Edible Suffering: An Interview of Jonny Negron

JONNY NEGRON
Desire Develops An Edge (2021)
Acrylic on linen
40 x 64 in

interview by Oliver Misraje 

The paintings of Los Angeles-based Jonny Negron are rife with ancient and contemporary symbology. Scenes of decadent, sensuous nightlife, commodity fetishization, and urban atmospheres with crepuscular orange and twilit purple hues—all with an impending sense of calamity—are wrapped in the structures of biblical and art historical motifs like a mummy’s gauze. Recently, Negron showed a new suite of paintings at Pond Society in Shanghai, his first exhibition at an international institution. 

OLIVER MISRAJE There seems to be an Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy in your work. Nietzsche talks about culture being fueled by primordial impulses. One is Apollonian, which you see in your color palette, the bright colors, the golds, which could be connected to order, poetry, and language. And then, there's the Dionysian impulse, which is where you see the purple and dark color palettes—this exuberant, animalistic impulse towards art and creation. It’s interesting how you center those things—to use Judeo-Christian terminology, it’s like the centering of heaven and hell. 

JONNY NEGRON I'm exploring the interpretations of color and phasing through colors, but it's a gradual phase. There are some works that are predominantly purple or orange, but then there are a few where there's a balance between the two. And there's really a wide range of interpretations that you can draw from it. The purple represents subconsciousness and the orange represents the activity of the intellect, which can then be interpreted as what some would call god or the inspiration that comes from beyond ourselves. 

JONNY NEGRON
Valis (2023)
Acrylic on linen
64 x 56 in

MISRAJE I don't get an ideological sense of your work where you're saying oh, the Dionysian is good and the Apollonian is bad, or vice versa. It just is. You're drawing these focal points which are like an electrical charge that moves through the work. 

NEGRON I try to observe things from a detached place. I try not to insert my own value system into it. Work like that bores me. A few years ago, everyone was painting Donald Trump looking ugly or something—depicting something unpleasant and making sure the viewer knows that. Around that time, I painted the rapper Tekashi69. He was in the zeitgeist when Trump was still president. Similarly to Trump, he just seemed to offend everyone. 

MISRAJE Like a trickster god figure.

NEGRON Exactly. Yeah. I also chose Tekashi69 as a subject because he's Puerto Rican, and he also has the same birthday as my mom. And when I posted it on Instagram, I got such intense backlash. Part of the backlash was because I depicted him in a flattering way. People just assumed that because I painted him in my normal style, this meant I'm a fan or that I support him, and a few people really tried to attack my character. So, I just took the post down. In a way, it was an experiment. I was trolling myself by painting him. But it’s interesting how people take things at face value now. 

JONNY NEGRON
Here Comes the Flood (2023)
Acrylic on linen
64 x 56 in

MISRAJE I was thinking about your painting, “Here Comes The Flood,” with the lyrics by Peter Gabriel. I lived in Haiti for a bit during one of the big hurricanes and the only memory I have of it is the sound of the wind, which was so deafening. There's something so primal about a hurricane. The painting also made me think of the quiet despair of coming back home to Los Angeles after a trip. 

NEGRON That painting ties back to the work that I was making about Puerto Rico. And I think with the work that I've made recently, it's nearing the end of that phase. The color palette reflects this a little bit. “Here Comes The Flood” is a callback to the work I was doing previously, about hurricanes and floods; also my heritage. I felt like the lyrics to that song really articulate the tragedy of my island. Although it's not directly related to the works in this collection, it’s a callback to my own personal history. It started to become taxing for me that there is this obvious demand for work that is rooted in generational trauma; real trauma that my family had been through. My grandmother almost died. She lost her home at ninety years old. But “Here Comes The Flood” is also informing what's to come—it's suggestive of something imminent. On the windshield, there are eleven droplets of water. The number eleven comes up often with a lot of the new works. I call it the number of initiations. And I'm opening up more with these kinds of esoteric symbology that I interpret. In terms of time, eleven is also the hour of the wolf. A lot of my work exists at night and in the nightlife. 

MISRAJE In ancient Rome, when Christianity was first introduced and it was still a fringe religion, the Roman pagans were worried. They obviously dismissed Christianity, but they also worried that there might be this actual secret god that they didn’t know about. So, then they created this new form of god, which was like a void, “the nameless god.” It was this category they created for any god that they might've missed, but could still properly acknowledge. For you, the number eleven is like an intentionally created void that language can’t put a name to. 

NEGRON Through a deep study of religion I think one can come to that realization. Christianity is an especially funny religion because it uses these absolutes: there's only one god. But throughout the Bible, there's the trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And that's not technically monotheistic. But what Christianity did is that they took the pagan hierarchy and obscured it. So, you have the twelve apostles, you have the saints, which are sort of like the lesser deities of the ancient world, like the sun god or the moon god. 

JONNY NEGRON
Vitriol (2023)
Acrylic on linen
42 x 32 in

MISRAJE It's also interesting with your Puerto Rican background—and it’s the same thing with Haiti—they are these Caribbean countries that were colonized and their pagan religions were heavily policed. In order to worship their old deities, they had to give their deities names like Mother Mary. The colonizers would see that they were praying to Mother Mary and not chop off their hands. Your art reflects a similar hidden symbology. Obviously, you can't separate your identity, no one can, but you're not selling your identity to these art buyers. You're like, oh I'm a person of color and this is my work about my trauma. 

NEGRON It’s like that garbonzonia stuff in Twin Peaks, which was sustenance for all these evil spirits but was basically edible suffering in the form of creamed corn. Just seeing the way collectors would respond, where it's like, yes, make more of this kind of thing. It just didn't seem right. And context is so important to me: LA just didn't seem like the right context to show that work. I want to present that kind of work where my people are also part of the viewing experience. I don't want to be consumed solely by a group that is totally alien. 

MISRAJE It’s like a secret code. You can't erase your identity. So, it’s almost like you're creating this intentional blind spot, and I think that also universalizes your art. I'm not a Puerto Rican person, but I can look at “Here Comes The Flood” and feel something, even if what it means to you is different. There’s something approachable about that. 

NEGRON Also, it deals with a larger idea that is more universal—that relates to nature and the modern world. The image came from a dream where I could see myself in the rearview mirror, the forest behind me, and I’m moving away from that towards the city—the melancholy, panic, and dread of moving away from paradise. Although I only lived in Puerto Rico for two years as an infant, and most people wouldn't even remember that stage of their life, for me it was so vivid and so vibrant. I feel like I was born in paradise and then was taken away from it. So, those memories are really potent for me. And it's such a strong part of my identity. There’s a thread of alienation through my work because that is part of my experience: seeking acceptance or searching to fit in. 

JONNY NEGRON
The Return (2023)
Acrylic on linen
64 x 93 in

MISRAJE There's a term for this: third culture kids. It’s when you grow up in a culture that is different from both your parents’ and your own nationality. It's a semi-new phenomenon in our globalized world. On one hand, you're a chameleon—you know the codes of the art and fashion world. And on the other hand, it's a performance, but you never actually belong to those spaces. So, there’s a sense of mourning your lack of belonging, which I feel particularly in your depictions of nightlife, like the people waiting in line to presumably get into a club. There are metaphorical codes. And I could see a lot of people’s assumptions being that it's satire, but I don’t think that’s the case. 

NEGRON That painting, “The Return,” also relates to ancient art in that the nine figures waiting in line represent the nine planets. The figures are archetypes—they're representative of the characters that I've been working with, all situated together. They are waiting in line, but it resembles the kind of imagery that you would see in ancient religious art, like in a Greek frieze, or Egyptian hieroglyphic, that depicts various deities together in a line. But it also relates to what you said earlier—it’s a representation of a moment that is real: people standing in long lines to get into events; to see the attraction. I once did an interview for an art magazine, and the interviewer was commenting on one of the paintings that I did of a man sniffing poppers. He said something about finding the image horrifying. And I said, “Well, you know, if you've never been in a situation where people are just doing this, then maybe you might see it that way.” It's based on an experience that I've had. I've been to many parties where people are casually passing around poppers. So, for me, it's important to include these scenarios that deal with excess or indulgences, because it's a part of our society. I gravitated towards that kind of imagery because that's what's surrounding the artwork. If you go to Art Basel, it's a rather excessive affair. There are a lot of grandiose parties. There are tons of food and drinks and a huge amount of waste. You could argue that the work is critical of the art world in a sense. The art world sometimes has this kind of hypocrisy. They want to celebrate work that talks about politics, about identity, and about all these problems, but it's being consumed and purchased by people who don't have those experiences at all.

MISRAJE Similar to what you're talking about earlier with identity and feeding them your suffering. 

NEGRON As artists, we're just happy to get a taste of that lifestyle. We're just happy to be on the scene. We're just trying to hang on to what we have. 

Spiritual Hygiene: Devendra Banhart & Isabelle Albuquerque In Conversation

photography by Magnus Unnar

Devendra Banhart and Isabelle Albuquerque have been friends since they were just kids. Together, they dreamed of becoming artists Banhart became a critically acclaimed musician with over a dozen albums under his belt; listening to each one chronicles the evolution of one of our era’s greatest singer-songwriters. His lyrics are surreal, humorous, dark, and dangerous, but also tender—all sung with his instantly recognizable vibrato. Albuquerque is now an accomplished sculptor with inclusions in numerous group exhibitions and a solo at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in New York. Her series, Orgy For Ten People In One Body, is an erotic elegy to selfhood through a plethora of materials like wax, wood, rubber, and bronze. Each one headless to remain ambiguously depersonalized, they tell the story of the artist’s selfless multiplicity. On the occasion of Banhart’s newest album, Flying Wig (Mexican Summer), they discuss their definitions of instinct and how it plays into their practice and life.

ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE When we first met, I lived on a really isolated mountain. No TV, no neighbors. It took twenty minutes to drive anywhere. My sister Jasmine [Albuquerque] and I found out that you had moved next door. This was the talk of the town. We were so excited. We went to your house and took you on a night hike to the lake.  

DEVENDRA BANHART We call it “the lake.” It’s a special little secret kind of space. It doesn’t have a name. You’d never find it if you didn’t know about it. During the pandemic, I went there to get away. I once saw Billy Zane just sitting in his car there. Billy Zane knows about it.  

ALBUQUERQUE When we went, there was a full moon. You were so strange. We were twelve or thirteen.  

BANHART I lived in a house with maybe thirty copies of Architectural Digest on the table that I was not allowed to open. If I tried to open them, my mom would go “No, don’t open that, it’s for show.” My parents were both yogis, but they weren’t exposing me to stuff. Suddenly, I go into your house and it’s like, what is going on? Your mom, Lita [Albuquerque] immediately tells me something about Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, and Louise Bourgeois. I'm sucked into a conversation about art and artists that totally changed my life. And the books—it was the wall of books falling out and raining down. And then, of course, Lita's work, which was my introduction to seeing the madness of the artist.  

ALBUQUERQUE I remember, you were always drawing. I would come over and talk and talk and talk and talk and you were never not drawing.  

BANHART My first performance was with your mom. Something about the planet of the blue bees. You were in a leotard, I was in Speedos. She prompted us to pour honey all over our bodies. Then Lita poured this ultramarine blue powder on us while we held a vase. And Lita poured honey into the vase and we sang in unison: “Ooooooooh!” It was an Egyptian ritual. And we're beckoning the planet of the blue bees. We're like, “Wow, cool. We did a performance!”  

ALBUQUERQUE I want to talk about the record, obviously. I have heard the track “Twin.” The one thing that I've been thinking about is that it came out at the same time as the ANOHNI record. When we lived in New York together, all the shows we did were with ANOHNI. I really feel, at least what I've heard of the record, it's taking me back to that time, which were some of my favorite shows you ever did. Do you feel that connection?  

BANHART Those early days when I was playing in a dress. This record has a lot of that feeling. I recorded most of it wearing this Issey Miyake thing that I look horrible in, but it just feels so good.  

ALBUQUERQUE Is that the blue dress? 

BANHART Yeah, that's where this blue thing kept coming up.  

ALBUQUERQUE The new album has a real Blue Velvet (1986) vibe, which I saw with you for the very first time.   

BANHART It just felt like a blue record. 

ALBUQUERQUE You used to wear dresses to high school—at a time that was so different from now. You were beat up so much for that. And then, you did your shows in drag for quite a few years. When I see you wear the dress, I always think it’s about your mom. I’m curious about your connection to this blue dress.  

BANHART I was wearing a dress when I first started singing because my mom wasn't around. I put on her dresses and started singing. I was like, well, I can sing thanks to wearing my mom's dresses—from this feminine place. It's a really holistic thing. It's a safe space within myself. I’m a straight guy who loves wearing dresses, but I think there's other kids that are like that. It's not a sexual thing for me. I'm not doing it to be reactionary in any way. But in high school, I was definitely trying to get a little bit of a reaction out of people. It was terrifying and I had to leave because it got so sketchy.  

ALBUQUERQUE The first time you put on the dress was when you first started singing. 

BANHART In Caracas.  

ALBUQUERQUE Oh, so how old were you? 

BANHART Nine. I became a woman to be my own mother.  

ALBUQUERQUE Oh, to care for yourself.  

BANHART It was like, how do I unlock the feminine part of myself to the point that it will  provide what my mom isn't giving? If I even bring it up to her, it's just too intense, which I understand, I don’t want to judge. 

ALBUQUERQUE When we first met, you were a punk. And it’s actually kind of surprising to me how you’ve become more connected to nature and spirit.  

BANHART You know, it’s natural to rebel against the environment you grew up in. For me, that was the jungles of Caracas, Venezuela. You would think I would be very nature-y, but that takes effort for me. Maybe not so much now, but at the time I just wanted city city city city. The minute I heard the Velvet Underground’s first record, that is all I wanted in my life. Television’s Marquee Moon (1977). I just wanted to be in that city world more than anything on the planet.  

ALBUQUERQUE You moved to San Francisco when you were seventeen, and then to New York. But even before that, you would send your music and poems out. You were so courageous. You would make these incredible handwritten and hand-drawn packages, and get nothing but rejections.  

BANHART I wrote to SubPop, Matador, everybody. But nobody ever replied, ever. Except for Michael [Gira] of Young God Records.  

BANHART I would also send poems to The New Yorker every month, and they never wrote back, of course. I was like, I'm gonna be a fucking poet. But I was playing music then with your guitar. The first guitar I ever had was a nylon string that my dad bought me but it kind of sucked. It was nylon, which was not cool. I wanted a steel string. So, I stole your guitar. My first record was made with your guitar and I never gave it back (laughs). 

ALBUQUERQUE We were quite isolated up in the hills growing up. The coolest thing about walking through the mountains is that I could hear you singing. You had such an incredible voice.  

BANHART Those hills make me think of instinct, especially the cave. I think instinct is synonymous with vision in the way that irrationality is another way of saying magic. Irrational things are a kind of scientific, Western way of saying the word magic. The transcendent is magical and mysterious and irrational. And making art is irrational, but we must do it, right? And instinct might be that version of vision. And instinct might be a vision. So if you have a vision, it's the gift of instinct. I have a vision of grabbing a salmon and squeezing till those eggs all fall in my mouth.  

ALBUQUERQUE Really? How many years have you had this vision?  

BANHART The point is that it’s a gift. Because where does that vision come from? So, instinct is maybe a form of vision. And it may be in the same way that following your bliss isn't about, “Oh, go do ayahuasca,” it's really about, “Take responsibility for the gift of that vision.” And so you could call it instinct, because it was such an instinctive drive to do this irrational thing that the entire spiritual sanity of the planet relies on and needs. It's really important to have this kind of spiritual hygiene. Art is a form of spiritual hygiene. And we don’t really live in a world that supports that in any way.  

ALBUQUERQUE What do you mean by spiritual hygiene?  

BANHART Okay, you can call it spiritual hygiene, but that kind of takes away some of the magic of it. But that's probably helpful for a lot of people, to even consider taking a little five minute stop to check on their breath. Those things are totally intertwined with the practice of making art. Both disciplines require discipline in order to bear any fruit. 

ALBUQUERQUE  With regard to instinct connected to making art, it’s also about trust and responsibility. This thing is inside you already and you have to trust it. And then, you have to trust that this thing might be subversive or wrong. And then, you have to take responsibility for doing it, as opposed to what everyone else is doing. There is a kind of responsibility with following your instinct or even hearing it at all. It’s a practice just to hear it. Because we're hearing so many other voices all the time.  

BANHART Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Basically, take responsibility for it. And, know how difficult it is to listen to a voice whose source is so mysterious. It's really like silence. When you get messianic and insane, there's this bizarro world where you think that you’re god. But, the opposite of that is just when you listen to it and step out of the way.  

ALBUQUERQUE And there is an instinct to be empathetic and that is something we all share as humans. So, there is that thing that connects us as an organism, which is kind of like a shared vision.  

BANHART I think that's what I mean. When you get out of the way, you tap into this shared thing. As opposed to, “Oh, it's all coming from me and I invented it.” That's when it's a really heavy trip, when it doesn't really last, and it doesn't, and that's a turn off. Eventually, we all kind of want to run away when we’re around somebody that is telling you how to be.

ALBUQUERQUE There is something about instinct that's collective.  

BANHART That makes sense. But, as collective as it is, it's very rare to find some other people that understand you. That's what I was talking about earlier. I was talking to my therapist, and they're like, “Do you have anyone who understands you?” And I was like, “Well, Isabelle understands me. AHNONI understands me,” and the list stopped there. And that's so very, very precious, regardless of instinct, this collective thing that we all subconsciously possess. But that's the Buddha nature: we're all Buddha, but it's covered in the mud of delusion.  

ALBUQUERQUE When I finished Orgy For Ten People In One Body, I was trying to figure out: am I like a conceptual artist? I realized that, for me, it's not connected to vision. It's really connected to touch. If you asked me to draw a foot, I couldn’t do it. But if you give me some clay to make a foot—I've massaged John's foot so many times—I can do it in two seconds. So, that's when I started sculpting. And, maybe what I’m saying is that we can all have different ways that we connect to our instinct.  

BANHART I think that's so fascinating. And I am thinking, oh, do I know what a foot sounds like? I don't know, but I want to figure out what it sounds like. Maybe the way I can see a foot is by hearing it.   

ALBUQUERQUE Are you doing image conjuring in the sound and music of the new album? I feel like that's something you always do. 

BANHART I am trying to conjure a mood and set the scene. Everything is blue. And we made it at the house where Neil Young recorded the demos for After The Gold Rush, in Topanga. We made it in this hippie world, honestly, listening to the Grateful Dead constantly. Somehow, that was synthesized into a city pop nighttime record, even though we recorded it in the day—in this beautiful, natural environment.  

ALBUQUERQUE Where did the album start? Was it a poem?  

