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 SCHOORL: 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.

SCHOORL: 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.

SCHOORL: 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.

SCHOORL: 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.

SCHOORL: 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.

SCHOORL: 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.

SCHOORL: 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.

Superstudio: Italian Radical Design

Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City, 1970. Internal Landscape. Courtesy Studio Branzi

interview by Oliver Kupper

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

Superstudio, "Misura series" for Zanotta, 1970. plastic laminate with silkscreen print. Photographed in Panzano nel Chianti, Italy. Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KUPPER: Where did the love of film come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entering A World of Concerns: Survival Structures for Humanity

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

text by Abbey Meaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.