Well, maybe that’s one reason to do it. maintain it, bring new wrapping to it—you have to fervently present it in the tradition to stay on the quest for your own unique vision. Maybe that’s what I mean by truth—
In fact, it really was. It was to embrace that whole appreciation of bubbles that I think that I’ve created.” to avoid cliché or stating the known.
is what my work really is. I saw Luis’s own passion and obsession with his pet project,
his gallery, La Casa del Tunel, a redeemed smuggler’s house. I just really identified In a short time we’ve moved to you starting Refusalon—with which During our conversation, I’ve been thinking of Dada and the idea of
with it and thought, man, I want to seek this guy out, go down there, find out what in the minds of many you are still associated. I’m still not sure if the tearing down, pushing boundaries, and that there’s merit in that goal.
the scene is about, and I just became really obsessed. I felt maybe a little tired of Natoma venue was proto-Refusalon or its first iteration. But do you feel that the Art Institute—maybe aspects of the San
my local scene, and what it forced me to do is to look elsewhere for inspiration. I feel like the heart of the matter happened in the earlier days on Natoma. That was Francisco art community, but especially the Art Institute—valorized
Community is where the connection comes from, and that’s when you realize you’re what Refusalon really was. Once we tried to change that and take it downtown and transgression, perhaps for its own sake?
not just participating in a regional circle jerk. That’s when it really gets interesting. commercialize it, it wasn’t the same anymore. The idealist in me maybe fetishizes Undoubtedly. Beyond the sensational. But I found later in my career that I seriously
Your new audience gets your work and the bubbles overlap—a kind of catalytic some of the earlier projects and really ephemeral events. needed some limits. Limitations are bad but you need boundaries within which
reaction. That’s what was great about meeting Luis and being there. your art is contained. I think setting those as an individual artist is tricky. How do you
For example, one night at a performance event on Natoma Street, perhaps one of integrate yourself into an existing system that promotes art? Or how do you create
It sounds as if you two became good friends in a short period of time. the most memorable nights ever at Refusalon—and I know Tony, my old teacher, an entire system that promotes what you think art is? That was the challenge.
But let’s now go back to San Francisco and the Art Institute. would say this was the only thing that Refusalon was memorable for—we all were
Well, I ended up getting this scholarship to come here. I perceived the Art Institute to out in the backyard watching the performer when out of nowhere this guy comes Well, in fact, what I feel you’re touching on—the kind of truth you’re bringing up—
be a vehicle for why I came to California. I look back on it really fondly. I think of it as a walking into the backyard and simply sits down right in the middle of this campfire. is that the better art comes from collaborating. I’m so bored with monomaniacal Dixie becoming Bennie, 1996. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.
little cauldron. One of my teachers, Tony Labat, used to love to turn up the heat on us Before anyone can realize what’s happening, he’s caught on fire. The other guy’s artists, that one person doing the same thing over and over again. I need others to
tell me what’s not working, and what stays in. I think that can help you better reach Another example might be Emerson Woelffer at Chouinard in the
to watch us squirm. Tony was a really great influence on me at school. He’s there to performance, no one even remembers to this day. This guy is seriously injured. You
your audience. That’s where dialogue and having an art community really inform 1960s. Many of the younger LA artists—Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, the
push you outside the boundaries—to provoke, inspire, challenge. One of the things can see that he’s got a grizzly burn on his ass and leg; his pants are burned off. I’ll
you and make the work what it is. Ferus people—looked up to him. Not necessarily for his work but for
that stuck with me from the years I spent there with Tony was how he would point never forget, I walked out the back door just as this happened. I run down the stairs
his example: “He showed us what it was to be an artist.”
out to us that maybe one out of 20 in the group would go on to do something that and we drag him out of the fire. I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, we’ve really gone
Some of the leading visual artists either didn’t go to art school or That’s an interesting way of putting it. I think what I took away from Richard and
might get written about or might get put in a newspaper or might get bought by a too far. I needed to set some limits here.”
dropped out. Then why go to art school? What do you get—and then Wally was that both seemed content genuinely pursuing their careers. I remember
museum. And I remember it created a bit of a culture of insecurity.
maybe don’t get? Because in the age of conceptualism, you’re no Richard having a real sense of humility and being a great teacher, being able to talk
Was he a student of Tony Labat?
longer primarily learning craft—method, materials, technique. about your work and never bringing himself into it. I think that’s the measure of a
But I remember specifically thinking, “I am going to be one of that 10 percent or He was another student of Tony’s.
That’s a good question. I guess it goes back to that thing we’ve talked about several good teacher. True, sometimes they’re talking about themselves, but they’re able
less, I’m going to be one of those people.” And in that regard, I thank Tony . . . the
times. We were ostensibly operating in what was perceived as a guild system. One to make you divorce yourself from the material. If you can divorce yourself from your
one individual there who really pushed me. He was constantly fighting to define Let’s talk about Tony. Obviously he was inspirational for you. He
thought that this would lead to being integrated into gallery shows, purchased by agenda and be comfortable in that, it radiates—its power communicates almost
a position unknown at the time. I think that’s what I always really thought art was was within what appears to be a protected school framework where
museums, written about by magazines, collected avidly by supposed art collectors. without you. I remember thinking that’s what was inspirational about Wally. His was
about, pushing you towards this lifestyle of experimentation and discovery. I found the school’s noninterference policy has been to let the teachers
In fact, what you’re buying into is an elitist system of insider trading. What the schools a body of work whose infamy preceded it—yet it didn’t add up to a commercial
Tony very inspirational in that way. do whatever they want. Apparently Bruce Conner famously took
and galleries are trying to do is commodify once-radical personal narratives by entity. What was inspirational was his commitment to this extremely personal body
advantage of that freedom. Or so I’ve been told.
converting them into salient, long-term art market investments. of work.
You were at the Art Institute from 1988 to 1990. Right? Well, I’ve heard the stories, too. I know exactly which ones you’re talking about. With
Shortly thereafter I was faced with the predicament of being a young artist—of how respect to Tony though, there were just different styles of doing things. For instance,
And you pointed out that the Art Institute at one time took pride in Well, perhaps that’s the truth-in-art we’ve been looking for.
to get my work out there, how to take my essentially private activity into the real George Kuchar would pick the star students and nudge them on to do whatever
world. There was a perceived guild system with which this supposedly operated, they wanted, but then he’d take credit for it. Tony had a similar but more provocative being the only true fine art school in the country—meaning without a
but from what I could tell it was all based on nepotism and insider trading. I realized way of going about it. At the time it was tough for me. Now I think that’s the role of commercial program—without that practical side. [Link] // Instagram @linderisms // Twitter @charleslindersf
it wasn’t going to happen unless I started my own entity. Refusalon was a vehicle for the mentor, of the teacher—to provoke. It is to ask you to consider if the pre-existing Or perhaps even more memorably, without graduates matriculating into the art
my colleagues and me to show what we thought art was, a framework for creating model is good enough for you anymore. Are you going to have to fucking destroy it, world, which I think was really the problem of the Art Institute for a while.
an audience. That was our solution to being art students no one had ever heard of. break it down, rebuild it, and then call it something different? Tony encouraged us to
We were faced with how to get people to look at the work and maybe write about create our own individual art worlds, if you will, whatever the cost. Yeah, I think that How do you mean?
it, get affirmation enough to keep doing it. That for me was about a nine-year-long was inspirational, and it created a competitive environment amongst the students. It’s like an elite cult of artists that you’re part of. Whether or not the art school
project that was essentially non-commercial. education amounted to anything, the ones who are still out there on the street doing
What I took away from Harold Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) had to do art and getting shows and making books—it’s interesting to be part of that. I think
What year did you open your doors? with art school and the whole idea of the others that have come before: what they of the Studio 13 jazz band as a metaphor for the Art Institute, or how I envisioned
Refusalon started in 1990, in January 1990. did and their influence on you creating anxiety. I remember thinking of that in Tony’s myself fitting in. These idealists chasing truth, in pursuit of pure art at the expense of
class—who went hard on us for knowing our antecedents. It wasn’t so much that a career. As younger artists you look at the older artists and watch their demeanor.
Now, does that include Natoma? somebody had already done something, but a lot of people operate in naiveté and You try to determine whether they’re comfortable with this, do they really believe
Yeah, the Natoma era really was the beginning. Then we took Refusalon out of don’t realize that there have been influences that have impacted their work. There this? I remember particularly Wally and Richard Shaw, who both were teacher
the South of Market “wine country”—as we used to call the neighborhood—and was a whole student subculture that was paranoid about doing art for fear that it had figures of mine. Shaw was a teacher of mine at Berkeley later. Wally was more like a
moved to Hawthorne Lane next to SFMOMA: our attempt at going commercial or already been done. I just thought that was such a paralyzed position to operate from. mentor figure. But they were living it. They were really doing it on their terms.
at least integrating market concerns with our otherwise ephemeral lifestyles. I kept Aun Aprendo, 2014. Neon sculpture. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.
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Dave Hickey I DO NOT BELIEVE AND I DO NOT BELONG
Your analysis of the phonotext comes out of a lifelong love of music.
Yes, and I listen well.

What was the music that preceded your studies, when you were a
child?
My dad was a bebop musician and I was a rock and roll person and I could read
music, although I can’t write it out very well. I just tend to think of things in musical
terms. This puts me in a tradition with Monet, Miro, and Braque—people who were
basically musical painters. Duchamp was the alternative and nobody got further on
a one-trick pony than he did—a phonotext critique leads you into the tangible world,
and for some reason Duchampian critique leads you back into theory. Also, I always
thought it was my job to make up jargon and not to use it. I was a serious structur-
alist in graduate school in the 1960s—I wrote art criticism for nearly twenty years
without using “desire,” “deconstruction,” or any of those words. Finally I was forced
into using them because people presumed that you had to use those words or you
weren’t “serious.” I remember the first thing I did that used those words was a piece
on Jim Shaw. It talked about “representation” and “jouissance”—which are a fairly
shoddy concepts.

What do you mean?

Is there anything that is not representation? Like “self-expression”—is there any art
that is not self-expression? Also, where do you locate the boundary between jouis-
sance and what is not?