BANHART Right. Yes. There's a haiku by Kobayashi Issa: “This dewdrop world—Is a dewdrop world, And yet, and yet . . .” I was maybe trying to sing about the world we’re living in now without singing about it. It felt like the most important time to make a record because the world isn't going to be around in a month. But also, this is the most pointless time to make any art. It’s just this perfect paradox. You know, what is the point—everything is so unlasting.  

ALBUQUERQUE Is that “...And yet, and yet” part of it?  

BANHART Well “...And yet, and yet” is the hope part of it. Because everything is so impermanent. This is just a dewdrop world. It can go in a flash—the duration of a rainbow. And yet, we continue to live and make plans. There's that instinct to live set in stone and there's also a totally nihilistic way of looking at existence where there's just no point in doing anything. The point is that it's a mystery. In Buddhism, one of the main Zen prayers is, “Beings are innumerable and I vow to liberate them all.” Sounds like a high trip, but you're trying to say, “this is an impossible task and I'm going to try to go for it.” And you know, art is impossible. It doesn’t end. It's just really mysterious on its own.  

ALBUQUERQUE Where did the title of the album, Flying Wig, come from?  

BANHART Well, you gave me that black wig for my birthday during the pandemic and I looked so terrible in it.  

ALBUQUERQUE You looked gorgeous in it. 

BANHART I wore it to some restaurant and they practically booed me out of the place. I just couldn’t pull it off. But there it stood on a mic stand in the living room—this gorgeous object. It reminded me of you. I couldn’t see any of my friends and I started to picture this wig just flying off into the middle of the night. So, I kind of anthropomorphised it. And also, it kinda seemed like a good euphemism for getting high: tonight “I’m flying wig.” I’m so high that my hair is flying. And, of course, we can get high in the garden just smelling some Mexican marigold. But yeah, that’s where the title Flying Wig comes from. And I think it’s an okay record (laughs). We could talk for hundreds of years. I don't know why I'm talking so much. I never talk. I don’t like talking. I just wanna hear about you.  

Steve McQueen: Notes on Sunshine State

text by Abbey Meaker

“Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments, only later do they make themselves known, from their scars.” ― Chris Marker

What if instincts are actually descendents of memories? Memories are fragmented downloads of experiences–impressions, the essence of things seen, felt, endured. My father’s roses, the grass my mom planted over his garden–its smell, light through trees animated by the wind, the transporting song of a mourning dove. These interior recordings create invisible, connective chords, memory material. We come in with genetically encoded instincts; some may be translated memories of our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etcetera. They too were linked by invisible chords, to each other and beyond. This ‘memory material’ creates an ever expanding web of desire and drives that evolve through our own becoming.

Some of these instincts may be innate, raw materials, while others are profoundly individual, organic. In one person, suffering will create a prison and in another, liberation. Perhaps it is the soul, the unknowable thing which pushes us through time with a deep sense of knowing: material folding and unfolding. I would argue that the function of cinema is to explore these sense impressions, the murk of our desires. Film is exploration, rehabilitation, salvation; it uncovers what is concealed, brings to life the unseen, those invisible chords by which we are connected to infinite worlds.

The visionary artist and filmmaker, Sir Steve McQueen, has mastered storytelling beyond the limitations of language. Like feeling your way through a dark room, the experience of watching a Steve McQueen film is completely and viscerally experiential.  McQueen forces us to see with all of our senses. He directs and holds our gaze upon what seem like banal moments; however it is in these scenes that we find the essence of not only the film but of that mysterious invisible thing that guides and connects us: a light flickering upon the intangible, the invisible web of us. The depths of experience in being human. Through this durational observation, a scene from a movie becomes pregnant with meaning, like a  photograph in which you continue to find new information, greater depths. McQueen assigns a moment to our memory, keeps the camera rolling, elongating a moment for what feels like too long. There is a thought process that unfolds: why am I still looking at this? When will the next scene begin? There is an instinct to look away, but we are forced to keep looking until we’ve had adequate time to contend with what we have seen and felt.

Many of McQueen’s films are historical, and always about the individual, conflicted figures, their depth, interiority, the dynamics of relationships: that of families, lovers, friends, a political prisoner and his priest. Within the larger context of these stories and their historical significance are intricate, raw depictions of people and relationships, and the richness and complexities of in-between moments. We are asked to actively consider horrific truths of both the past and the present, where we come from and where we are now, what connects us in our humanness, where we have and continue to falter. McQueen deals with specific historical events as well as universal themes, particularly concerning loss, self reckoning, and liberation: political prisoner Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikes in 1980s Northern Ireland (Hunger, 2008); the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South (12 Years a Slave, 2013); Frank Crichlow’s Mangrove restaurant in west London, and the trial of the Mangrove Nine in 1970 (Mangrove, 2020).

“Mangrove”, from the Small Axe series, is an historical drama about the Mangrove restaurant in west London, opened in 1968 by Frank Crichlow, a Trinidadian immigrant. The restaurant was a sanctuary, an integral meeting space for the black community in the Notting Hill neighborhood, particularly for black activists, artists, and intellectuals. In the restaurant, McQueen has created a warm, immersive environment; it vibrates with atmosphere and life. Music is always playing and patrons are engaged in lively conversation, floating in and out of the space, signaling a feeling of safety, community, and home beyond the restaurant's physical borders. Crichlow is faced with relentless, violent, and baseless police raids led by sadistic office Frank Pulley.  The film jumps between the vibrant warmth of the Mangrove and the stark, cold monochrome of the police station: the life-giving glow of the sun, burning and suspended in vast, cold space. The police see the Mangrove as a transgression, a threat to the white British way. After a particularly violent sequence in the restaurant, a colander is knocked off its base. In a lingering shot, the camera traces the chaotic violence down to the kitchen floor where that colander aggressively rocks to its final rest. The plea to keep looking when the instinct is to look away from violence is challenging but comes with its rewards. The rocking colander lulls the viewer through conflicting emotions: the desire to get through the scene, to skip over what has happened, engenders a kind of reckoning. We are forced to process what we’ve just seen before moving on.

The harassment of the police forced Crichlow into becoming an activist. In response, on August 9, 1970, the black community organized a march in which 150 people protested police conduct. The police again provoked violence, and a number of the protestors were arrested and charged: Frank Crichlow, activist Barbara Beese, Triniadian Black Panther lead Altheia Jones-LeCointe, Trinidadian activist Darcus Howe, Rhodan Gordon, Anthony Carlisle Innis, Rothwell Kentish, Rupert Boyce, and Godfrey Millett. Their trial lasted 55 days, and though not all of the charges against the Mangrove Nine were acquitted, the trial became the first judicial acknowledgment of behavior motivated by racial hatred within the metropolitan police. It was a critical case in the British Civil Rights movement. For many children, “Mangrove” has created a connection to a time their parents may not have talked much about but that likely influenced their relationships. The present is imbued with sense impressions–wounds–of the past.

Steve McQueen’s latest artwork, Sunshine State, is weighted, ripe with memory material. In the two-channel video installation, projected on both sides of two screens, one placed beside the other, McQueen weaves the deeply personal with the historical. The work opens with footage of a burning sun and unfolds into scenes from the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, a musical drama and first feature length film with synchronized dialogue, the first “talkie.”  The film stars actor and singer Al Jolsen who is shown applying blackface makeup in preparation of a Broadway dress rehearsal. Against a black backdrop, the blackface is never actually shown. In McQueen’s version, only Jolsen’s suit and white minstrel gloves can be seen. The rest disappears; he becomes invisible. Juxtaposed with the black and white images of the Jazz Singer are video fragments of the blazing orange sun, a burning, breathing neon orb. Over the video is McQueen’s voice recounting a devastating story his father shared with him just before his death. The story is told in full, then repeated until fragmented, distorted. It is a life transforming story, like a door to a dark room opening to the sun.  His father was taken from the West Indies to work picking oranges in Florida, where a casual visit to a bar after work ended in traumatizing fatal violence.

It’s impossible to know to what degree this unknown experience, its memory, its wound, has informed McQueen’s art practice, but he has largely uncovered and shown a light on stories and people who were unseen, ignored, erased. There is liberation in being witnessed, in being seen, and through observing and absorbing, the invisible chords that connect us are fortified.  His father’s final words, “hold me tight,” are recited as a chant, a mantra to the sun burning on in a vast dark space. In an interview, McQueen asks himself what he discovered looking back on the years-long process of creating “Sunshine State”: “I suppose I was carrying shit with me…heavy shit, and I didn’t know I was carrying it. I think that weight is what I discovered, of what you carry with you, and I don't know if I’m lighter, but I’m more appreciative.”

Ponte

Denim jeans with studded elastic waistband

photography by Jermaine Francis
styling by Harry Pontefract
Modeling by Ker @ Menace, Ryan Skelton
hair byMasayoshi Fujita
makeup by Maho Moriyama
casting by Tytiah @ Unit C London
lighting by Pro Lighting London
Retouch by Jonathon Doe
photography assistance by Ian Conspicuous

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Mike Kuchar

interview by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Pat Martin

New York City in the 1960s was the cradle of underground cinema. Daring experimentations in celluloid were being made in the makeshift laboratories of urban lofts, on the streets, and on the water tower-dotted rooftops. Twin brothers, Mike and George Kuchar, were at the forefront of this movement, alongside Ken Jacobs, Maya Deren, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and more. To support his filmmaking efforts, Mike Kuchar worked in the commercial art field and created erotic illustrations for the pages and covers of magazines such as Gay Heart Throbs, Meatmen, and First Hand Magazine. His drawings are drenched in hyper-saturated colors with flesh-toned muscle men in homoerotic scenes of science-fiction and Biblical epics. Today, he is still making films and drawings—many of which were shown alongside historical work during an exhibition, Big, Bad Boys, at François Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles during the summer of 2023.  

OLIVER KUPPER When did your films and paintings enter this very libidinous place? 

MIKE KUCHAR It’s always been there. The urges, the drives, the desires—they’re inside me, they’re inside all of us. But, since I’m interested in playing around with mediums, I use them to express the drives, to get it out of me, and to reveal it; hopefully in a way that’s entertaining or captivating. Those libidinous drives are often the subject of the creation. It’s being taken out of oneself and put on the paper, or the silver screen, and presented to the outside world in a way that will hopefully be digestible, and in some ways entertaining. Using the gimmicks and language of the medium, whether it be paint or the camera, it’s materializing the urges.  

KUPPER It’s very instinctual.  

KUCHAR Putting it into a tangible form to be reviewed and experienced and told, but in a way where you stand back and look at it, to either be horrified or find it hilarious.  

KUPPER Or turned on. (laughs) When did you first discover this libidinous side of yourself? Were you scared of it or did you feel liberated? 

KUCHAR It had to come out. You can’t stop it. It’s there and it only gets stronger with age because the hormones are getting more fierce. It depends on who you’re working with or what interests you at the time. But, there are a thousand inspirations.  

KUPPER Your first films were made in your Bronx childhood apartment at around eleven and twelve years old with your twin brother [George]. What did your parents think of this? Were they supportive of these cinematic experimentations? 

KUCHAR They were domestic-minded folks. They just let us do what we wanted to do. Oh, actually, my mother kind of complained. We would sometimes use the bedspreads, or the coverings from the sofas as costumes and go up on the roof to shoot these kinds of Biblical epics. She would find out and get very mad. I remember she would go on a tirade. So, that was the only way she recognized interest in our movies; when we sort of disrupted the draperies in the apartment. But otherwise, they didn’t care. My father liked our movies—he was only interested in our movies because he liked some of the girls we had in the pictures. He’d sometimes ask if we could take some private pictures of them, but I wasn’t interested in doing that.  

KUPPER Was there religion in the home? Because there are a lot of Biblical references in your work. Did you go to church? 

KUCHAR Yes, we were religious. Our family always wanted us to go to church, but we didn’t go. My brother was more affected by the church, mostly attitude toward life and sex, and dealt with them in his movies. Sometimes, they’d border on sacrilege. He had a battle. But what affected me—I just liked the Biblical movies. I like them because of the costumes and sets. For me, going to church was a rather strange experience. It was really a temple full of masochistic imagery of suffering, and martyrs, and people chained, or nailed to things, like Saint Sebastian and Christ. It was such a strange mixture of sadness and eroticism.  

Mike Kuchar, Facing One’s Demons, 2015
Ink and Marker on paper
24.5 x 22 inches; 62 x 56 cm
Courtesy the artist and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

KUPPER It’s sort of what happens when you suppress these libidinal instincts.  

KUCHAR Yeah, it didn’t give me any guilt, though. It had a kind of haunting ambiance. My brother was more affected by guilt and salvation, and he had to deal with that and he did so in an often-entertaining and relevant way. 

KUPPER When you were making movies together, what was the creative process like? 

KUCHAR In the beginning, it was an activity, it was a sport. We’d get together, hold a party, and instead of putting on the record player and dancing, we were gonna make a movie. And everybody knew it. And we were all there to create a movie. And the people were there to act in it and to play characters. And then, when the picture was done we’d hold another party to see the finished product. As we grew older, it became something else. It was still movie-making, but it had a different process. You’d meet individuals and you’d create more controlled experiments of depicting inner drives, and inner feelings, and interpreting them into a movie. The directing was getting more internal and precise.  

KUPPER Did you and your brother share a twin language?  

KUCHAR No, the only thing we shared was equipment. He made his type of movie and I made mine. We were twins, but we actually had different temperaments. And then, of course, after we made the movies we’d show them to each other. 

KUPPER Can you talk about how instinct has driven your creative pursuits? 

KUCHAR Sometimes, the basic reason we create is not flattering. But what’s created from that urge grows bigger into something else, or at least that’s what you should aim for. It will begin to encompass something even greater, or something more important than the fundamental reason—just a basic kind of mood. A need. A basic need.  

Sometimes how I start making a movie is like being on a psychiatrist's couch. There are reasons why you place people in a certain way, and why you dress them in a certain way. And then, you begin to realize and analyze where it’s going. Very seldom have I made pictures where I don’t know the end. And a lot of times it has to do with the people you’re dealing with, or your feelings towards those people, which we then turn into a kind of bigger story, and then that begins to build into the structure of the picture.  

KUPPER I’m curious about how the underground movies of that time were brought above ground. Jonas Mekas was a big part of this process in New York. Where did you show your movies? How did Jonas discover your work? How did you meet him? 

KUCHAR There was a girl that we went to school with, it was in a poetry class. She said, “I know an older painter, let’s go over to his house, or I’ll tell him to come over, and we’ll make a movie.” So, we met this older painter and he said there’s something going on at a loft in lower Manhattan every month. Sculptors and painters would get together and show movies at night. This older guy said, “Why don’t we take your pictures and show some of the movies you made.” It was Ken Jacobs’ loft. They got a kick out of the movies. Ken Jacobs said, “Look, next month, come back and bring more of your movies. I’m gonna invite some other people.” He invited Jonas Mekas, who was writing articles about this underground film movement in The Village Voice. So, Jonas Mekas came, and he saw our movies, and he enjoyed them very much. He said that he opened an underground theater in New York and that they’d like to show them there. So, Mekas wrote a great review in his column in The Village Voice and showed our movies at his theater. 

KUPPER What were the first movies that you shared there? 

KUCHAR Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof (short, 1963), A Town Called Tempest (short, 1963), Born Of The Wind (short, 1962)…all done in 8mm.  

KUPPER And this was shortly before your first 16mm film? 

KUCHAR This was before, yeah. I found out about 16mm from other people in the underground, from seeing the others who were beginning to buy 16mm cameras. I got a bonus from a job, it was $250, I bought a Bolex. So, we upgraded our cameras to a bigger format.  

KUPPER And that was from doing illustrations in magazines? 

KUCHAR I had a job for a while in the commercial art field. I used to do photo retouching. I never went to college, but I went to a commercial high school. There were two art schools in Manhattan: High School of Music & Art, which was fine art, and The School of Industrial Art, which was commercial art. A teacher said to go to the latter because fine art is always tough in the beginning. So, I went to the commercial school, graduated with a portfolio, and ended up doing photo retouching in Harper’s Bazaar—with actual transparencies and dyes. It paid well, but I was never interested in it, so I couldn’t adapt to it. I was always a misfit within corporations.  

KUPPER Kenneth Anger passed away a few days ago…have you ever crossed paths? 

KUCHAR My brother knew him better than I did. They would get together during shows. I met him once in London. I happened to be in London to visit a distributor to see if there were any royalties for me and Kenneth Anger happened to be there doing the same thing. He came up and said, “Oh Kuchar, we finally meet!” And that was my only encounter with him.  

KUPPER There was a moment when he was in San Francisco with the Church of Satan and that whole crowd. You were in New York, but your brother was in San Francisco a lot earlier.  

KUCHAR I’d go back and forth. I was sort of a drifter and always had certain obligations. Eventually, I began to permanently live in San Francisco. But my brother was pretty well stationed there at the San Francisco Art Institute, which kept hiring him every year. He did that for thirty-five years.  

KUPPER You were both making art, but your drawings came earlier…can you remember your first drawing? 

KUCHAR When I was four years old, my father gave me a cigarette—he also wanted to know if I was interested in whiskey. I tried that and thought it was horrible. But one afternoon, he came in with a pencil and paper, and said, “Why don’t you draw us something.” And I remember the drawing I did: it was a stick figure with a hat. I was such a young child, but it seemed to be an omen of what I’d be interested in. I always admired comic book artists and I wondered if I could even come halfway close, so there was a certain urge in me to strive to draw something, even slightly close, like how they did it. So, I began to draw. But then, a freaky thing happened. Some guy was publishing a comic book and they needed someone to make drawings. This woman I knew recommended me. I gave a sample and they flipped over it. All of a sudden I had an assignment that would also give me a little money. So, that got me focusing on my drawing. My interest was now focused because I had to actually produce something. And then, it escalated—the comic book became successful for that publisher, so he kept asking me to do more. Then it got out in the world, and other publishers saw my work, and they somehow managed to contact me. The homoerotic became my specialty. It was no problem for me (laughs). I knew the subject quite well. I looked at drawing like my second career. And that’s what I became known for. I did get fan mail! And I’d get phone calls from strangers with heavy breathing…It was like voodoo. I would get these calls late at night and it was all because of the drawings. The drawings were haunting people.  

KUPPER When did color come into the work? Because in the ’60s and ’70s, it was expensive to do color in publications.  

KUCHAR The color came in later with the bigger, slicker homoerotic magazines. There was one illustrator who was really something, Harry Bush. He did all these kinds of vibrant teenagers and they would print his work more in color. But earlier, there was a publication called Physique Pictorial that was mainly black and white.  

KUPPER I want to bring up two things, which are artificial intelligence and the ongoing cultural war that we’re in now—there’s a renewed censorship going on with artists. One of your films, Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), which told the story of robots in a nuclear holocaust, was extremely prescient.  

