Jeffrey Gibson

interview by Nellie Scott 

Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Since the 1990s, Gibson has been weaving his own Native traditions and queer history with pop cultural references, particularly song titles, into kaleidoscopic textile works, paintings, videos and performances. His exhibition at the US Pavilion, the space in which to place me, takes its title from Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem Ȟe Sápa. In the following interview, Nellie Scott, the director of the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, delves into Gibson’s history-mining practice. 

NELLIE SCOTT In your work, you blend a rich tapestry of cultural influences, materials, and themes. How do you describe your artistic identity and vision and how has it evolved throughout your career?

JEFFREY GIBSON There are a couple of things that have happened recently, even in the past twelve months, that will serve as milestones for me, like the Venice Biennale and the publication of An Indigenous Present. So, I'm kind of thinking that I can move on to different aspirations artistically. It's a strange transitional place to be because I think for so long I've been pushing for different kinds of representation in the art world and trying to use every platform that I have to do that. I have outgrown a lot of the language that's been used to describe me and my work, which I have perpetuated myself. I think being a parent has shifted the way that I think about what I’m responsible for putting into the world and the conversations that I want to be a part of. One of the biggest things I would look at is the collaborations that I've done. I've learned a lot about what collaboration can mean. What kind of partner am I? I have always pushed for inclusion of Indigenous Queer voices and I think we're at a point now where we need everybody at the table. Culturally, we need all of the best perspectives for everything that we face in contemporary life. 

SCOTT Your artworks often feature a striking use of language. A quote of yours that feels like such an embodiment of the infusion of pop lyrics, club culture, queer theory, and intertribal aesthetics into your work is, “How do you write a word that screams? How do you write a word that whispers?” Could you describe your process for integrating language into your art, and how you decide what words or phrases to incorporate?

GIBSON For some reason, other people's words articulate my feelings. I have been trained by musical lyrics and excerpts. I love brevity. But they used to be more plentiful. I would listen to music and they would just kind of jump out. It's almost like foraging now. I have to go hunting for words. I try to envision a personal sentiment that I'm feeling. Maybe it's something that comes up in my head or a theme. For instance, my body and other bodies are an important theme. Intimate space, anonymous space, public space, private space, introspective and internal space. And time—I don't feel old, but I do feel like when I turned fifty, there was a shift. Somebody described it as suddenly you're on a branch, looking at the end of the branch, rather than looking at where the branch is connected to the tree. With words, it's interesting—I have thought about Corita Kent a lot lately and revisiting scripture, in particular, the way that she used it. There were times when I didn't know it was coming from scripture. It felt provocative or it felt political. It felt progressive. We live in a time where it's so easy to get caught up in the minutiae of life and it’s decontextualized from the intentions and dreams of the future and historical narratives of the past. So, I feel like it's been very helpful for me to think about the voices of people, historically, who have proposed progressive ways of living and communing. I think what always drew me to popular lyrics, musical lyrics, was the way that they hit this mass saturation point of so many people being able to remember them, repeat them, relate to them, and feel themselves in those words. Now that I’m authoring my own writing, what are the things that I'm afraid to say out loud to another person for fear of sounding too sappy, too sweet, too loving, too trusting, too naive?

SCOTT Your work offers an invitation to the viewer to be present, often using bold colors and familiar materials. In your 2021 exhibition, It Can Be Said of Them at Roberts Projects, you drew the exhibition title from an artwork in Corita Kent’s Heroes and Sheroes series created in 1969, which features a quote from the New Yorker, “It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not trim his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.” Considering the legacy of artists like Corita, how do you see your work contributing to or diverging from this lineage of artists who blend art with social commentary?

GIBSON I think of the generation when I was studying art, the late ’80s into the ’90s. At the time, the phrase “the personal is political” was always being thrown around. And it resonated with me for sure, because of being a gay man, because of being Native American, because of being an artist. And then, there was something about that language that became outdated very quickly. It lost its punch. It never stopped being true, but I think at this time in history, when we think about things that are happening at the political level and how much they are about our physical health, our mental health, our decision-making, our own bodies, that statement continues to be so true. It's almost like it's become realized. And it's almost been reversed. Also in the ’90s, we were presented with the concept of didactic thinking. But the space of freedom exists in between, or on either side of those two points. And for me, that's where poetics happens. Poetics happens because we let go of these firm points that determine meaning, and we suddenly have to open up to fluctuating definitions. Nothing is fixed. You actually have to be somehow welcoming of the unknown. You have to be welcoming of the unfixed. You have to suddenly become comfortable with things in continual transformation. 

SCOTT Your work has this incredible ability to remind us that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. And congratulations on the US Pavilion. I was just so over the moon when the news broke. I was also excited to see the commissioners were Kathleen Ash-Milby, Louis Grachos, and Abigail Winograd. Can you share a little bit more about your history of working with these three individuals, and can you touch on the work you’ll be presenting at the US Pavilion? 

GIBSON Kathleen, I've known the longest. We met in 2002. She was the very first to visit my studio in New York City. At the time, she was the director of the American Indian Community House in New York City when they were on Broadway. This was the time of slides and it would cost a fortune to get your slides duplicated. But I sent out like twenty packets, and she was the only person who replied. Then, she went to the National Museum of the American Indian, and in 2007, they did a project where they supported young Indigenous artists to come to Venice. So, I went over to support artist Edgar Heap Of Birds. Kathleen and I talked and I remember her saying, “One day we're gonna do this.” So, we've continued this dialogue now for over twenty years. Abigail and I met a few years ago through the MacArthur Foundation and we did an exhibition together. Lewis, I met when he was at the Palm Springs Art Museum. He commissioned a film called To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth. Then, when he went to Site Santa Fe, we started talking about the exhibition, The Body Electric. And one day, he was like, “You know, we should talk about proposing you for Venice.” I felt like having two curators is important. One, because I need these brains that understand the history of Native American art and everything that comes with that, which is policy, community relationships, and understanding sensitivities. Louis, I just really enjoyed working with and I needed the contemporary art mind. He's very charismatic. So, we asked him if he would come on board to help guide fundraising support for the project. It has been everything that I envisioned. Wait until you see the pavilion. 

SCOTT I’m just so excited. The title of the exhibition is the space in which to place me, which refers to a poem by Layli Long Soldier, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Can you share more about the poem’s influence and reference to the planned multimedia installation and performances?

GIBSON I refer to it as “the project” because there's programming, there's education, and there's the catalog—in addition to the artworks in the exhibition. From the very beginning, I knew that there would be text involved. I had to come to some terms with my relationship to the nationhood of the US, and how I think about my biography in the context of the United States. There are lots of obvious things, but where do I wanna sit? The founding documents of the United States were my starting point. Eventually, that led me to the proposed amendments that have not passed. It led me to voices, music, abolitionist speeches, suffragette speeches. I was like, wow, okay, so there have always been these voices demanding some of the things that we're still seeking today in terms of equity and justice. It was important to me to also think about who is represented in the voices that I'm choosing. Of course, I wanted there to be Indigenous voices, Black-American voices, and female voices. And just like when I do an artwork, the title always comes at the end. The pavilion—we're not calling it a site-specific installation; I am referring to it as a site-responsive installation because we took the architecture into consideration. And I’ve had a Layli Long Soldier obsession for a few years. She is able to write things that I didn't know other people saw too. It almost feels like we share a similar experience because of who we are in this world. 

SCOTT In your essay for An Indigenous Present, you describe your approach to expanding the way people think about Indigeneity. Has the process of curating such an incredible group of artists and such a monumental publication changed your approach to the US Pavilion? 

GIBSON The idea for the book had been with me for a very long time. And weirdly, when I started working on the book, these feelings of resentment were coming up. I thought, why do I have to make this book? I felt like I was waiting for somebody to make this book, and waiting is your biggest enemy. And then, I realized that I was supposed to be the one to make this book. There's been such a moment of recognition of Indigenous artists over the last ten years. More than I've ever seen in my entire lifetime. So, I knew that we were contributing to that moment. And when we published it in the way that it was meant to be published, it was perfect timing. You could feel there was a thirst in the world for a book like this. It wasn't just me. Other people recognized that there was a gap. And so, in that sense, it just felt like being part of a larger moment. 

SCOTT We all have educators or ancestors of influence who are pivotal in shaping our lives, someone whose hands we can almost feel on our shoulders in our work and practice. It can be powerful to bring their name into spaces with us. Was there an important figure in your life that you’d like to share more about?

GIBSON I would have to say my parents. They live five minutes from here. My parents were born in the ’40s in Mississippi and Oklahoma, and they both went to boarding schools. So, they both grew up with their families having been in communities that were torn apart. They're part of that generation trying to pull themselves back together and stabilize. To go back to some of the earlier themes that I was talking about—things I have been thinking about. These are things that they have not been able to speak of. They may never speak of them, and that's okay. There's this tremendous amount of allowance that you give somebody because you understand how layered a life can be, probably for everybody. One of the best skills that you can teach somebody is to give it some time. Life is unjust, life is inequitable. That is the world we live in. They taught me that in a way where it's like: yes that is true, but it leads you to learn the skills that help you to make the best of a situation, to give yourself space for mental freedom, physical freedom, creative freedom, generosity, and to recognize the abundance of what's in different spaces. When all you can see is scarcity, it just eats at your soul. 

SCOTT On a personal level, I think I needed to hear those words too, so thank you. I think it shapes our lived experiences. And those things could be really intertwined in the social practice of creating, it's the doing, and the making, and the message. 

GIBSON Being an artist humbles you very quickly. I've seen a lot of people think about art in this extremely privileged way, but you do need something that humbles you. You have to keep it at this really humble level. Something as simple as holding together pigment on a piece of fabric. The simplest technology of putting color on something, using lines and making images, and making letters that become words that we can share.

SCOTT What role do artistic place-making and place-keeping hold in the work you will be presenting in Venice this year?

GIBSON As I'm walking through what the exhibition is going to look like, who's going see it, and who we've invited to activate the performative spaces, it's really made me realize how much content we're generating at the invitation of one Indigenous person to other Indigenous people to come onto a global stage and be themselves. The spotlight of representing the US in the US Pavilion is a unique platform. I just want to take advantage of that. I’ve been thinking about how to photograph the artwork and the installations. These images are going to circulate. I could say there's no photography in here, but this is how we exist today—this is the time to send this all out as far and wide as we can. This growing interest and focus on Indigenous artists—the goal is for it not to be a trend. We are responsible for our longevity. We need it to go beyond Venice, which is what's guiding a lot of the programming and the educational efforts. How do we make the best of what happens in that space and seed everywhere we have access to?

SCOTT In past interviews, you have spoken about museum exhibition posters on your walls as you were growing up as an entrance point into the art world. What do you think a younger self would say about seeing a poster with your work on it for the Venice Biennale?

GIBSON I'll give you a parallel answer to that. I did get a call from somebody who I know and I have a lot of respect for—a creative person who is very much involved in the Indigenous art scene. And they told me what was so great about An Indigenous Present was that their kid who was eleven or twelve years old could just sit down with this massive book, go through the pages, and see how many people they knew. People they would refer to as an auntie or an uncle. Being able to look at those images and learn something about the person who made the work, who also happens to be family, is so much more powerful than a famous person that you don't know. I have always been pretty obsessed with artist biographies because I've always wanted to know what's at the root. How do I become these people I look at? What biographies teach you is that the person you are learning about did everything to have an interesting life and make their best choices, but there are so many factors that are beyond control. So, I hope my artwork survives me. I hope my words survive me. I hope my biography is interesting. My responsibility is to leave the breadcrumbs—to leave a trail. 

Everything Gets Lighter: An Interview of Alenka Zupančič

interview by Oliver Kupper

Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič comes from the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, which includes, most famously, Slavoj Žižek. Using the theoretical frameworks of Hegel, Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, Zupančič and her contemporaries have produced fascinating insights into social, cultural, and political phenomena. She has written about sex, death, ethics, love, and comedy. Her book The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008) is an expansive and integral Lacanian examination of the subversive machinations of comedy and laughter’s short-circuiting powers, which draws elucidations from Aristophanes, to George Bush, to Deleuze, to Borat. For Zupančič, the object of comedy is the name for all that is funny, which begs the question: how the hell can we laugh in a time like this?

OLIVER KUPPER I heard you on a podcast talking about the origins of comedy—that it comes from ancient Dionysian rituals. Can you talk a little bit about this? 

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ Well, Lacan used to say that the original fantasy is the fantasy of origins. We should always be careful when speculating about the “origins” of something, particularly about what this origin is supposed to mean or explain. That being said, yes, there seems to be an agreement among scholars, based on the Aristotelian account, that comedy started with Dionysian rituals called “phallic songs” (also referred to as “penis parades”). This doesn’t tell us so much about comedy as about the so-called “phallic reference” that is central to comedy. Before we jump up and dismiss comedy because of its “phallocentrism,” we better see exactly what this means.

Just think for a moment about the depicted scene: people marching in procession, carrying a phallus of huge proportions made of animal skins, singing obscene songs, full of ambiguous innuendo. Now, ask yourself this question: what is ambiguous innuendo doing in this setting if, at the same time, we have there no less than the phallus itself, in person, and fully blown? If one cares to think about it, it is indeed a bit strange. Usually, we have either the thing itself or the allusion to it. But here it seems that we have both at the same time and the same level. What does the fact that the two appear on the same level tell us? The first conclusion that imposes itself is that the phallus is just another allusion, innuendo. Yet we must be more precise: phallus is not just another allusion, it is the allusion par excellence, the mother of all allusions, so to say. It is the innuendo par excellence. More precisely, it is a signifier of allusion, or allusion as a signifier. This is precisely the Lacanian definition of the phallus. It is a “signifier without the signified,” an “empty signifier,” and as such, the “signifier of signification as such.” The play on signification, its instability, reversal, as well as its surprising material effects are indeed central to comedy.

KUPPER Through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and your philosophical examinations of comedy, what is your interpretation of levity, humor, and laughter in these particularly dark, unfunny times?

ZUPANČIČ As you said, levity can mean many things, and it is impossible to answer this in a general way. So, I’ll try to say something about the specific “levity” of comedy as I understand it. The weightlessness of comedy is often associated with its being without substance. I’d rather say that its substance is very delicate. It’s a kind of soufflé, in contrast to something like pudding. It is a substance shot through with air, and yet, it still demonstrates a consistency, a structure. This demands both wit and skill, or technique, including timing. This is why bad comedy is like a fallen, collapsed soufflé. In this sense, the art of comedy is that of introducing levity into some solid structure, of drilling into it as many holes as possible, without letting this structure collapse. I’m not saying that comedy doesn’t have the power to bring structures down, yet this is more its possible after-effect. Comedy is usually associated with entertainment, and we should perhaps take this word at its etymology (from old French entretenir). That is to say not simply referring to something funny, but to something that holds (tenir) things together in their interval (entre), with the help of the space between them, across this space, rather than by gluing them together.   

Concerning the zeitgeist of doom and our dark, unfunny times: This has never been a problem for comedy, on the contrary, comedy often thrives in dark times. The problem is not doom, but its affective solidification, and the morbid pleasure that this solidification seems to offer. Affective solidification of doom squeezes out all space for thought. Because thought operates in the holes of structures. Comedy can introduce the space for thought and the time to pursue it. Thinking, even the most serious thinking, implies a kind of levity. Otherwise, it gets buried under the weight of things before it even starts. 

KUPPER In your lecture, The End Of Laughter, you explore comedy through the context of the Hollywood system and how different comedic directors address the ultimate question: is it an artist’s responsibility to respond to the times they are living in? Can you talk about this responsibility and comedy’s place in this reflection? 

ZUPANČIČ Shakespeare is the author of the famous line that says art holds the mirror up to nature. The only way one can agree with this is to add that this mirror is a very peculiar one; not such that it reflects reality, but such that it also brings to light the hidden presuppositions of this reality, as well as things that this reality represses in order to appear consistent. The picture we see in this mirror is thus never the same as what we see when we look at reality. It is always somewhat “distorted.”  Yet it is precisely this distortion that brings out some truth of reality. This is why to illustrate his thesis that “truth has the structure of fiction,” Jacques Lacan also comes up with the example from Shakespeare, the example in the context of which the famous line about art mirroring reality is pronounced: namely the mousetrap, or play within the play in Hamlet. Fiction can render a reality that a simple mirror misses, yet which is essential for the given reality. Truth needs fiction to register in reality. I suppose that in one way or another, artists always respond to the times they live in. This is part of the artistic sensibility.  It’s kind of inevitable—perhaps especially inevitable in what we call “timeless” art. Timeless does not mean something that remains the same across different times, it rather suggests that there is something about this or that particular work of art that keeps changing with time and with different configurations, which rings new and different in different configurations—a reality which is not directly visible, and gets articulated in different configurations in different times… 

The more specific question today, to which I guess you refer, is the question of the so-called engaged art: Should artists engage directly in social and political struggles? Again, the answer is not simple, because sometimes engaged art does little else than consolidate the ruling ideology, whereas art that pretends to be there just for people’s pleasure, and stays away from direct engagement, sometimes subverts the hegemonic ideology, since it doesn’t fit or respond to any ideological demand, including that of being appropriately “critical.” The two examples that I discuss in the lecture you refer to are examples of this. I discuss the “political” difference between Preston Sturges and Frank Capra. They both made movies in the times of the Great Depression and the related social hardship, and they both reflected on the position of the film as popular art in relation to that hardship. I cannot reproduce my analysis here. Let’s just say that when it comes to social issues and hardship, Capra leans toward sentimentality, whereas Sturges manages to preserve the levity, and with it the true political edge of his comedy.

My point is not that Sturges is better because he opts for art that is not directly engaged, whereas Capra advocates engagement. My point is that in the end, Sturges’s films—at least some—are much more political and radical. Capra’s slogan is “poor is good.” Poor people are rough at the edges, but they have a golden heart, and we should like, accept, and reward them for that. Sturges offers another axiom: “Poor is bad.” There is very little good that comes from poverty, so it makes no sense to romanticize the poor on account of their inner richness. This is pure ideology. Poverty is like a plague. It corrupts you, rather than makes you noble. It should be eradicated, not romanticized. I thus argue that Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is politically much more interesting and subversive than, say, Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936).

