Mindy Seu interviewed by Lara Schoorl

interview by Lara Schoorl

For over three years. designer and technologist Mindy Seu has been gathering online activism and net art from the 1990s onwards. Commissioned by Rhizome in 2020, the growing collection of text and imagery forms the always-in-progress web database Cyberfeminism Index. By way of a “submit” button, anyone can contribute to the project making both the creation and outcome accessible to everyone. In 2023, the Index was translated to print by Inventory Press and includes over 700 short entries with scholarly texts on the hacktivist utopias of the internet’s nascent years.

LARA SCHOOL: Do you think it is possible to invent a new type of cyber-utopia outside of the surveillant, capitalist, algorithmic framework?

MINDY SEU: During the Cyberfeminism Index panel at the New Museum with E. Jane, Tega Brain, Prema Murthy, and McKenzie Wark, we tried to trace the evolution of what's happened from the early ‘90s until now. This idea of the utopic internet was very palpable in the ‘90s because it was the first introduction to this new technology that promised global connectivity, the ability to be everywhere all the time with those that were not in close physical proximity. However, people quickly began to realize that, while the internet did afford these new potentials, it was also very much guided by the infrastructure that the internet was created on, which was born from the military industrial complex. This ultimately shapes the platforms we use now and the behaviors that these platforms perpetuate: things like surveillance, censorship, and data extraction. In my essay, The Metaverse is a Contested Territory for Pioneer Works, my good friend and Cyberfeminism Index collaborator Melanie Hoff describes what pushes people to imagine is the need to imagine: a survival mechanism to find release from the the pressures of your current reality. Some examples of this were given throughout the panel. E. Jane talked about the liberatory potentials of bespoke and local experimental music communities. Tega Brain talked about projects that consider the materiality of the internet and the physical implications of these seemingly ephemeral networks that we use. There are definitely potentials for how we can begin to think of not necessarily a utopia, but broader views of how the internet might be able to serve more people rather than the smaller minority.

SCHOOL: It seems as though the internet is almost showing us that this need to imagine is universal. Even if the status quo might work for some-arguably it does not work perfectly for any person— the internet has made visible the failures, corruptions, shortcomings, and discriminations of and within all kinds of systems. Perhaps free imagination is not fully possible on the internet itself now, or not as was anticipated, but it has made visible the need for imagination and change across the globe and all demographic groups.

SEU: Absolutely. And as you are saying, in some ways the internet did al low more people to publish these kinds of narratives online without the gatekeeping of more “legitimate” institutions.

SCHOOL: Typically, things are now translated from print to on-line, but you did the inverse. What are your thoughts behind turning the online archive into a book? Something that continues to morph organically through submissions into a more or less fixed, prescribed format?

SEU: Because my background is in graphic design, I have always believed that print and web are very complementary. In Richard Bolt, Muriel Cooper, and Nicholas Negroponte's Books with Pages 1978 proposal to the National Science Foundation, they describe how soft copies are seen as ephemeral and dynamic whereas hard copies are seen as immutable, permanent, or more reputable because of how academia valorizes printed volumes. But, with my website collaborator Angeline Meitzler, we tried to flip this hierarchy. The book, while it did come after the website, acts like a snapshot or a document of the website's mutation, whereas the website acts an ever-growing, collective, living index, to grow in perpetuity. Even since we (my book collaborators Laura Coombs and Lily Healey) froze the website's contents to create the manuscript for the book, the online database has already received 300 more submissions. The book functions as a call to action for the website to continue gathering ideas of cyberfeminism’s mutation moving forward. That said, with my publisher Inventory Press, we made sure the book was included in the Library of Congress. When creating these revisionist histories, grassroots information activism must contend with the perceived legitimacy of forever institutions by penetrating it, hacking it.

SCHOOL: Thinking about physical versus online spaces, where do you think safety and accessibility of both people, information and/ or archives, like the Cyberfeminism Index, are better achieved, online or in print? Or does a hybrid environment foster these more widely?

SEU: Generally, especially with people who resonate with cyberfeminism, there is an appreciation for complexity. It is never the binary of this is better than that, but rather seeing the pros and cons of both media and how elements of both can be used to achieve the community’s goals. For example, with print, you do have these connotations of legitimacy, but we also see the rise of sneakernets, which are physical transfers of digital media rather than using online networks as a way to avoid different methods of surveillance. With the web, there is the ability to have a dynamically changing environment that updates over time. The co-existence of print and web allows both to grow.

SCHOOL: I keep returning to the word “hybrid” when thinking about the future. I recognize it in so many of the entries in the Index: William Gibson’s cyber-space, Donna Haraway’s cyborg, E. Jane’s anecdote about us needing air to breathe, Ada Lovelace and Jacquard’s loom, and more. How do you consider a hybrid on-line-physical point of view?

SEU: It makes sense why people think the internet is ephemeral and acces-sible; we have these computers in our pockets that have become extensions of our bodies. It is harder to see the physical infrastructures that make this thing possible: fiber optic cables running along the ocean floor, or the rare earth minerals that make up our phones, typically mined in Latin America in places that have very few or non-existent labor laws. Even after our devices die, they are very hard to recycle so they end up in e-waste graveyards in Guiyu, China where people break apart the phones to sell different parts, and the remainder is burned, leading to a very cancerous environment for those who live there. expand on these ideas in a forthcoming essay called “The Internet Exists on Planet Earth,” commissioned by Geoff Han for Source Type and Tai Kwun Contemporary that attempts to unpack the materialism of the internet. For one of the people who coined cyberfeminism, Sadie Plant, materialism is a huge component of her seminal book Zeroes and Ones (1997). In it, she gives a retelling of techno-history, redefines what technology actually includes, and details the ecosystem in which technology lives.