KUCHAR I didn’t give any thought to that picture. I said, “Okay, so this will sort of be my robot movie.” I might’ve seen some trashy poster about robots that are mimicking people and then I said, “Okay, I’m gonna do something like that.” Maybe it was that we unknowingly do things that are really prophetic. But that film was unconscious, I just thought it would be a colorful thing to work on. 

KUPPER During that time, a lot of those underground film screenings were being raided and negatives were being stolen, and people were being arrested just for showing their art.  

KUCHAR That was interesting, though, because then whole court cases came up and things were settled and became more open. But there had to be court cases and they had to deal with this stuff and that opened the gates for the culture to become more lenient or acceptable, and digestible. Then these films were being shown on bigger screens at bigger theaters, and even in museums. The MoMA had a big series on the underground cinema movement. They presented it to the more refined public in institutions that were bigger and revered, and legitimized. So, it slowly seeped in and was absorbed by the movie-making culture. 

KUPPER Did you deal with anything personally during that time in terms of being censored or raided?    

KUCHAR No, not my brother and I. Our films were like camp-y manifestations. We made them in studios, or in apartments, with people who wanted to be actors. We were hosting the artificiality, but it was not to destroy the tradition of movie-making. It was carrying on the tradition, but then it became something else. It became grotesque, or beautifully funny. 

KUPPER The one thing that sticks out are the characters’ eyebrows. 

KUCHAR My brother was very interested in makeup and seeing makeup on actors. Sometimes to make the scene work you change the shape of their eyebrows—it’s like a kabuki master—to make them look sad by putting the eyebrows like that. Their faces are canvases you can paint on, especially if they are female characters. The eyebrows even made non-actors look like they were acting.  

KUPPER Your show at François Ghebaly is really interesting because it mixes a lot of new and older work. What was the organization behind this curation? 

KUCHAR Actually, it was up to the gallery. If they’re gonna put up money to house me, and fly me in, I said “Look, have fun.” I’m very happy they took an interest in my work. I mean, my brother and I have closets full of movies and it piles up. You can die, the landlord comes in, throws everything away, or the house can catch on fire. It’s interesting, but there are these institutions and places that somehow find worth in all the work and they wanna house it, protect it, and also make it available. It just happens. 

KUPPER I think a lot of your life has been led by intuition and it got you to the right place. 

KUCHAR It’s all chance. It’s because of our interest, we would just make movies no matter what. But it affected some people who thought it had worth and they wanted to preserve it. 

KUPPER Do you still imagine movies you want to make?  

 KUCHAR I do, of course. I made one last week. They’re more minimal. I don't have the versatility to do things. I’m too old. But that changes my style. You have to adapt to what you can physically do—I call them soul-searching pictures: people talking about their existence or certain problems. I try to make them feel like they have depth in the way they’re photographed, and the words used. 

Julian Charrière

Julian Charrière, And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, 2019
Video still. Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

interview by Oliver Kupper

Traveling the world—from Greenland to Bikini Atoll—French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière captures the debris of human impact on Earth. Using myriad mediums, he exposes the layers of sedimentary scar tissue as a result of our unbridled ambition to conquer nature, and decodes the ecological algebra within its complex systems. Balancing anthropogenic and cosmic time scales, he fuses fine art and scientific practices to discover where we fit into this ancient equation. In Buried Sunshine, which will debut this fall at Sean Kelly gallery in Los Angeles, he explores the fraught history of oil extraction in Los Angeles; the world’s largest urban petroleum field. Using heliography—one of the oldest photographic techniques using light-sensitive emulsion incorporating tar from La Brea, McKittrik, and Carpinteria Tar Pits—he creates an abstract aerial view of the wastelands. Charrière’s oeuvre asks eternal questions: how did we get to now and will we survive tomorrow?

OLIVER KUPPER You are currently in Greenland; can you talk a little bit about what you are doing there and why the country is so important in your practice?

JULIAN CHARRIÈRE There is something about the topography of Greenland, or perhaps the lack of topography, which I am drawn towards. Without trees and houses, the landscape itself is a blurred boundary between sky, and ice, and land. Even circadian rhythms come undone there since the planetary tilt delivers entire seasons of white light and then months of uninterrupted darkness. I am traveling there with a scientific expedition, joining the scientists on a journey around East Greenland. During this time, we live on an icebreaker and trace the coastline, allowing samples to be collected from otherwise difficult-to-reach locations. For me, it marks the first step of an upcoming project, for which I am trialing a new ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle) in the icy surrounding waters. Filming below the surface of the Greenlandic Sea, you quickly realize that global warming is not only causing glaciers and icebergs to disappear, but that with them entire oceanic ecosystems dissolve.

KUPPER The theme of this issue is instinct. I think a lot of artists unleash their instincts, or unlearned impulses, to drive their creativity. What does instinct mean to you and how does it drive your work, especially when it comes to your immense, adventurous spirit?

CHARRIÈRE I think instinct plays an integral role in my output, fused always with curiosity, though I would maybe describe it more as intuition. And honing that is part of what makes artists capable of approaching ambiguous, complex, and dense topics, which might otherwise seem daunting. Even when encountering something opaque, you can instinctively choose a thread to pull on or descend into a certain rabbit hole, guided by the voices that echo from within it. My intuition has, at times, unleashed an instinct leading me down some very strange paths. From polar ice sheets to the depths of palm oil plantations, these are locales that at first glance might seem remote or liminal, until you arrive and realize that these are places. They are as much homes to the human and non-human animals who live or lived there as your home is to you. Of course, it is exciting to dive in the Bikini Atoll and see the hulls of warships sunk by the US during nuclear tests in the 1950s, but the adventure is secondary to the encounter with that history, and especially how we relate to it today. The first instinctual spark of curiosity is almost gravitationally connected to that physical encounter, tethered to it like those distance lines cave divers follow in the dark, leading them through the unknown. You feel there is something beneath or beyond—some long-forgotten history, or fate, or lively material shuffling around—and so you listen to your gut, and look beneath the rind, and see what you can maybe bring into the light.

Julian Charrière, The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I I I, 2013
Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

KUPPER When did you become interested in the natural world and when did the ecological enter your artistic lexicon?

CHARRIÈRE Even from an early age I was interested in immersing myself in my surroundings, and so I spent a lot of time in the natural landscape interacting with snakes, and frogs, and birds, and plants. It has always felt like an integral part of my being and how I evolved in the world. As a kid, it wasn’t so reflected, and this idea of immersion and encounter only began fully developing when I started studying art. It expanded into this idea of meeting a particular landscape, rendering it a tool for thinking about how we think about ‘nature’—how it is framed as a milieu, or a system, or whatever. In terms of environmental perspectives, this is almost always present, since when you investigate such topics you almost inevitably arrive at the ecological meltdown which looms ahead.

KUPPER The summer of 2023 was the hottest in recorded history. Your work deeply explores the impact that humans have on our natural world and landscapes, why don’t you think our survival instinct kicks in with these dire warnings about the planet?

CHARRIÈRE Complacency is a tricky thing. But I think it is critical to examine who is responsible for the situation we are in and what one can conceivably expect from individuals. It’s like how British Petroleum in the early 2000s popularized the expression ‘carbon footprint,’ devising a marketing campaign that bestowed upon us the idea that environmental pollution is the responsibility of private citizens, rather than the oil companies. More so than asking why our survival instinct hasn’t kicked in, maybe we can investigate the often-reciprocal relationships between political systems and corporations. How can we require scrutiny and transparency? How can we build platforms and communities or even start conversations about the industrial actions that, while conducted out of the public’s view, will have devastating consequences for our planet? One of the reasons why I think our response may appear so apathetic is because climate change is vastly abstract. Our human reaction time is incompatible with it, making global warming feel fast and slow at the same time. It only becomes somewhat tangible when you encounter it firsthand: when your commute to work is flooded, or your house is engulfed in fire, or a garden that was once abuzz with life is dead quiet in midsummer. I think one strength of art is that it can be used to countermand this kind of apathy by exploring challenging topics and uncomfortable feelings; deconstructing the arbitrary and systemic, thus perhaps providing tools for dealing with the terrifying uncertainty that might otherwise shut us down emotionally.

KUPPER Do you feel there are too few artists leaving their studios to tackle these major issues of our time? Is a studio painting practice self-serving in the age of the climate crisis?

CHARRIÈRE No, I wouldn’t say I feel that way. A painter should paint, whereas another artist might need to travel to dream. It would be reductive to art as a vocation if there was pressure to conform to political themes, even if those themes are urgent ones. And really, how interested would we be if every artwork we experienced was didactically about climate change? In my works, there are often environmental themes present, but these are often enmeshed in other perspectives as well. With my latest film Controlled Burn, for instance, the meta-layer is very much about extractivism, visually foregrounding the buildings we construct and spaces we carve out for energy production. But while it features a power plant cooling tower, an abandoned open-pit coal mine, and a towering ocean oil rig, it also explores other things beyond environmental degradation. In the film, you soar through reversing pyrotechnics, mirroring the intense power released by our terraforming. But it is also about the past biomes that now constitute our coal, and petroleum, and natural gas: the Carboniferous woodlands that outgrew themselves and condensed in the earth to what we now repatriate as resources. It is not explicitly about tackling a major issue but acts as a cosmic meditation on energy transformation. Someone could argue that what we need are more explicitly environmental works, but art often operates in less obvious and more ambiguous ways, and that is a strength.

KUPPER Fire has been a central theme in your work, but also ice and glaciers. There seems to be a fascination with the primordial and the elemental. Where did this fascination come from and what is the symbolism of fire and ice?

CHARRIÈRE Our history with fire, but also the history fire has with our planet, was something I delved into recently for my exhibition, Controlled Burn, at the Langen Foundation. It foregrounded one of the reasons why I am interested in these kinds of biochemical processes: the fact that they have fates of their own, often long predating our hominid entry onto the planetary scene. The first fires emerged from the very properties of life. To paraphrase the fire ecologist Stephen J. Pyne, the story of fire is the story of oxygen and plants. Without either, the ignition of lightning would never flourish into flame. So, as life ascends from the seas and begins to grow on land, we also encounter the earliest flames, with the earliest record dating from charcoal in rocks some 420 million years ago. This was in part an inspiration for Panchronic Garden, which is a dark and crackling installation in the show. Set in a reflective and coal-based scenography, it figures ancestral plants to those who lived during the Carboniferous era. Entering this smoldering coal seam, the visitor can listen to a real-time soundscape produced by the ‘umwelt’ experienced by the vegetation in the space. Now and then, a fluorescent flash erupts in the space—perhaps the ignition of that first coming-together of the components that necessitate fire. But then, sweeping through that deep time, we arrive in the era of humankind. Fire integrates into our agriculture, and then to a degree manufactured in our combustion engines, not only burning the raw materials of the present but the lithic landscapes of the past. Oil, and coal, and natural gas are extracted and burned for fuel, warming the future. In my work, I am drawn to investigate these cycles and systems, with which our idea of reality is inextricably linked. Ice too holds histories, suspending within it registers of past atmospheres, yet for us living in the so-called Anthropocene era, the icebergs, and ice sheets, and glaciers also act as clocks, physically counting down towards an uncertain future. There is also the paradoxical situation where neither state is particularly compatible with human beings, both ice and fire are entities with which our bodies cannot cope—thus confronted with agencies beyond our immediate control.

Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn, 2022
Video still. Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

KUPPER One of your most symbolic works is And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire, which adds another layer of symbolic meaning. Can you talk about this iconic work and how the fountain is connected to civilization?

CHARRIÈRE Alongside the control of fire, the fountain represents one of the most fundamental achievements of human civilization, since the invention of wells shifted us from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary one—in turn giving rise to agriculture and thus sowing the seeds for future industrialization. As a symbol, it has this rich and poetic history, from the original spring fountain where it provided vital water, to the ornamental versions that publicly displayed not only the technical achievements of the jets, but the power and ‘overflowing’ wealth of those who could afford to install them. In this sense, And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire is a memorial of anthropogenic hubris; our belief that the natural world can be dominated and natural elements controlled. But it can be interpreted in many ways, with the presence of fire anachronistically engulfing it, pointing to the nether realms beyond our purvey. How beneath the political debates, philosophical reflection and symbolism, there lies the original and autonomous state of the planet, free from human interpretation. How deep beneath the Earth’s surface, between the outermost crust and the inner core, magma constantly churns. I was interested in juxtaposing this uncanny underworld, where liquid fire constantly flows inside of a recognizable structure like the fountain. And while I wanted to point to the ambiguity of fire, a power which, like us, is capable of both creation and destruction, it is maybe unavoidable in the current climate of erratic wildfires and rising temperatures for the work not to feel a little like an omen.

KUPPER Not only has this summer been blazing hot, but there has been a renewed concern with nuclear devastation—can you talk about your experimentations with atomic energy?

CHARRIÈRE In a way, our belief that we can control elements, as with water in the previous question, becomes truly unhinged when we begin developing nuclear weapons. As we are no longer trying to command simply an Earthly element, but the atomic power housed by stars. I first began working with radioactive materials in my series Polygon. I traveled to the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan where the USSR conducted its nuclear tests. In the production of the photo series, the negatives were exposed to local sand, which was still radioactive from the site. Though invisible to the human eye, the radioactivity seared bursts of white light onto the final photographs. I returned to this method in a more expansive project where I, together with curator and writer Nadim Samman, journeyed to the Marshall Islands; to the atolls where the U.S. detonated some of the world’s most powerful nuclear weapons in the 1950s. It especially focused on the Bikini Atoll—a now deserted but once-populated island whose citizens were displaced by the tests. It is easy to think of this tropical island as remote, situated on the very edge of the world, but it was very much home to the Bikinnians. Even after some half-hearted clean-up efforts by the Americans, it is completely unlivable with the ground still containing the radioactive substance cesium-139, effectively poisoning any locally-grown produce. The world quite quickly forgot about the people on these atolls whose legacy fell by the wayside of the spectacular images the US took of the detonations. A large part of this military project was about visually documenting the violent potential of the US military; a way to disseminate its power through media. In a sense, I too documented this action with my photo series First Light. It was not an encounter with the thermonuclear reactions, but rather a portrait of the white shadow eternally expanding from the events themselves. A meeting with a cosmic specter who still haunts the beaches: the radioactivity forever crackling on the atoll. It is strange, of course, to think how much and how little has changed since. Returning to political conditions similar to those of the Cold War, it is hard to not feel like we are reaping what we sowed during that first nuclear arms race.

Julian Charrière, Hickory - First Light, 2016
Copyright the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

KUPPER Can you talk about your upcoming show, Buried Sunshine, at Sean Kelly in Los Angeles?

CHARRIÈRE With Buried Sunshine, the aim is to bring together a mise en abyme of the geological materials, especially those which we utilize as tools and resources. A large part of the show is also about prying at the veneer of Los Angeles, which is the world’s largest urban oil field. It includes the aforementioned film, Controlled Burn, and a new series of heliographic works with which I wanted to unearth some of the fossilized sunshine upon which the mythos of the city is constructed. Because when you think about it, Los Angeles is a spatial anomaly, built both on top of and by hydrocarbons. Without the overwhelming abundance of oil, the film industry boom might never have exploded as it did. And to this day, one-third of residents live within a mile of a drilling site, yet those derricks are whimsically hidden behind shopping malls and artificial buildings, forging a contradictory paradise, as much a nightmare as a dream.

The heliographs, named Buried Sunshines Burn are made using one of photography’s oldest techniques, first developed by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1822. It is a production method I first began experimenting with for my series A Sky Taste of Rock in 2016. To make heliographs, you use a light-sensitive emulsion, made in this case with regional tar collected from the La Brea, McKittrick, and Carpinteria Tar Pits in California, creating photographic imprints of local oil fields on highly-polished, stainless steel plates. Shot from a bird’s eye perspective, it shows the immense Kern River Oil Field in the San Joaquin Valley, the Placerita and Aliso Canyon Oil Fields in Santa Clarita, and the giant Inglewood Oil Field, which from this point of view become abstracted, coiling like oil spill through reality. Presented alongside these new works are the sculptures Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, and slows, which consist of large pieces of obsidian. The material is a type of volcanic glass produced from congealed magma during eruptions, and when you look into its seemingly depthless interior, you see why, historically, many cultures used it for divination.

With the show, I sought to contrast the dark vitality of these materials, from obsidian to coal and petroleum, with the colossal nuclear fusion of the sun: the celestial ignition for our planetary machinery. I wanted to suspend the visitor like a speck of dust in this cosmic sunbeam, revealing how light is not as immaterial as we believe. But rather show it as a topography, reaching from the silver lining of our exosphere to the deep carbon orbiting Earth’s core. It not only shines but sediments, registering in the strata much like a camera captures an image on a light-sensitive surface. It too is a photograph, opening portals to other places and times far beyond the present.

The Archive of Becoming by Jeremy Grier

photography - Jeremy Grier
styling - Julie Ragola
model - Quillian de Boeck @ Unit
hair - Nikki Providence
makeup - Yasmin Istanbouli @ The Wall Group
location - Thomas Mann House

Jan Gatewood: Attitude Becomes Form

interview by Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi 
photographs by Jan Gatewood

IKECHÚKWÚ ONYEWUENYI Can we talk about how the figures entered your work? 

JAN GATEWOOD My drawing practice aims to produce dynamic images that seamlessly employ abstraction, figuration, and text. My initial impulse to depict animals was primarily due to political and formal concerns I have within art making. I believed early on that abstraction alone wouldn't be enough for my practice. Additionally, I'm interested in the conversation of representation. I felt that if I depicted animal bodies in my work, it would allow many demographics to attach themselves to my practice and simultaneously create a viable way for me to explore my interest in materials.

ONYEWUENYI When you say abstraction is not enough, can you talk a little bit more about that? 

GATEWOOD I like to think that using abstraction, figuration, and text speaks to the complexities of the concepts embedded in my work and exposes more access points for the viewers. More simply put, I like to see if I can give something to everybody. Part of the fun of art making for me is the idea of the impossible. I like the difficulty of trying to make a balanced and exciting image using methods that may be at odds with one another. The difficulty of that task produces the possibility of making a visual language that's synonymous with—but not exclusive to—me.

ONYEWUENYI You mentioned being very systematic—how does that inform that first abstract impulse? Some abstract artists are very precise in how they apply the materials. Is there a rule for approaching this initial experimentation? 

GATEWOOD My drawings are materialized through resistance and a slightly chaotic system. That resistance is created through chemical reactions happening in and on top of paper. My abstractions are done with a range of materials including fabric dye, salt, bleach, glue, food, debris, etcetera. The figures present in my drawings are rendered using graphite, oil pastels, and oil sticks. Because the oil and water-based materials can't mix, I've created a system that allows me to do two things at once. So, in terms of my production process, there aren't too many strict rules but there are definitely consistent guidelines that I allow myself to explore.

ONYEWUENYI It almost seems like, compositionally, you are using the background to dictate what comes after.

GATEWOOD The initial mark-making informs the placement of the figure and subsequently the moves made towards the completion of the piece.

