Pippa Garner interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist

December 10, 2025

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

From the auto body to the human body, artist Pippa garner is one of the most pioneering artists of our time. Serving first as a combat artist during the Vietnam War, Garner’s radical practice took on the form of absurdist automotive sculptures and utopian inventions. A backwards car, an umbrella with real palm fronds, a half suit, satirized our lust for objects and teetered on the edge of fine art and commercialism. Even Garner’s own sex change, transitioning from man to woman, become a materialistic invention, her sexual organs equal to the raw material sent down the factory assembly line; body and thing becoming one and the same part of capitalism’s bioindustrial complex.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you how it all began. How did you come to art or how did art come to you? Was it an epiphany or a gradual process?

PIPPA GARNER: Well, I was a misfit to begin with. It seems like the growth process can be enhanced by the situation you're in. I was a war baby. I was born in ‘42, and I still have a few memories of what life was like during that time. Everybody knew somebody that was in the Army. Even a small child can get a sense of what it feels like to have the world be at war. I didn't pick the time I came to life on Earth. The war years were a time of deprivation. And this is a country of extravagance—it was based on independence and outlaw thinking. And all of a sudden, the whole thing was thrown away because of the war. But living was good for me then because I went through adolescence just as consumerism was really born. The assembly line technology that had preceded World War II was advanced by war needs, so there were all these companies suddenly producing the fastest, best things they possibly could, from airplanes to shoes. Advertising was born out of that because they had to convince people they needed things they didn't realize they needed. Suddenly all these stores were flooded with consumer goods. Things that nobody could imagine: chrome blenders, waffle irons, ovens, and lawnmowers. And I was fascinated with that, particularly automobiles, because the cars that I grew up with all had very distinct faces—the eyes, the mouth, the nose. You could recognize whether it was a Studebaker or a Ford. They had a certain character and I felt like there was life there. It goes back to another childhood thing of wanting to bring things to life. I think all children go through that with their stuffed animals. They get off of it pretty quickly, but I never quite overcame that. Clear into my puberty and beyond, I still felt that cars were living. If I’d see a bad crash where the face of the car was all smashed, I’d burst into tears. I found that it was a useful tool as an artist because a lot of the stuff that I was making was a kind of consumerism.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You were in the Vietnam War with the US Army as a combat artist. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? It also brought you to photography because you got these state-of-the-art cameras from Japan and started to take personal photographs, which became important for your later magazine work.

PIPPA GARNER: I was drafted in college. I used up several student deferments. Finally, they sent me the notice. So, I was sent to train as an unassigned infantryman in Vietnam, having no idea what I was going to be doing. I went over on a big plane full of people who were going to be assigned to different units. Once I got there, I thought, gee, I wonder if there's something that might have to do with my art background. I did some research and sure enough, one of the divisions, the 25th Infantry, is the only division with a Combat Art Team (CAT). A group of people who had some art background were given an itinerary to go out with different units and document with drawings, pictures, and writing. The camera thing was interesting because the military store on the base had all this expensive Japanese camera equipment, very cheap. And I got a really nice Nikon camera for nothing and trained myself to use it. A lot of times things were going so fast that you couldn't really hold the image long enough to document it, so that's when photography became very much a part of my life.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: Then you studied transportation design at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, an extremely well known institute. You had one of the first major epiphanies in 1969. You presented your student project, which was a half car, half human. Can you tell me and our readers about the epiphany that led to Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car). And also how people reacted to it?

PIPPA GARNER: There was a Volkswagen sports car in the '60s called the Karmann Ghia. It was considered a very sophisticated sports car during that time and that’s why I modified the spelling and called the sculpture Kar-Mann. I started going to art school fairly early. I went to the ArtCenter College of Design, which at that time was called Art Center School and it was in Hollywood. My father, who was in charge of things, saw that my interests were leaning toward art. To him, that was bohemian and something he didn't like. He was a businessman and wanted me to go into business. And so he tried to direct my art to car design because I was so interested in cars. He did a lot of research and found out that the school where all the car designers were trained was this Art Center School in Los Angeles. So I went out there in 1961 and found myself alienated because all the other students there wore suits and loved cars in a much different way than I did. I cherished [cars] in a way that was sort of comical. I thought some of them were really funny and stupid looking, so I felt pushed into a satirical corner. So, I quit that school and went to the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, which is a wonderful fine art school, and I started doing a lot of life drawings. I fell in love with life drawing. To study the form, you have to understand it from the inside out or else it doesn't look lifelike. But I got quite good at it. So, eventually I went back to the Art Center. I still had the design classes, but they had life drawing work. And so, I began doing tons of life drawing and sculpting the human form. It just fascinated me. But the idea of making this half car, half man, was something that I did as a sketch. There was a wonderful teacher that encouraged out-of-the-box thinking a bit more, and when I showed him the sketches he said, “Why don't you make that?” So, I figured out the proportions—I wanted the human part to be about the size of a small male figure, and then I found a toy car and was able to integrate that using styrofoam to make the basic sculpture. And then, I covered it with resin to make the surface hard and did all the detailing. I was making fun of cars.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I've just written the book Ever Gaia [Isolarii, 2023] with James Lovelock, who invented the Gaia Hypothesis with Lynn Margulis. He was a serial inventor. In a similar way, you are a serial inventor. You created all these objects between design and non-design, and then images of these objects were published in magazines, like Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. It's interesting that you then decided to go beyond the art world. I've always been very interested in that. Can you talk a little bit about how you bring these objects to a bigger audience, through magazines, but also appearances on talk shows?

PIPPA GARNER: When I was doing all that work in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a real barrier between fine art and commercial art. If your work occurred in magazines, it was low grade. No matter what it was. It was degraded by the fact that it was published. And I reversed that in my mind. I thought, well, gee, that's not right. Here's an opportunity to have things out there reaching thousands of thousands of people as opposed to an art gallery. I love the idea of having as much exposure as possible. Even though I've had close friends that were recognized fine artists, and in a bunch of the galleries—I never really cared much about it. I did have a couple of gallery shows here and there, but mainly the thing that fascinated me was the fact that I could reach people clear across the country, and sometimes beyond, with these images. I didn't have much money during those years, but I always got enough out of the magazines.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And of course, one of your key inventions, which is so famous today, is the backwards car from 1973. It’s also interesting because it was a different time in magazines—when they paid for these extraordinary realities to happen. Can you talk a little bit about the epiphany of the backwards car and how it then drove on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco?

PIPPA GARNER: There was a period in all the major American car companies after World War II when they started having these really huge design departments. They used a lot of references to jet planes. The Cadillacs in the ’50s were huge, and they looked like they were moving even when they were standing still, which is called directional design. After my half car, half man, I started seeing cars in a context that had nothing to do with their purpose. The Cadillac particularly fascinated me because of the huge fins. And I had a good friend that was a designer who worked for Charles Eames in the early ’70s. He and I would go roaming around sometimes on our bicycles. One time, we went by this used car lot and there was a ‘59 Cadillac, and it just popped into my head, what if that thing was going backwards? It was just devastatingly funny and that convinced me that in some form it had to happen. So, I started sketching and figuring out how to do it, and I made a nice presentation. Esquire Magazine in New York responded and said, “Oh my God, we have to do this. How much do you want? How long will it take? We’re going to send a photographer to take pictures of the process.” But it couldn't be a Cadillac, because you couldn't see over the fins. So, I started looking in the papers until I found the car I wanted: a 1959 Chevy, two door sedan, six cylinder, no power steering or power brakes. I wanted a drive train as simple as possible so it would be easier to reconnect. It had fins, but the fins were flat, so they didn't obstruct your vision. And so I did the whole thing myself in a little garage space. Now, it was a matter of, how do I lift this thing up, turn it around, and set it back down on the frame? I didn't have access to any sophisticated technology to do it, so I got everybody I knew and we had a little party when I finally got everything cut away. Once everyone got a little bit high from the alcohol, I said, “Okay, folks, everybody around this car, shoulder to shoulder. When I give the command, I want you to lift the car up, and then walk it back, turn it around, bring it forward, and set it down again.” I thought it was going to be too heavy, but fortunately they didn't have any trouble. Once it was set back down, there was the backwards car. One day it was ready to try out and that was it, we went out and drove it around the San Francisco coast.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: The other day, I visited Judy Chicago, and of course she worked with car elements. There was also John Chamberlain. And during the same era, there was also Ant Farm, the architecture collective with whom you actually collaborated. And Nancy Reese was a big influence on you, because she made you realize that you can identify yourself as an artist. Can you talk a little bit about this?

PIPPA GARNER: Well, that was an interesting evolution, especially when you think back on it from the Information Age. Now, everything is shrunk down to nothing. There's no presence. Even cars look almost identical. You can't tell one from the other. The only way you can tell the difference between a Mercedes and a Kia is by getting close enough to look at the logo. Other than that, they're identical. They all get the same input. They use CAD design. So, that whole era really stands out. Everything was so unique. There was such an emphasis on trying to make things attract attention and to design things that make people say, gee, I gotta have that.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: In 1995, you did this great project where you tried to get a custom license plate that said “sex change”—spelled SXCHNGE. But the authorities at the Department of Motor Vehicles turned it down, so you resubmitted with HE2SHE and it was accepted.

PIPPA GARNER: For me, the sex change thing was a material act. I never had a sense of being born in the wrong body as one of the expressions that they use goes, or had the trauma of being treated badly because of my sexual feelings. I never thought of any of this until I had already lived in my thirties as a male. And then suddenly, I ran out of interest in the assembly line products that I was so fascinated with. Even with cars, I felt like I had done as much as I could do. So I thought, there's gotta be something new, something else. And that was just about the time that changing your gender worked its way into the culture. The first example was, of course, Christine Jorgensen, way back in the ‘50s. But it wasn’t until the ‘80s when terms like transsexual started to be used. Leading up to that was the whole gay revolution. When I was growing up, you couldn't be gay. It was the most horrible, evil thing that could happen to a person. Gay culture was completely concealed. So coming out of these cultural biases became a real issue. And the human body—flesh and blood—fascinated me because I could still be using existing objects and juxtaposing them, but at the same time, making it fresh again. So, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, you know, I'm just at an appliance, like that radio over there, or the car sitting outside. The body that I was assigned to, I didn't pick it. I didn't say I want to be white, middle class, and heterosexual. So, if I am nothing more than another appliance, why not have some fun with it? Why not play with it and alter it in a comical way? Finally, that escalated into my deciding to go through with the surgery, which I went to Brussels for in 1993. I had what they call a vaginoplasty. Now, part of me is European [laughs]. I came back from that and thought, this is great, I’m in my forties, I've had a penis for all these years, and now I have a vagina. What an amazing thing—I live in an age when you can do that. You could go and pay somebody some money and say, “Here, I want to have my genitals turned the other way around.” And they said, “Fine, here's the bed.” (laughs) I was fascinated with the fact that I could do that with my body. It gave me a sense of control and a sense of a whole new area that I could explore. Meanwhile, the culture was changing and becoming more open. It's still not good, but it's much better than it was. I was kind of a pioneer with that perhaps.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: There's this amazing conversation, which you did with Hayden Dunham, about the struggle of being inside bodies. You say that because the advertisements and consumerism in the background in your life were always very gender oriented, you were forcing yourself to become more masculine. And at a certain moment, you decided not to conform anymore. It’s so pioneering. Can you talk a little bit about that?

PIPPA GARNER: Everything is structured in the culture to try and keep people in a comfort zone. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit everyone. But how do you deal with that? How do you let people be what they want to be and still have a sense of the culture being unified and functional? Again, all these things are just a point of evolution. Things keep changing and moving forward, and they always will. I think about my life being one frame of an endless film—just my little thing, and then it goes to the next frame. And that goes on into the distance forever. I think that my perceptions of gender were very materialistic. I’m a consumer and this is what I do with my body. It was no different than someone putting on makeup, or somebody going to a gym, taking steroids, and building this huge body that doesn't have any purpose at all except for looks. I didn’t have anyone that was going to suffer for it. If I had a family, it might've been different, but probably not. At this point, I was single. I had nobody to be responsible for, except to keep things moving forward. I don't want my life to ever get stagnant, to start losing its rhythm. And that's what I'm fighting now, because at this age, how do I maintain that? It's very hard for seniors to keep one of the things that I think is essential for life and that is sexuality. Everything for me represents the lifespan—from baby to aged person. Whether it's called puberty, adolescence, middle age, old age, I feel the need to incorporate that thinking in my work to keep that sense of life going, and the most obvious way is by maintaining sexuality. If I don't have any sex drives, all of it goes flat. I take estrogen and testosterone so that I can keep an endocrine system that's young and still is attractive and wants to be attracted, even at 81. That’s one of the real essential parts of my inspiration. If I lose that, I don't have any ideas. It's funny because hospitals are all divided into these clinics. Because I’m a veteran, I've got this ten-story VA hospital building at my disposal and there are clinics for everything but sensuality. So, they’re really missing the point of trying to make people want to stay alive.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: In this conversation with Dunham, you say that you see the body as a toy or a pet that you can play with. You can change the shape of it. You're an inside and an outside.

PIPPA GARNER: Well, that's it right there. That keeps things interesting and keeps a sort of question mark floating in the air over everything. So, you're not quite sure what will happen, you know, maybe it will be a drastic failure, or maybe a revelation.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: We know a great deal about architects' unrealized projects because they publish them. But we know very little about artists' unrealized projects. I wanted to ask you if you have any unrealized projects, dream projects, which are either censored or too big to be realized, or too expensive to be realized?

PIPPA GARNER: Well, it's funny, because I always do. The problem is—and this is fairly recent—I was diagnosed with leukemia that was ostensibly from my time in Vietnam. I was there for thirteen months in the mid-60s. They were spraying Agent Orange, a defoliant, which turned out to be extremely toxic. I actually went on several of the missions with one of the planes that was spraying it, and there were no masks or anything. It stayed dormant until only a couple years ago, when all of a sudden, it caused pneumonia, which put me on life support for over six days. I was unconscious and I was in the hospital for a month in intensive care. Life support is terrible because it causes you to melt basically, mentally and physically. I've never gone through anything like that. All of a sudden, I found myself like a baby. I was able to go back home, but I still haven't fully recovered from that. I don't think I have the will. So, that's one of the problems. Now, I have this obstacle in my thought process because I'm constantly thinking, am I going to have some more time or not? You can be very isolated in Long Beach. Most of my friends are in Hollywood. So, I spend a lot of time alone, and I'm not good at that. I need to have back and forth. But I'm on the rules of the hospital. They did a five-hour infusion, which was a good thing. I'm lucky to have somehow survived to this point. I did something today with this young woman from the gallery who helped me take some pictures. It was a little thing I do for every April Fool's Day, which is my holy day. And so that was something that represents my thought process. I didn't have that two weeks ago. Then, all of a sudden, there it was. The same little mechanism back there was working. One thing that will be interesting is when we get autonomous cars. I want to live long enough to see that—something tangible. Something that affects my life that I feel stimulation from. Maybe I’ll just have one final burst left and then I drop dead. Or maybe not. I might be able to spread it out.

AUTO BODY UTOPIA

May 11, 2025

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I wanted to ask you how it all began. How did you come to art or how did art come to you? Was it an epiphany or a gradual process?

PIPPA GARNER: I was drafted in college. I used up several student deferments. Finally, they sent me the notice. So, I was sent to train as an unassigned infantryman in Vietnam, having no idea what I was going to be doing. I went over on a big plane full of people who were going to be assigned to different units. Once I got there, I thought, gee, I wonder if there's something that might have to do with my art background. I did some research and sure enough, one of the divisions, the 25th Infantry, is the only division with a Combat Art Team (CAT). A group of people who had some art background were given an itinerary to go out with different units and document with drawings, pictures, and writing. The camera thing was interesting because the military store on the base had all this expensive Japanese camera equipment, very cheap. And I got a really nice Nikon camera for nothing and trained myself to use it. A lot of times things were going so fast that you couldn't really hold the image long enough to document it, so that's when photography became very much a part of my life.

PIPPA GARNER: When I was doing all that work in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a real barrier between fine art and commercial art. If your work occurred in magazines, it was low grade. No matter what it was. It was degraded by the fact that it was published. And I reversed that in my mind. I thought, well, gee, that's not right. Here's an opportunity to have things out there reaching thousands of thousands of people as opposed to an art gallery. I love the idea of having as much exposure as possible. Even though I've had close friends that were recognized fine artists, and in a bunch of the galleries—I never really cared much about it. I did have a couple of gallery shows here and there, but mainly the thing that fascinated me was the fact that I could reach people clear across the country, and sometimes beyond, with these images. I didn't have much money during those years, but I always got enough out of the magazines.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: And of course, one of your key inventions, which is so famous today, is the backwards car from 1973. It's also interesting because it was a different time in magazines—when they paid for these extraordinary realities to happen. Can you talk a little bit about the epiphany of the backwards car and how it then drove on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco?

PIPPA GARNER: There was a period in all the major American car companies after World War II when they started having these really huge design departments. They used a lot of references to jet planes. The Cadillacs in the ’50s were huge, and they looked like they were moving even when they were standing still, which is called directional design. After my half car, half man, I started seeing cars in a context that had nothing to do with their purpose. The Cadillac particularly fascinated me because of the huge fins. And I had a good friend that was a designer who worked for Charles Eames in the early ’70s. He and I would go roaming around sometimes on our bicycles. One time, we went by this used car lot and there was a ‘59 Cadillac, and it just popped into my head, what if that thing was going backwards? It was just devastatingly funny and that convinced me that in some form it had to happen. So, I started sketching and figuring out how to do it, and I made a nice presentation. Esquire Magazine in New York responded and said, “Oh my God, we have to do this. How much do you want? How long will it take? We’re going to send a photographer to take pictures of the process.” But it couldn't be a Cadillac, because you couldn't see over the fins. So, I started looking in the papers until I found the car I wanted: a 1959 Chevy, two door sedan, six cylinder, no power steering or power brakes. I wanted a drive train as simple as possible so it would be easier to reconnect. It had fins, but the fins were flat, so they didn't obstruct your vision. And so I did the whole thing myself in a little garage space. Now, it was a matter of, how do I lift this thing up, turn it around, and set it back down on the frame? I didn't have access to any sophisticated technology to do it, so I got everybody I knew and we had a little party when I finally got everything cut away. Once everyone got a little bit high from the alcohol, I said, “Okay, folks, everybody around this car, shoulder to shoulder. When I give the command, I want you to lift the car up, and then walk it back, turn it around, bring it forward, and set it down again.” I thought it was going to be too heavy, but fortunately they didn't have any trouble. Once it was set back down, there was the backwards car. One day it was ready to try out and that was it, we went out and drove it around the San Francisco coast.

PIPPA GARNER: For me, the sex change thing was a material act. I never had a sense of being born in the wrong body as one of the expressions that they use goes, or had the trauma of being treated badly because of my sexual feelings. I never thought of any of this until I had already lived in my thirties as a male. And then suddenly, I ran out of interest in the assembly line products that I was so fascinated with. Even with cars, I felt like I had done as much as I could do. So I thought, there's gotta be something new, something else. And that was just about the time that changing your gender worked its way into the culture. The first example was, of course, Christine Jorgensen, way back in the ‘50s. But it wasn’t until the ‘80s when terms like transsexual started to be used. Leading up to that was the whole gay revolution. When I was growing up, you couldn't be gay. It was the most horrible, evil thing that could happen to a person. Gay culture was completely concealed. So coming out of these cultural biases became a real issue. And the human body—flesh and blood—fascinated me because I could still be using existing objects and juxtaposing them, but at the same time, making it fresh again. So, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, you know, I'm just at an appliance, like that radio over there, or the car sitting outside. The body that I was assigned to, I didn't pick it. I didn't say I want to be white, middle class, and heterosexual. So, if I am nothing more than another appliance, why not have some fun with it? Why not play with it and alter it in a comical way? Finally, that escalated into my deciding to go through with the surgery, which I went to Brussels for in 1993. I had what they call a vaginoplasty. Now, part of me is European [laughs]. I came back from that and thought, this is great, I’m in my forties, I've had a penis for all these years, and now I have a vagina. What an amazing thing—I live in an age when you can do that. You could go and pay somebody some money and say, “Here, I want to have my genitals turned the other way around.” And they said, “Fine, here's the bed.” (laughs) I was fascinated with the fact that I could do that with my body. It gave me a sense of control and a sense of a whole new area that I could explore. Meanwhile, the culture was changing and becoming more open. It's still not good, but it's much better than it was. I was kind of a pioneer with that perhaps.

Pippa Garner,Neopop Businesswear (Half-Suit), 1980–1981,Photograph by James Hamilton.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: In this conversation with Dunham, you say that you see the body as a toy or a pet that you can play with. You can change the shape of it. You're an inside and an outside.

PIPPA GARNER: Well, it's funny, because I always do. The problem is—and this is fairly recent—I was diagnosed with leukemia that was ostensibly from my time in Vietnam. I was there for thirteen months in the mid-60s. They were spraying Agent Orange, a defoliant, which turned out to be extremely toxic. I actually went on several of the missions with one of the planes that was spraying it, and there were no masks or anything. It stayed dormant until only a couple years ago, when all of a sudden, it caused pneumonia, which put me on life support for over six days. I was unconscious and I was in the hospital for a month in intensive care. Life support is terrible because it causes you to melt basically, mentally and physically. I've never gone through anything like that. All of a sudden, I found myself like a baby. I was able to go back home, but I still haven't fully recovered from that. I don't think I have the will. So, that's one of the problems. Now, I have this obstacle in my thought process because I'm constantly thinking, am I going to have some more time or not? You can be very isolated in Long Beach. Most of my friends are in Hollywood. So, I spend a lot of time alone, and I'm not good at that. I need to have back and forth. But I'm on the rules of the hospital. They did a five-hour infusion, which was a good thing. I'm lucky to have somehow survived to this point. I did something today with this young woman from the gallery who helped me take some pictures. It was a little thing I do for every April Fool's Day, which is my holy day. And so that was something that represents my thought process. I didn't have that two weeks ago. Then, all of a sudden, there it was. The same little mechanism back there was working. One thing that will be interesting is when we get autonomous cars. I want to live long enough to see that—something tangible. Something that affects my life that I feel stimulation from. Maybe I’ll just have one final burst left and then I drop dead. Or maybe not. I might be able to spread it out.