SCHOORE: Do you think it is possible to be completely inclusive, even if attempted? Is it more conceivable for utopia to be actually plural: utopias? Or, are they indeed meant to literally exist nowhere?

SEU: Generally, universalisms cannot exist. The utopias that are evangelized do not account for the many different perspectives and demographics that true equity requires. Rather than thinking of utopia as a space, we can think of utopia as principles. There are principles that could be embedded in our current landscape to benefit the masses, such as file sharing, basic income, open borders. Lately, I have been thinking about scalability. A couple of years ago, I co-organized an exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery with Roxana Fabius and Patricia Hernandez called the Scalability Project, whose title was borrowed from Anna L. Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World [2015]. Scalability was also a tenant of this year's Transmediale in Germany. Scalability implies a smooth, seamless, hyper-efficient growth pattern, but the breaking points it reveals inevitably create conditions for change. Legacy Russell writes that the glitch is the correction to the machine. Instead of the glitch as an error, it is an amend-ment, a reexamination of the problem. Another activist and scholar, adrienne maree brown, and her collaborator Walidah Imarisha, introduce the concept of fractalism, the creation of principles for a small local community that can grow as a spiral, with clear mutations at different levels in order to bring in more and more people. It is this idea of constant evolution rather than seamless scalability. We’re embracing glitchiness, bumpiness, and the errant.

SCHOOL: I know the project does not aim to define cyberfeminism, but do you have a particular understanding of the word “cyber”?

SEU: I think about “cyber” in the context of how it has been used in history and through its etymology. The prefix “cyber” first emerged in Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics in the ‘40s. In simplistic terms, it proposed the idea that you are impacting the system just as it is impacting you. It’s all about feedback. Then, cyber appeared in cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer [1984]. This sci-fi novel was important because it predicted the sensory networked online landscapes that we are very much talking about today. But Gibson's Neuromancer was also shaped by the white male gaze, with fembots and cyberbabes and depictions of women with assistant or robotic-like roles. He also created a very oriental landscape that is devoid of actual Asian figures. When cyber was then fixed to “feminism” to create “cyberfeminism” by VNS Matrix and Sadie Plant in the 1990s, it felt like a provocation for feminists, marginalized communities, or women to reshape what cyberspace could be.

Pippa Garner interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist

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.

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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.

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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.

Ariana Papademetropoulos: Cosmic Release

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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. 

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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.  

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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. 

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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

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.

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.

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 Interview of Nikki Maloof

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.

Ant Farm: An Interview Of Chip Lord

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Cadillac Ranchby Ant Farm (Lord, Marquez, Michels) under construction, June 19th, 1974.Amarillo, Texas. Courtesy Chip Lord

interview by Oliver Kupper

In 1975, Ant Farm—the techno-utopian multidisciplinary architecture collective founded in San Francisco by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (joined later by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier)—launched a customized 1959 Cadillac, renamed the Phantom Dream Car, at full speed into a wall of flaming television sets. Media Burn was an excoriation of Post-War American popular culture, mythos, and the consumerist imagination, particularly our obsession with broadcast media. This singularly powerful act came to exemplify Ant Farm’s irreverent architectural examinations, where the blueprint was the message itself. Armed with portable videotape cameras, Ant Farm turned the gaze back on those wielding the power in a time when America was entering its mirror stage, and millions of young people were realizing the country’s intrinsic hypocrisies and instincts for violence. From its inception in 1968 to its dissolution in 1978—from the last flickering embers of the hippie love fests to the early days of disco—Ant Farm experimented with alternative modes of living with detailed cookbooks for building inflatable shelters and a Truck Stop Network for flower children searching other flower children out on the open road. Ant Farm also buried Cadillacs in the Texas sand, reenacted John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and they had plans for an embassy where humans could communicate with dolphins. In the end, a fire at their studio was a symbolic curtain closing for the underground collective whose prophetic visions of the future can be witnessed today in a digital epoch of surveillance capitalism, artificial intelligence and the twenty-four hour news cycle. 

OLIVER KUPPER: I want to start off with talking about the day you kidnapped Buckminster Fuller. I think it says a lot about your generation’s fascination with his mode of utopian thinking, and it set the tone for the radical, utopian antics of Ant Farm.

CHIP LORD: The kidnapping? Well, Doug Michels [co-founder of Ant Farm] and I were teaching at the University of Houston. It was the spring semester of 1969. I don’t think Ant Farm was at all well-known at that point in time. We heard that Buckminster Fuller was coming to speak to the engineering school at the U of H, so Doug basically called Fuller’s office and said, “We’ll be coming to pick you up, and this is what we look like.” And then, he called the engineering school and said, “I’m calling from Buckminster Fuller’s office, and he won’t need a ride in from the airport.” (laughs) And so that’s what we did. We met the plane, and I think we were fumbling in my turquoise Mercury Comet. And we drove him to the campus of St. Thomas University, where there was the machine show exhibition [The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age]. And in the machine show was the Dymaxion car [1933]. At that point, he said, “Oh, I don’t want to see it, that was a bad episode.” (laughs) But we took him in anyway, and when he did see it, he was very excited. The front seat cushion, the back part had fallen, and he reached in to make a little correction, and of course, a guard came over and said, “You can’t touch the art.” And that was about it. But then, we took him over to U of H and delivered him to the engineering school.