After the work you did on literature in Texas, when you went to New
York to work at Reese Palley gallery, you started writing about art. How
did you approach writing then? Is there a connection between the kind other you out there in the world, doing shit, siring children . . . Eric Clapton told me this
of scholarly analysis you were doing on literature and the process of story: Cream was playing in the Midwest one night, jamming away; Clapton dropped
looking at art and writing about looking? his pick and bent over to pick it up. The crowd went wild—the whole time the crowd
I was learning how to write by studying linguistics, like a painter learning her palate. is cheering. They were cheering for him dropping his pick. He said, “I felt like walking
There may be a connection since my mother was a painter, but the sequence was off stage and killing myself. What the fuck am I doing here?”
interesting. I was doing literature and then I discovered that Ruscha, Rauschenberg,
and Johns loved language the way I loved it. I was beguiled by the idea of Ruscha Doesn’t this relate to what was going on with Warhol in New York—this
using the incarnate word, which is not the referential word but the word as flesh, and very question of celebrity—but in a more contained sphere?
Jarrett Earnest and Dave Hickey, Captiva, Florida, 2014. Photograph by Laura Ortman. that seemed pretty much to define a particular point of view, which Mapplethorpe I thought about that a lot with Andy because he was the fame guy. Finally, I think
and a lot of canonical Catholic artists used. This interested me more than Saul Bel- Andy really believed that there was true fame, or true charisma, and that Marilyn or a
low ever did—I want the language but I don’t want this shit. I threw my copy of The number of people had this true charisma. Otherwise Andy was an ad guy. He knew
In Conversation With Jarrett Earnest What I’m not doing now is interacting with the art world. Every six weeks or so I fly
to New York, I stay at the Warwick or somewhere Midtown, get a limo, and go look
Adventures of Augie March (1953) into the Atlantic—how symbolic. you could make people think anything. So the star-making process of the factory
was this enormous bullshit mind-fuck of “I can make you do that.” Warhol was a
(Part One) at art—the art promises not to say I’ve been looking at it—then I go home. I’m an art We talked earlier about that part of Auden where he says that all critics control freak. He went off the rails in the mid ‘60s when he discovered that he could
person; I’m not an “art world person” anymore. should have to define their Eden. That seems like what you’ve been make people do things. He could say “could you take off your pants, fella?” and the
‘I was stuck on a remote island for five weeks with Dave Hickey—’ I doing, and your Eden is like Las Vegas. fella would take off his pants and show Andy his dick. For Warhol, who wouldn’t do
started telling my friend when I got back in New York. Her face was You allude in several places to the work in literature you were doing as It’s like Vegas but with good waves. It has Ellsworth Kellys and French food. I think anything you told him, this must have been a traumatic disappointment. I think he
dismayed, ‘—and it was paradise,’ I went on. My friend’s disapproval a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas; I want to know a little more Eden is a good subject because the idea of utopia is a dead turd, some group inven- was angry that all he had built was a bunch a people who would do whatever he
slowly melted as I spoke, until she finally confessed, ‘I picked up his about what you were working on. tion. Seeking the architecture of Eden is my own little search for the sources of the told them to. I’ve always regarded fame the way Andy did; I know people who have
recent book and liked it, but someone saw it and told me, ‘Don’t read I was figuring out what I would call a grammatical calculus for describing language Nile, so I never really feel competitive with anyone. Peter Schjeldahl can write pretty authentic charisma—Rod Stewart has authentic charisma. If you’re in the room with
that! I know it seems exciting, but he is a misogynist cowboy,’ and I in a musical sense, incorporating elements of speed and frequency, so that you’re things and I say “that’s pretty.” Peter Plagens and any number of my contemporaries him, he’s in Technicolor and you’re in black and white. I’ve known a few people like
never finished it.’ This is not an uncommon response to the mention not just counting the repetitions of the word but you’re counting how often and how can write nice things—Paul Taylor could, even Craig Owens when he wasn’t in the that, but fame is mostly copy and coverage. A lot of the people I know who are fa-
of Dave Hickey, an iconoclastic writer eliciting ire and adoration for his fast words repeat so you can get a much clearer sense of the prose you’re describ- grip of his professors. The way that I write never became anything in the art world mous are like Emmylou Harris, who is an old friend of mine. Emmylou is comfortable
belles lettres prose and his crusade against art world iniquity. When ing. It’s more like musical notation software. I had a passage from Hemingway, D.H. but “the way Dave writes.” one place: on the stage with a guitar behind the microphone. If she’s not there, she’s
I realized we’d be together in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein each in three states of revision. Because I was at UT, not comfortable. I’m sure there is some psychological name for that.
Foundation my mind flashed to his recent talk in LA where he reported- they had all the manuscripts. I thought I could encode all these and, since revisions I feel one of the problems in the art world now is the people writing
ly said, ‘Identity politics broke the art world.’ As a flamboyant gay man are presumed to be intentional, I could make empirical statements about intention about art and putting on shows are not reading novels or poems, and When you started to become involved with people who were “real” ce-
intending to spend the entire residency in the shortest possible shorts, by encoding the changes from version to version. Nobody makes empirical state- that’s a big impoverishment of experience. lebrities in the music world, what did it show you about art?
and as a writer largely interested in art by people who are not straight ments about intention, but I thought that it could be done, and I think I pretty much did No shit! They don’t know what a Beethoven quartet is either. Four movies about a The first thing I learned is that there is no qualitative difference between great pop
white guys, I worried we might not get along. What I found was, like it, although I ran up against a lot of problems with my committee. Most offensively, I St. Bernard, perhaps? I teach a course called “The Sisterhood of the Arts” and it’s and great art. Good is good. Second thing I learned was that if you’re going to be in
all brilliant and truly worthwhile people, Dave Hickey is complicated took exception to a part of Chomsky that he couldn’t live without but I could—I’ll give about the points where art, music, and drama intersect. That sisterhood—that pri- rock and roll, bring a friend, because it can all turn to shit fast. I’ve known the guys
and I liked him immensely. Authentic, fun and deeply sensitive—he is you an example: “I” and “you”—personal pronouns? They’re not “pronouns.” They mal interconnection—that dance of frequencies—is being changed into a primal from The Eagles over the years and just in passing, and they were really good bud-
all you could want in another person in the world. I ordered his books don’t stand for nouns; they stand for gestures, they stand at the portal between the connection to academic prose, and that is cultural suicide. dies and that blew up so hysterically. I never would think of writing about an artist
while I was there and I was struck by how beautifully he fits the pre- palpable world and the world of language, and that changes the way sentences are the way I wrote about Keith Richards, because the object is there today and there
cision of his language with the originality of his ideas. During our last generated. It also creates a kind of tiered system so that sentences that use “I” are After you worked in the New York art world for a period in the ‘70s, you will be another every day—there will be a new day when they’re dead—so that is a
week in Captiva we met for three mornings on his sunny porch to re- first level sentences, “you” or “it” are in different categories altogether. Shifting into left to be part of the music scene. What precipitated that? liberation.
cord this conversation. The most important missing elements from this and out of these modes, especially with D.H. Lawrence, seemed to be a good way of Boredom. I got tired of invitations I couldn’t refuse. I got fired from my gallery job. I got
transcription are the skinks, the thick sunshine, and the laughter that demonstrating that, but I couldn’t do it without dissing Chomsky—and I did severely fired from Art in America. I started freelancing about music. I describe the moment Do you listen to music when you write?
punctuated our conversations. want to diss Chomsky. They—never let me defend my dissertation, but I wrote it; I like this—it was ‘72 or ‘73—I’m walking out of a Richard Tuttle show where he has No. I used to, but I don’t anymore. I hear the words too much.
MORNING ONE: A Pirate Retirement learned a whole lot; and I was right. glued weird white pieces of paper to the wall. I’m thinking “Richard Tuttle or Keith
Richards? Richard Tuttle or Keith Richards?” It was as simple as that—it was more There seems like an interesting connection to you being a songwriter
In Pirates and Farmers (2013) you describe the personality type of the You reference J. L. Austin. Is that where your thinking about language fun to write about Keith Richards. The drugs were better for sure. Also I was really and traveling with country music people and the way that you dealt
pirate concluding, “The paradox of a pirate retirement. You can’t do it.” then goes? Toward his performative speech acts? interested in that kind of fame, not in the sense of wanting it, but just in knowing what with the more recent phase of your life as a critic, which is as a persona
So I lied, and have before. I have a history of quitting things I have not found worthy. I treat literary prose as performative speech, and I’m interested in what they call the the mechanics of fame might be. an “outlaw,” an oppositional voice.
Sometimes I’m wrong, but I am still here to write about art that doesn’t come with an “phonotext”—you hear it as you read it. If you can’t hear the phonotext, you don’t Well, I named those Nashville guys “The Outlaws” in a magazine article. As for me,
excuse or a letter from a doctor. know what prose is. Many academics don’t deal with the phonotext at all, they just When I was still running the gallery in SoHo, I was sitting in Max’s. Two people in an- I’m a hard core alienated person, although a sweetie pie. I went to grammar school
read the words. I’m doing a talk at the College Art Association in February called other booth were talking about me. According to them it turns out I have a trust fund, for four years at thirteen grammar schools, and if you do this, you get good at good-
“Theory and Critique: The Raw and the Cooked” and I come out in favor of the I’m bisexual, and have an eidetic memory. The last is true but they were describ- bye. I’m happy to see people that I haven’t seen in fifteen years, that’s ok. We don’t
What was the purpose of proclaiming a retirement, knowing full well raw theory—no footnotes, so it’s lodged into the world, not lodged into other texts ing—there was a whole description of a person who was not me and I was thinking: exchange Christmas cards, that’s ok. I’m always sad when they die, and that is one
it’s impossible for a pirate like you? What are you doing now that is through footnotes. Jesus, what would it be like to be Rick Derringer or someone like that. So for me the good thing about digital: the hardest thing to do is to take dead people out of your
different? music writing was really focused on the vagaries of fame—what is it like to have an- Rolodex. I remember taking Scott Burton out of my Rolodex and thinking “awe, boo

104 [SFAQ Issue 19] 105 [SFAQ Issue 19]

 You’re working on an autobiographical book. In Pirates and Farmers
you said, “My life doesn’t have a narrative, it has episodes.” What is the
importance in that distinction?
I’ve always used autobiographical stuff as a pendant in criticism—I dangle it out
there. Using criticism as a pendant to personal narrative is going to be a little harder.
I have fallen upon Tristram Shandy (1759-67) in the sense that my book will begin
something like: “I knew I was coming out wrong. I was going to fall out of my mother’s
pussy onto my ass with a cord around my neck. My mom was going to be rushed off
to the ICU, and I knew she would hate me forever”—you know, something intimate
like that. I’ll follow the general tonality of Tristram Shandy, of letting it change with my
whims.