Ariana Papademetropoulos: Cosmic Release

August 26, 2024

interview by Jeffrey Deitch
photographs by Max Farago

Ariana Papademetropoulos’ paintings are thresholds—portals into alternate utopian universes. Oneiric interiors are grand stables for a fantasy menagerie and translucent figures that haunt with languorous decadence where beds become symbols of sexuality and dreaming. Painting these distinct worlds since her early childhood, Papademetropoulos was inspired by the occultist environs of Southern California, particularly her hometown of Pasadena where rocket scientist Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron once held magickal rituals at his estate in the 1940s with a coterie of believers in the esoteric. Coming from a family of architects, Papademetropoulos uses Renaissance techniques to build a world that is uniquely her own.

JEFFREY DEITCH: So, we're here in Mumbai, sitting in the lobby of the Oberoi Hotel.

ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS: Yes. We’re in a kind of utopian setting.

JD: This is, yes. An artificial utopia. But let's transport ourselves back to Pasadena, California.

AP: Okay, let's go.

JD: I've always been impressed by how you were so rooted in Pasadena, Los Angeles, but somehow your artistic outlook is so international. Your work encompasses influences from Italian Renaissance, French Surrealism, and many other sources. But the key is your California background. You are California all the way through. A lot of the artists in Los Angeles, they come from someplace else. But you come from Los Angeles, you went to school in Los Angeles, you apprenticed with artists and that's where you work. So, let's talk about your background. You come from an artistic family.

AP: I come from a family of architects on both sides, Green and Argentine, so although I was born in Los Angeles, I’ve always known a world outside of it. I suppose my interests are very influenced by both architecture and by my surroundings of Los Angeles, and so that follows through in all of the work.

JD: I met you in a very organic process. That's how I like to meet artists. It’s not like I saw your art in a group show and contacted you, and you didn't send me an email with your images.

AP: We met at the Autre dinner! We talked about Los Angeles history and that's how we connected.

JD: That’s correct. We were seated next to each other at the Autre dinner at a hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.

AP: And here we are doing an Autre interview.

JD: I already knew a little bit about your work from some mutual friends. People said, “Oh, you have to see Ariana’s work. She's brilliant. She's such a great artist.” So, I was already intrigued. And then, I visited you in this storybook house in Pasadena. What a romantic place. It was kind of an outbuilding, like a stable, a barn, connected to a grand estate. It was a little bit shabby, which was perfect. And I went into your studio. There weren’t just paintings propped up and easels—it was a total work of art. A gesamtkunstwerk: book covers, astonishing objects, stools that have human legs coming out of them (laughs). It was an entire prosthetic world, and that's my favorite kind of artist. Where it's not someone who just makes a painting or a sculpture, it's an entire artistic universe that you created. And it seems that you were born into this artistic universe. I mentioned to your mother once how talented you are, and so young. And she said, “Oh, well, she's been doing this since she was six years old or earlier,” that you were born to be an artist.

AP: I feel like it wasn't really a choice, it's just the way I've always been. But I think ever since a young age, I was highly sensitive to my surroundings and I figured out that the way I create a space affects my way of being. An architect creates a space and ideally it will affect the way that you behave in that space. Frank Lloyd Wright believed that the functionality of a space could enrich the life of whoever inhabits that space. In a way, it’s obvious, but I instinctively picked up on that ethos and knew that how I decorated my room would have an impact on my perception.

JD: And most of your artworks are set in an interior.

AP: Exactly.

JD: There may be figures, there might be a fantasy animal, like a unicorn. But almost always set in an interior.

AP: An empty room for me is like a portal to an imaginary realm. It always starts off of being basically bored in a house. That kind of suburban, empty room allows the fantasy to come through. It takes you to this middle world.

JD: You're interested in volcanoes as well.

AP: That's true. (laughs) I'm interested in archetypal subjects from fantasy, but I'm also interested in geological wonders and the natural beauty that exists on Earth. Volcanoes, crystals, waterfalls, flowers, geysers, bubbles, caves, you know, there is a lot of beauty everywhere if you look for it. Utopia does exist in some sense. It's just that we have to choose to see it.

JD: We've had a number of conversations about the special occult history of Pasadena. It’s a very unique place because on one side it's very Midwestern American, but on the other, it has attracted extraordinary people who enter into alternate realms. We talked a lot about Marjorie Cameron.

AP: And Jack Parsons.

DEITCH: I'm curious to hear how you learned about this as a child in Pasadena and how that alternate history of Pasadena has shaped you?

AP: I've always been very drawn to esoteric subjects, including magick, Aleister Crowley, all that kind of stuff. And then, when I came upon Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron, I got very excited because it really is this crossover between all the things that I love, which is the occult, science, and art. But what's remarkable is that the mansion where I had my studio belonged to this woman named “The Silver Queen.” She inherited silver mines. Her husband died and she got married eight times—one was a prince in India. But I was convinced when I was working there—because it's very close to The Parsonage, which is where Jack Parsons lived—that she threw parties and that Jack Parsons attended. I imagined this whole scenario. And what's wild is that, one day, I went to the studio and it was transported to the 1930s. The house was often used for movie sets. They brought in all these orange trees and everyone was dressed in suits and hats. They were filming a show about Jack Parsons and my studio was The Parsonage in the TV show (laughs). I found the script and my mind was completely blown. That crossover between what's real and what's a fantasy is so present in Los Angeles. And speaking of utopias, Jack Parsons wanted to create his own version of utopia. The Parsonage was an 11-bedroom house where people from all walks of life had rooms and they performed sex magick. It was basically this place of free love and they believed that sex magick could take you to an alternate realm. L. Ron Hubbard lived there for a while. Also, professors at Caltech, bankers, and people like Marjorie Cameron.

JD: It was a fascinating fusion of art, science, technology, the beginnings of space exploration. Religion was all there. Los Angeles art, for a long time from the perspective of New York City, was all about light and space and minimalism; high-tech materials. But there was always this undercurrent of homegrown surrealism; this utopianism. You mentioned Marjorie Cameron.

AP: Yes, Aleister Crowley told Jack Parsons she was the Scarlet Woman, the woman that would move us out of a patriarchal society, the age of Osiris, into the age of Isis, the age of women.

JD: It's fascinating that from the beginning you embrace that side of Los Angeles history in your art.

AP: Los Angeles is a place that's built on myth. The idea of the city came long before Los Angeles was there. It has always had a history where fantasy becomes reality, and not just in Hollywood. And then, we created the concept. Beachwood Canyon had The Krotona Inn where the theosophists lived, which had very utopian architecture. There were the Nature Boys in the 1930s, who were like the first hippies—these Germans who moved to Laurel Canyon, and were vegan, and had long hair, and looked like they were from the ‘70s. The Native Americans say that Los Angeles has always had this magnetic quality to it that made people delusional. So, it's always this place of smoke and mirrors. Even hundreds of years ago, there was some type of energy that made things unclear. That opens possibilities for people to believe whatever they want to believe. That's what Scientologists believe—you create your reality and however you choose to live becomes the basis of your reality—which can be dangerous and idyllic. Growing up in LA, all of this has been embedded in my work.

Ariana Papademetropoulos, *Phases of Venus*, 2022. Oil on canvas, 91 3/4 x 108 1/4 inches (223 x 275 cm); © Ariana Papademetropoulos; Photo by Argenis Apolinario; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery

JD: We presented a fascinating exhibition project together called The Emerald Tablet. It was quite unique. I'm not sure any other artist has ever done anything like this. It encompassed a very impressive solo exhibition of your work with epic paintings. And then, in the other part of the gallery you curated an exhibition that articulated your unique aesthetic and it was a kind of fusion of what we've been talking about. This Los Angeles occult history with The Wizard of Oz, and that myth. You should talk a little bit about The Emerald Tablet and Unarius, who did a performance in front of the gallery as part of the opening.

AP: L. Frank Baum [who wrote The Wizard Of Oz] was a theosophist. He named The Emerald City after The Emerald Tablet, which is an ancient alchemical text. The most famous line is “As above, so below.” I wanted to basically do an esoteric version of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of leading you to the Emerald City, it led to the Emerald Tablet, which is a place of collective unconsciousness. It's this place that all artists go to—a timeless universe. And that's why the green room had artists from the past hundred years. They all looked similar because they're all from this world some of these artists connected with. It's why the Mike Kelley piece looked so similar to the Agnes Pelton. The Jean-Marie Appriou piece looked like it was out of a Leonora Carrington painting. Everything was connected because it's this place that we can all enter into. Unarius believes there are these crystal cities on Mars, which was really similar to Mike Kelley's Kandor piece, which is where Superman was born. Unarius is a belief system, but they also functioned almost as a film studio because they made so many movies. They had their iconic bird release at the opening.

JD: Unforgettable. They drove their spaceship up North Orange, parked in front of the gallery, and had their cosmic release.

AP: I think perhaps Ruth, who started Unarius, was a performance artist without knowing it. She dressed as an Angel and flew down for her sermons suspended by a rope, surrounded by beautiful, young angel men. She lived out her dream.

JD: And I love the way this exhibition tied together your work with that of this special Los Angeles history by Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and artists from an earlier era, some connected to Los Angeles, and also artists like Leonora Carrington and Agnes Pelton.

AP: Agnes Pelton is a big influence for me. She's very connected to that other realm, that collective unconscious that I'm always interested in, and theosophy is a religion that has been very inspiring to a lot of artists. Kandinsky was a theosophist. It's just a fusion of worlds that almost looks musical, and it comes from this idea of thought forms; where the best way to describe a feeling is not through words, but through pictures. I think that's what art is. It's not articulated, but you can feel it. Those were the ideas of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant.

JD: So, you have an exceptional technique and you paint almost like a Renaissance master. I'm fascinated by the art education you gave yourself. You told me you were kicked out of about five high schools. Then, you attended CalArts where I'm sure you got very good artistic insights, but you didn't quite fit in. But then, you did something very interesting. You created an old-fashioned apprenticeship. You worked for Noah Davis. You worked for Jim Shaw and absorbed artistic techniques and approaches the old-fashioned way.

AP: I think that's the best way of doing it, seeing how an artist operates in the world. Because, in a way, I do think art schools are a bit problematic. I can tell when an artist goes to CalArts. I can tell when an artist goes to Yale. You go to an art school with your own way of being and then you come out as a product of that school.

JD: You didn't let CalArts do that to you.

AP: I just don't think I could have. I don't have that personality. I've been interested in the same subject since I was ten years old. I am so through and through myself that I'm not successful at being anything but that. I think some of my favorite artists are self-taught because that is what being an artist is. It’s figuring out your own path. I mean, there’s a way of being a successful artist where you follow all the rules, but ultimately, you can also get there by doing it your own way.

JD: Your perspective is also very international. Your name is Greek, but your mother is from Argentina. And you have a natural affinity for Italian culture—some of your wonderful paintings were painted in Rome, which suits you very well. Somehow, you're channeling the Renaissance in what you do—a sort of fusion of this unique California underground aesthetic and channeling Botticelli.

AP: I definitely have my fantasy version of Italy. I first went there as an escape, but the longer I'm there, the easier it is to see the real-world version versus my Dolce Vita version. But I think Rome and Los Angeles are kind of similar in a way. And the churches of Rome are basically installation art. It’s all about trompe l'oeil. You don’t even know what you're looking at anymore. Is the sky really opening up to the heavens above? You go into those churches and you are overwhelmed by the beauty. It’s almost a religious experience because beauty is a portal to get you somewhere else. And I think that's something that I really strive for in my own work. I try to use beauty as a gateway to get to another thing.

JD: I'm fascinated by your studio practice. You remind me of my friend Jean Michel Basquiat who was out all the time enjoying life in the clubs, yet astonishingly prolific. He obviously spent hours and hours in the studio. And so, unlike many artists, you have a very full and interesting life. Here we are in India, but your work is so demanding. It must be hours and hours in isolation doing this repetitive, exacting work.

AP: I travel and I live my life, but I don’t think an artist is never not working. I get inspiration from seeing the physical world. For the show we are doing together on Nymphaeums, it will take a lot of research and visiting grottos. And then, I’ll go into my studio for a prolonged period of time and work out the ideas I’ve absorbed. The physical nature of the work does require a long time, but it's almost meditative, and I enjoy the peace. I’m either working or I'm exploring, but anything in between, I've just never learned how to do that. It's either I work really hard or I'm wanting to live life to the fullest.

JD: So, a fascinating example of how you experience the world. You accompanied me some years back on a trip to Germany and you had read on the internet that there was some house built by a madman. It was the architecture of a schizophrenic and we were determined to see this house. When we encountered people in the art world and told them we were going to see this house, nobody else had heard about it. So, we rented a big Mercedes—I asked you to drive—and we saw this house. It was absolutely amazing. And that's typical of how you take in the world. I haven't seen the image of this house in your work yet, but something from this house is going to be there soon, I’m sure.

AP: That trip was actually the first time you mentioned to me this idea of a gesamtkunstwerk, or a total work of art. I never knew that word existed. And you were saying to me that that's what I'm doing. There's the work that I make, but it's also an extension of the world that I live in. And I feel like that idea really resonated with me. Now that I have a word to describe this thing, it’s opened so many new possibilities, because I've always been a little bit afraid of being anything other than a painter. There are always magical, beautiful things if you look for them. And there are things that are out of this world, that are in this world.

The Source Family

April 1, 2024

An image of several women sitting on & standing around a car

interview by Oliver Kupper

photography by The Source Family Scrapbook

The Source Family was a spiritual commune founded in the Hollywood Hills by James Edward Baker, otherwise known as Father Yod or Ya Ho Wha. A blend of Eastern mysticism and Western esotericism, the family was supported by The Source Restaurant on the Sunset Strip, which was one of the first vegetarian restaurants in Los Angeles. Isis Aquarian, or Charlene Peters, a former socialite and beauty queen became one of Yod’s fourteen wives and the commune’s de facto archivist. Together with curator, filmmaker, and scholar of spiritual communities, Jodi Willie, they have released a new monograph, FAMILY: The Source Family Scrapbook, published by Sacred Bones.

OLIVER KUPPER: Isis, where are you based right now?

ISIS AQUARIAN: Hawaii. I love it. It’s my soul home. But LA is my heart home. By the way, I really appreciate the topics you are covering in this issue.

KUPPER: I feel like people are thinking about building a better world again and thinking about utopia. There’s a new utopian urge.

AQUARIAN: I remember Father Yod saying it would be our children’s children to carry it forth. We were the foundation, the pioneers.

KUPPER: I want to start with the intro to the scrapbook. It’s so interesting and brilliant, that exploration into the dynamics of the Source Family. In it, there’s this Buckminster Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, you need to make the existing model obsolete.” Why do you think there was such an overwhelming global urge toward this utopian way of life in the late ‘60s and ‘70s?

AQUARIAN: My very simple understanding of it is that we all made commitments before incarnating. And when the timing is right, you get encoded, for lack of a better word. You step into that commitment you agreed to, so it was a no-brainer for many of us. Without even analyzing it, we stepped into that new paradigm. When I met Father Yod, he was still Jim Baker, and we drifted apart at first. Then, we met again when I stepped into the Source. When I saw him again, he looked like Moses and that was it. I never questioned it, I never turned around, and I’m still working within that paradigm with him.

JODI WILLE: Looking at history, things come in cycles. Studying the astrology of the time, it’s pretty wild to see how these cyclical energies come through the world and manifest in different ways at different times. They’re always different, but they have these similar threads. In the late ‘60s, you had these very dissatisfied people. You had the Vietnam War, which was affecting young people more than we could possibly imagine, and you had industrialized food and medicine reaching this high-profit breaking point. A lot of people were fed up with the food that they were eating and the drugs they were getting, and wanted to explore other pathways. Jim Baker had a lot of experience in that zone when it was very unpopular. Astrologically, they break these shifts down into 20-year periods, but then there are also these 100-year periods, and of course, you’ve got Pluto going into Aquarius again. So, Los Angeles was filled with people like Father Yod who helped to give birth to The Source.

KUPPER: Isis, you were a beauty queen way before joining the Family. Can you talk a little bit about your life before?

AQUARIAN: I think socialite is a better title. I was a complete socialite and I was a model too. My dad was Chief of Documentations for the Air Force, so I grew up pretty entitled. I grew up being archived and photographed, which wasn’t an issue with me. I moved to DC and worked for a senator and then I was a socialite out of the house at night in Washington under President Johnson. So, there was a whole elite circle that I was a part of. In the ‘50s, people were drinking, becoming alcoholics, and everything that came with that. And then, I moved to New York and slid into a whole other socialite scene with Warhol and Salvador Dalí, and I was dating one of the heirs to Smirnoff’s Vodka for a short period. Then, I started hearing about the hippies and flower children, and everything that was happening in LA. New York was just a dark zone. LA seemed very light and bright, and I was so pulled to it. I went, “I want to wear flowers in my hair, I want the sunshine, I want to drop out.” When I moved to LA, I very quickly walked into the Old World [Restaurant] and met Jim Baker and his wife Dora.

KUPPER: Jodi, how did you discover or learn about the Source Family?

WILLE: I went over to visit a friend one day—this was 1999—and he said, “I have this box and you’ve gotta see it.” It was this big 12-by-12-inch black box with this man who had a white beard and hair, and a bunch of small people collaged onto his belly area. At the top of the box it just said, “God And Hair—Yahowha Collection.” It was a complete collection of all the Source Family records that they turned into a CD box set. I was just blown away by it. I had been studying and researching occultic intentional community groups for many years at that point and there really wasn’t anything on the internet about the Source Family. Five years later, my then-husband, Adam Parfrey, came home with a student film that he’d found at Amoeba Music and it was about The Source Family. I was just like, “Oh my gosh, I have to find these people.” (laughs) So, I went online and it just so happened that there was a website that Isis had created. I wrote to the email address and asked her if they’d ever considered doing a book. Isis wrote me back right away and said, “My brother, Electricity, and I have been working for seven years on a book and we just finished it.” That conversation led to me coming out to Hawaii to go through the archives with her—this massive collection of photographs and documents, and putting together the first Source Family book, The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13, which also led to the documentary years later.

KUPPER: Isis, when you joined The Source, what did your birth family think of this new family? And what was the dialogue between them and you during this time?

AQUARIAN: Well, they were used to me being off the grid. I was the uncontrollable, dark horse. Between DC and New York, there were plenty of energies that shocked them. Also, my dad was in the CIA. So, he had a good handle on DC. He checked in on me a lot and found out what was going on with me in New York and LA. But no, they weren’t happy about it at all. How would you understand what was going on at that time if you weren’t in it, there’s just no way. And my dad was quite controlling to begin with. But my mom was fine with it. She loved Father Yod, by the way. She said, “I know where you are. You’re clean, you’re being fed, it’s safe.”

KUPPER: These utopian movements at that time, for some strange reason, really became the number one enemy of the CIA.

AQUARIAN: I know, we had helicopters flying over the house, we had men in black suits that we caught spying on us.

KUPPER: And Jim Baker sort of had a reputation before becoming Father Yod. He had this outlaw persona, which is very American.

AQUARIAN: Yeah, extremely. He was, and he loved that part of himself.

KUPPER: What brought him to this new spiritual movement? Was it something about his upbringing? Because he was older and came from a different generation.

AQUARIAN: He was searching his whole life, and he had a habit of just leaving every situation when it reached a level that wasn’t giving him what he needed anymore. He knew when he was done with a certain part of his life. And unfortunately, he didn’t handle it very well with the people around him. He would just take off and leave. Always leaving a trail of women—wives and kids. Because he was just moving on. He was on his journey and he was going full speed. He had Hollywood and he was on the start of his journey toward a spiritual path. Dora, his wife, was younger than him. She was a French girl. She smoked a lot of marijuana and that influenced him. She turned him on to the music, and it really was the music of the time that got to him. It struck his soul. He eventually got into that groove and he dropped out himself. Then, he met Yogi Bhajan, which got him into yoga, meditation, and the spiritual path. He wanted to merge the Western and Eastern vibration, and the yogis didn’t like that. They were stuck in a 3,000-year lineage. And so, that’s what he did. He opened The Source [restaurant].

KUPPER: The Source Family had a lot of alternative views about love and sex. This was at the height of the sexual revolution. Why was it such an important part of this new utopian model of thinking?

AQUARIAN: Because we made everything sacred. We smoked marijuana, but we called it the sacred herb. We only did it once each day for morning meditation, a spiritual process. We took our sex and it became what they call tantric. Most people now are aware of what tantric sex is. It's sacred sex, and usually the man doesn't use his seed unless he wants to have a child. He’s in control. It’s not lust. Our food was also sacred. We gave people an alternative to see everything in a different way.

An image of a young woman carrying an old man

WILLE: Teenagers during the sexual revolution were sexualized at a very young age. It’s a very unpopular thing to discuss now, but the reality was, from what I heard, there were a lot of underage women in the Source, and they were among the most highly sexualized of the women in the Family. For all of them, the women and the men, it was a very different kind of sexuality. It’s almost hard to imagine. It was not just like a free love, free-floating sexuality, it was a spiritual discipline.