KUPPER: Obviously, his thinking about the world was hugely inspirational, but what was it about Buckminster Fuller? Where did you learn about his ideas?

LORD: For me, it was through Whole Earth Catalog. Every issue, for several years, began by publishing something by Buckminster Fuller. I didn’t really have that personal connection to specific ideas until I started reading Whole Earth Catalog, which was a graduate education. Because a degree in architecture is not really an intellectual degree. It’s an art degree, basically, and there was no theory introduced into architecture during the 1960s.

KUPPER: What brought you to architecture?

LORD: As a high school kid, I was more interested in customizing cars and hot-rodding, but for my parents, that would not lead to a career. I also liked walking around in houses that were under construction in my neighborhood in St Petersburg, Florida. Especially when the walls had gone up, but they weren't solid yet, they were just the studs and you could walk through walls. Out of that experience, I thought, well, maybe architecture would satisfy both the creative instincts I have toward cars and yet, it’s a more professional career. I mean, that decision was made kind of at the last minute, so I went to Tulane. For an undergraduate architecture degree, you start right as a frosh, embedded in a culture that’s based around drawing and the studio, which was exciting at the time. But later, I realized I didn’t really get that much of a broad education out of going to college.

“There was a lot behind what we were doing as Ant Farm that came from the knowledge that there was a much bigger community exploring alternatives.

KUPPER You were also at the forefront of witnessing the post-war boom of the American economy—car culture, and the suburbs—which must have been fascinating.

LORD: When I was eleven, we moved from a small town in Connecticut to St. Petersburg Florida, and that was a huge transition. It was not really a subdivision, it wasn’t Levittown, but a nice, small development. Not really knowing it at the time, I was embedded in the world of advertising around the automobile in the mid-1950s, the tail fin era.

KUPPER: Politically, right around the time you started Ant Farm—the late 1960s—Kennedy was dead, modernism was proving its failures, pollution, Manson, Vietnam. There’s a lot going on. What was the ultimate epiphany that turned the youth to this kind of radicalism and distrust of the system? Can you talk a little about the sociopolitical miasma that was happening during that time? 

LORD: On a personal level, of course, it was the Vietnam War; how to make a personal choice. I really didn’t want to go. I actually was in the Navy Reserve program. I was a year behind in school, and it was the only way I could finish without being drafted and losing my college deferment. But once I had graduated, more than ever, I didn't want to be drafted. So, I went to the Halprin Workshops in San Francisco in the beginning of July 1968. It was a thirty-day workshop for architects and dancers, which is a great combination, of course (laughs). There was a third leader of the Halprin Workshops in addition to Larry and Anna [Halprin], a psychologist named Dr. Paul Baum. Eventually, he wrote me a letter that got me out of going to Vietnam. But it was only a little bit later within Ant Farm where I think we started to react or create works that were reflecting some of the craziness of living through that moment.

KUPPER That craziness definitely seems like it forced Ant Farm to think about this utopian impulse, that you needed to create a better world.

LORD: Or to add to the world in some way. I mean, the Eternal Frame [1975] was a pretty strange idea, to reenact the Kennedy assassination. But you know, there was this huge interest in literature around it and all the swirling conspiracy theories. And at the same time, that decade in the seventies was such a utopian moment in the art world, and all these additional mediums were being explored. One of them was performance art, and another was video art, and they kind of came together in the Eternal Frame. Maybe there was a truth in actually reenacting it, going to Dallas and being in that place, and recreating the image of the assassination. And it was frightening, actually, to be there, to do that.

KUPPER: Marshall McLuhan also had a big influence on Ant Farm and the idea of the “medium is the message” and the “global village.” Using technology was an example of this utopian thinking as well. How did his ideas influence you? 

LORD: I was a student when his book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects [1967] had just come out. And what was interesting was that it was a collaboration with a graphic designer, Quentin Fiore. It was actually reprints of things McLuhan had written as text and more theoretical analysis about the ‘global village.’ But in The Medium Is the Massage, it was put into a visual form, and I think that really influenced me. I never saw him lecture either, but the way images were used to amplify his ideas about the global village, it was so different from the discipline of architecture. At the same time, the realization that architecture was this kind of privileged, elitist profession, that you had to have clients, and the clients had to have the money for whatever they wanted to build. So, for my generation, graduating in 1968, so many people wanted to avoid going and doing the typical architectural career.

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Clean Air Podperformance by Ant Farm, U.C. Berkeley, Sproul Plaza, Earth Day, 1970(Andy Shapiro and Kelly Gloger pictured) courtesy Chip Lord

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KUPPER: What was Ant Farm’s interpretation of the global village? How would you define it?

LORD: I guess as the collectivity that existed in the counterculture, because there was a lot behind what we were doing as Ant Farm that came from the knowledge that there was a much bigger community exploring alternatives. Whether it was going back to the land, living in communes, co-housing, so many different ways to reject the existing set of expectations. I think that gave us the strength to keep going, to keep experimenting, and producing the work that we did.

KUPPER: One of the most incredible works that encapsulates those ideas was Electronic Oasis [1969], and also your idea of an ‘enviro-image future.’ Because it was way ahead of anybody’s time. Can you talk about the enviro-image future?