You put an epigraph from Tristram Shandy at the front of Invisible

Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993). It seems emblematic of the
way you write.
It is, and would that I could write that well. This is one of the reasons my work doesn’t
have much footing in the art world. Who’s read Tristram Shandy? My writing comes
out of Victorian journalism—Ruskin and Carlyle, Charles Lamb and De Quincey. I
was so glad when I found them. I picked up De Quincey’s Confessions of an English
Opium-Eater (1821) for reasons other than prose. I was a fan of opium, but reading it
I thought, “I can do this! I can write this kind of sentence that goes on for three pages
and ends with one word, just like bam! I can do that!” Then I knew what to do, but it’s
not a very fashionable way to write.

Given that so much of your own writing is grounded in “Dave Hick-

ey”—your anecdotes and personal experiences—what do you think is
useful to talk about: an artist’s life or what they have to say in relation
to the art object? Or about yourself as the writer? Damien Hirst. Courtesy of the Internet.
I’ve never regarded myself as much beyond an example of something, and I’ve al-
ways known that nobody is going to read this because it’s about art. They are going Have your opinions on works of art changed over time?
to read it because it’s good. That puts me and the genre at cross-purposes. I know Yeah, Pistoletto. I decided that Penone is the real artist in that crowd. There are peo-
most of the art criticism out there, and I have no idea why anybody would read that ple I still like, like Patrick Caulfield who ended up not particularly famous, which was
shit. good for Sarah Morris.
Michel Foucault. Courtesy of the Internet.
I think a lot of people are saying that too, and in fact no one is reading When you said Penone is a “real artist,” what is your definition of that?
it. I almost suspect that there are political forces that do not want any Can’t not make it. That is my impression with Ruscha—he’s just always out there
important because so many art propositions fall into ashes having failed the judicial.
form for real criticism. ferreting things out. I like real intellectual artists. I like Steve Prina and I like Josiah
Jeff Koons. Courtesy of the Internet. They lose becasue this is an adversarial culture; it is adversarial but not hierarchal.
I think what has happened is that critique won over theory. Theory died in 1978 or McElheny. I don’t want to say that art is a vocation for them but that’s probably what I
It’s “us against them” or “me versus you”—it’s about argument. I am not going to bring
something like that. The whole “kill them all and stand on their tummies” attitude that mean—art is what they do. This is so diluted now. I would say that 90% of the artists
hoo, Scott!” At the same time, this ties in with my feelings about fame: if you would in some fucking ad guy like Charles Saatchi to tell me what’s good—shouldn’t I be
Deleuze brought to the discourse is what I like about theory. The big problem was showing in New York today are part-time adjuncts and sabbatical artists. The only
tell me who I’m supposed to be famous to or for, I could address myself to it, but I’m arguing with him? I think we are affected because academia is hierarchal. The only
that Deleuze and Foucault in particular were translated by Americans who were lib- way I can see this getting better is by people throwing in their cards and saying “I
not really close enough to anybody or any institution to know. Art critics are not sup- real distinction I can make between the artists who teach and the artists who don’t is
erals, and I don’t think that either one of them was. They are really too cold hearted don’t want to play here anymore.” In the past, the great thing about New York was
posed to be famous. I have had periods of 40-watt celebrity and they weren’t any that artists who don’t teach will look you in the eye; the ones who do teach are either
to be liberals. I still like The Order of Things (1966) where Foucault dismantles sociol- that you could always move to LA—The United States was at least a two-table ca-
better than any other time. If you’re in a band, you’ve still got to get up and play. If looking up to the dean or down to the students—they are comfy in that little place.
ogy as a historical solipsism, but that was a war that Foucault lost. Look at The Logic sino, but they’ve converged.
you’re a writer, you have to get up and write, win or lose. If you win, you’re in vogue. I Where did you go to school?
of Sense (1969). It is about the phonotext, and Deleuze lost that one too.
know what works: word of mouth and that is all it is—there isn’t anything anybody at It seems like something you hold as a virtue is the ability to bite the
Columbia might write that is going to make you famous. San Francisco Art Institute. Then I was at the CUNY Graduate Center,
You cultivate this brash cowboy persona but you’re actually a sweet- hand that feeds you.
but I was a nightmare for everyone there and I dropped out.
heart and you really care; why not just be a little sweeter publicly? That’s just business and reputation. You can rent my writing but you can’t buy my
I’m interested in this because of the Koons effect: what is this thing Me too. Three times. I do not play well with others, and I do not know why. I like
Oh I’m a sensitive plant. The world is ablaze to me, and people are kaleidoscopes. praise. Try it and I will fuck you up. Also, I was born with a passel of “I don’t care.”
that metastasized from Andy Warhol into this pedantic, funless, criti- my friends but I hate to ask people for anything. I didn’t grow up asking people for
I get my feelings hurt, so whatever brashness manifests itself in my manner is to
cally unassailable thing embodied by Koons? things. The hierarchy in which the 1% have all the money is outrageous. The pup-
cover that up. I wrote an essay in Air Guitar (1997) about going to a jam session with Why do you think people keep inviting you to do stuff only to be
I just finished a book I really like called The Eloquence of Color (1993) by Jacqueline py food in the galleries that sells for a million dollars is 98% crap. Walter Robinson
my dad—we went to play jazz. I still don’t know what to do about it. The essay made shocked when you transgress?
Lichtenstein about the 17th-century French academy which was divided between had that great line “zombie abstraction” and I can’t figure out a way into that work. I
people cry. I wasn’t trying to do that, but maybe I’m such a swoony sop I can’t help it. I have no idea except I’m funny. Every time I get a chance to go to the Midwest it
those who believed in line and those who believed in color. The linear people were could be making five dollars a word if I could find a way into “the new casualism,” but
turns out they just wanted to get me up close to yell at me. I’ve had whole faculties
pedants, and I think Jeff is a pedant. As they would say in the 17th century, “He stinks there’s nothing there for me. Probably this is the consequence of minimalism. It did
I re-read Invisible Dragon here. After having studied a lot about the walk out of lectures I’ve given in Iowa and Illinois. These are institutions of higher
of the ink pot.” He has a terrible penchant for these retro-Fitzcarraldo technolog- not change: it started and it ended and that was minimalism; the people who made
culture wars and identity politics art in the 1990s it makes total sense education. Big ceramics dudes are bumping me around like Brooklyn goombahs,
ical projects that don’t do anything. How could Jeff Koons and Robert Gober do minimalist art did the same piece over and over in different circumstances. My first
as a culture war text. feminist troglodytes shrieking that I’ve stolen their safety. It’s like a homeless row in
the same thing—which is manufacture found objects? Jeff to no end and Robert to art world job was to ration the tequila for Dan Flavin when he was installing in Fort
It was intended to be. It was basically the same argument that Jacqueline Lichten- Tompkins Park, so what do I do? Do I burst into tears and run sobbing into an empty
what seems like profound ends? I don’t understand. I used to work at Reese Palley Worth. It was funny because there were these three lighting technicians who were
stein makes in The Eloquence of Color: there is a point in rhetoric where language classroom? Not an option. I just make snarky remarks about academic footwear.
right across the street from Fanelli’s, which is where Jeff always was. From the first, going to help Dan put up the piece. First two days, they thought Dan was crazy. Third
stops and art goes on. Cicero said that his ideal orator need not say a word, but sim- I’ve had students chanting “pig” in the first rows of a lecture at Claremont. I gave a
I was amazed by the thud of his wit—it was not there. People say “Jeff is so child- day, one of these guys points up the ceiling and says “let’s put a yellow one right up
ply stand before the crowd to manifest the justice of his case. Out of this premise lecture at Guelph—the newspaper the next morning said “Hickey offends Canada”
like” and I think he is really like a child, and I don’t attach any joke or flattery to that there,” so you know it’s not rocket science.
comes the elegant pantomime of Renaissance painting. That was my argument without a thought to the damage inflicted by Justin Bieber and Celine Dion. I gave a
remark. You’re always asked by people who collect, “What am I paying for?” “Am I for beauty. With beauty you’re free. You don’t have to ask anybody. Why would you lecture in LA and got 40 negative tweets in 40 minutes.
paying for Rauschenberg’s elan?” With Jeff it’s clear you’re paying for a whole lot of I wrote a piece on Jasper once to which he actually sent me a note and said he liked
have to ask somebody?
Detroit technology and that is an investment. And Damien Hirst is the same. They it. The premise was “why would Jasper use numbers?” My answer is: because they
These experiences have hardened my heart. Standing up there you feel like Han-
both make work that looks like work. are stupider than anything but letters, and he uses letters too. So all these stupid
You frequently turn to the founding of American democracy in your nah Arendt after her book came out. I always wanted to be a bad man, but I have
ideas are used to drive high interpretation away from John’s work, and open the way
writing— never been a “bad boy critic” even when I was a boy. I do not believe and I do not
I have a hard time with the fluffy art world. A lot of my opinions have changed over for something other, and that’s reasonable, at least to Jasper.
—I taught The Federalist Papers (1788) regularly for years. belong, and I’ve done evil deeds just because they are wrong, and I’m ok with that.
the years and a lot of my contemporaries are not making as good art as they used The thing I loved the most about the art world, when I was running my gallery in Tex-
to. They still do good art but— Have you ever written a review where the artist thought you got it to-
I imagine you are the only art critic who does; when did that interest as, was coming to New York so I could have lunch with Leo Castelli at La Pleiade, or
tally wrong?
start? go through the back rooms at Sidney Janis, or go see Lou Reed and Smithson at
Is that because of the climate in which they are making art, or what? I wrote an essay about Susan Rothenberg that she tore up and hasn’t spoken to me
It’s pretty much perpetual since civics in sixth grade, because it’s theory, because Max’s—I really looked forward to those moments. If I’m going to New York today,
A lot of it is the production demand. To cite a really good Ruscha drawing: “She Sure since. I wrote an essay on Pistoletto. I had all these stacks of his diaries in Italian. My
any country that chooses its masters then dispenses with them with a safe word who am I going to see, Brooks and Lisa? That is why I don’t tell people when I come
Knew Her Devotionals.” What is that about? It’s three graphic locutions of the shush Italian is not good, but I read them. I wrote that essay and when I finished I thought,
is a masochistic country in love with threat and fear. More to the point I was talking to town.
phoneme: SH / SU / TION. That is all it is. It’s cool but not a lot of people know that or “I’m wrong and this is not good art. I really fucked up.” I improved my Italian, though.
to Ruscha about the way he works, his process. He said, “First I think up the idea,
care. Is Ed going to go back and do that for two million dollars? Or “Guacamole Air- then I execute it, then I decide if it’s any good or not”—Executive, Legislative, Ju-
lines,” which comes out as “Wacky Molière Lines,” acknowledging Edward’s French Part Two to be Published in Issue 20 of SFAQ, May-July, 2015.
dicial! I know a hell of a lot of artists in this country who think like that. Also it’s really
descendants. But no longer. Ed is pretty interesting as an artist—serious in his own
way, cagey beyond imagining.
107 [SFAQ Issue 19]
Henry Martin
Such as? his Book about Death of a statue of somebody in Tompkins Square Park—some-
Well, he was the most intelligent person I had ever met. He was the strangest person body who was dubbed “the postman’s friend.” Samuel somebody. Samuel Cox.
I had ever met. How can I put it? He saw a possible strangeness in me, of which he I’m amazed that I remember all these things. We would meet at the post office at
approved. That’s very important if you are nineteen or twenty and don’t know who Tompkins Square, and at the corner of Houston Street and Avenue B. There was a
On Duchamp, Fluxus, Ray Johnson, Arte Povera, Nuclear Art, And The 20th-Century Avant-Garde you are, and have only figured out that most of what the world is doing is of no inter- Puerto Rican donut shop there, where we would frequently meet. Ray would take
est to you and fills you with anguish. Bill was the kind of person who could look at you me to places, introduce me to people and things. He was very wonderful in that way.
and more or less say, “I know who you are and what you’re doing, and please keep I’ve written about that.
it up.” That’s the way that Bill came to be so important for me. It was through Bill and
his wife Ann, who was even crazier—it was through them that I went to New York An extremely impressive visit one day—he took me to an eye hospital. He had con-
when I got out of Bowdoin. junctivitis. He phoned me up and said, “Henry, let’s go to the eye hospital.” I said,
“Sure, Ray.” We took the bus, because the eye hospital was on First Avenue and 14th
That was 1963? Street. We took the bus, and Ray was sort of standing erect, his hands in front of him,
Yes. Because otherwise, you know, they could have shipped me off to some chic a cap on his head. There was something strange about him, and I couldn’t tell what
Midwestern graduate school. it was. Then I realized there was something that Ray was not looking at. It was as
though he wasn’t looking at something because he wanted me to look at it. He didn’t
The Walter C. Arensberg Collection and Duchamp want to tell me to look at it. I looked around and there was an advertisement for a
bank with a picture of a very distinguished gentleman with grey hair and a grey suit,
Did you grow up in Maine? who had a silver dollar in his eye, like a monocle. I saw that, and for the rest of the day
No. I’m a native of Pennsylvania. I grew up just outside of Philadelphia. I grew up on the whole world was all about eye imagery.
the Arensberg Collection, really [laughs].
It was Ray’s presence, sometimes his attention, sometimes his dis-attention, his in-
It was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art at that time? structions—you couldn’t tell. It was impossible to tell, but somehow he turned the
Oh, yes. It’s been there ever since Arensberg left it. I was thirteen in 1955, so it could whole day into a day of optometry. He was going to the eye hospital, and he was
have been 1955, because I remember the Arensberg collection from before the time taking me to the eye hospital, and it went on starting in the morning and throughout
I could drive. the afternoon.