AQUARIAN: There were no orgies. Father Yod had fourteen wives, but we had our one- on-one time with him. Everybody got what they needed. The young girls that came into the Family—we had a couple of young guys too—they came in from the street for a place to crash. Nobody came in as a virgin, except one guy that I know (laughs). And when most of those young girls came in, their parents at least knew where they were and that they were safe.

KUPPER: It’s interesting because the sexual revolution is such a big part of the utopian model that started to develop in the ‘60s, but sex seems so retro to kids today. When they hear that Father Yod had fourteen wives, I’m sure they immediately think of these big orgies.

AQUARIAN: (Laughs) First of all, not many people could have pulled it off. Dude, you better be able to handle it. You better be able to have yourself in control on all levels to begin with, or it’s going to be a shit mess. And it wasn’t. The women were sisters before we were his wives. We knew each other inside and out, and we liked each other, which made a difference. It’s not like we were all thrown together and didn’t even know what the crap was going on. And he didn’t separate us, we were in this together.

‘The family that meditates together levitates together’ image

KUPPER: There’s a lot of misconstruction between the words ‘cult’ and ‘commune.’ What is the line between the two?

AQUARIAN: After Charles Manson, they associated the word ‘cult’ with him and that’s what stuck. That was the downfall of the whole thing, but a cult is just culture.

WILLE: The word cult didn’t really become weaponized by the corporate media until the ‘70s. Back in the 1930s, there was a rash of love cults that the tabloid magazines would write about. And there were new religious movements—that’s what most of the scholars call them these days. They’re basically just nascent religions. Of course, there are cults with leaders that actually do control people’s minds (laughs). All the way back to Pythagoras, you could call him one of the first cult leaders. Oftentimes, these groups are led by people who question things. They’re creating a group because they’re unhappy with the status quo, because they feel alienated by the larger society, and a number of these groups rise up when a society is in decline. They’re often seen as a threat to those who want people to stay in their boxes, who want consumers to keep buying things (laughs), to do as they’re shown on television.

KUPPER: It’s interesting how fearful the Judeo-Christian capitalist enterprise really is of these groups. Why is that fear so important and why has it been so effective, because a lot of these groups have fallen apart?

WILLE: Well, a lot of them have, but a lot of them haven’t. We know about a handful of them—the worst of the worst. We know about the groups who have murdered people, who have committed mass suicide, who have done horrible things. But there are literally thousands of these groups that exist now. They exist across the world and they’ve existed forever. Those are the ones you don’t hear about because they don’t murder anybody. The Source Family disappeared and nobody even remembered it until we put the first book out.

KUPPER: It also takes a lot of privilege to drop out. A lot of these groups are white and middle class, but the Source Family seems relatively diverse. Can you talk about that diversity and why so many other communes come from predominantly white, middle class families?

WILLE: For a lot of people, it does take a certain amount of privilege, and coming from a white, middle class family gives you the leeway to experiment, and explore. Although, I think it’s important to note that in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the economy was really challenged. There were a lot of people who were struggling financially. Timothy Miller claimed that one of the main reasons these groups lived together was because it made sense economically. They pooled their resources and that’s something that’s happened throughout human history.

KUPPER: The blending of Eastern mysticism with Western esotericism was a big part of these communes. What do you think was so magnetizing about this amalgamation?

WILLE: Manly P. Hall wrote about Western magickal tradition in Secret Teachings of All Ages [1928], which was a foundational book for the Source Family. Jim Baker was an avid student of Manly P. Hall for many years before he formed the Source Family, so he had this foundation in Western mysticism and magick. Then he met Yogi Bhajan, and immersed himself in that too. He also had some personal issues he was really working on, and one of those issues was that he was an itinerant philanderer. So, he became celibate for a while, and celibacy really suited him. After a while, he started seeing the limitations of celibacy. At the same time that Jim Baker got to know Yogi Bhajan very well, he started learning about Yogi Bhajan’s hypocrisies and corruption. So, he had less respect for that ascetic, Eastern mystical way of life. Yogi Bhajan had all these mistresses that he was hiding in the closet, and what really fascinated me when I was learning about Jim Baker and the Family was how he folded in some of the best tech— this incredible breathwork, the chanting, and then brought in Western magick.

AQUARIAN: What he realized was that part of him was what he called his animal man. And to me, Jim Baker became the ultimate animal man. But then, when he started switching over with the Yogi to his spiritual evolutionary process, he had to deal with his godhood. There was his animal man and his higher spirit. This meant controlling all parts of his life: what you eat, what you think, what you say, what you create, and your sexual practices. And that’s where tantra came in, which he took to heal that animal part of his being and became the spiritual godhead within his sexual practices. He had fourteen wives because he had threads with all of us. He had karmic issues for payback. He said, “My wives in this incarnation are either because I owe them or we need to heal something, end something, or as a gift to them for completion of a very beautiful past lifetime.”

WILLE: A lot of materialist cynics think there’s a con man who’s drunk on power, so he starts a group that he can do this to. But, what I and other scholars have found with these groups is that they are led by people who have skills. They’ve got interdimensional skills (laughs), psychic abilities, they’re intuitive, and they have a high ability for that. That’s why the Source Family attracted a lot of people who are also intuitive and psychic, like Isis.

All of a sudden, you have a father figure who actually understands your internal experience, which is one that most people don’t know anything about, unless you can feel or see energy, see auras, and a number of people do. Another incredible thing I’ve discovered by researching and getting to know these groups is that when you have people who are focused on the same practices together, meditating, setting magical intentions, doing these chants, it becomes this incubator. It’s not only a social and cultural incubator, but it’s a spiritual incubator. They’re just clearing all of the clutter of (laughs) the materialist death culture in these situations. That’s why they stay a long time, even though the situations are really messy and dangerous. What do you think about that, Isis?

AQUARIAN: Well, he tried to disperse us three times. He said, “I’m done. I’ve given you everything I know. It’s time for you to go out on your own path.” And we tried three times, but he really took us on his journey, and in the process of that, he told us everything. I know everything about Jim Baker, Father Yod, the darkest, most embarrassing, horrible things you can imagine, like robbing banks. He held nothing back. He processed what we call his “river of life” by orally giving us the history of his timelines. He gave us everything about him, which taught us how to do it with ourselves.

WILLE: We didn’t capture it in the first book, or the film, but we mentioned it in this new scrapbook. During morning meditation, Father Yod would look back on his life with brutal honesty and even a sense of humility. Years ago, Omni Aquarian told me at one of the morning meditations, Father Yod said when one of his early wives, Elaine, was divorcing him, she very gently told him that throughout their marriage, she’d never had a single orgasm, and he had no idea. He didn’t even know what a female orgasm was because most men didn’t at that time. He continued to tell the Family how he learned about female sexuality, which was through his best friend Gus, who was a butch lesbian. She was also running a harem of twelve of the most elite prostitutes in Los Angeles at that time, and they were all madly in love with her. So, Jim Baker learned about how to give an orgasm through Gus. Father Yod would often say that the only constant in the universe was change, right Isis? And he was always changing everything up in the Family.

AQUARIAN: Daily. It was an ideology, and you had to really step up if you wanted to move with him, which happened on the day he left his body. We didn’t know until that morning he was going hang-gliding. Nobody knew. He just got up right in the middle of our morning meditation and he said, “Do you have the kite ready? Let’s go hang- gliding.” If you weren’t in two seconds following him, you were going to be left behind.

KUPPER: So, what would be your advice to young people who might want to make the existing model obsolete, and is the utopian urge still important or relevant?

AQUARIAN: It is still important, and nothing has to be obsolete. That whole thing in the ‘60s and ‘70s with the Source Family was a foundation. It was part of being the pioneers, something this generation can now take, make it better, continue with it, and do it in their way for this era. There’s so much from that time that they need now, just like we took from things that happened in the 1920s and 1940s, going back to the 1800s. We were taking stuff and incorporating it. People are going to know what to do, just like we knew what to do in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

WILLE: I’d like to say one thing that I learned from several Source Family members over the years, which they considered one of the most valuable lessons that Father Yod taught them, and that was to be fearless. They learned to be fearless because they had to encounter so many intense situations over and over again. There were extreme risks that they took, and to me, that seems as good as any guidance that I could get from anyone.

AQUARIAN: Being fearless is a warrior’s mentality. We were spiritual warriors.

An image of the first birth in my family

Superstudio: Italian Radical Design

April 21, 2023

An image of a multiple objects in a pinkish room with silver pillars — Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City, 1970. Internal Landscape. Courtesy Studio Branzi

interview by Oliver Kupper

In 1966, a flood washed over Florence, Italy. Over one hundred people died. Millions of Renaissance masterpieces, artifacts, rare books, and monuments were destroyed when the Arno overflowed and consumed the capital of Tuscany. But this was not the first time the city was overtaken by chaos and destruction. Twenty years earlier, the Nazis began a year-long occupation of the ancient Roman citadel. Allied and Axisforces shared a brutal exchange of fireand shelling that destroyed many of the buildings surrounding the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge, which was miraculously spared by Hitler himself (all the other bridges were destroyed). Out of the rubble and loam of this violent miasma came a group of radical young architects who formed avant-garde collectives and declared a philosophical war against architecture itself. Against the violence of the past. Against the barbarity of fascism. Against formality. Against history. Against rigidity and conservatism. These groups had names like Superstudio, Archizoom, Gruppo 9999, and UFO. They were more concerned with ideas than structures—building conceptual visions of new worlds rather than erecting edifices in the present. Although they only existed for a brief period, burning wild and bright and visionary, their output would leave a lasting architectural impression—later inspiring architects like Rem Koolhaas and the late Zaha Hadid. But while Florence might have been the epicenter of this new psychedelic activity, these ’superarchitettura’ groups spread across Italy—from Milan to Turin, to Naples, and Padua as highlighted in the landmark 1972 exhibitionItaly: The New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Emilio Ambasz. The new landscapes of these radical utopians explored speculative visions of domesticity that included themes of anti-design and protests against objects as status symbols—anchors of materiality that exemplified the hubris of a hyper-consumerist, post-war society.

An image of a girl holding yellow flowers sitting on an outside bed — Superstudio, "Misura series" for Zanotta, 1970. plastic laminate with silkscreen print. Photographed in Panzano nel Chianti, Italy. Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

Founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and shortly thereafter joined by Roberto and Alessandro Magris, Gian Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro Poli, Superstudio’s psychedelic universe was an attack on modernism’s inherent failures. Utilizing photo collages, films and exhibitions, their vision was utopian at its core, but also examined the anti-utopia’s of urban planning pomposity with works like The Continuous Monument(1969), which was a singular gridded monolithic structure that spanned the globe. It cuts through meadows, cities, deserts and beyond. For Superstudio, the Cartesian grid, a system of x-, y-, and z-axes to control space, became their signature. Tables, benches and storage units are sold today with this pattern. In the following pages, the only surviving member of the group, Gian Piero Frassinelli discusses the group’s ambitions and his unique input, which was deeply steeped in his fascination and studies in anthropology. This translated to a vision of humanity returning to its nomadic roots, free from the slavery of labor and consumerist desires.

OLIVER KUPPER: Why did you gravitate towards architecture and were your architectural dreams before Superstudio always so radical and utopian?

GIAN PIERO FRASSINELLI: At first, I didn't have this utopic idea when I studied architecture. It took me a bit longer than usual to finish my architectural studies—about eight years. The word ‘radical’ wasn't used until after the creation of Superstudio, Archizoom, and all the utopian groups that were born during those years. The Superstudio group was formed during some of the toughest years for the university because classes were often interrupted. First, because of the flood in 1966. And later, in 1968, because of the student strikes. Those strikes were to fight the educational system in Italy and also to support peace all around the world. We were against the Vietnam War. Also, there was a huge gap between the ideas of the students and the teachers. So, we started to search for new ways of imagining what architecture could be.

KUPPER: You got your degree in 1968 and joined Superstudio the same year. How did you join forces with Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia who founded the group only two years before?

FRASSINELLI: I met Cristiano a few weeks before, on the street, casually. I hadn’t seen him since before the flood because I was preparing for my graduation project, and so I was spending a lot of time at home. Christiano told me about his studio that he founded with Adolfo and he told me to visit them when I graduated. After a few days, I finished my studies. When I arrived at their studio, they told me what their ideas of architecture were. At first, I didn't understand because my ideas were very different from the academic approach, but also from their point of view. But my architectural ambitions were very similar, so I decided to put my ideas aside and follow them.

KUPPER: You had an early interest in anthropology—why was that field of study important in the context of architecture?

FRASSINELLI: To be honest, my interest in anthropology came before my interest in architecture. I found myself in the architectural world because my dad used to sell building materials. His studio was packed with architectural magazines and books. My interest in anthropology started when I was a child. I got sick in a bunker during World War II, so I stopped attending elementary school for a few years. But I was lucky because I had an aunt who was a retired teacher. She taught me a lot to make up for the years that I had lost due to my illness. She was one of the first teachers to use the Montessori method. [Maria] Montessori was an Italian professor who changed the way of teaching. And she was a very religious person, so she did a lot of missions in Africa and other places. That’s how I learned about people who were very different from me, that had a very different culture and lifestyle than mine. I was around eight years old at this time. And from my dad’s architectural magazines, I got a passion for architecture. So, after high school, I enrolled in the University of Architecture in Florence. Over the years, I kept learning more and more about anthropology. My graduation project was a study about an anthropology museum.

KUPPER: Speaking of the war years. How did the ghosts of fascism in Italy, but also Europe at-large, in post-war Florence—a city steeped in the classicism of the Renaissance—inspire you as an architect and Superstudio?

FRASSINELLI: I was born in 1939, the exact day that Hitler invaded Poland. The next year, the bombing started in Italy. The bombing first started in La Spezia, which was the city where I used to live. Every night, we heard the sirens. We had to spend most of our life in the bunkers there. We actually moved from La Spezia because our house was destroyed in the bombing. So, we moved east and arrived in an area close to the Apennine Mountains, which was the location for a lot of Nazi killings. You’ve probably heard about Marzabato, which was the location of one of the biggest Nazi massacres. We were lucky to survive. It was a miracle. So, when we arrived in Florence, it was almost the end of World War II, but a big part of the city was destroyed, and there were land mines everywhere. Seeing the destroyed architecture was really influential for me and for my architectural point of view.

KUPPER: In connection to these totalitarian regimes and architecture, most people associate the Cartesian grid with rigid structures, conservatism, staying within the lines, but Superstudio’s imagination existed way outside these lines, what did the grid represent and why was it so important?

FRASSINELLI: The grid was actually developed casually. I was working with Superstudio for a year, and I was more like a draftsman than a researcher. At one point, Adolfo and Cristiano had the idea of building the Continuous Monument. They needed someone very good at drawing perspective. I was actually hired for drawing perspective and also photo collages. Also, during my studies in high school and university, to draw perspective, I always used the Leon Battista Alberti method. Leon Battista Alberti was one of the most important architects and artists in Florence. And that method consists of dividing each volume into squares using a grid. This is also how the grid made its way into the photo collages.

KUPPER: And the grid sort of took over everything—even tables and chairs. It became a main symbol of what Superstudio did.

FRASSINELLI: With architecture, we later moved forward from the grid. For the design aspect, the grid became iconic. A lot of people requested it. And Zanotta still produces Superstudio furniture with the grid. As for the drawing, the grid was just a way to emphasize the bi-dimensional volume.

KUPPER: This Cartesian order of the natural world through dominating monuments of architecture, like The Continuous Monument, which could soon be a terrifying reality in the Saudi desert, was described by Adolfo Natalini as an “anti-utopia.” Where did Superstudio’s intuition about the terrors of architecture’s future anti-utopias come from?

FRASSINELLI: The Continuous Monument was first an idea that Adolfo and Cristiano had to connect architecture from all around the world—to connect all the architectural methods. And the grid helped to put this in order and to be more rigid. But the problem for me, because of my anthropology studies, was that it led me to think that the interior of the Continuous Monument would be terrible to live in. So, the Continuous Monument was born as a utopia but died after my talks with Adolfo and Christiano, and became an anti-utopia.

KUPPER: One of your major contributions is “The Twelve Cautionary Tales [12 Ideal Cities],” which was extremely anti-utopian. Can you talk about this?

FRASSINELLI: “The Twelve Cautionary Tales” happened during a period when Adolfo was teaching at a university in the United States, so it was just me and Christiano here in Florence, and we didn't have that much work to do. It was a better way for me to explain to Adolf and Cristiano what life would actually be like inside The Continuous Monument. I took the ideas of the other eleven cities by focusing on crowded urban places all around the world that somehow don't work. Each city, each cautionary tale, is a different thing that doesn't work in those cities. I chose the number twelve because twelve is a very important number for Western culture and literature.

Supersuperficie for 'The New Italian Land-scape' exhibition, MoMA, New York, 1972. Migrazione, screen printed plastic laminate for Abet Print, 1969. Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

Amore. La macchina innamoratrice Collages et crayon blanc sur tirage, 60 × 80 cm © Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

KUPPER: Film was a powerful medium for Superstudio. I'm thinking about the short thesis film made for the exhibition at MoMA, Supersurface [1972]. Can you talk about that film and the power of moving images?

FRASSINELLI: To be honest, me and Cristiano started to make a movie during the university years with a few friends who didn't study architecture. It was about the Christian Gospels, but we had to interrupt it because we discovered that Italian director and writer, Pier Paolo Pasolini was actually preparing a movie that was about that. So, we decided not to compete with him (laughs). So then, there was another movie, which was less known. It was called Interplanetary Architecture [1972], and it was before Fundamental Acts [1972].

KUPPER: Where did the love of film come from?

FRASSINELLI: At the time, there was no TV at home. So, the cinema was very important for all of us because it influenced our life a lot, and gave us a lot of poetic ideas. We watched the movies of Fellini, Pasolini, and Antonioni.

KUPPER: You mentioned Fundamental Acts, which explored the five fundamental acts of a person's life. It was a very poetic project. Can you talk about this series and why architecture doesn't consider the human body or experience?

FRASSINELLI: My awareness of architecture began when I was very young, basically when I was born. I remember our first apartment in Florence after World War II. It was my first architectural experience and I was around seven years old. My family decided to visit another family that lived in the same building. When we entered this apartment, I actually saw my own apartment, but with different furniture and organized in a different way. This was a really visceral experience that was actually painful. This memory popped when I started my architectural studies. From that experience, I decided not to design a single apartment that was the same as another. Going back to my anthropological interests—in Western society, we have this concept of apartments and buildings that are very homogeneous, but in other societies and cultures, all the buildings are different from each other.

KUPPER: So, it's important to consider a person's life and bring humanity back into architecture.

FRASSINELLI: It's probably because of the humanity in architecture that I was always inspired and interested in anthropology. A lot of architects actually ask me what anthropology has in common with architecture and why it is necessary to architecture. And my answer is always: all the architecture is lived in by humans.

KUPPER: Nomadism and nomadic society is an important part of Superstudio’s architecture ambitions and it is also related to anthropology. Humans used to be nomads and there are still a few nomadic societies out there.

FRASSINELLI: Nomadism is the other face of architecture because it's actually life without architecture. In Western society, we have this obsession with work. In nomadic society, they would work just five or six hours a day to find food, and the rest of the time is just to enjoy their own life, which is talking to each other, learning different things or spending free time with each other.

KUPPER: On the other side of it, now with global warming and war, we have people who are forced to enter a nomadic lifestyle. Climate refugees they are called. How do you think architecture could rectify that, or build a better future for people forced to become nomads?

FRASSINELLI: There are a few people trying to do that, but it's very difficult right now because the architectural world operates on a purely economic basis. There has always been a war between those who are richer and those who are poorer. Right now, there are more than a billion people not living properly all around the world, and the hope that I have is that we will try to help the people who are forced to be nomadic. This is separate to nomadic societies, because these societies can actually offer us a closer look at how humans can live in better harmony with nature.

KUPPER: What is your advice to young architects today with utopian visions of the future?

FRASSINELLI: Young architects are the first to be in a prison of their own culture. My advice is to really change the structure of the society where you live, because otherwise, there's no chance to survive.

Four people sitting on a large pink couch, drinking and playing the flute — Amore. La macchina innamoratrice Collages et crayon blanc sur tirage, 60 × 80 cm © Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

Entering A World of Concerns: Survival Structures for Humanity

April 21, 2023

The point is not of planning utopias; the point is about practicing them. And I think this is not a question of “should we do it or should we persist in the existing order? It’s a much more radical question, a matter of survival: the future will be utopian or there will be none.
– Slavoj Žižek

text by Abbey Meaker

Utopia is not a place; it’s a shooting star: it appears suddenly, in the eye of the mind, bright and mesmerizing, mysterious. It demands our full attention before vanishing. Utopia is not a place; it’s a moment in time, a note in tune. Utopia is a transgression. It is a question, a confrontation. It can only exist outside of our imaginations in small gestures. We can’t go there; we can’t live there, and the moment we try, the dream collapses. Utopia is not perfection; it’s freedom. In the tide of our experience on Earth, moments of utopia find us in the awareness of our interconnectedness, of acknowledging our finitude without being silenced by it. For a moment, it liberates us, and with the wind it goes.