LORD: The idea that a computer could generate environments and put you in places was part of hoping to make another psychedelic experience, without drugs, without taking LSD. It just seemed obvious that it was going to happen. It’s only now really happening with AI. There was, of course, the enviro-man, who was connected to a computer, and sitting next to him was enviro-woman, and this was just a visual stunt that was done while we were teaching at the University of Houston. But that project was about simply creating that image in order to show that it might be possible. Most of our presentational form was through the slide show and that also came from architecture. It’s a very good way to contrast and to create a narrative between the images.

KUPPER: And then there was the Truck Stop Network [1970], which is really interesting. 

LORD:  A lot of people at the time were either building campers on a pickup truck, or modifying the Volkswagen bus. And there was this idea within the counterculture of nomadics. So, we were conceptually and architecturally combining the idea of the truck stops that already existed as a network across the US, and making them countercultural truck stops. You would stay for a few days or a week, plug in, and each truck stop had services built in that would make it more of a community. There's access to computers, there’s daycare, there's all of the social community structures.

KUPPER: Another work that had to do with cars was Cadillac Ranch [1974], which came a little later. It was installed around the time of the oil crisis, I don’t know if that had anything to do with it?

LORD: Well it did, absolutely. It was 1973 when that actual embargo from the OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries happened. You had to wait to get gas in California, to fill up. And so, Cadillac Ranch was conceived at that moment. It was easy to be very aware of the social hierarchy attached to the Cadillac. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler all had multiple makes and the idea for General Motors is you might, as a young man, buy a Chevrolet and be loyal to GM, then move to Pontiac, move to Oldsmobile, Buick, and then finally in your fifties, making a good salary, you would achieve Cadillac status. The funniest thing was, we realized that our fathers, none of them ever made it to Cadillac. The furthest they made it was Oldsmobile. So, you could say we were realizing the final two steps of the social hierarchy by making Cadillac Ranch, but also putting these gas guzzlers in the ground. 

KUPPER One of Ant Farm’s most iconic works that used a Cadillac was Media Burn [1975], because it wasa combination of two things, which were Kennedy and America’s fascination with television and cars. Can you talk a little bit about where that piece came from?

LORD: When we traveled in the Media Van, we went to the East Coast and met the publishers of Radical Software. There was an identifiable idea that there should be an alternative to the three major television networks, and it may be possible with portable video, which had just come out. The Sony Portapak was designed for education, schools, and businesses for producing training tapes. But artists and community activists immediately started using it as an alternative form of television and that was kind of solidified in “Guerrilla Television,” which was an issue of Radical Software. The editor, Michael Shamberg, had asked Ant Farm to design it. So, we did. We were engaged in the idea of alternative media and alternative architecture, and that became part of the idea of Media Burn. The idea was to create an image that would be powerful in its own right, but would also attack the monolith of broadcast television, which seemed to have a hold over the American public through advertising and image control. Seeing the car crash through that tower of televisions would be symbolic of an attack on that monolith. It was as simple as that. It took two years to realize that one image, and in that time of the planning, other meanings expanded out of it, and it ended up being a huge community effort. But we had to have a speaker, a politician, hopefully. And that is where the conceptualization of using a Kennedy impersonator as a speaker at Media Burn came in, and it was just a short jump to “Well, if we’ve got Kennedy, we might as well reenact his assassination.” And that was Eternal Frame. 

KUPPER: That also connects to a little bit of your personal work later with Abscam [1981], the recreation of surveillance footage; a statement on the power of these images of Kennedy’s assassination. Nobody, at that point, had ever really seen anything like that before. It really speaks to our voyeurism and thirst for seeing this kind of violence.

LORD: And also, taking control of it too, because it was such powerful imagery that made the viewer almost powerless in the face of it. So, could we take control of it in some way?

KUPPER: In 1978, your studio burned down. Why was that the official end of Ant Farm?

LORD: Well, at this point in time, Ant Farm had become a three-person partnership, Doug Michels, myself, and Curtis Schreier. Doug Michels wanted to move to Australia to develop the Dolphin Embassy. Curtis and I were not interested in moving to Australia. There was a woman involved and Doug wanted to go back to see her. I think in '76, there was a period of time when he was not present, and the studio space had become kind of just Curtis and me showing up, but it felt empty and people would often knock on the door asking, “Is this the Ant Farm?” (laughs) We would give them the little tours, but it had become almost a museum of itself in a way. It was over as a working partnership, and then the fire was a symbolic ending and almost exactly ten years after the founding, in 1968. So, that seemed appropriate, to have such a spectacular ending.

KUPPER After Ant Farm disbanded, how do you think your utopian thinking changed? I mean, there’s that incredible piece you did called American Utopia [2020]. Do you think that your view of the system became more cynical after Ant Farm?

LORD: There was certainly a cynicism within Ant Farm, I must say (laughs). No, for me, it was like, Well now how am I going to make a living? It was a different era, the counterculture wasn’t dominant. A lot of people in counterculture had opened businesses, natural food businesses, and other things. Not everyone, some people had successfully lived off of the land, but everybody had to confront, “how do you make a living, how do you survive?” I tried different things, like freelance photographer, and writer, having a contact at New West magazine, but you know, that was never going to pay the bills. So, I thought maybe teaching was going to be a collaborative venture, which was an aspect of Ant Farm. So, I applied for a job at UC San Diego in the visual arts department. The irony was that the work of Ant Farm was my credential, and there weren’t that many art departments where it would actually be effective (laughs).

KUPPER: What do you think now, post-pandemic in this weird political climate we’re in—what would Ant Farm be exploring now? 