KUPPER You wrote a book called The Odd One In: On Comedy—who is the odd one, and more importantly, why should we let the odd one in? 

ZUPANČIČ Generally, we construct our world and make it viable by excluding and repressing some things from it. If something thus excluded (or perhaps repressed) reenters our world, we usually experience anxiety and disorientation, sometimes we even feel that our world is falling apart. Comedy usually finds a way of bringing the odd one in so that we don’t experience this as immediately threatening, but rather as “funny.” By bringing the odd one in, comedy allows us some time and space to entertain the idea or possibility of this foreign element being part of our world, without our world collapsing, or without us reaching full blown anxiety. It brings it in as a possible source of pleasure even. This does not mean, however, that we necessarily end up accepting everything we are offered to entertain in this way—on the contrary, we may well end up rejecting it again, and sometimes for very good reasons. Letting the odd one in is in this sense an interesting exercise, which shatters our horizons in a strangely pleasurable way, but does not simply follow the normative or moral imperative of “letting the odd one in.” To repeat: despite—hopefully—being entertaining, comedy is not just a pastime, but rather something like a time off for thought, for entertaining odd ideas, configurations, and surprising connections.   

KUPPER The book was published in 2008—how have you seen comedy, humor, and the comedic evolve, especially in a post-pandemic world? 

ZUPANČIČ Well, this is a huge question, carrying in itself a variety of different questions. Ranging from the issues of political correctness and related self-censorship to willful transgressions of all decency as—supposedly—a matter of courage and “balls.” The two often go in pairs, inciting one another. But comedy is not the opposite of censorship. It is something that uses censorship to create new and different ways of saying, and imagining something. And comedy is certainly not simply about publicly “saying what is on your mind,” this is rather vulgar and lacks imagination, which usually relies for its success on brute—physical or economic—power. 

But new things happen and break down the smooth or linear logic, which keeps the two sides of this movement on a kind of autopilot mode and produces completely automatic, predictable reactions. Take the most recent example: the war in Gaza. Many activists of the so-called cancel culture have been themselves “canceled” for expressing their views on the conflict. If Netanyahu continues with his devastating politics and uses the word “antisemitism” to silence any critical take on it, the word will soon lose all its meaning. And yet it shouldn’t! Comedy is also not about “relativizing” everything, but rather about pinning down points and meanings that escape this relativization… 

I also noticed this recently: more and more, top politicians act as bad comedians, and top comedians act as good politicians—they make excellent, incisive political points and suggestions. What comedians such as Jon Stewart or Bassem Youssef have done recently is not simply what we call political comedy, but along with their comedy, they say things that make all political sense and which on the other hand are in terrible shortage among official politicians.

KUPPER Slavoj Žižek wrote the foreword, in which he talks about short circuits—what is a short circuit in the context of comedy? 

ZUPANČIČ It is similar to how many jokes work: they produce and work with surprising, unexpected, odd connections, yet such that nevertheless make sense, even a lot of sense. A short circuit of this kind not only makes you see the connections that are there, but not visible, it also changes the whole landscape, or perspective, and opens new lines of interrogation. This is the idea, at least. Differently from jokes, however, comedy has a temporality in which these short circuits are not its endpoints, retrospectively changing our perspective on the narrative of the joke, but are rather its inaugurating points. A comic sequence, say, often begins with some kind of unexpected short-circuit, or perhaps we should say with an unexpected occurrence, which is then used to create a time and space for its resonation with other elements of a situation, producing other short-circuits along the way. We can also call this comic suspense.  

KUPPER You talk about the collective power of comedy. Can you elucidate a little more on this? 

ZUPANČIČ Comedy can be collective-forming, all the more so when it involves a live audience. Comedy not only creates, but also presupposes something like a collective, in the sense of a certain common cultural background, web of references, proximity of experience, and so on. We could perhaps say that comedy usually works and operates between the two collectives: the one that it presupposes and the eventual new or slightly different one that it creates. There are comedy shows that clearly lack the second, and mostly work by consolidating, reaffirming, and boosting—for better or worse—the pre-existing “collective.” But even this is usually done with an eye on some minimal difference or oddity that we are asked to entertain during the comedic sequence, and which can make a difference, even if it is dismissed at the end. But some shows are more ambitious in this respect and also take bigger risks. They risk going more insistently against the grain of some collective presuppositions of the audience, attempting to form a collective around something slightly different, or simply other additional ideas from those that people have arrived with. They can use the familiar to make us think collectively of something else, and less familiar. If they are successful, this collective thinking doesn’t come as a strain, but as an enjoyable exercise.  

KUPPER I want to bring comedy into the fold of the new culture and class wars we are currently living through, because comedy seems to be seriously provocative on both sides of the battle—with calls of blacklisting, censorship, and then, of course, you have “cancel culture.” How does Freud’s theory of the pleasure principle enter the fray? What would Freud say about cancel culture?

ZUPANČIČ What Freud would say about cancel culture? I suppose he would discuss it under the general heading of what he called Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, usually translated as “civilization and its discontents.” According to Freud, and from the very outset, culture—in the broadest sense of the term—is double-edged. It has its intrinsic impasses, difficulties, and ways of producing its own libidinal substance, enjoyment, and “dirt.” This libidinal thrust is an inherent dimension of culture and not some intrusion into it from the “raw” outside…. Culture, or civilization, is not simply a remedy for aggression and conflicts, nor simply the evil without which we would live in some kind of natural harmony. It is a remedy that itself produces new problems that it needs to deal with. While inescapable, culture is not without inherent contradictions and antagonisms. 

This constitutive contradiction of culture is precisely what both sides of the so-called culture war ignore. A bit simplified, we could put it like this: For the partisans of censorship, blacklisting, and cancel culture, culture is essentially good, and it should be used as a weapon against lower instincts (hatred, enjoyment, racial, and other “naturalistic” prejudices). In other words, the idea is that we need more culture (more rules and stronger regulation), which sometimes becomes a caricature of bureaucratic thinking that is easy to mock and ridicule. According to the other side, culture is essentially bad, it restrains our “freedom” and potential; it is a prohibitory network of rules formulated by the “elites” that is designed to keep those elites in power. It is not only that both these perspectives are wrong, it is also that because of their wrongness they are perfect for feeding each other with more arguments for their problematic positions. And I would say that they are both symptoms of the absence of any real social politics, which consists precisely of efficiently negotiating cultural and social contradictions and differences for the general benefit. You also mentioned class war, which is certainly at the center of all this, but in an obfuscated, barely recognizable form. Also, paradoxically, at this point, it gets mobilized more by the right than by the left.    

KUPPER Can you talk about the relationship between love and comedy, the pas de deux? 

ZUPANČIČ Alain Badiou once remarked that art (and he was talking particularly about literature, including theater) seems to have no means of talking about love in its duration. It either focuses on the event of the encounter as an ecstatic experience that cannot be properly integrated into reality (and thus sooner or later tragically fails or disintegrates), or else it focuses on all the obstacles that need to be overcome for love to finally be possible and able to flourish so that we end up with some version of “and they lived happily ever after,” without seeing any of this happy love life. When Badiou first introduced this idea, my immediate reaction was: how about the art of comedy? Is there not—besides or beyond the romance often constituting the narrative line, the “content” of comedies—a singular temporal and spatial dynamic that relates love and comedy in their very form? “Love is a comic feeling,” wrote Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le Transfert. I believe this should not be taken as a casual remark, but rather as an invitation to a serious consideration of the particular temporality and topology—a “scene,” indeed, a pas de deux—at work in both love and comedy. 

The question here is not simply the question of longer or shorter duration or something like everlasting love and its impossibility. We can think of love as a sequence, even a relatively short sequence, and explore what happens during that sequence. Yet it still seems that there is little if any art interested in deploying this sequence for itself. But I think comedy does this, not necessarily or always in relation to love, although the latter is rarely far away when we talk about comedy. This is why I argue that in many aspects, which I cannot really develop here, comedy is structured like a love sequence, and vice versa. They have a structurally similar logic of temporality and causation, as well as a similar way of dealing with the impossible as something that happens.

Also, I believe we should think about the happy endings in comedies a bit differently than we usually do. What if happy ending narratives were not seen as simply leading up to, say, a love that finally works (in the end or after the end), but rather as celebrating the happiness or the workings of love that have already taken place during the narrated sequence? In this sense, “the happy ending” would not be a promise of a brighter future, but rather a punctuation mark that returns and refers us back to what we have seen or read. It is like a declaration that we have indeed been witnessing a love sequence, love in (some) duration, obstacles, and misunderstandings notwithstanding. I think that comedy, or what I call a comic sequence, involves a similar kind of temporality that gets created and extended through obstacles and mishaps. Not in the sense in which obstacles and prohibitions incite and fuel the desire for the “impossible,” but in the sense of the obstacles as an integral part of what happens.

KUPPER Why are we so obsessed with the end of things? In your lecture, The Fantasy of The End, the end is a distinct fantasy of capitalist society. How can we cure ourselves of this constant loop of doom? 

ZUPANČIČ I was interested in the fantasies of the end that proliferate in our social climate. A few years ago, I published a book in Slovenia called The End, which interrogates the ways we think about the end, fantasize about it, and even need to imagine the end of the world to go on as before. This last aspect is something that I discuss further and more specifically in a small book called Disavowal which will come out with Polity Books soon. In any case, I would say: Don’t expect too much from the end of the world. Don’t expect some kind of cathartic, redemptive apocalyptic moment that will liberate us from all ills, dead ends, and problems we’ve accumulated so far. And don’t expect it to be something momentary, after which we could resume again, or not. As I put it in another article on that topic: “the apocalypse is disappointing.” Rather, picture the end of the world as a kind of limbo, an indefinite prolongation, and aggravation of problems and suffering, without any possibility of a good collective response. We are already there, aren’t we? And most of us obviously don’t like it. 

KUPPER What can comedy, laughter, or levity tell us about our own humanity and our future? 

ZUPANČIČ Nothing. Not because it is impossible to say what the future will be like, but because it is impossible to say what the present is. Our present is breaking up, there are huge tectonic shifts taking place, and comedy struggles with “understanding” the present and its changing coordinates like most of us do. More often than not, we still ask questions that come from a horizon that is no longer here. We still talk about the future as if we had any. Big mistake. I’m not talking about the end of the world, I’m not saying that time will stop. There will be “future time” for sure, but thinking about it in terms of what we used to call the future is pointless. Think instead about the present, and of the past battles. It’s a bit like in the movie Back To The Future: we have to change something in our past, and present, if we are to have a future, or even the present. In the movie, the main character, who travels to the past, starts disappearing from the photo of the “present” that he has in his pocket. His task is not simply to find a way back to the future, that is to his “present,” without the technology he used to travel to the past, he also has to make sure that there is any future to return to. This is how we should think. And of course, Back to the Future is a comedy. 

WHO IS CHARLI XCX?: An Interview of Charli XCX by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Balenciaga

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist
photography by Davey Adésida
styling by Julie Ragolia

Born Charlotte Emma Aitchison in Cambridge and raised in Essex, Charli XCX is one of those rare superstars that defies genre categorization. She sways effortlessly between the experimental and the mainstream, the serious and the irreverent. Her rise, and rise, and rise, since releasing the first demo via Myspace in 2008 at the age of fourteen, has proven that a particular indistinct classification may be the key to her success. But who is Charli XCX? Pop star or performance artist? We enlisted her closest friends and collaborators to offer clues through quotes, tweets, and behind-the-scenes photos. On the occasion of Charli’s upcoming album, BRAT, a follow-up to her 2022 chart-topping album CRASH, Hans Ulrich Obrist examines the artist’s inspirations and solicits her advice for younger generations. 

HANS ULRICH OBRIST How are you? 

CHARLI XCX I am good, thanks. How are you? 

OBRIST I'm good. I'm very excited to finally meet. We have so many friends in common. Where are you? 

CHARLI XCX I'm in an Uber in South London and I'm going to East London. I imagine that you know my friend Matt Copson. 

OBRIST Yes, I know Matt Copson and Caroline Polachek. I'm going to tell them that we met. They will be excited.  

CHARLI XCX Nice, nice. Cool. 

OBRIST I wanted to begin with the beginning. How did you come to music or how did music come to you—because you started so early? Was there an epiphany? 

CHARLI XCX I think the reason I wanted to make music was because I wanted to be cool, really. I always just felt like such a loser. Also, I was enthralled by certain artists who I loved on Myspace. I was just at home in the countryside, living out this fantasy life through other artists that I would listen to on Myspace. I wanted to make music in the way that they made music; that made me feel like I was living in a film. And so, I just started trying. At first, I failed terribly because I wasn't really a producer. I didn't have an understanding of sound or anything, but I knew that I was trying to capture this feeling of excitement. The feeling of listening to music in the back of a car, and looking out the window, and immediately feeling like I was in a music video. I was always very against the idea of needing music to survive. But now, the older I get, the more I need music to keep me sane and functioning. It does really help me air out a lot of anger and emotion that I have. 

OBRIST In all art forms, the future is sometimes invented with fragments from the past—we stand on the shoulders of giants. I read that Björk inspired you. Also, Britney Spears. I am wondering if there are other musical artists, but also artists from other disciplines, that have inspired you.  

CHARLI XCX What I've learned about myself recently, particularly during the making of this record, is that I'm not actually that inspired by music. I'm inspired by the careers of artists like Björk. I'm inspired by her position in culture—what she has done for female auteurs in music. She carved a lane for herself and has been really defiant in the choices that she makes. I'm inspired by Britney because I'm fascinated by pop culture. I like looking at pop music and pop culture through the lens of society. That's the thing that gets me really amped up. Lyrically, I adore Lou Reed because he was looking at all of these people in New York—these amazing characters who were so fueled by drug culture, punk culture, by the culture of fame—and he was writing this incredible poetry about them. I think I write my lyrics from that same perspective. I went to art school at Slade [School of Fine Arts], but I dropped out after a year. I was always gravitating towards performance artists. I also really liked Alex Bag and Pipilotti Rist. 

OBRIST In an interview recently, you mentioned that music isn't as important as artistry; a great artist is more than the songs they make, it's the culture they inhabit. That’s, of course, the case with Björk, whom I met in the ’90s when I was a student. I went to her gig at Rote Fabrik in Zurich, which is a totally alternative space. And then, a few years later, she was super mainstream. But she never stopped experimenting. With your work, I feel like there is a similar oscillation. 

CHARLI XCX There is this pendulum within me that swings from caring about commerciality to not caring about it at all. And then, there is this thing where I gravitate only to what I love. I love Britney Spears, but I also love Trash Humpers (2010) by Harmony Korine. He's interesting because he plays with pop culture in a very glossy magazine type of way. And I like high and low. I think that's what I was actually trying to do at art school when I was there. I was putting pop music in a more traditional space. A lot of the people that I was at school with were interested in classical painting and I just wasn't at all. But it was fun to play in that realm with pop music and literally sing Britney Spears songs in my crits next to people doing these huge fucking canvases that were always brown, which bothered me. 

[Charli’s phone cuts out] 

OBRIST Hello? Can you hear me? I lost you. 

[Fifteen minutes later] 

CHARLI XCX Hello? Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I just went through a tunnel and then my phone just gave up on me, but I think I'm back now. 

OBRIST No problem. We’ll do the interview in different parts. (laughs) It's now part two. So, where are you now? 

CHARLI XCX I'm now in East London. So, part two is in East London. (laughs) 

Araks, Bloch, Malone Souliers Shoes

OBRIST I wanted to talk about collaboration. I have been doing studio visits with visual artists lately and everybody has these amazing collaborations going on. And your new album is a continuation of these amazing collaborations you’ve had for a long time, whether it’s Caroline Polachek, Kim Petras, or Troye Sivan, and your very special collaborations with SOPHIE. 

CHARLI XCX Collaboration, in general, has always been really important to me. When I was younger, I was very much searching for this crew of artists that I wanted to surround myself with. I felt like a lot of the people who I was looking to, whether it was artists signed to Ed Banger Records, there were this group of people who were working separately, but also collaborating and weaving in and out of each other's worlds. I was searching for that for myself, but never really found it. So, I kind of realized, okay, maybe I have to sort of create this for myself. And it was only when I met A. G. Cook, and I saw he was doing a similar thing with PC Music that I felt like, okay, we have a very similar outlook about the way that music can be made. You can bring your friends in, you can work with other artists really in a very low-stakes way without ego—just because it's fun, and I began doing that. Caroline, for example, is someone who I've collaborated with a lot and we work in possibly the most polar opposite way, but it works. She is so detail-oriented and in the weeds. The way I work is very instinctive and spontaneous, but then I literally will never revise a single thing. Whereas Caroline is such a perfectionist. It's fun to work with her because she makes me think about things that I wouldn't normally think about. 

There is one song, in particular, on the upcoming album that is about SOPHIE. And that song is about my dealing with the grief and guilt around her passing. She has obviously been such a huge inspiration in my creative process across the board. I think this album is a kind of homage to club culture as a whole. And, of course, she was an extremely big part of my experience of club culture along with many other artists, including A. G. Cook and a lot of French electro artists like Mr. Oizo, Uffie, and Justice. But while this record is about club culture and partying, it’s a very brutalist take on that. It’s very raw, confrontational, and in your face. What all of the artists have in common, which can be felt through this record for me, is this element of confidence and commitment to doing exactly what you feel in a very fearless way. That's something that SOPHIE was always encouraging, not just with me, but all of the people that she worked with. 

OBRIST You said that in the previous album, you were moving away from hyperpop. Is the new album moving further away? How would you describe the music of the new album? 

CHARLI XCX I don't pay too much attention to genres. To me, it's a club record. I understand that some people need to define the music. There are some pop songs on the record, but this is stuff that I would play in a club. It’s very much electronic. It's very much dance music. It's abstract in some ways, but in other ways, it's very tangible. There are elements of it that are super repetitive, but then there are also these really kind of blossoming, flowing melodies. It's my take on club music. 