There have been periods throughout history when the notion of utopia becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist, contemplated by artists, philosophers, and writers in the realm of an imagined paradise. Marie-Hélène Brousse opened her 2017 lecture entitled “Identities as Politics, Identification as Process, and Identity as Symptom” by arguing the fact that the dominant conception of identity is an ideal identity, whole and stable, unified and intentional (utopia). Contrary to such a view, Lacanian psychoanalysis posits that life is something which goes “à la dérive” (adrift). In other words, the idea of a unified identity is a lie, as the structure of the unconscious goes against the possibility of such a unity. The real utopia—cultivation of identity to oneself and the world around them—is one of quotidian practices. It is not an existence free of antagonisms. Our murky origins and inner workings have depth. From this dusky bloom we come with questions, compelled by curiosity and a need for connection. We follow that drive to dark places, and there we find a lighthouse, the artist. Artists are stewards of meaning, and as I consider experiential notions of utopia, I continually return to the work of Agnes Denes.

Utopia is an offering made by the hands of an artist. It is an act of creation. It is planting a wheat field on two acres in lower Manhattan as the artist Agnes Denes did in 1982. Wheatfield — A Confrontation, was sited on a landfill created when the World Trade Center was constructed in the late 1960s-early 1970s. This artwork was intentionally and aptly placed in the shadow of the towers, a stone’s throw from Wall Street with the Statue of Liberty in view. It yielded over one thousand pounds of healthy amber wheat, and in the months the wheat was maintained—on this property worth billions, representing some of the world’s greatest wealth—a compelling paradox was unearthed, a profound statement on the implications of global commerce, wealth disparity, and misplaced priorities on the culture and condition of the earth itself. Forty years later, this prescient work echoes with overwhelming urgency.

Agnes Denes, whose work has never been easy to categorize, is an artist who has continually engaged with the notion of utopia in tangible ways. Her practice, which investigates philosophy, science, linguistics, and history, is grounded in socio-political concepts and ecological concerns. Her work is motivated by a curiosity of the human mind, how we think, how we evolve, how time changes us, how previous generations inform current and future generations. Denes describes her entry into visual expression as an exit from the ivory tower of her studio into a world of concerns. For more than fifty years, Denes has used her work to call attention to and protest damaging systems of power, deteriorating values, and the ways in which our interests, choices, and problems interfere with and harm the whole of Earth’s ecosystems.

Her poetic eco-philosophical work Rice/Tree/Burial, first realized in 1968, began with a private ritual, a symbolic event and declaration of her commitment to the environment and human concerns, namely the ways in which one informs the other. Like chapters in a story, Denes began by planting rice. In the 1977 iteration of this work, the ritual was re-enacted and realized at full scale in Lewiston, New York. She planted a half-acre of rice in a field 150 feet above the Niagara Gorge. The site marked the birthplace of Niagara Falls between Canada and the US, twelve thousand years ago. Rice represented universal substance, that which brings forth and sustains life.

She chained together a series of trees in a sacred Native American forest. The chains symbolized connection, linkage in time and material, and our interference with natural processes. Reorienting these trees created, in a sense, a new ecosystem. Introducing new elements and materials, like a dam in a river, sets a cascading change into motion. The echo of interconnectedness sound.

The final chapter included the burial of a time capsule to be opened in one thousand years. It contained only the filmed responses to a series of philosophical questions that had traveled around the world, and a long letter the artist addressed "Dear Homo Futurus." The contents of the time capsule symbolized human intellect and evolution, clues as to the values of previous Earth generations.

Though conceptually rigorous, the acts involved in the rituals are everyday practices: hands in the soil, sowing seeds, burying the sacred, the symbolic, total absorption in the mundane. This work reminds us that ideas in the context of art can be more than flimsy imaginative notions, they can be used in the deconstructive remaking of the world. These gestures, the enactment of utopias, will bleed out, soaking our tightly interwoven fabric with new color and texture.

In my exchange with Agnes, she told me, and asked that I share with you, that we must turn around inside ourselves and look through a different window. To make sure we ask the right questions, questions that open the soul. The artist said she wanted to sit down with everyone reading this and start a conversation they would walk away from with a full heart, an open mind, and enough curiosity to kill a cat. I propose that we speak with Agnes, ourselves, each other, the past, the future, through a series of existential questions she buried in 1977:

1. What governs your actions? Do you think there is a force influencing what happens?
2. How do you feel about death?
3. What would you say the human purpose is?
4. What do you think will ultimately prove more important to humanity, science or love?
5. What is love?
6. What would perfect existence consist of?

Extra, Extra

April 21, 2023

JW Anderson merino wool top and skirt, fish-shaped shoulder bag, mirrored bag, and leather sandals

photography by Jermaine Francis
styling by Naomi Miller

Alexander McQueen polyfaille dress, Hobo jeweled leather bag, Slash leather bag, and metal earrings

Prada leather jacket and skirt; Supernova leather bag, Top Handle leather bag

KNWLS polyester top and leggings; Louis Vuitton canvas XL key pouch

Rejina Pyo wool blend jacket; Margaret Howell heavy cotton poplin shirt, cotton linen trousers and tie, pebble leather Doctor’s bag and Rambler’s bag

Chloé Patchwork calfskin leather bag; CELINE by Hedi Slimane Triomphe leather bag; Gucci Jackie 1961 canvas and leather bag

Lemaire polyamide, linen and cotton parka, cotton poplin shirt, silk and polyamide trousers, metal flask, leather flask, leather flask case, Mini Camera leather bag, Case leather bag, and Croissant coin purse

Hermés nylon coat, cotton turtleneck, Pansage Plumes leather bag with ostrich feathers and leather sandals

Acne Studios cotton sweatshirt; Uniqlo U denim jeans; Acne Studios Musubi leather bags, and Micro Distortion leather clutch

An Interview of Nikki Maloof

April 21, 2023

Nikki Maloof, *The Apple Tree*, 2022.
Oil on Linen. 70 x 54 inch.
Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

interview by Oliver Kupper

Nikki Maloof’s domestic tableaux are startling and at the same time humorous reminders of our own existence. Bright, prismatic, dreamlike, her paintings grapple with unexpectedness—freeze-frames before the tragicomedy unfolds. Fragments of a scream before a murder. A foot descending a staircase, a hawk’s talons moments from clutching a dove, a hand behind a curtain. The uncanniness is haunting and visceral. Maloof’s exhibition, Skunk Hour, which was on view at Perrotin gallery in New York, explored a new suite of paintings, many of which feature culinary activity in the home. The title is borrowed from a Robert Lowell poem of the same name. “I myself am hell;” he writes, “nobody’s here— / only skunks, that search / in the moonlight for a bite to eat.” Living and painting in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Maloof’s rural surroundings invite a poetic interiority that if rife with symbolism akin to Dutch Still Life—the bones of fish on a plate, a dog’s hungry eyes, the artist’s own reflection in a knife blade, her paintings invite us into another, stranger world.

OLIVER KUPPER: Where are you based these days?

NIKKI MALOOF: I live in Western Mass[achusetts]. My husband is from this area originally, and we would visit a lot when we were still living in the city. About six years ago, we decided to move. So, this is where we live.

KUPPER: I love that area. It has a weird, mystical quality.

MALOOF: Very hippie-dominated, kind of arty. But also, the colleges bring a lot of young people, so it's a cool place.

KUPPER: I want to start with your chosen medium, which is still life. I'm curious what first attracted you to the medium?

MALOOF: Well, I went to Indiana University, and it's a very traditional painting school. So, I really learned how to paint from painting still lifes. When you paint something from life, you turn off your brain and you're just doing it. It’s something I would pepper in with other things that I was doing in the past that had more to do with my imagination, and it's just always been there. But, when it came to this body of work, I retreated more into the home as a setting. I started wanting to treat the spaces in a home like a character and not necessarily paint the people that inhabit them. That lended itself to looking to the objects that we surround ourselves with for ways of conveying meaning. I'm very attracted to houses and the things that we compile. I'm always following a little trail of crumbs and one painting will lead to the next. It started off with animals, but then it slowly became about our interaction with the domestic space.

KUPPER: I think of the Dutch still life painters and how portraiture completely started dropping out of those paintings in this really surreal way.

MALOOF: For a long time, that kind of painting would not have been the thing that I related to as a more developed painter. As a young painter, I would always walk past those paintings, and it's been an interesting challenge to try and make a still life catch your attention or convey emotion because they're sort of inert.

KUPPER: Even though those paintings are about objects, each object has this deeply spiritual quality.

MALOOF: When I started to look deeper at those works, I became aware of a whole language that is lost at first when you just think, oh, like fruit, whatever. I find that really intriguing—that there’s little messages all the time.

KUPPER: Seafood became part of those Dutch still lifes because of their connection to water. In your work, there are also some symbolic notions of seafood. Can you talk a little bit about the symbolism in your work and about some of the different objects that reoccur?

MALOOF: Painting things like seafood began years ago when I was painting a lot of domestic animals—trying to make stand-ins for us. I was thinking about the way that we interact with animals on an everyday basis. One of the biggest ways we interact with animals is by eating them. It's this relationship where we tend to look away really quickly because it can be a weird reckoning, especially when you look at the industry of it. So, I was thinking I should enter the kitchen because that's where we actually interact with animals. I thought it might be a challenge to make a fish seem emotive, and I wanted to borrow from the realm of the Dutch fish paintings, but make it my own by breathing some weird life into them. Fish are strange because we feel almost nothing for them, but then they look so alive compared to any other thing that we come in contact with. There's a dark humor there—something that’s kind of ridiculous about it all. Also, painting fish and food is extremely delightful, and I think if something seems weirdly fun, there’s usually some reason that you need to go there. If the desire is there, I usually follow it, and then see if it has any repercussions.

KUPPER: There's also this humorous, dark side to a lot of the work. During the pandemic, and also during the Plague, painting started to become very dark and strange, and people started dealing with their emotions in different ways.

MALOOF: Yeah, I'm really attracted to anything that is on the line. All artforms that are one foot in lightness, one foot in darkness are really intriguing. I feel like that's what it is to be alive. Ideally, you want to be on the light side, but that's an almost impossible place to remain. Being a human, there’s too many factors to grapple with. So, that tone really makes sense to me.

KUPPER: The title of your new show, Skunk Hour, was inspired by a Robert Lowell poem. It’s interesting to hear about an artist’s inspirations outside of painting.

MALOOF: I've been really interested in poetry since grad school. I look to it for answers in a way that I can't with painting. A poem conveys meaning without telling you exactly what the answer is and I found it very freeing when I realized that you don't have to explain everything—that the artwork takes on a life of its own. I like that Robert Lowell poem because you're basically following him as he drives around his town and notices things. He's describing it and slowly coming to terms with his own mind. It goes from being somewhat light to this intense, dark place. And when you're in a space that's so familiar to you, like your home or your neighborhood, those things do occasionally hit you. That’s the whole point of the show: the realization that there's moments in our everyday lives that are so intense, and we notice them, but they’re always in the background, and then we have to move on. Skunk Hour is like nighttime, when we're alone with our thoughts. It’s about the way that we deal with existential experiences in everyday life.

KUPPER: There's this interesting sensorial notion of being reminded of your own mortality.

MALOOF: Yeah! When I moved out here, I realized that when you're a little bit closer to nature, it hits you all the time. You could be walking, and then see a hawk dismembering something, and it makes you think of so many things, but then you just carry on with your day. I wanted to paint those experiences and feelings. As far as other inspirations, I like the more confessional poets, like Sylvia Plath. She is definitely a figure that looms large in my mind. Stylistically I get a lot from her work. She would often take instances from everyday life and electrify them into a kind of psychodrama or operatic grandeur full of darkness and pathos.

KUPPER: And you're sort of in Sylvia Plath territory now.

MALOOF: I am. She is a figure who created under intense pressure … pressure to be a good mother and the pressure of her intense ambition. I relate to those struggles a lot. Under all of that stress her work took shape almost like how a diamond is formed. The facts of her death aside, her art can be a reminder that sometimes the difficult aspects of life can also be the fuel to a fire that’s within us. I guess that’s a utopian view of art making for sure.

KUPPER: I read about the epiphany you had with this exhibition: seeing a newborn deer in the morning and then a dead neighbor being wheeled out of their house.

MALOOF: That was the craziest day. It was this perfect spring day and so strangely bookended like that. I basically woke up, was having coffee, and then I saw these little ears poking out of an iris bed in my neighbor's yard. When I went over, it was a brand new, baby fawn. And then, at the end of the day, we had a neighbor of ours who had been ill for a while, and it was just so surreal to see the car drive up and take him away. But homes are where everything happens. They’re full of humdrum experiences—chopping onions, folding laundry—and then they’re peppered in with these very dramatic moments as well.

KUPPER: Would you say there's a sense of psychological self-portraiture, even in the still lifes?

MALOOF: That's really what the goal is—to convey what it's like to feel like laughing and crying in the same day; to exist in that. I grew up playing with dollhouses, and imagined worlds were a big part of my being a child. That has to inform some part of it.

KUPPER: There's also a societal aspect of it where the woman's place is in the home.

MALOOF: There's a residue of that, for sure. I'm from the Midwest and was raised by people who were very patriarchal. We went to school, but while it was clear that you were to get married, there was such an emphasis on becoming a successful person.

KUPPER: The heteronormative American dream.

MALOOF: Yeah, there's tension there with having this type of career and having kids. I'm watching their experience of the world from a different vantage point. I garden a lot, which has made me acutely aware of how we’re not that different from that fawn or any of the creatures we come across. That's another thing that I think about in the work: how do we fit into it all?

KUPPER: Would you say that your work is utopic in any way?

MALOOF: I don’t think of my paintings as utopias, but I definitely think of the act of painting as the closest thing to a utopia I can imagine. It’s not unlike the way I would arrange a dollhouse as a kid. It’s where I can have everything the way I want it and play with ideas freely.

KUPPER: In your work, it feels like the reality comes from the sense of paradise lost. The apple tree has a very Edenic quality to it. Can you talk about that painting specifically?

MALOOF: Well, I try to grow food all the time here, and I fail at it most of the time, but the orchard attracted me because of how it would work, paint-wise. In a tree, of course, there's birds and bird nests, and I immediately was like, oh, bird nest and then a hawk devouring a bird right next to it. I was thinking about the way that you move a person's eye around a painting, almost like the way that a child would draw a life cycle. This was also the first time I put myself in a painting in probably a decade. Mostly because I was thinking about the way that scale changes meaning in a painting. I made myself almost the same size as an apple to address the way we’re not as important as we think. I feel like that painting hit every note that I was trying for.

KUPPER: There's a strong sense of time in it. It's like a clock.

MALOOF: Time is definitely a thing I don't talk about enough in the work. When you have kids, you suddenly feel like everything is a clock. You're really aware of it ticking, and it's deafening sometimes. I did it in one other painting called Life Cycles. It's a dinner scene where you follow the fish from an egg to the bones.

KUPPER: There's a sense that you're watching a time bomb of our mortality.

MALOOF: It's something I think about all the time. Does it seem very morbid to you? (laughs)

KUPPER: No, you deal with the morbid aspect of it with a lot of humor.

MALOOF: Humor is definitely the thing that I use to offset all of these intense thoughts—to try and lessen the blow or something. That's where color and paint comes in. The meaning comes from finding a way to manipulate this weird material that just is so deeply fun and pleasurable. I want you to experience that as much as all the darker things. There's a lot of levity with paint.

KUPPER: Art can be fun, and it should be fun. That's where the utopian idealism comes from.

MALOOF: Maybe they're utopias and I didn't know it. Do you think they're utopic?

KUPPER: I do. I think they're your own invented utopias.

MALOOF: Maybe they are a place where I can have everything I want, and arrange it just so, and live in it for a while. I never thought of it that way because I don't think our reality lends itself to utopia. Our everyday life is far from it. It's not the first thing I think about, but I guess it is the place that I go to make sense of it all. So sure, it can be a utopic place.

KUPPER: I think that if you can invent your reality in a painting, and even if they're based in realism, there's still a utopic urge in that creation of a world. There's also this clash—psychologically and philosophically—between your Judeo-Christian upbringing with its heteronormative ideas about one’s place in society and the realization of our own mortality.

MALOOF: There's definitely a theatrical element to it all. The worlds that I create are far from my actual reality. The Judeo-Christian thing isn’t such a big part of it, but there’s always a residue in how you approach things that is based on your your early conceptions from childhood.

KUPPER: Where do you think that humor you employ originated from?

MALOOF: I have four sisters, and I'm the middle, so I was probably the one who was trying to make people laugh most of my life. But I've always gravitated towards things that have humor embedded in some way. I think about musicians that do it and I’m always trying to strike a balance with each painting. You're balancing the color, the composition, and the tone so that the song works. Humor is one aspect of that orchestration. It’s putting together all these harmonies and trying to make them work.

Craig McDean in Antarctica

April 1, 2023

Funktopia: George Clinton in Conversation with Lauren Halsey & Overton Loyd

April 1, 2023

Not Casa Orgánica: Javier Senosiain & Dakin Hart in Conversation

April 1, 2023

interview by Oliver Kupper
photographs by Olivia Lopez

Casa Orgánica is a romantic elegy to living in harmony with the natural world and natural forms. Built by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain Aguilar in 1985, the house is located in Naucalpan de Juarez, a stone’s throw from Mexico City. Senosiain’s architectural philosophy was to build a home that more closely resembled the habitats of animals and prehistoric humans: a cave, a womb, a snail’s shell, an igloo. Sinuous earth-tone tunnels lead to different living chambers, giving the feeling of entering the earth. From the exterior, the domicile is barely visible through layers of grass, trees, shrubs and flowers, which, by evopotranspiration, produce oxygen, reject pollution and filter dust and carbon dioxide creating a unique microclimate. The house and workof Senosiain was recently featured in a landmark exhibition at The Noguchi Museum, entitledIn Praise of Caves, which was organized by Ricardo Suárez Haro and curated by Dakin Hart. Alongside projects by Mexican architect Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, the exhibition was a metaphor for reexamining how we live on planet Earth.

OLIVER KUPPER: We should start with the connection between utopia and organicarchitecture.

DAKIN HART: One of the interesting things about organic architecture for me, is that tosome extent, it offers a path back to Eden. It suggests an entirely alternative family treeof development—of the idea of how we live on the planet—that could have departedfrom the one that we’ve ended up on very early in human history. So,it’s nice to thinkabout following it backwards the way that Javier does in his scholarship, and if you thinkabout utopia as an umbrella category for a way of living that we might recapture, onethat has different characteristics and a different value set, that seems really interestingto me.

JAVIER SENOSIAIN: In the case of organic architecture, I believe that utopia could be a reality.

OK: The exhibition catalog goes back to the original cave dwellings, which is the prehistoric idea of organic architecture.

DH: Every time modern architecture has tried to address the idea of utopia, it runs into such trouble because the version of abstraction that it leans on is mathematical. And that doesn’t really have to do with life, it has to do with a kind of purenotion of what lifecould be or should be. Maybe it’s fundamentally religious or spiritual too, which is also highly problematic, because it gives it this messianic quality. Organic architecture potentially offers a salve to that.

NATALIA SENOSIAIN: Modern architecture involves a lot of technology. When you think of sci-fi movies, it’s all about technology and not really about humans.

DH: Right. The closer we can get to stainless steel, the better everything will be is sort of the premise of modern, International Style, architecture. Javier, what kind of utopia do you think organic architecture could build in contrast to something like the Corbusian notion of utopia, which is total uniformity, total cleanliness, total purity.

JS: We are in a very difficult world situation now, mostly because of climate change, and to solve really big issues, we need big solutions. Corbusier used to say that the house is a “machine for living.” That statement doesn’t really apply anymore, it would be better if we thought of the house as the nature of living. Maybe going back to our origins can take us closer to utopia, even if it sounds weird.

OK: I’m curious about how the exhibition came to be, how it was curated based on Javier’s work, and why the Noguchi Museum?

DH: Ricardo Haro was thinking about this lineage of organic architecture that Javier has invested so much of his life and career in, in terms of scholarship and practice. And I think he just intuitively recognized that this group of artists could work really well at theNoguchi Museum. So, Ricardo just sent us an email out of the blue in 2018, and part of what we do with these exhibitions at the Noguchi Museum is we try to treat the museum like nature. We treat it like a park or a natural environment. So, we started trying to put together a structure that could work at the museum, and this was a perfect opportunityto show a different side of it. We're always trying to split the Noguchi beam into different aspects, or peel the onion. I had never even heard of the term ‘organic architecture’ before Ricardo wrote, and while it’s not an ‘ism’ that’s currently in art history textbooks, it may well be in the near future because there’s obviously a strong seedbed of interest, which our exhibition proved. I think it maybe the most popular show that we've done in the last ten years. The response to it was just extraordinary, and really worldwide too. It was exciting to have hundreds of young architects and architecture students coming to see the show. We don't know how exactly it's going to ripple out, but young architects want different solutions. They’re not satisfied with the status quo, and here is a serious body of work that's well rooted in history, and cultural traditions, and a landscape, andbuilding traditions, and it's still current. It's being taught and practiced by somebody incredibly inspiring. I think it has a real chance to offer an important counterpoint to what most people are learning in architecture school, and when they come out into their own practices or go to a big firm, they're still expected to do whatever it is they choose to do.

OK: Javier, when did you first start developing your scholarship around organic architecture?

JS: When I give a lecture, I start by showing the students a couple of projects I did whenI was at the university, which already had some resemblance to organic architecture. I was very lucky because I had Matías Goeritz as my teacher. At a school where all of the other teachers were very rigid, he was very abstract and he would let us do very free work. When I went to do my social service in a small village, I proposed a sports and cultural center with square shapes and then realized that I could start working with more freedom. That was when I started thinking about curves and realizing that curved spaces are far more human. I started doing research on the natural shape of a human being. This is one of the features of my architecture—the continuity and the space.When you walk through the space, you can see the continuity and the flow. So, organic architecture has a lot of that.