ONYEWUENYI The animals have a very ludic, playful quality about them, which makes me think of nursery rhymes. Talk to me a bit about some of these figures and what they mean to you. 

GATEWOOD Depicting animals is a solution for dealing with representational imagery in various ways. I'm weary of identity politics immediately dominating my work. Obviously my race, class, gender, etcetera, heavily inform my work, but I wanted to also make room for discussion about my ideas and how they're realized. I think a lot about humor, tone, and the importance of playfulness; working with storybook or childlike images helps me communicate that.

ONYEWUENYI I'm thinking of the instinct theme, and the role animals play in psychoanalysis. Looking at the case studies of Freud where maybe a kid is scared of a horse, but he's not really scared of the horse, it's tied to his sexuality or angst with his mom. Thinking about the images that we use or the symbols that we use, where do they lie in our subconscious? Can we even locate them? In relation to childhood nursery books—those images stay with us and never seem to leave. How does that connect with your work? 

GATEWOOD The possibilities of the viewers' psyche fascinates me, but my use of animals is more of a practical concern than an interest in, or knowledge of psychoanalysis. In addition to the reasons I touched on earlier, my use of animal imagery allows me to explore repetition and how it affects the understanding of an art practice as things progress.

ONYEWUENYI It also makes me think of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and his use of animals to comment about society. But I think with a lot of these animals, you come to it with your own perception and then when you see the work, you reinterpret that perception. It's kind of like this interesting hermeneutic. 

GATEWOOD Oh sick, I'm not familiar with that book. I'll have to check it out. With that being said, the viewer’s perception and their subjectivity is something I value and don't want to take for granted.

ONYEWUENYI Some of the animal subjects of your work are cute and some of them look quite menacing. There’s a book about cute aesthetics by Sianne Ngai, called Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012). She's making the claim that minor affects have such a big role in how we think about the world—the way we talk about things. I used to work at a buy, sell, trade store and these young high school girls would come in and they would say, “What do you think of this dress?” And one girl's like, “It's cute, but it's not cute. It's kind of cute.” With the repetition of the word, it's almost not landing on anything, but it's landed on something. And I think those minor affects are really how popular culture understands aesthetics. I mean, talking about aesthetics, it's very lofty—Heidegger and all these people talk about that shit. But for the common man, cute is a very important word. So, there’s something about the animals that reminds me of this idea of cute, but how it helps make sense of society, culture, what we think is desirable, or not, and whether or not we want to attach ourselves to something.

GATEWOOD That's a fun observation and example. Typically, I try to skillfully use attributes of cuteness and its relationship to desirability to balance a work and articulate the presence of multiplicity. Cuteness is a thin line for me, so I believe it's best to complicate it. For example, I might pair an image of a lamb with some gestures that could be read as "violent.” Of course, the idea wouldn't be to push any direct narrative, but to reiterate the importance of the viewer’s subjectivity.

ONYEWUENYI Another book is Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1980). The book talks about schizophrenia within culture, but one of the ideas is the idea of becoming. One of the points they drive home is “becoming-animal.” And that gets you towards this place of seeing we are all in this space, navigating the world, by committing to becoming or becoming human, becoming a woman, becoming an animal, you are opening yourself up to experiences that are different to yourself. It feels like there's some of that going on in your work. 

GATEWOOD Absolutely, I'm so glad you mentioned that. My 2022 show at Smart Objects titled Tiptoe Hassle was heavily informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of machines. Machines being a political concept designed to prioritize new ideas was really useful for me in terms of figuring out ways to comfortably push the ways I think about my own artistic production. I see that being connected to the “becoming” in several ways. One of which being the way that artworks actualize through their connections to the world. This inevitably involves a constant state of change and becoming. Embracing these changes leads to a greater self awareness, which is a material I'm focused on harnessing more in my work.

ONYEWUENYI You know, one of my classmates back in New York, he's doing a PhD in architecture at Princeton. He sent me this essay by Guattari where he talks about how we all have impulses, but what does it mean to celebrate them and actually let them be? What does it mean to create a society that allows space for different impulses? And Guattari was part of this group of French psychoanalysts who created this community for folks with different mental abilities and disabilities. Everyone in the hospital, from doctors to patients to staff, wore the same thing. And the patients have free reign to move around the premises. It was a way to welcome impulse through movement and activity, and not create these hierarchies. I have a brother-in-law who has schizophrenia, and he has these delusions and visions that are so real to him. But within our capitalist society, his visions are very anti-capitalist because they don’t operate towards this sense of labor and production. But what if we made space for his world? What would that look like? 

GATEWOOD There's a lot of beauty in that concept, it's cool to hear that empathetic action came from their thoughts. I'm curious to know more about how that affected patients. I find so much beauty in the idealism that art, language, and philosophy can occasionally actualize. Maybe that optimism is one of the reasons why so many of us dedicate ourselves to the aforementioned.

ONYEWUENYI You mentioned that you don't personally want to be read in the work, but how is the work a kind of self-fashioning? 

GATEWOOD In my drawings, for the most part, I actively remove anything that alludes to my physical appearance, in part because of issues I had to resolve internally around creating images of black people that will be bought and sold. I wanted to disperse my image on my terms and use it to heighten my practice. My past two solo exhibitions have had hundreds of free artworks all using a selfie I took. The intention was to make sure my image is linked to a specific part of my practice, make commentary on exhibition length, and gesture toward generosity. Perhaps it's about autonomy, perhaps it's about control. I'm still finding the language.

John Waters & Gregg Araki in Conversation

Disdain for authority, wide open sexual fluidity and addiction, homicidal mania, perversion, bodily secretions, religious blasphemy, bestiality, incest, and pedophilia—John Waters and Gregg Araki’s pornographically electric gems of silver screen beauty have forever changed the cinematic medium. In the fall of 2023, John Waters will see his first comprehensive directorial retrospective at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Pope Of Trash will have costumes, props, handwritten scripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, film clips, and more. At the same museum, Araki will present the world premiere of his newly restored queer classic Nowhere (1997), alongside Totally F***ed Up (1993) and The Doom Generation (1995), which comprise what became known as his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. In this historic, career-spanning conversation, Waters and Araki discuss their lifetime of celluloid perversions.

JOHN WATERS I'm against instinct. Do you know why? I resent that I have to take a shit every day. I resent that I didn't think up sex, but I have to do it. Anything that isn't my idea that I have to do, I hate. But it’s amazing that some people think they have invented things.

ARAKI I feel like you did invent things. That's why, to me John, you're like the North Star. You're the OG one, right? I mean, there were obviously underground, experimental filmmakers before you, like Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren, and all that stuff, but you brought it all together. I feel super fortunate. In the age that I was born, there was punk rock music, New Wave music, Queer culture, Sundance, and indie cinema. Everything in my career, all the films I've made, have lined up with this timeline of the rise of indie cinema. I was just basically in the right place at the right time. But you're about ten years ahead of me.

WATERS I know, but still, I lived in Baltimore. You lived in LA where you could see these movies. I just read about them from Jonas Mekas’s column, or we'd go to New York and see them. But I saw Jean Genet movies, Kenneth Anger (like his first film Fireworks [1947]), the Kuchar Brothers, and Warhol. Certainly Warhol. At the same time, I was watching Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis movies.

ARAKI For my generation—filmmakers like Christine Vachon, Richard Linklater, Allison Anders, Gus Van Sant—it felt like a high school class. There were Sundance and independent distributors. There was a structure for indie cinema that existed in those days that was sort of growing as we were all making movies, and we were all growing as filmmakers. But you were kind of before all that, you know what I mean?

WATERS Underground cinema was really non-theatrical except for the main three cities. Where you went is the college market and it was huge. That's where people went to see my movies. We toured college markets everywhere.

ARAKI I remember seeing them. They used to show them on 16mm.

WATERS …And I'd come out and Divine would throw dead fish in the audience and a fake cop would come on stage and bust us, and Divine would strangle him, and the movie would start. We had a vaudeville act.

ARAKI So, American indie cinema didn't exist before.

WATERS The way it existed was The Film-Makers' Cooperative, which was founded by Jonas Mekas. But there were way less places to play.

ARAKI And also way less populous. Do you know what I mean? I remember seeing Kenneth Anger in an experimental film class when I was an undergrad. It was very underground, but it didn't have that element of entertainment and comedy. It didn't have what you brought to it, you know, the vaudevillian. (laughs)

WATERS Really, I made exploitation films for art theaters. And there wasn't any such thing as that really.

ARAKI As I said, you were the North Star. You were the one that paved the way for everybody.

WATERS Well, that's very sweet. I was a mudslide ahead of you. (laughs)

ARAKI (laughs) I mean, it's real. Your significance in that world is never to be questioned. I was always in the right place at the right time, but you were even more in the right place.

WATERS No, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time! I still am. I still live in Baltimore. If I had ever moved to LA it would've been the worst thing for my career because they would've gotten used to me. And then when I’d go pitch a movie, they’d say, “Oh, we'll see him at a party next week.”

ARAKI But you were there for everything. You went right to Studio 54, right? Like with Halston and all those people?

WATERS I hated Studio 54. No, we made fun of that. We were at the Mudd Club. We hated disco. No, I couldn't stand Halston, actually. And he had the worst boyfriend ever. He was too much of a pissy old queen. I was at the Mudd Club, I was at Area. We couldn’t get into Studio 54.

ARAKI I remember you telling me that you were at the first Sex Pistols concert.

WATERS I saw the Sex Pistols in Manchester in London. Somebody took me before they even came to America—before I'd ever heard of punk. And when I saw them, I thought, oh my god. Divine saw the punk girl, Jordan—with her spikes and everything—and said he felt like Plain Jane for the first time ever.

ARAKI As I said, you were literally always at the right place—the epicenter of everything.

JOHN WATERS And now here we are, Gregg. Who would have ever thought that we would be together talking about being in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures?

ARAKI It's fucking nuts, right? (laughs)

WATERS (laughs) It gives hope to everybody.

ARAKI It's like when I got into Cannes for the first time—I was in The Directors' Fortnight with Smiley Face (2007) and then Cannes proper for Kaboom (2010). If you're around long enough, eventually they open the doors.

WATERS Cannes was always great to me too. Are you kidding? They always like nutcase American film directors. The only thing I could think of that's up there for me along with this Academy Museum show was when I was on the jury at Cannes with Jeanne Moreau. Now how did that ever happen? That was pretty amazing.

ARAKI Were you on the real jury?

WATERS Yeah. The competition jury.

ARAKI Jesus. That’s crazy.

WATERS Yeah. It was exciting. Black tie every night. Being with Jeanne Moreau, who chain-smoked and had a hundred pairs of sunglasses, I said, “It’s so sad that [Michelangelo] Antonioni can't talk anymore.” And she said, “Why? He never said anything anyway.”

ARAKI That's fucking hilarious. So, we should talk about your grand exhibition opening in the fall?

WATERS My directorial exhibition.

ARAKI Wait, directorial?

WATERS It’s really everything about my movies. It has nothing to do with anything else. And they've been working on it for three years. Everything they got from film archives, and they went, and found every crew member, props, handwritten things, costumes, everything. It's really exciting though, and I get to see it before I'm dead. It's really good.

ARAKI So, there’s nothing from your personal collection?

WATERS No, it has nothing to do with my artwork at all. I don't have one thing in my house about my movies. There's nothing in my career hanging around. There are some things in my office, but most of it is at the Cinema Archives at Wesleyan, which started in the 80s. So, it's the most glamorous storage ever. They also have Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Ingrid Bergman’s archives. I met Clint Eastwood there and I said, “Just think, Divine's fake pubic hair will be next to Dirty Harry's badge.” And he was really great about it and laughed and everything.

ARAKI So, who's curating it then?

WATERS Dara Jaffe and Jenny He have spent three years on this. There's a beautiful catalog. There’s lots of stuff going on with it. So, they've been everywhere. They've done an absolutely amazing job. They know more about me than I do.

ARAKI I haven't seen you for a while. When was the last time I saw you?

WATERS I don't know, but I was looking through my research about you, and I love the fact that Roger Ebert was mean to you too. He used to do these horrible reviews, and then say to me, “Hi, John! Would you do my panel?” And I thought, “I’m a professional, but am I a masochist?” And I did it, because he did one great thing, he wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which is one of the best satires that was ever known to man! And he wrote that because he likes big tits! But thinking of that “thumbs up” and “thumbs down,” how tired was that? I was nice to him always, and he was always so mean to me, and I was happy to see he was mean to you too. (laughs)

ARAKI Well, was he ever a fan of anything?

WATERS No! He wrote once about Pink Flamingos, kind of like, it wasn't for him, but it was recognizing its power. But then, he wrote mean stuff about it over and over every other time. I don't remember if he ever gave us a good review, but especially in all my Hollywood movies, he was really mean. And then, I'd see him and he’d go, “Hi, John!” We were very nice to each other and everything, but that is being a pro.

ARAKI It's part of Hollywood.

WATERS I was never angry. I was treated fairly my whole life in Hollywood. I love that documentary—when Janice Joplin, after she became a star, went back to her high school reunion because they were so mean to her. They were still mean to her, even though she was famous. (laughs) So that’s the thing, don't go back to your high school reunion. I've never been to mine once.

ARAKI But wait, were you in the book? Doom Generation was in his book, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie (2000), which was his list of the worst movies ever made. Were you in that book too?

WATERS But at least we weren't on the most mediocre list. I love being the worst and the best. It's the middle I've always had trouble with my whole life.

ARAKI Well, I told you he loved Mysterious Skin (2004). It was so crazy. His review was literally like I had never directed anything before. He didn't mention anything I'd ever done before.

WATERS Is that the only novel you actually adapted?

ARAKI It's the only novel, Yeah.

WATERS So, do you think he liked it because it was based on a novel?

ARAKI Mysterious Skin was a weird movie because a lot of people who hate me, love that movie (laughs). It was kind of like the movie that everybody loves because it was about such a serious subject matter. But it's funny, when I made it, I really thought it was going to be the end of my career. I really thought this movie was just so out there—I mean, I've always been so polarizing—but I thought people were going to run me out of town.

WATERS But then, didn't you always think all your films would be hits? I did. I was always amazed when they weren't (laughs). I always wanted them to be. I never thought: I’m making this arty little weird movie.

ARAKI When we were touring with the revival of Doom Generation, I told the audience, it's just so meaningful to me and James [Duval] that the love for this movie exists twenty-eight years later, you know? We always loved this movie—this little queer fuckin’ underground crazy movie. But it's like the idea that other people love it and they keep the fire burning for it for decades.

WATERS And it’s no old hat to the next generation, which usually things are.

ARAKI It's amazing. It’s definitely what keeps us going: the idea that we just march to our own drummer, and do our own thing. And you know, I think you have to be a little bit crazy to be a filmmaker.

WATERS I knew about you from the gay punk scene. That's how I first knew about you. And I feel the most comfortable in the punk world. Those are my people because there are ten good queers there that I like. And they're always on the down low in the punk world anyway. When I first saw your films, you were one of the first “gay is not enough” filmmakers who I really like.

ARAKI I told you that's where the Doom Generation came from. The producer, Jim Stark, came up to me and said, “If you can make me a heterosexual movie, I'll get you a million dollars in financing for it.” The Living End (1992) and Totally Fucked Up (1993) were made for twenty grand or whatever. So, he was like, “You make these gay movies that gay people hate (laughs). They're too punk for gay people. If you do a heterosexual movie, I'll get you a real budget for it.” I remember The Living End, especially, was triggering for so many gay people. And I wrote Doom Generation in my sort of punky way of making it the queerest heterosexual movie ever with this really exaggerated queer subtext to it.

WATERS But now, it's so different. There’s that really cute DJ Diplo that said, “Well, I’m not not gay.” And because you had a girlfriend that you got a lot of shit about, you can say, “I'm not not straight.”

ARAKI (laughs) Yeah. And when I was dating a woman in the mid-90s…

WATERS It was so hilarious that you got shit—I gave you so much shit.

ARAKI You said, “He just went in.” (laughs)

WATERS That was the most radical thing you can do. And I keep saying, “What stunt am I going to do for my 80th birthday?” I hitchhiked across the country in my sixties. I took acid in my seventies. Maybe I’ll turn straight in my eighties.

ARAKI That was probably one of the most scandalous things ever because I had been known as this Queer New Wave filmmaker. And I remember being on the Sundance jury in 1996—I was there with Kathleen [Robertson], and we were stupid, and young, and in love, and were making out at every party. People’s jaws were literally dropping. It was crazy.

WATERS (laughs) I think it's great because people give you shit about it, which really makes me laugh that you can come out of the closet, but can you go in and out, in and out? Can't it be a revolving door? You're lucky. Everybody's cute. I wish I was bisexual. But I'm interested in what the young people are doing. As soon as you say, “Oh, we had more fun [than today’s youth] when we were young,” that means you're an old fart and don't matter anymore (laughs). Because they're having just as much fun right now.

ARAKI Are they?

WATERS Yeah, they are. Oh yeah.

ARAKI I hope so.

WATERS They're having just as much fun and they're scandalizing us with a new sexual revolution.

ARAKI I hope you're right. I am actually concerned about the newer generation in the sense that they aren't having sex anymore. There’s too much social media and texting.

WATERS They don't have any parts anymore to have sex with! They can't figure out where it goes, which is real anarchy. Like, you go home with somebody now, they take off their clothes, and you have no idea what's going to be underneath there.

ARAKI (Laughs) Yeah. I love that. It's really interesting when we've been doing these Doom Generation screenings, I just expect it to be a nostalgia trip, but at least half the audience, sometimes 85%, is all young people.

WATERS I know. Me too. That's great, Gregg, do you know how hard that is to get?

ARAKI It's amazing to me.

WATERS No, it's the ultimate compliment.

ARAKI Like, how do you even know about this movie? You weren't even born! Your parents weren’t born.

WATERS (Laughs) They weren't born when I made my last movie, much less the first one. I just did a tour in Paris for my book, and little 20-year-old French kids gave me poetry books they had written about me. It was amazing and incredibly exciting. If you're a director, you always have to go with your movies. You have to meet the ticket buyers. I always believe you have to be out there involved in the selling of it. I know you don't like to travel, but I have a fear of not flying.

ARAKI Yeah, I know we've talked about that. I'm not a big traveler, but I do it. But you're afraid to not be touring everywhere.

WATERS I am. Because Elton John told me, and it's true, “Once you stop touring, it's over.” And you can't blink either, because somebody's ready to steal your place, Gregg! Remember that—somebody in LA is trying to steal your place.

ARAKI But didn't Elton John just stop touring?

WATERS Yeah, but he didn't say he was never performing again. He just wasn’t going to do 150 shows a year. (laughs) Do you know who tours the most? My idol, the mentalist, The Amazing Kreskin. He plays 300 nightclub gigs a year, and he must be 85. I have him in my book under A. I just call him Amazing. What a great career.