LORD: (laughs) It’s funny because that question was also asked at the end of a lecture, and I turned it on the room full of students. I said, “It’s really up to you, the next generation, to make that utopian gesture.” So, I don’t really have a good answer to that, except that now I’m not such an optimist. I think that after the Ant Farm exhibition, which was at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2004, I traveled to a few places. When I came back to make videos afterward, Elizabeth Kolbert’s book had just been published, the Sixth Extinction [2014], and I realized that we’re in the process of creating this extinction of our own species with climate change. So, I created several works in video about that, which had to do with the rising sea levels. One is called Miami Beach Elegy [2017], you know Miami Beach maybe isn’t going to exist by the end of this century. Another one is New York Underwater [2014], and that was preceded by a Hurricane Sandy, which flooded so much of Manhattan. So, I’m trying to shift my love of cars into loving trees. 

KUPPER: You mentioned that you’re not so much of an optimist anymore, but do you think utopian thinking is still important?

LORD: You know, I’ll have to think about that question. I guess yeah, of course it is, but maybe utopian thinking is shifting now. I love this book, To Speak for the Trees [2021], by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. As a child, she was orphaned and went to live with her uncle in Ireland for the summer, and the people of that community decided to teach her Celtic knowledge. She had this intense learning experience about plants and other species, which led her to becoming a professor with a specialty in botany. So, that’s now utopian: understanding indigenous people, and indigenous ways, and the integration with other species we share the planet with. That’s so utopian now, because it’s so different from the mindset we’ve lived with throughout the 20th century. The Dolphin Embassy is one the most popular projects by Ant Farm. Again, it was simply a very symbolic idea, and we didn’t have the personnel, or the budget, or the power to find the scientists, and work with them, to make Dolphin Embassy a reality. It was a utopian idea, to focus on trying to communicate with another species.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

interview by Oliver Kupper

Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher Solomon, now ninety-five years old, studied graphic design in Switzerland under the legendary Armin Hofmann in the late 1950s. Her most famous project, the graphic identity for Sea Ranch, a planned community imagined by architects Al Boeke and Lawrence Halprin on the Sonoma Coast, was a blend of Swiss Style and California Modernism, an amalgam of irreverent hippie cool and clean straight lines in oversized texts and symbols called ‘supergraphics.’ The logo depicted two sea-shells that formed a ram’s head. When the idealism of the ‘60s and ‘70s died down, Sea Ranch lost its utopian ethos, but still remains a relic of what could have been. Solomon, however, is more prolific than ever.  

OLIVER KUPPER: Right now you are working on some new supergraphics for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

BARBARA STAUFFACHER SOLOMON: Yes. I'm doing absolutely enormous “OKs” with stripes. We're going to make it so visually nuts. It's like choreography, where you get everybody to walk in one direction with the design.  

KUPPER: Like the old dance step footprints that would be painted on the floor.  

SOLOMON: Yeah, kind of like that! Only it'll be on the ceiling. “OKs” will lead you to the Mario Botta building. So, people will go through the “OKs,” which is where the information and tickets desk is, but then they get into this kind of maze of stripes.  

KUPPER: You have also been working on a series of books, like UTOPIA MYOPIA (2013), which has a page that is a five-act play set in Hollywood, between angels and palm trees.  

SOLOMON: That one section is totally illiterate. I never went back and cleaned it up, or I just gave up and decided nobody's ever going to read this, the type is too small. But you did!  

KUPPER: I dissected it immediately, because the lore of Hollywood attracts me. Did you spend time in Hollywood?  

SOLOMON: I've been down there a lot—with my first husband who was a movie maker, Frank Stauffacher. All the screenwriters loved him. That’s how I knew George Stevens and Frank [Capra], who was an angel! My husband, who had a brain tumor, started fading after he presented one of his movies. We went out for a drink, and my husband passed out. Capra, a strong little Italian man, just picked my husband up and carried him to the car. I mean, he's a mensch. We knew them towards the end when Frank was dying, and we were quite a scene. I was this beautiful little chick, and he was handsomer than the movie stars.  

KUPPER: That was the golden age of Hollywood.  

SOLOMON: They made the American Dream. For Capra, it was the American Dream to get out of Italy and the mess there and live in Hollywood. And make these democratic movies, teaching everybody to be good little democrats.  

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Supercloud 22, 2020
Mixed media: Pigment print collage, gouache, ink, graphite,
colored pencil, white-out, cellophane tape, rubber cement, paper
8.5 X 11 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm)
Courtesy the artist and Von Bartha

KUPPER: Did you ever meet Man Ray and what was he like when you met him?  

SOLOMON: Oh, he was sweet. He never said anything. He only talked about money. He was always short of cash. He always wanted to sell a drawing or a painting. He always wanted to have the next show because he needed money. We had dinner at their house one night, and Julie Man Ray was teaching me how to make risotto in the little kitchen. Think of yourself out on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and just walk about six houses south, and that was where they lived. That was in 1948. We went down and saw them on our honeymoon. And we took a walk around the block to look for the sites of where all the novels had been written. I was very young. I was sixteen when I first met Frank [Stauffacher]. He was fifteen years older than I was. He was fancy, and he knew all the surrealists. 

KUPPER: Where did you stay when you were in Los Angeles in 1948?  