DH: The difference between that and someone like Frank Gehry, who's a contemporary of Javier’s, or Zaha Hadid, a generation behind, is that Javier’s architecture is organic from the inside out. It's based on organic models, and it's developed in a craft methodology that emphasizes the connection between the eyes, the hands and the brain. From the outside, those other structures look organic in that they’re not strictly quadratic anymore, but that's just an expression of technology. They demonstrate what modeling programs were gradually able to accomplish over time as they pushed the technology, but that form of abstraction isn’t anymore inherently organic than square buildings. Javier is starting from a completely different premise that isn't CAD models, or what a manufacturer can do. He’s using thousand-year-old technology to approach building as an expression of our innate, human instinct, as opposed to just putting the latest processor through its paces in coordination with modern manufacturing. I just read that article about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and all of its delays in LA. A lot of them have to do with the complexity of fabricating those fiber panels that cover the whole thing because every one of them is unique throughout the entire structure. It's one of those examples of trying to push beyond what modern manufacturing can do. It looks like a spaceship, or a fish, but it’s not really organic, even though it's not rectilinear.

OK: Casa Orgánica truly is a masterpiece example of contemporary organic architecture. Can we talk about that?

RICARDO SUÁREZ HARO: Natalia grew up in it, and it seems utopian when you visit it. I can only imagine the type of brain connections it forms to grow up in that house, as opposed to the one that I grew up in, which was a California tract house.

NS: It was my normalcy. But, when my friends used to come visit, I could see their reactions—the way they loved the house and instantly wanted to play and everything. Now that I'm grown up, I can see the impact that it has. My father always says that he wanted to create a more humane architecture, and now I believe that he accomplished it because all types of people want to go visit the house. You can be an engineer or a mathematician and still find it remarkable. But, I believe that I did grow up with a different mindset, just because of living in that house. Once, when my sister was in kindergarten, the assignment was to draw your house. So, she (laughs) just painted grass and round windows, and the teacher was confused. She called the school psychologist, and then the psychologist decided to talk to my mother, and my mother was like “Oh no, it's just that my husband is an architect and he does this really different type of architecture.” And the psychologist said, “Oh, maybe I should be speaking to your husband.” (laughs)

OK: So, where did the idea for the house come from? I've read so many different things about where the ideas came from around its shape.

JS: The idea was to take into account the physical aspects, environmental aspects, cultural aspects, and the necessities of the human being. It was part of an investigation in which I took all these aspects into account, while putting aside the very rigid aspects that are taught in university. The idea is sort of like a peanut, but in some interviews it has been misunderstood. I had the concept and the philosophy of the spaces that were needed to live, and there are two spaces: one is the day space, which is much more social, and then the night space, which is more intimate. The zoning was like a peanut because there were two spaces, but it was sort of shapeless. We adapted that peanut into the shape of the house, taking into account the topography of the land, and there was a big eucalyptus tree that was in the middle, so the house surrounded the tree.There was a lot of stone on that land, so originally the idea was that the walls were made out of stone, and the roof was made out of wood, but I didn’t like it because there was no continuity in the material. That’s when I came up with this constructive method of ferrocement. It’s a very noble constructive system that can allow you to buildpractically any shape and respect that continuity.

DH: Javier gave this beautiful talk at the opening of the exhibition about the CasaOrgánica and the way that once we leave the womb, we end up living and dying in aseries of boxes. If you think about it, it's a form of torture, to go from the womb into a shipping container. And that’s essentially what modern architecture is; just a series of hard, square spaces. The whole philosophy of organic architecture offers an alternative to that regime, and that's where the humanity comes from. The Casa Orgánica is a nest.It's the most enveloping and natural form. When I walked through, I couldn’t help thinking about what it would have been like to grow up in those bedrooms, the way that using the faucet is like starting and stopping a stream. It really is like living in a forest glen. It's the ultimate fort. All kids try to achieve that by building forts out of pillows and blankets, but at seven you don't have the resources to do what Javier accomplished with the Casa Orgánica. It’s the most sophisticated version of what we all want as children.

OK: So, how do we protect organic architecture, especially when we're so obsessedwith putting people in these boxes? Of course, the Casa Cueva [built by JuanO’Gorman] was tragically ruined, but also, how do we cement its importance in thehistory books and in scholarship?

JS: I believe they're very isolated examples of organic architecture. O’Gorman's house and Carlos Lazo's house were made in the ‘50s. Now, with the climate crisis and with people being much more conscious about the planet, these houses could be more affordable than regular housing. They're also much more resilient in certain climates, and in response to natural disasters, like earthquakes. So, they could possibly become more commercial in the way that they're built.

NS: When I lived in the Casa Orgánica, I remember my friends really enjoying the house and telling their parents, “Can we live in a house like this, please!” And the parents would be like “Okay, yeah, it's interesting, but I would never live in a place like this.” I believe that the generations are changing, so people will look more for these types of experiences.

RH: What’s interesting about exhibiting organic architecture in museums is that inatypical painting exhibition, the audience is passive, and they only contemplate whateverthey're looking at. But when you see these kinds of shows, you realize that we can all be active players in our own homes. Just moving the furniture from one side toanother,you can see if you feel better, if you gain more natural light, if it makes more sense. Wecan start interacting and see how we feel, and that's something very organic as well.

DH: That's really what Noguchi's work is about—empirical intelligence—trying to train us to think better through our bodies, to think better physically. We've all been taught that the use of language is the highest expression of intelligence, but it's just one expression of intelligence. There are many others, and we would all be better served if we had more empirical literacy. The neat thing about organic architecture is that it's one discipline for doing that, and if you live with it, it formats your brain differently. You have different expectations, which leaves you open to different solutions. The NoguchiMuseum is trying to do just that; to open up a universe of other solutions. And organic architecture is an extraordinary example of that, one that's incredibly important to society.

My Body, My Pleasure: Gia Love by Katsu Naito

April 1, 2023

Sisters of the Valley

April 1, 2023

Interview by Summer Bowie

Photography by Damien Maloney

Located in the impoverished, but agriculturally rich Central Valley, Sisters of the Valley is a nondenominational sisterhood whose mission is to bring the healing powers of plant-based medicines to the world. During the Harvest Moon of 2014, Sister Kate, originally a Reaganite Republican who transformed into a liberal anarchist, activist nun after discovering the medicinal powers of weed, developed their first line of cannabidiol teas and tinctures. Inspired by the Beguines of medieval Europe who formed semi-monastic communities but did not take formal religious vows, the Sisters of the Valley abide by their own spiritual order, which includes wearing the traditional habit worn by nuns, praying together, and respecting Mother Nature. Their products, which are all made according to the moon cycle, are shipped globally to anyone seeking to heal their suffering.

SUMMER BOWIE: So, how does a Reagan-voting, suburban mom become a gun-toting weed nun in the Central Valley?

SISTER KATE: (Laughs) Well, I would say a long journey of being shit on. That would be my short answer. The longer answer is that it was a journey of realization that I was living in a bubble, that my attitudes toward the poor were formed by propaganda, that there is no safety net, and that even good, hard working people end up with nothing by a turn of the circumstances in our society, which offers them no help.

BOWIE: Your life story thus far really has attested to the fact that you can work hard to build a nest egg for yourself and it can all be taken away from you without any legal recourse.

KATE: Exactly, and no help from the system. There are some ridiculous rules that stack the deck against you. We live in a very transient society now, and the rules in the courts for custody don't consider that. There's no safety net for those like us who have moved around a lot. And also, my journey of living in the Netherlands where, yes, they pay very high income tax, but they don't pay for a hospital bill. In fact, the hospital gives them bus fare if they need it on the way out. They don't pay for their children's education. They don't pay for care in their old age. Over there, capitalism and socialism live side-by-side in a very happy way like we do with our Postal Service and our transport services. They also don't have the same pushback from a corporate oligarchy that has to gain from us not having these things. So yeah, it was all of that that made me go, "Oh my god, I voted for Ronald Reagan. I was part of the problem.”

BOWIE: Right. We can clearly see the way that trickle down economics got us to where we are now. I'm curious about your first experience with cannabis. What was that like and how old were you?

KATE: I was very afraid of it. My first marriage lasted less time than the Iran Contra affair, but he was a weed smoker, and I remember visiting him in his apartment for the first time in Chicago. I got there before he got home and his roommate was rolling weed at the kitchen table, so I locked myself in the bedroom because I was pretty sure he was gonna rape me after he smoked that joint. That's how stupid I was. I had also bought into the alcohol culture in those days. I bought into a lot of the things that were fed to me. Three or four years later, while I was working in the corporate world, I experienced smoking weed in a new setting and realized that this was much better for me than alcohol. It was always a recreational thing to me then. But then, when I went through menopause, I was living in the Netherlands having hot flashes, and I was an emotional, crazy woman. So, I go to see my doctor and he says, "Have you ever smoked weed?" And I said, "Yes." And he goes, "Well, you're not smoking enough," (laughs) "You need to smoke a whole joint before you go to bed and lay off the alcohol and caffeine." And then, my symptoms went away. I don't know if that would work for everybody, but for me it worked. So, at the age of like forty-five, I started to really have renewed interest and respect for the plant.

BOWIE: Do you consider the farm a utopia in some way? And how do you feel about utopian thinking?

KATE: Well, some moments it's a utopia and sometimes it's hell (laughs). It's like everything else in life. I'm a very practical person, so I consider utopian thinking to be kind of insane. What I'm aiming for is a monastic style of life without the dogma: the quiet, the contemplation, the meditation, the people living by a code of some sort, together in harmony without there having to be a scary god or a religious bent to anything that we do. Though, we do follow the cycles of the moon. And we make our medicines in a spiritual environment. But, we don't try to export our dogma or our religion. We don't care if people know or understand that side of us. It's for our own healing. So in many ways, I feel like I have achieved something close to a utopia on Earth, which would be a compromised utopia. But, I feel like it's succeeded because we have achieved so much harmony. And we have done that through a persistent, diligent effort in following the rules that we set up.

BOWIE: What do those rules entail?

KATE: Well, you're allowed to have a difference of opinion. Sometimes people trigger people without even knowing it. Those things are allowed to happen, but you have to mend it. We have a 3-to-5-day rule. Like if it was really bad, they get five days, but they have to talk about it and resolve it. We also have a no surprise rule. You're not allowed to keep secrets or things that are gonna surprise us. I'm talking about secrets that are gonna impact everybody. Like, you've been planning to leave for three months and you decide to tell us the day before. We like to plan our lives. We don't like to be rushed. You see something, you know something, you report something. If there's a burst pipe flooding out back, you don't walk past it without telling anybody. You'd be surprised how many people live in their own worlds and don't understand that when you live in a community, you have an obligation to keep your eyes and ears open for the enclave.

BOWIE: Can you talk a little bit about your Beguine ancestors—who they were and why they're so important to the Sisters of the Valley?

KATE: The Beguines are timeless, and I even know some Catholic nuns who agree with me on this. There is no point in time that they began. But, we know from historical evidence that the Beguines operated probably as early as the 600s. They were women who lived together, worked together, prayed together on farms, and identified their enclave by their clothing. They served the castle in the town with medicine, soaps, textiles, and they were known for their excellence. If you look them up today, though, you are only going to find information from the 1300s forward. The Catholic Beguines. You have to really dig to find out about the pre-Catholic Beguines because they originally were not Catholic. They didn't affiliate with any religion, but those that survived had to turn Catholic at the point of the sword of the Inquisition. They were religious scholars who studied all religions. They would not affiliate themselves with any one religion and they could make or break a priest or pastor in town because they were so well respected. So, we are set out to emulate them. We want it to be known that we do it in a spiritual environment and we wear a uniform to identify our enclave, but we don't export any dogma, and neither did they. They farmed, they provided medicine, they were spiritual, but they didn't have a message to preach to the people.

BOWIE: And you grew up in the Catholic religion. What was that experience like?

KATE: It was good. I was born in 1959, so it was in the mid '60s and there were six of us kids. My parents were part of the home and school, and very active with the church. They were both scout leaders. So, it was normal for us to be very involved; to be sent on errands to the convent or to the rectory. It was normal that we'd be called on when the teachers or the nuns needed help for something. It was very interesting to me, very enriching. I loved the nuns. I loved how one could be sick and another one would just take her place, and no one missed a beat. I loved how they stood for excellence and they stood for their work. There were some I was scared of, but I just had a good experience. We had thirty blind kids in our school and one of the sisters translated all their books to braille. Their mission was to get the blind kids studying with the sighted kids. And so, I grew up with that as well.

BOWIE: I'm curious about your vow of chastity. I understand that it's not forbidden to have intimate relationships, but that they're privatized. Can you talk about the importance of that?

KATE: We live in a world where sexuality is just squandered all over the place, in my opinion. The energy of healing and the energy of seduction are opposite energies. We're in a meditation to be in touch with our mothers, to make them proud of us, to have them guide us through this process of making medicine by the cycles of the moon—the same way they did. Most of the elders sisters here are celibate and are devoted completely just like if we were Catholic nuns. But there's no requirement on anybody because we think intimacy is important and a very healing part of life. We would never want to deny our sisters the ability to participate in something that can be quite nourishing and healing to the soul. But, the relationships and the sexual activities are kept far away from the enclave and the brand. So, as I say to the cats when I hear them screwing, "If Sister Kate isn't getting any, no one gets any."

BOWIE: Many of you in the enclave come from all different parts of the world. How did you find one another?

KATE: People like you (laughs). If it wasn't for the media, we probably wouldn't have found each other. If you ask Maria she'll say she saw a Facebook post and then Sophia will say that she saw a news report. And then, they reached out to me, which started a long, organic dialogue, and multiple trips to the farm where we made medicine together. We're so small and we've grown so slowly because we're not gonna do a nun-in-a-kit thing, which people have so disgustingly suggested. We have to get to know them and then we have to figure out how they're gonna start commerce in their part of the world.

BOWIE: The politics around legalized cannabis in California is pretty tricky because each county has its own rules. Where are the sisters in this fight?

KATE: We've always ignored the county rules and it's pretty much how we've survived. When we started doing this in 2015, they considered CBD the same as cannabis and it was totally outlawed, but I kept doing it. And then, I was harassed by the police, but I was doing everything by the book. I was paying every cent of tax. Recently our Drug Czar admitted to the Dutch media who were here interviewing him that they've tried every way to shut me down and there's no way. And that's because we're very diligent. We don't care what the county says, but we care very much about paying our state tax, our payroll tax, and having a bookkeeping team. We have everything sewn together and clean so that no one can accuse us of doing any wrongdoing. In the eight years we've been doing this, they went from outlawing it completely to saying, "It's allowed, but only on quarter acres and only in particular cities," to saying, "You have to have twenty acres," to "Okay, you can do it on a quarter acre." I would have whiplash if I tried to keep up with the county. They quit hassling us five years ago and that's where we are.

BOWIE: I've always found it so interesting the way that the federal government raids farms in states where cannabis is legal, but they also collect income taxes.

KATE: Exactly. And I was in a fortunate position because I do keep such a control of the numbers that the last time the sheriff visited, I reminded him and his guy on the way out that we pay enough taxes in a year to pay for both of their salaries. I think that's important because if you're playing in their system, they're gonna find a loophole to shut you down. That's why we don't take cash sales ever. Our poor postman, if he wants a $10 tin of salve, we're like, "Sorry, you have to do a PayPal transaction or something, because we won't take cash." Because we know that's where they'll try to get you.

BOWIE: A lot of cultivators use pesticides and other fertilizing chemicals that aren't very natural. How do you approach things like nitrogen enrichment and pest control?

KATE: As naturally as we can. We order boxes of ladybugs and put other plants that attract pollinators around them. That way we don't have to use any chemicals. In fact, we do regular clean green testing with our lab, which is quite expensive. About a year ago, we determined that we had a bad crop and about 40% of our products failed. It was a real crisis where we had to pull products off the shelf because they all had mercury and lead. So, even though the lab scientists said, "Yeah, but it's not in harmful amounts." We're like, "Yeah, but any mercury and lead is not cool. We don't want it in our products." I've been testing the soil since I moved to this farm and it's never been there before. It might have been from the droughts, but it was in the water. So, we had to put in a system at the well to clean it out, because we want to make sure that we're not doing harm in delivering medicine. That's really the realm of the pharmaceutical companies.

BOWIE: Can you talk about your visit to the Tule Mountain Native American reservation and how their connection to the natural world inspired what you're doing now?

KATE: That was incredibly powerful. I was delivering cannabis to patients in 2014 when I received a special invitation. Once a year, members of tribes from Alaska to Mexico make this pilgrimage to Tule Mountain Reservation. So, I was invited into circles with these elder medicine makers and I was overcome with the fact that they weren't sharing their information. They were gonna die with a lot of medicinal knowledge because they felt there were no young girls walking the Red Road. This is the way they've always worked. So, I told them that I have this Sisterhood, and I work with the medicine, and with your permission, I'd like to take this knowledge with me and walk kind of a Pink Road. They all thought that was hilarious, and that started a conversation that has been going on for twelve years. This year we were honored to be on their route to Alcatraz. So, we fed them on the way there and back, and sent medicine with them to give away. There's nothing official about it, but we're connected.

BOWIE: Can you explain the significance of the Red Road?

KATE: The Red Road is working with Native traditions. I would have to spend a lifetime with them to truly understand it, but it is about honoring and taking care of the women. What we ended up with here in Fresno is a diversity of tribes that came together for survival reasons, because the Trail of Tears ended here. So, Fresno has become a hub for many of the tribes. The Red Road is also about taking care of the land. For example, before they take down a tree, they pray and they need to understand that that tree wants to come down and needs to come down. We only have trees taken down by the Natives because they have a whole spiritual ceremony around it. We have huge respect for that. The Beguines organized and made their medicines by the cycles of the moon, and so did the Native Americans of this land in the year 800. We're trying to honor all of them in what we do.

BOWIE: What is it about cannabis specifically? What are its greatest healing virtues?

KATE: For some people, cannabis can take the anxiety that renders them completely dysfunctional and make them functional again. I don't know if that's called healing. The new science on mushrooms is that they have the power to rewire the circuits in your brain, and mushrooms have the capacity to heal, whereas cannabis is more of a survival tool that helps mitigate symptoms. I can smoke a joint and mitigate my anxiety, but what I'd really like to do is not have that anxiety. I'd really like to have a brain that manages its own anxiety. I'm talking about both functional mushrooms and psilocybin mushrooms. They all contribute to this and you don't need to have a trip. You can either microdose the psilocybin or introduce a combination of six functional mushrooms, like we have in our mushroom coffee.

BOWIE: What are the six varieties of mushroom that you use in your coffee?

KATE: Yes, we use cordyceps, chaga, lion's mane, turkey tail, shiitake, and reishi. Then, we also add ashwaganda, turmeric, and ginger root, which all add to mood stabilization.

BOWIE: Is there anything you feel is misunderstood about your mission that you would like to correct for the public record?

KATE: Yes. We say we do a million in sales and then the editors in the media turn that into a million in profit. That's insane. We are not magicians. A million in sales means we're lucky if we can preserve $90,000 in profit. And we've been about half that since the pandemic, so we're climbing our way out.

BOWIE: Lastly, Do you have any advice for other women who want to start their own businesses and/or healing communities?

KATE: I would say that women should be bold and know that there's an awful lot of funding available in certain states. There's microloans and other funds that are available to both women and men where you can start a cottage industry on somebody else's money with low interest, and there's more money now for minorities than ever. So, I would recommend that they look for those resources. And there are resource centers available to aspiring business owners. I think the only way to heal the world is to have women owning and running more stuff. So, I highly encourage women to follow their passion and not hide from anything. Most businesses fail from procrastination. The owner gets a notice from the Employee Development Department of California and they don't wanna open it, so they leave it on their desk for two months. My advice to anybody starting a new business is get in touch with your most proactive self. Don't let any problem deter you from facing it head on, so no uglies grow. Put everything in place so you don't have any surprises.

Take Care, It's a Desert Out There

April 1, 2023

Text by Oliver Misraje

Photos by Michael Tyron Delayney

Illustrations by Isabelle Adams

It’s 10:30 PM and we’re much deeper into the Mojave than where we met Ken Layne at the Joshua Tree visitor center. It’s full dark. No stars—yet. Clouds drifted in an hour ago, making for bad UFO hunting weather, but if we drive far enough east, we might beat the overcast. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 is playing from the speaker system in his Subaru. “What’s that?” Ken Layne interjects suddenly in his characteristic sandpaper drawl, “It’s very low, it just went out.”

“I saw it,” says Isabelle Adams from the backseat. She’s an LA-based painter and inaugural member of our off-brand Scooby gang. “If you look in the corner near the base of the mountain … oh wait it’s gone.” Michael Tyrone, the photographer, and I strain our eyes to no avail.

The third kind of sighting (not to be confused with the Hyneck’s scale commonly used by ufologists) are experiences so awesome—in the biblical sense of the word—that you brush up against something ephemeral and undeniably original. Ken has only experienced this once in his life. In 2001, he was driving down Highway 395 with his then-wife in the passenger’s seat when they noticed a light to the north. It seemed innocuous enough, though something felt off. It moved erratically as though untethered from the horizon. The pair debated what it might be for a few moments, when suddenly and without warning, it was gone and in its place a large black triangle, about 200 feet in diameter. Its corners glowed and a spotlight emanated from its center, illuminating the desert floor below with a brilliant intensity, like a “great, unblinking eye” as Ken described it. He hit the gas. The car got nearer. But when he pulled to the curb and rushed out— the mysterious triangle was gone, vanished without a trace or residue to affirm its presence.