ARAKI Did you see the Joan Rivers documentary? That’s how she was too.

WATERS I think either one of us, wherever we had been born or lived, we would do the same thing. We would kind of glorify what's going on in the city that some people are against. We would praise what others put down. LA is very much a character in your movies, but in a good way, in an exciting way. You're not going to meet the cheesy sitcom stars, or if you are, something bad happens to 'em. And the characters are always sexy. People jerk off to Gregg's movies, nobody jerks off to mine. And I think that's important, Gregg. I honor you for that.

ARAKI (laughs) I remember when Now Apocalypse (2019), my Starz show premiered, somebody took a screencap of them watching the show on an iPad and jerking off at the same time. (laughs)

WATERS I had the guy with a singing asshole—who's a straight guy by the way—tell me it was a yoga exercise and he said, “Would you like me to audition?” I said, “I believe you. No, that's okay.”

ARAKI (laughs) But yeah, it's very true that Los Angeles is a huge part of my movies and a huge inspiration for me. I remember when I was in film school somebody said to me, “Living in LA is like being inside a giant cartoon.” You know what I mean? And that's why I love it here, that it's so surreal and you just see the craziest shit. One of the things I love about LA is people just don't care. You can walk around naked with a chicken head on and people won't blink twice because it's LA. Whereas in Santa Barbara, or Goleta where I was born, which is a suburb of Santa Barbara, if you have an earring or something and walk into a restaurant, people stare at you. You hate it here because it's the center of Hollywood.

WATERS I don't hate it because it's the center of Hollywood. I hate it because it's suburban. I don't hate LA. I have some of my greatest friends there. When things are going well, LA is so fabulous. When they aren't, it can be terrible for me. When things go bad in your career, it's kind of the worst place for me to be. In Baltimore, no one's in show business that much. I have trouble in LA ever meeting anybody that isn't in show business. But I've had some of the best times in my life in LA. My movies do well there. You can read my book, Mr. Know-It-All (2019): I'm not bitter about one thing. Hollywood treated me fairly from the beginning to the end. I climbed my way to the top and climbed right back down.

ARAKI But the question is, did you treat Hollywood fairly? (laughs)

WATERS No! They'd say. Because the executives that greenlit my movies—they liked them twenty years later, but they didn't make money then, and they got fired. They don't care if people like it twenty years later; they get to greenlight three movies a year and they better be hits.

ARAKI Did you self-finance your first movies or how did you make your first movie?

WATERS Well, I borrowed it. I raised the money all the way up to Polyester (1981). I raised the money and paid everybody back. So everybody that I ever knew personally got their money back from me and still gets their money. Even when they die, I give their kids money. The studios didn't always pay them back. Luckily, I own Pink Flamingos. I own all my movies up until Polyester. But who would ever imagine that Warner Brothers would be the distributor of Desperate Living (1970)? Who would have ever thought that Janus Films would distribute Multiple Maniacs (1970)? I used to see the Janus Films logo ahead of [Ingmar] Bergman and [François] Truffaut films.

ARAKI That's where you belong, you know, in Criterion and Janus Films along with the Battleship Potemkin (1925).

WATERS When I was starting with Fine Line, which was the arty part of New Line, they made up Saliva Films, which I hated. That was to avoid police prosecution for Pink Flamingos.

ARAKI As I said, you kind of have to be a little bit crazy to be a filmmaker or an interesting filmmaker. You really just have to believe in what your vision is.

WATERS I didn't have any idea what I was doing! You went to film school. The first movie I made was Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964). It's very Dogma 95 without realizing it. I didn't know there was editing. I just shot each scene of the movie in order and that was the movie.

ARAKI (laughs) You have to believe in your own voice. I just have a very myopic view of what I do. I collaborate, I listen to people, and I listen to the DP or actors, if someone has an idea or something, but for the most part, I just have a vision. It’s almost like a mental illness; it’s like, yeah, this is what I'm gonna do.

WATERS Exactly. That's the only way anybody gets their first movie made. You don't even consider that you can't make this movie. People say later, “Did you have fun making that movie?.” Fun? Fun is when it's a hit and you're having a drink two years later. Fun? Being outside for those early movies—outside for twenty-hour days—you want something to eat? Go into the woods, find it, kill it, and cook it.

ARAKI I have to say, in retrospect, I had fun. I have super fond memories.

WATERS I'm proud of it in retrospect, but not fun. Like, haha, lalala, isn't this fun?

ARAKI In the moment, I'm not having fun. Because it's so stressful. It's so much work and you're just so focused, but in retrospect, I look back on it as a really warm memory. I mean, we're lucky, we've gotten to make a handful of movies. And each one, they're like my kids.

WATERS Yeah, and you can't pick your favorite. I always like the one that did the worst. You have to just stick up for the one that has a problem.

ARAKI (laughs) You like the one that's neglected, you know what I mean? Like the real popular one, the one that's super successful, it's just like, oh yeah, that one. But then, there's the one that has the problems.

WATERS Yours are very different. To me, all my movies are sort of exactly the same. They have one moral: don't judge other people, make the people you don’t agree with laugh, and then they'll listen.

ARAKI Is that the overriding theme? The overriding themes are not that different for my movies then, I would say.

WATERS No, I disagree. Your movies have the same joy in it. What you're saying is that people who don't rebel by the time they're twenty, usually have a very dull life. The prom queens and the football stars, it's downhill from the day they graduate. It really is. You see them later and you think, oh my god. I’m also against homeschooling. I think that's crazy too. You have to learn how to get through it. That's how you learn to do everything. And I always used humor. The people that would have beat me up didn't, because I could make them laugh at authority, which made me safe. You can't tell your children to just go make fun of the teachers and the kids won't beat you up. But it does work.

ARAKI Well, neither of us has real kids. We just have celluloid kids.

WATERS I like kids. And they come over to me now because I was in the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. I look like a child molester, so it's awkward in airports. But if we had to make our movies today, I guess we’d have an intimacy expert telling Divine that it's okay to be fucked by a lobster. (laughs)

ARAKI You'd have an intimacy coordinator telling the guy with the singing asshole that it’s okay.

WATERS Divine would drink her own urine rather than eat dog shit in a more Hindu, kind of politically correct, way.

ARAKI I don't think my films would change really at all. The only issue is social media. When I made my TV show in 2018, one of the issues is so much of the fucking movie is texting, and on a device—so many inserts of texting.

WATERS That's a whole other third unit.

ARAKI Story-wise, and script-wise, it's such a pain in the ass. I'm working on one thing now and I'm just setting it in the 90s, so you don't have to deal with that device.

WATERS Even though I was a chain-smoker, I never had anybody smoke cigarettes in my movies because of continuity problems. If you ever wanted to cut to make a scene shorter, then their cigarette is half-smoked in one second. Or don’t have people yawn in a movie, because then the audience does, or look at their watch. If people are yawning or looking at their watch while they're watching your movie, that means it's boring.

ARAKI Those are good rules. You should put those in a rule book.

WATERS Also, don't ever say the word “cult” in Hollywood when you’re trying to raise money. That means ten smart people liked it and you’ve lost the entire budget. My advice is to go see every movie. Watch it without the sound and you can really tell how it's made and see the ones that work and what didn't work. Read Variety every day—you have to learn the business and see everything. And two people have to like it besides the person you're fucking and your mother.

ARAKI I'm taking that advice.

WATERS And if you ever think you should cut a scene, you should because all movies are too long.

ARAKI I’m currently remastering Doom Generation, again, re-mastering Nowhere—both those movies are like 82, or 83 minutes.

WATERS That's perfect.

ARAKI Remember, John, this isn't the first time we met. I remember winning the Filmmaker on the Edge Award at Provincetown for Mysterious Skin, in like 2004. And you presented the award. Backstage you were like, “Oh, you know, Mysterious Skin is great, but I really miss the old-school Gregg Araki movies.” Kaboom was one of the ideas I was working on at that time and that comment was just lodged in my brain. And Kaboom was very much inspired by what you said to me.

WATERS Oh, don’t pay attention to anything I say. Take it like a bad note from the studio.

ARAKI Kaboom is all my themes and motifs—almost like my greatest hits, like every movie I've ever done—rolled up into one.

WATERS Are your parents alive?

ARAKI Yes, both of them.

WATERS Have you sat with them and watched your movies?

ARAKI I have not. Particularly with The Living End, I was like, do NOT see this movie.

WATERS Me too, but then they feel like they have to.

ARAKI My family is super supportive and they've always supported me, and it’s amazing.

WATERS Mine too, but my father once said, “It was fun. I hope I never see it again.” And that was the best blurb.

ARAKI One time my parents actually drove to Los Angeles and watched The Living End at the The Regent Showcase on La Brea. It was a matinee screening. I told them specifically not to watch it. And the theater manager told my mom, “Ma'am, I think you're in the wrong theater.” (laughs) My mom told him, “No, no, I wanna see it.” Thinking about my parents watching my movies, I could never make my movies. You know what I mean?

WATERS The reason people like our movies is because they know their own parents would be horrified.

ARAKI It's a parent-free zone, you know, and you could just express all the craziest shit you want.

WATERS I filmed Multiple Maniacs on my parent's front lawn. You know, “the cavalcade of perversion!” They were very accepting. They were horrified, but I think they figured, what else could I do? Really? What else could I do? Hag In A Black Leather Jacket. For that movie, my grandmother gave me the camera.

ARAKI Was it a Bolex?

WATERS No, it was a little Brownie! A Bolex, are you kidding? This was a little Brownie—an 8mm camera. And I shot it on the roof of my parent's house. It's a Ku Klux Klan man marrying a white woman and a black man. I don't know what I was thinking about, but it was very influenced by the Theatre of the Ridiculous at the time. That's what I would say was the big influence. It was 15 minutes long and it showed once in a beatnik coffee house.

ARAKI Do kids have that now?

WATERS Well, it would be online, it would be on the phone. It's a whole different way. We don't care, you know, phones look better. You can't see the mistakes (laughs). Who wants to see Hag In A Black Leather Jacket in 70mm? You know? I guess that would be a new experience.

ARAKI Or IMAX.

WATERS Yeah, exactly. I saw Jackass in IMAX, the last one, and I never saw someone's balls that big in pain on a screen. Well, it was great talking to you, Gregg. I'll see you at the Academy Museum this fall. I'll see you at dinner.

ARAKI Thank you, John, for doing this. I know you're so busy.

WATERS All right. Toodle-oo.

Metamorphosis by Parker Woods & Julie Ragolia

photography by Parker Woods
styling by Julie Ragolia
modeling by Samu @ Tomorrow Is Another Day
casting direction by Ben Grimes
hair by Jacob Kajrup
makeup by Erin Green

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Martine Syms

text by Estelle Hoy
photographs by Kennedi Carter
styling by Julie Ragolia
styling assistance by Kaylee Gibson

Martine Syms
Belief Strategy XVI (2023)
Wood, screws, glue, paint, glass jar and mixed currency
96 × 192 inches
© Martine Syms
Courtesy Sprüth Magers
Photo: Robert Wedemeye

She’d Do Well to Drown
Loser Back Home
Martine Syms (*1988, Los Angeles) 
June 2-August 26, 2023
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles 

“Why can’t I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.”― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

There’s something quite arbitrary about the idea of home, but to the degree that this arbitrariness is the shape of the space we inhabit, which looks very logical, even matter-of-course. Mostly ideas that appear ‘matter-of-course’ to our contemporaries are how we know something instinctually lunatic is going on. Refusing to fuck-up the Altadena census, lavishing endless attention to detail on surface proportions as if a building or space were an occasion for plausibility, is California-based artist Martine Syms; her magnificence of diction through video, performance, publishing, and installation makes clear what we already know to be true; home is a privilege for some. It’s depressing. Our actions are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature that reveal elements of our deepest laws associated with shape, place, belonging, possession, and their every supine iteration. Survey polls are for fucking losers, (usually) white (always) men who believe there’s a semblance of consensus in a census. Systematically acquiring information about where and how we live is an archaic, utilitarian convention that collects the artistic façade of space and time. Displaced people cannot form a viable, representative sample of a hometown if they’re not there to check a box to begin with. It’s a small mess.

Through the halitosis stink of white men holding purple clipboards with transparently unlikely answers, Martine Syms issues a rule change that might restore the mental stability of those excommunicated physically and psychologically. In Loser Back Home, her first solo show at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, Syms premieres her latest works in video, sculpture, painting, and photography, collating data about dysplacement—a term extemporized by American historian and Black rights activist Barbara Fields. In her effectual theory of Dysplacement, Fields disses the destruction of place and loss of collective connection to one’s familiar home or country. Discovery more than invention. It’s what people fear the most. On the plane to Los Angeles to see the exhibition, my skittish, certifiable neighbor, with a considerable lack of wit, clutched onto a golden sea captain’s compass as though the pilot were a dodgy taxi driver trying to run up the meter. After stifling laughter for several minutes, I realized the integrity of this atypical picture and its pseudo-Syms condition. In histrionic effect, my madcap neighbor painted an image of a hyper-simplified, formalist action of the absolute human need for directions home; not merely abstract signs, words, or figures but immediate, tangible hints that we belong somewhere. The lunacy was, in fact, my own. 

But I am starved; to hell with his suffering! Where’s the Jatz crackers? 

Exerting pressure on artificial skies, Syms airs This Is A Studio (2023), presenting surveillance footage (black and white, no less) capturing a late-night visit from police wearing starched tactical uniforms, a holstered Glock 22 here and there. The small problem with police visiting at 3am, crumbed in Dunkin’ Donuts, and a yeast infection, is that it’s fucking terrifying because American cops are pretty racist and can’t work a safety lock, ostensibly. Ugh, everyone is disappointing. Syms expands on the instinct of disapproval by clustering images of mundane, routine home-life banalities on a laser-cut cardboard box, inside which the surveillance tape is playing—from the inside. Routine living breeds ‘routine’ checks, don’t you know? Trespassing is one fine pursuit. Sticky orange PVC tape wraps around the carton, depicting the words double penetration, notarizing the comprehensive way that constitutional rights are so casually perforated for Black people. Or if you are Black and poor, you’re double fucked. It is here at level orange (orange is the new black…for people of color, at least) that Syms takes the point of biological stratum, using the epidermis as a sensitive point of contact, an interface between the conscious self and the infinite emission (or omission) of racial signifiers. Whether or not you have title deeds to your art studio is inconsequential to LAPD because they mostly can’t read. In 2.10 minute loop-de-loops of supplanting ambition and a trigger-happy corporeal punishment, sorry, I mean police corporeal, This Is A Studio (2023) dislocates in a kind of socio-aesthetic diphthong: This Is THEIR Studio (1457-present). Here is where primacy enters. There is a vaguely held belief that being the first to an idea or place gives you property rights. This is the gold rush model. If you can get there before others, you can stake a claim; if you can prove it, we might recognize it. Exceptttt if you’re Black, or Brown, or colored or.... ; We also might just want your house and hand-on-heart willing to dial 911 as many times as necessary with falsified home intrusion reports and A.I.-generated security alarms. Home rights are an elaborate, Machiavellian charade, and sadly, we know the whole, unscrupulous plan; the entire goddam fantasy is fundamentally flawed. Cognitariat Martine Syms will have to be very careful about how she continues to noose that videotape to shape her studio image. Persistence isn’t always safe. 

Here the idealist vision is turned upside down, wrapped in images of excavated trips to Palma de Majorca and a calorie-counting, S'Aramador sand-dusted ass that's never had mascarpone in its life. This unexaggerated prognosis of delusional dialectic opposition pursues a social treatise in i am wise to die things go (2023, 13:73 minutes, looped video). A split-screen depicts a desperate, pacing woman under punishing sunlight, her rising sign in Pisces, trying to avoid boring, ugly people as she seeks to return to a neverland of milk and honey (aka Mallorquin vermouth and a Soho House membership)–avoiding boring people is wise, just quietly. All sorts of utopian collective dreams spill from her mouth: Was Jeffrey Epstein murdered? Heading toward morphogenic eden with all her judicious schizoid traits, the actor, in singular breath and sneering cosmic rhythm, searches with the utmost intensity of the mutation underway. Syms wants to question the assumption that home is passive and purely receptive while dysplacement implies budding creation and transitional stimulation. A falsified view that insensibly actions   emancipation and secure reception for some types of people and pathological rearrangement for others. Inasmuch, West Hollywood viewers of i am wise to die things go are exhausted of their human 'reason,' as Syms frenetically implores us to consider the deficit disorders of piecemeal displacement. Locked in a pink green-screen like a screwy, art-world Truman Show, our schizoid plaintiff perspires toward a quixotic paradise that doesn't exist. 

Martine Syms
i am wise enough to die things go (2023) (still)
Single-channel video, color, with sound
13:73 mins, looped
© Martine Syms
Courtesy Sprüth Magers

But I am boreedddd; to hell with her suffering! Where’s the 6th Street Metro from here?

The whole social proxemics of the artist's existence fight the gallery walls upstairs, an extensive photo collage of laser-cut sculptures and images from quotidian life: camel-colored commercial moving boxes, Whole Foods shopping bags in limoncello, proselytizing signs by salty desert-dwelling Mormons, and striped vacation-y garden chairs with their view of a thicket. Dream about the forrest fingering me from both ends (2023)—an ambition we all share—is an installation composing simple circadian pleasures of finger fucking in peaceful, scenic symbiosis. Or maybe Syms just had a Prozac crash. Either way, she is deactivating the carnal distance between individual reality and the rhythmic desire for a safe, nurturing environment surrounding a person. Triggering psychopharmaceutical socio-environmental and cultural devastations whose traces are found in the room, Syms chases a King-sized future-present we can all cream into. I had a dream! The primary source of existential stress is the competition for safety and home, and its accompanying epidemic symptoms are experiential misery, panic, SSRI-resistant angst, loneliness, and the constant desire for normalcy. A differential diagnosis: fear. In Martine Syms's solo show or Prozac-crash, the violence of suffering no longer concerns an uninsured minority, but involves the majority of weird, boring, ugly, insufferable people, which is to say you.  

She’s very pushy. 

Octavia E. Butler shits on the general majority in Parable of the Sower, a fucking lachrymose, dystopic book in which a Black protagonist, the hyper-empathetic Lauren Olamina, is forced to leave her home to find a home: They (the colonizers) have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it. It doesn’t matter which dismal character said it, her Baptist preacher father or possibly herself; the point is that it’s said. Picking up power in Loser Back Home, Syms hurries to analyze whole clusters of socio-historical and procedural fallacy, dysplacing assumptive ideas we fail to examine because we might have the luxury of a quiet forest finger-fuck and think nothing of it. For real. Some people’s anxiety about home is never tested. However many personalities you have, whatever color your excoriating skin, it is your human fucking right to know a deep sense of belonging to place, country, and community. Connecting to the enduring desire for place shows up through all sorts of freaky iterations: clammy compasses on long-haul flights, cumming on all fours from a Californian date palm; making videos in your art studio without being cased; endeavoring to live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world. Dysplacment as merely another piece of art-world weather becomes something bold, honest, hopeful, and genuinely communal in Loser Back Home, inviting us all to drown social wrongs that do or don’t directly affect us; you know, stop ignoring the obvious. 

