At the Sharjah Biennial in 2017, Dineo Seshee Bopape exhibited away from the main exhibition galleries, in a dusty, sun-beaten courtyard. When I came upon her presentation, it didn’t immediately register as art; more like the ruins of a local shrine, with modest ritual offerings: a stack of burnt bricks, chunks of coal on torn strips of crumpled foil and plastic water bottles half-full of pale liquid. The space felt used. Later on, when I wandered past the site at night, its eerie power was amplified by moonlight.

The piece’s title, +/- 1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (2017), pointed specifically to its feeling of blighted history. This work was my introduction to Bopape, and her earthy vocabulary of materials: herbs, crystals, ash, soil, feathers, light. Video, too, has been one of her most consistent mediums, often including music, both by Bopape and by great musicians of the past, such as Nina Simone. Her gallery shows have a way of standing in stark contrast to their white-walled containers. At Art in General, New York, in 2016, she installed a thick bed of carved soil; at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the same year, a hill of rubble; for the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff this year, murals of painted mud.

Since Sharjah, Bopape and I have attempted multiple methods of conducting a formal dialogue. First we tried email, which faltered, then we tried exchanging voice messages, which had its own awkward limits. All our correspondence was made particularly tricky because, in the past years, Bopape has been nomadic, moving through residencies across the world (as have I). Born in Polokwane, South Africa, in 1981, she attended Columbia in New York for graduate school, and when we found time to record a video conversation recently she was on a residency in Paris, where she was studying “the energy and resonance of minerals to translate them into song”.

Bopape responded to most of my questions with long pauses, and often used “yeah” in the punctuative way that others use “um”. We spoke for two hours during an overlap in our very different time zones, just after I woke and just before she fell asleep. Later, she made a few text edits through email, using various forms of punctuation.

A Current of Somebody Else

Ross Simonini You told me that when you think of someone, they often write to you soon after.

Dineo Seshee Bopape Yeah. More and more.

RS What do you think about that as a phenomenon?

DSB I think I might just be more and more conscious of it. (Forgetfulness.) It’s not quite terrifying, but it almost is. Things are so quick and I wonder about the thoughts that pass through my mind, what they mean physically. And I wonder if thinking about somebody when they call does something to the other thoughts that one is not conscious of sending out (and the denial of it is a wonder).

RS Are you saying these thoughts can be disruptive?

DSB Sometimes when I feel unhappy about something I feel as though that person/thing/ being knows that I’m unhappy about them/it. I’m not sure whether it’s the thoughts transferring, or whether I am being paranoid that ‘they’ have read my thoughts, or whether the universe is that open, we don’t quite have the borders that we imagined, things are more permeable…

RS Do you try to control your thoughts?

DSB That reminds me of a meditation practice I often do, where I’m asked to observe rather than control the thoughts coming through. That creates a different experience than I shouldn’t be thinking about that right now.

RS Is it ever necessary to control, though?

DSB When you say that, that reminds me: I keep imagining political prisoners in the ‘history’ of South Africa, the thoughts that might’ve gone through their minds, let’s say Winnie Mandela’s mind when she was incarcerated, in solitary confinement. At those moments, you – she/the person/I/one – have to have and exercise some kind of control, because otherwise it’s possible to let fears just take over your mind.

RS I remember in Sharjah, you and I were talking about Bessie Head’s 1973 novel A Question of Power, which is a portrait of a woman losing her mind. Maybe we try to control thoughts to avoid insanity?

DSB Yeah. ‘Thoughts’ are already being controlled. We’re taught to do so as young kids – to ignore certain parts of reality, particular ways of hearing or trusting the information that one is receiving from the surrounding environment.

RS What thoughts from your childhood are you trying to change?

DSB There are a lot. Where to start? I grew up in post/transitional-apartheid South Africa in a township, in a village, in a city, in a town… so I’m working through those kinds of peripheral, and integral, structural ideas/weeds… and my place in the world in relation to, not in any order, colonialism, patriarchy, ethnocentrism, racism, classism, capitalism, feminism, MTV, media, plants, soil, space, beauty, water, ethics.

RS How do you change these?

DSB Through research, I’m trying to ‘understand’ what happened on the African continent, between Bantu, between Africans and Europeans, and between Africans and Arabs etc. I spend a lot of time thinking about what information is and was taught in school, and socially, and what information is and was not. It takes a lot of effort to go digging for what actually happened in the 1600s, the 1800s, etc.

RS I find that reading is helpful for turning off assumptions. You can replace your own thoughts with someone else’s.

DSB That reminds me of something that Kara Walker once said in an interview, about the struggle of being caught up in the narrative of the protagonist of a story. I think she was speaking about Gone with the Wind. It could apply to ideologies in general, and to being swept by a current of somebody else’s thoughts. This could be pleasant, or not.

An Inverted Commerce

RS You are often moving through different residencies. Do you enjoy being nomadic?

DSB Yeah…? This answer changes depending on the day. I have a preference generally for longer residencies rather than ones for one month or two weeks. Yeah. That would feel too short.

RS How long are you in Paris?

DSB Six months. Perhaps.

RS Have you been focusing on one project while there?

DSB I’m doing a residency, which is supposed to be focused on a research project, but you know how it goes: the other project starts calling and ‘all of a sudden’ you have projects and conversations in the US and Italy. It’s also so hard to be in one place anymore. One mentally goes everywhere.

RS You’re not really in Paris.

DSB Even though I’m in Paris, I feel as though I’m everywhere else. I’m not sure what it feels like then to be fully here, or whether it’s possible to really be here as well.

RS Is our world moving towards placelessness?

DSB Maybe, but what would be the point of the body then? This weight that we are. We have to bear the shadow that travels with us so that we travel through or with it. We somehow can’t deny it.

RS Are your installations a way for you to reclaim placeness?

DSB Yeah, definitely. (It depends.) And the research and the search for particular elements for the work, for soil or for clay or certain herbs or objects. That inserts me into the place. And also involving the people who are from the place helps me to be in communication with that place. Perhaps there are also various energies that are passing through a place or through people at a particular spot at a particular time. That then makes the place apt for an event where one is able to receive all the information needed, parallel to it or not.

RS Do you plan your installations or just respond to a place when you get there?

DSB One thing leads to another. I have a general plan but if I get too specific, if I know exactly what I’m going to do, it doesn’t work out well. It gets a bit boring for me in the process of making, realising. To discover new things, there has to be some room for things to come. Sometimes I have a list of ingredients going in, but I’m not sure how they would come together. I have a feeling, like knowing I want to use clay here but not being sure exactly what the clay would be doing or how it would be arranged in the space.

RS Do you try to develop that feeling?

DSB Sometimes it’s more about resting. Things flow easier when there’s less pressure. When I can think of something without directly looking at it, almost ignoring it, or half-ignoring it, then it comes alive.

RS Working on multiple projects at once seems like a good way to achieve that.

DSB Yeah, it is. That’s been happening consciously and unconsciously. Even with videos, I like playing with something over and over again, on multiple timelines, and seeing where it leads and having multiple possibilities of where the story might go.

RS Did you enjoy grad school, with all its different projects?

DSB I found it amazing. And moving from Amsterdam to New York, I had to shift the way I was working, because it would have been too expensive to move all the objects I was working with, so I had to imagine a different relationship to those objects. The conversations with people, from other contexts, were not the same as the conversations that had been happening in Europe. Europe had felt conservative in some regard, and New York just felt more open, more vibrant. There were people from everywhere, it felt, bits and pieces of the whole world seemed to intersect. It was vibrant.

RS How so?

DSB I was in Amsterdam for two years during a moment that seemed to highlight the ‘conservatism’. There had been a (Dutch) rightwinger who’d been shot by a radical (Dutch?) Muslim, after some Islamophobic statements etc, and that had a particular effect on the society. But even before that, or rather amidst that, I found the Dutch had somehow collective amnesia about slavery and the history of the world and their role in where things are. So that was shocking, because I hadn’t expected it. And that affected how my presence was read and how my presence in particular videowork would be read (and also how I had made sense of the park benches.) All of that just felt too tight and not expansive enough. New York was much more open, more spacious, I could just be myself.

RS Were you making similar work in grad school to your work now?

DSB Yes and no. I think the themes were similar. I actually did an interview recently, and the writer was shocked that I was using a lot of plastic in the work in grad school. But for me, for example, glitter feels like water.

RS You still use plastic water bottles.

DSB Yeah. It brings up a conversation about what is purely natural (or not). It’s an inverted commerce. And there’s certain implications with every material. If the framing of that object happens too soon, then one can easily miss another thread.

A Bridge to Jump over the Water

RS Plants play a big part in your work. Are they also a big part of your life?

DSB [laughs] Yeah.

RS Why are you laughing?

DSB Because I’m looking around and plants are everywhere in my studio: pots of tea, incense, dead plants, a living one (or five). A eucalyptus branch. So plants are: every day. We are: friends. This morning, I actually went back to an older work from 2011 and it had pictures of plants in it, and for me there was this longing in the photographs to connect to the real plants. I asked myself, why did I have photographs of the things rather than the actual plants in the space?

RS Last time we saw each other was at a lecture on plant intelligence.

DSB When you say plant intelligence, I become aware that I have a certain anxiety about the word ‘intelligence’ being applied to plants, or the necessity of applying it to plants or to animals, and our relationship collectively with ‘intelligence’ and being ‘smart’, and what is framed as their opposites. The idea that because plants are smart, it’s possible to then have empathy towards them, because they are deemed intelligent. But is it possible to have a relationship of respect for other beings without attributing something that’s ‘valuable’ in our current society? Can that thing be itself? Not stupid, not smart, just itself. Funnily enough, the other day I had a conversation with another artist about ‘Mother Nature’, and they had a similar itch: can nature just be itself without being gendered?

RS ‘Intelligent’ is one of our holy words. We are scared of artificial intelligence and obsessed with intelligent life from other planets.

DSB The ‘intelligence’ thing, the intelligence of a thing, orders the world in a particular, possibly epistemologically Euro-imperialistic-Darwinistic, way. It’s a sociopolitical prejudice for a particular type of logic, I find. And it sends me back to childhood and being able to perform, or not, in particular situations, like playing a game and being able to follow the rules – colouring within the lines of a colouring book, for example. Similarly with IQ tests, which were culturally prejudiced. And that hovers in the same WhatsApp group as European colonial practices, for example the practice of taking indigenous children to colonial boarding schools, where the aim was to raise a child into a particular type of ‘intelligence’, to ‘de-nativise’/‘de-savage’ them. Wow, that erupts so many things in me, hmm. James Baldwin wrote, ‘We do not know enough about the mind,/or how the conundrum of the imagination/dictates, discovers,/or can dismember what we feel,/or what we find’.

RS Do you favour intuition over intelligence?

DSB When you say that, I also realise that I have a tense relationship with the word ‘intuition’. For some time, that word was a bit ‘scary’, because of how it had been assigned politically, historically. I had a fear that intuitive knowing would be perceived as being lesser than book knowledge. For instance, when asked if I’d planned out my installations. With a particular type of education (politic), planning was over-valued above ‘intuition’.

But words are a bit tricky, because one gets caught up in definition and its matrix. And how does one express something without having to rely on an ‘old’ system – or rather than old, let’s say a wonder-reducing narrative – to make something valid? It’s like the science that’s now describing the function of dreams. Are dreams to be understood only through science? Has it to be trusted only through a particular system of knowing?

RS Are you often asked to explain your art?

DSB Yeah, even the process of interviews is tricky, because it’s also important to draw a window into a space to allow for people to come in. Or a bridge to jump over the water, if the water seems too big. A thread that one can hold on to, to be able to enter the work.

RS Do you find that you need that when you look at art?

DSB Sometimes. All the time. Some works are easy to enter but others need ‘context’. For me, before going to (insert place), I hadn’t really understood the work that was coming out of (insert place), with the artists from there. After having been there, that opened up a new way of reading the work. It’s like visiting a friend that you’ve known awhile, and then you go visit their family or hometown and certain things just become clearer. They become particular to a place, everything becomes connected, and complexities emerge.

On a spring day, I spent a long, edifying Friday with Richard Tuttle in New York. In the afternoon we dined at a fine Italian restaurant in Midtown and surveyed a potential space for one of Tuttle’s future exhibitions, talking all the while. In the evening, I accompanied him on his weekly ritual at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which included eating pastries, drinking espresso, studying the map of exhibits and proceeding on a long, rambling tour through the galleries, guided by one of the great eccentric personalities of contemporary art.

Tuttle began showing his work in the mid-’60s, at the age of 24, and quickly became a significant contributor in an art scene that included artists as diverse as Robert Smithson and Agnes Martin. While some of Tuttle’s early, spare work builds upon the precedent of Minimalism, his art for the last 50 years has maintained its own curious independence: defi- ant of trends in contemporary culture, poetic in times dominated by austere conceptual art.

Tuttle’s quiet abstractions take the form of painting, assemblage, sculpture and drawing, often simultaneously, as if such discrete categories never occurred to him. The philosoph- ical category of importance to Tuttle is the object. The objects he constructs have employed a host of common materials—lengths of rope and string, strips of tape, balloons, pieces of plywood, lightbulbs. One material, fabric, has been essential to his practice since his earliest exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where he showed works such as crumpled, irregular octagons of dyed cloth. His show earlier this year at New York’s Pace Gallery, “Looking for the Map,” displayed an ornamental approach to fabric, which is also seen in his sartorial sensibility (at our meeting, he wore a psychedelic gold tie and a purple handkerchief tucked into his shirt pocket). The works in the Pace show served as a series of studies for a very large-scale installation that opens this month in London at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, filling the space with a rainbow of textiles, some made by Tuttle, some culled from international collections. The installation is accompanied by a major, five-decade retrospective of Tuttle’s work, held just a couple miles across town, at the Whitechapel Gallery. The two showings comprise one exhibition, titled “I Don’t Know or The Weave of Textile Language.”

In our conversation, Tuttle’s discussion of his work and his intentions for the dual-venue show involved frequent tangents, asides, references and exegesis. Listening to him speak can feel vertiginous and labyrinthine in a way that complements his work. Questions are rarely answered. Topics are introduced and dropped without explanation. The following is an edited version of our interview that attempts to retain the tumbling, digressive spirit of Tuttle’s speech.

ROSS SIMONINI The last time we met, you told me that you’d been trying to “hold strong to the object.” What does that mean?

RICHARD TUTTLE The object is important for looking. The eye, seeing the totality, is physical and spiritual—a lifelong development. I have a col- lection of glass objects. The eye is invited to go through, if it wants, or to stop. These are superb training devices. Objects can be made with embodied hands or disembodied hands. I like making things with disembodied hands.

SIMONINI What are those?

TUTTLE Our culture is anti-hand; it thinks it’s better to work with your head. Everybody aspires to go to college, so they don’t have to work with their hands, yet hands are a source of intelligence. You divorce yourself from a part of your intelligence without them. To work with disembodied hands is perfect; you have all the intelligence, but don’t submit to the sentimentality that says handmade is more valuable. The “maker’s movement” is not sentimental.

As a little kid, I saw my grandfather draw from across the room. I saw harmony between eye/brain, hand and heart/spirit; I was astonished. People say there are just as many, if not more, neurons in the heart as in the brain; people talk about neurons in the intestines. Where does intelligence come from? I have not heard anyone talking about the hand having neurons.

SIMONINI Your recent Pace show was a series of studies for the upcoming Tate installation.

TUTTLE That show made me happy and excited about the future. [Pace founder] Arne Glimcher sent me an e-mail, saying that many people came into the show as grumpy New Yorkers and left happy. The show could turn you around.

SIMONINI How so?

Purple Octagonal, 1967, dyed canvas and thread, 54 7/8 by 55 1/2 inches. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, and Pace Gallery, New York.

TUTTLE If you made a list of great novels, symphonies and architecture, you could see the beauty of humanity, which is one of the hardest things to see right now. We’re so critical, so competitive. We blame ourselves for ruining the Earth. A theme in the Pace show was the beauty of people. Jacob Boehme, an early-Renaissance German mystic, wrote The Signature of All Things. It’s nice to pass that book on; it’s always been a kind of secret, generation after generation. His chief idea is that mystical presence exists as a signature. Every time you see something, part of what you see is the signature, which is the beauty of man. I’m taking time with this, because the last time we spoke, we discussed Plato.

SIMONINI I read the Phaedrus dialogue on your recommendation.