SOLOMON: I would always stay with Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. All the men were madly in love with her. She was so good at being charming, and she was just marvelous. She had been my best friend since I was about 16. I mean, she would tell me what to do, and I would do whatever she said. We were very close. They had a glass porch on the front of their house with a little cot in it. It was about three-feet wide. That was my bed.  

KUPPER: Wow, that’s an amazing memory of Luchita Hurtado.  

SOLOMON: I didn't even know she had her own last name. She was either Luchita Paalen or Luchita Mullican. She had so many husbands and names. And as long as the men with their egos were alive, they were the painters, and she was the one who cooked dinner. She never really let herself paint until she was a widow and had time. She always knew she could, I think, deep down. And the minute that Lee died, she started doing it, and then she was immediately very successful.  

KUPPER: I wanted to talk about your thesis book, Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden [1981]. Why is the union of architecture and landscape so important? 

SOLOMON: It's everything. They are two sides of one wall. First, the architect destroys all the trees and builds his precious little house. And then the landscape architect comes back and puts the trees and nature back. The world is all one big landscape. Inside the house and outside—they're all one thing in a way. They're extensions of each other. But in the architecture department, they hate each other. Architects think the landscape architects are the stupid ones who didn't have enough brains to be architects. And the landscape architects think the architects are the shits that are tearing down the trees.  

KUPPER: Well, a lot of architects are building now with more organic architecture in mind, where the landscape is more seamless with the architecture.  

SOLOMON: Well, the landscape architects have won. The landscape architects are going to save the world because otherwise, it's gonna get too hot, and everybody's just going to burn up.  

KUPPER: When did you start becoming interested in green architecture?  

SOLOMON: Somebody in art school once said, “Never use green. It's a very hard color to deal with, and never put empty space in the middle of your painting.” So I did both, actually. I have hundreds of those goddamn green architecture drawings. The ones with square trees that look like buildings. I just visually like green rectangles and want to make the world look that way. I was born in San Francisco and I lived all my childhood in the Marina District where there's the Marina Green. Every night with my mother, we'd walk around the Marina Green. And the grid of San Francisco has all these green squares where there are parks scattered around. At a certain point, the tops of the hills were just too difficult to build on, so they made them into parks. Little rectangles on top of almost every hill. 

KUPPER: San Francisco is such a beautiful, green city. And the surrounding areas like Marin. The utopian ethos has been so strong in California. Why do you think that is? And what does utopia mean to you as an architect?  

SOLOMON: All architects think they're building utopia. Even if it's just a gas station, they think it's utopia. 

I just think California is—I mean, open your golden gates! Since we found gold here, they assumed California is utopia. Californians have that feeling about California. That's why I came back. I could have lived in Europe. California is just an extension of people's bodies. 

KUPPER: Where do you think your rebellious spirit came from?  

SOLOMON: I don't know. My father was a lawyer, and he told me there's no such thing as god or the president of the United States. Don't have respect for any of those things. So, there's no reality. There's nobody you believe in and listen to. It's all absurd. My mother was like that too. She was a pianist. She was a rich girl that was no longer rich and loved walking among the redwood trees. She thought god was in the redwood trees.  

KUPPER: Can you tell me about Sea Ranch, and your contribution with the Supergraphics. When did the Swiss Style start to merge with the California Modernism?  

SOLOMON: When my husband died in 1955, I went to Basel, Switzerland to learn how to make money and how to be a designer instead of just a painter. I came back with all this training in me when they handed me Sea Ranch in 1962. Al Boeke and Lawrence Halprin, two of the architects, wanted Sea Ranch to be like the French new towns. Also, Lawrence had been raised on a kibbutz in Israel. First, he gave me an office that was in the same building as his firm. When they told me to do Sea Ranch, I designed it the way I had been trained under Armin Hoffman at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel. I had no idea what I was doing until I did it, I have to admit. But I was such a modernist. I went up there in a truck with the two sign painters. Everything had to be straight lines because they were sign painters and could only do letter forms. So my vocabulary consisted of what a sign painter could do. I started with that big blue wave on the west side of the building. The wave went up the shed roof, and then it came down, turned green on the other side. We only had black and white, vermilion and ultramarine blue, and I think one small can of yellow—primary colors. It was kind of like De Stijl. I was best friends with all the architects until I got all the press. Charles Moore never spoke to me again because I got in Life magazine and forgot to tell them he was the architect.  

KUPPER: So, who did they hope would live in Sea Ranch? Was it supposed to be for artists, for intellectuals?  

SOLOMON: No, Al was very square. I mean, it was supposed to be just plain old nice people. They weren't supposed to be intellectuals. And it certainly wasn't supposed to be second homes for the rich. That happened when they started making it so you could save on taxes with your second home. And that's when everybody was buying second homes up there. And they hired a couple of salesmen to come in and take over selling off the land. All of a sudden, it wasn’t about a nice town with a church and a school.  

KUPPER: Sea Ranch is really an example of an almost failed utopia.  

SOLOMON: It really is. It's very successful if you're rich. A lot of people from Los Angeles are coming up and buying property. Now it's all diamonds up there and the richest, trickiest people. 

KUPPER: Do you think design can be dangerous, especially if you are designing for a dangerous philosophy? 

SOLOMON: Of course, but that's what design is: it's the bullshit on top. It's making things look good.  

KUPPER: That's a good answer. I wanted to ask you if there is any connection to your time as a dancer and graphic design? 