Life above a fault line can be a perilous thing—the threat of the San Andreas fault swallowing the county notwithstanding, the constant tremors seem to inform the psyche of those living above it. Ken is something of an antenna himself for the murmurs and reverberations of California’s inland desert, picking up and broadcasting tales of the uncanny to all the lot lizards, and hippies, and hipsters, and occultists who color the landscape. On his radio show and newsletter, The Desert Oracle, for which he has attracted a cult following since its genesis in 2015, Ken adopts the cadence of an old time-y creep show host, but with a folklorist’s edge. His stories—whether they be about haunted petroglyphs, the Yucca Man, or missing tourists—are about the cryptids as much as they are about the people who encountered them. It’s the vestiges of his past career as a journalist, including a stint as a crime writer in Oceanside, that appeals to his more skeptical readers.

Ken grew up in New Orleans but moved to Phoenix when he was in middle school. His formative years in the Sonoran Desert are visible in the structures of his narratives. They unravel like a meandering stroll in the desert—winding, and seemingly aimless, until you reach the open expanse of a question mark where you were expecting a period. It’s that big, looming uncertainty that is so tantalizing; the suggestion that maybe, there really is something out there lurking in the dark. “Storytelling, which is the oldest form of human entertainment, probably after sex and mushrooms, has to involve set and setting,” Ken says to us after pointing out the rusted exoskeleton of an incinerated car next to a sign welcoming us to Wonder Valley, “To tell a story by a fire is one of the most primal things, a perfect setting. There’s not a lot of hyperbole in a good campfire story, you should just tell the narrative and the place, and everybody’s personal experiences all conspire together to make something greater than the parts.”

We reach a roadblock. Michael suggests we utilize the dim glow of the traffic cone to take some portraits. “We are now officially in the wilderness,” Ken says, stepping out to the dazzling, unobstructed spine of the milky way. Izzy and I take turns holding flashlights pointed towards Ken, casting ominous shadows on his face. He’s a natural model. No longer Ken Layne, this is the Desert Oracle in action. His gaze twinkles with a discreet intrigue that softens his otherwise shrouded face. The alter-ego has itself become an integral part of the mythos of Joshua Tree; an archetypical wandering stage that retains fragments of his heroes, like Edward Abbey of The Desert Solitaire and Art Bell. Between camera flashes, Ken tells us about his closest companion, a German Shorthair Pointer dog. It’s a breed of hunting dog that are usually cast away for their aggression, but Ken is drawn to outcasts.

As we get back into his car, I ask Ken about that aforementioned journalistic scrutiny. He pauses a beat, then says, “a story, warts and all, is much more interesting than the kind the UFO fanatics tell, which is something like ‘Oh, a person of the most unimpeachable character, never touched liquor, blah blah blah.’ Like, c’mon . He’s already sounding really weird. When stories gauge the reality of the human condition, they’re naturally more real. They resonate. No one’s trying to sell you anything along the way. No one’s trying to convince you the government is covering up aliens eating strawberry ice cream in an underground base somewhere.”

“Weren’t you on Ancient Aliens?” Michael asks from the backseat. Ken laughs. “Touché. I’ve repented down in the river for that.” And in his defense, he was only in two episodes. One was a history lesson on the Integratron out in Landers, a cupola structure built by aviation engineer and ufologist George Van Tassel, allegedly capable of generating enough electrostatic energy to suspend gravity, extend our life spans, and facilitate time travel. The other segment was a cultural debriefing on the viral meme about storming area 51 to see dem’ aliens.

Fans of The Desert Oracle often occupy a more cosmopolitan demographic, which some journalists have attributed to the “escapism” of his stories. Escapism is a misnomer. The appeal lies in the return to meaning and a resistance to the sinking feeling of post-modernity that we are losing our archetypes—the haunted house at the end of the street, knowing how to differentiate between good and bad winds, which roads a ghostly woman in white frequents.

I grew up in Sun City, a small town in the desert not terribly far from Ken’s haunts. Like him, my dispositions were shaped by the landscape. I discovered The Desert Oracle my senior year of college while working on my thesis, a hauntological study of our local monster, Taquitch—a shape-shifting, child-eating, “meteor spirit” that prowls the San Jacinto Mountains. Taquitch originally appeared in the mythology of the Payómkawichum tribes who still occupy the area, but legends persist today. I was interested in the ways these paranormal stories were a metaphorical vehicle for sociological phenomena. The Inland Empire is riddled with poverty, addiction and despair, and as a result, experiences higher rates of domestic violence and lower child expectancies. It is haunted either way you look at it.

Ken talked about Taquitch in the twenty-first episode of his radio show. On our way back to Joshua Tree, we make a stop at Roy’s Motel and Cafe, a defunct relic of Googie architecture. While poking around abandoned motel rooms, we discuss the merits of the hauntological approach. Ken ultimately disagrees with the notion of trauma as a prerequisite for a haunting; some things are older than us and more original to this world than we can comprehend. Even so, he is well aware of the ‘cultural dressings,’ as he puts it, often applied to paranormal phenomena. Take UFO sightings—while observed across cultures since time immemorial, explanations of such often reflect the dispositions of the times. He tells us that there’s nothing actually connecting UFOs to extraterrestrials. The theory appeared in conjunction with the Cold War and the space race. During the industrial age, many explained them as the inventions of eccentric, steampunk robber barons. In Medieval times they were thought to be witches with lanterns hanging from their broomsticks.

The fault line that the Inland Empire (which includes Joshua Tree) sits upon, demarcates it geographically, as well as symbolically. To the Western imagination, it is the ultimate nowhere; a psychic space to project its dreams, ideals, anxieties, and nightmares. The idea of the desert as barren is a colonial project, one that has historically been used to justify its desecration since the frontier period. We’re driving through Amboy when Ken tells me, “one of the biggest misconceptions about the desert is that it’s barren. Desert means wilderness. It’s Greek, borrowed from the Latin deserto. Not arid, not barren, but untamed, uncultivated wilderness. It’s where Pan ran around in the primal wilderness. Ancient Greece was the desert. Civilization is born in the desert.” The Desert Oracle repopulates the landscape. While his documentation of hibernating birds native to the Southwest might seem mundane in comparison to shape-shifting monsters, it's where his Transcendentalist musings are most poignant, revealing a gentle, more meditative side to Ken.

Cultivating a sense of awe for the desert is an important part of its conservation. Advocates for environmental personhood also seek to reimbue the landscape with soulfulness. In 2020, tractors in Arizona leveled the earth for the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, unceremoniously demolishing 200-year-old Saguaro cacti in the process. The Saguaro are sacred to the Hia-Ced O’odham tribe, whose ancestral grounds lay 200 yards away from the site. After fiercely resisting the construction, the tribe successfully passed a resolution affirming the legal personhood of the Saguaro. In an op-ed piece for Emergence Magazine, tribal member and activist Lorraine Eiler wrote, “When something is acknowledged as a person with rights, it is much more difficult to overlook the infliction of harm. This resolution has brought us one step closer to bridging our spiritual understanding of how to sustain life with the practices of the dominating culture.”

We’re driving down Amboy Road when Ken stops the car. He pulls the keys out of the ignition. The road is empty, beyond the receding taillights of a distant car far behind us. “I had us meet up on a weekday because I wanted to avoid the traffic going into Death Valley. You lose the mystery when it’s filled with Audis.” He tells us to watch the taillights until they disappear beyond the bend. We oblige. After several minutes, the lights blink out.

“It’s a long way, right? About ten or eleven miles. One night, I was coming back from Death Valley and I was the only car on the road. Moonless night just like tonight. I’m doing 65 or something. It’s a 55 limit so you’re always watching for that occasional CHP dispatch. Suddenly, I see what seems to be a car’s lights appear, and what I notice in my rearview, is that it is racing, like Roadrunner, Coyote cartoon speed. I'm driving, and my first thought, of course, is it’s a cop, so I slow down, and it keeps on coming up-up-up-up,” Ken says, stressing the word up like a rapid-fire machine gun. “It’s like the brightest high beams, and it comes right up to my ass. So now, I’m thinking it’s just some jackasses coming back from Vegas. I start slowing down to let the car can pass me. I’ve come to a complete stop. And it’s still there, just blinding me. I turn around to look out, and this is the first time it occurs to me: the lights aren’t attached to anything, they're just floating there, and I have just a moment to try and rationalize it, when the lights retreat at the same speed they came up ZUUUUUUUUERRR. It doesn’t turn around. No sound. No nothing. All the way down, until it blinks out in the end.” Ken lets the story dangle in the air for a moment. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 13 opus. 135 plays quietly from his sound system, lending itself to the eerie atmosphere.

We stop at Out There Bar in 29 Palms for a nightcap. It’s neon-lit inside and the walls are painted with murals of varying cowboy iconography. The bartender and several straggling patrons look at Ken with a glimmer of recognition. I forgot my ID card at home but the bartender winks at us and says she’ll make an exception just this once. While Izzy and Michael go head to head in shuffleboard, Ken and I drink tequila at a table and talk about the Puritan origins of the environmental movement; how theologians like Emerson and Thoreau saw corruption in all things made by man, so they glorified nature as the true expression of god. When I mention that my father was a pastor, he tells me, “There’s nothing better in the world for maneuvering through life than a semi-educated, literate redneck.” Afterwards, the four of us take pictures in a photo booth (Michael sits on Ken’s lap) then Ken drives us to the Joshua Tree Visitor Center where we left our car. On the way, we share stories of our respective encounters with the Otherworldly. Michael tells us about a night in Griffith Park when he saw a coyote stand upright on its hind legs and run off into the chaparral. A few weeks later, the tale of the Coyote Man appears in The Desert Oracle.

As Izzy drives us home to our remote outpost in Landers, the absence of Ken is palpable. Peggy Lee croons on the radio and the shadows cast by the Joshua trees look a bit more animated; the world a bit more occupied.

Halycon Days

April 1, 2023

Zamir wears Rick Owens cotton tank top, Shayna Arnold metallic lamé necklace

photography by MAT + KAT
styling by Shayna Arnold

Zamir wears Rick Owens cotton tank top and ripstop pants, and Shayna Arnold metallic lamé necklace

(left to right) Kathy wears Issey Miyake polyester dress, and Shayna Arnold metallic lamé earrings; Seffa wears Loewe steel mini dress

Amandine wears Shayna Arnold metallic lamé head scarf

Kennedy wears CDLM cotton sateen jacket and washed satin dress, Shayna Arnold metallic lamé sleeves, and cotton spandex and metallic lamé tights

(left to right) Amandine wears Pucci sequined nylon dress; Mikala wears Pucci lycra dress; Ayan wears Pucci lycra dress. All wear Shayna Arnold metallic lamé head scarf, belt, and leg bands, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh leather shoes

Tytianna wears Giovanna Flores cotton dress and Maryam Nassir Zadeh stone bracelets

Denzel wears Loewe nappa calfskin jacket and nappa leather shorts, Shayna Arnold metallic lamé cape, and Adidas sneakers

Denzel wears Shayna Arnold metallic lamè cape

The View From Future's Past

April 1, 2023

Text by Mike Davis

The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llano del Rio - Open Shop Los Angeles's utopian antipode - you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake. Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where Stealth Bombers (each costing the equivalent of 10,000 public housing units) and other, still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point.

The desert around Llano has been prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis: hundreds of square miles of vacant space engridded to accept the future millions, with strange, prophetic street signs marking phantom intersections like '250th Street and Avenue K'. Even the eerie trough of the San Andreas Fault, just south of Llano over a foreboding escarpment, is being gingerly surveyed for designer home sites. Nuptial music is provided by the daily commotion of ten thousand vehicles hurtling past Llano on 'Pearblossom Highway' - the deadliest stretch of two-lane blacktop in California.

When Llano's original colonists, eight youngsters from the Young Peoples' Socialist League (YPSL), first arrived at the 'Plymouth Rock of the Cooperative Commonwealth' in 1914, this part of the high Mojave Desert, misnamed the Antelope Valley, had a population of a few thousand ranchers, borax miners and railroad workers as well as some armed guards to protect the newly-built aqueduct from sabotage. Los Angeles was then a city of 300,000 (the population of the Antelope Valley today), and its urban edge, now visible from Llano, was in the new suburb of Hollywood, where D. W. Griffith and his cast of thousands were just finishing an epic romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation. In their day-long drive from the Labor Temple in Downtown Los Angeles to Llano over ninety miles of rutted wagon road, the YPSLs in their red Model-T trucks passed by scores of billboards, planted amid beet fields and walnut orchards, advertising the impending subdivision of the San Fernando Valley (owned by the city's richest men and annexed the following year as the culmination of the famous 'water conspiracy' fictionally celebrated in Polanski's Chinatown).

Three-quarters of a century later, forty thousand Antelope Valley commuters slither bumper-to-bumper each morning through Soledad Pass on their way to long-distance jobs in the smog-shrouded and overdeveloped San Fernando Valley. Briefly a Red Desert in the heyday of Llano (1914-18), the high Mojave for the last fifty years has been preeminently the Pentagon's playground. Patton's army trained here to meet Rommel (the ancient tank tracks are still visible), while Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier over the Antelope Valley in his Bell X-1 rocket plane. Under the 18,000 square-mile, ineffable blue dome of R-2508 - 'the most important military airspace in the world' - ninety thousand military training sorties are still flown every year.

But as developable land has disappeared throughout the coastal plains and inland basins, and soaring land inflation has reduced access to new housing to less than 15 percent of the population, the militarized desert has suddenly become the last frontier of the Southern California Dream. The pattern of urbanization here is what design critic Peter Plagens once called the 'ecology of evil.’ Developers don't grow homes in the desert - this isn't Marrakesh or even Tucson - they just clear, grade and pave, hook up some pipes to the local artificial river (the federally subsidized California Aqueduct), build a security wall and plug in the 'product.’ With generations of experience in uprooting the citrus gardens of Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, the developers - ten or twelve major firms, headquartered in places like Newport Beach and Beverly Hills - regard the desert as simply another abstraction of dirt and dollar signs. The region's major natural wonder, a Joshua tree forest containing individual specimens often thirty feet high and older than the Domesday Book, is being bulldozed into oblivion. Developers regard the magnificent Joshuas, unique to this desert, as large noxious weeds unsuited to the illusion of verdant homesteads. As the head of Harris Homes explained: 'It is a very bizarre tree. It is not a beautiful tree like the pine or something. Most people don't care about the Joshuas.'

With such malice toward the landscape, it is not surprising that developers also refuse any nomenclatural concession to the desert. In promotional literature intended for homebuyers or Asian investors, they have started referring to the region euphemistically as 'North Los Angeles County'. Meanwhile they christen their little pastel pods of Chardonnay lifestyle, air-conditioned and over-watered, with scented brand-names like Fox Run, Mardi Gras, Bravo, Cambridge, Sunburst, New Horizons, and so on. The most hallucinatory are the gated communities manufactured by Kaufman and Broad, the homebuilders, who were famous in the 1970s for exporting Hollywood ramblers to the suburbs of Paris. Now they have brought back France (or, rather, California homes in French drag) to the desert in fortified mini-banlieues, with lush lawns, Old World shrubs, fake mansard roofs and nouveaux riches titles like 'Chateau.’

But Kaufman and Broad only expose the underlying method in the apparent madness of L.A.'s urban desert. The discarded Joshua trees, the profligate wastage of water, the claustrophobic walls, and the ridiculous names are as much a polemic against incipient urbanism as they are an assault on an endangered wilderness. The eutopic (literally no-place) logic of their subdivisions, in sterilized sites stripped bare of nature and history, master planned only for privatized family consumption, evokes much of the past evolution of tract-home Southern California. But the developers are not just repackaging myth (the good life in the suburbs) for the next generation; they are also pandering to a new, burgeoning fear of the city.

Class war and repression are said to have driven the Los Angeles Socialists into the desert. But they also came eagerly, wanting to taste the sweet fruit of cooperative labor in their own lifetimes. As Job Harriman, who came within a hair's-breadth of being Los Angeles's first Socialist mayor in 1911, explained: 'It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living.' What Llano promised was a guaranteed $4 per day wage and a chance to 'show the world a trick they do not know, which is how to live without war or interest on money or rent on land or profiteering in any manner.’

With the sponsorship not only of Harriman and the Socialist Party, but also of Chairman W.A. Engle of the Central Labor Council and Frank McMahon of the Bricklayers' Union, hundreds of landless farmers, unemployed laborers, blacklisted machinists, adventurous clerks, persecuted IWW soapbox orators, restless shopkeepers, and bright-eyed bohemians followed the YPSLs to where the snow-fed Rio del Llano (now Big Rock Creek) met the edge of the desert. Although they were 'democracy with the lid off … democracy rampant, belligerent, unrestricted,’ their enthusiastic labor transformed several thousand acres of the Mojave into a small Socialist civilization. By 1916 their alfalfa fields and modern dairy, their pear orchards and vegetable gardens - all watered by a complex and efficient irrigation system - supplied the colony with 90 percent of its own food and fresh flowers as well). Meanwhile, dozens of small workshops cobbled shoes, canned fruit, laundered clothes, cut hair, repaired autos, and published the Western Comrade. There was even a Llano motion picture company and an ill-fated experiment in aviation (the homemade plane crashed).

In the spirit of Chautauqua as much as Marx, Llano was also one big Red School House. While babies (including Bella Lewitzky, the future modern dancer) played in the nursery, children (among them Gregory Ain, the future modern architect) attended Southern California's first Montessori school. The teenagers, meanwhile, had their own Kid Kolony (a model industrial school), and adults attended night classes or enjoyed the Mojave's largest library. One of the favorite evening pastimes, apart from dancing to the colony's notorious ragtime orchestra, was debating Alice Constance Austin's design for the Socialist City that Llano was to become.

Although influenced by contemporary City Beautiful and Garden City ideologies, Austin's drawings and models, as architectural historian Dolores Hayden has emphasized, were 'distinctively feminist and California'. Like Llano kid Gregory Ain's more modest 1940s plans for cooperative housing, Austin attempted to translate the specific cultural values and popular enthusiasms of Southern California into a planned and egalitarian social landscape. In the model that she presented to colonists on May Day 1916, Llano was depicted as a garden city of ten thousand people housed in graceful craftsman apartments with private gardens but communal kitchens and laundries to liberate women from drudgery. The civic center, as befitted a "city of light', was composed of 'eight rectangular halls, like factories, with sides almost wholly of glass, leading to a glass-domed assembly hall'. She crowned this aesthetic of individual choice within a fabric of social solidarity with a quintessentially Southern California gesture: giving every household an automobile and constructing a ring road around the city that would double "as a drag strip with stands for spectators on both sides."

If Austin's vision of thousands of patio apartments radiating from the Bonaventure Hotel-style Assembly Hall, surrounded by socially owned orchards, factories and a monumental dragstrip sounds a bit far-fetched today, imagine what Llanoites would have made of a future composed of Kaufman and Broad chateaux ringed by mini-malls, prisons and Stealth Bomber plants. In any event, the nine hundred pioneers of the Socialist City would enjoy only one more triumphant May Day in the Mojave.

The May Day festivities of 1917 commenced at nine o'clock in the morning with intra-community athletic events, including a Fat Women's Race. The entire group of colonists then formed a Grand Parade and marched to the hotel where the Literary Program followed. The band played from a bunting-draped grandstand, the choral society sang appropriate revolutionary anthems like the 'Marseillaise', then moved into the Almond Grove for a barbecue dinner. After supper a group of young girls injected the English into the radical tradition by dancing about the May Pole. At 7:30 the dramatic club presented 'Mishaps of Minerva' with newly decorated scenery in the assembly hall. Dancing consumed the remainder of the evening.

Despite an evident sense of humor, Llano began to fall apart in the later half of 1917. Plagued by internal feuding between the General Assembly and the so-called "brush gang', the colony was assailed from the outside by creditors, draft boards, jealous neighbors, and the Los Angeles Times. After the loss of Llano's water rights in a lawsuit - a devastating blow to its irrigation infrastructure - Harriman and a minority of colonists relocated in 1918 to Louisiana, where a hard-scrabble New Llano (a pale shadow of the original) hung on until 1939. Within twenty-four hours of the colonists' departure, local ranchers ('who precariously represented capitalism in the wilderness') began to demolish its dormitories and workshops, evidently with the intention of erasing any trace of the red menace. But Llano's towering silo, cow byre, and the cobblestone foundation and twin fireplaces of its Assembly Hall, proved indestructible: as local patriotic fury subsided, they became romantic landmarks ascribed to increasingly mythic circumstances.

Now and then, a philosophical temperament, struggling with the huge paradox of Southern California, rediscovers Llano as the talisman of a future lost. Thus Aldous Huxley, who lived for a few years in the early 1940s in a former Llano ranch house overlooking the colony's cemetery, liked to meditate "in the almost supernatural silence' on the fate of utopia. He ultimately came to the conclusion that the Socialist City was a 'pathetic little Ozymandias,’ doomed from the start by Harriman's 'Gladstone collar' and his 'Pickwickian' misunderstanding of human nature - whose history "except in a purely negative way ... is sadly uninstructive.

Llano's other occasional visitors, lacking Huxley's vedic cynicism, have generally been more charitable. After the debacle of 1960s-70s communitarianism (especially the deadly trail that led into the Guyanese jungle), the pear trees planted by this ragtime utopia seem a more impressive accomplishment. Moreover, as its most recent historians point out, Huxley grossly underestimated the negative impact of wartime xenophobia and the spleen of the Los Angeles Times upon Llano's viability. There but for fortune (and Harry Chandler), perhaps, would stand a brave red kibbutz in the Mojave today, canvassing votes for Jesse Jackson and protecting Joshuas from bulldozers.'