TUTTLE Isn’t it amazing? I’m reading the Apology. I thought recently, “The reason our ancestors began standing on their hind legs was to talk, to look in each other’s faces.” It wasn’t to pick apples. It was to be face to face, because dialogue is the glue of the social matrix. I’m also reading Sophocles. You have to read the original Greek. It’s not hard. I just do two lines a day.

SIMONINI Very slow reading.

TUTTLE That is the difference from school. If I had studied the works there, with exams, etc., they would have given me too much. I give myself one hour a day, so I’m always hungry. I can’t wait for the next 24 hours to pass.

SIMONINI How do these works connect to the London show?

TUTTLE Figuring out skin and structure, skin and bones. The key of the Turbine Hall project is scale. A seed wants to grow; it has growth potential. Sometimes I start a drawing on a piece of paper and can hardly keep it on the page.

SIMONINI Largeness isn’t something I’d associate you with. Your work is generally focused and contained, and your drawings usually deal with the center of the support.

TUTTLE One can distinguish between scale and size. Usually, we are happy with the issue of size—if it’s small, it’s small; if it’s big, it’s big. But scale is a question of the individual. Each person, everyone ever born, has a unique scale. They have it like a unique fingerprint. You can decide to find your scale. The day you find it is a day you remember. It changes your life. Your parents may determine your size, but you determine your scale. Your creative dimension allows you to create yourself in a more significant way than how you are created by your parents. Life offers each of us that possibility. It’s sad how few take it up.

SIMONINI Are you talking about proportion?

TUTTLE Human experience is a constant struggle between the real and the unreal. Every moment you are faced with trying to work out an acceptable relationship between the two. Art is almost by definition a working out of real and unreal; that is its value. The world is a place where size issues need to be worked out, and this involves all kinds of quantitative issues, which can be expressed emotionally or physically, in relationships with other people, etc. But the relations between the real and the unreal are negotiated internally, where issues of scale come in. You don’t want to waste your time look- ing at an artist who doesn’t know their scale. The buzz around the Turbine Hall show is because the world knows me as making artwork of small size.

SIMONINI Certainly.

In 23, 1998, acrylic, canvas and wood, 131⁄4 by 121⁄2 by 2 inches. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Pace Gallery. Photo Joerg Lohse.

TUTTLE The reason I can do small size is because my scale can be small. Scale contains the issue of right and wrong, the moral and the ethical. I don’t care if you kill your mother, if your ethics are right. Everyone wants their point of view to prevail, but it’s so much better to have many points of view.

SIMONINI Can you distinguish between the real and the unreal?

TUTTLE Our brains are real. Mythology feeds the brain. Our souls are not real; truth feeds soul. We need mythology the way dogs need to sniff. Their brains don’t work without sniffing. Newspapers feed us mythology.

SIMONINI Is it sort of like the difference between sensory and extrasensory?

TUTTLE Western culture defines reality as concrete. Asian culture defines reality as the absence of the concrete, as absolute nothingness. Western culture drives Asian people out of their minds, and Asian culture drives Western people out of theirs. Maybe I can contribute the next, best definition of concrete. Eastern tradition has major achievements; Western does, too. So it’s not about choosing one over the other. We have to figure out how to absorb and move on. When I speak about the real and the not real, the real is a sort of Western side. It’s a stupid, thumbnail way of speaking.

SIMONINI Is art real or unreal?

TUTTLE Art is unreal; color is real. That’s why painting is so fascinating. Color is real when you paint, but paint is not real. Paint is one of the great inventions. It can transport you from this world to the next. It’s a major thing.

SIMONINI How did the Turbine Hall show come about for you?

TUTTLE Chris Dercon became director of Tate Modern [in 2011]. I met Chris when he was 18. He was an intern at a gallery in the attic of an old building in Ghent.

SIMONINI What work were you showing then?

TUTTLE Notebook drawings. Those just showed at the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont in Burlington [in an exhibition of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel collection]. The notebook drawings were an attempt to solve the problem of the artist in democracy. Marginalized, because the artist cannot subordinate personality to demos—an artist can’t really be a member. The drawings came to be about how many could be made. There were probably 7,000. I threw most of them out. When I was moving, I took some of them to the garbage. Herb Vogel came to visit. I said to him, “The garbage truck’s coming in five minutes. If you want those drawings, you can have them.” So he, being a collector, went down and got them.

Perceived Obstacle No. 72 (Oil Painting #1), 1991, oil and graphite on unstretched canvas, 133⁄4 by 381⁄2 inches. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Pace Gallery. Photo Kerry Ryan McFate.

SIMONINI Do you often throw out work?

TUTTLE If it’s a creative act, you can. But if it’s out of ego or intellect, you suffer a lot.

SIMONINI How does this relate to the Turbine Hall show?

TUTTLE The realized piece will be a model of itself and itself as a model; I don’t want just a blowup of a model. I’m working with a theater production manager on it. The problem is, I don’t know the stuff I need to know. What I most don’t know is how the skin is attached to the bones. As you saw in the Pace show, ambiguity between color and structure was stated quite clearly and exercised as ambiguity—that’s really hard to do. I’m thinking of the Steve Jobs biography I just read. He wound up in Silicon Valley after he went to Reed College. While at Reed, he sat in on a few calligraphy classes with Lloyd Reynolds—as did so many. That sense of design that Lloyd gave him led him into . . . I mean, we’re sitting across the street from one of the most important Apple stores. Its design comes from those simple calligraphy classes at Reed. I know other people like that—their ability to absorb is phenomenal.

SIMONINI Will you make most of the work for the Tate project beforehand?

TUTTLE We’ve already been working two and a half years. Chris Dercon was director of the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam during the time I made a show there. His strength is visionary, and I understand that my job for the Tate exhibition is (1) to understand his vision, (2) to realize it and (3) to make a Richard Tuttle show—a pretty tall order.

SIMONINI Do you feel like you’ve synthesized all of those?

TUTTLE Not yet. My dream is to be myself in public. The only way I could survive growing up was to construct a persona; it had nothing to do with me. I was a popular kid, functioned in the world, but I lived in another place.

SIMONINI Your mind was separate.

TUTTLE Yes. No one to talk to. When I came to New York I met Betty Parsons. Henri Bergson was important for her; she could say a picture is an accounting of the visible world, but it’s also an accounting of the invisible world. She knew the invisible world, and I lived in the invisible world.

Recently, I had a high school reunion. I loved all those people, and they loved me. They wanted me to come. In the end, I didn’t go. My friend called the next day. I said, “I have fought so hard to live in the world as I need to. I am never going back.”

SIMONINI I didn’t go to my reunion either.

TUTTLE My college reunion hooked me into doing a yearbook, because I had done the one for the class. I love books. I got dragged in, so I went, and everyone wanted to talk about playing Frisbee 50 years ago. These are smart leaders of America. We have inner lives; inner lives are destroyed, replaced by outer lives. My work is food for the inner life—I want someone to make something for my inner life.

The first day of kindergarten, my drawing was rejected by the teacher. Now I’ve studied a bit of child development, and I see that my drawing was at genius level, which the teacher wasn’t able to grasp. Not only did I not receive praise for a drawing that was important to me, but I was marginalized, punished. I have never trusted a teacher the rest of my life. That’s good. One of my lines is, “If Aristotle can’t be your teacher, you have to teach yourself.” When I speak at art schools, I say, “I’m not here to teach how to be an artist but to say, as best I can, what it’s like to be an artist.” They are eager to hear.

originally published | September 27, 2014

In the last few years, I’ve been spending my free time learning about the esoteric side of Taoism, known as Neidan or “internal alchemy.” This is a set of mysterious techniques aimed toward becoming an immortal being, a term which can be interpreted, like many religious ideas, both metaphorically and literally. The practice, which continues to this day, involves radical alternations to diet, sex, exercise, meditation, and every other basic element of life.

I remain an amateur enthusiast in this vast field of ancient knowledge but the two thinkers who have greatly helped me in my learning are Eva Wong, a taoist practitioner and translator, and Livia Kohn, a scholar and professor at Boston University. Both have produced many remarkable Taoist texts in their careers, archiving and translating rare works, opening the Western mind to this little-known branch of Taoist thought. Kohn’s book, The Taoist Experience had a particularly strong influence on me, and I have since followed the numerous studies she continues to publish through Three Pines press.

On the path for deeper understanding, I reached out to both of these women for an interview. Wong’s “correspondence manager” responded promptly by saying “Eva follows the hermit tradition of Taoism that does not publicize an individual in media presentations,” which was perhaps the greatest interview rejection I have yet to receive. Kohn, on the other hand, is a public figure, and often speaks about Taoism, so we arranged a time. We spoke for two hours, during which I asked her the questions that could be answered and avoided the ones that I wanted to remain unknown. 

ROSS SIMONINI: What is the sage?

LIVIA KOHN: Well, there are three different figures in Taoist literature, and the terms are used in various ways. One of them is the sage that you already referred to, but another term is called the perfected, which sometimes is translated to the true man or the genuine person. And the third one is the immortal. The perfected or true person is the most fundamental of the three in the sense that you could really just think of that as an accomplished mystic. So if you know some of the Zen masters, like every day is a good day, wherever I am I am blessed, I am constantly connected to Tao, and there’s no big personality issues, and there’s no major emotions that these people have ups and downs from. And there’s no planning or ambition or competition or just like a very enlightened, accomplished mystic kind of figure.

And then when you go on from there, the sage is the person who has all of that but who is also a political figure. A sage is a person who plays a role in society, in culture, in government. The perfected is a person who stays away from government, doesn’t want anything to do like a recluse or at least like a private person who says whatever goes on in society, I don’t want anything to do with it. There’s the sage, especially in the Tao Te Ching which is the classical literature place for that. The sage really is the ruler and a high government figure. And it is the sage that has these mystical qualities and flows along with Tao that changes society and that makes it perfect, makes it ideal and open to this very high level of what the Chinese call Great Peace. 

And immortals are a different dimension again because they have the mystical qualities, but in addition to that, they have shamanic power. They’re astral travelers. They go to the other world. They communicate with the spirits. They have all kinds of magical abilities so they can multi-locate and they have impact on nature, but they also stay away from society, so they’re not the kind of administrative types. They’re actually the most elusive of all. They live in the mountains and would be very unusual to come across.

RS: Are there living examples?

LK: Yes, there’s a book by a guy called Bill Porter. He was an English teacher in Taiwan for many years. He read all these stories, and he wanted to find out if these people were still around. Once China opened in the eighties and you could go to all kinds of places again, he made it his business to find them, and did. He hiked into the mountains and asked people who lived in monasteries, villages, and in isolated places, “Are there any recluses?” and some would say, “Yeah yeah, there is so and so, and you just have to climb there.” And so for many weeks and months, he climbed all over the place and found quite a few of these people who were isolated from society. Some of them were very eccentric. Some were eating only walnuts. One of them—it was the late eighties—had never even heard of Mao Zedong. He was so far separated from society, which was like, wow. We have a document of all this, and it’s called The Road To Heaven. It’s a really nice book.

And then we have people who are very high level Taoist masters. They rise through the ranks of the Taoist institution, but then they get tired of some of the political problems—administrative issues and such. So they just leave, and become what we call inner-city hermits. They live by themselves and do a lot of self-conservation practices and make some money by teaching calligraphy or doing something so they can survive. Some of these people we know because they’ve agreed to teach, and they’ve agreed to teach westerners.

RS: I’ve heard anecdotally that Taoism is growing a bit in popularity in the last few decades.

LK: That’s correct. After the Cultural Revolution, all the destruction, they had, I don’t know, ten temples left. Now there’s almost twenty thousand. I mean the numbers are just unbelievable. Some of the temples are really big, and some are small—somebody’s private property who sponsors the Taoists to live there. There are a lot of younger people who join the movement or religion nowadays. There are even some higher level educational institutions established in the early 2000s where people can train to be government-sponsored, where they can become very high level executives within the religion. Oh yeah. It’s flourishing all right.

RS: What do you attribute that to?

LK: Well, you have some religious freedom, not total religious freedom, but you have enough of a government sponsored openness that people can get the permits to rebuild. A lot of land was confiscated and it took a lot of time for the Taoists to go back to the local governments saying, you know, we’d like the land back, and they kept arguing. Eventually they got it back. By now most of it has been returned.

RS: So as you see it, Taoism was largely repressed for a period of time, but the Taoists remained. The interest was there, but it couldn’t be made public or funded or supported.

LK: Right, every village in Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, popular religion, shamanism, Islam. Every religion was suppressed starting in the 1940s during their major civil war. A lot of stuff was destroyed. And then people don’t really have time to sit and meditate when they have to fight for their survival. From the mid-thirties to the early nineties we’re looking at close to a sixty year hiatus of no religious activity in China.

Once the communists came to power in 1949, they suppressed religion, and then a lot of the temples got confiscated. People had to leave, and then whoever hung on was finally kicked out in the cultural revolution in 1966. By 1966, there were no temples or any places of religious worship left in the country. If there were a temple that had frescoes and paintings inside, they would whitewash over them.

The revolution ended in ’76. It took another ten years for people to finally accept it wasn’t coming back. People were very traumatized. All religions were essentially exterminated for that period. But you still have the knowledge, scriptures that are either hidden away or taken abroad. A lot of Taoist material has been re-imported from Taiwan and from overseas. There are some Taoist scholars who were trained in fairly complicated rituals in Taiwan who went over to mainland China and taught the Taoists what their rituals were.

People have to come back and learn. And then you may have some really older people who just went into hiding, and then they came back. They say they’re coming down from the mountains. So some knowledge survived. Some buildings survived. Culture survived. I’ve seen this. Some of the temples that used to be really big compounds with many different buildings. There was maybe one building left, and it was like all the statues were desecrated or ruined, and the place itself was razed, and the place itself was miserable. And then you know these bits and pieces, they started restoring by the late eighties. And it’s true for everything. The mosques, the churches, and the Buddhist temples––the same story.

RS: And the kind of Taoism that has become active again, does this encompass esoteric practices as well?

LK: Yes.

RS: Do you practice Taoism?

LK: To a certain degree. To me, a lot of Taoism is energy work. You’re relating to the universe through chi which is vital energy or life force. So you start working the philosophy long enough. I do a lot of Tai Chi  and Qigong practice. You sort of see yourself in those forms. I would never live in a house that does not use feng shui, and I arrange my life according to the principles of vital energy. But I don’t do a lot of the ritual things.

RS: How do Taoist talismans function? Are they considered art?

LK: Talismans are magical implements. They look like art but they’re not completely art. They’re more like the staff of a cardinal in the Catholic church. It’s a separate sign of power. Holy men and wizards and cardinals all have their staff. The staffs as much as Taoist talismans symbolize the power holy or special people are endowed with. They can certainly be ornate, but they’re not considered art.

A talisman is an amulet that contains the power of a particular deity or a particular divine entity, and that is geared toward a particular process. It may be protection against the monk influence. It may be protection against evil or negative energy. It may be in support of business success. It’s a consecrated holy piece of paper that has sacred writing on it. The writing is special both in content and form, reflecting a more original form of Chinese characters as they would be in heaven. A lot of talismanic writings are originally downloaded in trances by a medium. Of course, now you have a standardized pattern that people know. You know how to do this. They learn this over a number of years, and then they can provide the talismans with specific properties and then you can post these inside your house, or you can roll it up and put it on your body in a little pouch. You can put it on your belt. It’s more of a ritual implement like a protective device. This is a holy thing. It’s not art.

RS: How is literature used within Taoism? The same way that the Bible and the Torah are used in western religions? Are texts a source or focus of worship?

LK: No, it’s the same. The holy Taoist scriptures––it’s more like Islam. Islam has the belief that the Koran was originally placed in heaven and then it was just downloaded or transmitted by the Prophet, and that’s the Taoist idea. All holy scriptures are originally in heaven, and then every so often some parts get channeled or downloaded into specific revelations by prophets or by inspired seekers. Beyond that, too, Taoism is like other religions. You don’t just have the Torah and the Bible. You have commentary. You have exercises. You have people like St. Augustine and Ignatius of Loyola, St. Theresa. I mean, a ton of people who have done poetry and exercises and interpretations, and then they also have their own personal vision. They write biographies. You have the saints. You have priests, and monastics, and lay practitioners. Religious materials are multiple and not just one pack.

RS: You mentioned “heaven” a minute ago and I hear the celestial plane mentioned a lot in Taoist texts. How do the two ideas relate?

LK: I’d say it’s very similar. You have divine entities hidden above the clouds having a good time. 

RS: Some of the things you’ve written about, the more extreme practices of consuming a toxic substance such as cinnabar. Do these still go on today?