OBRIST Do you have any unrealized collaborations or projects? 

CHARLI XCX I have so many. (laughs) Firstly, the fans don't know it yet—I guess once they read this interview, they will—I am releasing a lot of my demos that won't make it to the album and playing them at my shows, at my DJ sets. Just to show that there are a lot of tracks that don't make it—not because they’re bad (in fact, some of them are really good), it's just that they don't fit with the record. I'm into the idea of this massive amount of material being out there, saturating the fan base with all of these things that could have possibly happened. In terms of other projects outside of music—I acted in my first film last year, called Faces of Death. And that has spun a wheel for me. I was very afraid to explore that side of myself for quite a long time, but now I really want to act. And that put me in this zone of writing a script. Also, I went to Italy for six weeks to write my book, but then I ended up just drinking Aperol spritzes all day, every day, and chain-smoking cigarettes. I think I wrote the beginnings of two chapters and then gave up (laughs). But there are a lot of projects. Right now, there's this film I'm beginning to formulate in my brain, and that's probably my biggest project that hasn't been realized yet, but I'm hopeful that it will be. 

OBRIST I'm really interested in the connection between music, literature, and poetry. I just had a long discussion with Lana Del Rey a few weeks ago. Lana, of course, wrote this very beautiful poetry book. In a recent interview, you mentioned books by writers like Rachel Cusk, so I am interested in your connection to literature. And do you write poetry? 

CHARLI XCX You know, I don't write poetry. I mean maybe some people would say that song lyrics are poetry, but I tend to think of poetry in a more traditional way. And I don't feel that I'm a poet in the way that a lot of people would call Lana Del Rey a poet. I don't feel that I'm operating in that same sphere. But I think my favorite author of all time is Natasha Stagg. I really like the energy of her writing—it just feels very visceral but very blunt at the same time, which I absolutely love. When I'm reading her essays, I feel like I'm in a conversation with her. That’s my favorite kind of writing, those are my favorite kind of song lyrics. It's why I love Lou Reed's lyrics. I feel like he's talking to me, and it's why I really feel quite strongly about the lyrics on this record that I've just made. They feel like I'm texting my friends. If I was ever gonna write this book, I think it really would feel like a kind of group chat, like a flurry of iMessages. (laughs) 

OBRIST Now the topic of this issue is levity, which has to do with high spirits, but also vivacity, which has to do with one of my favorite virtues, which is energy. Your work is so full of energy. Can you talk a little bit about what the word levity means to you and its connection to pop music? Do you think that music can bring levity to people in the form of positivity or optimism, as opposed to doom? 

CHARLI XCX It's funny, when we were shooting the images, everybody was saying the word levity a lot. The stylist, the photographer, everybody was sort of saying, “Remember levity.” Which is sort of funny because I don't smile in pictures. And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, totally—it's in my head, but it's not coming out of my face.” There is such a joy to music and a lightness to the feeling that it often brings people. Even when I get so bogged down by the theory behind what I'm doing, like the reason I make my album cover, the things I say, my lyrics, and the production choices, at the end of the day, I gravitate towards all of it is because it's fun and it makes me feel something. That's what good music does. You can be as clever as you want, but the important thing about art, in general, is the feeling and conviction. 

OBRIST Caroline Polachek works a lot with Matt Copson who created these gorgeous volcano visuals. Musicians often use visual art, or do visual art for their stage sets, or for music videos. I’m curious about your own visual art and also your collaborations with visual artists. 

CHARLI XCX On this record, and the past few albums, I've been working with Imogene Strauss on building out the entire visual world. Sometimes we'll go super in-depth with another collaborator. For example, the music video I made for my first single from this record, “Von Dutch,” was something I worked on with Torso. I had this idea for it, and I knew they could pull it off because their camera work is so intricate. I filmed little pieces of it on my iPhone and would send them to them. I would put the phone on the ground and walk over it—demonstrating to them exactly how I wanted it. The album cover, for example, was made on my iPhone in June of last year. I don't use Photoshop. When it comes to computers, I'm not very skilled at all. So, I made the cover with this app on my phone. We went through a million different iterations of this green square that had the word ‘brat’ on it with this design company called SPECIAL OFFER, inc. Eventually, we just came back to the version that I made on my phone. But I enjoy sharing things with my friends and going back and forth with them, even if they're not really in the art world. That's fun to me. Also, I’m sharing music with people who don’t have anything to do with music. Getting opinions on music from visual people, like photographers, is interesting. And getting visual opinions from musicians is more fun. 

OBRIST When I was about sixteen, I started to curate and visit art studios. But I was so lucky to have these mentors who gave me advice. And you, of course, started even earlier. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this book, which is advice to a young poet. A lot of young people are going to read this interview. Given your huge amount of experience, I am wondering what kind of advice you would give to someone who might be sixteen today and wants to be an artist or a musician. 

CHARLI XCX I would say, there’s no rush to create. You have your whole life to create and maybe you'll make your best work when you are fifteen years old, but maybe you'll make your best work when you are ninety-five. There's no peak in creativity. Obviously, in pop music, especially for women, there is unfortunately this kind of time bomb on age, this myth that women are at their peak at a particular age. But I don't agree with that and I think it’s changing—it’s just an awful trait of the industry that still lingers over us. But it's not true. I mean, it doesn't matter how old you are, you can still create great work from a really unique perspective as long as your perspective is interesting and as long as you're true to yourself. There's no timeline for creativity. When you are ready, you’ll know it deep within you; when you feel the most confident and fearless. But that also takes a lot of trial and error. You have to work your craft in whatever you're doing. 

OBRIST That's great advice. Today, we had a conversation here with Alex Israel, another friend we have in common. He was saying how important it is when he makes a feature film or does an AI project for a big brand like BMW, his art can reach many more people than just through the visual art world. And that's also true for music—for example, when you did that amazing song for Barbie (2023). You reach hundreds of millions of people who might otherwise not encounter your work. So, I wanted to ask you about that as a strategy to reach many different worlds and bring people together. I think the world is too fragmented and separated, and we need to bring things together now. 

CHARLI XCX It's interesting. I actually didn't really have a strategy, but it's totally smart to think of it like that. I’ve known Mark Ronson for a long time—he reached out to me and said, “There's this driving scene in Barbie. Greta Gerwig thought of you, do you wanna do it?” And was like, “Yeah, sure.” But in my head, even though at that point they had Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, and Billie [Eilish] on the soundtrack, I still wasn't thinking, oh this would be a smart thing for me to do. Even though Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are in it—and Greta Gerwig is directing. I was just like, okay, I love doing driving songs. I can do that. And I like Barbie and driving scenes—that’s the only reason why I did it. It didn't feel like this high-pressure, massive, multimillion-dollar budget movie thing. It felt like me and EASYFUN, who I made the song with at my boyfriend's flat in Hackney, making this song in forty-five minutes and then him spilling coffee over the white sofa before he left. That was the day. And then, it comes out and it catches fire, and you're like, Oh my god. I'm part of this cultural moment. I don’t think you know that you're going to be part of a cultural moment before a cultural moment happens. Otherwise, it probably wouldn't be one. 

OBRIST We haven't spoken yet about you as a DJ. I was in Milan and Erykah Badu was DJing at a Bottega Veneta event. She makes music and does concerts, so it was really interesting to see her DJing. Recently, your Boiler Room DJ set went viral. Can you tell our readers and me what it means for you to DJ?  

CHARLI XCX It's one of my favorite things. I actually hate going to live shows; I just love watching DJs. I grew up listening to 2manydjs and Soulwax mixtapes, and it would always just make me feel so alive. And the sound quality—listening to a DJ is always better. It makes me feel so much when I see a good DJ playing good records and controlling the crowd with their own choice of music. It makes me wanna party and get fucked up. But also, I don't need to do that if I'm watching a really good DJ because I just feel so elated and in the zone. It is totally joyous for me and I love it when I get to do it. And the Boiler Room thing, I was definitely very nervous because there were a lot of cameras in our faces, but we had a really good time. 

OBRIST Amazing. Thank you so much. It was such a great conversation. I really hope we can meet in person. I can show you our shows at the Serpentine and maybe have a coffee. 

CHARLI XCX I would love that. 

The Poem of Fire: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Mathilde Laurent in Conversation

interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Pat Martin

The Greek myth of Prometheus is one of the most powerful metaphors for our current era of emergency. Seeing Earthly mortals living in the brutal, primitive dark, he steals fire from the gods and offers it to humans as a form of technology and knowledge that would become vital to civilization. Knowing that humans would destroy the world with this new resource, Prometheus was bound eternally to a rock by the gods, where his liver was eaten each morning by an eagle and regenerated each night. In 1911, Russian composer and theosophist Alexander Scriabin created Prometheus: The Poem of Fire; a short, powerful composition inspired by the myth. It was intended to be performed not only with sound but also with a synesthetic explosion of lights. In March of 2024, The San Francisco Symphony and Cartier presented a multisensory reimagining of Scriabin’s Prometheus with olfactory curation, led by Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Cartier’s in-house perfumer Mathilde Laurent. Together, they discuss their immersive collaboration. 

OLIVER KUPPER The myth of Prometheus, who gave the world fire, light, and inspiration very much fits within the milieu of levity. Through the lens of Alexander Scriabin's piece, what are your definitions of levity? 

MATHILDE LAURENT The function of art is elevation. A way towards levity. This work, and the way Scriabin wanted to make all art forms meet, is really important nowadays. I think it helps us find a sense of optimism and light in our lives. Total art was a way to unite art with all the senses. This is where olfaction can help because it’s a very specific path in the brain and in the body. It is the only sense that creates unity between the brain, the heart, and the gut. This is a definition of ecstasy and of transcendence. So, we are here with French pianist Jean-Yves [Thibaudet] and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen trying to create a transcendental experience toward light and joy. 

JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET Beautiful. I agree with everything you said. God only knows how much we need to be elevated in this world with everything that's going on. That's why music is here too. I think music is the true elevation of the soul. After a concert, people would come to see me and say, “You know, for two hours you made me forget about all my problems, and it felt so good.” We are transporting people both with the music and the olfaction. We are taking them to another world. Now, Scriabin was probably a little crazy, in a good way. He was incredibly ahead of his time. I don't think he could show his pieces in the way we can do it now, certainly not with the lights. So, it was only an invention in his mind. And his music is very unique. You hear one chord of Scriabin and you know it couldn't be anybody else. I remember with Mathilde, when we heard it together—she was listening to it for the first time—how powerful it is. It's a power that is very hard to describe in words. He invented a language of harmonies, of colors. I can't even tell you how many years I've been dreaming about this project. 

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Prometheus is one of the most important myths. Today, we are facing, for the first time in the history of humankind, a moment where we are potentially using the tools we have developed to destroy not only ourselves, but the planet. And of course, it all started with Prometheus on a highly symbolic level. Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem Of Fire is technically a piano concerto. It's a piece that doesn't deal with the story in any particular narrative way. It's an expression of the ecstatic moment when Prometheus hands over the fire to humankind, which was, in his opinion, deserving of it. Scriabin was interested in this kind of mystical expression of joy and excitement. He was one of the pioneers of describing sexual love in his music. Not in concrete terms, but the sort of anticipation, excitement, and the climax. Scriabin somehow saw the act of Prometheus stealing the fire and giving it to humankind as not only the ultimate gift but also the ultimate sacrifice, because as we know, Prometheus was punished. So, it becomes almost like a physical manifestation of love. The only reason Prometheus gives the fire to humans is because he loves them. The Greek gods were fairly ordinary people, except that they were immortal. I think that's the center of this: the idea that what makes a life valuable and worthy is the fact that we know that it's finite. Every second counts. 

KUPPER It's completely fascinating. Mathilde, you studied as a molecular chemist, which is the perfect background for somebody going into olfaction. Can you talk about your background in that? 

LAURENT I wouldn't dare call myself a molecular chemist. I went to university to study chemistry, but I did not perform well. I only got my degree in chemistry to become a perfumer. I was scientific enough to get a degree. (laughs) 

KUPPER What was it about olfaction that inspired you to begin with? I'm curious what your first memories of perfume were. 

LAURENT I came to perfumery to express myself about the world and beauty—to offer something and to have a dialogue with other people. When I was a child, I was not only seeing and listening, I was smelling, touching, and tasting everything. I was hypersensitive. So, when I was thinking of choosing a job, I hesitated between architecture, photography, and perfumery. I was creative, so I needed a job with artistic expression. I was about to become a photographer, but then something interesting happened. I got a job writing articles for different psychoanalysts and scientists who were learning how a perfumer's brain works. This is when I realized that photography and perfumery are totally linked. Each smell has a photograph and each photograph has a smell. 

KUPPER Both are very connected to memory. 

LAURENT Exactly. They work together. I cannot smell something without printing an image in my mind. And now, I know that the brain works like that. You can register a photograph without the smell, but you cannot register a smell without a photograph of it. It’s the olfactory path I was speaking of previously. When you smell something, all of your senses are activated. Each time you detect a certain smell, you will come back to where you were, eating what you ate, listening to what you listened to, and feeling the same emotion, whether it’s a good or very bad one. 

KUPPER It's very Proustian. Jean-Yves, I want to talk to you about your beginnings as a pianist because you were performing from a very young age. 

THIBAUDET I was seven—a late bloomer. Growing up, I felt very lucky because I never thought of doing anything other than music, in particular, the piano. All my friends were having nightmares, saying, “We go to bed and think: what am I going to do when I grow up?” It was very heavy. So, I felt lucky. I said, “Well, I'll be a pianist.” I didn't know what it meant, but I thought it would just happen. My parents were not professional musicians, but music was very present at home and there was a piano. I also remember the sound of my father playing the violin. Music is almost like a smell for me. Music is also very much connected to memory and the brain in the same way that the other senses are. 

KUPPER It's interesting that music and scent both have the language of notes. Mathilde, how did you write this score through the notes of olfaction? 

LAURENT I just had to listen to the music. What I wanted to express through olfaction is what Jean-Yves and Esa-Pekka wanted to present to the audience through the music. So, I needed to have them tell me what they were feeling when playing, and the meaning of the different moments of the piece. It was about listening and sharing, and understanding the different instruments. We all agreed on three different areas in the piece: before the fire, the moment when the fire appears, and after the fire. Before the fire, the world was a dangerous place where man had to survive against thunder, cold, and wildness. Nature was an enemy. Immediately, I smell this place and I only have to evoke it: the smell of thunder, the smell of water, of ice, of anxiety, of cold nature, of wild vegetation, of humid earth, of stones. 

KUPPER Esa-Pekka, when this was brought to you, how did you imagine the symphony hall adapting to this new olfactory technology? 

SALONEN It's all about technology because every attempt to combine music and scent generally fails. We all know from experience that perfume lingers, because the alcohol, which carries the scent molecules, takes time to evaporate. Over a number of years, technology was developed to dry diffuse molecules without any carrier, which means that the experience is instantaneous and finite. You can accentuate things with the scent, and you can also regulate the intensity of it. It's all Wi­Fi-controlled. I went to see Mathilde in her lab in the Fondation Cartier building, pre-­pandemic. I was expecting to see a Severus Snape type of person mixing these vials. But no, her lab was all white with iMacs everywhere. And I said, “Mathilde, how do you create a scent? Do you experiment with various components and then come to the right one?” And she said, “Oh, no, no, no. Quite often, I conceive the scent in my dreams.” And then, she wakes up and writes it down. But she doesn't write it down as “This was the smell of daffodils in a field on an April morning.” She writes down an actual molecular formula. So, I realized that this is a highly sophisticated thing based on science and theory as much as sensitivity to fragrances. She had made thirteen scents based on Remembrance of Things Past, the big seven­-part novel by Marcel Proust. And the scents were stored in leather boxes with nothing to see inside—just the molecules, I guess. So, she opens the lid and I sniff one called l’Heure Perdue, the most Proustian one, she said, because it’s about the smells of childhood, of grandmotherly things. It's interesting because my grandmother was not a very good cook. She was not particularly warm as a person. There was very little that was grandmotherly about her. She definitely didn't bake cookies. I was smelling the sort of archetypal “good grandmother” and that was astonishing. I said to Mathilde, “This takes me to a childhood I didn’t have. It’s somebody else's story, not mine, but it's pleasant nevertheless.” It’s powerful.  

KUPPER Esa-Pekka, on the topic of your childhood, I want to talk about your beginnings in the world of music, because you didn't intend to become a conductor. You were a composer, but you felt like you needed someone to be able to conduct your pieces correctly. Can you talk a little bit about that transition into conducting from composing? And what is it about classical music that inspired you? 

SALONEN I was a late bloomer according to classical music standards. My mom tried to send me to piano lessons when I was four years old and I said, “No. I play soccer. That's my thing.” I started playing instruments without any external pressure when I was about nine. And when I was about eleven, I thought that it was the coolest thing on Earth. I had found my thing and there was nothing else I wanted to do. Even through the shittiest days in my life, professionally, and even privately, I have never seriously thought that I would do anything else. It's my function on this planet. I felt that writing one's own music was the coolest thing. My world, my rules. I was very suspicious of conductors because in those days, conductors were these men who filled the LP covers with their silvery manes, and they seemed to be hogging all the air in the room. To give you an example, there was an LP of Herbert von Karajan conducting Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben or some heroic piece—on the cover was a picture of him in a leather jumpsuit leaning on a Harley-Davidson. And I thought, What is this all about? So, I didn't like conductors as a species, but I was in this group of young composers and no real conductor was interested in our music. So we thought, somebody has to conduct these things. And I thought, okay, I'll do it. I had a lot of experience as a performer already because I was a horn player, and I played a lot in Helsinki orchestras, and also on backing tracks for various pop and rock songs. Even today, sometimes, I will listen to the car radio and hear myself playing at nineteen. So, I started taking conducting lessons. I had no plans to be a conductor, but I thought at least I should know something about it. And then, I realized that it seemed to come quite naturally to me, and I enjoyed the interaction with musicians. If somebody had told me that a little over a decade later I'd be the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, I would have laughed. By and large, I'm still kind of astonished that it happened, but it happened. And now, with all these decades of experience, I'm quite enjoying what I know now as opposed to what I didn't know forty years ago. 