What drew you to that particular collection? We ended up at a Spanish restaurant. There were two restaurants we would go to.
Well, my mother was always taking me to museums, and what interested me most, One was Il Faro, on East 14th Street, which was Italian, and then there was El Faro,
I think, at that time, was a huge Rubens, Prometheus Bound. I was always very fond on West 14th Street, and that was Spanish. So, we ended up at El Faro, and Ray or-
of that. Then somehow or another, what first attracted me to the Arensberg collec- dered paella. They took the cover off this thing, and it was a face with two oysters for
tion were the paintings by Dalí. There was one particular painting, Soft Construction eyes. That was how the day ended. The whole day had been like that. That’s the way
with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936, one of those things with beautiful it could be with Ray. And then, two days later, he brought me a collage, which I still
light and battle scenes and bodies all over the place, people dying, and the king in have, of course. And what is the collage? It is not an eye—e-y-e—it is a black paper
miniature in the middle. There was that, and there were the Brancusis. There was a cut out in the form of an I—“I” as in “me.” That’s the way it was with Ray.
huge wonderful Mayan calendar—this great big circular stone. And then, there was
Duchamp. There were all these weird things there, and it was intensely fascinating. How were you supporting yourself at this time?
I was teaching. I was teaching at P. S. 78 on East 5th Street. First I was in graduate
Were you drawn to Duchamp at thirteen? school. I went to graduate school at NYU in 1963-64. I got a master’s degree there
Oh, absolutely. It was very strange. I have no idea why. I wrote a piece about that in English Literature. But it was becoming ever more clear to me that I was not an
once for Leggere, an Italian magazine. It’s all about taking the bus to get to Fairmount academic. That was one of the routes people would have sent me down, but that
Park and going to the museum to see the Arensberg Collection. For a while, the wasn’t really where I was, and it made me unhappy. So, after my master’s degree, I
great mystery for me was how Duchamp managed to break the Glass [Large Glass, didn’t want to continue on to a Ph.D. I thought I’d have to, but I really didn’t want to at
1915–1923] exactly that way, because it could not have occurred to me at that time that time, so I got a job teaching junior high school at P. S. 78. Then there was another
that there was anything accidental about anything. So, my question was, how did he one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and then Italy happened.
manage to break the glass in exactly the way he wanted to? It didn’t occur to me that
it could possibly be an accident. How did Italy happen and why?
Italy happened – it’s another Bill Wilson connection. One of my friends at Bowdoin
Well, that’s a fantastic background. College—a lovely person, David Berry—was from Maine, an old name family. His
It was very strange, because, you know, I was attracted to these things—the Large mother was Priscilla Alden something. There were two boys. Bruce, who was one
Henry Martin and Ray Johnson. 1964. Photographed by William S. Wilson. Courtesy of William S. Wilson. Glass. I loved the cage with the marble sugar cubes—Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy. year older then me, and David, who was three years older. They had a lovely farm
There was also a very strange Portrait of Dr. R. Dumouchel. I didn’t know anything in Bowdoinham. Priscilla was Bill’s friend. David was quite special, because he had
about it. I couldn’t make sense of anything at all, but it was a place for me of enor- accidentally shot himself in the arm when he was fourteen or fifteen. He played the
In Conversation With John Held, Jr. You’ve interviewed so many people—Ray Johnson, George Brecht,
Francesco Conz, to name a few—but has anyone ever interviewed
mous fascination. There were also the Brancusis, his various versions of Bird in
Space. I had no idea of his relationship with Duchamp at the time. I didn’t know any-
mandolin beautifully even though he had very little mobility in his right hand. David
had been my classmate in Bill’s Chaucer course. David’s home in Bowdoinham was
you?
In the mid-1950s, while yet thirteen years old, Henry Martin haunted thing about it until a little bit later, maybe 1963 or 1965, when I knew Gene Swenson. one of the places we went. David graduated a couple of years before I did.
No, I don’t think so. Oh, yes, a friend named Lea Vergine did an interview with me for
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, paying special attention to the Walter Gene did this very important exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Phila-
Uomo Vogue—“Vogue for Men.” That was very strange. Lea is an Italian art critic.
C. Arensberg Collection, and in particular, the art of Marcel Duchamp. delphia, called The Other Tradition. Gene was another person I met because of Bill. I He reappeared in my mail yesterday, because there is a Maine mail artist who is
She’s married to Enzo Mari, who is sort of the last remaining prince of Italian design.
Fifteen years later, he was in Milan, Italy, assisting Arturo Schwartz in had gone to New York in 1963 because of Bill. He had already introduced me to Ray applying for a residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation, and I wrote back, “Do you
She’s been a friend for a long time. She did a series of interviews for Uomo Vogue,
the preparation of the monumental monograph, The Complete Works Johnson, and through Ray I met Gene, and through Gene, and on and on and on. know Dave Berry, by any chance?” He replied, “Yes, I do. And if I get the fellowship,
which became a book called The Last Eccentrics, and I was one of the last eccen-
of Marcel Duchamp (Abrams, 1969). Between those seminal years, he Dave will pay me a visit.” David had graduated from Bowdoin, and he had come to
trics. I don’t know if I deserved that.
attended Maine’s Bowdoin College, schooled by Ray Johnson scholar I’ve read the first time you met Ray was when you brought some lob- Italy. I don’t know why. He taught for two years at the Bocconi University in Milan. At
William S. Wilson; moved to New York, where he befriended Johnson, sters down from Maine? that point, David didn’t want to teach for a living, and he wanted to go to India. That
Did that only appear in Italian? Both the magazine article and the book?
as well as members of Fluxus; and relocated to Italy on a permanent That was the lobster trip, yes, in 1961 or 1962 [laughs]. For a long time, he sent me didn’t happen, and he came back to the States to run his farm. David decided he
Yes, only in Italian.
basis, initially as a university professor, becoming a foreign correspon- pictures of lobsters. To which I had no idea how to respond, because that was the wasn’t going to stay in Italy, so he wrote to me and said, “Henry, one of the things I do
dent for Art International, Art and Artists, Studio International, and Art thing with Ray. Many people don’t really understand Ray, because they always sort here is teach a Chaucer course, and they need somebody who can handle Chaucer
You mentioned to me previously that you were a student in the 1950s.
News. His subsequent career has been just as significant, meeting of reduce him to the level at which they knew him. Ray was solitary, but he also had and Beowulf at the university in Milan. Would you like to do that?” I was kind of unde-
I was at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. I was there from 1959 through 1963.
artists associated with Arte Povera and Nuclear Art, writing the first enormous capacities, enormous capabilities of empathy. Ray could and would cided, and I wrote a note to Bill, even though we were both in New York City. I told
In my sophomore year, 1960–1961, I had the enormous good fortune to study Chau-
English monograph on Nouveau Réaliste, Arman (Abrams, 1973), and meet you wherever you were. He could fly with the angels and run with the wolves, him that David had suggested that I take his job in Milan. Bill wrote back, “Go, go, go
cer with Bill Wilson [William S. Wilson, Ray Johnson scholar and collector].
several books on the artist George Brecht, conducting an essential in- and do babysitting in between. Ray’s task with me was more like babysitting, I think. to Italy. Romantics always do.” [Laughs.]
terview with Ray Johnson, curating a number of important Fluxus ex- I’m not sure.
He had come up from New York to teach?
hibitions, and joining the Emily Harvey Foundation board of directors What year was this?
No. He was teaching there at Bowdoin College. Bill taught there for two years. He
in continuing the late gallerist’s support of contemporary artists, poets You lived near each other. That would have been 1965. I sailed on a boat from New York harbor in August 1965,
taught in both my freshman and sophomore years. I don’t know if I knew about
and musicians. I interviewed him at the Emily Harvey Gallery (Archivio I had an apartment on East 3rd Street. Way over there between Avenue C and Ave- and came to Italy, landed in Naples, and headed to Milan, because that was where
Bill, I don’t think I could have. But somehow or another, I saw fit to take his Chaucer
Emily Harvey) during the course of my residency at the Foundation in nue D, right above Houston Street. Ray lived right below Houston Street on Suffolk the job was going to be. Meanwhile, I had begun, again at Bill’s suggestion, to write
course. That was important for very many reasons. Chaucer is the reason I learned
Venice, Italy, during November and December 2014. Street—76 Suffolk Street. We would often meet at the post office. He’d ask me to about art, he had suggested that I write an article about his mother’s work. So, by
Italian. So, that’s sort of a footnote, for Bill was important in many other ways.
come meet him at the post office, which was on a square near 6th Street between the time I left for Italy I had written about May Wilson and also about Lowell Nesbitt.
Avenue A and Avenue B. It was Tompkins Square Park. Ray did one of the pages for