LK: The answer is yes, but it’s underground. Every so often some scholar somewhere comes across these things and the chemical or operative alchemy that you were talking about, they use cinnabar and mercury, and they refine these things. We don’t have a lot of documentation. But one of my grad students, he was interested in the practice called bigu, which is an extreme practice. It literally means “avoiding grain.” A radical practice, it’s historically described as one of the ways to achieve immortality and become an otherworldly kind of being. People would get to a point of being vegetarian and then eat very little grain. They supplement their diet with some herbal remedies. They do self massages to keep the energy flowing in the body. They also undertake eternal visualizations, a lot of breathing practices, and some physical movement. There’s a whole series of things, but the bottom line is that, after so many weeks or months of this, people no longer need to eat regular food and instead can live on breath. Some people would do it for a week and then they start eating again, a little bit, which is sort of okay. But once you talk about multiple months, it starts to get very strange. So my former student was looking at these historical documents. He also had an undergraduate degree in chemistry, and he was really into theology and nutrition. So he studied this combination of sesame and ginger and whatever else, and what that would do to the body, and how these concoctions can help people keep their strength while they’re refusing food.

Then he went to China. That was about fifteen years ago. He studied in various places at different universities, and he would look at texts and get help with his research. These texts, some of them are quite difficult to read. Then he started going to Taoists and ask if they practice bigu, and they would say, “No no no, we don’t even know what that is. Oh no no.” That went on for quite a while. Eventually he started to go to smaller temples, and he started to make friends, and people would begin to trust him. Then one of the guys takes him aside and, “By the way, I’ve done this.” And then he started to tell him his experience. He introduced him to another guy and another guy and to another guy. And so it turns out it’s common. Some people will really have done it for very vast, longer periods. It’s still around, but it takes a lot of effort to learn about.

RS: What is ecstatic sleep?

LK: That’s a fairly advanced form of internal alchemy where people refine their internal energies to create a spirit entity. At some point the spirit entity is able to start traveling, and so the person is just laying there, not moving in this trance and going off to the heavens. And the entity, that’s another one that is being done in the monastery.

RS: So a lot of this stuff, which often can read as if it’s a metaphor, is actually quite literal.

LK: Yes. Assume whatever you read is real. You may start thinking, oh, this is fictional, this is crazy. However, once you get over that you say, wait a second. Maybe there is something here that needs to be taken seriously. Maybe it sounds exaggerated. Yes, it maybe sounds fanciful, but there’s something there. If you look around in this country, you could google shamanic journey and find ten/fifteen websites where people will take you for a fee and train you to go into trance and visit whatever other world there is and meet your spirit guide and connect with various deities.

RS: Do you consider Taoism dogmatic?

LK: Not at all. It’s very practical. Everything about Asian religions is very practical. Dogma is utterly irrelevant. They don’t ask you what you believe. They always ask you what you do. And that’s true for all Asian creeds, including Hinduism and Buddhism and Shinto.

Overall, belief matters much less than what you’re doing. On the other hand, what’s also happened in Japan, people interviewed will say, “Oh no, I don’t have religion.” And then you turn around and say, “Wait a second, that’s a shrine to the ancestors.” And they say, “Oh no, that’s not religion. That’s just what I do.” See what I mean?

RS: That’s a nice distinction.

LK: To me a lot of religion has to do with how you divide your time. If you think, here’s Christmas and here’s Lent and here’s Easter and here’s Pentecost and Mary’s ascension, then it’s like the year is how you structure your thinking. That’s your religion. If you’re Jewish, Rosh Hoshanah is coming up. Then there’s Yom Kippur. All these different festivals. That’s what punctuates your year. And that’s what happens in these Asian places. If you’re like a Buddhist, then there’s all these various Buddhist festivals that you’re attending to. That’s the way traditionally people would go, “Oh yeah it’s so many weeks before or after Easter.” They wouldn’t so much focus on the beliefs associated with these events.

RS: When people talk about Taoism in China, it’s often placed in contrast to Confucianism, as if the two are at odds. Is this true to how you think it is played out?

LK: Yes, to a certain degree. The Confucians have a tendency to focus on society and on human relationships, and they believe if you make rules and if you systematically train people in ethical behavior and basic virtues then you can create this very nice society. It’s well organized and clearly rigid but also very society-focused kind of way of doing things. It’s everywhere. It pervades the culture. They don’t acknowledge it as such but the relationships are still very very important and the way you cultivate and deal with relationships is part of the work of Chinese culture. 

Taoism deals with the creation of the universe. They work more with chi, with energy, and so society is good and fine but it’s secondary to your relationship to nature and the greater universe and the energies that are flowing around. It’s a different way of approaching life, and it’s not totally contradictory. You can be very socially aware and also have a relationship and also honor the changing of the people, right? So a lot of Taoists and Taoist monasteries have mastered codes and ethical regulations that very closely echo the Confucian conduct code, code of conduct. They all engage in society on a Confucian level, but you have a tendency that Confucians tend to be more limited, like if you have a relationship you have to act a particular way, whereas Taoism, you may be the senior here but it might be good to step back and let the junior person do more because that’s the way the energy flows.

Jonathan Meese usually refers to himself in the third person, as if he were a character in the wild and tumultuous opera of his art. He is, of course, the protagonist, but there are plenty of supporting roles: Wagner, Hitler, Napoleon, Nero, Nietzsche and an ever-present, ever-erect phallus.

Through sculptures, paintings, performances, videos and writing, the Berlin- and Hamburg-based Meese has built a nightmarish world of power-hungry European men. It’s a place of crude, juvenile figuration and German military iconography. In Meese’s paintings, which are at the centre of his work, colours smear and simmer together in an energetic maelstrom that is both brutal and chromatically stunning.

For the artist, his entire project is one great deadpan farce. Meese is aggressively reappropriating the propaganda of the oppressor, draining any power that its language or imagery may hold. In this way, he sees his work as a denouncement of all ideology, political, religious or otherwise. He’s creating a visual manifesto of antiauthority, of true uninhibited freedom. He wants to be like an adolescent rolling around in the mud, and so it seems right that, for many years, his mother has served as his studio assistant.

To break down the systematic thinking around him, Meese embraces contradiction. In his ‘dictatorship of art’ he is not the dictator – art is – but the agitator, the trickster, the spectacle. During performances, he has worn a bicorne, fellated an alien doll and given the Nazi salute, an illegal act in Germany for which Meese was tried and acquitted in 2013. (‘Art has triumphed!’ he said in response.)

In February 2017 he called Donald Trump ‘the greatest performer on this planet right now, second only to myself’, a statement that manages to simultaneously mock and embody megalomania. His work is unabashedly slathered with his own image, and yet he is never the hero, always the fool.

Meese’s critique of German history is potent, but he’s also provincial in his interests. His painting clearly emerges out of German traditions, from the Expressionism of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde to the New Fauves of the 1980s, and many of the artists working in this same lineage – Jörg Immendorff, Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter, and Tal R – have been his regular collaborators. If Meese has an ultimate goal, it seems to be the long-sought German one: the totalised, multidisciplinary artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.

For the following interview, I emailed questions and he responded in scrawled responses, mostly legible. The handwritten text, often stylised in all caps and punctuated by exclamation marks, echoed the same statements squeezed from paint tubes onto his paintings. In videos of the artist, he speaks mostly at the top of his lungs, and even on paper he seems to be overflowing with the vehemence of a child playing an imaginary game of war.

Ross Simonini How do you define ideology?

Jonathan Meese Ideology is an invention of adult brains. Ideology is taste, not necessity. In nature there is no ideology. Children have no ideology. Objects have no ideology. Ideology is something that children are taught. Animals have no ideology, ideology seems to be only a need for adults. Every political system is ideological, so is religion, spiritualism, esoteric or self-fulfilment. Ideology consists of institutionalised thinking and behaviour. Ideology is always a devil circle of unnecessary activities. Ideology is never Art. Art is always totally free and absolutely contrary to ideological stupidity. Ideology is the worst obstacle against the future. Art destroys all ideologies. Art is the leader. Art overcomes all ideologies. Art says no to all politicians. Art rules. Art leads and Art takes over! The ‘dictatorship of Art’ is the leadership of evolution: ideology is always the enemy of evolution. Art is the sum of all evolutions.

RS But do you think people can truly escape ideology?

JM Jonathan Meese has always successfully escaped ideology by playing. Playing like a child is the answer to all ideological influences. An artist has to play away all ideological indoctrination. Artists have to keep away from all ideological terror. Ideology is always the room of fear. Artists have to stay away from fear or even have to destroy these cynical rooms. In Art censorship is forbidden, especially self-censorship. Obedience to ideological concepts is deadly for art. Art is the future. Art is the room of future. Artists should work in their ateliers without disturbances. Artists should be hermetic! Artists should only trust in Art, not policies. Art is not another political system, Art is stronger than all politicians. Art is no anarchy. Art is Total Order. Art is the Total Order of the future. Art is the most radical future! (Art is Total Love. Art is Total Respect.)

RS So isn’t ideology just a natural human state?

JM My mother and I fight daily over this question. She believes that ideology is inherent in human life. I think it is not. Children and babies are already human beings and do not need ideology… that need comes later. Why? Ideology seems to be a weapon of adults. These ‘teachers’ hammer ideology into the brains of the young, and I don’t accept this. My mother violently disagrees and thinks that human beings need ideologies to survive in a hostile world. She is eighty-seven years old and experienced a lot of ideological movements. Jonathan Meese truly awaits a world without ideologies. That will be the evolutionary step of total radicalism into a world of total Art. The ‘dictatorship of Art’ is the guarantee for survival. Art has no cynical aspects. Art is always the future. Art is the master.

RS How does working with your mother affect your process?

JM My mother is a natural authority. I did not ‘vote’ for her! My mother is chief, chief of evolution. My mother is not a God! My mother evolutionises Jonathan! My mother brings order into my life and my atelier! My mother disagrees with my visions but in the end she knows that something new must evolve. Dispute is totally necessary for future! Art is dispute, not discourse. Art is mother ‘Earth’.

RS Do you think education is possible without ideology?

JM Yes. Education itself is never ideological as long as there is no message, indoctrination or other political or religious influences! The education that leads to future allows children to play and learn without ideology. Ideology is always the jail of the past. Art is total freedom. In Art all ideological devil circles are destroyed. Evolution shows that we are not the masters but the children of the future. Evolution is the teacher of Art! Art is the education of nature. Art is total metabolism! Art is the pressure of the future. All children are artists. All Art lovers are Artists. Nature is Art.

RS Why do you capitalise ‘Art’?

JM Art is not God. Art stands above everything else. Art is the sum of all evolutions. In Art nobody has to kneel down, nobody has to pray and nobody has to make a pilgrimage. Art is no temple. Art is no holy ground.

RS So why call it a dictatorship of art?

JM The name ‘dictatorship of Art’ means the total declaration of total love towards Art. Art is like love, like friendship, like future, like mother, like father. Art is therefore not democratic but an evolutionary process! Art is, like the sun, a dictator, but an objective dictator, not an ideological one.

RS Is visual art well suited to rejecting ideology?

JM When people play, they serve Art, when people live in ideological systems and obey them, they are against Art. People have to free themselves from all ideological brainwashing! Ideology is the enemy of future. Ideological persons are brainwashed and brainwashers. Visual Art, like all Art is the guarantee for Evolution and Future.

RS Do you think of yourself as working in the lineage of Joseph Beuys, who declared everyone an artist?

JM Beuys became political in his later years. He suddenly trusted politics more than Art. Art is no political party. Art is no politician. Art survives. Politics vanish. Art is the counter reality. Art is the dreamland. Art is the antireality. Art is total future. Art says no to all nostalgic governments. Artists never trust politicians. Artists should never follow ideology! Artists should work constantly in their ateliers. Artists should not believe too much in cultural networking. Artists should love lovely isolation in their ateliers. Artists are loners!

RS Do you consider yourself a loner? What about your recent collaborations with Daniel Richter and Tal R?

JM Normally, I am a total loner and love to work on my own in my studio. Daniel Richter and Tal R are very, very old and close friends, and I trust them totally, so cooperation with them is no problem. We are three captains whose ships meet occasionally on the high seas of Art. In these collaborations we are totally even but not democratic. We do what is necessary. In Art, real friendship is needed, but it takes a long time to develop. Art is family business! Art is the exchange of respect! In Art you need patience! Art is the chain of loners! Daniel Richter, Tal R and Jonathan Meese are children of Art and play Art. Art is the total game and Artists are toys!

RS Is it true that you refuse to fly to exhibitions?

JM Yes. I don’t want to fly any more because I want to slow down, concentrate on my work in the studio and let the art travel. Art is not the artist. I am not afraid of flying. I just don’t want to be available all the time and everywhere.

RS Evolution and future are clearly two key concepts for you Evolution is an idea from science, which is of course its own ideology, and future is a construct. Aren’t these adult ideas?

JM Future is no problem for babies, animals or objects. Future seems to be only a problem for grown-up people, only ideological brains produce future problems. Children just play into the future. Future is no ideological construct for children or objects. Evolution happens without human interference. The only relevant question is: do we fear future or look forward to it? For an artist, future is the chief. An artist should never fear future. Evolution is Art. Art is Evolution. Evolution is future. Evolution is not revolution. We need people who serve evolution, not revolution. Evolution is not based on ideology. Revolution is always based on ideology. Nature needs no revolution. Only adult ideological brains produce revolution. Art is number 1! Art is the law! Art is the sum of all evolutions. Art is hermetic action. In art you don’t illustrate nowadays, you play future! Artists should never react on political day-to-day developments. Art is stronger than politics. Artists should never behave like politicians. Artists are baby animals. Artists are not left- or rightwing! Artists have no political ideologies. Artists doubt reality. Artists deny reality. Artists cannot serve reality. Artists are radical dreamers.

RS Why do you exhibit at all? Why work with the market or institutions or the Internet? Why not just play privately in your studio?

JM Jonathan Meese is no monk! To work alone in your studio does not mean that you are not connected to the world. I am suffering from reality, not Art. I fight against all ideologies because I am not cynical. I am not a religious prophet. Meese cannot live in the woods just looking at his own navel. As an Artist you love Art and Art will change the world and rule the world. I love the total power Art, I know that only Art is the government of the future. I cannot hide away because this would only be self-fulfilment! Art expands… Art is no lifestyle. Meese is no prophet but Meese takes responsibility! Meese sees failure and points at these wounds. I have to play against all Art enemies. Art is the most fascinating never-ending power of all. Art is the perpetual mobile. Art created everything. Art is the beginning with no end! Art is total Parsifal. Art rescues from reality!

RS When did this anti-ideology position begin for you?

JM No ideological adult ever injected the ideological juice into my brain. Meese’s brain is too well protected.

RS Why do you wear an all-black Adidas uniform?

JM Meese needs a uniform to protect himself against reality! I need a totally organised daily routine to be radical in Art. Everything in my life is structure, therefore I can totally concentrate on welcoming future. My home is my castle. My home is Art. Your home is Art. Everybody’s home is Art. We need to be based in our own homes. Art is as close as the point of your nose. Art is not far away. Very important! I wear Adidas because the three stripes frame the body and protect it. I love Adidas because it is simple, effective, not so expensive and practical. ‘Black’ is a very neutral colour and the opposite of white. White is too holy for me and too delicate. To wear a kind of Art-Uniform makes life easy. Artists should be radical in Art, not in real life. Reality should be banned and Art should take over. Art is Art!

Our Time

Humans want to see time, to give it shape. We picture time as a relentless force. We bargain with it and race against it, and as the visual beings we are, we want to look our rival in the eye. We want to transform this abstract idea into reality so that we might heal our endless anxiety about the future.

Science views time through physics. Newton described it as a container and Einstein folded it into space. Time is measured in observable movement—a day is a turn of the earth; a year, an orbit around the sun.For millennia, time has been a circle— the wheel of samsara, the Maya calendar, Nietzsche’s eternal return. The sundial materialized this. The clock mechanized it. The watch bound it to our bodies. We even named it “watch” because wherever we go, we keep our gaze fixed upon the second hand as it ticks away our lives.

The most common image of time is the simplest: a straight line. Invented in 1765, the timeline is a track in a single direction. Soon came synchronized times and the age of punctuality began: time zones, railroad time, consensual time.

In a famous debate with Einstein, the philosopher Henri Bergson rejected the whole paradigm of spatial time for an intuitive temporal experience. True time, he said, can only be accessed through introspection, and he called this phenomenon “duration.” Duration is the time produced by humans, ratherthan observed by them—a creative force, not a metric.