KUPPER Speaking of the cult of personality around conductors, Leonard Bernstein has been in the zeitgeist a lot lately. But it seems like you had a similar experience coming to the international stage—or some kind of prominent stage—through stepping in and replacing another conductor for Mahler's Symphony No. 3. It seems like you have to wait for somebody to move out of the way to jump in. 

SALONEN Well, you know, the one I replaced was Michael Tilson Thomas in London. Michael and I have been laughing about this. In some funny way, our lives and careers have been intertwined, because now I'm sitting in his former office. So yeah, a lot has to be said about being in the right place at the right time. Luck plays a big part in all this. There's a series of seminal moments in my life, like getting the right teachers and meeting some people who then became my mentors or supporters in other ways. But I think everybody's career and everybody's life is a result of those seemingly random encounters. Nothing happens in a vacuum. 

KUPPER A couple of last questions about Scriabin. He was working on a last piece called Mysterium, which he planned to perform in the Himalayas, and he thought it was going to heal the world. 

SALONEN Yeah. (laughs) I'm not so sure about that. Most likely, he started talking rubbish after six vodkas to some friends, saying “You know, my next piece is going to be written for 12,000 people and played in the Himalayas.” And everyone was like, “Yeah, what a great idea.” But I don't think it was a concrete plan. It was just like his usual hubris because he had a very, very high opinion of himself. So, it's more like some kind of bullshit among friends. 

KUPPER And it became a legend. 

SALONEN But the fact that one can even entertain such a concept, drunk or sober, tells you something about his character. I think he was removed from reality in many ways, but also super talented. And you referred to him being ahead of his time in terms of his harmonic language—yes, he was, and he developed a very individual harmonic language. 

KUPPER Scriabin was also a theosophist. A lot of his tonalities were metaphysical. So, of course, these Greek gods would inspire him. How did you discover his music? 

SALONEN My first-ever contact with Scriabin's music is one of those rare, unforgettable moments in my life. I remember it very, very clearly. I went to a concert—I must have been in my early teens—in Helsinki. The USSR State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra was visiting Helsinki with the chief conductor, Yevgeny Svetlanov, who was a truly fantastic musician. I can’t even remember what the first half was, but the second half was The Poem of Ecstasy, which is perhaps the best-known Scriabin orchestral piece. The conductor was quite visibly drunk but conducted really well. And the orchestra responded fantastically. The last chord from that piece is massively, massively loud. It's one of the loudest songs in all of classical music. And he decided to make it even louder, so he sort of crouched, and as he would rise, the orchestra would hit this crescendo. But he was so drunk that, for a time, the audience was mesmerized by whether he was going to keel over or not. He started wobbling, but he stood up triumphantly and the orchestra, because they had no choice, made this unbelievable crescendo. The noise was just completely deafening. I had never, ever heard anything like that beyond amplified music. As the last chord cut off, I realized a lady, who I didn’t know and was maybe in her thirties, was grabbing my hand. When she realized she was grabbing my hand, she was like, “Sorry. I didn't mean anything by it.” She was maybe twenty years older than me and shocked. 

KUPPER Yeah, that's memorable. 

SALONEN I thought, there's definitely something here. And then, I started studying his music. I learned some of his piano preludes and so on. And I got interested in his world, which was a very strange place, I must say. I guess he is somebody who these days would be called a narcissist. It was all about him and his universe. You’re welcome to visit, but it's still his world. And he had synesthesia, as we know. So, he had this private experience with music that he couldn't share with anybody. Synesthesia is a connection between any two senses. But in his case, it was the most common, which is hearing sound in color. 

KUPPER Which he tried to translate into his performances through the invention of a light organ. 

SALONEN In Prometheus, of course, he's trying to share this with other people by writing the light organ part. But of course, the score that is available has no further instruction. It's just like, “Here's the light organ. Deal with it.” So, there's no detailed instruction as to how he wants it done, and especially what happens when he writes two notes at the same time. I mean, a note is supposed to correspond with a color. But then when he writes two notes, like an interval, what on Earth is that supposed to mean? So, we don't know this. But to do this piece with scent makes sense. Because, as we know, synesthesia can be any connection between any of the senses. It's kind of a meaningless speculation, but I'm pretty certain that if Mr. Scriabin was sitting in my office at the moment, he would be totally beside himself by the potential of having scents connected to his harmonic language. 

KUPPER What do you hope people take away from this unprecedented performance? 

LAURENT I would like people to understand that olfaction has an incredible power to enhance the experience of listening to music. Because they will listen to music with their other senses activated. Maybe more with their guts and hearts than with their brains.  

SALONEN When I sat through the test runs with the fragrances, my reaction was that scent works on a subliminal level. These scents are designed to evoke very deep feelings. In the very beginning, I realized that I was feeling unsettled and slightly fearful, but I didn't know why. And then, I figured out that it was the scent. It was the scent of chaos. The scent of ­fire. Before the invention of fire, the nights were always scary because of darkness. All you hear are the sounds, but you don't know where they come from or what they are. The sense of smell is the first sense that develops in utero. So, what I hope is that people will feel that they've had a deep experience over the full spectrum of what we can perceive, and in the best­-case scenario, people will have felt things that they haven't felt before. 

 THIBAUDET Absolutely. We are bringing a new experience—a new dimension to art. To show how music can touch from different angles. And how the brain can be affected by vision, hearing, smelling. I think it's an experience that should change people. It will be extremely powerful. I think it's going to open a new road and a completely new artistic path in front of us. 

Afrofuturism: An Interview With Sandra Mujinga

interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Hailey Heaton
styling by Camille Ange Pailler & Tyler Okuns

Sandra Mujinga is a Norwegian artist and musician who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through a multidisciplinary practice, herworks are a necropolitical examination of postcolonialism’s hauntologythrough the unique lens of Afrofuturism. Her work exists in an amorphoustimezone bereft of past and present. Layers of visibility, disappearance, andopacity—the lightness of fragile existence—manifest as sculpture,installations, holograms, and electronic music. They ask eternal questionsabout the survival strategies of othered bodies. Heavily inspired by sciencefiction, Mujiga uses speculative storytelling to imagine alternate realities as adelivery system for hope.

OLIVER KUPPER Much of your work has been discussed in the context of Afrofuturism, but it would be great to start off with the present moment and the hauntological aspect of your work. Our current zeitgeist seems wholeheartedly focused on this heavy darkness, the end of times. Can you talk about the spectral quality of your art, and these gossamer-like looming figures? 

SANDRA MUJINGA Reading about the ghost forest in the book The Art of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), edited by Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, and Heather Swanson, made an impression on me. I read it after discovering Necropolitics (2019) by Achille Mbembe, which helped me grapple with deathworlds—how so many people are sacrificed for the comfort of others. Being born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and learning about its history later, on your own, because it is hardly touched upon in the educational systems, one cannot overlook the numbers of lost lives, and those that continue to be lost. Then again, why are those numbers normalized? Zombies, which are shared among Haitians and Central Africans, come to mind—what constitutes a lived life when it is dehumanization through exploited labor? Being haunted gives hope in a sense because it reminds us that our bodies bear witness in ways we cannot imagine. 

OLIVER KUPPER You once said in an interview that you felt this sense of floating in your work. Can you talk about what you mean by this? Do you think that as a society we are living in a time of antigravity? 

MUJINGA I think I was contemplating floating on water. My thoughts turn to Micaela Coel analyzing her series I May Destroy You for British GQ, particularly the scene where Arabella sits on the beach, alone and terrified. Coel talks about these invisible borders, how we are made up of water and yet also terrified by powerful waves—perhaps even by our own power. I believe the genuine fear of one's own power is real because it can feel alien and foreign, especially since our notions of power are often rooted in dominance rather than vulnerability and co-existence. For instance, I am also water, not just a user of water. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020); it was a book I breathed with. Often, I find myself thinking of animals' heart rates when I produce a track. So, floating perhaps involves being more in tune and erasing those invisible borders. My experience of time is very much like this, as I don't perceive it as linear. 

KUPPER Non-linear timelines are also a big hallmark of the science fiction medium. How did you become interested in sci-fi? 

MUJINGA I had seen some sci-fi classics before, but my interest grew after discovering Octavia E. Butler. My first encounter was with the "Lilith's Brood" collection; after that, I wanted to devour everything she had written. I consider her a mentor. I thoroughly enjoy reading her interviews and even examining her notes. I believe that working with electronic music helped me to contemplate shapeshifting bodies and invisible bodies that still possess a presence—like ghosts. There was something deeply fascinating about transitioning from the sound produced by four people to producing it solo, and then undergoing a transformation yourself, and composing as if you were an octopus playing drums at 180 bpm. Additionally, I've viewed clothes as a form of self-building and body-building, and sci-fi has provided me with the space to explore all these ideas. Just today, I visited the Mori Museum in Tokyo and encountered works by Kimura Tsunehisa from the 1970s as part of the group show Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living. It moved me because it served as a reminder that sci-fi has long been a portal for artists to express urgent matters concerning our planet. 

2100, 2023

Steel, fabrics, steel wire H3021.7 x L5064 x W2000 mm Size of fabric varies.

KUPPER Opacity is another aspect that ties into your work—there is a lightness to opacity, but the ability to see yourself through the work is really interesting. Can you talk about the use of opacity in your work? 

MUJINGA I insist on my works being multi-layered networks, where the opacity of each layer can vary. I feel that is one of the many gifts art making can provide me—it creates space for contradictions. That's why sometimes when asked what I am reading, I hesitate to reply because my art can also serve as a trace of friction and may encompass everything I disagree with. [Édouard] Glissant activated my thoughts around coded languages and belonging, particularly due to the dynamics of power and surveillance. Being misunderstood can also be a gift. 

KUPPER Speaking of Glissant and his archipelagic thinking, specifically in relation to cultural institutions, because your work traverses these waves of post-colonialism and you are tied to these two worlds, how do you contend with or confront the Western museum framework when commissioned for an installation? Especially at a time when there are calls for repatriation and acknowledgement of these institutions’ own violent colonial pasts.  

 MUJINGA I see the term post-colonialism more as a manifestation than a reality, and I believe it's crucial to also use terms like neo-colonialism to examine deeply-rooted systems that perpetuate oppression. I view post-colonialism akin to utopian thinking—a place that may not exist, but this doesn't negate the necessity of decolonial practices. It's about world-making for all of us. I think engaging in intergenerational conversations is also a part of decolonial practice. I believe in documenting and archiving to communicate with the future, acknowledging those who paved the way before me, making my journey easier. Despite the discussions feeling like a sci-fi loop at times, where frustration grows regardless of the choices made, I think they can generate more clarity. My friend Linda Spjut once beautifully said, "Love is also discipline,” I do believe in the possibility of honest conversations. I have to. 

KUPPER Going back a little bit, because you explore your own personal history, you were born in Goma and raised in Norway—what have you learned about your own lineage through your artwork? 

MUJINGA I explored that lineage in my exhibition, Real Friends, which was shown at Oslo Kunstforening in 2016. It marked the first time I traveled to Cono on my own, a trip I undertook to visit Virunga National Park. I realized I somehow didn't feel like I belonged anywhere; in Congo, I was seen as Norwegian, while in Norway, I was seen as Congolese, having practically lived there my whole life. What I hadn't considered before the trip was my gaze, and which cultural lens I carried with me. I also grappled with the expectations I had of myself to assimilate, only to realize that my upbringing in Norway was immediately apparent the moment I spoke. I believe the contradictions my sculptures embody—being hyper-visible and invisible simultaneously—have also a lived experience. 

KUPPER You not only work in the medium of sculpture, but also multichannel video, moving images, like holograms. How did you come to these media to express your artistic vision of the world? 

MUJINGA At art school, I primarily focused on sculptures and performance. I began working with video to document my performances. When we had a video course, I aimed to efficiently learn and decided to create a music video, believing it encompassed all the essential elements and could aid in my understanding of time. Eventually, I chose to craft a performance diary and produce a video for my music project, Naee Roberts. These videos also served as a means to archive ideas, evolving from self-filming to engaging in dialogue with other online videos. At the time, I developed a parasocial relationship with Congolese wedding videos from around the world, finding them intimate and longing for connections with Congolese communities in Scandinavia. 

Sandra Mujinga, Closed space, Open World, 2022.

Three-channel video installation with sound. Consisting of 3 x aluminium sculptures with projectors inside and led-strip light. Esti-mated size each 150cm (D) x ca.3 m (H). Three clear frosted plexiglass boxes, 2x (H:3000mmx L:3024mm x D: 2002mm) 1x (H:3000mmx L:4026mm x D: 2002mm), glass clamps, carpet,walls painted black and green light. Animation drawn by: Nancy Saphira. Three different files, 10 minutes asynchronized loops.

KUPPER You explore the hypervisibility of surveillance and how we’re sort of collectivized under the guise of this authoritative, all-seeing eye—why is surveillance so fascinating to you? 

MUJINGA I became increasingly intrigued by surveillance technology when I discovered the world of the deep sea. Something was fascinating about creatures living in deep, dark spaces and how it altered their vision and bioluminescence. Reflecting on the melancholic relationship we could have with the sun due to the state of the planet, I found the idea of a world absent of sunlight captivating. Bioluminescence deeply inspired my work Pervasive Light (2021). I contemplated how the appearance of the performer served a function, whether as a negotiation or as a strategy to find new ways to hide. As Joy Buolamwini has stated, "If you have a face, you have a place in the conversation about AI." I am interested in the growing conversation surrounding biased surveillance and the realization that the technology we are surrounded by is not created in a vacuum. Its biases stem from the lack of diversity among makers, and this disproportionately affects Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. 

Build My Skin with Rocks 2022

Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, DE

KUPPER Can you talk about the significance of the color green in your work? 

MUJINGA I work with multiple mediums. My process can start on the sewing machine, then switch to creating a sound loop and doing some writing at the studio. I see it all as part of bodybuilding. My first exploration of the blue screen was driven by my interest in the chaotic spaces of Seapunk online, along with the worldbuilding in aquariums and aquarium YouTube videos. This was around 2013, and I was fascinated by simulation and how I increasingly found myself googling images of trees instead of going outside to take pictures. Instead of erasing or replacing the blue screen, I found it intriguing to use it as something that would camouflage itself as water. When I traveled to Virunga National Park, I was surrounded by dense greenery, which was also interesting because beautiful green nature could be found in relaxing videos. The screen became a window, and that's why the gorillas I saw there seemed almost unreal. This led me to contemplate endangered animals that we may only see on screen—will they even be accurately represented? So, the green background remained prominent, later transitioning into a void, interchangeable with blackness. 

KUPPER This issue is about our world and offering an antidote to the doom loop in order to see the future. So, I want to end with a quote by Octavia Butler: “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.” How do we learn to deal with the demands of the living world? How do we use levity to see the future?  

MUJINGA I believe the future is already here, guiding us through what needs to be done. The violence that is happening in Gaza, Congo, Sudan, Haiti cannot be separated from history. James Baldwin once said, "You think that your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Love is transformative, and the step to that is curiosity, even when it feels unsafe. Perhaps levity can provide a sense of clarity rather than escapism—a reminder that we embody many aspects, and the world is always intertwined with us. 

Burn Down the Data Centers: An Interview with MSCHF

Animorph Anime Painting (Reclining Nudes) 2024

interview by Oliver Kupper

Drop after drop, MSCHF continues to irreverently subvert the traditional delivery systems of both fashion and art. Last year, the Brooklyn-based artist collective’s Big Red Boot (BRB)—a "Cartoon boot for a Cool 3D World"—became a viral sensation. Though, MSCHF’s disruption isnot without a purpose; in a pervasive attention economy, virality equals creative power. The collective’s upcoming exhibition,Art 2, at Perrotin Los Angeles will explore their anarchicalantics in a commercial gallery setting, exploring fakes, forgeries, and the democratization of theart world.

OLIVER KUPPER What is MSCHF’s definition of levity through the lens of the collective’s involvement in the art and fashion world—is MSCHF an agent of chaos or of rectification? 

 MSCHF To some degree, humor and absurdity are core to MSCHF because that’s just how our brains work. But more generally, humor is incredibly useful as an entrypoint to critique. It draws people in and makes things accessible, and MSCHF has always been concerned with the utilitarian efficacy of our communication. Internally we talk about living in the Spicy Present—not looking to the future (everything feels stagnant), but leaning into the spiraling intensification of the present moment. 

Bootlegs the Sculpture 2023

Together: 26 15/16 x 16 3/8 x 18 3/8

Microscopic Handbag (Hermes) 2024

657 x 222 x 700 μm

KUPPER We live in a world where authenticity plays into the post-truth ethos of our time—we are obsessed with the idea of the real even if the real seems to be slipping away. Can you talk about how MSCHF plays with authenticity in your product drops and artist multiples? 

MSCHF Art 2 includes a follow-up in our “Museum of Forgeries” series. Previously, we’d duplicated a Warhol drawing 999 times before shuffling the original in to make a run of 1000 indistinguishable originals. This time, we’ve run the process for a Picasso sculpture, creating a total of 250 duplicates. Both of these objects are explorations of creation via destruction of authenticity. The authenticity gets sort of probabilistically distributed across all of our forgeries. It’s worth questioning how authenticity works, especially posthumously for artists who made huge volumes of things in their lives, and whether everything they touched becomes an artwork of stature. The Picasso we forged for this show relies on dual COAs from his occasionally-conflicting heirs (both of whom have now passed away themselves), which is the gold standard for Picasso works—but even from that sentence we can see how messy authenticity is. 

KUPPER Can you talk about the collectivizing power of drop culture and how MSCHF utilizes drop culture to exemplify its message and objectives? The upcoming show at Perrotin LA will show the relic of Public Universal Car, which was part of Drop #84 Key4All, the sale of which will fund the next automotive adventure.  