108 [SFAQ Issue 19] 109 [SFAQ Issue 19]

 had just died, and she had left me a little money. It wasn’t very much, maybe five or
six thousand dollars. I said to myself, “Well, why don’t you see if you can live on your
typewriter?” and oddly enough, I could.

Who were you writing for?

By then I was writing for Art International, and for Art and Artists, and also for Studio
International.

As a foreign correspondent from Italy?

As a correspondent from Milan. I had also written a book about Arman. That was my
first book. I did that for Harry Abrams in 1969. That happened because I knew Ileana
Sonnabend [among other things, married to Leo Castelli], whom I had met in Pal-
ermo, when I first arrived in Italy. In Milan, I was friends with people like [Gian Enzo]
Sperone, [Michelangelo] Pistoletto, and all those people who were later Arte Pove-
ra. They were connected with Ileana. There’s a connection, and I’m not sure how it
worked out, but at one point she asked me to do an article on Arman. I think that’s George Maciunas. Courtesy of the Internet.
how it worked out, probably for Art International. Later Harry Abrams was planning
to do a book on Arman. Pierre Restany was supposed to do it, but Pierre was utterly
unreliable. Pierre would say, “I’m going to do the book,” and then give it to you twenty
wasn’t any language that he wrote with absolute certainty. It was very difficult to
years later. Arman was tired of waiting for him. Harry Abrams was tired of waiting for
work with him, because he was very attached to every word he wrote. You had to
him. At a certain point, Arman asked me if I would do the book. So, I did the book. It
explain to him, “You cannot say that, Arturo, it can’t be done. It’s not English. It doesn’t
was the first book on Arman.
work. Tell me what you want to say, and I will say it for you.” I had to work sentence
George Brecht, Water Yam Editions, 1963-1986. Courtesy of private collection.
by sentence with him, word by word. I would tell him why a verb had to be where it
Was Arman living in New York or Paris, at that time?
was. What a direct object was—very cautiously working around this thing that he
Both. He was in New York and Paris, and also had a house in Vence [France] on the
really believed in, always knowing too that he knew more about it than just about
Cote d’Azure.
anybody else. George was having a show with Arturo Schwarz, whom I knew quite
well because of the intimacy of the work I was doing for him. And Arturo asked me if there alone in Locust Valley. George was basically alone in a wonderful little house
Were you going back and forth between Milan and New York at this he had in Cologne. First he was in the South of France with Robert Filliou. And then
I’d like to do an interview with George, since Jim Fitzsimmons at Art International had
time? he was in Cologne. It was a marvelous house with an attic apartment, which had
expressed an interest in some such sort of article, or maybe an essay.
No. The first time I went back to New York was when I was working on the book. I been built for a painter. There was a huge glass wall with a northern exposure in this
was Milan correspondent for Art and Artists, Art International, Studio International, bourgeois neighborhood. It looked like a house René Magritte would have lived in.
That was the first interview I did with him. It was 1967. That was the beginning of my
and maybe even Art News by then. So, it was a possible life. I was also doing a lot of
whole relationship with George, which lasted until the end of his life. A few years
translating. Teaching English had been a great way to learn Italian. It was a possible A Ray Johnson house.
after that interview, I did the book for Gino Di Maggio for Mudima Edizioni’s An In-
life. It wasn’t a luxurious life, but it was possible. Yes, it was like that.
troduction to George Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire. Then there was a sec-
ond interview when George had a “hetrospective” in Berne. A show called Beyond
Maybe I can take you back to those earlier New York years, for I as- In the Mail Art world, which is the world I come from, George Brecht
Events. The title on one of his very first shows, or maybe of one of his early essays,
sume being there in 1963, you were exposed to Fluxus. and Robert Filliou, and their shop, La Çédille qui Sourit, has gained
had been Toward Events. By the time of that second interview, I was no longer really
Ray took me to . . . I’m not sure if it was Ray, but I remember meeting George Maci- mythic status, with their development of the concept of an Eternal
an art critic. I could be trusted not to sound like an art critic, by that time.
unas and Henry Flynt. It was at a place downtown, on Canal Street. Network, an international community of artists, cooperating rather
And what time was that? than competing.
You mentioned earlier that Maciunas scared you. I knew Filliou, although not tremendously well. But there was also a period when
By the middle seventies. I was still sort of an art critic, I guess, when I wrote the first
Henry Martin in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of art, circa 1975. Oh, he frightened me to death. He was a horrible person. First of all, his life was made
book on George, but not all that much. It was a very open book too. I did an essay, Berty [Skuber, Henry’s wife] and I were often in the South of France, and Robert was
Photograph by Berty Skuber. Courtesy of Henry Martin. of his own proselytism. He was a very violent person. He was always colonizing oth-
republished my first interview with George, but I also republished all the other inter- living in one of those towns in the Var. We visited him a couple of times, and also saw
er people’s minds. Which is okay, if the people around you are Dick Higgins, Ben him at the home of mutual friends. And then there was the wonderful time that Berty
views people had done with George. It was a very open situation. After that, George
Patterson, Alison Knowles, Philip Corner, or La Monte Young, who were grownups. and I met him in New York.
Where were they published? would turn to me whenever something needed a comment. George would come to
But you don’t do that to a boy, and that’s what I was. I was just this nice kid—a nice
I don’t know why Lowell asked me to write that piece, and I don’t know where, or if, me and ask me to write something—like the piece I did on his Event Glasses or the
kid that Ray took to places. Ray was the person I needed in my life. I did not need When would that have been?
it was published. The piece on May Wilson was a little thing used in a catalog, and it one on his VOID Stones. It was a relationship that lasted until he died [2008].
George Maciunas. I mean, he frightened me. During that first visit there was a pair Maybe in 1976, that very first time that Berty and I went to New York together. We
began, “May Wilson has invited us into a crypt to take a look at her doll’s house.” So, of spectacles that Daniel Spoerri had done. Nails jut forward from the inside surface
I had written about May and written about Lowell, and Gene Swenson at that point He was hanging around with the Rutgers crowd—Allan Kaprow, George met him there quite by chance, on what occasion I don’t remember. It may have
of the lenses, so to put on the glasses, you would blind yourself. This just occurs to been when I did the interview with Ray.
had published a couple of articles in a Sicilian magazine called Collage. He told me Segal, Geoffrey Hendricks—but he was a scientist by profession, at
me now, but that’s just the opposite of the story I just told you about Ray. Ray was all
to send these things to Palermo, so I did just before I left the country. I stayed at an that time.
about opening people’s eyes—not necessarily, but Ray for me was all about open- That was in 1982.
impossible hotel in Rome. I’d been there for a couple of days when a friend who was He was a chemist. That’s something he talks about in one of the interviews I did with
ing my eyes. That visit to Maciunas’s was about the spectacles and blindness. I had No, it couldn’t have been that, because John-Daniel [Henry and Berty’s son] was
using the apartment I had left in New York City forwarded me a telegram with an him. He talked about the way scientists relate to the world in general. George always
no interest in that. I was a very delicate person. I was delicate and open to influence. I born in 1978, and Johnny wasn’t there when we ran into Robert in New York. It must
invitation to come to Palermo as the guest of a festival. So, I did. And that’s where I had this sense of marvel—of wonder—in front of everything. George could look
had no idea who I was, or what I wanted to be—what was right or wrong for me. I just have been some earlier trip. It was Robert who sent Berty to her first New York deal-
began to meet my Italian friends in the art world. at the shape of an icicle. He wasn’t given to ecstasy, but he was given to looking at
didn’t need that kind of violence in my life. But you know, Alison was wonderful. Dick er, Jill Kornblee. That’s what happened. He sent her first to . . . I forget who it was, but
things with great wonder—with great wonder. Things asked George questions, let’s
was very kind and nice. I met all kinds of people through Ray and Bill. he was at the beginning of a chain of people which lead to Jill Kornblee. He was very
How long did you stay in Milan? put it that way. Always fundamental questions, and like all fundamental questions, as
I was in Milan for four years. I left in 1969. Bocconi University was a private university all fundamental questions always do, they bemused him. That’s how that was. What nice. He introduced us to John Gibson, and John Gibson introduced us John Weber,
When did you meet George Brecht? and then John Weber introduced us to Jill Kornblee. That’s how that worked.
that was run by the Confindustria—the major association of the great Italian cor- his life had been like in New Jersey, I don’t know. He knew those people, because he
Oh, that’s a very beautiful story. That again is Ray. That would have been in the spring
porations, including Fiat—and the university had two departments, economy/com- was in New Jersey. He was living in New Jersey and working at Johnson and John-
of 1965. George had already gone to Italy. Ray took me to see a George Brecht Robert was doing a show with John Gibson, and it was a show with cards mounted
merce, which they were interested in, and modern languages, which they weren’t. son, and he would have been connected with people who were around him in New
show at the Fischbach Gallery. I don’t know what kind of impression it made on me, on music stands. He had come to New York with only one music stand and a little
The law in Italy was such that a university had to have two faculties. So, that’s where I Jersey, and people respected George.
I couldn’t say now. But it was just the way George was, or how I later learned him to box with cards, but it never occurred to him that music stands in America are very
was teaching, at the faculty for modern languages. Everything got very hairy in 1968, be. Relaxed and contemplative. Very light and very deep at the same time. The ac-
because the university was occupied by the students. All that was very exciting. Robert Watts, for instance. different from music stands in Europe. Music stands in Europe have a clip on one
ceptance of superficiality. Bill Wilson often talks about surfaces—the metaphorical side. But not in America.
He and Bob were good friends. George had an aura. He had been to John Cage’s
importance of surfaces, dealing with surfaces of things, not plumbing too deeply. If
It was especially wonderful, because I was twenty-six by that time. My students composition course [The New School for Social Research, 1958]. He was very im-
you plumb too deeply you can lose your own ability to know things. You can grow I remember with Berty, we walked all over New York City with Robert trying to get
were the same age, because things took longer in Europe. They were getting out pressive, because there was no shit about George. There was no fooling around.
ignorant of your own stupidity. So, there is that problem there. him the music stands he needed. He thought it would be the easiest thing in the
of high school at nineteen or twenty. University took longer in Europe than it did in George was interested in an ultimate font of things. He had a wonderful philosoph-
the United States. It was a weird situation, because I was, on one hand, faculty, but ical mind. He was very much into Oriental thought. It may have been George who world, but it ended up that he had to have fifty music stands flown in from Paris, or
When I left New York, Ray gave me a small sealed bottle that contained the water somebody did it for him. So. Berty and I were running around the city with Robert try-
surrounded by students the same age as myself. introduced me to the I Ching. All these people were sort of playful—Fluxus playful-
from a New York ice cube, which I was to deliver to George in Rome, so he could ing to find music stands, and it was then he introduced us to these other people. But
ness. There was an attitude of play there too in George, but there was a fundamental
transform it into a Roman ice cube. That didn’t work out. George was no longer the Eternal Network. I don’t know. I don’t think it had anything to do with networking
It was a very exciting period, but the reaction of the university to all the student pro- seriousness. People respected that. You couldn’t not respect George. It just wasn’t
there. I left the bottle of water with somebody else, to be delivered to him. But it nev- with other people. It wasn’t like a mail art network, or anything like that, at all.
tests was to close down the faculty of modern languages. When that happened, possible. I don’t know how intimately he connected with other artists.
er got to him.
they didn’t fire us, but from that point on staying at the university would have been
a question of simply doing examinations to get rid of all the students. I didn’t want It was a natural thing to do, but there was also a natural distance. He was in and out of Although Filliou did go to Vancouver and mixed with the Western Front,
At a certain point, I was working with Arturo Schwarz, because I helped him correct and a newly emerging mail art network that was a presence there.
to hang around the university to help close it down. At that point, my grandmother relationships with people. Rather like Ray. George was more solitary, because Ray
the manuscripts for his book on Duchamp. Arturo is a natural polyglot, but there His notion of the Eternal Network was very open to everything and anything, but I
also had this very frenetic life. Ray knew zillions of people, but basically he was out