Bergson lost the debate, so we live in Einstein time, but he inspired many artists with his ideas, most notably Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time was an opus of duration.

Humans are aware of our personal time. We are morning larks, night owls, nostalgics, worrywarts. Can you believe a whole year has already passed? I thought that week would never end.

Bergson believed that if we come to know our own duration, we become filled with genius and produce something truly new.

Paint Time

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase illustrated space time by recalling the blurry, time-lapsed images of chronophotography. But most art expresses time in less literal terms.

Unlike space time, which can be shown in symbols, duration cannot be reduced
to a universal image and all art contains its own duration.

Literature invents its own relationship to time. Writers bend the pacing of plot to suit the needs of their ideas. Jorge Luis Borges saw his work as inventing “an infinite series of times ... parallel times ... a network of times.”

The filmmaker Chantal Akerman spoke of wanting to capture “the physical experience of time unfolding inside you.”

The interdisciplinary artist Dieter Roth spoke of using his work to record “a moment that endures ... that remains embedded and suspended in time.”

Art objects appear static, although we know they are not. Perhaps this is why fine art prioritizes timelessness, while fashion, film, and pop music emphasize trends and technology.

Timelessness is unreal but it is a suspension of disbelief that allows painting to invent new temporal possibilities. This is the enchantment of picture time.

Anyone who has ever lived with art knows how paint reveals itself over time. Every hour and mood transforms the work. After years of looking, a fresh shadow appears beneath a foot. The paint cracks like aged skin, offering its color back to the sun.

Some paintings explode on first look; others enter the eyes in an instant but remain quietly hanging in the mind for weeks, releasing their potency in a slow drip.

A work may take twenty years before a viewer is ready to receive it. Each artwork and viewer form their own temporal relationship.

Present Time

For me, duration is among of the great sensations of art. A good picture activates our sense of sight, space, body, and time. It dissolves the linear, circular diagrams and presents us with a direct metaphysical experience.

Roger White is a painter of duration. Through the classic forms—landscapes, still lifes, domestic scenes—he offers a doorway into the passage of time. When I look at his pictures, the clock fades away and I discover the rate of my nervous system.

There is no drama in these paintings. Emotional stimulation blurs time: on bad days, time drags, and on good ones it flies. For an artist, time speeds up when work is going well and stagnates when inspiration flags. The same could be said for viewing art. A bad film lasts forever.

Of course, a life free of conflict is neither possible nor desirable, but when art like White’s offers a respite from drama, we are given the opportunity to see beyond our mood, beyond the mechanical clock and peer into our own duration.

In spiritual practices, it is sacred to commune with time. Some call it “the now” or “God.” A seeker might reach for this communion through prayer or meditation and when she arrives there, it is said that she discovers the apotheosis of consciousness.

White gives the viewer glimpses of this awareness through objects so unremarkable they seem to bypass stimulation—a Brita water jug, a toilet bowl. He calls this the “presence” of painting.

Presence is a challenging state. There’s immediate pleasure in stimulation and distraction, but presence is a more subtle phenomenon. People who want to deeply connect with the present move to mountaintops and monasteries. They spend years sloughing off emotional noise and perceptual ticks.

Truly knowing time, or anything or anyone, is complex. An art experience of time is no different.

When I look at one of Roger White’s watercolors—a sprawling urban landscape
in the late afternoon—I somehow feel resentment, melancholy, clarity, and wonder all at once. It’s a little overwhelming, but along with all these feelings, White offers the sublime. The beauty of the world can save
us from ourselves.

Hand Time

Time is a fundamental medium for artists. Some pictures take years to create, some

seconds. A line can be drawn in a swipe or a drag. A mark in space is a mark in time.

The tempo of perceiving a painting might come from the pace of its creation: a Joan Mitchell flings itself at me; an Agnes Martin draws me in; a Helen Frankenthaler pours into my eyes.

The vocation of painting is also a game of time. “There’s never enough time to paint,” White says, “I hate that I wish I had more time to paint.”

A “productive” artist uses time for production, but some painting requires hours of staring. And each medium has its temporal necessities. Tempera dries quickly. Terracota crumbles. Bronze lives forever. Roger White chooses slow-drying mediums: oil paint is a waiting game and watercolor is an evaporating puddle.

“I remember seeing a show of portraits by Hans Memling at the Frick,” White says, “and thinking that there is not enough time in the modern world for someone to paint even one finger of one of these Flemish bankers. The entire structure of our experience is so radically different.”

Ultimately, what humans desire is not more minutes, but the feeling that we used our time well. We did the best we could with the time we had.

White Time

White’s mention of Memling invokes another category: historical time. Lineage, influence— these are sticky subjects for artists.

White works in the history of luminous painters: Caravaggio, Vermeer, Turner,

Yuskavage. Like them, he makes sunlight from paint.

He paints portraits of the sun, the ancient clock that helps to set our circadian rhythms. Most still life painting is a portrait of the sun. A bowl of cherries allows me to feel the sun as it inches across the sky. It brings me to the present, where I am neither rushing nor waiting, only growing aware of my awareness.

I am experiencing the moment while forming a memory of the moment at the same time. This is how Bergson described déjà vu.

For me, White’s calendar paintings are experiments with time. He depicts the diagram of modern time: the Gregorian calendar. It is a grid, intended to be read like a letter: left to right, top to bottom.

He stretches us into speculative time by creating years from the future—2049, 2086, 2027. He embeds abstract paintings inside the calendars themselves, creating paintings within paintings, times within times.

The more I consider White’s work through time, the more I see it in his fundamental impulse as an artist. His mirror paintings, his empty rooms, his studies of plastic packaging.

“When I talk about the plastic container paintings,” White says, “I mention that there are lots of implicit time scales: the time it takes to make the object, the time it takes to use it, the time it takes me to make the painting, a duration that the object exists,
a duration that the painting exists ... my most didactic works.”

Indeed, humans need new ways of perceiving time. Plastic is made from prehistoric fossils, a time too distant for the average person to understand. As far as we know, it may never decompose, and yet every day we casually fling chunks of it into landfills.

We can’t conceptualize this lifespan. It’s an abstract number, an intellectual concept, and we cannot see it. It is this limit of human imagination that can harm us.

When Mick Jagger sings, “time is on my side,” he taunts his listeners in the voice of the devil, because time is not on the side of humans. We remain forever caught up in its drama.

Somehow, painting—this ancient and simple desire—can reveal time. It can alter
our temporal reality. It can make us feel time in ways we could never logically understand. In a picture, we can feel what has always been.

This essay appears in thew new book, The Pedestrian, on the work of Roger White. Order here.

Anthea Hamilton’s art speaks the language of design. Her work is often a reconsideration of classic forms: tables, rugs, boots, tiles, wallpaper, kimonos. For her Turner Prize exhibition in 2016, she exhibited a doorway in the shape of a man’s ass, an idea she lovingly poached from the designer Gaetano Pesce. Yet this piece, like her other work, stretches design beyond its function, which is perhaps why she ultimately feels more at home in the messy experiment of contemporary art.

Hamilton refers to herself as indecisive, but her work expresses a bold freedom from any decided field. Like an interdisciplinary scholar, she slides fluidly between subject matter and source material. As with the Pesce-related work, she elegantly folds other artists into her practice, through curation, collaboration and collection. Her performance The Squash (2018) in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, for example, rooted itself in an old photo of choreography by Erick Hawkins to create an otherworldly experience of movement and installation. All of Hamilton’s work is a kind of collage, playing with nostalgia: a young John Travolta, the size of a wall, gazes at you; a cropped R. Crumb drawing looms overhead. As in a dream, the work’s very familiarity makes it all the more disorienting.

I spoke to Hamilton on the phone in late summer. She was warm and voluble and spoke openly about her life, while remaining at the measured distance of a business interaction. At that moment, she was emerging out of a pandemic-long hiatus from art and had just started thinking towards a fall show at O’Flaherty’s in New York.

Ross Simonini Your next show is two months away. Where are you at in that process?

Anthea Hamilton I’m always slow to start. I get tentative and nervous about committing to works, keep everything propositional and wait till nearly the last minute before diving into things. I must be waiting for a final kick up the ass to do it.

RS Do you usually need some external push to get moving?

AH I always like things really to be in dialogue, whatever shape that dialogue might be, a deadline or conversation with someone or reading a text. I’m someone who uses reciprocity to make things happen.

RS Is art communication for you?

AH I’m interested in the idea of performativity within an exhibition context. I like to use the endpoint as a performative moment, there’s a transition of performing from myself to the viewer and it’s over to them to animate the work.

RS You seem to take the audience into account quite a bit. Is that accurate?

AH I think it used to be more accurate, in the sense of prescribing what I think the audience is. For me, it’s a museum-going demographic. And maybe they’re the ones most designated to understand how they’re functioning within that space. I’m recognising their physical behaviours – how people tend to move, how long they stay within a space, how they’re being invited to think about something via information offered from the institution – and then trying to use that as material, as a way to create a framework for how a work can function. But it’s also thinking about potential audiences or those who don’t tend to go to those spaces – my shows can be designed for uses that may never occur. I don’t just mean people who might be underrepresented in gallery-going statistics but people from other places, times, animals, vegetables, and so on.

RS Is sociological behaviour an interest of yours?

AH It’s more like observation of an etiquette: recognising the patterns of behaviour but trying not to have them be too prescriptive. It was always something I thought about in a sculptural and formal way, how to scale a work to make someone look at it or stand next to it in a certain manner, or what would happen when you would make something superhuman size, and then have somebody be in proximity to it. Or what happens if you make someone peer really closely at something? Sometimes it can be a good idea to put something high up on the wall so everybody can see it, not just that person who likes to squish themselves in front of it. What if your viewing height is lower than average and you can’t see something? It’s not a fair experience for them either. So I’m just trying to offer different types of people different experiences. I tend to lead with the visual but process it alongside the other senses.

RS When you find an image that compels you, is your first instinct to use it?

AH I used to see everything as an image, whether an object or a space, and what was pertinent about images is that they had edges.

Plus I was interested in what fell outside of their visual space. But I don’t necessarily think in images now. I’m trying to think about what happens when I take that kind of framework and zoom out and go extradimensional. Like how can those sensations or that kind of methodology work when I step further back?

RS What do you think about originality? Does it matter?

AH I’m more aware of the term ‘ownership’, and that maybe something was made by someone else’s hand. And perhaps that loops back to the idea of performativity and the multiplicity of perspectives. Because the search for originality is quite exhausting. Normally what happens is that there’s something in the air, people feel it and make it present at the same time in batches of responses but only one or two may be declared of the author of that moment. Novel things happen in waves. I find it hard to separate readings of the term ‘original’ from a territorial, divisive attitude.

RS If you were working on something and then you saw someone else was doing something similar, would you change what you were doing?

AH When you’re at art school, it’s very much about staking your own territory. Like, these are my tools and this is what I’m going to do, and these are my signatures and this is my brand. That very much seemed the language, and competitiveness was actively encouraged. But normally, if you had made the same thing, the reasons why were driven by different ideals. Or, inversely, you might share an ideology and that competition was there as a destructive move to stop alliances forming. Whatever it was [you made], it was just the right object at that time in culture and had a capacity to speak in a number of different ways. So I would be wondering whether what I’m interested in is just participating in the contemporary conversation, or whether the work itself was significant.

RS Has this happened to you?

AH Many times. The thing wasn’t important – on one occasion just a cigarette – but it kept appearing in people’s work. I realise I wanted to engage in a current conversation, to say hi and be friendly somehow. It entered the work at SculptureCenter [in Cigarette Pipes, 2016] as a pipe work in the courtyard. And maybe I just needed to get through it, you know? It supported me through that moment of wanting to make that work.

RS That’s such a nice, noncompetitive perspective.

AH Yeah. Maybe that’s a thing of being a bit older. My battles and ambitions lie elsewhere now. A notable artworld figure once said to me that the first ten years of working as an artist is a gift. Does that imply that you only have ten years’ worth of ideas within you? My first ten years is already up. I expect that person was trying to psych me out.

RS You return to some formal ideas, like the various kimonos you’ve made, but not others, like the cigarettes. What brings you back to an idea?

AH I can be super uptight when I’m really agonising over what things to do. I try not to declare myself indecisive because I feel that’s negative, but it probably appears to people I work with that I’m incredibly so. For instance, it took a month to decide the width of grout for The Squash at Tate Britain. It was only a millimetre’s difference, but it was important to me. It was a vast space, so the decision would have equally vast impact, and resonance. It needed that level of care – the performers would have been framed poorly otherwise, and therefore they’d be compromised.

So how that lives in the work is that things are associated with freeness. A kimono, it’s like somebody in LA walking down a glass staircase, just out of the shower, and they wrap themselves round in it: it’s silky, it’s chic, or it’s like the kimono-wearing geisha, who’s been declared by others as a site of sexual freedoms. The kimono has been so battered culturally, but it doesn’t ever lose its formal shape or visual impact. It’s a very stable object, I think. That’s why I come back to it. It can deal with whatever kind of absurd combination of imagery I might place on there.

RS How do you end up making grout-level decisions?

AH Oh my God. Usually someone’s messaging me furiously saying, ‘We need to know now’. And this forces a moment of epiphany, when I can recognise what decision to take to make the objects or materials perform as the most like themselves. And it turns out that five millimetres was the answer in that situation and the use of the black grout with white tiles ties the work to Superstudio’s Quaderna works, [French Nouveau Réalisme sculptor] Jean-Pierre Raynaud and cheaply installed municipal bathrooms. I think people may assume that the work is just quite visual, but really I’m just working with images to make other, nonvisual activity happen.

RS In retrospect, do you usually feel as if you’ve made the right choices?

AH I’m happy if I’ve finished something, but really finished it. I want to know I’ve considered something all the way around, inside and out. If I have to rush something, I just can’t enjoy it, even if it works. Because it would just feel cheap.

RS Do you get decision-fatigue in your daily life?

AH Oh, totally. I was decisioned out for quite a while for a couple of years or so. It was horrible. I’ve been working on the new public garden for Studio Voltaire in London, and when the invitation to take part in it arose I felt it would be really healthy to work on a garden because, you know, gardens are meant to be restorative, a site of sanctuary. But it was the same problem, just in a different format. It was decision-making fatigue and also infrastructural mess but with horticulture rather than fabric, tiles, press texts.

RS You can’t escape yourself.

AH That’s why I like to collaborate with other people, seeing how other individuals or industries make decisions, or what a decision is constituted from, or how it behaves in another field. Decision-making itself is a practice.

RS Do you live by a schedule?

AH At the moment I wake up early and have two hours of reading in the morning: summer schedule. I have a young kid and they have their own timescale that doesn’t map easily onto anything else. It requires a shift in what the creative process is.

RS Has parenthood affected your art?

AH So the first bit, when I was a new mother, was wild because there were a lot of hormones coursing through my body as a consequence of the very extreme, physical act in giving birth. There’s a lot of adrenaline and so I could get a lot of stuff done. Biologically, all was in place to protect the newborn: I was like a cavewoman, ready to fight off sabre-toothed tigers. My peripheral vision was increased, it was as though my eyes were on the side of my head. The notion of hours and minutes disappeared and time for me was wholly psychedelic. So it was a very free period because everything was totally deregulated. Several years later things are more institutionalised.

RS I often think about the monastic life and how every decision is already made for you, down to the foot you use to cross a threshold.

AH I’m literally thinking about monasteries and convents here: I romanticise that there’s kind of a decadence to that life because it’s so set. Like, you’re in a state of constant focus and holding oneself on a limit of rapture for even the smallest decisions or acts. You’re close to the edge all the time. Hormonally, it must be a really extreme space.

RS You play with the idea of being an artist and a designer. Do you see a distinction between the two?

AH I was recently speaking with someone who’s a product designer and felt they used a different vocabulary to how generally artists tend to speak, a different methodology of decision-making and solutions. The ways in which design problems are identified and resolved seem to exist quite differently to the way that artists deal with problems. And so, even though I agree with you that my practice maybe is quite blurry with regard to design, I think it is very much playing at it, like dressing up in the idea of being a designer. Because my problem-solving methodology wouldn’t make any sense in practical, structural terms. The physics wouldn’t hold up. Things I produce are often physically unstable – even relying on a precariousness of equilibrium – because I’m interested in the image of a solution or the image of a question, or how one asks the question. I feel like the work I’m making is just about making public the questions that are going through my head, rather than solutions.

RS What was the design vocabulary you mentioned?