But, then again, we do not stand at the gates of Socialism's New Jerusalem, but at the hard edge of the developers' millennium. On May Day 1990 (the same day Gorbachev was booed by thousands of alienated Moscovites) I returned to the ruins of Llano del Rio to see if the walls would talk to me. Instead I found the Socialist City reinhabited by two twenty-year-old building laborers from El Salvador, camped out in the ruins of the old dairy and eager to talk with me in our mutually broken tongues. Like hobo heroes out of a Jack London novel, they had already tramped up and down California, but following a frontier of housing starts, not silver strikes or wheat harvests. Although they had yet to find work in Palmdale, they praised the clear desert sky, the easy hitchhiking and the relative scarcity of La Migra. When I observed that they were settled in the ruins of a ciudad socialista, one of them asked whether the 'rich people had come with planes and bombed them out.’ No, I explained, the colony's credit had failed. They looked baffled and changed the subject.

We talked about the weather for a while, then I asked them what they thought about Los Angeles, a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua and the May Pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite. One of my new Llano compañeros said that L.A. already was everywhere. They had watched it every night in San Salvador, in endless dubbed reruns of I Love Lucy and Starsky and Hutch, a city where everyone was young and rich and drove new cars and saw themselves on television. After ten thousand daydreams like this, he had deserted the Salvadorean Army and hitchhiked two thousand five hundred miles to Tijuana. A year later he was standing at the corner of Alvarado and Seventh Streets in the MacArthur Park district near Downtown Los Angeles, along with all the rest of yearning, hardworking Central America. No one like him was rich or drove a new car–except for the coke dealers–and the police were as mean as back home. More importantly no one like him was on television; they were all invisible. He argued that it was better to stay out in the open whenever possible, preferably here in the desert, away from the center. He compared L.A. and Mexico City (which he knew well) to volcanoes, spilling wreckage and desire in ever-widening circles over a denuded countryside. It is never wise, he averred, to live too near a volcano. "The old gringo socialistas had the right idea.”

Excerpt from CITY OF QUARTZ: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, “Prologue: The View From Futures Past, pp. 3-14. Copyright, 1990, Mike Davis, Verso. First published by Verso, an imprint of New Left Books. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Excavation by Jaime Huidobro

April 1, 2023

An Interview of Diva Amon

April 1, 2023

Diva Amon diving with Manta Rays. Photograph by Michael Pitts. Courtney Diva Amon

interview by Kaylee Gibson

Back in 2021, I found myself at the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by scholar Hashim Sarkis, which sought to answer the question: “How will we live together?” One of the most poignant exhibitions was held at the Danish pavilion, which was completely transformed by Architecture studio Lundgaard & Tranberg and curator Marianne Krogh. In an exposed cyclical system of piping, rainwater was collected from outside and taken on a closed-loop journey through the space. Visitors become part of this system—a poetically visible merging of nature—by drinking a cup of tea brewed with leaves from herbal plants that absorbed the water. Sipping my tea, listening to the calming streams, traversing the city by water taxi through its famous canals that pour out into the Adriatic Sea, I pondered our planetary water system, and how it links us all. Deep sea marine biologist Diva Amon feels the same obligation and urgency to highlight this link. The deep sea, which is defined as a depth where light begins to fade, is the largest habitable ecosystem of our planet, yet it lies furthest from our reach. Not only does it regulate our planet’s climate at large—it also has the potential to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

KAYLEE GIBSON: What roles do the deep oceans play in our planet’s ecosystem?

DIVA AMON: Our deep oceans are a reservoir of biodiversity, but it goes beyond that—it is a journey through time. Because of their huge size, they provide over 96% of the habitable space on Earth, they cover a vast percentage of our planet's surface, and that size is what really allows them to play such a significant role. They regulate the climate by absorbing heat and sequestering carbon. They provide food for billions with their provision of fisheries. And then, there’s nutrient cycling. Cycling nutrients on the planet is everything ... it is life as we know it. It also plays a large role in detoxification. So, we have nutrient cycling, elemental cycling, and really big services like primary production. They provide a home for so many animals. There are also so many potential pharmaceuticals that could come from the deep sea. Life in the deep ocean evolved in these extreme conditions: high pressure zones, close to freezing temperatures, darkness, so many of those animals have genetic material that could be quite interesting to us in the future—for pharmaceuticals, or biomaterials, or for industrial agents.

GIBSON: Biomaterials are so interesting. Can you give a few examples of these?

AMON: Sure, there’s a species called a glass sponge, it’s not actually made of glass, it’s made of silica. They look like fiber glass and have these beautiful, intricate structures. These creatures have actually been used as inspiration to make more efficient fiber optic cables. Another example of biomaterial comes from dead whales. When whales die, they usually end up down in the deep sea where they become food and shelter. There are bacteria that break down the fats in whale bones most effectively at deep sea temperatures, so 3-4 degrees Celsius. These enzymes have been utilized for more climate-friendly laundry detergents because they remove stains at lower temperatures.

Sea Slug. Photograph by Alexander Semenov

GIBSON: These are very new findings and applications, but it seems like there’s still a lot to discover.

AMON: We’re just scratching the surface. There’s only maybe thirty of these applications so far. We know probably 1/3 of the multicellular species. They think there’s close to 1 million species that live in the deep sea, and about 2/3 of those still have not even been discovered, and that’s not even taking into account unicellular species. There’s so much to be discovered, so much that we could potentially use. All of that life is linked to the functions and the services that keep our planet ticking. There’s this untapped reservoir of potential use and benefit to us that could help with some of the most profound challenges of the future.

GIBSON: Can you predict the potential of those undiscovered species in anyway?

AMON: In terms of microbial life, there will be things that are entirely unexpected. And there are single corals that can live for over 4,000 years. Think of how much has happened in human history in that time. There are sponges that live for over 10,000 years. Not only are we seeing new life, but we are also seeing it in new ways. There are these teams in California that have been doing amazing work on bioluminescence, a phenomenon where animals create their own light. In the past ten years, we’ve realized that it’s far more common than previously thought. The majority of the species in the deep sea create their own light, and because of the vastness of the deep sea, bioluminescence is possibly the most common form of communication on the planet. So, it’s really rewriting paradigms, which is what I think we’ll see more of in the coming years. We’re at a pivotal point in ocean exploration, and we’re conducting research in more effective ways, which is leading to discoveries that we never could have dreamed of.

GIBSON: That’s so fascinating. So, much of our understanding of life on Earth has been linked to our reliance on both oxygen and sunlight, but our deep oceans function so much differently.

AMON: It wasn't very long ago that we realized there are entire ecosystems in the deep sea that are able to exist completely in the absence of sunlight or oxygen. A lot of life in the deep sea relies on food from the sea surface: dead animals like whales, plankton, and fish. But about fifty years ago, hydrothermal vents were discovered, and those are these incredible environments where life doesn’t actually use the photosynthesis-related food chain that 99.9% of life on Earth relies on for its existence. Instead of using sunlight as their ultimate source of energy, they use chemical energy. So, there’ll be methane seeping from the sea floor, or hydrogen sulfate, and life has evolved to use that as the starting block of their food chain. You get to those places in the deep sea and they are booming with life.

GIBSON: What do you think this means for the future of society and how we think about our oceans?

AMON: A hundred years ago we thought of the ocean as this deep, dark place, like a vacuum with no life. Since then, our explorations and discoveries have shifted so many paradigms, allowing us to realize that life not only finds a way, but thrives in these places, changing everything we previously thought was possible. I think that lends itself to life on other planets. If life can exist in these extreme places on our own planet, what’s to say it doesn’t exist on other planets that exist under extreme conditions? It’s really about showing what’s possible and rewriting the laws of biology. Apart from that, the slightly cynical answer is that while more people are engaging with the deep sea than ever, it’s still not enough. Many people still have this idea that there’s not much to conserve there, and as a result, I worry that it’s seen as this final frontier on Earth, which is a very challenging mentality. Economists have a term called the ‘blue economy.’ It’s a real push to harness all the resources the deep ocean has to offer.There’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s done in a way that is not just sustainable, but also restorative. What we are seeing now with some of the industries that are pushing into the deep sea are attempts to exploit it. Fisheries have been operating for decades in the deep sea and there’s been purposeful dumping in the past, but now there’s an accidental sort of pollution. We’re seeing oil and gas going deeper and deeper, we’re seeing deep sea mining on the horizon, and a lot of those industries benefit from the notion that there’s not a lot of life down there. All of this knowledge is not as mainstream as it should be, so we risk losing species, losing habitats, losing those functions and services that we rely on.

Glass spicule stalk collected from Cape Range canyon, showing fiber optic properties. Courtesy Schmidt Ocean Institute

GIBSON: How can we engage the public more? What do you think that looks like?

AMON: That's really the challenging question. Unfortunately, deep sea exploration and deep sea science is incredibly expensive. It's akin to space exploration. It’s very high tech and very high skill, which means it’s not accessible to the majority of humankind. And that has resulted in it being colonized by a small set of humanity. If we can begin to remove those barriers so that more of humankind can participate in those conversations, we can develop a better understanding of what’s there and how best to manage and protect it. Ultimately, there's a big geopolitical issue here. Scientists have had the privilege of conducting research on these parts of the planet that no one else has seen. I do wish that more scientists would utilize that privilege to the benefit of the deep sea itself. Thankfully, we’re seeing a rise in scientific exploration being live streamed. We're also seeing more mainstream documentaries being made such as it being featured on The Blue Planet. There’s a lot in the works that will bring the deep sea to millions of people around the world. We need to take it to the policy makers who are drafting regulations now that will be in place for decades, if not centuries, and will be pivotal for our ocean and its management. We ourselves have abig role to play.

GIBSON: It is so wild to me that the International Seabed Authority (an off-shoot agency of the UN) is essentially deciding the fate of the deep oceans. Are they playing an effective role in their protection?

AMON: There are so many issues happening around the ISA. Since 2018, I've been going to their meetings twice a year, and you see in the room that not every country is at the table. They all have a seat, but they're not necessarily present. That is often due to a lack of resources. It’s not considered a priority. Many countries can't afford to send delegates there for three weeks a year. As a result, the voices that tend to be the loudest are the ones that are ultimately going to benefit. Intergovernmental processes are not perfect, but it's particularly glaring at the ISA.

GIBSON: I had no idea until recently that there are permits being issued to mine the deep sea, nor that the ISA even existed. How likely is it that deep sea mining will happen?

AMON: Very likely, unfortunately. That devastates me. But I think there are so many brilliant organizations doing their best to at least delay it. As of now, the Republic of Nauru, Pacific Island triggered a two-year rule. That means by June 2023, they could be issued an exploitation license and that’s it. Not only is this entirely out of step with much of what humankind is talking about now, what’s most distressing is the fact that biodiversity loss is the highest we’ve seen within human history, the climate crisis is spiraling out of control, and here is this UN-related body that is essentially trying to kick-start what is going to be an extremely disruptive industry in one of the most pristine parts of the planet. It’s completely at odds with what we should be doing. A lot of people are saying, “Well, we need the metals for the climate crisis.” But that's a band-aid. Let’s not mince words. We’re working our way through the planet's resources and ultimately just finding new things to use and destroy.

GIBSON: If deep sea mining were to happen in just a small area, would that have effects on very large areas?

AMON: We really don't know. A big part of the problem is that more than 99% of the deep sea floor has never actually been visualized with human eyes, nor with a camera. A lot of it is based on modeling. We're using the best data we can to inform those models, but it's still mostly unverified. I used to work for the University of Hawaii and the contract I was working on was for one of these mining companies trying to understand which life forms exist in the Clarion Clipperton zone (between Hawaii and Mexico). We went out on a cruise in 2013, which was the first time anybody had seen that sea floor and over 50% of the large animals we saw were entirely new species to science. And now, more scientific teams have been observing through the CCTV that 70-90% of the species there are new to science. And that's just multicellular species. We're not even talking about microbes. So, we're operating in this real dearth of information, and not just about what's there, but how it might be impacted. If we don't know how the animals will be impacted, we don't really know how the functions and services that we rely on will be impacted. The parts of the planet that have been licensed off in these areas, and there are about eighteen licenses out there, each of them is about the size of Sri Lanka. These are not small places, and we know that all life in the path of the machine will be killed. There will be huge dust plumes kicked up off of the sea floor from the mining machinery, all of the minerals will be pumped up to the surface, they will be separated from the water, and that water will be pumped back into the ocean. That water will have metals, it will be a different temperature, it'll be a different chemistry, and it will essentially be a form of pollution. That's going to create another one of these plumes that has the potential to suffocate animals, or render them blind. The currents have the potential to take these plumes to further areas and the footprint will be much, much larger, and we're not even talking about noise, which travels huge distances in the deep. There’s so much to consider and it's been acknowledged that there will be species extinctions. Ultimately, when those things happen, there will be impacts to the fisheries that much of the world relies on. There’s grave concern about the impacts on the carbon sequestration capability of the deep ocean. There's so many unknowns that it's really worrying to think about an industry on this scale. We should be taking a very precautionary approach. And, if we do decide that we absolutely need these metals for our survival, then we should start small—just license one entity to begin with, and then do lots of monitoring around it. But that's not what’s expected to happen. There have been thirty-two licenses granted globally, and most of those places don't have protected areas in place yet. Most of those places don't even know what lives there.

Pelagia noctiluca. Photograph Alexander Semenov

GIBSON: Is there anything we can do to keep this from happening?

AMON: That's the real challenge about the deep sea. It’s not like we can go out there and protest. So, the first thing we can do is talk about this, the more people who know about this, the better. Many well-known countries are participating in deep sea mining. France has a contract area, Germany has several contracts, and so does the UK. Apart from that, it's about consumption. The oil companies came up with ‘carbon footprints’ to try to put the onus on us, the individuals, for pollution, rather than themselves. But there is something to be said about living more consciously, and thinking about where everything we buy comes from. Each of us has a cellphone, and those use about sixty different types of metals. So, trying to consume less is important and also pushing for technology that can be recycled more easily, or technology that can be fixed. I think we are seeing those shifts in society. It's just not happening quickly enough. It's a tough one. People aren’t engaging first hand with the environment of the deep sea, so it’s a hard one to get people on board with, even though it’s absolutely essential to us being here.

GIBSON: I did read that Samsung, BMW, Google, and Volvo vowed to not use anymetals mined from the deep oceans.

AMON: Yes. There are steps happening. These four major corporations have come forward and pledged to not source any of their production materials from the deep sea, at least until it is deemed to not be destructive. Seeing these big corporations willing to take a stand on this was probably the most hopeful thing that has happened. I hope it really is this pivotal event where after these four, we see more and more coming forward. Ultimately, many corporations know that they are rewarded for good behavior by their consumers, so their leadership in this area has been very refreshing.

Ken Layne: Take Care, It's a Desert Out There

April 1, 2023

text by Oliver Misraje
photography by Michael Tyrone Delaney
illustrations by Isabelle Adams

“Was it blinking?” He asks, "if it blinks, it’s probably just a navigation light for aircrafts.” He tells us that most sightings of unidentified flying objects are easily explained; extraordinary things rarely happen when you’re looking for them. Twinkling lights are usually just planets. Stationary orbs that blink out after ten minutes are probably military flares (the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center carries out frequent training drills nearby). Then, there's an aerial phenomenon that isn’t as easily explained, “now and then you see something that simply doesn’t make any sense,” he says, “It’s just silly. It’s not dramatic.” The third kind of sighting (not to be confused with the Hyneck’s scale commonly used by ufologists) are experiences so awesome—in the biblical sense of the word—that you brush up against something ephemeral and undeniably original. Ken has only experienced this once in his life. In 2001, he was driving down Highway 395 with his then-wife in the passenger’s seat when they noticed a light to the north. It seemed innocuous enough, though something felt off. It moved erratically as though untethered from the horizon. The pair debated what it might be for a few moments, when suddenly and without warning, it was gone and in its place a large black triangle, about 200 feet in diameter. Its corners glowed and a spotlight emanated from its center, illuminating the desert floor below with a brilliant intensity, like a “great, unblinking eye” as Ken described it. He hit the gas. The car got nearer. But when he pulled to the curb and rushed out— the mysterious triangle was gone, vanished without a trace or residue to affirm its presence.

Life above a fault line can be a perilous thing—the threat of the San Andreas fault swallowing the county notwithstanding, the constant tremors seem to inform the psyche of those living above it. Ken is something of an antenna himself for the murmurs and reverberations of California’s inland desert, picking up and broadcasting tales of the uncanny to all the lot lizards, and hippies, and hipsters, and occultists who color the landscape. On his radio show and newsletter, The Desert Oracle, for which he has attracted a cult following since its genesis in 2015, Ken adopts the cadence of an old time-y creep show host, but with a folklorist’s edge. His stories—whether they be about haunted petroglyphs, the Yucca Man, or missing tourists—are about the cryptids as much as they are about the people who encountered them. It’s the vestiges of his past career as a journalist, including a stint as a crime writer in Oceanside, that appeals to his more skeptical readers.

We reach a roadblock. Michael suggests we utilize the dim glow of the traffic cone to take some portraits. “We are now officially in the wilderness,” Ken says, stepping out to the dazzling, unobstructed spine of the milky way. Izzy and I take turns holding flashlights pointed towards Ken, casting ominous shadows on his face. He’s a natural model. No longer Ken Layne, this is the Desert Oracle in action. An Odin-like picture of rude health, he holds his trusty wooden staff and smolders into the camera, framed by the dark silhouettes of the mountains in the distance. His gaze twinkles with a discreet intrigue that softens his otherwise shrouded face. The alter-ego has itself become an integral part of the mythos of Joshua Tree; an archetypical wandering stage that retains fragments of his heroes, like Edward Abbey of The Desert Solitaire and Art Bell. Between camera flashes, Ken tells us about his closest companion, a German Shorthair Pointer dog. It’s a breed of hunting dog that are usually cast away for their aggression, but Ken is drawn to outcasts.

Fans of The Desert Oracle often occupy a more cosmopolitan demographic, which some journalists have attributed to the “escapism” of his stories. Escapism is a misnomer. The appeal lies in the return to meaning and a resistance to the sinking feeling of post-modernity that we are losing our archetypes—the haunted house at the end of the street, knowing how to differentiate between good and bad winds, which roads a ghostly woman in white frequents. I grew up in Sun City, a small town in the desert not terribly far from Ken’s haunts. Like him, my dispositions were shaped by the landscape. I discovered The Desert Oracle my senior year of college while working on my thesis, a hauntological study of our local monster, Taquitch—a shape-shifting, child-eating, “meteor spirit” that prowls the San Jacinto Mountains. Taquitch originally appeared in the mythology of the Payómkawichum tribes who still occupy the area, but legends persist today. I was interested in the ways these paranormal stories were a metaphorical vehicle for sociological phenomena. The Inland Empire is riddled with poverty, addiction and despair, and as a result, experiences higher rates of domestic violence and lower child expectancies. It is haunted either way you look at it. Ken talked about Taquitch in the twenty-first episode of his radio show. On our way back to Joshua Tree, we make a stop at Roy’s Motel and Cafe, a defunct relic of Googie architecture. While poking around abandoned motel rooms, we discuss the merits of the hauntological approach. Ken ultimately disagrees with the notion of trauma as a prerequisite for a haunting; some things are older than us and more original to this world than we can comprehend. Even so, he is well aware of the ‘cultural dressings,’ as he puts it, often applied to paranormal phenomena. Take UFO sightings—while observed across cultures since time immemorial, explanations of such often reflect the dispositions of the times. He tells us that there’s nothing actually connecting UFOs to extraterrestrials. The theory appeared in conjunction with the Cold War and the space race. During the industrial age, many explained them as the inventions of eccentric, steampunk robber barons. In Medieval times they were thought to be witches with lanterns hanging from their broomsticks.

The fault line that the Inland Empire (which includes Joshua Tree) sits upon, demarcates it geographically, as well as symbolically. To the Western imagination, it is the ultimate nowhere; a psychic space to project its dreams, ideals, anxieties, and nightmares. The idea of the desert as barren is a colonial project, one that has historically been used to justify its desecration since the frontier period. We’re driving through Amboy when Ken tells me, “one of the biggest misconceptions about the desert is that it’s barren. Desert means wilderness. It’s Greek, borrowed from the Latin deserto. Not arid, not barren, but untamed, uncultivated wilderness. It’s where Pan ran around in the primal wilderness. Ancient Greece was the desert. Civilization is born in the desert.” The Desert Oracle repopulates the landscape. While his documentation of hibernating birds native to the Southwest might seem mundane in comparison to shape-shifting monsters, it's where his Transcendentalist musings are most poignant, revealing a gentle, more meditative side to Ken.

Cultivating a sense of awe for the desert is an important part of its conservation. Advocates for environmental personhood also seek to reimbue the landscape with soulfulness. In 2020, tractors in Arizona leveled the earth for the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, unceremoniously demolishing 200-year-old Saguaro cacti in the process. The Saguaro are sacred to the Hia-Ced O’odham tribe, whose ancestral grounds lay 00 yards away from the site. After fiercely resisting the construction, the tribe successfully passed a resolution affirming the legal personhood of the Saguaro. In an op-ed piece for Emergence Magazine, tribal member and activist Lorraine Eiler wrote, “When something is acknowledged as a person with rights, it is much more difficult to overlook the infliction of harm. This resolution has brought us one step closer to bridging our spiritual understanding of how to sustain life with the practices of the dominating culture.”