SOLOMON: Every once in a while, it used to feel like it. When I used to work with the crew, and when you stretched your body big and long or got on the floor, I felt like I was making the same moves I made as a dancer. You're kind of moving with the paint with your arms stretched out. And you know, where I feel like a dancer again is when I’m at the SFMOMA making these stripes that'll make people walk from the entrance and up the stairs. They’ll wonder, now what am I supposed to do? And now, I'm going to give them big red stripes to have something to do. I’m choreographing them with art.  

KUPPER: Looking back on your career, what's the one thing that's been most misunderstood about you as an artist?  

SOLOMON: Well, nobody remembers that I was a widow with a child, and I needed money. The whole damn thing has been to support myself and my child. My husband, who died, his family just dumped me because my daughter has cerebral palsy. They were scared I'd ask for money. Then my second husband dumped me because he was young and cute. I aged, and he seemed to not. And I always had to support myself. I had two daughters, and I have a granddaughter. It was like, "Grandma is painting some supergraphics. I guess we can have oysters tonight!” If Frank hadn't died, I would have been a painter. And if I hadn't gone to Switzerland, I probably would have painted big color fields.  

KUPPER: Well, I'd say you came out on top.  

SOLOMON: Look, I was talented. I mean, when I had those two big rooms in the Sea Ranch to do, I was lucky, I got Charles [Moore] and Bill ​​[Turnbull’s] architecture. The walls had beautiful shapes, and I just followed the shapes and played with the shapes, and thank god it came out right. It's just dumb luck if it really works.  

KUPPER: Do you have any advice for people who might be reading this and thinking about building a better word; their own utopia? 

SOLOMON: I remember when I was teaching at Harvard, I asked the students, "What is art?" The answer: "It's nothing; just learn to see, and you'll learn that everything is art." The problem is that people look, but they don't see. If you look and see, the whole damn thing is certainly art.

Marina Abramović

Peter Do oversized blazer coat and cotton wrapped blazer gown
Prada leather boots

interview by Miles Greenberg
photography by Justin French
styling by Julie Ragolia

Performance is a kind of collective action. It is one of the truest collaborative art forms. Since the 1970s, Marina Abramović’s main collaborator has been the audience to some of her most iconic, dangerous and breathtaking performances, which are often durational and test the limits of the human body. For Abramović, the artist is a universal vector for the experiencing of all things and all emotions. To protect her art form, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute, which regularly holds workshops, lectures, seminars and performances around the world. She was recently chosen for the Pina Bausch professorship in Essen, Germany, where she has been working with a multidisciplinary group of performance artists over the course of a year in preparation for their ten-day durational performance at the Museum Folkwang. Miles Greenberg was one of her performers in a six-day production, NO INTERMISSION, at Theater Carré in Holland that took place earlier this year. They caught up to talk about the transformative power of durational performance and the importance of freedom in one’s artistic process.

MILES GREENBERG: You came up as a young performance artist in Amsterdam. Can you talk about how the show we did together at Theater Carré reflected those years in its format?

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: You know, it was inspiring that the space where we did the performance is not a museum space, it’s not a kunsthalle, and it’s not the kind of space where you traditionally show art. This was a theater, and to actually break all of these rules that the theater imposes and create new rules—the playfulness was a very important part of the show. After doing this stuff for fifty years now, I’m so fed up with the rules, with the political correctness, and with all the shit that’s going on. Now, with a bit of nostalgia, I'm looking to futurists, to dadaists, to surrealists, to all these people with groups that actually created a history of art by playing. They weren’t afraid of mistakes. This is such an important situation where real, live art can happen, and also shit can happen, and both of those things are so exciting for me. We chose the artists but the artists were free to propose the things that fit them the best. Normally, if you have a show in a museum, you have to send the title of the performance, the duration, and what space it’s going to be in. All these regulations have to be followed, and then the work is made. I mean, who could have predicted that on the last day, the audience and the performers would jump into the canal, just like that (laughs). Normally, you don’t jump in the cold canal in Holland, apart from it being dirty, but never mind.

GREENBERG: I totally feel that. I think it resonated so much on a personal level when I went and participated. On the flip side, I had a museum show that I was working on back home in New York that was very regimented. Every single day I was having to deal with another tiny issue. There was so much preconception that it completely lost the spontaneity. It was great, but that process is so different. The performance we did in Holland, I had no idea what to expect, and that was such a palate cleanser—to be able to feel the immediacy of how the performance came to be. It’s an immediate art form. How does immediacy in that way—and the gratification of being able to create something and see it immediately with your body, with the audience’s body—how does that still play into your work and your practice today?

Marc Jacobs merino wool, baby alpaca and polyamide hooded cape
Gucci moiré smart coat

ABRAMOVIĆ: Jan Hoet was one of the very few great curators in art history, he was the director for documenta IX, and at the time, he took from Joseph Beuys' 350 secret potato recipes. So, every day we would have a new recipe and we hated potatoes. We wouldn’t get anything else, but he created this kind of family situation where you eat potatoes even though you hate them and you create art, because we all have to be in the same space with the same chemistry for this to happen. We need this feeling of freedom to create anything. It's from chaos that things actually happen, but you have to have that kind of vision.

Your project went through so many different phases. You were proposing one idea and then something else completely. What makes it great is when it's not just the artist who is doing experimental stuff, but the people who organize the performances need to have the same attitude. Did you feel the freedom to change the concept and everything else as you went along, even once you were in performance?

GREENBERG: Oh, things changed up until the last moment of the very last performance, absolutely. There were so many decisions that were made while making and while doing. The opportunity of having six days to feel it out with that audience every single day in a different way was great. Not everybody performed every single day. There were different versions and configurations, and everybody was working so much internally. For example, the way that Ying Mae walked through with her singing vase—it made the performance radically different from the day before.