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 on the other side of the valley. We see them directly across the valley, but to get to
them from where we live would be an hour’s trip by car. The place where we live is
perfectly isolated.

You’ve curated shows in the area.

Yes and no. I’ve never done anything professionally that was serious or constant. My
one constant has been as a translator. It’s part of me. I’m good at languages. I don’t
have a lot of imagination, so I use other people’s imagination. That’s what a translator
does—he’s a language expert at the service of other people’s imagination. I’ve only
curated two or three shows, ever. And always only because somebody asked me
to do it.

The first time I did it, there was a show of American graphics at a local museum, and
I’m an American and an art critic, so they asked me to do that, and I did it. This also
put us more closely in touch with a wonderful man—later the first director of the
new Bolzano Museion—named Piero Siena. Piero was very much like my father:
very handsome, very urbane, beautifully dressed and always soft-spoken. Women
adored him, and he also had a kind of attentive reserve.

What did your father do?

My father ran a type of laundry business. He had concessions in nightclubs, person-
Henry Martin & Berty Skuber with Robert Filliou, circa 1985. Photograph by Fabrizio Garghetti. nel for parking lots, hatchecks, restrooms. He also did this for racetracks in Philadel-
phia and New Jersey, and also in Florida. He had the concessions for the two main
racetracks in New Jersey. One was in the south in Atlantic City, and the other was
don’t know if he had a sociological idea, as far as I can tell. The Eternal Network was in the north in Monmouth. I don’t know where I’m getting these words from. You’re
one of those ideas like the Genial Republic. It was an imaginary place in which he bringing back memories I didn’t know I had. In Florida, he did the concessions for
lived. Like his concept of the Principal of Equivalence—well made, badly-made, not- Hialeah.
made, were all the same thing. To make sense of these ideas you have to realize he
was a Tibetan monk. He told me a wonderful story about a meeting with one of his There was a point at which Piero said, “Do you want to do a Fluxus show? You know
Tibetan teachers. Robert had said something about the tremendous difference be- all these people. Why don’t you do it?” I did, and it was a fabulous show [Museo
tween the East and the West to his Tibetan teacher. The teacher responded, “It’s not d’Arte Moderna, Bolzano, 1992]. The point of the show was that I didn’t call it “Flux-
really all that different, because after all, you people in the West think that television is us.” I called it “Fluxers,” remembering too that George Brecht always said, “Fluxus
life, and we believe that life is television.” [Laughs.] was Maciunas.” With Maciunas gone, there was nothing left. The Fluxus group for
George Brecht was like a man walking his dog in one direction, a lady walking her
When did you and Berty move to Bolzano [South Tyrol, Northern Italy]? dog in another direction, the dogs stop and sniff for a while, and it’s over and done
We didn’t move to Bolzano. She is from that area. Bolzano is up on the road that goes with.
from Verona to Munich. It’s a German-speaking area. Bolzano, the capital of the
Province, is about fifty miles south of the Brenner Pass. After Milan, I was in Rome for I’ve always felt that if there is anything to be said about these people, it’s because
a while. In Rome, I was working on a book. A little book published by Gino DiMaggio. each of them has an independent life. They are not defined by their relationship to
The subject of the book was Gianfranco Baruchello and his work. I created a kind each other. I mean, Philip [Corner] is a musician, and he does the things he does.
of a dictionary of the cardinal images in Baruchello’s work. It’s called Fragments of Alison [Knowles] is Alison. Geoffrey [Hendricks] is Geoffrey. George [Brecht] is
a Possible Apocalypse. I worked on that throughout a spring and summer in Rome. George.
At that point, I had had enough of Rome. It was an art world life in Rome. That was It was a great show at the museum in Bolzano. It was great because they had eight
the attraction of Rome, and I didn’t find that attractive at all. So, I asked for help from a George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Benjamin Patterson & Emmett Williams performing Philip Corner’s Piano Activities at Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, Weisbaden, 1962.
large rooms and a huge central room. In the central room, I borrowed the Fluxus col- Photograph by Hartmut Rekort. Courtesy of the Internet.
friend, who has remained a very good friend. He’s our oldest friend in Italy, from Bolz- lection of Ken Friedman from the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, Norway. Each
ano. He’d been a student of mine at Bocconi University. I asked him to find me a place of the other rooms showed major works or groups of works by only two or at most
up in the mountains, because that’s where he was from. The idea was to spend the three artists. There was a beautiful piece by Alison Knowles, which was a clay circle
winter there and to write a book and ski. It was in the course of this that Berty and I on the floor with objects on it.
met though another artist friend. I guess we must have met in 1970 or 1971, because I
left the university in 1969, and I was in Rome briefly. I moved to the Bolzano area—to There were both historical works from the Friedman Collection, and
the village of Fié allo Sciliar—in 1971, and met Berty shortly after. newer works?
The other stuff is work they did there. There was a beautiful room with works by Al-
You did a Ray Johnson show with the Arturo Schwarz Gallery in Milan ison and George, and a big installation by Geoffrey. Joe Jones too had a beautiful
in 1972, Evaporations by Ray Johnson. group of works. Joe died on the day before the show closed. It was a Saturday, and spondence I kept, and the other things we have by Ray are things that he gave or I had it in my mind to “interview the interviewer,” because the one you
It wasn’t the Evaporations show. Ray may have done the Evaporations show with Ben Patterson or Michael Berger phoned us that he had died. On Sunday morning, sent to Berty. Very beautiful correspondence. I told you that at the beginning Ray did with Ray Johnson is by far the most incisive.
Arturo. I think he had two shows with Arturo. I’m not sure, but one show was his Po- Berty and I went down to the Museum and turned on all of Joe’s music machines, was sending me lobsters, and I was just this dumb kid who didn’t know anything That was Gene Swenson’s fault. Gene wrote a couple of pieces for Art News in the
tato Mashers show. Arturo, Ray, or both, asked me if I would write the essay for the and let them run until the batteries died. That was our tribute to Joe. about anything. I didn’t really know how to respond to his messages. Ray put up with 1960s where as an interviewer, he worked himself out of the piece. That taught me
catalog. So, that’s what I did. that. He was like that. He was a mentor, in a way. But with Berty, it was different. They something. If fact, I’ve done it even more extensively than Gene ever had the chance
Have you given your papers to this same museum? were two mature artists, and they could communicate with each other through ob- to do. Gene died in a car crash when he was barely thirty-five.
So, you moved up to Northern Italy, and you met Berty in Bolzano. No. My Ray Johnson papers have gone to MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst jects. For a while, they were sending each other pictures and drawings of pieces
We were both friends with an artist named Sergio Dangelo. Danglelo was famous Stiftung Ludwig Wien) in Vienna. It’s a museum of modern and contemporary art. of twisted wire, and sometimes the actual twisted wires, things they found in the I’ve done these two books, one called How to Imagine [New Paltz, New York,
for Nuclear Art. Dangelo was a friend of Berty’s, and my last apartment in Milan had streets. They would find these things and send them to each other. There were oth- McPherson, 1983], and the other one, Why Duchamp [New Paltz, New York,
been just above his studio. One day when I had to go down from Fié to Bolzano, I Why did you decide to deposit them there? er things too. Wonderful things. Two or three of the envelopes that Ray sent or gave McPherson, 1985], which began as conversations. Each book began as several
ran into another friend who just happened to mention that Sergio would be in Bol- They were interested. Berty is very good friends with Sophie Haaser, who is the to Berty are among the most beautiful things I remember him ever to have done. hundred hours of conversation, which I then turned into a narrative with only one
zano on the following evening for a small show. So, I went to the show, and Sergio Registrar of the Museum, and also with Egidio Marzona. Egidio is an important col- voice. I learned the importance of that from Gene, even though I developed it myself.
said, “Well, now that you’ve come to my show, I also want you to see the show of my lector and one of the major donors to that Museum. I don’t know how they knew Well, thank you very much, Henry.
friend, Berty Skuber.” That was the occasion when Berty and I first met. about my Ray Johnson papers, but they did. Maybe we just told them, because I I hope it proves useful in some way. That was the attitude with Ray, and also with the shows that I’ve done. The Fluxus
had boxes and boxes full of Ray Johnson correspondence. It began in 1959, and show that I did was a wonderful show because I just asked people what they want-
You’ve been living in the mountains above Bolzano ever since? continued until his death [January 13, 1995]. So, what do you do with that stuff? You We’ll see. ed to do. I was given the job of organizing it, and I did, but choosing the specific works
I came to Italy to take a two-year teaching stint as a junior professor, and I stayed in can burn it. Which would make perfect sense, but you really don’t want to do that I had no idea I could remember all these things. to include in the show was a task that I largely passed along to the artists. That’s
Italy the rest of my life. In 1971 or 1972 I went to a small town in Southern Tyrol intend- either. And it’s not the kind of thing you can leave to children. I mean, what are they how the show worked out. Everybody had a wonderful idea and it all came together.
ing to stay a winter, and now I’ve been there for forty years. Johnny was born in 1978. going to do with it? The problem was to find a home for the stuff, and MUMOK was I really wanted to do this, because as I said at the beginning, I couldn’t The interviews, especially with Ray, were like that. Let Ray talk. Follow his thoughts.
We live in a fabulous place. It can’t be believed. Farms up there are not that large by interested, so it went to them. find an interview with you in English. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
American standards, but it’s in the mountains, and we rent an old farmhouse. The Well, there aren’t any. Nobody bothers with me.
farmer is fifty meters up the hill behind us. We don’t see their house, but it’s a pres- How many letters are in the collection?
ence. Aside from them, we don’t see another house, aside from a group of houses There were hundreds. The things we have left—there are a few pieces of corre-