“It’s a long way, right? About ten or eleven miles. One night, I was coming back from Death Valley and I was the only car on the road. Moonless night just like tonight. I’m doing 65 or something. It’s a 55 limit so you’re always watching for that occasional CHP dispatch. Suddenly, I see what seems to be a car’s lights appear, and what I notice in my rearview, is that it is racing, like Roadrunner, Coyote cartoon speed. I'm driving, and my first thought, of course, is it’s a cop, so I slow down, and it keeps on coming up-up-up-up,” Ken says, stressing the word up like a rapid-fire machine gun. “It’s like the brightest high beams, and it comes right up to my ass. So now, I’m thinking it’s just some jackasses coming back from Vegas. I start slowing down to let the car can pass me. I’ve come to a complete stop. And it’s still there, just blinding me. I turn around to look out, and this is the first time it occurs to me: the lights aren’t attached to anything, they're just floating there, and I have just a moment to try and rationalize it, when the lights retreat at the same speed they came up ZUUUUUUUUERRR. It doesn’t turn around. No sound. No nothing. All the way down, until it blinks out in the end.” Ken lets the story dangle in the air for a moment. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 13 opus. 135 plays quietly from his sound system, lending itself to the eerie atmosphere.

Casa Orgánica: Javier Senosiain & Dakin Hart in Conversation

April 1, 2023

in conversation with curator Dakin Hart
interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Olivia Lopez

Casa Orgánica is a romantic elegy to living in harmony with the natural world and natural forms. Built by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain Aguilar in 1985, the house is located in Naucalpan de Juarez, a stone’s throw from Mexico City. Senosiain’s architectural philosophy was to build a home that more closely resembled the habitats of animals and prehistoric humans: a cave, a womb, a snail’s shell, an igloo. Sinuous earth-tone tunnels lead to different living chambers, giving the feeling of entering the earth. From the exterior, the domicile is barely visible through layers of grass, trees, shrubs and flowers, which, by evopotranspiration, produce oxygen, reject pollution and filter dust and carbon dioxide creating a unique microclimate. The house and work of Senosiain was recently featured in a landmark exhibition at The Noguchi Museum, entitled In Praise of Caves, which was organized by Ricardo Suárez Haro and curated by Dakin Hart. Alongside projects by Mexican architect Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, the exhibition was a metaphor for reexamining how we live on planet Earth.

OLIVER KUPPER: We should start with the connection between utopia and organic architecture.

DAKIN HART: One of the interesting things about organic architecture for me, is that to some extent, it offers a path back to Eden. It suggests an entirely alternative family tree of development—of the idea of how we live on the planet—that could have departed from the one that we’ve ended up on very early in human history. So, it’s nice to think about following it backwards the way that Javier does in his scholarship, and if you think about utopia as an umbrella category for a way of living that we might recapture, one that has different characteristics and a different value set, that seems really interesting to me.

JAVIER SENOSIAIN: In the case of organic architecture, I believe that utopia could be a reality.

OK: The exhibition catalog goes back to the original cave dwellings, which is the prehistoric idea of organic architecture.

DH: Every time modern architecture has tried to address the idea of utopia, it runs into such trouble because the version of abstraction that it leans on is mathematical. And that doesn’t really have to do with life, it has to do with a kind of pure notion of what life could be or should be. Maybe it’s fundamentally religious or spiritual too, which is also highly problematic, because it gives it this messianic quality. Organic architecture potentially offers a salve to that.

NATALIA SENOSIAIN: Modern architecture involves a lot of technology. When you think of sci-fi movies, it’s all about technology and not really about humans.

JS: We are in a very difficult world situation now, mostly because of climate change, and to solve really big issues, we need big solutions. Corbusier used to say that the house is a “machine for living.” That statement doesn’t really apply anymore, it would be better if we thought of the house as the nature of living. Maybe going back to our origins can take us closer to utopia, even if it sounds weird.

OK: I’m curious about how the exhibition came to be, how it was curated based on Javier’s work, and why the Noguchi Museum?

DH: Ricardo Haro was thinking about this lineage of organic architecture that Javier has invested so much of his life and career in, in terms of scholarship and practice. And I think he just intuitively recognized that this group of artists could work really well at the Noguchi Museum. So, Ricardo just sent us an email out of the blue in 2018, and part of what we do with these exhibitions at the Noguchi Museum is we try to treat the museum like nature. We treat it like a park or a natural environment. So, we started trying to put together a structure that could work at the museum, and this was a perfect opportunity to show a different side of it. We're always trying to split the Noguchi beam into different aspects, or peel the onion. I had never even heard of the term ‘organic architecture’ before Ricardo wrote, and while it’s not an ‘ism’ that’s currently in art history textbooks, it may well be in the near future because there’s obviously a strong seedbed of interest, which our exhibition proved. I think it may be the most popular show that we've done in the last ten years. The response to it was just extraordinary, and really worldwide too. It was exciting to have hundreds of young architects and architecture students coming to see the show. We don't know how exactly it's going to ripple out, but young architects want different solutions. They’re not satisfied with the status quo, and here is a serious body of work that's well rooted in history, and cultural traditions, and a landscape, and building traditions, and it's still current. It's being taught and practiced by somebody incredibly inspiring. I think it has a real chance to offer an important counterpoint to what most people are learning in architecture school, and when they come out into their own practices or go to a big firm, they're still expected to do whatever it is they choose to do.

OK: Javier, when did you first start developing your scholarship around organic architecture?

JS: When I give a lecture, I start by showing the students a couple of projects I did when I was at the university, which already had some resemblance to organic architecture. I was very lucky because I had Matías Goeritz as my teacher. At a school where all of the other teachers were very rigid, he was very abstract and he would let us do very free work. When I went to do my social service in a small village, I proposed a sports and cultural center with square shapes and then realized that I could start working with more freedom. That was when I started thinking about curves and realizing that curved spaces are far more human. I started doing research on the natural shape of a human being. This is one of the features of my architecture—the continuity and the space. When you walk through the space, you can see the continuity and the flow. So, organic architecture has a lot of that.

DH: The difference between that and someone like Frank Gehry, who's a contemporary of Javier’s, or Zaha Hadid, a generation behind, is that Javier’s architecture is organic from the inside out. It's based on organic models, and it's developed in a craft methodology that emphasizes the connection between the eyes, the hands and the brain. From the outside, those other structures look organic in that they’re not strictly quadratic anymore, but that's just an expression of technology. They demonstrate what modeling programs were gradually able to accomplish over time as they pushed the technology, but that form of abstraction isn’t any more inherently organic than square buildings. Javier is starting from a completely different premise that isn't CAD models, or what a manufacturer can do. He’s using thousand-year-old technology to approach building as an expression of our innate, human instinct, as opposed to just putting the latest processor through its paces in coordination with modern manufacturing. I just read that article about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and all of its delays in LA. A lot of them have to do with the complexity of fabricating those fiber panels that cover the whole thing because every one of them is unique throughout the entire structure. It's one of those examples of trying to push beyond what modern manufacturing can do. It looks like a spaceship, or a fish, but it’s not really organic, even though it's not rectilinear.

OK: Casa Orgánica truly is a masterpiece example of contemporary organic architecture. Can we talk about that?

OK: So, where did the idea for the house come from? I've read so many different things about where the ideas came from around its shape.

JS: The idea was to take into account the physical aspects, environmental aspects, cultural aspects, and the necessities of the human being. It was part of an investigation in which I took all these aspects into account, while putting aside the very rigid aspects that are taught in university. The idea is sort of like a peanut, but in some interviews it has been misunderstood. I had the concept and the philosophy of the spaces that were needed to live, and there are two spaces: one is the day space, which is much more social, and then the night space, which is more intimate. The zoning was like a peanut because there were two spaces, but it was sort of shapeless. We adapted that peanut into the shape of the house, taking into account the topography of the land, and there was a big eucalyptus tree that was in the middle, so the house surrounded the tree. There was a lot of stone on that land, so originally the idea was that the walls were made out of stone, and the roof was made out of wood, but I didn’t like it because there was no continuity in the material. That’s when I came up with this constructive method of ferrocement. It’s a very noble constructive system that can allow you to build practically any shape and respect that continuity.

DH: Javier gave this beautiful talk at the opening of the exhibition about the Casa Orgánica and the way that once we leave the womb, we end up living and dying in a series of boxes. If you think about it, it's a form of torture, to go from the womb into a shipping container. And that’s essentially what modern architecture is; just a series of hard, square spaces. The whole philosophy of organic architecture offers an alternative to that regime, and that's where the humanity comes from. The Casa Orgánica is a nest. It's the most enveloping and natural form. When I walked through, I couldn’t help thinking about what it would have been like to grow up in those bedrooms, the way that using the faucet is like starting and stopping a stream. It really is like living in a forest glen. It's the ultimate fort. All kids try to achieve that by building forts out of pillows and blankets, but at seven you don't have the resources to do what Javier accomplished with the Casa Orgánica. It’s the most sophisticated version of what we all want as children.

OK: So, how do we protect organic architecture, especially when we're so obsessed with putting people in these boxes? Of course, the Casa Cueva [built by Juan O’Gorman] was tragically ruined, but also, how do we cement its importance in the history books and in scholarship?

RH: What’s interesting about exhibiting organic architecture in museums is that in a typical painting exhibition, the audience is passive, and they only contemplate whatever they're looking at. But when you see these kinds of shows, you realize that we can all be active players in our own homes. Just moving the furniture from one side to another, you can see if you feel better, if you gain more natural light, if it makes more sense. We can start interacting and see how we feel, and that's something very organic as well.

DH: That's really what Noguchi's work is about—empirical intelligence—trying to train us to think better through our bodies, to think better physically. We've all been taught that the use of language is the highest expression of intelligence, but it's just one expression of intelligence. There are many others, and we would all be better served if we had more empirical literacy. The neat thing about organic architecture is that it's one discipline for doing that, and if you live with it, it formats your brain differently. You have different expectations, which leaves you open to different solutions. The Noguchi Museum is trying to do just that; to open up a universe of other solutions. And organic architecture is an extraordinary example of that, one that's incredibly important to society.

ART / FASHION/ CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM

Daily Journal

Complicated Patterns: Read an Interview of Ian Davis

about 6 days ago

Richard Linklater Offers a Sweet, if Tame, Ode to Jean-Luc Godard

about a week ago

Read An Interview Of Jingyi Li On Craft, Culture And Feminism

about 2 weeks ago

Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

A love letter to a city made in moving images. Los Angeles is gearing up for one of the most exciting exhibitions in a generation. A true temporary contemporary museum, Berlin- based institution @juliastoschekfoundation is landing in the city of dreams and taking over an entire building DTLA for its time based programming of short films, silent film and moving images. Dozens of artists across multiple floors. Must see. Must not miss. Visit jsf.la for early access. We did. You should. Chris Burden, Poem For LA, 1975 #chrisburden #juliastoschekcollection #cinema #silentfilm

Max Richter, who scored the @chloezhao film Hamnet, which just won the @goldenglobes for best picture, photographed by @kuba_ryniewicz for Autre FW24 “Citizen” Issue Interview by @hansulrichobrist styling @anitaszymczak_ grooming @oliviacochrane art director@martinmajor all clothing @dior men Special thanks @huxley #maxrichter #hamnet #chloezhao

Paul Thomas Anderson’s @goldenglobes award sweep and win for Best Screenplay and Best Director not only asserts the fact that he is the most prescient director of his time, but also that revolution is thick in the air. All his movies capture the zeitgeist, but One Battle After Another, which he started writing the seeds of in the late 1990s carries a rare pulse in the midst of global protests, at home and abroad. Photographs by @amandademme for Autre #4 SS18, Paul Thomas Anderson in conversation with editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper #paulthomasanderson #onebattleafteranother #revolution #goldenglobes #awardsseason

In our FW25 Work In Progress issue we took a pivot into the world of professional racecar driving with a focus on two female drivers: @lynstjames and @zoebarryracing . Now retired, Lyn St. James set astonishing precedents on the track: the first woman to exceed 200 miles an hour on a closed oval, and the first to win an endurance race solo. The sport nearly killed her. In 1986 at Riverside Raceway, another driver triggered a crash that launched her Ford Probe into the air and onto its roof, erupting into a fireball with St. James trapped inside. She escaped—miraculously—without a scratch. In an in-depth conversation, Lyn and Barry discuss the challenges of racing in a sport where women are the outliers. #lynstjames #zoebarry #racecar #motorsport #racing #cars

@kidcudi in Miami for our dinner at @miamibeachedition Scotty Ramon “Echoes Of The Past” - new paintings open at @ruttkowski68 in Paris on Jan 31 Photo by @andrewtess #kidcudi #painting #polaroid

Great book intros remain indelible. Luke Goebel’s incendiary new novel begins with a great description of the Santa Ana winds that one year ago today fueled two of the largest fires in Los Angeles history. Since then, the grift, the corruption, the fraud, the cover up to steal land and obscure blame has been the modus operandi for a city that operates in the shadowy caddy corners of morality. Kill Dick follows in the great tradition of sunshine noir—murder, ambition, intrigue, but with a distinctly contemporary flavor in our era of opioids and attentional economies. And Goebel’s pretty little rich girls are almost too real. The book comes out April 2026 on @redhenpress #lukegoebel #fire #losangeles #santaana

For Autre’s FW25 Work In Progress issue, we partnered with @laeyeworks to produce a series of wide-ranging interviews with @caltechedu scientists working at the frontiers of contemporary space exploration. From the moons of Jupiter and the icy Kuiper Belt to the event horizons of distant black holes and colliding galaxies light-years away, space is the place where our understanding of the universe—and ourselves—collides in spectacular wonder. Mike E. Brown is Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at Caltech. He has discovered dozens of dwarf planets (and demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet), and is currently hot on the trail of Planet Nine—a hypothesized body that is possibly the fifth largest planet of our solar system. Cameron Hummels is a research scientist and Director of Astrophysics at Caltech. He is an expert in galaxies and the processes that dictate their formation and evolution over cosmic time including star formation, supernova, and black holes. Katherine de Kleer is Assistant Professor of Planetary Science and Astronomy at Caltech. She is interested in dynamic planetary processes and how they relate to the surface environments, atmosphere, and thermochemical histories of planets and satellites. All scientists wear l.a.Eyeworks Interviews by @summer.bowie Photographs by @damienmaloney #spaceistheplace #blackhole #space #galaxy #kuiperbelt #telescope #caltech #laeyeworks

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕘𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕥𝕤 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕒𝕤𝕥 𝕙𝕒𝕦𝕟𝕥 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕥. To better understand petro-imperialist ambitions in Venezuela—and the environmental devastation they leave behind—we revisit our interview with human rights lawyer Steven Donziger from our FW24 Citizen issue (🔗 in bio). Donziger’s lawsuit, filed on behalf of Amazonian Indigenous communities, targeted Chevron (formerly Texaco) for dumping more than 16 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Ecuadorian rainforest—an environmental catastrophe thirty times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill. The contamination poisoned rivers, farmland, and drinking water, triggering a brutal wave of cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects across the region. The case ultimately resulted in the largest damages judgment ever awarded in an environmental lawsuit. Venezuela’s entanglement with foreign oil interests has long been shaped by resistance as much as extraction. In the 1970s, following decades of domination by U.S. and European oil companies, the Venezuelan state moved to reclaim sovereignty over its natural resources, nationalizing its oil industry in 1976 and forming Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). The move was intended to curb foreign exploitation and redirect oil wealth toward national development—an assertion of independence that directly challenged U.S. petro-capital interests. Nearly fifty years later, that struggle persists in a different form. Today, Chevron is the only U.S. oil company operating in Venezuela under a special U.S. government license, granted amid sanctions and geopolitical negotiations. Its presence underscores the cyclical nature of petro-imperialism: even after nationalization, foreign oil power continues to re-enter through exceptions, loopholes, and crises—often with environmental and human costs that echo the past. Photographs by Lou Dematteis/Redux #venezuela #maduro #oil #crude #donziger

“If you can make a critic cry, you’re doing well.” Nan Goldin in conversation with editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper for Autre FW20. On January 13 at @gagosian London, all 126 slides of Goldin’s iconic masterpiece The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency will be on view. Photograph of @nangoldinstudio by @patmartin__ outside @markmahoney_ssc old Shamrock Social Club location on the Sunset Strip Artwork: Skeletons coupling, NYC 1983 #nangoldin #theballadofsexualdependency #slide

Sustainability has become a corporate trope, a well-worn mindset, a broken promise. In Autre’s FW25 Work In Progress issue, fashion editor @camilleangepailler has organized a critical round table discussion on the state of sustainable fashion with three independent designers: @loudebetoly @kostasmurkudisarchive and @juliekegels Photographer Timothy Schaumburg @timothyschaumburg Fashion Editor Camille Ange Pailler @camilleangpailler Production Gabrielle Cox @gabs__production Casting Olga Sikorska @olgy_call_me Model Lotte @lemanagement Hair Kosuke Ikeuchi kosuke_ikeuchi @shotview_managementMakeup Lee Hyangsoon @leehyangsoon__ Photo Assistant Kristina Weinhold @kristinaweinhold Stylist Assistant Nadine Sahm @nads.studio Retouch Color Workz @colorworkz Special thanks to @yellownosestudio #greenswashing #sustainability #fashion #sustainablefashion

New acquisitions. Just before Christmas, we received what looked like an impeccably official package from @sothebys. Maybe an invite. Holiday surprise deliveries from luxury brands aren’t unusual. On closer inspection, it was an editioned artwork by our favorite LA vandal, Zachary Fernandez (@jesushands - best known for turning the Hollywood sign into Hollyweed in 2017). The timing feels prescient. As much of the art world falters, Sotheby’s sales continue to rise, quietly consolidating power. The auction paddle becomes a symbol of control and spectacle—consensual, calibrated, and a little sadomasochistic. #sothebys #auctionhouse #paddle #art

New Year’s resolution: be more radical, take more risks. AUTRE is a 100% independent media platform. To support our mission, we urge you to consider purchasing a two year subscription (4 issues delivered directly to your doorstep - as a bonus you will receive our entire archive of 21 issues sent to your inbox after checkout. Hit the link in bio. Photo @bjork at the @chateaumarmont by Spike Jonze #bjork #autre #newyearsresolution #print #support

More of this energy in 2026; a perverts guide to f*cking the system before it f*cks you. @nadya and Slavoj Žižek #2026energy #pussyriot #slavojžižek

Los Angeles 🌴Berlin 🌭Paris 🪩London 🫖New York 🗽 Miami 🌊—in 2025 we partied around the world with friends and collaborators. From @sharonstone teaching our dinner guests how to pose at the @wehoedition to @kidcudi and @crystalwaters meeting in Miami. Thanks to everyone who attended, all the sponsors, all the hosts cohosts, the cultural engineers, performers, DJs , venues, security, servers, cleaning staff, bar backs, chefs and more. #party #worldwide #paris #london #losangeles #berlin #newyork

“Some of the best art I saw in 2025” — Oliver Kupper (editor-in-chief) 1. Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith CORRESPONDENCES at @kurimanzutto NYC 2. @_alfonsogonzalezjr THIS WAS HERE @jeffreydeitchgallery NYC 3. @dougaitkenworkshop PSYCHO DEBRIS FIELD @regenprojects LA 4. @jonrafman PROOF OF CONCEPT @spruethmagers LA 5. Bruce Nauman PASADENA YEARS @mariangoodmangallery LA 6. P. Staff EARTHSHAKER @delvazprojects LA 7. Anne Imhof DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE @parkavearmory 8. Jack Pierson CAPITALIST DECADENCE @lisson_gallery 9. Paul McCarthy ADAM & EVE COOKING SHOW @am_cinematheque 10. Vaginal Davis FABELHAFTES PRODUKT @gropiusbau Berlin 11. Wolfgang Tillmans NOTHING COULD HAVE PREPARED US @centrepompidou Paris 12. Rick Owens TEMPLE OF LOVE @palaisgallieramuseedelamode Paris 13.Eliza Douglas GUGGENHEIM @overduinandco LA 14. @elmgreenanddragsetstudio THE ALICE IN WONDERLAND SYNDROME @pacegallery LA 15. @ryanjgander IVE FALLEN FOUL OF MY DESIRE @camdenarts176 London 16. @devilintraining_ IT’S IMPORTANT TO HAVE UR FANGS OUT AT THE END OF THE WORLD @mendeswooddm Paris 17. @puppiespuppiesjade DEAD LIBERTY @balicehertling Paris 18 @meriembennani SOLE CRUSHING @lafayetteanticipations Paris 19. R. Crumb TALES OF PARANOIA @davidzwirner LA 20. Alex Da Corte PARADE @matthewmarksgallery NYC #2025wrapped #2025 #yearinreview #art

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

interview by Jeffrey Deitchphotographs by Max Farago

interview by Oliver Kupper

photography by The Source Family Scrapbook

interview by Oliver Kupper

text by Abbey Meaker

photography by Jermaine Francisstyling by Naomi Miller

interview by Oliver Kupper

interview by Oliver Kupperphotographs by Olivia Lopez

Interview by Summer Bowie

Photography by Damien Maloney

Text by Oliver Misraje

Photos by Michael Tyron Delayney

Illustrations by Isabelle Adams

photography by MAT + KATstyling by Shayna Arnold

Text by Mike Davis

interview by Kaylee Gibson

text by Oliver Misrajephotography by Michael Tyrone Delaneyillustrations by Isabelle Adams

in conversation with curator Dakin Hartinterview by Oliver Kupperphotography by Olivia Lopez

interview by Jeffrey Deitch
photographs by Max Farago

photography by Jermaine Francis
styling by Naomi Miller

interview by Oliver Kupper
photographs by Olivia Lopez

photography by MAT + KAT
styling by Shayna Arnold

text by Oliver Misraje
photography by Michael Tyrone Delaney
illustrations by Isabelle Adams

in conversation with curator Dakin Hart
interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Olivia Lopez