ABRAMOVIĆ: When the public normally comes to a performance, they’re led into an auditorium, they take their seats as they’re used to. But then, they had one person, which was me, actually watch over them. And my watching was designed to turn them toward something they’re going to see, something that would be for a long duration, where they can just relax and take this as an experiment. I was trying to make this kind of dream for them, and after that, it strikes them that some can go to the left side, others to the right side, and some can go up. They were all free now to move around. But to start with a very simple exercise—let’s all breathe together twelve times—these simple exercises are so important to energetically connect everybody who would normally come to the theater not connected, and it works. So, the only structure was that one, and then everything else was so free, and whatever happens will happen.  

GREENBERG: I love the way that you describe the difference between theater and performance. In theater, it's a fake knife and you’re seeing ketchup, whereas in performance, the knife is real and so is the blood. You like to bring people into the universe and prepare them to see something. I’m wondering how that differentiation exists in the audience’s body?

ABRAMOVIĆ: What we were doing at the Carré was so interesting because it was a mix of everything. There was a big performative team that was very theatrical, but also there was the Spanish guy who would really take a drug that would knock him down, and then he’s left to the public to take care of him. It was absolute exposure, vulnerability, and danger. This was real and you could immediately see how the public reacted emotionally on each day. Your work was extremely emotional too, it was dance, but you introduce this physicality of endless time, where you could come and see it in the ballroom and then you could have a full dinner, come back, and it's still there. It’s never-ending, that investment of time, of possible danger, it brings a lot of emotion to the public. The durational performance form is so unique because it has this transformative function. You’re not just doing it because you’re going through the process and changing yourself, you’re also changing the public. That’s the key. It was so interesting how every day more and more people came. They would invite their friends, and those friends would invite their friends because they couldn’t believe what was happening. At the end, it was this huge celebration and the audience was no longer looking at something, they were a part of something.

GREENBERG: Can you talk a little about teaching at Essen, the legacy of Pina Bausch and that crossing over with your performance work?

ABRAMOVIĆ: My love for Pina Bausch really dates back a long time. In the ’70s, she had an incredibly radical approach to dance, made some amazing pieces, and there’s hardly anyone left from the original company because everyone is so old, but the new group is still performing these pieces. Every time I see their work I’m in shock by how relevant, how contemporary, how incredibly important it is, and how many other choreographers take from her to create their own work. For her, dancing was everything. It was walking in the snow with bare feet, standing in the forest, smoking a cigarette—there was no limit to what dancing was. And also, working to the point of trance. I went to see The Rite of Spring, which I had already seen several versions of, but I wasn’t prepared for this one. They went to Uganda and they took thirty dancers from fourteen African countries, male and female. The moment they started to act, you’re elevated to this spiritual, shamanistic, energetic level where you hardly even notice you’re breathing. Unbelievable. It was so spectacular because they add their own culture to the dance, which she made space for. This was really something.

I stopped teaching a long time ago, but I got a phone call from Pina Bausch’s son and he said that when she died, she wanted to establish this academy in Essen where people from different disciplines could create a multidisciplinary group, and I was the first teacher who’d been asked. It would only be teaching for one year and we could propose different people. I got 150 proposals and I chose twenty-six people. These people are coming from from physical theater, from drama, not many from dance, a male opera singer who is a soprano, there are jazz vocalists, composers, and none of them have ever done anything durational in their own fields. So, we’re working together for this big event and they gave me half of the museum where they’re going to perform for ten days, six hours a day. More and more, I want to create new work that mixes performance and dance. The Pina Bausch approach to the physicality and the spirituality of dance really speaks to me the most.

GREENBERG: I’m curious about your group of students. What kind of work are they producing?

ABRAMOVIĆ: The way I’m teaching, I want to be just a conductor to their own ideas. I don’t want to push my ideas, so I don’t even talk to them about my work. They can look on Google, but I’m not giving it. They bring their own stories, problems, investigations, dramas, whatever they want to do. There’s one student, she’s working on physical theater and her biggest drama is feeling ignored in public but being too chicken. So now, she studies chickens. She went to several farms in Germany, she covered herself completely with feathers, and she’s going to do ten days, six hours a day, being a chicken. It’s perfectly done and I just give her space, time, and the facilities.

It was very funny also to tell them how to value their performance projects financially. Because they are students, they are not going to be paid. The school pays for the production, plus they get a museum show, TV show, catalogue—I mean, I’ve never seen such a thing in my life. But I said to them, “In real life, you have to be paid for what you do, so put the price.” Some of them put like 300 bucks and some like $10,000. Very interesting how they value their work. (laughs)

GREENBERG: You’re an extremely good teacher, because nobody ever teaches that.

ABRAMOVIĆ: You know, I never got paid for any performance in my entire life until The Artist is Present [2012], and they had to pay me because I performed for three months in the museum and I had to pay my mortgage. Tino Sehgal is a genius because he really found out how to sell a performance. Kiss [2003] was the first thing he ever sold and he sold it for $250,000. It’s an edition of five plus two artist proofs, and lots of museums bought it. Every museum has to pay for the piece plus the performers, but at the same time, you have to control who they are. I saw this piece performed really wonderfully, and then another time I saw two shitty guys who had no charisma, nothing. So, you have to set up rules for how the piece should be performed in the future.