112 [SFAQ Issue 19] 113 [SFAQ Issue 19]

Name-Dropping Stories Off The Top Of My Head Presented at Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco, 2013 (Edited)
I’m going to tell some stories off the top of my head—is this thing on? Okay. All right.
TOM MARIONI Some of these stories are in my book, Beer, Art and Philosophy. It’s available at
Crown Point Press and on Amazon. At the end of the evening, tonight, I will sell this
autographed copy for $20.

There’s one more seat up here in front. Let’s see. I’ll take you. Come up and take this
seat up here.

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the famous Armory show in New York City,
1913—it was the first time that the word avant-garde was used, and it was the first
time Americans had seen modern art. They had Gauguin and Van Gogh, Picasso,
Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp. That’s where Duchamp showed his famous Nude
Descending a Staircase, which one critic referred to as “an explosion in a shingle
factory,” and it was a big scandal.

A guy named Frederick C. Torrey, who was an art dealer in San Francisco, had a
gallery at 550 Sutter Street. He sold antiques and Japanese prints. Torrey went
to the Armory show in New York and he bought Duchamp’s Nude Descending a
Staircase and brought it back to San Francisco. He paid $324 for it, which, in today’s
money, is about $5,500.

He had that painting for years and showed it in his gallery, and also he loaned it out
and it traveled around. And then in the 1970s the Reese Palley Gallery was in the
same space. It showed all the conceptual artists, Bruce Nauman, Terry Fox, Paul
Kos, me, and other conceptual artists of the period—mostly California artists. I lived
in that gallery for a whole week, as a project, and I had my first LSD experience. That
was the first and last time I had an LSD experience.

Sometime in the ‘70s, the Reese Palley Gallery went out of business and another
gallery moved in there at 550 Sutter Street. I can’t remember the name of it. They
had an opening of Andy Warhol’s paintings. Warhol came to the opening, and
brought Carol Doda with him as his date—she’s the topless dancer from North
Beach. They arrived in a limousine and all the news media were there out on the
sidewalk. Warhol entered the gallery with Carol Doda and then they separated. It
was just about his entrance.

Terry Fox got drunk at the opening, and in the back hall there was a line waiting to
get in the bathrooms, so he peed into one of the empty paint buckets there and was
escorted out by a guard, in front of everybody including Andy Warhol. He went on
the wagon for six months after that. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503-1517. Oil on poplar. 30 x 20.5 in.

I told this story to Jasper Johns and everybody at the dinner. Then I asked Johns,
Today, 550 Sutter Street is the Craft and Design Museum. I went in there about a “Have there ever been any fakes, any copies of your paintings?” and he said,
year ago. I told them these stories and they had no idea that the space had a history “Impossible.”
with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase or Andy Warhol’s opening with Carol
Doda. In 1975 I was the founding editor of an art journal called Vision published by Crown
Point Press. We did five issues: California, Eastern Europe, New York City, Artists’ Talks,
and Artists’ Photographs. That was the last one, 1981. For the Eastern Europe and
All those who believe in telekinesis raise my hand. New York issues I went to the places and visited artists in order to collect material.
For the New York issue, every artist got six pages. I went to Carl Andre’s penthouse
apartment—he was living with an art dealer at the time. He was a famous artist and
I don’t know if you all know this, but I founded the Museum of Conceptual Art. It a Marxist, and there he was in his overalls in this penthouse.
was the first alternative art space in the country, and I organized some of the first
conceptual art shows and the first video art show in California, the first sound I went the next day to meet with Walter De Maria. He did The Lightning Field in New
sculpture show anywhere, and a lot of ground-breaking shows. I was in the peace Mexico. We went to lunch at an Italian restaurant—I had spinach ravioli and he
and freedom party, I supported artists, and I am an artist myself. And do you think I’m had veal piccata. He said, “Where are you going next?” I said, “I’m going to see Sol
known for that? You fuck one sheep . . . LeWitt.” I already knew Sol but they had never met. Imagine that—and they lived
three blocks from each other. It was in the Little Italy part of New York. We went to
In 1970, I went to Los Angeles and there was a dinner at Irving Blum’s house for Sol’s studio together, and I happened to have a joint with me. The three of us got
Jasper Johns. I was visiting Larry Bell and Larry had been invited to the dinner. Irving stoned in Sol’s studio, and that was one of the high experiences of my life.
Blum is the guy who had the Ferus Gallery, a famous gallery in Los Angeles at that
time. I told a story at the dinner. I said, “The guy I used to work with, Hayward King, In 1980 there was a gallery in Naples, Italy, run by Lucio Amelio. It was the hippest
who was the director of the Richmond Art Center when I was curator there, had a gallery in Italy, and he had invited Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys to have a show.
boyfriend in Paris who was a curator at the Louvre Museum. Hayward used to go to At that time Warhol was the most famous American artist, and Beuys was the most
Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Paris every summer. The Louvre curator told him that the Mona Lisa on exhibit was famous European artist. Beuys had his usual felt and fat and his organic materials.
not the real thing. It was a copy, because in 1911 the painting was stolen by an Italian He did art about generating electricity, power, heat, and light—things like that.
and brought to Italy for three years. It was recovered, but there have been other Beuys’s art was all about curious materials.
attempts to steal it or deface it over the years, so they kept the copy on display.”

114 [SFAQ Issue 19] 115 [SFAQ Issue 19]

Warhol had done portraits of Joseph Beuys in diamond dust, as negatives. They his cartoons—Kathy always wore boots and she looked just like the main female gotta pee.” The guy’s mother is there, and she tells the firemen, “Run the hoses, run Then I went to the Oakland Museum and I asked George Neubert, who was the
were black on white portraits of his head. The German press referred to Beuys as character. So I’m walking down the street in North Beach and a car drives by and the hoses.” Then he says, “I can’t go now, with all of you looking.” curator, and George couldn’t say no because the year before when I was curator at
“the man with the hat.” Kathy hollers out the window, “Hey, Tom,” and they wave to me. And Crumb said the Richmond Art Center I had done a show called Invisible Painting and Sculpture,
to them, “Why do you want to wave to that WOP pimp for?” I actually felt flattered I was in New York and my wife and I were visiting John Cage. I was lucky to know and George was in that show. He was a graduate student at Mills College at the time.
Warhol and Beuys were both at the opening, and it turned out to be like a heavyweight later when I heard about that from Kathy, because I thought, “I almost became a Cage, and we went into this kind of organic restaurant and there’s Teeny Duchamp, Later he got the job as curator at the Oakland Museum. That’s how I got to do my
championship between the American and the European. But Beuys lost to Warhol character in one of his comics.” Marcel Duchamp’s widow. He introduces us to her and that’s how I met her. I didn’t Beer with Friends in the Oakland Museum in 1970.
because Warhol, clever as he was, appropriated Beuys and made him the subject know at the time that she was from Cincinnati like me, or I would have asked her
of his work for the show. Mickey Mouse hired a psychiatrist to check up on Minnie Mouse, and a week later about that. Then, that night, we went to dinner at Cage’s loft where he was making Sometime in the ‘70s, a psychologist from Canada who had written a book on
the psychiatrist says to Mickey Mouse, “You know, I think you’re right. Minnie Mouse dinner for Louise Nevelson. It was her birthday, and John says to her, “How old are architects using the Rorschach test came to San Francisco. She said she wanted to
Then Warhol went on Italian television, where the interviewer asked him, “Are there is crazy.” And Mickey says, “No, I didn’t say she was crazy. I said she was fucking you today?” Louise Nevelson says, “I’m 80.” He says, “Oh, that’s marvelous. I can’t do a book on artists, so she gave me the test and I looked at the cards. They’re really
any Italian artists that you’re interested in?” And Warhol replied, “There aren’t any Goofy.” wait till I’m 80.” John Cage died two weeks before his eightieth birthday, about 10 kind of thick, and they have rounded corners. I looked at them and turned them
artists in Italy. Maybe Giorgio Armani.” He was insulting to the Italians. years later. over to see the back, and it said, “Printed in Switzerland.” I was curious, but I wasn’t
Mel Bochner is a conceptual artist of my generation. I’m going to give you an idea interpreting. I was supposed to see spiders and vaginas in the images. Instead, I was
Sometime in the ‘90s, the Goethe Institute in San Francisco organized a music about the prejudice that New Yorkers have about California—like when Woody interested in how the cards were made. It turns out Rorschach made hundreds of
festival, and they asked me to be part of it. I was known as a sound artist as well as Allen said, “The only advantage to living in California is that you can make a right- inkblots and then selected eleven of them and, the psychologist said, “The seventh
a performance artist back in the ‘70s. The Hawthorne Lane restaurant, which was hand turn on a red light.” one is how you see a woman.” Rorschach had it all figured out. I said, “I’d like to make
next door to my studio, let me use their space; they had a baby grand piano in there. an exhibition of these cards.” We were sitting in Breen’s Bar, which was downstairs
First, I conducted my Beer Drinking Sonata for 13 Players—the players drink beer from my Museum of Conceptual Art. “Oh, you could never do that,” she said. “If the
and blow in the bottles after each swig. After that, at the piano, Steve Goldstein images became familiar, then they wouldn’t have their power.”
performed John Cage’s famous 4’33”. It’s in three parts, making up four minutes and
33 seconds of silence. About a minute into this piece, I heard a woman whisper, “I still A guy goes to a doctor and he says, “I have five penises.” The doctor says, “How do
can’t hear anything.” your pants fit?” And he says, “Like a glove.”