“Oh, you arrived!” says Martine Syms, forest branch in hand, drowned in warm coital fluid; "I didn't think you were coming.” 

The Perversion of Self-Preservation

text by Oliver Misraje

War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.

—Filippo Marinetti

Picture this: 20th century Italian poet and father of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at an anonymous but grandiose convention center in 21st-century Abu Dhabi. Behind him are a neat procession of dildos of mass destruction: bombs and rockets erect with potential energy. Tar and rubber fumes waft off the newly minted aluminum heaven. Marinnetti is the appointed speaker for the International Defense Exhibition (IDEX) commencement. Sporting a bow tie and a foreboding mustache, he looks like a fascist Pee-wee Herman when he declares, “WAR IS THE HYGIENE OF THE WORLD.” And what a fitting environment for such a declaration—the AC on full blast, the shiny new guns on display, the sales associates for Lockheed Martin, sharply dressed and lint-free. Some dress for continental breakfasts, others for total annihilation (says my editor). And it’s true. Syria is only a day’s drive Northwest up the Arabian Peninsula, where these newly minted aluminum heaven bombs will be dropped, but not before being sold here.

In this scenario I imagine Marinetti is on a press tour for his newly published manifesto, Il Futurismo, where he, in so many words, argues that war is the final and only high-art. Like most closeted homosexuals, Marinetti suffered from melodrama and a misdirected hatred of women.  Compare the libido of an obviously closeted Italian man to that of an unarmed hand grenade and you’ll find they have a lot more in common.

Some keystone points from his manifesto:

• We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideals which kill, and contempt for women.

• We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and blow with the fist.

• Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!

Marinetti, who served in the Eighth Italian Army during the Battle of Stalingrad, died of a heart attack at only sixty-four, in October of 1943. On his deathbed he wrote to Mussolini: “My cardiac condition (a degenerative pulmonary edema) that I contracted in four months of war on the Russian front, has withstood until now the lacerating pain of seeing the assassination of Italy, you, and Fascism… But I no longer have the strength to walk and eventually return to the battlefields…” Marinetti never made it to Valhalla. 

Like Marinetti, I also seek to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the absurd, in this case, the unfathomable reservoir of the absurd is IDEX. Marinetti is dead and I am not actually in Abu Dhabi, instead, I repurpose the experiences relayed to me by Berlin-based artists Roman Goebel and Jelka Von Langen whose photographic essay we are discussing on a Zoom call. But no creative liberties or leaps of my imagination could match the absurdity of some of the keystone points from IDEX:

IDEX Keystone Point #1

As a result of the war between Russia and Ukraine, global defense
spending is on the rise. NATO member states in particular are
increasing their military budgets substantially. This gives momentum to
the global arms industry, which showcased its newest capabilities over
the course of the five-day IDEX exhibition.

The war in Ukraine is not just profitable, but good. War spurs innovation. New and creative ways to kill each other. People are getting rich off the war. Take it a step further: the fresh influx of American arms sent to Ukraine are mysteriously appearing on the black market, fueling civil wars in the Congo. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari also reported American weapons sent to Ukraine have slipped into the Lake Chad Basin area. The same way grains of sand from the Sahara appear in Puerto Rico during hurricane season—war is a global ecosystem. At IDEX, however, Russia and Ukraine are in a competition to see who has sexier, blond-er escorts working their respective pavilions. Roman and Jelka suggest Russia is winning that war. 

IDEX Keystone Point #2

At IDEX 2023, $21  billion dollars worth of deals were signed.

How many dead civilians and foot soldiers do you think they’ll fit into twenty-one billion dollars? They are incentivized to maximize that number, but only to a certain degree. Because, after all, EMTs and medic technologies are also being sold at IDEX. There’s a Goldilocks sweet-spot. Kill everyone and you’re out of a job.  Kill no one and you’re also out of a job. The economy of the war machine is an ouroboros.

Pivotal to the conference experience is the gap between a weapon and its lived experience, made evident by a photograph of a woman in a gaudy Versace chain couture dress trying out a bazooka at the bazooka booth. I’ve noticed in Los Angeles, where I live, there’s a popular misconception that a fired gun makes a BANG, most likely arising from the prop guns used in Hollywood films. If you’ve ever witnessed a fired gun and the brief interval of silence that follows the smell of gunpowder, you know it actually makes a POP—a neat, efficient, compartmentalized, little pop that’s more akin to opening a champagne bottle than anything remotely connoting carnage or violence. In order to be sold, before a weapon is an object of death, it is something else. That something-elseness is usually sexual. Between the distance of the imagination of a weapon, its mechanized logistics and the lived experience, is an intrigue that borders on the erotic. For those at a shooting range for the first time, a common expression is “how good it feels in the hand.” To Roman, the grenades and missiles on display resemble sex toys of varying heights, suggesting that before a gun is a weapon it is a sex toy. The portraits of attendees also share a similar, vaguely erotic exuberance; their faces are a strange concoction of patriotism and glee that, in a different context, could be perceived as generalized horniness. At IDEX, the Disneyland of war plays itself out with a dazzling, if worn libido. With a softie, Marinetti says, Today, more than ever, art is not done but by those who do war. Worthy of glory nothing appears but the erect foreheads to rape Mystery, to challenge the monstrous temptresses of the Impossible. Only the asyntactic poet with loose words could penetrate the essence of matter and destroy the deaf hostility that separates it from us. Pasted on the terraformed backdrop, Abu Dhabi makes an ideal host city, because it can be nowhere and everywhere at once. Insert your desert landscape of choice (though I would have liked to see it in Los Angeles). It’s the same marketing strategies of the fashion industry: make the advertisement a mirror for the consumer to insert themselves. 

At a panel titled Drones Challenging the Future, Professor Dr. Gert-René Polli says: “I strongly believe that adapted and specialized unmanned aerial vehicles will increasingly become an indispensable tool for law enforcement, as well as for the intelligence community who will start using these technologies on the operational level and on a tactical level. Later, Lieutenant General Richard G. Moore Jr. announces that the U.S. military’s approach to artificial intelligence is more ethical than adversaries’ because of its roots in a Judeo-Christian society. Marinetti nods in agreement: Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed. 

After the panel, the crowd steps outside into blinding, scrutinizing sun to watch an aerial show. Marinetti knew how to have fun. At one point, afterall, he was a punk—a punk for the system; a fascist punk soldier, but a punk nonetheless. A high-speed jet shats out red tracer rounds, to which Marinetti shouts amidst a sound barrier torn to shreds, “Here is the very first sunrise on Earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword, which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.” Roman snaps a photograph and it is stunning.

IDEX Keystone Point #3

2023 marks the first year Israel opened a national pavilion at IDEX, showcasing more than sixty Israeli firms. The small nation had about as many firms there as China. 

It’s the first year Israel opened a national pavilion at IDEX, in the hopes of fostering relations with buyers in the Gulf. “There is a very big difference between a mistress and a real wife,” quipped General Ariel Karo, executive vice president for marketing and business development for Raphael, an Israeli defense firm that showcased its Iron Beam—a high-energy laser weapon—at IDEX. “Israel knows how to deal with the same threats, the same weapon systems, the same doctrines, the same capabilities of the other side, and… therefore, here the neighborhood is really, really eager to buy Israeli systems.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It will lead to the effective ending of the Israeli-Arab conflict—not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but the Israeli-Arab conflict.”  

PICTURE THIS: Marinetti giving his closing speech to the patrons and peddlers of IDEX. He stands on a soapbox, and thanks said patrons and peddlers for their valiant, unyielding dedication to war, the final high art. 

The representatives of Russia and Ukraine hold hands while he speaks; Biden and Xi-Jinping make out in the bathroom. Beauty exists only in struggle… He says as a red dot floats to the space between his brows. He raises his champagne glass and all the representatives of all the nations in the world raise theirs. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. BOOM. Marinneti’s final performance art, an MK22 opens his 3rd eye chakra, red splays over the crowd. Everyone claps and the curtains close. The husk of a man hits the ground with a dull thud.

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

Marinetti 

Harmony Korine: AGGRO DR1FT

“Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great.
Without it, you’d be dead.”

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All images: ©Harmony Korine Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Julian Cousin

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

A visionary filmmaker constantly challenges and reinvents the cinematic form—all while remaining true to the zeitgeist. For the past three decades, Harmony Korine has pushed the medium to its bleeding edge. Kids (1995) took us to New York City for a gritty, NC-17 portrait of urban youth in an ecstasy-fueled fantasy of teenage desire. In Gummo (1997), his directorial debut, Korine took us to a tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio where a socioeco-nomically devastated community resorts to satanism, prostitution, and stray cat poaching to survive. The film is a revelatory montage of vignettes using everything from 35mm film, to found footage, and presaged our cli-mate-ravaged future. Not since Victor Fleming's The Wizard Of Oz (1939) has a tornado seemed so darkly beautiful. In Trash Humpers (2009), a mockumentary shot on worn VHS, an elderly gang terrorizes a community in Nashville, Tennessee, and masturbates with garbage. At a Q & A after a screening, Korine presciently told the audience: "In the future, all documentaries will be lies." In the fall of 2023, Korine will unleash Aggro Drift, a movie about the world's greatest assassin, which was rendered in thermal heat-seeking imagery using Al and advanced gaming tech. Starring Jordi Mollà and rapper Travis Scott, the 80-minute hallucinatory experimentation was created by EDGLRD, Korine's Palm Beach-based video game studio and design collective. For his first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, AGGRESSIVE DR1FTER, (on view from September 15th, 2023 to January 14th, 2024), he has chosen stills from his latest film and recreated them with traditional painting techniques, a completely novel amalgam of his cinematic and painting practice.

HARMONY KORINE Hey. What's up, bro?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Good morning. How are you? I'm glad we connected. Congratulations on the film. It's amazing. I was grateful to be able to see it yesterday in Vancouver. Thank you for arranging this.

KORINE Of course. My pleasure. 

OBRIST We've known each other for nearly thirty years! This is almost like an anniversary. Agnès B. introduced us in 1997.

KORINE Oh my gosh. Unbelievable. Time really flies.

OBRIST But today we are going to talk about the future, not the past, because in many ways the future is in video games. Last year, for the first time, more than three billion people were playing video games. That's more than a third of the world's population. It’s bigger than the music and the film industry put together. When I visited your studio in Miami, you told me that your new film and paintings have a lot to do with video games. Also, I remember speaking to you about Spring Breakers (2012), which you told me was like a video game. Can you talk about when and where your interest in video games began?

KORINE I grew up playing video games, in the ’80s. After school, we'd spend all day in arcades. It was always an escape. It was fun for me, obviously, in a similar way to films and art. Thinking back to Spring Breakers, I was feeling like life was starting to meld with gaming. And gaming was starting to meld into real life. In Spring Breakers, [Ashley Benson’s character] repeats the phrase, over and over again like a chorus, “Just pretend it's a video game.” It was a way of desensitizing herself to commit crimes.

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Harmony Korine
6LINX, 2023
Oil on canvas
184.5 x 126 x 6.7 cm / 72 5/8 x 49 5/8 x 25/8 inches
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Julian Cousins

OBRIST The notion of violence is present in some of the games. There's a conversation you had about violence with Paul McCarthy where you discuss the different stages of violence. Can you talk about how you see violence?

KORINE Violence in games, or violence in live action, always plays a role. It’s a transgressive action—something that you can consistently go to because there are many different shades of violence. Sometimes, depending on how you do it, violence plays out like a dance. In first-person shooter games, it's exciting. It becomes a basic premise for the narrative. That's something you can see with Aggro Dr1ft. In a lot of ways, it’s like Assassin's Creed or Halo: violence is part of the language.

OBRIST My next question is about rituals and our relationship to ritual. I was thinking about Trash Humpers (2009), which has all of these strange rituals. But also, in the new film and the paintings, there are quite a lot of ritualistic moments. In the ’70s, Andrei Tarkovsky said we live in a time bereft of rituals. And more recently, the philosopher, Byun-Chul Han, wrote a book about the lack of importance in ritual in the digital age.

KORINE I guess there's a certain connection between rituals and belief and even some type of a religious element. At the end of the movie, one of the characters says, “There's nothing but love in God, even after all the destruction.” He still has a belief in ritual and transcendence. 

OBRIST Aggro Dr1ft has this very immersive dimension, like in video games.

KORINE I've always been interested in and strived towards something that has a total effect. Something very immersive and all-encompassing. I've always wanted a physical component to what you're watching—something that was just beyond the explanation.

OBRIST There’s an almost liquid narrative in the new paintings and in the new film. Can you talk a little bit about this liquid narrative?

KORINE If you play first-person shooter games, like Deathloop, Apex Legends, or any of the Overwatch games, you have a sense of being inside them. And there's a world creation that's very exciting to me. With the new film and the paintings—when we talk about this kind of liquid narrative—it’s more about this idea of stepping into a world where the narrative is not so one-dimensional. It’s much more immersive.

OBRIST Can you talk about the genesis of Aggro Dr1ft?

KORINE The name came late. I went through several different names. I was listening to this aggressive drift phonk remix, which describes the BO character perfectly. And obviously, there's a correlation between cars and drift music, and drifting. I think Aggro Dr1ft will probably be the name of the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth.

OBRIST When did you first start writing the script?

KORINE I had a storyline and characters, but there was no actual script. Honestly, I started to lose interest in conventional movies. I haven't felt much attachment or excitement in a while. And then, I noticed a singularity happening—where films, live-action, artwork, and music were starting to merge. But the real unifier, for me, was gaming. Gaming is capturing the culture in a way that nothing else is. Because graphics have gotten so good, and storylines, and role-playing games have gotten so immersive, it almost started to feel limitless. And so, I started this company with a lot of gaming developers, VFX kids, and people in this world. The question became: what's beyond movies? While Aggro Dr1ft is not a game, there is something that bridges the two things. Can you use gaming aesthetics in a way to tell a live-action story? We spent close to a year trying to develop a language, a look, and a feel of something I hadn't seen before. It was a challenge—we involved a lot of different elements of tech and art. Then, we started to crack it with the infrared, VFX effects, AI, and using gaming engines. We started to merge all of that into basically what the film became. Honestly, I wasn't even trying to make a movie. I was trying to make something else; I didn't even have a name for it. I was just drawing pictures.

View fullsize

Harmony Korine
UOU, 2023
Oil on canvas
125.7 x 185.7 x 6.7 cm / 49 1/2 x 73 1/8 x 25/8 inches
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Julian Cousins

OBRIST Since Kids (1995), you have always worked with a script. Was this the first time you worked without one?  

KORINE What’s funny is that I started as a writer and then as the decades progressed, I lost almost all interest in writing. And so, I wanted to be able to almost freestyle a film in the way you could freestyle rap. I wanted to freestyle the film based on characters and ideas. And that's kind of what Aggro Dr1ft is. It was freestyled around a certain structure and the tech dictated a lot of the storyline.

OBRIST When I was watching it, it made me think of this text by the cultural commentator, Venkatesh Rao, on the unnarratability of the world.

KORINE I just don't even think time exists anymore. Time has been obliterated. I don't feel like there is even a past or a present. I think it's just the endless now.

OBRIST Can you tell me a little bit about the casting process in this film? You have Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott.

KORINE Jordi Mollà was one of my neighbors in Miami. I was hanging out with him a bunch. And I thought he was great in the movie Blow (2001) and Bad Boys II (2003). I just love the way he speaks and moves. So, he felt like the perfect BO. And then, Travis Scott just felt perfect for the Zion character.

OBRIST Since we have known each other—since the ’90s—you have always had this very holistic practice. You draw, practice photography, write books, and then of course, make movies. But these have all been parallel realities. With the upcoming show at Hauser & Wirth, painting and cinema are becoming one. Can you talk a little bit about how this fusion happened, which has led to your first show in Los Angeles in nine years?

KORINE I always liked the idea of a unified aesthetic. Painting, in a lot of ways, has taken over my life. But, I think it's the first show that I've ever done where the paintings directly relate to any of the film work. The paintings are stills from the film—done with oil on canvas. They're very simple, versus the film, which is very technical. I wanted to make the paintings in a very traditional way, but we're using a thermal coat of paint so that they resemble the film.

OBRIST When I saw the film yesterday, I was thinking that one could almost stop and take a screenshot at any moment. The film is almost an infinity of paintings. How did you choose the moments in the film that you would then paint?

KORINE It was so hard. Like you said, almost every frame you could stop at could be a painting. A lot of it was just random. I tried to jump from character to character and experiment with different moods. It was a process of elimination. What tone or ambiance felt the strongest? And as far as the show, what story can I tell through sixteen paintings?

OBRIST In the early ’90s and 2000s, you made a lot of doodles and drawings. And now in this digital age, does drawing still play a key role? 

KORINE I draw much more than I write now. With Aggro Dr1ft having no script, really everything came from my drawings. Then, we started to develop things in-house that looked more like what you see in the film.

OBRIST In all your previous exhibitions, I always thought that the drawings are the heart of the work. They're so important. 

KORINE It's like Dieter Roth. At his shows, the drawings are always the most exciting part. 

OBRIST Or Paul McCarthy.  

KORINE Or Paul. Exactly.

OBRIST I read this interview you did with Rita Ackermann about a previous series of paintings with teddy bears inspired by the professional arm wrestler, Cleve Dean. How did the new paintings grow out of that series?

KORINE They kind of progressed from that series, but I feel like this new series of paintings is a whole other thing. I started this design collective called EdgeLord which has some of the most innovative game developers and VFX guys. Sometimes, we'll sit there working with gaming engines, and sometimes we go in there and just play video games—it’s all to see how far we can push the imagery. The look of Aggro Dr1ft, both the live action and the paintings, comes from that process, which is very similar to putzing around with drawing. It’s a similar instinct or creative inclination. I’m using tech in a way that I never have before.

View fullsize

Harmony Korine
DRONE CODES, 2023
Oil on canvas
154.3 x 186.7 x 4.1 cm / 60 3/4 x 73 1/2 x 15/8 inches

OBRIST You also said that there is freedom in painting, which you don’t have in any other medium. Why does painting give you the greatest freedom?  

KORINE The other stuff requires a lot of time spent with other people, which is fun, which I like, but it can also be exhausting. There's something nice about going to the studio—in a similar way that I used to enjoy writing—I could just lock the door and start throwing paint and messing around. And then, there's nobody to talk to, no one to tell you they don't like a specific color that you're using or a gesture. Painting is very direct and immediate in a way that everything else isn't.

OBRIST In the teddy bear paintings, you inserted a radiating quality, which is also present in the new paintings. There’s that great song by Blondie, “Fade Away And Radiate.” Can you talk about this radiating quality?