MSCHF Key4All is a great example of a piece where every additional participant makes the work conceptually stronger—it’s specifically leveraging and enabled by scale. For a car to travel communally across the US, it requires a minimum density of participants across all fifty (or at least the forty-eight contiguous) states. The more existing keyholder, the more interactions occur, the more fully the car fulfills its status as a commons. The Public Universal Car was on the road for nine months, across hundreds of drivers. Now, in the gallery, with its engine burned out and twenty coats of paint on it, it’s an artifact of a crowd-mediated performance. 

Key for All Pt Cruiser 2022

69 x 169 x 68 inch

Key for All Pt Cruiser 2022

69 x 169 x 68 inch

Key for All Pt Cruiser 2022

69 x 169 x 68 inch

KUPPER How has MSCHF been inspired by predecessors like Ant Farm or other radical collectives experimenting and exploring the power of mass media? 

MSCHF Two groups MSCHF is indebted to are K-Hole and DIS Magazine—both of which were trailblazers for business entities that operated as art practices, while using the form of business as a cipher to present to non-art audiences. We’re also, of course, specifically interested in the power we can gain from operating as a business: the efficiency we can bring to bear in executing any and every concept, and getting it into the world. 

KUPPER What is your advice to artists who want to wield more power in a world where power is so hidden, decentralized, and hegemonic? 

MSCHF I’m not necessarily sure the power is hidden or decentralized. Looking at the internet, there’s an argument to be made that people are looking for decentralization, or at least for subcultural spaces. The major (centralized) internet platforms have gotten so lousy with ads and degraded user experience so much that people are searching for alternatives. Yancy Strickler writes about this in his “Dark Forest Theory Of The Internet” (stealing from Cixin Liu)—the reason you hang out in a Signal group chat is to get away from centralized power (the market forces of the public internet, which will monetize and destroy your community given half a chance). But, for creative work, the risk here, as Yancy also notes, is that embracing the dark forest means abdicating the mass and the central, which is exactly where MSCHF excels, and something we place value on precisely because there is power there. How can we Trojan Horse conceptual work into central culture? MSCHF has always tried to be off-platform. We build our own infrastructure. We’ve made something like 250 standalone websites. Platforms prevent agency, they flatten the content that lives on them, and if you get reliant on them you can have the rug pulled out from under you completely. We got deplatformed from Shopify at one point; we couldn’t sell anything. We got deplatformed from the T-Mobile network at one point; we couldn’t send text messages. Some of us are still personally perma-banned from Venmo. 

KUPPER How do we bring meaning back into a world where nothing means anything anymore? 

MSCHF Burn down the data centers. 

Crone Star

text by Hanna Sage Kay

The experiences of womanhood Zarina Nares chronicles—those forces of toxicmasculinity, celebrity culture, and social conditioning thatinevitablycome to bear on usall—take shape as videos, artist books, and electronic music that faithfully speak tocertain universal (female) truths, which, due to their very ubiquity, have been gaslit intononbeing—just like the women that they befall.

The patriarchy is balding and you’re suffering the consequences 

In a haptic, horizontally-formatted, 23-page, spiral-bound book titled TIKTOK + THE PATRIARCHY + THE 4TH DIMENSION (2023)—that could just as plausibly be the product of an incredibly high person or a genius (is there a difference?)—Nares charts a course between shopping addiction as a palliative for sadness and transcending to the fourth dimension en route to the matriarchy. Between points (a) and (b), she lays out a series of Venn diagrams and flowcharts that map, via TikTok screenshots, the causal relationships between shopping, sadness, dating, and the need to look hot, which brings us right back to shopping (illustrating better than anything that our primary occupation under capitalism is not work, but spending money). 

This leads Nares to what she calls, the “war on the crone” and the omnipresence of anti-aging products foisted upon women of all ages, which instill—not at all accidentally, her book claims—a rampant fear of age thirty-five. Nares explains that we younger millennials are beset by an internalized fear of this seemingly arbitrary age, not because it has any significance for us, but because it's when “approximately 66% of men will have experienced some degree of hair loss.” Now who should be scared of age thirty-five? The patriarchy, she says, that’s who. 

In what I imagine as the voice of a wellness coach or TED talk presenter, Nares writes: "Release the pressure to find love and have kids by thirty-five and recognize the receding hairlines around you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” A true prayer for a more liberated womanhood. And in due fashion, the book concludes with a page that reads: “Welcome to the matriarchy,” featuring porn cutouts of women sitting astride harnessed men, riding them whip in hand into a desert sunset. 

But so much for liberation. The first printer that Nares approached to produce TIKTOK + THE PATRIARCHY + THE 4TH DIMENSION refused to do so because of this climactic final page. The person relaying this news to Nares was herself a woman, encapsulating Nares’ very concern—echoed throughout her work—that women unconsciously further the very patriarchal systems that they otherwise consciously work to dismantle. 

So, what started as an investigation of shopping trends on TikTok and why they’re so often the result of feelings of sadness came to engender Nares’ conspiratorial diagnosis of the consummate ways that capitalist patriarchy has infiltrated not only our social norms, operating systems, and conceptions of beauty and womanhood, but infected our innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires. 

“Early criticism of media culture,” Nares says, “is about what’s being given to us. But we know that the forces outside of us are evil. These things aren’t going to change…. What became scary for me is not what other people are posting, but what I’m posting and how capitalism can be so internalized that I’m exploiting myself.” 

I am abundant. I am happy. I have everything I want. 

Is anything more emblematic of our self-exploitation in the service of capitalism than a haul video on TikTok? Not only are these individuals the consumers, but they’re also making the commercials for free, in their own time. 

In doing so, some appear to reap real pride and confidence from their new purchases, others market their wares as influencers, and the most vulnerable of the lot may be seen crying over mounting debt. The broad spectrum of emotion conveyed by the creators of these videos evinces that shopping can function simultaneously as a comfort, an advertisement, a privilege, and an addiction. 

And so, over a barrage of shopping haul TikToks wherein certifiable Amazon addicts share their bounty, Nares has programmed an AI-generated text-to-voice TikTok narrator to repeat a variety of affirmations such as “I am abundant. I am happy. I have everything I want” and “I do not worry too much about what everyone else is doing” in a video titled Meditation For Releasing The Capitalist Patriarchy Within (2022). 

In an irreverent bid to cultivate a semblance of agency and autonomy for those of us (all of us?) ensnared by capitalism’s darker forces, these affirmations stand in tension with TikTok excerpts that Nares looped to repeat a single word or phrase, such as: “Amazon,” “They’re literally obsessed with me,” “Kendall wears it all the time,” or “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip-flops, so I bought army pants and flip-flops.” Interspersed throughout Meditation For Releasing The Capitalist Patriarchy Within, these glitched sequences serve as a bewitching voice of the capitalist patriarchy (what Nares calls “Your Spirit Guide’s Frequency”) that spur our continual drive to buy and fuse conceptions of selfhood with the products we’re conditioned to want and need. 

When collaged together in rapid succession by Nares and ornamented with a record of rapidly increasing debt ticking away at the top of the screen, the TikToks that comprise her video may read as an easily humorous barrage of excessive consumption, a sly take on the annals of the internet where Amazon is a drug and celebrity its dealer—but Nares is more “interested in that moment right after the laughter stops, where it’s not so funny anymore, and you have these moments of reflection.” 

What consequently rises to the surface is a distinct awareness of the fact that you’re laughing at real people (or at least a very real condition of our world). Despite the calculated chaos with which they’re presented, the TikToks that Nares culls together linger on the subconscious with an aftertaste of pity, and some small doses of (guilt-ridden) relief that they are not immediately relatable. While pity and the distance that art and social media prescribe might allow us to see ourselves as a step apart, the guilt of this rather voyeuristic position serves as a reminder that Nares’ video, and the TikToks that comprise it, are not so much a distant allegory, but rather an acute representation of an inescapable condition that we are all subject to under capitalism. We might not all document our hauls on TikTok, but we are all party to the same gross systems of consumption that have made such videos a valid form of expression in this economy wherein material possessions and the ability to acquire them are the one true arbiter of our self-worth. 

Through laying bare such cycles of shopping and sadness, consumption and debt, Nares’ work implores us to ask whether we are so subsumed by these systems that our wants and needs are no longer distinguishable from the patriarchal engine that we’re furthering via an insatiable drive to buy those products that Kendall Jenner and Cady Heron (as capitalist avatars) tell us we need to … feel happy, get a date, and look hot. 

Hoes that know 

Between a chorus of “hoes that know” in DIVINE FEMININE AWAKENING (2021)—a song released by Nares on the album “once I completely detach myself from reality and transcend my physical form, it’s over for you hoes”—a soft female computer-generated voice one would expect to find on an app for guided meditations shares her wisdom for the construction and maintenance of an empowered self. “To be a woman is to feel pain so deeply. To be a woman is to be shamed for our bodies, our biology, and our very existence.” But she goes on to say, “You must unlearn that feeling of powerlessness because, my dear, you are incredibly powerful.” 

What’s hardest to reconcile about DIVINE FEMININE AWAKENING is the lack of irony with which it is received. Hypnotized by the truth—which feels shamefully cringe-worthy—she leaves us only with the will to: “Inhale your power…. Exhale your fear, shame, guilt, blame, hurt, pain. It isn’t yours, and it no longer serves you.” 

And so, in a work that absents the humor that so often serves as a conduit for those unfiltered truths that define Nares’ work and instead adopts a sobering explication of the capitalist (balding) patriarchy that unavoidably shapes our lives, DIVINE FEMININE AWAKENING rather sincerely asks us to stop, listen, and take what’s ours. 

But wait, not so fast! Nares’ song is bookended by advertisements on SoundCloud—even though the platform attempts to masquerade as a free resource for artists—making it impossible not to wonder, as Nares does, if her creative output has “just become another capitalist wellness product for empowerment,” further anesthetizing us (against her will) to the will of the patriarchy. 

Read Rest Repeat: Willy Chavarria and Idris Balogun in Conversation

set design by Natalie Hoffman
photography by Boe Marion
styling by ulie Ragolia & Amy Bialek

Mexican-American designer Willy Chavarria’s eponymous label, which helaunched in 2015, is an amalgamation of race, politics, and sexuality.His lines are wide and oversized, but elegantly crafted. Inspired by hisWest Coast Chicano heritage, a sense of spirituality, and club culture,Chavarria's world is dark, dangerous, and alluring. Idris Balogun, founderof menswear brand WINNIE, was born to Nigerian immigrants in New Yorkand raised in London. He cut his teeth on Savile Row where he learned thefine art of fine tailoring. After working with Burberry and Tom Ford, hefounded his own label in 2018. In a fashion world ofconstantly shiftingtectonics, Chavarria and Balogun discuss theircircuitous arrival.

WILLY CHAVARRIA How did your show go?  

IDRIS BALOGUN It went really well. It went crazier than I thought it was going to go, which is good, I guess. It was our first time doing a proper show in Paris and it was at the American Library. It was the first time they'd ever done a [fashion] show there. It was super community-based and it came out beautifully. 

CHAVARRIA How did you figure out the American Library venue? 

BALOGUN The collection was inspired by a poet named Ted Jones, who was an American expat in Paris. I was trying to figure out how to capture his spirit, and vibe, and ethos. He frequented the American Library. I reached out to them, they were down, and it just ended up happening. 

CHAVARRIA We're going to do my next show in Brooklyn, which is a little high-risk because it's outside of the main fashion week map. It's going to be in the building where my studio is. It's pretty sick. It's an old, pre-war warehouse—just super raw. Everything about the show is changing constantly. 

BALOGUN What's the inspiration for this collection that you're going to share?  

CHAVARRIA The collection is called Safe From Harm. The inspiration is about caring for one another, and looking after one another, and being good to one another. That's the core feeling of it. There are a lot of familiar patterns, warm-feeling fabrics, and a lot of leather. There's a toughness and a softness with heavy masculinity, which I always like to play with. 

BALOGUN I've always loved that idea of playing with masculinity and femininity, and how you can find one inside of the other. I think it's quite beautiful. I also love the cathedral aspect of your work. There's an aspect of Catholicism to it, it’s ecclesiastical. 

CHAVARRIA It's heavy Catholicism is what it is. There's this phrase I remember daily from the Bible: “Always be joyous.” It is possible to hold joy in your heart even if you're not happy. You can be mourning the loss of someone you love and still hold joy in your heart. Humor is important to have. 

BALOGUN I feel like you need to feed people a balance of emotion for them to really understand and unpack it. You can't fully get the message across without some kind of adjacent humor. That also makes it multidimensional because we're not always trying to just say one thing. It's important to have multiple ways for someone to attach themselves emotionally. 

CHAVARRIA It's like communication in general. If you have a serious subject that you want to discuss—maybe something confrontational—when you include a level of humor, it’s much easier to ingest. Levity is very important in my work because otherwise, it'll just get too heavy. 

BALOGUN What's your first experience with the sartorial? There is a lot of draping in your work, but there's a lot of tailoring too. There are a lot of plays on lapels and shoulders and structure. 

CHAVARRIA I worked at Ralph Lauren where I did some tailoring. So I had a little bit of schooling on that, but it wasn't until, I'd say four seasons ago, that I started to fuck with it seriously. I have an atelier where I make samples first and work together on the fit,the tailoring and the patterns and all that. It was a conscious decision. I wanted to make sure that the positioning of my brand did not get stuck in a “lower tier” price point, so I wanted to make sure I had some of these finer pieces, nice gowns, and some of the more luxury products. 

BALOGUN I remember seeing your work maybe two years ago, and you had extremely wide trousers back then. It was a play on proportions. It looked like a zoot suit but modernized. I read something about it having to do with LA Chicano culture. I think you kind of found a way to bridge those things. 

CHAVARRIA That's why the word sartorial kind of throws me off because when you're thinking about fine tailoring, a pair of Dickies is the most beautifully fit and tailored pant there is, but that wouldn't be considered sartorial. When I hear sartorial, I think of suiting. But I guess you could say tailoring has always been a part of my work, even in denim. 

BALOGUN Yeah I agree. I started from a super practical background on Savile Row. You start doing buttonholes, then you move on to pattern cutting, then you move on to cutting fabric. You do waistcoats, then you do blazers. It makes you look at the world in lines. I can appreciate a line that I feel is a risk on the designer's part—something new, something interpreted differently. When I saw your work years ago, I thought it was really something fresh. You have many different references, like a pair of Dickies, or the cultures that you were seeing growing up, or even Ralph Lauren, and subconsciously those things are working. I could see the tailoring, I could see the lines, I could see the play on volume, I could see the play on silhouette, I could see the play on fabric. 

CHAVARRIA I think you have a more studied eye. You're coming from the inside out and I'm coming from the outside in. 

BALOGUN It's interesting, from the inside looking out, coming through the buttonhole, it looks very well-versed. It looks like someone who understands the rules and is now breaking them. There's no one way to do it. You can come from any angle, but as long as the passion and the love is there, then you get the result you want. 

CHAVARRIA I think so, and the craftsmanship has to be there. It has to be thoughtfully fit and thoughtfully constructed. All of that has to be a part of the game. In the last four seasons, I have spent a lot more time focusing on the craftsmanship and moving to the much better factories. Right now, my better stuff is produced in the US, but for this coming season, I'm looking for factories in Europe.  

BALOGUN How has it been in Europe? When I first started, I was doing everything on my own. And then, I was doing things with two or three tailors in New York. I would teach them how to do certain things. But then it got really hard for me. It has to be a real passion project. Because in New York, some people are exceptional at what they do, but they're really hard to find, and they're really expensive. A regular tailor may not know how to do some horsehair stitching on a canvas, or know how to do pig stitches, or how to do fine finishes, stuff like that. So for me, it was just easier to move to Italy. People understood my language. I'm curious how it’s been for you to have an atelier in New York and try to push these fine tailoring nuances, these little finishes, and the craftsmanship. 

CHAVARRIA It took some time to find the right people. And to tell you the truth, the best atelier that I could find is in Los Angeles. So, even though I'm in New York, my atelier is in LA. There's a lot of back and forth. So I'll go stay in LA and work with them on a collection. Once it gets going, I come back, start working on the other samples, come in, and make comments. A lot of constant texting all day, FaceTime meetings, and photos, but we've been getting by. Just this last spring is when we first started wholesaling. I was doing some wholesale in Asia only, and then to just a couple of stores in the US, but most of it was direct to consumers. Now that I'm getting into wholesale, the volume will be increasing, I'll be looking for manufacturers in Europe. 

BALOGUN When did you start the brand? 

CHAVARRIA 2015. 

BALOGUN What made you move from LA to New York? 

CHAVARRIA The fashion industry. I just ended up getting a job over here. I was working for a cycling apparel company in California. Before that, I was very involved in the club scene, and then I took a little pause on that and moved to this little coastal town and started doing triathlons, and I got this job with this cycling apparel company. I was out there in the middle of nowhere just getting in-touch with myself, and then Ralph Lauren launched RLX, their authentic athletic line, which was really sick at the time. At that time, nobody knew how to do athletic apparel, there was no Lululemon. RLX was contracting out, so they tapped this little cycling apparel company I was working with. At the time, “Polo sport” was my look. I was all like, Oh I got this. They hired me and brought me to New York. 

BALOGUN Wow, that's crazy. That's very similar to my story. My first major fashion job was at Burberry, and I fell into that because I was doing an apprenticeship on Savile Row. I didn't know what fashion design was—I knew about tailoring. And then, Christopher Bailey, the creative director of Burberry came in and was like, “Do you wanna come and work for me?” and I was like, “What do you do?” And he was like, “I'm a designer at Burberry,” and I was like “What the hell does that mean?” So, you kind of roll with where the world takes you.  

CHAVARRIA I really believe in that. I pray a lot and I do a lot of things like envisioning the future and manifesting. 

BALOGUN It's like we fell into these things but we had different ways of going about it.  