AH This is based on a couple of conversations with individuals, I’m not trying to declare this as an absolute truth but they often spoke about this term ‘story’. Like, what is the story for this? And while I’m working quite logically through issues, the design process seemed to be more about narrativising situations. I’m almost more mathematical, or wishing to be. As a kid, maths was my absolute favourite subject – I loved it, I was very attracted by the idea of making things equal. It was about being logical.

RS Do you use systems in your work?

AH Mathematical is probably not the right term for it. It’s just about a sense of satisfaction when a conclusion is reached. There is no hidden technique to my process, but normally a system becomes clear to me in how I’m trying to understand things and I can fundamentally recognise myself in it all. I don’t think in a sequential way, which is why the work is the way it is – I want everything to happen at once. I can’t comprehend how you could possibly know how to have one thing before the other.

I wanted to make films, be a movie director, but still now I puzzle over how one would know what frame follows the next one. In fact, I’m more interested in the transitions in films rather than what the content is. For me it needs to be one big thing that happens all at once, a state forever finding its own forms and adapting to variables. Maybe it’s like when you see a big sum on a board: it’s all there.

An interview with Thom Yorke

(from the archives)

published in The Believer, 2008 (In Rainbows era)

At the turn of the twenty-first century, when Radiohead became the new gleaming hope for innovation in rock and roll, the band began renovating the dismal state of the music industry. At concerts they banned corporate sponsors; they attempted to minimize the heavy ecological footprint of traditional touring; and, recently, they released their seventh album, In Rainbows, without a record label, in a digital format on their website, allowing buyers to pay as much or as little as they liked.

Along with all these experiments came furies of hype that Thom Yorke, primary hype-target and living-legendary singer of the band, described as “being the Beatles, for a week.” Yorke has been reticent in his interactions with the press, and in past interviews, especially those from the OK Computer era, Yorke acted downright spiteful: hissing at questions he didn’t like, ignoring others, and criticizing the interviewer with Dylan-esque zingers: “Next question…” “It’s not your business.…” “Answering questions like that’s a fucking waste of time.” Meeting People Is Easy, the only of several Radiohead documentaries the band endorses, is mostly an investigation into the conflicted relationship between the press and the music.

I met Yorke in the lobby of his hotel, the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. Before the interview, he had spent the day shopping with Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s longtime producer, and during the interview he took a few minutes to talk about Australia with Neil Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts. He wore cargo pants mottled with white paint. He apologized four or five times for his jet lag, but responded to every question with thoughtfulness and patience, demonstrating what seemed to be a newfound acceptance of his place amid the stars of rock.

—Ross Simonini

I. “WINDOW-DRESSING AND NICE PROGRAMS ON THE TELLY”

ROSS SIMONINI: You’ve talked before about the environmentally awful aspects of touring and how Radiohead is trying to find more sustainable options for traveling. Have you come to any conclusions about a touring industry that would be less disastrous for the environment?

THOM YORKE: Well, when we started talking about touring, I had just been reading about David Bowie’s Station to Station tour. I’m not sure if this is entirely true, but as far as I can tell, he did actually go station to station. He didn’t get on a plane. He even did the Trans-Siberian Railway. And he did it across the US as well. So the first thing that I said, with a sort of pouty lower lip, was “I don’t want to fly, I want to go by train.” But then it was completely impossible. There was no way to do it. The infrastructure is no longer there. I mean, it wasn’t really there then either, but Bowie wasn’t taking a great deal of gear. So I don’t know. The whole thing has become a massive compromise, and the nature of flying, which is the absolute worst disaster situation… Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. The biggest disaster—’cause we had this study done—the biggest disaster is people getting there. People driving.

RS: That makes sense.

TY: We tried to set up carpooling things. I don’t know how effective it was. So we tried just playing cities, and that had its limits as well. But anyway, even if you ignore the flying thing, there’s still the basic lack of infrastructure and public transport, and that has the most significant effect on touring. And in fact, most of these issues, you go round and round until you sort of get to a point where unless, say, Obama decides to change the infrastructure, we’re all just pissing in the wind, especially in a city like L.A. I mean, did you know that it used to have fucking trams? I found that out when I wound up downtown one day. There’s fucking tram lines down there. And then a friend of mine gave me a book about it.

RS: Reading anything good right now?

TY: Yeah, I’m reading Bram Stoker’s short stories. Just read The Secret Agent, but I didn’t enjoy that very much. I’m a very slow reader. I don’t want anything heavy at the moment. But what was the last heavy thing I read? Borges’s Labyrinths. That was pretty cool. The idea is the story, you know. I tried reading it a few years ago, and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” and then some guy in the pub explained to me what was going on and then I actually really enjoyed it. And then I read that L.A. public-transit book.

RS: I remember when I first realized that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was really about the death of L.A.’s red-car system. That sort of blew my mind.

TY: The same thing happened in Europe. The car industry made a concerted effort to destroy public transit. And the Western government’s running around all like, “Oh no, what are we going to do? Blah, blah, blah.” Well, you fucking let it happen. You let it happen. So you figure it out.

RS: So on future tours, do you think you’ll stick to the standard touring style?

TY: At the moment, there’s a limit. Or we could just not do it.

BLVR: That shouldn’t have to be the answer. Should all international touring artists stop playing live to minimize emissions?

TY: Well, I don’t know, because at what point is it all a self-fulfilling ego thing? “Hey, I’m doing everybody a favor here.” Are you really? Are you sure about that? Or are you doing yourself a favor?

RS: What about your day-to-day life? Have you made any changes there?

TY: We’ve had a house by the sea for eight years. It’s got one of those systems that go into the ground. Uh, what is that called? I know this. I know this, but I’ve got jet lag.… Ground-source heat. Yeah, so that house has basically become carbon neutral, barring the energy it took to do it. So that’s exciting.

RS: Was that difficult to do?

TY: Well, we first looked into it two years ago and, yeah, it was a nightmare then—because again, the government hadn’t decided to encourage companies to invest in this sort of thing. But now they have decided to, so it’s a lot easier. So now companies know that they can make money doing it. So it’s the same thing. If Obama now said, “I want shit to happen,” it would make a massive difference. ’Cause no matter what way you look at it, once companies know they can make money out of it, they’re gonna do it. But they ain’t gonna do it if the government is standing in the way. Sadly, as individuals, you learn pretty quickly that this is about the big shit. It’s got to be at the level of law and infrastructure. It has to feel fair to people. I’m being vague, but I got involved in this campaign in the UK where we got bills through parliament to commit to reducing carbon emissions.

RS: The Big Ask?

TY: Yeah, and straightaway the thing we realized is, well, infrastructure is actually what this is all about. Everything else is window-dressing and nice programs on the telly that make you feel good. Everybody has to do it ’cause they have to do it. A friend of mine, an environmentalist, was explaining it like a war scenario. It’s exactly the same as a situation in the Second World War and rationing. People should start thinking that way right now. Rationing only worked because everyone knew that was the rule. That was it. That’s what it’s all about.

RS: So you think the government needs to step in?

TY: Well, say a Western government came out and said, “Now we’re going to ration your energy consumption.” I mean, that’s going to mean some serious shit to people. But that’s what’s going to need to happen.

RS: Would you say that the Big Ask was successful?

TY: It was successful because it made the government do something it absolutely did not want to do. But really, it’s not succeeded because, in a sense, it hasn’t done anything at all.

II. “THE MUSIC BUSINESS WAS WAITING TO DIE IN ITS CURRENT FORM ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO.”

RS: It’s looking like people aren’t going to listen to music in a physical form for much longer, since CDs and records are being replaced by digital music.

TY: But then the CD was never physical, because it was digital.

RS: Right.

TY: But yeah, you don’t have the artwork with digital. I mean, I always hated CDs. Me and Stanley [Donwood, Radiohead’s longtime album-art designer] always hated CDs. Just a fucking nightmare.

RS: Based on the way you released In Rainbows, it seems as if you have no problems with the digital switch.

TY: I’m happy to see the CD format disappear. But what about laser discs?

RS: Let’s switch to the most impractical medium of all.

TY: Yeah, completely. [Laughs] But, no, I’m not too bothered with it. I’m more interested with the way things sound. Because of the nature of the music software, within the music itself, the tendency is toward soft synths and soft effects—and I use these too—which are all internal, inside the computer. And I think that’s making a big difference to music as well. Some of it’s really exciting but some of it’s a bit lame-ass. It gives everything a softness which is not very exciting to listen to. I know Modeselektor would love me for saying this.

RS: Plus the tinny, low-fidelity quality of MP3s has become the standard way to hear music.

TY: Yeah, that’s a bummer. But I’m out of my depth here. Nigel [Godrich] is the one to talk to about this.

RS: It’s funny, because the loss of palpable CD artwork seems like it would effect Radiohead more than other bands, considering that your artwork collaborations with Stanley Donwood have become so linked to your aesthetic. How do you normally work with Donwood on artwork?

TY: Has it? Well, the In Rainbows artwork came literally from him knocking a table over. He had some candles on a table and, well, we were gonna do some pornographic etchings, which didn’t work out for a number of really good reasons…. They were pornographic landscape etchings.

RS: Pornographic landscape etchings, huh? Is that how I would describe them if I saw them?

TY: No, you’d say, “That’s a bunch of fucking scratches on a piece of paper, mate.” [Laughs] But in the process of doing that he knocked all these candles onto his paper and thought, Well, that looks nice, scanned it in, and went from there.

RS: And weren’t NASA pictures somehow involved?

TY: Me and my son got into watching the shuttle live. And one day I ended up at the gallery to the NASA page, which is fucking amazing. So all my input ended up being, “Here, look at these NASA pictures.”

RS: So you’ll continue collaborating with Stanley on artwork? This isn’t the end of Radiohead album art as we know it?

TY: No, we’ve actually got a really good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out.

RS: In a digital realm?

TY: In a physical realm and a digital realm. But, yeah… no, I can’t tell you what it is. [Laughs] Sorry to be so vague about everything.

RS: Other than just the physical quality of the music, the move toward digital is killing the traditional music label.

TY: Yeah, there’s a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about twenty years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead. So you have this top-heavy infrastructure. The press is top-heavy in the same way. You think, Why are these people surviving? Well, because they just started reissuing the back catalog.

RS: So it seems like you don’t really consider this transition a loss in any way whatsoever?

TY: Vinyl sales have gone up, you know. It’s no great shame that labels and CDs are gone.

RS: Will less physical musical production mean less plastic and carbon energy?

TY: That’s not entirely true, because, you know, all the servers have to run. All the big providers are trying to work out a way to reduce the energy waste of the servers. It’s a massive ecological disaster. The servers themselves are built like small rack things and they’re all running at the same power, day in, day out. But they’re not being used at capacity at all. And there are fucking huge buildings full of them. It’s apparently a huge expense for the providers and it’s a huge energy waste.

RS: And that’s worse than all the plastic?

TY: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know how to weigh them. That’s when you have to pay the twenty thousand dollars to the experts. The virtual world is not going to be environmentally safe until they find a way to rationalize it.

III. “FORTY MINUTES OF BLOOD AND SWEAT ISN’T ENOUGH.”

RS: One of the aspects of your pay-as-you-will method was that people could pay up to $99.99, right?

TY: Yeah.

RS: So why did you set that limit? Why would you say it’s OK for people to pay you a hundred dollars for this album?

TY: It’s not. You’re barking mad if you do that.

RS: But people did it, right?

TY: Yeah, yeah. Uh, why did we do it? Honestly, those meetings were so, so intense. I mean, they were really fun, but we were making it up as we went along. The ninety-nine-dollars thing came as a limit, because we didn’t want people showing off, saying, “Look how much I’ve spent!” But I guess the ninety-nine dollars was bad enough.

RS: How many people paid full price?

TY: I don’t know. There were a bunch. I’ve got all the figures somewhere, including a country-by-country breakdown.

RS: So you can see which nations are the most frugal...

TY: Oh yeah, but I’m not going to talk about that…

RS: People talked a lot about paying as little as they want for an album, but you didn’t hear a lot about people paying as much as they wanted. If you keep thinking about this idea a little, with people giving money to musicians, you start thinking that artists could start functioning, at least financially, almost like nonprofit organizations.

TY: Sure, but that sounds mawkish. For us, it was more about a statement of belief, like, “We believe the people find music extremely valuable and we’re going to prove it.” Everybody else was like, “Oh, it’s the end of the world, the sky is falling in,” and we decided to figure a new method. But then again, it depends who you talk to in the band, because, to me, the whole name-your-own-price thing was definitely secondary to being able to leak it ourselves, rather than having some guy at a record plant do it. And that was where I was coming from. But we’re a funny bunch. All these ideas came from a group of fifteen of us, sitting around a room, saying, “Yeah, that will work.” Most people would think, That will never work. A lot of it came from Chris [Hufford, Radiohead’s manager]. If it didn’t work, we could’ve just blamed him.

RS: Do you think it worked?

TY: Oh, yeah. It worked on two or three different levels. The first level is just sort of getting a point across that we wanted to get across about music being valuable. It also worked as a way of using the Internet to promote your record, without having to use iTunes or Google or whatever. You rely on the fact that you know a lot of people want to hear it. You don’t want to have to go to the radio first and go through all that bullshit about what’s the first single. You don’t want to have to go to the press. That was my thing, like, I am not giving it to the press two months early so they can tear it to shreds and destroy it for people before they’ve even heard it. And it worked on that level. And it also worked financially.

RS: Do you think this method would work for other bands who aren’t as known as Radiohead?

TY: With the press, we’re in a lucky position where we don’t really have to rely on a reviewer’s opinion, so why would we let that get in the way? If people want to play it for themselves, why don’t we just give it to them to listen to? I just don’t want to have to read about it first.

RS: And that style of release definitely promotes the album as a work of art, rather than as a bunch of singles floating around the Internet.

TY: Oh, that’s interesting. I appreciate that. Unfortunately, a lot of people got the album in the wrong order.

RS: What about the idea of an album as a musical form? You think that format is still worthwhile amid iPod shuffling?

TY: I’m not very interested in the album at the moment.

RS: I’ve heard you talk a lot about singles and EPs. Is that what you’re moving toward?

TY: I’ve got this running joke: Mr. Tanaka runs this magazine in Japan. He always says to me, “EPs next time?” And I say yes and go off on one, and he says, “Bullshit.” [Laughs] But I think really, this time, it could work. It’s part of the physical-release plan I was talking about earlier. None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us. It’s also linked up to this whole thing about what is the band, what is the method of how we get together and work. But you know, Jonny [Greenwood] and I have talked about sitting down and writing songs for orchestra and orchestrating it fully and just doing it like that and then doing a live take of it and that’s it—finished. We’ve always wanted to do it, but we’ve never done it because, I think the reason is, we’re always taking songs that haven’t been written for that, and then trying to adapt them. That’s one possible EP because, with things like that, you think, Do you want to do a whole record like that? Or do you just want to get stuck into it for a bit and see how it feels?

RS: Certain ideas seem like they aren’t meant to be forty-five minutes long.

TY: Yeah. I mean, obviously, there’s still something great about the album. It’s just, for us, right now, we need to get away from it for a bit. But it’s important to keep it going. The CD-reissue thing almost killed it, because all the labels were like, “Seventy minutes! Let’s fill it up! Blah, blah, blah.” So you get all the bonus-track shit. The majors used to put huge pressure on us and everyone to put extra stuff at the end—you know, to give the shop something extra to sell. All that fucking crap. As if your forty minutes of blood and sweat isn’t enough. But basically, they were charging too much for the CD—they knew it, and they were trying to justify it with extra stuff.

RS: Thinking about it, digital albums could really be any length these days. You could make it five hours or you could do a Stockhausen thing and—

TY: What? With the helicopters? [Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet was written for string quartet and helicopter.]

RS: Yeah. He also wrote an opera that lasted seven days.

TY: Nigel wants to do this thing where, I mean, I know it would be awful, but hey…

RS: But hey…

TY: He says, like, OK, we book in for three days, and at the end of the three days we put two tracks up every week and we do it for six weeks. I mean, it’ll never happen, but that idea of, we put it out even if we don’t know what it is and then, oh dear, it’s out.

RS: Almost like an automatic writing process.

TY: To us, that’s completely against everything we normally think. This may be shit. We don’t know. We haven’t had time to realize it yet. You know, that sort of thing. But that kind of gives the game away, because, actually, we are shit. And that’s why it takes three years to uncover the stuff underneath. The lyrics, I know, would be appalling. Jonny’s really big on increasing our output, though. He has a better way of saying it. Like “knocking shit out” or something. He can’t stand it anymore, the pace of the way we work. It’s fallout from all our false starts.