KORINE Yeah, radiation is good. I wanted the new paintings to feel like they could just melt the walls. (laughs)

OBRIST Do you have a favorite color? You told Rita that your favorite color is yellow, but the new paintings have a much different color palette.

KORINE There's not much yellow in the new paintings, because it's all infrared. I was almost trying to figure out how to go beyond normal color. So, the new paintings are very red. They're kind of on fire. They're a bit dystopian. 

OBRIST Very post-apocalyptic.

KORINE Yeah, a bit dystopian, post-apocalyptic for sure.

OBRIST You’ve said that you have recurrent elements in your films—images of the ocean, guns, marginalized characters, and laughing. Can you talk a little bit about these four elements?

KORINE There are just certain images, now looking back, that I have always been obsessed with. I think they are built into my subconscious. I don't even know where they come from or how to explain them. But, there are definitely themes and images in all the films and artwork I’ve been repeating for years. They are probably things that I love.  

OBRIST The film and paintings remind me a lot of what I saw when I visited your studio in Miami: the boats, the water. Miami has had an influence on your current work, but I was wondering why you originally moved there.  

KORINE [points to view] Well, look at the view! I always loved Florida in general. I always thought it was the most interesting state in the Union. But Miami, specifically to me, feels like a city of the future. The city is built into the ocean, so it's like a floating metropolis. And it's culturally all over the place. It's closer to Latin America than it is to conventional America. For me, it is mostly about the vibe here: the way things look and feel, the way cultures are mashed up. That’s why it has inspired a lot of the work in the last decade. Miami has extreme wealth and then extreme poverty, and then everyone is rubbing up against each other. And both those worlds influence each other. You have high culture and low culture. It's also a city that exists without irony. Even the hipsters here drive Range Rovers.

OBRIST And you have a lot of technologists in Miami. 

KORINE There are a lot of people that are working on tech innovation and game development. We have hired a lot of them. Miami has become a real cultural mecca for that. 

OBRIST As you know, I'm very interested in this idea of artists making video games—not only making work inspired by the aesthetic of video games, but actually making video games. I curated this exhibition, WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, which started at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. And now, it’s on view at the Centre Pompidou Metz. And we are gonna show your work there. It’s an exhibition of more than thirty artists who all either invent games or work with video games. So, I am very curious if you have any plans to do your own video game.

KORINE That's pretty much all I've been working on besides the paintings. We have three crazy games that are in development. And actually, what I'm sending you for your show is a first glimpse at this game that we're going to introduce called Baby Invasion. It will have a live-action component. It's all about home invasions. And it's a game we've been developing for like a year. We're working on a first-person shooter. We have one role-playing game being developed, and then a really wild mobile game.

OBRIST And for the exhibition, you're going to send a teaser, or prelude, of the game. It will be in a series of light boxes with moving images, which are going to change all the time.

Harmony Korine (b. 1973)
MANT1X FAZE, 2023
Oil on canvas
179.7 x 122.6 x 4.1 cm / 70 3/4 x 48 1/4 x 1 5/8 inches

KORINE The lightboxes will have these digital black and white silhouettes of the characters doing home invasions. They will run simultaneously. They're very beautiful, very haunting, kind of violent, but extremely exciting. I'm going to send them to you probably in the next day or two. We're putting them on a loop so that they never end.

OBRIST One thing we didn't talk about, which is always in my interviews, is unrealized projects. Architects sometimes publish unrealized projects because they do competitions, but we don't know much about filmmakers’ or visual artists’ unrealized projects. And the range, or scope, of unrealized projects can be pretty wide: either the project is too big, too expensive, too utopic, or too time-intensive to be realized. The late composer [György] Ligeti said he had forty to fifty years of music to write. And then, other projects might be self-censored or simply are censored. Can you tell me about one or two of your favorite unrealized projects?

KORINE I used to dream of putting a book together called Commercial Failures. I spent a lot of years working in advertising. In the very beginning, I was obsessed with this idea of radical advertising and trying to infiltrate the mainstream. I think I lost hundreds of jobs because the ideas were too subversive, or strange, or outside the box. But, some of the most interesting things of mine that were never realized were commercial failures. They failed to even become commercial. I have another movie called The Trap that I was about to make. We got very close—then the film collapsed within a couple of weeks of principal photography. That's something I would probably turn into a game. We've already been talking about how to create the whole thing in Unreal Engine or use a gaming engine to create the film itself.  

OBRIST Do you have a script for The Trap? 

KORINE We had the actors, the script, we had the whole thing. It was probably my largest budget up to that point. I spent a solid two years prepping it, and then at least half a year just drawing the storyboards. I have thousands of pages of boards—from the first frame to the final frame. Then, there was an issue with an actor at the last second. He couldn't be in the film, and then everyone's schedules collapsed, and the whole film was nixed at the last second. But it's probably my favorite thing that I've written. It's a revenge film that takes place in Miami. People have been trying to get me to come back to it, or maybe turn it into a book.  

OBRIST One of the things that has been very important to you is publishing. We talked a lot about your fanzines when we met in the ’90s. You also have some amazing artist books. Is publishing still relevant to you? Are you working on any books related to the film and the show?

KORINE Yes, I need your help, Hans. (laughs) I have a pretty significant-sized archive. There's a lot of text and writing that I guess should be fanzines. Also, there are a lot of books in there that I just never published; just because I'm too lazy to finish things, or life gets the best of me.

OBRIST You mentioned that some ads were too radical to be realized. But you have realized quite a lot of ads and you told me that they were fun to do because it’s a sort of language. It’s interesting because a lot of great little films have been made out of advertisements. For example, [Federico] Fellini created a beautiful commercial for Barilla noodles. It's one of my favorite advertisements of all time. Can you tell me about one or two of your favorite ads that you have realized?

KORINE I've done a lot of fashion. I worked with Gucci, Valentino, YSL—those are all fun. But I have also done things for 7-Eleven and Velveeta Cheese. I love them all. I've always liked advertising because it's a technical exercise and it's a way to tell a story in a very short period and you can be very creative. Advertising, in a lot of ways, has influenced the live action and art just because they can become quite experimental. 

OBRIST What did you do for 7-Eleven?

KORINE I did an ad for their Slurpee. I made it look really delicious. (laughs)

OBRIST Something that I always felt has gone missing, but is now coming back is the relationship of art and poetry. And one of the least known publicized aspects of your practice is the fact that you are a poet. Can you talk a little bit about this? Have you made any recent poetry? And what's the role of poetry in your practice? Who are some of your favorite poets? 

KORINE I love poetry. I love Richard Brautigan and sometimes it's just a couple of words on a page. I just love the way that certain words fall on top of each other. Even the way letters look and the way that certain things sound. Poetry is such a maligned art form now. It’s strange, but can poetry compete with Twitter? At the same time, there is this interesting thing about the idea of putting disconnected words and letters, seemingly randomly, to discover the meaning and context. And I like what's not said. For me, it's poetry, horror films, rap music—they're transgressive and it can be exciting. 

OBRIST The 20th-century poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote this really beautiful book full of advice for a young poet. I think a lot of students will read our interview, so I am wondering, what would be your 2023 advice to a young artist, painter, or filmmaker? Or maybe a game inventor. 

KORINE It's hard because I'm not that smart and I never took advice when I was a kid. I would just say: look at the world, look at what's out there. Maybe we're living in a moment that's post-meaning; maybe it's impossible for anything to have a real impact in the way that it used to. I'm not sure. But I think in a lot of ways, it's never been a more interesting time to be creative than it is now. People romance the past but in a lot of ways the past sucked. You were so limited in how you could put things out. There were so many gatekeepers, and naysayers, and so many people that put up blockades that you really, really, really had to be creative to get your work out. There are so many avenues now where you can release work that there's really no excuse. The hard part, though, because there's so much out there, is how do you cut through the noise and how do you make something that affects the culture? The advice I would give is to look and see what's out there, see what's missing, and then see what you can add to the equation, and then just be bold. If you believe in it, never stop.

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Harmony Korine
DRONE CODES, 2023
Oil on canvas
154.3 x 186.7 x 4.1 cm / 60 3/4 x 73 1/2 x 15/8 inches

Love Is A Primal Instinct

photography by Peter Ash Lee
styling by Julie Ragolia
featuring Grace Valentine @ Heroes
all clothing by Balenciaga Winter 2023 Collection
modeling by Nikolai Kokanovic, Patryk Lawry @ Heroes, Momoudou Njie @ Anti

makeup by Dan Duran @ FrankReps
hair by Hikaru @ FrankReps
production assistance by Babe Lawrence
photo assistance by Hyeonwoo Lee, Sangwoo Suh
fashion assistance by Sydney Sullivan

Now Why See: Will Always Be, New York

NAUDLINE PIERRE wears Balenciaga new wool jacket and shorts, polyamide and spandex boots

photography by Annie Powers
styling by Julie Ragolia
located in Powerhouse Arts, NYC
special thanks to Ellie Hayworth, Pamela Rapp, Sam Polcer, Phoenix Lindsey-Hall, Zoe Weingarten
text by Eric Shiner

SHIRIN NESHAT wears Comme des Garçons polyester sweater and skirt; Peter Do boots

Dear Artists of New York, 

Very rarely, I imagine, do artists receive love letters out of the blue. Fan mail, perhaps; random odes in gallery registry books, periodically; DMs and emojis galore on the socials, most definitely. But a love letter? Nah, that’s too mushy, too emotional, too…too. I would also venture forth that is too long overdue, too necessary, and too late, decidedly, for some.   

To those who have already left, nothing that I say here will lure you back with the enticement of greener pastures, an easier life, a superstar career. You’ve already packed your bags, your paints and your tools and headed upstate, or perhaps to Greece, or if you’re edgy, the Poconos or maybe even, gasp, Los Angeles. Wherever you’ve landed, you are basking in the triumph of having escaped, of finding more space for less money, of salvaging your sanity with forest views and the occasional bear lumbering through the back yard. You’ve achieved nirvana, I’d say, and your work is likely all the better for it. 

But tucked in the not-too-distant recesses of your brain lurk memories of New York.  Most of them are awful: rats scurrying by on the sidewalk late at night as you walk home from a friend’s party in Flatbush; the anger and incredulity of finding out that your landlord will increase your rent by 15% the following year; the uncaring rejection from a gallerist who’d promised you a show, but has now changed her mind. And yet, despite all of the nightmare experiences that you had while living in New York, you are trying to make sure that absolutely everyone around you is fully aware that you don’t miss it AT ALL. You don’t really. Or do you? 

Now back to those of you that stayed. And yes, I will happily include those of you who left briefly, but have already returned, pride bruised and tail between legs. Heck, I’ll even include those of you that left, because you know it as well as I do: once you’ve lived in New York, it will always be in your heart, in your mind, in your soul. For all of you, then, at last, a love letter: 

Camille Bidault-Waddington: Variations on a Theme

Emma Stern

Area crystal embellished wool dress, crystal earrings

text by Evan Moffitt
photography by Jason Miller
styling by Erik Ziemba
hair by Sergio Estrada
makeup by Sena Murahashi @ MAGroup
photo assistance by Benjamin Jastremski
production design by Evan Jean

New York-based painter Emma Stern’s muses are digital avatars—buxom, sexually liberated, 3D-programmed and rendered machinations; some might also say alter egos. The relationship between artist and alter ego as a muse is what makes Stern’s paintings so fascinating, alluring, and psychologically titillating. Utilizing proprietary character design software to create digital sketches, Stern turns to formal oil-on-canvas painting methods to make her digital fantasies come to life. In a new body of work, Penny & The Dimes: Dimes 4Ever World Tour, which will be exhibited at Almine Rech in London, Stern’s new avatars are members of a fictional all-girl rock band. In an interview with Evan Moffitt, Stern expounds on her unique practice.

EVAN MOFFITT So, @lava_baby: what is “lava”? 

EMMA STERN (laughs) Lava is like an amorphous blob of virtual clay. It’s the basic starting point of any 3D program. When I first started messing around with it years and years ago, I was reading one of the last books Carl Jung ever wrote—it was about UFOs. There’s a part in it where he's talking about quicksilver, this medieval, mythical material that can take the shape of anything. I realized that's kind of what I was dealing with in these 3D programs. So, I just started calling it “lava.” When I started doing these figures, I was calling them “lava babies,” and then it became my Instagram handle, and then it took on a life of its own. I've called my social media presence an extended performance piece—which wasn’t really intentional in the beginning, but that's where it is now. 

MOFFITT Can you explain how that 3D rendering comes into your painterly process? 

STERN Instead of doing a sketch with paper and pencil, I sketch in these programs and develop the compositions. Most of the decisions get made before I ever put brush to canvas. It's very akin to when I was learning how to paint formally, working from a live model: you set up a scene, fix the lighting, you have this person pose for you, and you can kind of move around 'em to understand them volumetrically. It's far preferable to painting from a photograph, which most painters would tell you tends to really flatten everything.  

Emma Stern, Margot + Spike (venti), 2023. oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches. courtesy the artist and Half Gallery, photo: Daniel Terna

MOFFITT When did you first start painting? As someone who's super engaged with digital media, what about this very traditional, canonical form interests you? 

STERN I've been doing some version of painting my whole life. I was always interested in the figure, and the female form specifically because it allows me a level of self-portraiture. But in general, female bodies are so much more fun. When I was learning to paint in this very formal, traditional way in art school, I felt quite stuck. All of my heroes, like Michelangelo and Caravaggio, were dead white guys, and I'm a female painter in the 21st century. So, it became a question of how I could add to this conversation rather than just carrying on a tradition that really is not super connected to my experience.  

When I started working with 3D modeling, I realized I was building my own muses. I've long been interested in this relationship between the artist and the muse. When I was in art school, I was working at Cooper Union as a nude figure model. I was using that almost as research, you know? I enjoyed the experience of being a muse and thinking about what that meant for me on either side of the canvas. 

People ask me all the time: “Why paint when it's already an image that exists on a computer?” I really want this work to exist in conversation or at least add continuity to the tradition of painting and portraiture. I like the idea that it's this very traditional way of making work, but a very non-traditional, contemporary subject matter. 

MOFFITT  You’ve described these avatars as self-portraits. Do they ever begin as your own image? Or do you think of them as more abstract representations—like expressions of yourself that the rest of us can’t see?  

STERN  Of course, there is some fantasy involved, but then an avatar is an idealized, virtual version of yourself. The cool thing about a virtual self is that it doesn't have to be static. Quicksilver is this constantly changing thing. There's an inherent drag element to it too. I’m using drag interchangeably with role-playing and cosplay because drag makes most people think of gender, but my show last year was all pirates, and that was like my pirate drag, you know? 

Now, I’m working on rockstar paintings. It’s my rockstar cosplay, because as performative as I may come across, I actually have stage fright. I'd love to be a rockstar, but I hate to perform in front of a live audience. Making these rockstar avatars for the past five months is a way for me to live out the rockstar fantasy and offload my stage fright onto these proxies. Ultimately, that’s what these avatars are. They're vessels I can offload different parts of my personality onto.  

Emma Stern, Ursula (Hindsight), 2023. oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches. courtesy the artist and Half Gallery, photo: Daniel Terna

MOFFITT  It reminds me of something that Nash Glynn once told me: “Every painting is a wish.” You've been making digital avatars for computer games since you were a teenager, right? 

STERN  I'm actually using a character design software that is mostly used by people who make 3D porn. There's an online marketplace with a lot of user-generated assets for that. You can go buy genitalia and different kinds of pubic hair for the characters. Often people call my work pornographic, which is so interesting to me because I don't even really do nudes at all. My characters tend to be at least partially clothed, and there are never any depictions of sex.  

MOFFITT In that respect, I see a lot of Lisa Yuskavage in your work. I'm curious if she's been an influence on you.  

STERN Oh, yeah. I'm a huge fan. When I was in art school, I was going to all of her lectures. She probably thought I was stalking her. But I think she has a really different relationship with painting than I do. She's much more of a painter’s painter, whereas I spend a lot of time erasing my hands. There's really not a lot of brushwork. I also feel she's really focused on pain as a subject matter in a way that I'm not. The thing I've really taken from her is the psychology of color: the way different colors can elicit different emotions.  

MOFFITT Your paintings have a distinct palette. Is that supposed to denote lava? Or, the spectrum that lava can reflect? What’s its mood?  

STERN  With the pirate paintings, I called the palette “tequila sunrise.” It was all very sunset, tropical. For this show, there are a lot of paintings that have stage lighting, so it's very cool, indoor, and artificial. I wanted it to look as fake as possible. Although, my palette is always kind of unnatural. These are not colors you see together in nature generally. That's something I started doing, however subconsciously, to emphasize that these aren't humans; this isn't real life. These are cyberspaces, not landscapes. Lava itself, or virtual clay, is actually a grey, plasticky material. I build and design the characters and then I import them into a program. It's an incredibly powerful piece of software.  

MOFFITT Yuskavage was criticized in the ‘90s for painting hyper-sexualized women, as if a female artist couldn't determine the contours of her own desire. Given that people have made these comments about your work, do you think this attitude is still a problem? Historically, it’s come both from men and anti-porn, second-wave feminists.  

STERN I got a lot of this criticism early on, and it seems to have really gone away. But I did notice it was almost always coming from straight men. They assigned a lot of irony to my painting. My definition of irony is a lack of authenticity and these are very authentic coming from me. Perhaps there's some humor, but I almost feel that for someone to call something ironically misogynistic, they’re just giving themselves permission to enjoy something. It's such a cop-out. People are scared to like things that appeal to base instinct, which again, is where porn comes in. But if you enjoy something, how can that be ironic? Enjoyment must be authentic on some level. I also don't see anything inherently problematic with hotness. It’s actually the most misogynistic thing to say that sexy women are offensive. To whom? I'm not offended.  

Diesel sheepskin leather shirt, skirt and pant, leather boots; Jennifer Fisher plated brass earrings

MOFFITT What about your social media persona? You called it a performance. Do you consider that authentic or ironic?  

STERN It's a character. I don't think I did it intentionally. My virtual self has become so much bigger than my actual self, in a way. Most people who know me and know my work are experiencing it through the filter of my social media persona. I think that persona functions the same way as the rockstar cosplay. “Lava Baby” was not supposed to be an alter ego. It was just supposed to be an Instagram handle. But then, everyone's social media presence is an alter ego. Even the most authentic feeds are hyper-curated. I'm very sassy and cheeky online, but I actually think I'm a pretty serious person (laughs). Sometimes, when people meet me in real life, they tell me I'm so much nicer than they thought I would be (laughs). I’m talking with my therapist, and she's like, this is a defense thing. You're offloading social anxiety onto this very confident, sexually conscious, strong-minded character, which contains a lot of me but is not me.  