CHAVARRIA What was it like confronting the fashion industry—the dream versus the reality? 

BALOGUN My first ever dream of fashion I had was watching the documentary about Oswald Boateng. He was a guy who started on Savile Row and ended up becoming the creative director for Givenchy in the ’90s and early 2000s, and I was like, this guy is so freaking cool, I wanna be just like this guy. Fast forward, I have my own brand and it's not the same. I spend so little time actually designing than I do putting out fires, like how am I gonna do the show? Where's the show gonna be? Oh, the venue says you need to do a talk if you want to do the show there. So, now I gotta do a talk, and I've never done a talk before. You've got to put on so many different hats. That's the reality, but in the dream you're like Yves Saint Laurent in some atelier, sitting at a desk, sketching away and coming up with crazy ideas. I'm very grateful for the time I do get to do that, but the reality is you do not use most of your time doing that. 

CHAVARRIA Definitely not. (laughs) Having worked for companies before starting my own label I already knew what time it was when it came to the work involved. I mean, I was ready for it. I’m still ready for it even though it's grueling work—it's the only thing I know. 

BALOGUN For sure, It's grueling work. Do you ever think you're gonna show in Paris? 

CHAVARRIA Yeah, definitely, I think you have to show in Paris to be on the global stage. This city has supported me quite a bit, so it's still a very personal relationship I have with New York City and I like to mix it all together. But it's definitely been a plan to show in Paris. For a while, I was worried it would be too expensive to bring everything there, but I think that New York has just gotten so crazy, any place is cheaper than New York. 

BALOGUN Do you use sustainable materials?  

CHAVARRIA I do. I have used a material called Econyl, which is made of old fishing nets, ocean waste, and discarded carpet. The company works with Re-Nylon for Prada. They do a lot of luxury labels’ recycled stuff. They do stuff with corn, with mushrooms, and a lot of synthetics that are recycled from the plastics that wash up ashore. They will go out to these locations all over the world, collect the materials, and produce fabrics from it in their factory. But to be honest, my quantities at this stage don't have much effect on the environment. 

BALOGUN We work with one factory in Mongolia that does all of our knitwear. They raise the sheep and they make the yarns there—it's super traceable and sustainable. But at our scale, it's pretty easy to do that. Even the factory we work with here in Veneto, I see everything being made. We go to Biello and we get dead-stock fabrics from these warehouses. At this point, sure it's sustainable, but it's like a survival tactic for us. At this stage, how can you not be sustainable? 

CHAVARRIA Any small brand is operating as sustainably as they can. We are not making any excess—we are eating all the meat on the pig. 

BALOGUN And we're using the bone for broth, and taking out the marrow and using it to make some other dish.  

CHAVARRIA And then when it's done, we mash it up and make some sort of powder for our faces.  

BALOGUN Exactly. 

CHAVARRIA But, it's the bigger companies that have to really make a change.  

BALOGUN I grew up in a first-generation Nigerian immigrant home where survival is sustainability. If you're not sustainable, you don't survive. 

CHAVARRIA What is your advice for future generations? 

BALOGUN Be more curious, and don't be afraid to ask questions. The younger generation, they want things to happen so much more quickly. They want things to be immediate. Everyone wants to be a professional overnight. In reality, that's not the way it works. I am so receptive to questions. People might have a different way of looking at things, like the way you look at tailoring, for example. It gives me a different way of thinking about it, and maybe now when I approach a pair of trousers or I approach a shirt, I'll say, “Let me try to look at it from Chavarria’s lens—from the outside-in.” If we all have that open line of communication, we can create more dialogue. 

CHAVARRIA I think that patience and the willingness to learn and grow is a skill that they don't teach in school. Now, everyone is a creative director, and everyone is a fashion stylist. And you don't have to say that you're the best—you become the best through work. You'll work for nothing sometimes, and you'll do things at your own expense because you know that you're going to learn from it. I think that it's really good for young people to be more self-challenging, and don’t feel so entitled. Humble your ass. (laughs) 

BALOGUN Last question: Do you have a favorite reading chair? 

CHAVARRIA Yes. I'll mostly read at home before bed. Do you?  

BALOGUN I do, but mine is not a chair in my home. Mine is usually in public. I love public reading. On the train, or a bench, or at a restaurant, or something like that. That's my favorite. 

CHAVARRIA That’s super hot. Guys reading in public, that's like burning hot. I am way too distracted as a person to read outside. Maybe I'll hold a book on the train, just so I look like I'm reading on a train. 

Otis Houston Jr.

photography by Nick Sethi
text by Tara Anne Dalbow 

The first time I saw Otis Houston Jr., he was standing beneath the Triborough Bridge in Harlem, New York, with half a watermelon balanced atop his head and a paintbrush in his hand. Stuck in the congestion of rush hour traffic, I watched from the back of a cab as he traced short, careful strokes through the air as if he were painting the world before him. More striking than his overalls and melon cap was the expression of absolute calm and contentment on his face as if he were standing beside not a heaving highway but a mountain lake. What I remember is straining in my seat to look back, transfixed by the grace and gravitas of the man painting over the exhaust, the sirens, the crush of cars, with a smile on his face. 

It wasn't until years later that I found out who he was and that far from being anonymous, he was something of a legend in Upper Manhattan. Well-known for his impromptu performances, found-object installations, and spray-painted signage, he’s been the unofficial tenant of that marginalized strip of concrete at 122nd Street since 1997. “It’s all about location, location, location,” he told me during our conversation more than a decade after our paths first crossed on FDR Drive. 

While some things have changed for the artist since then, he’s now shown his work at Canada and Gordon Robichaux galleries and numerous international art fairs. Other things have stayed the same: he still performs roadside in outlandish outfits with watermelons balanced on his head a few times a week. “FDR Drive is like my freedom,” he explained, having first spotted his future studio and stage from the terrace of the public housing unit where he lived after his release from prison. “It found me, it did.” 

Art seemed to have found him, too. He first started creating work while incarcerated, namely, layered collages constructed from magazine clippings and whatever other print media he was allowed. In more ways than one, the pictures he made then prefigured the method and materiality of his art practice now and established his insistence that the artist “use what he’s got.” Along with a passion for artmaking, he also developed a voracious reading habit and earned his high school equivalency diploma while behind bars. “I don’t call it prison; I call it education,” he explained. “You have to read to grow, to evolve. Read, read, read!” 

Both the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge are central to Houston Jr.’s practice, as well as his conception of himself as an artist and responsible member of society. This is as much a byproduct of his edifying experience in prison as his grave dissatisfaction with politicians and other people in positions of power who refuse to share what they know with the public. “Few know too much; many know too little,” he told me. Viewing his work through this lens reveals how the multivarious facets of his democratic practice—performance, sculpture, painting, signage, and song—are united by a common goal of reversing the paradigm so that many know much and few know little. As he sees it, with the great power afforded to him by books comes the great responsibility to share his wisdom with others.  

That said, Professor Houston Jr.’s teaching methods are about as zany as they come. Perhaps the most straightforward are his signs, and even then … slogans, epigrams, poems, protests, and exhortations are spray-painted across gym towels, old paintings, and banners made from salvaged fabric scraps. Their messages range from “educate yourself” to “man do not destroy man build.” Then, there’s the profusion of fruit that he integrates into his performances to promote healthy eating and encourage the “95% of Americans [that] don’t eat enough fruit” to go home and have an apple. Or his assemblages, constructed entirely from found objects that he salvages from the streets and the office building where he works as a maintenance custodian. All of these works extoll an ethos of reuse and restoration that returns a sense of reverence and delight to once-treasured objects as various as children’s toys, artificial flowers, and broken chairs. Still, he imparts other lessons through example, like lifting weights roadside, greeting everyone he sees with a smile and a wave—because “the closest thing between two people is a smile”—and confidently affirming his identity, experiences, and artistic creations for all to see. As he says, “They see someone that looks like them doin’ it; they know they can do it too.” 

His generosity of spirit and talent for infusing mundane moments and objects with levity and laughter also make learning difficult lessons possible by tendering receptivity instead of defensiveness. Alongside celebrations of health, education, kindness, and creative expression are poignant critiques of racism, poverty, and power. Questions like, “Can I live” and observations like, “he ain’t did nothing, but being a negro,” distill complex issues surrounding systemic racism and social injustice and confront unspoken prejudices and acts of violence. “We not in the same boat, but we all in the water,” he tells me in a sing-song voice that tempers the gravity of the subject. 

When I asked him how he maintains so much joy and hope in the face of adversity and increasingly unbearable realities, he laughed and told me, “It’s not hard” because he loves himself, he loves people, and he loves making art. In his words: “We are the canvas. Abstract. Original. Breathtaking.” Recalling the first time I saw him, paintbrush in hand, I wonder all over again if he was, in fact, painting over the world, making it a little brighter than it was before. 

Michelangelo Pistoletto

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interview by Dan Thawley
portraits by Alessandro Sartori

Art and spirituality have been inseparable for millennia as humanity grapples with the unknowable through sculpture, painting, performance, and the written word. Through depictions of beauty and pain, using figuration and abstraction, artists construct their own mythologies in conversation with the world around them. The ninety-year-old Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto is a living legend and a world builder who has traveled further down this philosophical rabbit hole than most. His ‘mirror paintings’—first executed in the 1960s—formed a crucial axis of the Arte Povera movement, one that found an explicit universality due to its interrogation of the relationship between self and society. In 1994, Pistoletto returned to his native Biella, a historical textile town one hour north of Milan, to consolidate his practice into the Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto where continues to provoke new conversations in the arts and sciences.

Our visit to Cittadellarte in early spring came at the invitation of the Italian fashion designer Alessandro Sartori, creative director of Zegna, a global empire with historic roots in the region. Born and raised in Biella, Sartori first visited Pistoletto as a student and returned to his hometown with us to photograph the artist for this interview. Today, Pistoletto’s cultural factory serves as both an art foundation and a ‘laboratory school’ for students and traveling academics. The sprawling riverside complex inhabits multiple sites with temporary exhibitions and permanent installations, artist residencies, a restaurant, and a library. Its most spectacular asset is a vast expression of The Third Paradise, a long-term artistic and philosophical project represented by a tripled infinity symbol inside the vaulted concrete hall of a former wool mill. Traced in yellow on the smooth floors and studded with metal tactile paving, it’s an idea that continues to morph in form and scale across the globe—from a mirrored loop on IM Pei’s glass pyramid of the Louvre in Paris in 2013, to flash mobs in Milan and Sarajevo, to ‘land art’ installations featuring textiles, benches, and flags in other major cities.

For those only familiar with Pistoletto’s ‘mirror paintings’—stalwart presences in art foundations and museums across the planet—the scope of his vision as a cross-disciplinary thinker may come as a surprise. Yet it is that very immediate, unapologetic nature of the mirror’s reflection that remains at the center of his practice, which demands us to look back at the successes and failures of humankind as a new roadmap for a more equitable existence. Despite its associations with ego and vanity, Pistoletto deconstructs our relationship with ourselves and the world through the collective and transient possibilities of the mirror. Often the mirror is removed entirely, yet the idea remains more palpable than ever. It’s a soothing balm in troubled times.

DAN THAWLEY I wanted to start by asking you about infinity.

MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO Infinity is the right word. My mirror paintings date back to ’61 or ’62, and I still engage with mirror painting, because the mirror represents infinity. Within infinity, we have all that exists. So, in the mirror painting, are we looking at what exists directly? No. The mirror painting represents what exists. The mirror comes from the work of making the material smoother, taking roughness, and making it more brilliant—increasing its ability to take in the vision. Art in the ’40s and ’50s, even before that, was based on creating more and more material on the canvas. 

THAWLEY Like Abstract Expressionism?

PISTOLETTO I did the opposite until the material disappeared. The canvas was not the canvas anymore, it was a mirror. The first mirror paintings were black varnish, and very shiny. So shiny that they started to reflect not only the light but also the images. It was absolutely necessary to give the meaning of art to that material because that material became representative, and representation is the entire history of art. So, putting my image in the middle of the mirror meant putting art in the middle of infinity, you see? It's incredible because we have two opposite elements. One is me, and the other is the world. I am necessary to make the conception of what exists. So, in that case, what exists becomes conscious. The universe that is reflected becomes conscious of its existence through me. For me, this is incredibly important because I discovered what I was looking for. Who am I? Why do I exist? All the questions were finally answered.

THAWLEY I wanted to ask you about technology and how it has changed the way you think about your work. You have continued making mirror paintings up until today, yet the meaning of the mirror has changed so much over time. The meaning of a photograph, of a self-portrait, has changed in the 21st century, with the camera, with the smartphone. So, how have you evolved that thinking with technology yourself?

PISTOLETTO I couldn't go on painting my figure on the reflective surface with a brush, because the reflection is so objective that any intervention I make is not as objective if I use my hands. So, I had to use something as objective as the mirror, and that was the camera. Photography can fix an image that would otherwise exist in the mirror for a fraction of a second. That image becomes the memory of a moment that immediately passes. So, what we have in our mind is the memory. The mirror paintings have the same function: the figure that is fixed within the photo is the memory that lives in each moment of the future of the mirror painting. Not only for one person but for everybody. They represent everybody, every mind, every life. Art is virtuality and the mirror is the maximum possible expression of virtuality. I recognized that the mirror itself doesn't have any image of itself. Because it is a zero image, it can reflect all existing images. It’s a binary system. But what is important is that the mirror becomes activated through technology. It's always a metaphysical process.

THAWLEY Most of your body of work sees layers of symbols placed between the viewer and their reality, with the trompe l'oeil painting or photographic transfer that you add to the surface of the mirror. What we've just discussed shows how the practical application of the work leads to an entire ideology that you have extrapolated from this universal capacity of the works. You've mentioned the everyman and how everybody can see themselves in the work. So, everybody can relate to what is in the mirror differently due to their lived experience too.

PISTOLETTO Society is dependent on common thinking. This is always a question of using our collective memory to reorganize and create new dimensions of living. And for me, art is the fertilizer of science, religion, and society. Art is a kind of stimulation that comes from the combination of the material of the universe and the capacity of that material to think about itself. This is incredible. That's humanity. And we’ve arrived at a point where humanity can possess the universe. And we have the responsibility of possessing that universe. What we are doing today with artificial intelligence—this accumulation of memory that is so vast and so big—that it is getting closer to reality. The present moment and memory are almost connected. I think that's something that we are very, very close to. It is why we have become responsible for the way we connect memory and reality.

THAWLEY I wanted to ask you about the concept of “demopraxy,” which is another essential idea in your approach to art and philosophy. 

PISTOLETTO At Cittadellarte we have the school, UNIDEE, a university of ideas. Every year, for almost twenty years, we have invited artists or designers who come from all over the world. As artists, as designers, as architects, we have to explore democracy. At a certain point, there were two or three guests from different countries who said, “For us, democracy is the wrong word.” So, we started to search for the right word. Paolo Nardini, the director of Cittadellarte, came up with the idea of using another root. Instead of ‘kratos,’ which means ‘power,’ use ‘praxis,’ which means ‘practice.’ So, how can we use the practice? Practice is in all the different organizations that exist everywhere, and each organization needs a small government.

THAWLEY Where does the idea of protest and social responsibility come into your work?

PISTOLETTO We call Biella an Archipelago City because there are seventy-four municipalities. We have land, we have mountains, we have water. We have been organizing forums to discuss renewable energy among all the different municipalities. It is difficult to convince everybody, but we can no longer have destructive energy sources. If we really want to eliminate war, eliminate conflict, we have to learn to put the monster on one side and virtue on the other side. To eliminate the violence, you cannot just have virtue, you have to have the two elements. There has to be harmony. It is why in art we look to find harmony. If you put together two sounds, you have a third sound, and the more sounds you put together, the more harmony you can have. That is the chorus. The chorus of life. This is the chorus of society. There's a chorus of war or a chorus of peace. You decide. This is politics.

Everything Is Beautiful When You Look At It With Love: Maurizio Cattelan

Everything Is Beautiful When You Look At It With Love
On Maurizio Cattelan’s SINGLE POST INSTAGRAM 

Essay by Perry Shimon 

Maurizio Cattelan’s Instagram consisted of one post at a time. It paired a bold, memetic image, seemingly gleaned from the authorless subconscious of the internet, with a witty and often unexpectedly insightful all-caps aphorism.

If I had to characterize the mood of these posts; it would be an irreverent, libertarian, stoned, punk rock ethos that’s as surprisingly philosophical as it is extremely funny. Cattelan seems well suited for the loose velocities of internet meme culture and, retrospectively, much of his conceptual work operates in a similar register. His gift as an artist appears to share similar qualities to that which determines success in both the metaverse and the aphoristic mode; a striking distillation of complexity. 

It is not a provocative claim to say that art often mirrors the hegemonic ideas of its time. This can play out as an affirmation or contestation of power relations, and sometimes both simultaneously. To take an example from recent art history, there is a tendency to understand the Pictures Generation as contesting notions of authorship and ownership, intervening in or challenging conventions of visual circulation and canon formation. Read historically though, this collection of work from the likes of Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and so on, articulates many of the trends of neoliberal and platform capitalism: deregulation, appropriation, arbitrage, as well as the production of value through recombination, memesis, and transmission. 

McKenzie Wark offers us the concept of the vectoralist class to describe this kind of value extraction through transmission, recombination, and analysis, and Jodi Dean suggests it’s simply an updated version of Feudalism for the digital age. Sianne Ngai develops an analysis of this cultural production in their Theory of the Gimmick, situating the valuation of this type of conceptual art in an era of financial capitalism, offering that this gimmickry both under-performs and over-performs in its bid for value and attention. What this conceptualization might imply seems to be a general crisis of value, mores, and ethics characterizing our anomic era of anthropogenic mass extinction. Cattelan offers us a humorous sublimation of these anxieties, for truncated attention spans and art markets. It is a curious—if not exactly new—imperative that art should have an idealistic and socially-restorative function. This becomes an untenable position as the art industry swells into the world's largest unregulated market speculated in by so many financially motivated and ethically questionable actors. The art industry as such becomes the culmination of individuals and ad hoc alliances produced in service of the production and manipulation of markets. Today, this happens with a dizzyingly complex set of social practices and technological practices, one might even say relational aesthetics. 