IV. “THE DEATH KNELL OF AN AGING ROCK BAND”

RS: In some ways, the way Internet singles work is close to the way things used to be with the music industry in the ’50s, before full-lengths were the thing, and radio singles were what defined artists.

TY: Right, and if you forget about the money issue for just a minute, if it’s possible to do that—because these are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about—and you look at it in terms of the most amazing broadcasting network ever built, then it’s completely different. In some ways, that’s the best way of looking at it. I mean, I don’t spend my fucking life downloading free MP3s, because I hate the websites. No one seems to know what they’re talking about. I’d much rather go to sites like Boomkat, where people know what they’re talking about.

RS: Boomkat is great.

TY: It’s brilliant. To me, that’s a business model. It’s like when I used to go to music shops in Oxford. You’re looking at this and you’re looking at that and there’s a whole line of other things going down the side saying, “You’ll probably like this,” and “You might like this.”

RS: I love those stores where everything’s hand-selected and the clerks write little descriptions about the music.

TY: Yeah, and you can listen to it all. I mean, Boomkat is very specific with the type of stuff they flog there, but I can’t see why that wouldn’t work for all music.

RS: Actually, I think it was on one of those types of blurbs where I read the “return to form” phrase for In Rainbows, which I’ve heard about twenty times since.

TY: [Snorts] But have you not noticed that they always say that? That’s the death knell of an aging rock band right there.

RS: Well, it also doesn’t seem like there’s a form to return to.

TY: We’re formless motherfuckers.

RS: Do you feel like there’s any definitive sound that you’ve been solidifying over your career?

TY: I fucking hope not.

RS: There’s this idea of Radiohead as a band who is always in transition.

TY: It just always feels like, we’ve gone down that road now. We’ve done that now. That’s that. In Rainbows was a particular aesthetic and I can’t bear the idea of doing that again. Not that it’s not good, I just can’t… bear… that.

RS: Do you think it’s really possible for artists to stay static anyway, to take one idea and develop it on the micro level over an entire career?

TY: Solo artists can do that.

RS: Yeah, seems like it would be impossible to stay static in a band.

TY: Absolutely, completely, utterly impossible, at least in our band. I mean, because everybody wants different things. Everybody brings different things to it. Jonny’s got his thing. He’ll always be trying to get extra things in there.

RS: Extra things?

TY: Yeah, come on, we need some wrong notes, he’s always saying. OK, you got ’em.

RS: So what’s the next sound?

TY: As a band we haven’t gotten together much. I’ve just been working on stuff.

RS: Electronic?

TY: Well, yeah, ’cause my inability to play drums dictates certain electronic drums. Computers are pretty nice at tidying you up. It’s great. Actually, it’s not that great… but I’ve been working, keeping myself going. It’s like a limb. I need to keep exercising it. Otherwise it goes dead, floppy.

The below recording was made shortly after the above interview.

Materialists are compelled by the things of the world. Usually such things are understood to be luxuries—cars, clothing, jewelry—objects they accumulate for the sake of worldly status. In artistic circles and leftist political ideologies, these sorts of materialists are often derided as the shallow kind of people you should avoid at all costs.

The philosopher Jane Bennett provides a more generous concept of materialism. For her, matter is everything—electricity, feelings, ideas—and each of these things is an embodiment of a “profoundly generic” vital force. This is not a mystical source of energy, like God, but the fundamental animating substance of the world. There is no intrinsic hierarchy: gold hums with the same vitality as carrion.

From this perspective, a materialist connects to the force through things, whether natural or artificial. Hoarders and artists are two examples of people who are so sensitive to things that they dedicate their lives to the power of thingness. Such people are not acquiring things for wealth, but because they find the truth of reality within the living presence of matter.

Neovitalists, new materialists, object-oriented ontologists—Bennett is part of a movement of philosophers rethinking our relationship to things. The implications of their ideas are vast, radically shifting the way we engage with the natural world.

Bennett is a professor of political theory at Johns Hopkins and is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), and Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (2020). We corresponded by email in fall 2024 to produce the following exchange.

—Ross Simonini

ROSS SIMONINI

As you’ve developed your own philosophy over the years, how has it changed the way you experience the world?

JANE BENNETT

A philosophy of vibrant matter is, among other things, a filter for perception. It directs attention toward—marks as notable—some happenings and some aspects of things rather than others. A philosophy is in that way a sensibility, a style of seeing and feeling and thinking, of selective sympathy.

Sensibilities evolve or dissolve on their own, as time passes and different atmospheres are inhaled. But a particular style of encounter can also be induced by more conscious practices or habits. My growing sense of the liveliness of things was cultivated by a habit of reading nineteenth-century nature writing, twenty-first-century ecological poetry and plant science, and Renaissance herbalists, and by a tendency to doodle (more on that later) and to walk along Baltimore’s alleys and patches of woods and trash-strewn streams.

Lately, the reading also includes Paul Klee’s notebooks (“there is a non-optical way of intimate physical contact . . . that reaches the eye . . . through the cosmic bond that descends from above”); Cicero on divination (frogs have “some faculty of premonition, clear enough of itself, but too dark for human comprehension”); Zhuangzi (on orienting toward the hinge of the Dao, “a state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites”); Roger Caillois (“I felt myself beginning to resemble, not to resemble anything but just to resemble”); the poets Inger Christensen (“I always thought reality was something you became when you grew up”), Lia Purpura (“the despoiled and radiant now”), and Forrest Gander (“How to sustain attentiveness? How to keep the mind from dropping its needle into the worn grooves of association?”). These and other literary/literal exercises help to reveal how bodies and forces exceed their role as useful/harmful objects. They show nonhuman or non-exclusively-human things to be participants living alongside and inside human endeavoring; they direct attention to how things ingress into and alter us.

RS

Do you often think through other people’s quotations?

JB

Yes, for sure. When I come across a good one, I write it down on one of the index cards I keep in my bag.

RS

Joseph Beuys said, “Only the human ability to think is able to bring new causes into the world.” What do you think about this? To you, is it anthropocentric? Absurd?

JB

Anthropocentric, yes, but not absurd. Because there are surely occasions when the ethical need is to prioritize people over other forms of being—even as I also affirm an expansive, multispecied understanding of what it is to be human, and even as I also affirm that there are many other-than-human agencies involved in “creativity.” I am here drawn toward Henri Bergson’s notion of “creative evolution,” i.e., the claim that the universe as such, and not only its human elements, is capable of a more-than-mechanical repetition that produces novelty, or that which is more than the sum of preexisting parts.

RS

You mentioned Renaissance herbalists. What have you learned from them?

JB

I’ll talk about the strange and wonderful Paracelsus (1493–1541): herbalist, alchemist, experimental scientist, pagan/Christian. He teaches me to look closely at the physical shapes of things, and to better discern how the past gets inscribed in the lines of a body. Paracelsus was good at the patient, curious, nonjudgmental practice of what Walt Whitman called “doting.” He doted on plants in order to divine the divine signs he believed were implanted in them—hints from God concerning their potential uses to retain or restore human health. The Satyrion plant, for example, a kind of orchid, has roots resembling testicles, a resemblance that for Paracelsus indicated its medicinal use for men seeking virility. I don’t share his faith in a cosmos of divine hints or “signatures,” but I try to imitate his exquisite, sensuous attention to the lines and shapes of things.

Paracelsus also teaches about the value of focusing attention not only on already-formed shapes but also, and this is more difficult, on the energetic processes from which they emerge. Keep on the alert, in particular, to those very subtle moments inside a process when a vague potential is about to (maybe) become something more actual—when the seed is just about to sprout, or the democratic culture is on the cusp of transitioning to fascism. Paracelsus describes this as happening at the “hem” of the “matrix” of nature: the edge of the matrix folds over on itself to form the consistency needed for a “thing.”

RS

Is your definition of vitality entirely about a thing’s capacity to produce effects in the world?

JB

Yes, more or less. I think there are vitalities and intensities that are not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by the meanings they offer us.

RS

I know your definition is not a kind of animism or pantheism, where there’s a nonmaterial presence behind the substance. Do you believe that everything is a kind of material?

JB

Yes, I do, but materiality in the sense not only of formed bodies but also of their protean potential precursors, such as effervescent energies and restless movements, some subtle in the extreme, which is why I am now trying to catch the drift of the Daoism of Zhuangzi.

RS

Erich Fromm talks about two modes of existing in the world: being and having. Our relationship to things in the world is usually having-based, but you also believe that people who are sensitive to objects can relate to things in a kind of being mode. Is that right?

JB

Yes, in a being mode, and also in a mode of sympathizing or trying to form productive alliances across always-porous bodies. Even stones can absorb new colors or microorganisms.

RS

Are some things more alive than others? Are some artworks?

JB

Everything has the potential to enliven and reveal its liveliness. In general I think it’s foolish, and falsifying, to offer a definite rank ordering, despite the fact that some such ranking seems endemic to human perception and to some extent survival. The force of one thing as received by another (including us) varies with every occasion, with every encounter—the elements composing that force are always multiple and in transit.

RS

What art expresses your philosophy?

JB

One powerful such expression is Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Dada heads (1920) and her marionettes and stage set for King Stag (1918). Puppets deploy anthropomorphism to nonanthropocentric effect.

RS

What film does?

JB

I am infected by Len Lye’s Free Radicals (1958–79; more on that later). I also can’t get over Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987).

RS

As a political philosopher, do you care about the fruit of action being grown from your philosophy?

JB

I do care. I’m hoping to add an oomph of endeavor to more ecological ways of sensing and acting—with the hope that such a sensibility becomes a slightly more powerful lure within a nightmarish culture of endless growth, consumption, exploitation, extraction, waste, profit, etc. etc. A philosophy sensibility can’t yield “fruit” in the reliable way that trees (sometimes) do, but it can still be a subtle force vying and allying with billions of other influences.

It’s also a good idea to be somewhat skeptical about the dominant model of action that’s usually assumed within the question of a philosophy’s effectiveness. That model tends to imagine actors as standing outside the field of happenings, and entering into it by way of a decisive act, an assertive intervention whose effects will be obvious and macro level. Motivated in part by a longing for one fell swoop, that model associates what is most effective with what is most direct or overtly disruptive. Sometimes that works, but that image of efficacy tends to occlude other, less heroic models of acting. There are feminist, Daoist, and many other kinds of practice oriented instead to becoming attuned to the natural, political, economic, aesthetic ecologies in which we live, in order to foster a capacity to discern their potential turning points or nascent shifts in direction. The idea is to enact small but potent tweaks or amendments that inflect, from the inside out, the tenor, propensity, or trajectory of a process. And to do so in a way that’s unlikely to prompt an immediate counterreaction.

RS

Have other philosophers ever changed your experience of the world in a way you wish they had not? Have they opened Pandora’s box for you? Or has the understanding of philosophy always been helpful?

JB

Interesting question. I was a nice Italian American Catholic girl until I stumbled upon [Friedrich] Nietzsche, who opened a Pandora’s box of disquieting affects—new anxieties about violence, and more generally about mortal creatures’ prospects for happiness once god is dead. Do I regret that? No. That encounter opened the way for what came next, which was the course of my life. (Nietzsche is onto something with amor fati.) More generally, if I encounter a philosophy that doesn’t stick, or bores me, or is ethically or aesthetically repellent ([Jacques] Lacan? Ayn Rand?), I tend to just move on.

RS

I’ve heard you describe doodling as an expression of the nonhuman. For you, does this relate to the way automatic drawing attempts to express the unconscious?

JB

The unconscious is but one way to acknowledge that there’s so much that happens to us, with us, around us, about which we are ignorant or only very dimly aware. Another way to nod to that point is to appreciate that we live on many planes at once—the conceptual and the spatial, the shaped and the vague, the static and the vibratory, the geological and the biographical, the everyday and the cosmic. Each plane intersects with or shades off into others; existence is an overrich mix of impressions, tempos, feelings, and moods. Life, as they say, is complicated. Or, as Klee puts it, “It is not easy to orient yourself in a whole that is made up of parts belonging to different dimensions.”

Doodles, as lines and shapes on their way to elsewhere (Klee speaks of lines “out for a walk”), mark and express the dim, unspoken, vibratory, or cosmic planes of human existence. There’s a peculiar experience of myself that comes to the fore while doodling—an “I” that is carried along by a creative process of influx and efflux that would not be the same without me and yet seems to carry on whether or not I am present. That’s a theme I find in and explore by way of Whitman’s poems, as in this passage from “Song of Myself”:

Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,

Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,

Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,

Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,

I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I.

The nondeliberate aspect of doodles suggested to the Surrealists that doodles express an obscure region of the human psyche called the unconscious—what Carl Jung called the “unfathomable dark recesses of the conscious mind,” with its “wealth of subliminal perception.” The Surrealist Max Morise described doodles as “spontaneous images” prompted by “imperceptible undulations of the flux of thought.” Surrealist games of automatic drawing, such as the “exquisite corpse,” aim to unearth the secrets of this psychic substratum and to render more perceptible the undulations of human thought.

There’s no doubt that the figure of an inner unconscious realm has much explanatory and therapeutic power. But a Freudian model of it does not capture well the doodler’s sense of the presencing of a flux that exceeds intrapsyche and interpsyche relations, a vibrant matter that overflows the frame of human thought/mind and operates more broadly. The anthropocentrism of Surrealism makes it difficult to detect ahuman prompts from flora, breezes, atmospheres, fauna, etc. A psyche-centric account of doodling raises the question of whether doodling is an automatic process or a creative human act, but such an either/or insinuates that artistry is an exclusively human power, an idea fostered by a binary grammar of active subjects and (relatively) passive objects. And if, instead, bodies and forces of many different sorts are capable of the effort of impress-operations, then other questions concerning doodling come to the fore: How do doodles bear witness to outside forces that have seeped in, and to a distributive, conjoint quality of action? A messy swarm of outdoor elements activates a drawing process, which leans into the momentum of the strolling line, which taps the shoulder of the human doodler, who lends her arm to the pencil, which gives the nod to emergent shapes (with vice versas all around).

RS

I know you’ve been writing about the newly published doodles of Franz Kafka. Why are these of particular interest?

JB

Lye’s four-minute experimental film Free Radicals, created by scratching lines directly on celluloid with a pointy stick, consists of mesmerizing, vibrating, wiggling lines that appear and disappear on a dark background. They dance to the music of the Bagirmi people of the southern Sahara. The film, says Lye, is a “vicarious evocation” of inexact energies already among us, energies that include but also exceed those emanating from human artists or audiences. The energies exposed are atmospheric, generic, cosmic, and usually unsensed. But the film dotes on them and pulls them within our radar of detection, even as they remain not fully defined or determinate. I think some of Kafka’s drawings do the same. I don’t mean his better-known stick figures or abstract depictions of human postures and moods. But rather the ones that are more like scribbles of apersonal lines and vectors—vital forces. These doodles express the apersonal movements or vitalities of our more-than-human world. They are apersonal, sparse line-vectors that are irreducible to their anthropocentric entanglements with Kafka’s individual/cultural biography. Through them comes through the generic vitality of matter.

RS

In your mind, can writing ever be a form of doodling? Or does language prevent us from doodling?

JB

The first Kafka doodle I came across was made from words—it was Odradek, the protagonist of Kafka’s three-paragraph story “The Cares of a Family Man.” Odradek is a small (mouse-sized?), spool-shaped, wooden, thread-tangled animate (non)creature, able to speak and laugh but mostly mute, scurrying but also lurking in the bourgeois household. Kafka’s impossible or absurdist description of Odradek goads the reader into trying to imagine its specific shape. It prompted me to try to draw it on paper. Because there’s a lack of fit between Odradek and the Euclidean space required for normal things to exist, you have to kind of just “let go” of that world, relax any strongly agentic effort, and go with the flow of the emergent process. Just doodle it.

originally published in Gagosian Quarterly in 2024.

The work of Olga Balema is a satisfying defiance. She maintains a fluid approach to every aspect of her art: titles, forms, expectations and materials, which are occasionally actual fluids. Most often you can find her work resting on the ground, slumped or flat, and settling into the architecture.

Her recent show Formulas, at Croy Nielsen in Vienna, is a collection of tilelike works, placed on the floor, where they appear to have been broken, then reassembled into elegantly inelegant collage. Her work brain damage (2019) is an installation of sundry spindly threads, stretched at ankle level: a patternless and beguiling web. Another work, Motherfucker (2016), exhibited at the Baltic Triennial in 2018, features sagging breasts affixed to crudely painted ripped maps. (Balema was born in Ukraine, in 1984, and moved to the United States while a teenager.)