Something happened to me recently that many artists have experienced. I was

included in a group show in a museum dedicated to food, drink, and art that was
founded by a big winery in Napa, California. My work, Golden Rectangle, was a shelf
unit filled with empty beer bottles with yellow labels and designed to be lighted with
two yellow spotlights. After I saw the show, I sent the following email message to the
curator: “I think you forgot the yellow lights on my work.”

He emailed me back: “We didn’t quite forget the yellow light. In fact, it was a conscious
decision not to use it. We felt that Golden Rectangle already looked so good and was
such a draw to visitors who see it through the gallery door that we would actually
lessen the impact with a yellow light. I intended to call you to discuss our thoughts,
but I’m afraid my mind moved on to future exhibitions. I do hope you will not feel that Charlie Chaplin.
we interfered with your concept. Our intention is always to present works of art to
their maximum advantage. We are pleased and honored to have your work included
in the exhibition, and I hope we will have future opportunities to bring you and your Charlie Chaplin goes to visit Picasso and he doesn’t speak French, and Picasso
Miles Davis. doesn’t speak English. Picasso was a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, and vice versa.
work to our museum.”
Picasso pulls out all his paintings to show Chaplin. After that, Chaplin goes into
Mel Bochner said to me, “Larry Bell is just Sol LeWitt with color.” Larry Bell was doing Picasso’s bathroom and takes out Picasso’s shaving cream, soaps up his face, and
I emailed him back with this message: “The yellow light was not an afterthought. beautiful glass boxes that had slight color on them, and Sol LeWitt was doing kind
Many of my sculptures are lighted with yellow light. It’s a signature with me. Did you shaves for Picasso.
of cubed open space objects. That was a put down, because “California’s just about
light it with yellow light and then decide it looked better without it? color.” The comedian Jonathan Winters was a Sunday painter, and he had a show in a
The work looks good the way it is, but it looks better with the yellow light, the way I gallery. Somebody came up to him and said, “You know, if you weren’t Jonathan
In 1968 I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival with Alvie Lersen, a Cincinnati friend. We Winters nobody would pay $10,000 for that painting.” And he says, “But I am
intended it. I understand the lighting is usually the job of the installer, but in this case are driving around late at night—it is midnight and we see a diner. As we’re driving,
the yellow light is a component of the piece. It’s not the job of the curator to change Jonathan Winters.”
I see this red Ferrari. And it’s Miles Davis. He is with another guy. I say, “Follow that
an artwork to try to improve it. But don’t feel bad, it happens to me all the time.” car.” We stop at the diner, we go in, and Miles Davis is sitting down at the counter. I sit Bertrand Russell was giving a lecture on the origin of the universe and he said,
on the next stool. On the other side next to him is the other guy, one of his musicians. “Nobody knows the origin.” And a woman puts up her hand and she says, “I know
In the early ‘70s, I knew Robert Crumb slightly. For the last twenty years he’s lived
in the south of France, but in the ‘70s he lived in San Francisco with two women, the answer.” And he says, “What is it?” And she says, “The universe is resting on a
I sat down and thought, “Oh, my God. Here’s my chance to talk to Miles Davis.” And turtle.” And he says, “Well, what’s the turtle resting on?” And she says, “It’s turtles all
Kathy Goodell and Dotty Reed. They were sort of the basis for the characters in I knew that if I were to talk to him, he would put me down, or he would just say, “So the way down.”
what?” Because that’s what he used to say to fans. He even wrote a song called So
What. An artist comes home and he finds his house has burned down. And he asks the
fireman, “What happened?” And the fireman says, “The museum director came to
I said, “Excuse me, do you have a light?” And he handed me a pack of matches your house, murdered your family, and burned your house down.” And he says, “You
without even looking. I lit my cigarette, said “thanks, man,” and I handed him the pack mean the museum director came to my house?”
of matches. His friend next to him said, “What do you want to give that honky a light
for?” And Miles said, “Shut up.” In the ‘70s I was down in LA visiting John Coplans, who had been curator of the
Pasadena Museum and was then editor of Artforum magazine. He got together
I visited Chuck Close one time in New York in his studio and he was working on a with me and Irving Blum, from the Ferus Gallery. We had lunch and they said to me,
painting of April Gornik. She’s a great painter and a great beauty. She’s got big full “We want you to move your Museum of Conceptual Art to Los Angeles.” I went to a
lips, and she’s just like a movie star, she’s so beautiful. Chuck Close says, “You see party that night at Coplans’s house. He had a fluorescent light tube on his wall, and I
those lips? That’s $60 worth of cadmium red.” said, “Wow. Far out. He’s got a Dan Flavin in his house.” And somebody said, “That’s
not a Flavin. It’s just a light he bought.” And everybody was swimming nude in the
This is a story that I heard Lenny Bruce tell; I saw Lenny Bruce twice back in the swimming pool out back. That was LA in the ‘70s.
‘60s. This guy’s in a hotel room and it’s late at night and he’s got a friend with him and
they’re sharing a room. There’s a sink in the room, and the bathroom’s down the hall. 1970 was the first time I did the piece that I’m most known for, The Act of
So, the guy gets up in the night and he’s starting to piss in the sink. His friend wakes Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art. I proposed it to the Museum
up and says, “What are you doing? I hope you’re not pissing in the sink.” of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and they said, “We’ll do it.” But the president of
the board nixed it later, even after it was already announced in their museum
The guy says, “Oh no, I was just washing my leg.” So the friend says, “Well, you better newsletter.
not.” The guy still has to pee and he can’t go down the hall—he’s not dressed—so
he goes out on the ledge. He’s going to piss outside the window. After he goes out Then I went to Gerald Nordland, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern
on the ledge of the window, the fire engines pull up and then the police are there Art, and asked him if I could do the Beer with Friends work there, and he said, “We
with speakers and lights. And they’re saying, “Stay there.” They call a priest, and the never present anything in this museum until it’s at least five years old.” That was a
priest is on the megaphone and he says, “Don’t do it my son.” And the guy says, “I just rule he just made up on the spot. Marcel Duchamp, Nu descendant un escalier n° 2, 1912. Oil on canvas. 57×35 in.
R. Crumb.
 #HANDS
Zine Reviews By Lele Saveri
Please Come Again
By Camilla Candida Donzella (Italy)
If it wasn’t for Camilla Candida Donzella I would prob-
ably not be making zines or doing much of what I do
now. Multidisciplinary artist and long-time friend and
collaborator, Camilla is based in Milan. She’s been
doing things since before it was cool to do things.
Events, zine fairs, pop-up stores, photos, drawings,
illustrations—there isn’t much she hasn’t made into
a zine or turned into art. I picked her latest publication
(considering her productivity, she’s probably already
made a few new ones by the time this article comes

UP
out), which is a collection of found snapshots, mostly
very old, in which Camilla has covered every person
with white paint making them look like ghosts. A very
simple but funny appropriation of existing images.

[Link]

Notes To Girls (9 letters that were not to you)

By Curtainboy Books
Hand-written notes, letters, post-its put together in an envelope by NY-based publisher Curtainboy
Books. Dedicated to different girls of different ages probably in different parts of the States, it’s a very sim-

DON’T
ple and adorable idea that brought me back to my school years and the many different ways I would find
to let all my crushes know my feelings . . . something that died with text messages.

Artists included : Eve Ahearn, W.M. Akers, Christina Drill, Joe Koplowitz, Alex Lee, Robert Norman, Joey
Pisacane, Travis Watkins, and Ted Watkins.

[Link]/shop-zines

I Only have Eyes for You

By Emma Kohlmann
I only recently found out that illustrator Emma Kohlmann, based
in Providence, makes tons of zines. Very good ones, too. Here, a
series of quick, spontaneous, dark drawings of contorted body
parts, sketched out with black ink. “It’s a collection of drawings
I made focusing on loneliness and solitude,” says Emma, who
works and hangs out with some of the most productive and ex-
citing group of young artists. Get into their world.

[Link]

118 [SFAQ Issue 19]

SHOOT
March 5–8 2015
PIER 26 NEW YORK CITY

[Link]
Meg Hitchcock, Shema: Deuteronomy 6:4 (detail), 2014
Letters cut from the Koran on archival paper, 11 x 14 in.
Courtesy of RandallScottProjects.
 still solid

Dissolving
distinctions
between art and
everyday life.

Madrone Art Bar is pleased to announce:

January–March
CLARK SWARTHOUT
On the main wall

January–March
SADIE MELLERIO
Window installation
Art Bar
March–May
ANDREW AGUTOS
500 Divisadero Street (at Fell)
On the main wall [Link] 111 MINNA ST SF CA 94105 4 1 5 9 74 1 7 1 9 1 1 1 M I N N AG A L L E R Y. C O M
 February - March 2015
Pamela Wilson-Ryckman
Tomas Nakada

March - April 2015

Ruby Neri
Carter

Artists News:::
Dean Byington : American University Museum “Buildings without Shadows”
Bruce Conner Print Survey : San Jose ICA “Somebody Else’s Prints”
Bruce Conner & Jean Conner : American University Museum “YES! Glue”
Lynn Hershman Leeson Retrospective : ZKM Karlsruhe “Civic Radar”
Mildred Howard : Lee Krasner Award recipient
David Ireland : UC Press Book Release: 500 Capp Street by Constance Lewallen

Gallery Paule Anglim

14 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 Tel: 415.433.2710 Fax: 415.433.1501 [Link]