MOFFITT  I think you're right to note that we all do it in some way or another. But then, aren’t the real and the virtual inseparable now? It’s like the old joke: a fish swims up to another fish and says, “Isn't the water nice?” And the other fish says, “What the hell is water?” Even the way that we process analog images, like paintings, has been conditioned by our engagement online.  

STERN We all are internet artists. Everything is mediated by a screen. Anyone who makes art and posts it online, most people who see their work will only ever see it at the scale of a phone screen. You can choose to take that into account or not. I think about how my work is going to look on a phone. How elitist would it be for me to only think about how it's going to look hanging on the wall of a gallery somewhere in Europe or in someone's home? I feel guilty sometimes because I think like, my gosh, I'm in the business of luxury retail. That's what the art market is at the end of the day. And the thing that rescues me from that dark place is the realization that so many people are seeing this and connecting to it online. Social media is a way for people who will never be able to afford a piece of art in their life to experience and enjoy it.  

MOFFITT  You're bringing internet subcultures to a different context where they might not usually be taken so seriously.  

STERN Right. Something that is really exciting to me is bringing what would be considered lowbrow, like fan fiction, and digital art, and all these weird niche subcultures that exist in the underbelly of the internet, and turning them into something that's considered capital “A” Art. You hang it on the wall of a gallery and someone writes a press release about it. Because now, there’s discourse, right? But that’s important because this is the visual culture of the masses. I love Russian minimalism, but it is not post-internet. You can't post a painting of a black canvas. It doesn't translate to Instagram. Color field painting does not work on the internet, either. Joseph Albers doesn't work on the internet. If you're making stuff that has to be seen in person today, I think it's actually quite elitist. So, recontextualizing what's considered lowbrow subject matter is super interesting to me. A decade ago, no one expected that suddenly, they’d see street artists in a gallery, and then become the highest-selling artists in the world—that graffiti works were going to be auctioned for millions of dollars. There was an opportunity to have some discourse.  

MOFFITT You're not talking about elevating a low cultural form so much as you're talking about getting the art world's attention economy down to the level where everybody else’s has been. 

STERN Yeah. I like to think of elevating it a little bit, but you're right. For a while, I was concerned, because a lot of the people who collected my work were men. And I think there's been a real switch lately. A lot of women are collecting my work now, which makes me super happy. I mean, I love that people are buying my work because they want a big-titty centaur girl in their home. But that's also a surface read. If you can get a little deeper than that and start thinking about the avatar aspect, the fantasy of the virtual self, you might want to spend more time with the work.  

Emma Stern, Catherine (window licker), 2023. oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches. courtesy the artist and Half Gallery, photo: Daniel Terna

The Opioid Crisis Lookbook: A Speculative Semiotics Special by Dasha Zaharova & Dustin Cauchi

Power Images: Paul McCarthy & Judith Bernstein in Conversation

The word graffiti comes from the Italian word graffio, which means to scratch. The Ancient Romans would write their names and protest poems on buildings. Since the 1960s, artists Judith Bernstein and Paul McCarthy have been brutally scratching the surface of the American Nightmare with inspiration from the psychological graffiti of its violent and totalitarian collective subconscious. Bernstein had her revelation by absorbing the rude hieroglyphics scrawled on the bathroom stalls in the men’s room of her alma mater of Yale—McCarthy’s landscape was California; its dark optimism and congenitally blind ambition. Together they meet at the intersection of a disillusioned dream.  

PAUL MCCARTHY I'm not sure when I discovered your work. I think I knew of the screw paintings from magazines. When did you start making those? 

JUDITH BERNSTEIN I started in about ’69 and I continued them through the ’70s. I got a lot of brouhaha with those. I was censored in Philadelphia. There was a show called Focus: Women's Work—American Art in 1974 at the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center. It was curated by Cindy Nemser, Marcia Tucker, Lila Katzen, Adele Breeskin, and Anne d’Hanoncourt. They chose 86 up-and-coming and well-known female artists. When they saw my work, they said, “Oh no, we can't have that. It's pornography. All the kids will be damaged forever.” It went all the way up to Mayor Frank Rizzo. But there was a petition in protest that was signed by a lot of very well-known people, like Louise Bourgeois, Clement Greenberg, Linda Nochlin, Howardena Pindell, and Alice Neel. So, that's how I got more on the map.  

MCCARTHY My interest in your work is probably related to how I viewed art and society at that time. I made these pieces in the mid-60s that I called the “Black Paintings,” which were eight or nine feet tall. They were based on a dragster car—like if you take a drag car and look down on it from above. The image was abstracted and flattened out. At the top was always this masked head, a gas mask. It was man, as machine—like a screw, but like a machine. So then, with the masked head of the man at the top, it was a totem stack, it was like a standing dick. Those paintings were all done between ’65 and ’67. They were always painted flat on the ground and I would be on top of them. They weren't painted with a brush but with a rag. And there was a frame about two inches off the plane where I would pour gasoline. Then, I would throw a match in and burn them. I was thinking about this today: with the trajectory of all my work, there has always been a similarity in a certain kind of critique of power structures and the patriarchy.  

BERNSTEIN With the work that I was doing—the screw is a power image. It was a combination of masculinity and anti-war. They were also about feminism, like mine's bigger than yours. And actually, that screw drawing, the horizontal one shown at The Box, I recently sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I'm thrilled beyond belief about. Nevertheless, it was once something that was censored. I always think that women, although we don't literally have a penis, we can certainly have access to the imagery. So, as I said, mine's bigger than yours, because the size was nine feet by twelve and a half feet. But, you know, it's funny because a lot of people think that I do some of these drawings when they're flat on the floor, but I don't. I always make them on the wall, so I can get farther back and be able to see the whole image. 

Paul McCarthy, Performance still from Bassy Burger, 1991
© Paul McCarthy, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
photo: Vaughn Rachel

MCCARTHY Mine is the opposite. I'm not often standing back to look at it—to judge it. It's always a shock when I look at it, and that's still the case. I didn't paint paintings on the wall until 2013. I viewed the paintings and drawings as an arena, like a room: it's on the floor or a large table and I'm moving around on it. It's a different experience, but the trajectory of painting and drawing is something that you stayed with. I was never attached to one medium—it could go in all directions simultaneously. But the connection between us is to that period of time in the ’60s, the institutions, and the war in Vietnam as a grounding point for suspicion and mistrust in the government. And of course, the subject of the male patriarch and the female. Even very early on, the words “Adam” and “Eve” came up in my work as a kind of joke or something. But always, there's this thing of portraying myself, the male, as the buffoon.  

BERNSTEIN It's very psychological. And it’s much deeper than actually the buffoon because it speaks about a lot of things in your subconscious. And I do the same thing. When I actually make an image, I don't think about it. I get the general idea and then I do it. And then, later on, I think about what I've actually done.  

MCCARTHY I think back to the ’70s, but it became more pronounced in the ’90s—I would only describe it as painting or drawing in character. It's not so much about inhabiting an accurate interpretation of Walt Disney or Hitler, that’s not the point, but I talk all the time. And I realized at one point, I talk as if I'm drunk. And the drunk character, the brave character, likes to destroy the good paintings. In performances, I do get drunk. By the end of a performance, I can be pretty drunk.  

BERNSTEIN I think you have access to the subconscious with that. I know my own work is autobiographical, and I think that your work is also autobiographical. There's a lot of self-portraiture in spite of the fact that you're using characters that are outside yourself. And it's also very much a performance, Paul. The work is very performative. I consider my work somewhat of a performance, but yours is even more so because you're literally in the painting itself, or in the drawing, or in the piece of sculpture, or whatever you're doing.  

Judith Bernstein, Gaslighting (Blue Ground), 2021
acrylic on canvas, 90.5 x 87 inches
courtesy of the artist and The Box, Los Angeles

MCCARTHY I've done a number of them where the action on the painting or on the drawing, there's someone else there, like the ones with Lilith Stangenberg. It's like creating this distraction. I would draw for three or four hours in these sessions. Somebody said, “Your paintings, your performances are like trances,” or, “Are you in a trance?” And I go, “Well, no, but there is something about focus and a form of involvement in a character that affects what I do.” 

BERNSTEIN There is something about being in a trance. I know that when I'm painting, I have to finish it up because I'm in a zone and I don't want to wait until the next day. You're in a zone and there's something that is beyond you. It's interesting because when you have another person there, it's a happenstance that they are actually part of. And I do think, in essence, it’s like you're drunk. And there's something quite marvelous about it, because in a way it feels like an out-of-body experience, like someone else did it. I’ve heard Bob Dylan talk about this.  

MCCARTHY There's this schizophrenic experience going on. Like I said, now I'm painting with the canvases leaning against the wall. It's like a whole new thing in a certain way. But I actually still try to get very close. I mean, literally two or three inches from them. I lean on them. I put my face on them. 

BERNSTEIN Just in your face. 

MCCARTHY I get very, very close and sometimes I stand back, but it'll go back and forth. And then you look at it and you go, I really like that one. And then, later you go, I've hated it ever since I started it. Yet it's almost on the edge of being something. But I know that the only way I can really get to it is to destroy it and start over. And then, I will talk constantly. And I'm saying these things to myself. The character always goes, “You don't trust it, Paul, do you, you don't trust. Paul doesn't trust me. Paul doesn't trust.” And then he goes to this crazy one: “Paul doesn't trust God.” You could say the drunk pretend character is crazy. 

BERNSTEIN Well, we are the god of our work. Many times you'll have some extraordinary drawing, and then you'll just smear the whole thing over. Maybe it's too perfect. How can you actually be even more creative than you did the first time around and bring something else to it that you didn't the first time around? 

MCCARTHY Do you paint over the top much?  

BERNSTEIN It depends. I made a painting recently where I didn't get the color I wanted. So, I blacked out most of it. Then, I went in and did something entirely different, and I liked it better. Most of the time I do paint on top, but not much. I know when I geot it, and then I move to another painting. It's almost like the game of telephone: you do one thing and then it moves to something else, and then it transforms into something else.  

MCCARTHY I paint over the top more now than ever before. Sometimes I think, oh, there's like six paintings underneath there.  

BERNSTEIN I bet they're all as good. 

MCCARTHY Maybe. I'm interested in painting over the top of paintings and keeping it going in a certain way—to keep the mental state going.  

BERNSTEIN It's a great mystery. And also that mystery is a great gift because there's something so hallucinogenic about that. I use “We Don't Owe You A Tomorrow” because you don't know what tomorrow is. I think there's something very childlike about the world. They go into a room and they mess everything up, and then they leave and go into another room. And that's basically what we've been doing with our planet. We're so primitive in some ways, yet so technologically advanced. But it's still that motivation for power. As an artist, it is power over your own work. We think that it's only now that we don't want to pay the price of the future. But unfortunately, the future is now, and it's moving exponentially faster.  

MCCARTHY Since the ’60s, I’ve been fascinated by the subject of fascism. Also, psychology, the subject of repression, and all the Freudian stuff. The discoveries of Wilhelm Reich's book Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Norman Brown’s Love’s Body (1966), Herbert Marcuse, Sartre, and R. D. Laing, and, of course, then you discover Duchamp, or John Cage, and then art and life become a thing. And then, there’s the subject of film and the moving image. It was critical for me. It's in California, but also you have the Europeans: [Jean-Luc] Godard and [Ingmar] Bergman. But there was also experimental film: Warhol was interesting for me, and Jack Smith. I was interested because they were dealing with the weird subject of the pretend. And on top of that, you have the political critique; the attempt to understand the absurdity of what humans have created. This thing of fascism and repression, as well as the subject of the phallic and the vagina, appears in both our work very early on. Is it a penis? Is it a vagina? What is it? This thing of desire and the pleasure principle versus the reality principle. But in the past twenty years, the subject of fascism continues to come up. In the last five years, I've been doing performances in the character form of Adolf Hitler. And the character that Lilith plays is Eva Braun, but she's also referred to as Marilyn Monroe. At some point I asked, what male stands out in Western culture? Is it Adolf Hitler? Is it Jesus Christ? And what's the female? Is it Marilyn Monroe? And of course, the two together are crazy, right? We're not trying to be in the ’40s or anything. It’s some sort of version, some sort of pretend play in a very ultra-serious, ultra-dumb, and ultra-buffoonish way. I’m pretending to be an American Adolf Hitler and Lilith is a German Marilyn Monroe. 

BERNSTEIN It's goddamn serious, but it's actually so surreal. Trump brought back McCarthyism, Roy Cohn, and all this stuff that's out there now. And also Putin. I use the swastika. It's only a Nazi symbol at this point, not a Buddhist symbol. There's permission now to have a lot of this horrible fascism. It's much more accepted. It's very terrifying for those of us who know how horrible fascism can be—the extremes of fascism: death and concentration camps. 

MCCARTHY But the goons or those who follow these characters, do they understand how the propaganda is being constructed? Do they recognize it? Their notion of what fascism is gets to be pretty small and pretty limited. And so they reject that. And then, you wonder about Trump—who is he and what is he? A few years ago, when we were remaking Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), the Max character I was playing in my version, Night Vater, was not actually the Nazi officer that Dirk Bogarde plays. I become like a character living in California that produces films. The image I made was very mafioso in a clichéd way. The connection between government, fascism, and mafia or organized crime is real.  

BERNSTEIN All these characters, they're two sides of the same coin. They're terrifying and very seductive at the same time. 

MCCARTHY The one thing that has happened in these pieces that we've done is that the Eva Braun character, or Marilyn Monroe, becomes a mother, and a daughter. And Adolf Hitler is a father and a son. And they switch these roles. It’s built into the script that if the female kills the male, it's in response to the actions of the male. It's in response to who he is. And when the male kills the female, it's mean. It's the berserker. There's a difference in how violence towards the other happens. With the male, there's an insanity in there that comes out in these plays that we do. He’s a very ugly buffoon goon and a lush drunk character. 

BERNSTEIN The male can be very ugly because it's killing his mother. The father is someone who has had physical power for so long. It's complex because it goes all the way back to the primal family, and it's very primal.  

MCCARTHY There’s also the crazy part of how all this is understood, like how somebody reads this kind of imagery. How do they deal with the subject of irony, sarcasm, metaphor, or caricature? How do they understand the language of art? It's a forum, an arena. The idea that as an artist you have to know your intentions before you begin. How art is talked about, I’ve sat in on crits in colleges, and there is an emphasis on having a correct idea before you make the work. Then, the question is about how well you’ve carried out your initial intentions, so how good the work is would be determined by how well you’ve completed your intentions. What is frowned upon is working from an idea through a process to get to an understanding, allowing yourself to change, and resolving issues in the process, letting the process move the work. But also, in this way art can expose something. What scares me right now is the type of criticism that's going on. I was censored in the ’60s, but I've been censored more now than ever before. In one way, as the world gets more extreme, you would think it's natural that art would inevitably become more extreme in response.  

BERNSTEIN I hope that's the case, but I don't know. It may become more simplistic. 

Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg, Performance still from A&E, Adolf and Eva, Cooking Show, 2022. Directed by Damon McCarthy © Paul McCarthy, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Stevens.

MCCARTHY But a lot of that is the market and the art world. The art world as a market controls so much of what we know of art. You know, like what the gallery shows, but really what the museums show. And then, you know, who's on the board, and who the curators and directors are, and how the money flows. I went to a gala a few years ago and a film director got up and said, as part of his speech for the award, “Remember, if it's not popular, it's not art.” Nobody said a thing. In fact, people clapped. And I thought, oh, god. It becomes propaganda. Imagine that statement moving through an audience of five-hundred or six-hundred people. Then, you have museums creating shows that are popular and counting people that are coming and going.  

BERNSTEIN It's all intertwined, Paul. 

MCCARTHY Yeah. It's all entwined. It also has layers to it. In some ways, the art world has opened up and in other ways, it's closed down. It's a strange combination. It may indicate that we’re in a transition. But the seduction of money is huge. You and I, in some ways, have experienced the same art world, but in different locations. You've been primarily in New York, and I've been primarily in California. There’s an interesting difference. But there are a lot of levels where our work connects. I think it was Mara’s [McCarthy] idea that I would curate your latest show, We Don’t Owe You A Tomorrow, at The Box. Maybe there's less to say about the curating, and more about the paintings. There was a question about the black light paintings. I think if we could have afforded it, I would've turned the whole gallery into a black light situation so that you really had a chance to see these paintings in the two situations.  

BERNSTEIN I put a black light on stuff so that you have a parallel universe. There's something very mysterious about the way I handle it because I make a painting and then I see it under black light after it's finished. In a way, it's like a surprise. I thought about the work being mostly about this nightmarish zeitgeist. Also, I'm very much into humor, just as you are. But mine has a different kind of black humor. I think that humor makes the work more accessible and more memorable, but also that it makes it easier to accept. Laughing—it's almost like an ejaculation.  

When I was a graduate student at Yale, I had the idea to go into the men's room. I read an article in the New York Times, and it said the title of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1962) was taken from bathroom graffiti. Right away, I was off and running. Graffiti is actually much deeper than you expect. And the same with your work—you have stuff that is so psychologically charged. I also use these great limericks: There once was a man from Nantucket who had a dick so long he could suck it. All those graffiti pieces led to the Fuck Vietnam pieces and the large projectile phalluses. I was always so interested in doing things that express my rage at injustice. My rage at the Vietnam War was extraordinary. My work has a lot of energy and a lot of balls. There's something so primal and so primitive about painting and just putting your whole self in it, your whole life in it—it's been an extraordinary trip. 

MCCARTHY I think the paintings you've made in the last few years kind of indicate a sense of speed and quantity. You know, quantity is a subject or part of what I'm doing. The idea of the studio being a B- movie sound stage. But the thing that's happening now is digital quantity. There are hundreds of thousands of images, but it’s also video—there’s more video than we can possibly ever edit. For me, the accumulation of imagery becomes a piece in and of itself. The hard drive that holds all the images is the object. At one point, all my videotapes in the ’70s were in cardboard boxes, and the cardboard boxes were stacked like a totem. The subject of stacking has gone on in my work since the ’60s. So, I stacked the videotape boxes and it was sold as a sculpture. The object is the boxes that hold the videotapes. I think there's something about the unseen and the skin of the box is like the skin of the person and inside it holds the information. For me, they become kind of metaphors for the body. Now what I’m doing, intentionally and unintentionally, meaning it’s just happening, is the stacking up of hard drives. I would say that a good portion of what I've made in the last ten years doesn't even get shown. It has no place. 

BERNSTEIN Yes, but you got a chance to do what you wanted to do. And you know something, you don't know what will happen tomorrow.  

Judith Bernstein in her studio in New York City. Photography by David Brandon Geeting.

The Anatomy Lesson by Carlota Guerrero

photography by Carlota Guerrero
styling by Julie Ragolia
models are Ann-Océane, Diarra @ Next, Famzi, Khia, Lynsha @ Cover, Mai @ Aeon, Mouna @ Elite, Nadia @ Identity, Stella
all clothing by Hermès