For me, Balema’s works have always been characterised by mystery, especially her ongoing series of clear acrylic sculptures. Almost entirely transparent, they rest quietly between the wall and floor, without any interest in announcing their form. Looked at from a certain angle, in a certain light, they would not appear to exist at all.

This translucence is often accented by Balema’s modest installations and bare context. Many of her works are untitled, and in the past she has not been particularly vocal about her work, doing no interviews and making few written statements. But in line with her resistance to consistency, other work carries elaborate titles (eg, Manifestations of our own wickedness and future idiocy, 2017), and at times in the interview below she even responded loquaciously.

Initially when I reached out to Balema about an interview, she turned me down. But eventually we began to speak: first over the phone, then in a series of email exchanges. During this time, she was busy, intermittently sick and installing multiple shows around the world. Our exchange occurred over three seasons.

A Process of No Process

Ross Simonini You said you were late to our conversation last week because you were installing video chat software. Did you manage to avoid video during the pandemic?

Olga Balema I had to install it on my phone, my computer doesn’t have the right headphone jack. But yes, I was not zooming much during the pandemic.

RS Do you use your computer much for your art?

OB Some email. I write on the computer.

RS Your work Computer (2021), a vast floor collage, somehow led me to assume that you weren’t much of a computer person.

OB I’m not anti, I just don’t really get excited for new technology and try to keep the same devices for as long as I can. I did use a computer to make that work, an old, kind of dirty computer.

RS That title does a lot of work for the piece. Are you careful about titles?

OB Yes. There were a lot of titles swirling around in my mind. And Computerseemed like a nice followup to brain damage. I usually come up with titles during the making of a piece, or after, which is why a lot of things are not titled. If I’m struggling too much, I just leave it untitled. I feel like if I do have a title, I want it to add something to the piece. Computer added a sense of humour that maybe would have been lacking otherwise.

RS What kind of writing are you doing on the computer?

OB Lectures, job applications, grant applications, interviews, press releases. Descriptions of my work for myself and the public. Emails.

RS You mentioned interviews. Have you done others?

OB This is my first ‘real’ interview. But I have done some fake interviews with myself. There is also a conversation I once did with another artist.

RS Do you read about art or artists?

OB Yes, sporadically. Recently I read a Duchamp biography I found on the street in my neighbourhood. Since I’m not moving around as much, I’m trying to buy more books. Reading about other artists can be really inspiring, but it’s also a double-edged sword, because you can end up getting swept up in ideas that have nothing to do with you. Getting hijacked for a second. For example, I did a lecture on the artist Maria Nordman at Dia [Art Foundation, New York]. I was supposed to deliver it in April 2020, so I was doing my research for it in the month before that. Then the pandemic hit and I put it aside and did not think about it for another year. In the meantime I was working on Computer and I was noticing that I had some ideas in my head about it, some concerns that even though related to my past work somehow sat weird. Thoughts about how the audience would almost be finishing the work by wearing it out through movement, that without the audience the work does not really exist. Which partially came from working with a public institution and becoming more aware of how the audience in a way bears a lot of responsibility for its longevity and continued existence. But also in combination with other aspects of the piece, like bringing the piece outside and frottaging the sidewalks in New York. Here I recognised echoes of Nordman’s ideas, especially once I took up preparing the lecture again. It was an instance of not intentionally taking someone else’s work as a reference point, but the idea operating in a deep background.

RS Does social conversation feel laboured for you?

OB I mean… I don’t think I would be described by most people as someone who loves to talk.

RS You sound like someone who doesn’t think in language.

OB I would say that, but when I observe myself, I realise there is no outside of language for me, there is always a lot of language going on in my head, even if it’s nonlinear or incoherent. It shapes how I see.

RS Do you think with your hands?

OB I think with everything: my hands, my brain, my eyes. I can’t say that I only think with one part of my body. A lot of the work happens through association or a kind of visual or textural rhyming in the studio. Physically making things does help in that process. I can’t say that I have a set process of how I do things. Sometimes I come up with something I want to do in my head, and then I try to do it and then it kind of doesn’t work out and I go from there. Or it does work out and then it’s there. Or I abandon it. So it’s a process of no process.

RS Are you resistant to pinning down your process?

OB I’m just trying to be honest. A lot also depends on circumstance and factors outside of my control, like the aesthetics of the places I am showing, shipping constraints, etc.

RS Do you purposely avoid repetition?

OB I used to. There was a lot I wanted to try, and I made this resolution that I would keep my practice very open, make each body of work different from the previous. I found a lot of pleasure and energy in not being consistent, or maybe in trying to figure out a consistency that was more of a feeling than a set of visual attributes. Also I thought it was important that the work was difficult and uncomfortable to absorb. So I really made an effort towards this. Now I am making an effort to stay in the same register a bit more.

RS And why do you want that?

OB I think the shift has been gradual and more internal. I was becoming overwhelmed with the amount of work I was doing and exhausted from the adrenaline rush of constantly trying to do something different and letting too many ideas in. The work became more reduced and quieter because I hit a point at which I was mentally unable to do things like going into the metal workshop and facing the fumes and dust. Also, practically, in New York it’s a true feat to have access to production facilities, especially if you want to do the work yourself and can’t pay a lot of money. So I think it’s partially an adaptation to moving to a very expensive, visually stimulating, loud, crowded city and a response to a need to feel more grounded. That said, ‘same register’ doesn’t mean repetition. I’m still searching for things. It’s important for me that the work feels alive.

RS Have you felt much resistance to that kind of experimental approach?

OB No, not too much from the people I work with. I established this way of working early on as part of my practice, so I assume the people who would resist just did not approach me.

RS Your most recent work at Barbara Weiss in Berlin is working with the same materials and gestures as brain damage. What does that kind of recapitulation do for you?

OB The works at Barbara Weiss were ones I made in 2019 and did not install. So I was engaging with the same body of work, rather than repeating.

RS Do you often show older work?

OB I do, and I find it very rewarding, especially when I have not seen something for a long time. It often informs my current work and helps me to understand new ideas I have. I would love to do a show of just older works and see how they all speak to each other and interrelate.

RS Repetition seems to create what we call style. How do you define style?

OB At its best iteration, it’s being able to work with your limitations. At its worst, it’s being contrived.

Mrs. Hippy

RS Do you enjoy making your work?

OB Sometimes.

RS Do you prefer the work you made with enjoyment rather than work in struggle?

OB It depends on when you ask me. Maybe when I’m first showing it I prefer the work I made with enjoyment, because maybe I’m more confident in it. But with some distance it ends up not mattering.

RS While working, is there a feeling you find yourself returning to more often than others?

OB One of my favourite feelings when I work is when I have had a new idea and am rushing to execute it in one way or another. It feels very urgent in a fun way.

RS When you were young, did you know you’d be an artist?

OB Maybe from the age of thirteen I wanted to be an artist. But before that we moved around a lot, and things were looser for me. I moved to the US when I was fourteen and decided to study art once I was in college. Or ‘decided’ is maybe too strong a word. I started creeping towards becoming an artist. I had some really great teachers, Lee Running and Isabel Barbuzza, who blew my mind with what sculpture could be and were generally very encouraging.

RS What were you making at thirteen?

OB Drawings of dolphins and celebrities. I used makeup like eyeshadow and lipstick for drawing, to be experimental. I also made collages with iridescent stickers in order to put them on a copy machine and see how the iridescence would be reproduced by the machine. It was exciting to see the different images I would get from the same image sources.

RS Where were you before the US?

OB I was born in Lviv, Ukraine, and we moved to Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1991. We stayed there for a year and moved back to Lviv, lived there for two years and then moved to Leipzig in Germany. After that we spent some time again in Lviv before moving to Ames, Iowa, in the US.

RS How did all these places affect you differently?

OB I had the idea to reinvent myself each time I moved, but I always stayed the same, except for the usual changes one encounters when growing up. It wasn’t always easy to adjust to constant change. Some places were more hostile than others. When I lived in Leipzig I was the most unhappy, but I also developed my interest in being creative then. I had a lot of time to myself and I would try to learn how to play guitar and record myself singing. I also spent a lot of time at music stores, listening to CDs at listening stations. There was a store called Mrs. Hippy that my friends’ older friends shopped at. It smelled very strongly of patchouli and a lot of goths shopped there. I wasn’t really allowed to buy stuff there, but I loved to go and look. There were a lot of different subcultures around like goths, punks, ravers, also neo-Nazis. Some of my schoolmates were already going to the Love Parade in Berlin at the age of thirteen. When I moved to Iowa at fourteen the scene was very different. The kids were much more wholesome in general, less angsty and edgy, more into sports and watching movies.

My most formative years were spent in Ukraine. It’s where I first thought, spoke, heard and saw, learned how to exist and relate to people, I’m not sure how to encompass that experience, because it’s the most distant and also most present. The tragedy of the war has made this distance/presence most palpable. I am safe from physical violence, but to know what a place looks, feels, smells, sounds like and now it is being blown up sent me into a different corner of reality, one I was unable to imagine before. And even with that understanding I can’t begin to approximate the reality and distress my family and the Ukrainian people are experiencing in face of the brutality and violence of the war.

RS Do you consider your history and identity to be a significant part of your work?

OB I think it shapes the why and the how, but maybe not what I make. By that I mean my history and identity are not the subject matter of my work. My work concerns itself more with formal explorations, materials that I encounter in my present, art-historical concerns, feelings etc. But I think how things end up coming out or what I am interested in has to with my history and identity. I would not believe myself if I said my work has nothing to do with my history. There is no escaping yourself. It comes through.

Last year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any time I answer a call, send a text, or enter the drooling state of the scroll. I do it even if I’m not feeling particularly grateful for my device, because blessing isn’t a way of worshipping technology—what many people are already, unknowingly doing—but the opposite: a method for transforming a false icon into a portal of possibility.

I do not make a habit of blessing many things in my life, nor do I have a clear definition of the word bless, which I think of intuitively, unrelated to any specific spiritual doctrine. For me, a blessing is a concentrated feeling, an intensified internal attention. When I do it, I’m not asking for anything or hoping for an outcome; I’m just opening a space in my mind that, in my daily life, stays closed. After years of experimenting with many varieties of meditation and prayer, this is my best explanation of the phenomenon. To explain it under further scrutiny would betray its central mystery, which I don’t want to do, because mystery is the nectar of my life. The important thing is, I know a blessing when I feel it, and it feels good.

In the case of the phone, I began to notice that it had become a source of fiery, negative intensity in the world around me, and when I decided to quell this feeling, my natural response was a blessing. Some of this intensity came from within me, in the form of compulsion. It’s a feeling I’ve endured with many things: food, people, and art—none of which are inherently corrupt, all of which can be addictive, and any of which might seem like a natural recipient of a blessing.

But that was just the fingernail of the problem. Most of the conflict with this technology came from my community. Wherever I went, people cursed their phones. It was seeming fashionable to feel angsty about screen technology, even if you and everyone you knew used it constantly. I think people feel obligated to complain, as if it were their small, futile resistance to the phone’s tyranny over our lives.

Amongst my milieu, the phone became a villain, the leading culprit for asocial behavior, bullying, stupidity, depression, ADHD, totalitarianism, cancer, and climate change. In an interview on the Louisiana channel, the artist Cecily Brown said, “The phone is obviously the death of art and culture.”

This is the Promethean tale of the evil phone, and while it contains validity, I am bored of it. For one thing, it’s worth noting that this story is told most emphatically by people who have lived two lives: before and after phones. We who have seen across that divide are profoundly aware of our new phone reality. The past and future wrestle inside of us, and we can hardly stand it.

Those born later—the native-phone generations—will likely let go of this struggle. When I was young, my parents wrung their hands over my TV time, believing its screen would melt my eyes and brain. Before that, electricity, radio, cars and books all inspired similar debates. Before that, Plato believed writing would destroy our minds—now it is the standard measure of academic intelligence. Civilization was flawed long before any of these technologies and it will continue to be long after they are obsolete.

But for a moment, imagine the phone is irredeemably evil. It’s been corrupted by corporations and governments. It’s eroding away our thoughts, feelings, desires, and human connection. Humanity’s downfall is in our pocket. If these dangers are all true, then a blessing seems more necessary than ever. Turning a blind eye to such an enormous threat and defenestrating the phone—this would be an act of fear and cowardice.

Of course, I too feel some disgust and unease about the smartphone, but where I used to complain, I now harness these feelings in my blessing. As Matthew said in the Bible, “Bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you.” For real change, we must find the sacred inside of the phone’s darkness. This is how we become a more mindful steward of our technology.

Consider the philosophy of Tantra, a word that translates to “technology.” In Tantric Hinduism, all the traditional sins—sex, red meat, alcohol, morbidity—become tools for connecting to God. Instead of avoiding sex, bring such a high quality of attention to the act that it becomes prayer. Instead of abstaining from alcohol and drugs, imbibe intoxicants until you master their slippery ways. Instead of ignoring death, live in a graveyard and drink from the skull of a corpse, as is practiced by the monastic order of the Aghori.

If the phone is now a symbol for the profane, it is also a profound site of the sacred. The act of real power is to transform it into something that can support us. The crucifix was once a symbol for pain and wickedness, but the Christians turned it into an engine for divinity. Praying to the crucifix is not an endorsement of torture or cross-makers, but an act of love. Every path leads to grace when you walk it correctly.

When I bless my phone, I take a brief moment of pause before my mind drops into cellular fixation. I begin by opening up what I want to feel—gratitude, empathy—and I just stay with it for a moment. Then I remind myself of this object’s miraculous capabilities, complicated potential, and even the dubious radiation it emits. Now, I keep a folded swatch of electromagnetic-blocking faraday fabric in my bag, placed between my body and the phone, as a sign that I acknowledge and respect its volatile energy.

Yet, with all its threats in mind, I have still decided that the phone improves my life more than it impairs it. I’m not getting rid of it, and when I look around, it seems that most of the detractors have come to the same conclusion.

Still, the story of the sinful phone now lives in my blood, forever keeping me weary and vigilant against its charisma. This might be a good thing, but in what ways has the guilty weight of this narrative prevented me from using my phone well?

What happens when we refer to the phone as an extension of ourselves while simultaneously condemning it? After all, this is the device that I use to speak to my favorite people, to look at pictures of my daughter, to make and orchestrate various forms of art—all the things I care most about in life. Worse yet, if we believe the phone as a site of all the monstrosities in culture—social media, news headlines, porn—do we all turn more monstrous when we enter its blue-lit space? The way dark, sordid bars give people permission to do what broad daylight does not.

We spend hours stroking our phones, showing them the kind of attention that babies and pets usually receive. In moments of suffering, we are thankful for whatever relief they give us, through a meme or message or music. We crave this kind of intimate phone time. It puts our mind into the standby state of beta, which is as necessary as delta (sleep), gamma (insight), theta (meditation) or alpha(daydream).

Yet many categorize this time as distraction, which is one of the greatest sins in neoliberal capitalism, where a human’s value is defined by our productivity. Personally, I need distraction. As an artist, I discover inspiration through aimlessly following pleasure. Of course, I have experienced acedia, lost in the apathy of unfocused exploration, but mostly, distraction has served me well.

As a child I used the encyclopedia for this purpose, and my parents encouraged my hours of turning pages. Despite Plato, they believed the book to be a beneficial technology. But now, the same activity on our phone—clicking through the hyperlinks of Wikipedia—is perceived as a waste of time. Flipping through dusty crates in an old record store is a romantic way to spend an afternoon, but discovering the strange, unheard corners of Spotify is culturally vapid.

I’m saying all of this not to defend the phone, nor to encourage phone use—especially not for children—but to point out the ways in which our narrative of the phone colors all its activities, regardless of what they might be.

I began blessing my phone in the fall, and in the winter, I lost my home, my art studio and everything I owned in the Los Angeles fires. I evacuated my house with an armload of objects, one of which was my phone, and in many ways, it saved me.

Over the following months, the amount of generosity and kindness that poured through that device was, next to my family, the greatest source of love in my life. Of course, it wasn’t the phone loving me, it was the people—and yet, I cannot think of a real-world analog for the mobile’s flavor of human connection. In the pits of my post-fire darkness, I would have been exhausted by a queue of well-wishers at my doorstep; but receiving texts, emails, and calls was the ideal form of passive communication for that moment. I could respond at the lugubrious pace of disaster recovery, without licking a stamp or even looking presentable.