What I found pleasurable about Maurizio’s Instagram practice was its openness, its loosened sense of subjectivity, and its dialogic disposition. However, when skimming the comments sections in the final goodbye/fuck you post, one can’t help wondering if the popular dialogue is not overrated. Its fleetingness made each post feel like a special gift, while also perhaps capitulating to the art market's injunction of scarcity. 

Richard Prince, after a tedious and costly, many-years-long litigation battle, recently settled for $650,000 regarding his use of Instagram screenshots. After commenting profusely on other artist's IG posts he would screen capture the preexisting image and authored commentary, then sell the resulting print in the art market. Prince’s practice, a paragon of The Pictures Generation, offers these provocations-as-rarefied-art-objects in a gesture that perhaps, more than anything else, valorizes the capaciousness of financial markets. His practice seems to rehearse in miniature the legal restructuring of intellectual property rights through the circulatory mechanisms of social media and visual culture. Art in the age of attention economies could perhaps be viewed as the ideological staging grounds for the legitimation of competing theories of value, in addition to establishing infrastructural projects and legal precedents.

The project of Web3, and Silicon Valley more generally, is primarily an infrastructural one, allowing for the financialization and transaction of all life; bonded in blockchains. Art, as the most plastic and promiscuous of commodity forms, can be adapted to virtually any kind of object, relation, concept, intellectual property, and recombination thereof, making art a perfect handmaiden to the emerging digitally-enabled frontiers of potential commoditization. 

This, of course, is counter to what makes the internet, and life more generally, beautiful, enjoyable, useful, social, and—increasingly–existentially possible. The commons of the internet, as exemplified by collective endeavors of shared knowledge like Wikipedia, and viewed in stark contrast to platform monopoly capitalism, create a very different kind of internet. One of generosity, abundance, helpfulness, and relative freedom from abuse of power. What makes Cattelan’s work more than just hilarious is the promise of conviviality and common exchange without the burden of artistic ownership. The crux of the issue remains that the dictates of financial doctrine demand a more-than-human sociality, which efficaciously distracts us from the axiomatic shift needed to literally save life on Earth.

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Maurizio Cattelan is the ultimate artist as prankster, poet, and philosopher. He is brilliantly mischievous in his exploration of the capitalistic machinations and power imbalances of the art world. Cattelan has organized imaginary biennials (it was just a party for his friends on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts), crash-landed a meteor on the Pope, held a gallery exhibition with no physical artwork; only a sign that read “Back Soon,” and when Peter Brant commissioned him to make a portrait of his wife, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour, he created a nude sculptural bust that was nicknamed “Trophy Wife.”

For his 2011 retrospective at The Guggenheim, Cattelan hung his life’s work by rope from the museum’s oculus; a startling vision that forced visitors to view his work with a sense of awe and acrophobia. Afterward, he famously retired. But his return to global notoriety came in 2019 when he duct-taped a banana to the wall of his gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami—a Duchampian ready-made that became a viral sensation. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, Cattelan has been selected by The Vatican to exhibit at the Holy See Pavilion, which will be held at the Giudecca Women’s Prison.

OLIVER KUPPER I want to start with the theme of this issue, which is levity—the literal definition is lightness, and irreverence, especially when confronting serious subject matter—do you think your work fits this definition and what is your own personal interpretation of levity?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Levity is what comes after tragedy. I looked for levity with the Guggenheim show, when I sort of broke up—and even broke down, maybe!—with the art world. With All, I was trying to get to some levity: in that void, I suspended all my neuroses and all my memories together. The solution I found was to retire after that. An extreme gesture for sure, but necessary and urgent for my well-being. At that time, I did not think too much about when and if I would have ever been back at work, and that was a moment of levity, indeed.

KUPPER Eventually, you went back to work—what did that feel like? Did you feel a sense of jubilation or duty?

CATTELAN I felt a sense of inescapability. I had no other option than to return to work.

KUPPER The world is in a bit of a shitstorm right now. What do you think is the power of levity, irreverence, and lightness in a time like this?

CATTELAN I believe that the path to levity is acceptance. Acceptance of our human limits, of the mistakes one might have made, of every bit of bad news that gets to us. One can learn from everything that happens around them. It does not mean that you must do nothing about it, but acceptance is the only way to surf the shitstorm hoping not to fall from the surfboard. Then, you can start drafting a plan of action for change.

KUPPER About naming Comedian, you said in an interview that “a comedian is doomed to make people laugh—an actor has the option of making people cry”—do you feel doomed to make people laugh and have you ever made anyone cry?

CATTELAN Outside the art world, yes, sure, I made more than one person cry, and people also made me cry. In the art world, I’m not sure my works have that power. I've had epiphanies, and works by other artists that have destabilized me. They have the power to make you reconsider everything, or make you decide something you never imagined. Masterpieces can be a trigger for transformation.

KUPPER Even though the sculpture was called Comedian, it clearly played with the value systems of the unregulated art market and the inflationary tactics of boosting an artist's worth—were you hoping that Comedian would open a wider dialogue in the realm?

CATTELAN With Comedian I was trying to understand something about myself and the world I live in, that’s where all my works were born. I don’t feel like I have a specific audience, my arena is the world, and I think every artist wishes to be as ecumenical as possible. It can also be seen as a comment on the dangerous aspects of walking through an art fair, focusing on the art on the walls without looking at where you put your feet. There could be a new version of it: you can place a banana peel on the floor in a fair aisle, and title it Clown.

KUPPER Did you expect the piece to have such a powerful impact? Did you expect that people would buy it?

CATTELAN When Comedian went viral it was totally unexpected in its proportions and enthusiasm, both by the media and the market. It was also broadcast on Good Morning America. I was shocked. My mother would have been proud.

KUPPER Comedy still seems to have the power to shock, especially when it comes to religious imagery. What attracted you to the provocative power of religious symbology?

CATTELAN The fact is that religion is undeniably part of me. I grew up in a very Catholic context. Everyone brings their own cross—that's what makes us unique. I’ve always thought that in a parallel world, I would have ended up in a seminary, and eventually, I would have become a good priest. I grew up immersed in the Catholic sauce, and you can’t get rid of it, no matter how much you wash your hands. Also, Catholic symbology is some of the most influential and powerful imagery I know: not even the most followed influencer can beat thousands of years of influence on our minds and souls. That’s why I’m pretty excited to participate in the Vatican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year.

KUPPER Can you divulge what you will be showing? I can’t help but think about your famous and controversial 1999 sculpture, La Nona ora, which depicted the pope being struck down by a meteor. Where did the idea for that piece come from and was there a moralistic message behind it?

CATTELAN In 1999, I participated in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale with a performative work in which a fakir was buried in the ground for two hours at a time with only his hands visible above the dirt in a position of prayer. It was titled Mother. Twenty-five years later, I will bring his counterpart, Father, to the facade of the chapel outside the prison. Father is a mural-size, black-and-white image of the soles of a man's feet. It may recall Renaissance iconography such as that of Mantegna's dead Christ, or the crucifixion painted by Caravaggio. Neither in this nor in La Nona ora is there any moralistic intention: I believe they both work as a memento mori.

KUPPER Your single post Instagram page was a sensational exploration of the memetic powers of social media. Where did the idea first originate?

CATTELAN It has been inevitable to be attracted to it since I've always been obsessed with images, but the usual way didn’t work for me. The idea of looking back at previous posts and reviewing what I had posted seemed anachronistic, selfish, and useless. I've followed my rules: posting a single photo that erases each time the previous. It’s no different than doing an exhibition and leaving the empty gallery with the sign “Back Soon.”

KUPPER What was the process of determining the captions?

CATTELAN It was like looking for a title for a work, but with some more levity, because it wouldn’t have lasted more than a day.

KUPPER Your final post had a wonderful quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” Why did you end the single post Instagram project?

CATTELAN It started as an experiment and it ended up like a real job. By the end, I would wake up every day obsessed with the task of posting something: it was the closest thing I’ve done to being an employee in my life. As soon as I realized it, I escaped the cage I built by posting one last time.

KUPPER You once constructed a replica of the Hollywood sign in Palermo near the municipal dump. I’m curious how you feel about fame and the star system of Los Angeles?

CATTELAN We dream and we live for them! How would we entertain ourselves without them? They are our deities. It would be like being in that period when humanity did not yet discover how to make a fire. What would you do every night? Can you imagine how boring? Also, it would be sad … we would read more books.

KUPPER How can an artist best respond to their times without appearing trite, or is it even the artist’s responsibility to respond to the times they are living in?

CATTELAN A work of art is never just the artist’s individual experience, but rather, the thing that it is in the world. It is a moral, social, and practical identity, a being that is recognized by, and relates to others. It is not merely a physical object, but a social one too. And the more it has meaning for those other than the artist, the more it is relevant. To me, art should be incendiary; it should never satisfy expectations. In the latter case, it is a style exercise and a waste of time, both for the artist and the audience. Art must change your life, you should not remain the same in front of it. On the other hand, I believe that art is also not about providing commentary on the news.

KUPPER For you, it seems like failure is an option, what is it about failure that intrigues you?

CATTELAN Failure is the best occasion we have as humans to learn something, and I believe that by learning something you become a better person. So, you fail to improve yourself. I’ve always agreed with the one who said that failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. It does not taste good alone but is the only factor that makes you aware that the bite you’re chewing is excellent.

KUPPER Do you think levity and optimism could allow us to break through our current atmosphere of doom to look at a brighter future? Why are we so obsessed with the end of things?

CATTELAN Because we cannot avoid death.

Polly Borland: Interrupted Innocence

photography by Damien Maloney & interview by Summer Bowie

The playfully disturbing works of Polly Borland have an uncanny way of tapping into our inner child’s psyche. Her recent foray into sculpture features abstract animal and humanoid forms that challenge notions of gender and beauty—themes that were foundational to her early photographic works and have remained central to her oeuvre. Born and raised in Melbourne as the third of seven children, Borland lost her mother at the age of twenty-one and was thrust into a maternal role within the family while navigating a burgeoning punk scene saturated in violence and addiction. Her early work was regularly published in Australian Vogue and her career as a portrait and reportage photographer quickly gained momentum after she moved to London in 1989. In 2001, her first book, The Babies, turned a motherly gaze on a cohort of infantilism fetishists with an essay by Susan Sontag, effectively establishing her as a proper art photographer. Shortly thereafter, she was selected as one of eight photographers to take portraits of Queen Elizabeth II for her Golden Jubilee. Following several books of photography that muse on surrealist themes of ego, eros, and pathos, Borland finds herself living in Los Angeles using models to create soft sculptures that are 3D scanned and cast as hard sculptures in a puckish improvisational process that is layered with an amalgam of discreetly suppressed memories from her youth.

SUMMER BOWIE I want to start with you first picking up a camera. I think your dad gave you your first camera. 

POLLY BORLAND Yes. I was doing art history in Australia, and at the time, it had to accompany a practical art subject, but I didn’t feel like I could draw. So, my teacher said, "Well, why don't I build a darkroom in the closet and you can take photos?" That’s when I started taking photos, and the minute I started, my father lent me his camera. It was a Nikon 35mm and I was shooting originally in black and white. I absolutely loved it. I could edit, control, and curate my environment. I was always, from the get-go, photographing people. My sisters were models, my friends were models. And so, the final two years of my high school life were spent taking photos as well as other academic subjects. Then, I decided to apply to a photography college. I took a year off, and worked shitty jobs, and lived at home. I was only interested in photographing cool things or cool people. And so I used that year to get a folio together, and get into an art school. I got in and never looked back. 

BOWIE Would you say that your discovery of the adult babies was a foundational step in finding a subject that combines so many of your interests and your approach to documentation? 

BORLAND Well, that was the thing, the subject matter was hugely important to me, but I was also very interested in making photography less about reality and more about painting, almost. For me, it was the light, and the framing, and the texture—almost taking away the photographic element. During art school in Australia, I went to an exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery. It was Larry Clark before Larry Clark became a thing. And there were these photos literally pinned to the wall. You could see all the scratch marks. And then, the subject matter of teenage lust in Tulsa. I'd never, ever seen anything like that, even though I was surrounded by heroin users. There's something horrific about those photos, but also very seductive. I liked the push and pull of that. Diane Arbus, for me, was similar. People like to say that she was very cold, but her photos are very human to me. I think there's a deep connection between her and her sitters. They're up close and personal. 

So, the subject matter was always key, but it was also the craft or the art involved in elevating them just from being documentation. I think a very formative influence for me was the Mary Ellen Mark photos of the working women in Bombay. And there was that book Nicaragua, from Susan Meiselas where there's a stylization of color and drama in the lighting. Everything is fused to make something that transcends just a document. 

BOWIE There always is a degree of power that you have as the photographer. With the adult babies, they were allowing you to document them in states of extreme vulnerability, which meant that they had to trust that you weren’t going to exploit them for other people's entertainment. Most of us don't know what it's like to want to wear a diaper and have it changed by another adult. But there's a humanity that you bring to those images where we can connect with the inclination to be taken care of. 

BORLAND What I realized quite early on was that the camera gave me license to go into other people's lives. All human beings are the same, some just have more power than others. But people like attention. Not everyone, but it's a general rule that I instinctively knew. The leap from my school years was that I found myself living in England, and I was doing portraits for a lot of the magazines. Then I discovered the adult babies through a friend, and it really felt like I had died and gone to heaven when I went there. These giant babies are crawling around the floor. It was a mixture of pathos. It was very carnivalesque. It was surreal. All my favorite things all wrapped up into one. Originally, I photographed them for The Independent in London, and they were obscured by masks. But then, we established a level of trust and they took off the masks when we shot the book. We talked about it a lot, and they liked the attention they were getting from me. I would say for most photographers behind the camera it's an intense gaze. So in a way, I was replicating the mother's gaze. 

BOWIE Was this before you became a mother yourself? 

BORLAND The book came out in 2001, just before I had Louie. 

BOWIE So, you were just about to become a mother when you released the Babies book. There’s a similar vibe to the Bunny book, in terms of this very gritty approach that also feels very childlike in its playfulness. However, this was the first time you started to work with stockings, which have been a theme within your work ever since. 

BORLAND Yes. Basically, I'd seen Gwendoline Christie walking around Brighton, where I lived in England, and she worked in a knick-knack shop called Pussy. Gwendoline was very tall. She looked like a 1950s starlet. And I had had a child, so suddenly I couldn't do all my traveling, and I really was just trying to focus on my own books and exhibitions. And so, the original idea for the photos with Gwen was a series of Bunny Yeager-style pinup photos. But, quickly, that idea got tired. It was a five-year project with Gwen, so it just kept evolving. She went off to drama school and she'd come back on the weekends. We slowly realized that we were using a lot of different feminine clichés and turning them on their head. The stockings came about because I was trying to turn her into a doll. In the ’70s, and even earlier, you could get dolls that had painted stockings, and Bunny obviously feeds into the whole idea of the Playboy bunny, Bunny Yeager, the pinup. And then we did cat photos and horse photos. It was everything you associate little girls with, but we'd always subvert it in some way. The more she was doing her drama course, the more playful the photos became. 

BOWIE You guys were playing so much with humor and pathos. 

BORLAND Take Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), or Diane Arbus, any of her photos, they have this incredible pathos in them. For me, in particular, there is an interest in childhood and the loss of innocence. Pathos can move you in ways, like Fear Eats the Soul (1974) by Fassbinder. I can name many films that just have so much pathos for me. If I was to achieve anything, it would be that pathos in my work. There is always that clash of the beauty and the innocence with some kind of horror, some kind of jarring element. 

BOWIE It's the impending killer of that innocence, right? 

BORLAND Almost interrupted innocence. I'm sure some people just went through childhood and it was maybe an easy transition. But for others, there are outside circumstances that can come in and rob children of being children, like the death of a mother or adverse people within the family. It's not just an awakening for me. The loss of innocence is circumstantial. It’s as physical as the environment. As a teenager, you realize the world isn't as friendly as you would have liked it to be. It's a kind of interruption that is more omnipresent than defined. If you look again at the Larry Clark photos, you think, People live like that? People can embrace that lifestyle with guns and needles in their arms, and a lot of them are young. Those situations are not just found. It's like outside forces have come in and disturbed. 

BOWIE It seems to me to be the overall entropy of life. At some point, these outside forces are beyond our parent’s or community's capability to protect us and we have to confront them because life is not completely safe. 

BORLAND Yeah, and if you go back to where I was right at the beginning of the conversation, photography for me was creating, curating, and controlling. 

BOWIE You can, at least temporarily, create a space where the chaos has parameters. 

BORLAND But at the same time, when people view the photos they don't necessarily feel safe. 

BOWIE Sure. But it’s like BDSM, there are safe words and protocols between all parties to create something that looks like trauma, and yet when done ethically, there is full control over the degree of pain, and what direction it goes, and how it all ends. Where the frame is held—which goes into what I wanted to ask you about the Smudge series, where you worked with three subjects, one of which being your good friend Nick Cave. In reference to that series, he said, “I had to give myself over to this process of being degraded, initially degraded and there was quite a beautiful thing that happened out of that.” It’s as though you inspire a level of liberation for those who are willing to submit themselves to this sort of infantile play. 

BORLAND Well, he liked the fact that he didn't have to think. It was interesting because the first day he gave himself completely over to the process and there were no mirrors in the house. He couldn't see what costumes I was putting him in and what I was doing. I think he quite liked the sensual feel of the leotard and the Lycra that I was putting him in. He found the whole thing very sensual. He also just gave himself to the process, he didn't have to think he wasn't in control. Which, if you know Nick, he's a control freak. But he came back the next day and he'd been thinking about what I'd been doing, and had real doubts. He became really self-conscious and the second day was not easy. 

BOWIE I love being in the sensory deprivation of your costumes. You’re so in the moment that you are sort of delivered from your ego. When we're capable of looking in the mirror, or at the screen with digital photography, there's too much control. And if you can't lose control, then you can't feel that liberation at all. 

BORLAND The thing that interested me about photography when I started, and for years this kept me captivated, was the delay between taking the photo and getting the film, not really ever knowing what I got until I saw it. It was very instinctual. You had to go off of how you felt. When I was dressing you up the other day for a sculpture—which is what I now do—I get that excitement. That excitement that I was feeling was what I used to feel. In photography, with forty years of experience, I know what works and what doesn't work. There's always an element of surprise, but you go on how you feel. It is magic, photography. When you do it the old-fashioned way. 

BOWIE Recently, for the first time, you stepped in front of the camera and allowed Penny Slinger to shoot you. What did you learn in that process of being on the other side? 

BORLAND I loved working with Penny, and I felt uninhibited, which my whole life I've been very inhibited in my own physicality. The only way I could get to the point where I could do that work with Penny was because I'd spent a few years photographing myself for my Nudie series with my iPhone, and the minute that work went out into the world, I knew that I had gotten rid of any attempt to cover myself up in any way. But the Penny work freed me in order to get in front of somebody else and be photographed. What I did find hard, which Gwen found hard, was then you have to live with the photos and you have to be okay with them being out in the world. But I think it's necessary. We're living in pretty dark times. And I've never been afraid in my work. The things that have informed me and my life have been people that are really unafraid. So, Penny and my work is really important work. It's not pretty. I've got a whole thing about ugly and pretty. I like things to look beautiful, but I like the jarring. 

BOWIE We all have demons that we need to exorcize. Gwen needed to find acceptance for her unusual height and unique body type so that she could develop the confidence to go on and become a big actor. But once you're liberated from those demons, you want to believe that you never had them to begin with. Other people do it in therapy, but for artists it's often public domain. 

BORLAND Yeah. It’s very cathartic. If you look at all the work I've done over my lifetime, one thing has always led to another. It's never staying in the same place. Someone said to me the other day, "It's hard to be good at one thing, but when you're good at lots of different things, people find that confusing." I have kept changing, but thematically all my work is about the same things. 

BOWIE There's a very clear continuum. I read that your Morph series were originally going to be hallucinogenic mindscape experiences, these sort of pre-conscious creatures that eventually evolved to have human-like qualities. Were you originally attempting to transcend the human condition? 

BORLAND Yes, exactly. And I have got a film. It's called The Morph Movie. It has only been shown at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The Morph series was definitely meant to transcend the human experience. I just wanted to strip everything away from that work, like the eyes, the mouths, the noses. It was also rooted in Doctor Seuss and Dumbo (1941) as well—that surrealist, childlike, dream effect. 

BOWIE That’s really where your photography started moving into sculpture. 

BORLAND It was all because of a chance meeting at a tiny art event in this little country town. I met Dan Tobin from a foundry called UAP in the middle of Covid in the outback in Australia. He just said, "You've been making sculpture in your photos, and we want to take the sculpture out of the photos and put it into the real world." It revitalized my relationship with my work. Because it's given me a whole new playground to play in. I'm in my sixties and it's like I'm starting again. But it makes sense as a thing for me to be doing if you look at what was happening in my photos, it was all costumes. 

BOWIE And there's this connection with the animal play and the Bunny series, because many of them start to become these scrutable animals. Is that something that you plan ahead of time, or is that something that happens in the improvisational process? 

BORLAND That happens in improvisation. And like with Gwen, we were coming up with ideas and then I'd get props or bits of costumes and have ideas, but a lot of how I work is in the moment. I did do some drawings before I dressed you yesterday. I've got this weird drawing with big bosoms and a big bum, so it's pretty much how I imagined it, but I don't always pre-imagine. A lot of the time the session will take me to a different place. That's how I used to photograph. There's a whole visual logic to how I think and it's very rooted in the imagination. Also, I think I'm conjuring up visual references from my childhood in a lot of ways. 

BOWIE You approach sexuality in a very playful way. There's always these breasts, and asses, and penises, and vaginas, and sometimes they're where they should be, and sometimes they're where they shouldn't be. I got such a kick out of seeing the sculpture after I came out of it. There were these huge labial folds that were created by the stockings. But why is sex so funny? 

BORLAND Well, I actually don't know if I think it is funny. I think it's deadly serious, actually. But, I feel like I was playing with the non-binary, the genderless. The non-specific, but also the very specific. Mixtures of the binary genders way before we even started having these discussions. I remember as a child, I wanted to be a boy. I was obsessed. I used to have this gorgeous little pillow for a baby that was very soft. I used to stuff the pillow down my pants to pretend that I was a boy. But I also became aware from a very young age that boys were more empowered than girls. So, it was a bit like, fuck you, I'm not playing that game. I never really felt like I fit into a feminine type or what we were all told was a feminine type. Those are hints to where it comes from, but at the same time, it's just playful. I also don't necessarily want it to be easily digested. 

Rose Wylie by Juergen Teller

photography & portfolio by Juergen Teller
creative partnership by Dovile Drizyte
interview by Jennifer Higgie
postproduction by Lucas Rios Palazesi at Quickfix

Art and life are as inextricably linked as inhaling and exhaling for British figurative painter Rose Wylie. Her cottage studio in the English countryside is evidence of her prodigious output. Newspapers, magazines, brushes, sketches—the flotsam and jetsam of a creative life, mirror the frenetic energy of her large-scale, unprimed canvases that are rife with references from Hollywood movies, art history, lost civilizations, and her own domestic environs. At almost ninety years old, Wylie is more prolific than ever. On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, CLOSE, not too close, at David Zwirner, novelist and art critic Jennifer Higgie explores the hidden archetypes and symbolism of her paintings; and Juergen Teller visits her studio in Kent for a picnic lunch and a document of portraits.  

JENNIFER HIGGIE How are you, generally?  

ROSE WYLIE Painting most of the time.  

HIGGIE I can see that from these amazing paintings. It's extraordinary.  

WYLIE I can stand up. I can move around okay. No, I'm fine. I’m in my ninetieth year.  

HIGGIE I'd love to start with your show in Los Angeles, CLOSE, Not Too Close. It's such an intriguing title. How did that come about?  

WYLIE It comes from 17th-century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge doesn't go for wax works; he doesn't like copies. He doesn't think art should be a copy. It is about finding the likeness in the unlikeness. What I often do is make a list of characteristics: age, type of hair, type of physical makeup and additions, tall, wide, big shoulders, huge hips, tiny ankles, all these sorts of things. That's what CLOSE, Not Too Close, refers to: it's close to the image that you're looking at, but it's not too close, a lateral slant, but connected. This title suits me perfectly. I don't want it too close because I think art has to go through a process of transformation.  

HIGGIE It makes sense to me that there are, say, portraits or resemblances that aren't necessarily about the actual way something looks. It's about how something feels or the resonances.  

WYLIE Exactly. It's how it feels, how it smells, how you sense it. It's all those things. It's putting all this stuff together, which is what Matisse called the ‘synthesis,’ rather than the ‘analysis.’  

HIGGIE Do you believe in the idea of the spiritual in its broader sense, like the idea that objects or people have a spiritual dimension or a dimension of some other reality? 

WYLIE I do, but I'd call it mood, or quality, or transcendence. A shift into something outside the subject or the painting. But it's mostly about appearances, how the painting looks. That's what our business is about. 

HIGGIE Considering it's your first major exhibition in Los Angeles, and I know you've long been interested in the movies and movie stars, was it an extra dimension for you that this show was in LA? And did knowing that they would be in LA shape some of the paintings that you were making?  

WYLIE Well, it did interest me, but it didn't shape anything. I do paint from films. It's one of my genres. I love films, and I've done a lot of paintings based on film. I didn't do anything in the show specifically for LA. I think often if you do that, it doesn't actually come out too well. Maybe for some artists it does, because it's an impetus; it tricks them into something new, but sometimes you go into it and it just doesn't work.  

HIGGIE Have you ever been to LA, just out of interest?  

WYLIE No. But I love Mexico, so it's sort of going down in that direction.  

HIGGIE And maybe it's good not to go to LA in a sense, because Hollywood is such an idea of a place,  rather than an actuality sometimes.  

WYLIE No, it could be a good thing not to go. Some writers, when they write, they research and go everywhere. Other writers deliberately don't. I mean, it's a way of working, isn't it?  

HIGGIE Do you feel that, in some ways, all of your paintings are a kind of self-portrait, even when you're not painting an image of yourself?  

WYLIE They are and they aren't. This particular show is a kind of self-portrait. Without actually painting myself. If you say that the subject I choose and the way I paint is a self-portrait, then it's all a self-portrait.  

HIGGIE But maybe it could be said that these are portraits of your life, that it's a friend's Sunday garden, or things that you have in your home, or films that you've watched. And humor has always been important to you. I really love your painting, Lying In The Sun (2022), with “cautionary tale” written across the top. Is it a cautionary tale because she's naked or because she's getting sunburned?  

WYLIE If you lie in the sun too much, you can get moles later, and moles are often cancerous. So in fact, it's a suggestion that to lie in the sun and fry is not a good idea. And then, top right in that picture is a fire department sprinkler boat. It is funny. She's on fire. She's burning. She's roasting. It's almost medieval, and yet, it's not medieval at all. It’s transtemporal.  

HIGGIE What do you mean by transtemporal?  

WYLIE Well, I mean it could turn up in the history of painting at any time. It could be medieval. It could be well before medieval: early wall painting, before Christ, or Pompeii. People have always painted objects, girls, women, clothes. I think the painting I do fits something which crosses time.  

HIGGIE That was really noticeable in this group of pictures. I thought that time moved very swiftly around. I was looking at Wing Tips and Blue Doodlebug (2022), which I think are references to your memories from World War II. And then Spindle and Cover Girl (2022), which has “Observer Magazine” written across the top, and also “Assyrian hair.” You're moving around thousands of years. 

WYLIE It’s using what you've got. Often artists think, What shall I paint? If you do a lot of drawing and ideas, there’s often something you can just use. If you look back at what you’ve done, something turns up. So that's how “Assyrian hair” came up. The sarcophagus eye came up. Those pink plants, the spindle from the hedges, I just put them together.  

HIGGIE And when you said they came up, where did “Assyrian hair” come up? (laughs)  

WYLIE (laughs) I watch television programs that deal with Mari Art, that deal with history and Easter Island, Syrian, Babylonian. I like ancient art.  

HIGGIE What is it you like about it?  

\WYLIE I mean, it's often isolated. It's not hugely detailed or textured. It's not flashy and arty. If you just look at ancient art, it's often not terribly realistic. Sometimes it is. But the way it's realistic is somehow not quite photographic, it’s universal.  It’s close, but not too close.  

HIGGIE In our 21st-century world, we're bombarded with images all the time. But you can look at very ancient images, and surprisingly, they seem very fresh. It's like we haven't seen the world or a body represented like that before.  

WYLIE It can be exciting and, well, intensely compelling. But there are so many contemporary artists I like as well.  

HIGGIE Who are the contemporary artists that you like?  

WYLIE Well, there's Alida Cervantes. She does very fresh painting. And Tschabalala Self I have a particular affection for. She's young and she's very fresh and very vigorous, but also there's a pleasant splash of vulgarity. But it's not hideous. It's vulgar ... nice, but it's not cheap. I don't mind cheap when it's the right kind of it. Jonathan Meese I've liked, and he's very gestural. But I think I'm off gestural at the moment.  

HIGGIE Why is that?  

WYLIE I tire of it. I prefer other images. I like Giorgio de Chirico and El Greco. I mean, there's no gesture in sight in de Chirico. El Greco or Giovani di Paulo. Today, if a painting is too gestural, I get rid of it. That's just how I work, because you work through ideas and faces in your painting life, and you just keep moving on 

HIGGIE So has that been quite a recent shift in your work, this move against the gestural?  

WYLIE It's been coming up, but probably I’ll be back on it tomorrow. I do both … I like two apparently contrary things going on together. 

HIGGIE In terms of how you go about making your paintings, at the moment, are you doing many preliminary drawings, or do you just go in there and work instinctively? 

WYLIE I do a lot of drawings, pick one and work from it, then put it down, and think I should have started with another, and then I use another, and then I go back to the first one. It's all flexible and fluid. There's no real fixed rule for it. But I often have a drawing because that's where all the decision-making is, you can do a lot of getting the image into something which you can bear to look at. And then, the painting goes on from the one you like the look of most, or the one that you think will translate better, and then the other decisions begin.  

HIGGIE Is there a lot of slippage between the preparatory drawings you do and the final painting? Do you change things a lot when you're making the painting?  

WYLIE There isn't. Sometimes it's very close, and I want to get it close. And if it's not close, I go on with it. Other times, I just let it go.  

HIGGIE Would you describe yourself as a very instinctive painter?  

WYLIE I think both. Both instinctive and—what would be the opposite of instinctive?  

HIGGIE I think it might have been Caspar David Friedrich who had his palette in one room and the easel in the next room so that he could never make an instinctive gesture. He had to move slowly between the two rooms, so every gesture would be very considered. Maybe very considered is the opposite of instinctive.  

WYLIE I do both, instinctive and considered. I'm a hybrid. I'm a combination of any kind of attitude that you can dredge up. I mean, the painting My House Front, and Back (2022)—I took nine hours drawing the blackberry leaf. I had the leaf in front of me and I just kept thinking, That's cheap. It's horrible. I can't bear it. I don't want to look at it. That's no good. It's not good enough. For hours, I kept changing it. And then finally, I did the painting quite close to the drawing because such a lot of decision-making had gone into the drawing that there was nothing more for me to do, and why not use it? 

HIGGIE How long would you spend on most of your large paintings do you think?  

WYLIE Sometimes I work obsessively for two, three days, you know really, just all the time because no one is here to stop me. And then, I leave it for a bit, just simply because I've got somewhere, and then I come back to it and if I don't like it, I change it again. So, I would always leave a painting for at least two weeks, and then come back to it, perhaps, and change it. Occasionally, you can do one in two days, but not often. Very, very rarely.  

HIGGIE Do you abandon many paintings?  

WYLIE I usually go on with them. I don't like wasting the paint and the time, so I push on. I just change it, scrape it all off, and put more paint on. 

HIGGIE And at what point do the titles come in? Do you begin with a title, or do you come up with a title once you've finished?  

WYLIE It gets an affectionate nickname, and I sometimes stick with that. One of the paintings in the show, I nicknamed Tarantino's Sister. Really, though, it was a bit too close to Hollywood. If you look at the heads, the middle head looks a bit like Tarantino. But because it's a girl, I called it Tarantino's Sister. Now it’s called Up the Bikers.  

HIGGIE Where did that title come from?  

WYLIE I live in a village, and up the road, there's a lot of spare land. The Prince, now King of Wales, bought a plot of land and gave it over to ex-army people who had motorbikes. It was a kind of rally-point. Motorbikes stream past the window and they can use this plot of land for racing.  

HIGGIE So, you don't mind the bikers going past the window?  

WYLIE No, I don't mind them at all. It's life. It's noise. It's only sometimes—four times a year or something. No, I don't mind the noise coming in. The bikers and the noise and the traffic—I like it. It's the opposite of death. My studio is generally thought to be a bit messy, but it's the opposite of sterile, and hospitals.

HIGGIE It's life. And there's almost a feeling in that painting of a slippage with time. They look like Easter Island heads or something. They feel very ancient in that picture.  

WYLIE Well, I hope so. I like Easter Island heads. And they're also quite current because I think the hairstyles are current.  

HIGGIE Do you ever make paintings which please you, but you don't fully understand what each component is? One of the many things I love about painting is that however full of resemblance it might be, painting is still enigmatic. The meaning is often enigmatic even to the painter.  

WYLIE It can keep on accruing, can't it? It can get more and more.  

HIGGIE How important, or not, is it for you that people looking at your paintings understand the references? Or can they take away their own new meanings from them?  

WYLIE It doesn't matter at all. I think it can be enriching for the audience if they do see, or interpret it in some sort of way, but it need not necessarily be what I intend. I think it should be open. But it's quite nice if they've seen films, like For A Few Dollars More (1965) or Blazing Saddles (1974). I think it can help. 

HIGGIE I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on color, because I remember you telling me once actually, in that piece that you wrote for Thin Skin, the exhibition I curated, you talked about your love of yellow and green. I'd love your thoughts on that.  

WYLIE I love yellow and green. I had a bed for my daughter, Henrietta. I painted it green. It was metal. It had yellow flowers on it and was early Victorian. But while I do like yellow and green, I also like pink and black. I like black and brown. I love pink, but I think color depends on how much and how it's used.  

HIGGIE I'm sure there are artists who you particularly admire for their use of color.  

WYLIE Manet and El Greco, something about the black keeps it all together. But then, I don't necessarily like to have too much black. Matisse is good at color, but then so is Picasso, and look at Ugo Rondinone or Franz West. 

HIGGIE We've obviously talked a lot about extraordinary painters, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on caricature and cartoons, which I know that you've spoken about before.  

WYLIE I'm not so interested in caricature, it’s too distorted. What I do is transform and extend. And the thing about cartoon language is that it has to be immediately recognizable or the cartoon has no point. If you're painting something like a brick or an ice cream, it's quite useful if people can see what you're doing. I do like predellas and little paintings at the bottom of big paintings which show movement—they link into cartoons in a way that I can completely accept. Cartoons are a move away from reality, which I also like. And the cartoon language is actually very useful if you grab hold of it and channel it. Sometimes I get accused of being too cartoon-like. And from my point of view, they're not cartoon-like at all. I'm simply using everything at my disposal. For instance, if you paint a hot dog, you paint the lines of heat. I use cartoon language, but I also use Renaissance devices of foreshortening and cross-hatching. I put it all in, mix it up. I think distortion can go too far, and that's perhaps more to do with the comical or the tiresome. Exaggeration, I don't actually go for that either. I go for poetic transformation.