I do believe that blessing my phone made some of this possible. It allowed me to scrape away a little plaque of phone sin and perceive the support I needed in a time of despair. Because of that, I now have palpable experiences I can call upon to uphold my ritual.

Since then, the feelings in my blessing are deeper and easier to access. The whole process has become increasingly natural, almost reflexive. Sometimes, I’m not even aware I’m doing it. Over time, perhaps the phone (or any object of a blessing) becomes irrelevant and my habit becomes an orientation toward the world. That sounds like a nice outcome.

So far, this practice has helped to keep me in a state of astonishment with the phone. As someone who lived in pre-phone reality, I still regard this device as some kind of bizarre magic, and I’d like to hold onto that disbelief. Any one of us is lucky to own what billions of people cannot. We are wielders of power and we should hold ourselves accountable for using it well.

The Buddhists emphasize that we live through right action, right speech, and right view. These values are not just for easy days, but are most useful in the times of overwhelm or mundanity. If we find ourselves thoughtless and reactive with our devices in hand, then we are in a ripe state for contemplation. If the phone is our new window into reality, then through it we can revere everything.

published Aug 4 in Cluny journal.

I’ll be performing music on November 5th in Los Angeles at Earth, for a reading by founder of Cluny, Jordan Castro, who will be in conversation with Tao Lin.

Also:

I just released “Pearen” the earliest recorded music I have as a solo artist, from 2007. The fire destroyed most of my hard drives and this the last surviving track from a project called The Family Dances in which every song represented a family member. The instruments in each song were built from materials that expressed that member’s personality and “Pearen” was made of rubber bands, metal cans and twigs.

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary writer and thinker. Most of his work has taken the form of short stories: haunting, existentialist landscapes that privilege atmosphere over narrative. He has also written essays and a book-length philosophical text on the history of pessimistic thought, from Buddhism to nihilism to anti-natalism. His work simmers in the dark unpleasantness of nightmares: it does not release into catharsis; his characters do not overcome; and his stories often leave me feeling hollow and uncertain about reality. This writing is not for everyone — or perhaps even most people — and I am not always of the mindset to appreciate his meditations on pain and suffering, but occasionally, when I lose my grip on meaning, his vitriolic, bleak perspective is exactly what I need to feel alive. For that, I am grateful to Mr. Ligotti’s discomfiting visions. Thomas and I exchanged this interview during the pandemic but I have not published it until now.

In your email to me, you signed off with “locked down and loving it.” I know you have a reputation as a recluse, but can you say a bit on what you are personally enjoying about the lockdown?

I wouldn’t say that I’m personally enjoying the lockdown. I ended my email as I did on the chance that you were was aware of my reputation as a recluse, which I thought likely since I’m described as such on several online sites. So my closing to your email was meant as an joke, given that some people strongly object to being in lockdown, but a recluse might not. Of course, I took the risk that what I intended as a good-natured joke might have come off as offensive. After all, you might be one of those people who strongly objected to the lockdown or perhaps suffered in some way due to this policy. I hope this isn’t the case.  

I took no offense. If anything, I took delight in hearing alternate perspectives. The lockdown is certainly anxiety producing for us all, but it would simply be untrue to say that any situation is bad for all people all of the time. Personally, I have certainly been enjoying aspects of the quiet slowness, though I have also lost a family member to the pandemic. I suspect that others feel the same conflicted way, and I would imagine that those with reclusive tendencies (myself included) appreciate a moment of not fighting against society's extroverted busyness. To see the benefits in any situation doesn’t, I think, make light of the many hardships but is a way of refusing to reduce reality to a single perspective.

Do you feel that the characterization of you as a recluse is incorrect? Has it been exaggerated in the press? Do you think this portrayal of you affects the perception of your work?

My reclusive lifestyle is entirely a function of emotional disorders or diseases, whichever term one prefers, assuming that such conditions are considered real or just fabrications of a psycho-medical establishment. I really have no problem elaborating on this point, but hearing about people’s mental problems can be as tiresome. To quote Williams Burroughs: “Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit.” I don’t think of myself as a recluse. To my mind, a recluse is somebody like Ted Kaczynski or a Zen hermit-poet. I am a shy, self-conscious person, but I don’t avoid people because I hate them or am working off some bad karma. Both misanthropy and meditation with an eye to attaining Nirvana are full-time jobs, and I’m not that ambitious. It’s quite possible that being a recluse is not a bad public image for a supernatural horror writer, or any kind of writer. Ask Thomas Pynchon.         

 It all began for me with the onset of a panic-anxiety disorder in August 1970, when I was seventeen years old. From childhood, I had been a high-strung, moody individual. Mood disorders, or diseases, ran in my family on my father’s side. But not until the summer of 1970 did I become clinically unwell. I continued to attend school and work, but the symptoms of PA were unpleasant enough on a daily basis that I preferred not to leave the house if I could avoid it. It was during this time that I began to read. With the exception of reading assignments in school, I rarely picked up a book. After I entered college, I became an avid reader. In the early 1970s, Lovecraft was being reprinted in paperback, as were other supernatural horror writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. It was reading the works of these authors that led to my interest in writing. The world of mystery and harm depicted in their works harmonized with my own, and their ability to express this world in language made me want to do the same. Around this time, the worst symptoms of panic-anxiety abated for a while. However, in late 1975 I flipped into depression, specifically the kind of depression characterized by anhedonia. After about four years of that, I bounced back to panic-anxiety. For the past twenty years, my mood has been, by my latest psychiatrist’s diagnosis, a treatment-resistant form of bipolar depression with melancholic features. While plenty of people manage to lead relatively normal lives in severe states of emotional anguish, reclusiveness suits me. I don’t think of myself as a recluse. To my mind, a recluse is somebody like Ted Kaczynski.     

The reading of horror is often discussed as having the ability to purge the experience of fear and to cultivate it. Is this a paradox? Or is the paradox the point?

No doubt some people are to a degree paradoxically purged of fear, or, in some perversely Baudelairean way, cultivate their hysteria by experiencing fear at a literary distance. But, no, that’s not the case with me. The kind of roller coaster thrill sought by some horror fans is best conveyed by novels, which isn’t my purview. I have read heaps of horror fiction and studies of its major and minor figures as well as critical analyses of the genre. However, I could say the same of non-horror writers and commentary devoted to them. For over twenty-five years I worked as an editor and writer at a reference book company that published compilations of literary criticism on authors from the pre-Classical Era to the present. That was really my dream job.

I find that fear often stimulates a fundamental, primal part of myself that I have rarely been able to access since childhood. Fear makes the imagination work harder, and makes the mind more receptive and desperate for resolution, which is probably why it makes sense that horror is so accommodating to the supernatural.  

Do you have any particular intentions toward creating an experience for your readers? Is fear important? To what end do you use fear as a tool?

I would say that of course I intend to create a certain effect in writing a story. However, I’m not sure I can explain the exact nature of that effect. I only know where a story begins and that’s in a feeling. It may be a feeling provoked by a dream, an image, an idea, or any number of things. But it’s a particular feeling. In retrospect, it seems—and I emphasize “seems”—that the feeling that I’ve most often tried to create in a reader—wittingly or not—is that of the uncanny, which bears a family resemblance to horror but at the same time is distinct from horror in the same way that Ann Radcliffe argued terror was distinct from horror. For decades, I wasn’t aware of trying to create an effect of the uncanny, and perhaps I haven’t done it as precisely and consistently as I think I have. One thing I might say of use concerning uncanny stories is in their origins: I would contend that they are more likely than other types of stories to have their source in a dream. To cite Poe, I would say that, in the case of uncanny stories, the “unity of effect” he advocated for any literary work would be a dreamlike unity. From beginning to end there seems to be a pervasive oddity about them. This is in opposition to horror stories whose effect is based on a feeling of realism. Lovecraft asserted that a successful horror story—or “weird tale,” as he would put it—resides in its being realistic in every aspect except that of the weird, or perhaps supernatural, element. In a way, Lovecraft’s emphasis on realism in fiction intended to produce an effect of the weird is, well, weird. While I don’t think it’s worth arguing about this with Lovecraft, it does raise the issue of proper nomenclature with respect to the type of story in question: horror, terror, weird, uncanny, fantastic, strange, supernatural. And just now I realized that you asked about my use of the experience of fear. I can’t think of a single reference to “fear stories.”

Has writing fiction allowed you, in any way, to develop your philosophy? Or has fiction primarily been a means to expressing it? Both? Neither?

To the extent that I have written what has some of the earmarks of philosophy, it would fall under the category of pessimism, an attitude or outlook dominant in my fiction. So, yes, it’s worked both ways for me. Pessimism isn’t usually considered a philosophy as such, unless like certain nineteenth-century Germans you develop a complex system à la Schopenhauer to justify or illuminate your thought. I’ve never been trained in that field, and I have only a dilletante’s interest and aptitude for it. The advantage of horror fiction for a pessimistic writer is that it allows you to present a grim view of existence in your narratives and not be derided for it to the extent a so-called mainstream writer might be. At the same time, pessimism is not necessarily encouraged in horror fiction. However, at least in short stories, readers tend not to be scandalized when a tale ends on a downbeat note, as in Poe’s best work or Lovecraft’s canonical writings. 

For the record, I appreciate thinkers such as yourself working outside the codified institution of philosophy, which has become too insular to be accessible many people who are interested in the state of contemporary thought. I find that reading your work on pessimism often creates a positive emotional response for me. I have found similar response to many philosophies that consider human life to be meaningless (Zen Buddhism, Existentialism, Cosmology, etc.). It seems that some people seem to find comfort in meaning, while others see it as an unnecessary burden.

You’ve said that “subversion in any art form is impossible.” Why is this the case, and what do you mean by subversion? 

Well, I really put myself into a corner with that utterance. I should probably have been more intellectually prudent than to make such a statement. However, at the time an interview asked me whether or not I thought horror writing was necessarily subversive, my impulse was to air the view that literature was necessarily entertainment as opposed to social, political, or cultural bomb throwing. I think it was during the 1980s or 90s that “subversive” and “transgressive” became widely used to describe certain authors’ works. The interview was conducted in 2004, a year after the centenary of George Orwell’s birth. Thus, it was fresh in my mind, with the all the reprints of 1984 the previous year, that both conservatives and their worthy adversaries were both claiming Orwell for their side, and I had become mightily annoyed by the idea of subversion as a vital quality in literature. But now I’ve come around and can accept the fact that subversive thought, like everything other aspect of human existence, is right there in the entertainer’s toolbox along with love and death and horror. This is not to overlook works that subvert art itself, at least until they’re assimilated and become as entertaining as the art forms that preceded them. Without question, you can spend as much time in heated contention over the subversion of Mark Rothko’s painted squares or a piece of music composed of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence as you can over the political stance, its subversive nature being assumed, of 1984. However, what most moved me most about Orwell’s novel was not its subversive quality—right, left, or ambiguous—but its great first sentence: “It was a bright, cold day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen” and many entertainingly horrific conceits that fill the book. I guess I’m just old-fashioned, as well as given to stating or misstating the obvious. In any event, I would have embarrassed myself less if I had said that subversion is any art form is impossible if it fails to entertain, either at the time or once it has been assimilated by the culture it was intended to awaken or undermine.   

Has writing fiction allowed you, in any way, to develop your philosophy? Or has fiction primarily been a means to expressing it? Both? Neither?

To the extent that I have written what has some of the earmarks of philosophy, it would fall under the category of pessimism, an attitude or outlook that is also dominant in my fiction. This isn’t usually considered a philosophy as such, unless like certain nineteenth-century Germans you develop a complex system à la Schopenhauer to justify or illuminate your thought. I’ve never been trained to that, and I’ve never been interested in doing that. The advantage of horror fiction for a pessimistic writer is that it allows you to present a grim view of existence in your narratives and not be berated for it to the extent a so-called mainstream writer might be. At the same time, pessimism is not necessarily encouraged in horror fiction. However, at least in short stories, readers tend not to be scandalized when a tale ends on a downbeat note, as in Poe’s best work or Lovecraft’s canonical writings.

Do you consider yourself a sick person? Do you identify with your chronic illness? 

I guess that would depend on what you mean by a sick person. If a doctor diagnoses me as having a particular sickness, then I would normally take his word for it if my symptoms seemed to conform to that diagnosis, especially if they would so severe that they needed immediate attention. I’m not a distrusting person or a hypochondriac, but with the advent of the internet I thought it might be a good idea to check out that diagnosis on the relevant sites, if only to find out more about that sickness and its symptoms. I was once diagnosed twice in the same day with sciatica by two different MDs. Given its symptoms, I didn’t think it was far-fetched to think I really did have sciatica. However, I did have one symptom that wasn’t included in a diagnosis of sciatica. So I dug deeper and found that this symptom suggested I had a case of shingles. It was late Friday, so I couldn’t go back to the either of the doctors because they were closed. But given that, in case I did have shingles, I needed to take antibiotics as soon as possible, I called a doctor on an emergency medical line and told him my symptoms. He thought that I probably did have shingles and should start taking antibiotics right away, which I did the same day. On Monday, I returned to my primary care physician, who confirmed that I did in fact have shingles, not sciatica. Thereafter, I was treated for shingles. It was a bad case, but it could have been worse if I hadn’t gotten the antibiotics when I did.  Thus, while I did consider myself a sick person, it occurred to me that I might be sick with some other disease that the one I was diagnosed with by two different doctors. I’m not sure what you mean by Identifying with an illness. I once collapsed in my home with terrible pains stomach pains. It turned out that they were stomach pains, but pains from a burst colon. The EMT guys who came to take me to the hospital after a family member called them weren’t sure what I had, and I couldn’t describe my pain to them in detail because it was so severe I couldn’t talk. The doctors and nurses in the emergency room didn’t know what I had either, even tough I was screaming in pain. X-rays and a CT scan were taken. I still couldn’t talk because the pain was so bad. In fact, in later describing this experience, I said that I not only had pain but I was pain. I was operated on about ten hours after arriving at the hospital. I had become septic and almost died. This was acute not chronic pain at the time, but I had to wear a colostomy bag for eight months before I could have a second operation to see if my colon could be reattached to my rectum. There was some chronic discomfort during that time, but I would not say that I identified with it.

The reading of horror is often discussed as having the ability to purge the experience of fear and to cultivate it. Is this a paradox? Or is the paradox of the point?

No doubt some people are to a degree paradoxically purged of fear, or in some perversely Baudelairean way, cultivate their hysteria by experiencing fear at a literary distance. But, no, that’s not the case with me. The kind of roller coaster thrill sought by some horror fans is best conveyed by novels, which isn’t my purview. I have read heaps of horror fiction and studies of its major and minor figures as well as critical analyses of the genre. However, I could say the same of non-horror writers and commentary devoted to them. Aside from personal reading and study, I also worked for over twenty-five years as an editor and writer for a reference book company that published compilations of the literary criticism on authors from the pre-Classical Era to the present. That was really my dream job.

I drove back to the fire after dark. 100 mph winds whistled around the windows. Branches danced across the freeway. A ragged strip of cardboard flapped into my car’s undercarriage, dragged on for a mile and scuttled away.

This was my fifth disaster evacuation in California in a decade, and during each one I had fallen into a hypnotic survival state, numbly packing up a few items, usually forgetting something crucial. My life and property had never been seriously threatened, and I’d grown almost casual about the process. I’d developed a belief in immunity, the way children trust they will never die. I did not have the ability to believe in such a total, personal devastation.

Yet there I was, returning to the fire. If I was going to evacuate, even for a few days, I’d need my hard drives. But also, I should get them, just in case.

When I arrived at the house, I could see that the fire had spread: The entire mountain was now a streak of bright and terrifying light. It looked like hell seen from below.

The danger of the situation finally began to flicker in my nervous system, but I tried to look at the situation with cold logic: The fire was six miles away, farther than many other fires I’d known in the area, all of which had been extinguished quickly. This one hadn’t touched a home yet and the notion of it moving through thousands of structures to arrive at our house was just too absurd to consider at that point.

I packed my hard drives. Then I gazed across my studio and began considering what else I might grab. I could load up the car with everything.

My wife called: Our daughter was three months old, she reminded me, and I could not die out here. I pictured it: Struggling against the storm with one of my six-foot-tall paintings until it caught the wind like a sail and ripped apart in a final, fiery gale. Or: As I carried my final armful of art to the car, a chunk of rogue debris falling from the sky and cracking my head open. These were real, present threats I could understand, but I still could not believe that my home would burn. I took the hard drives and left.

• •

Four years before the fire, I’d begun an experiment to alter my beliefs through painting. I’d become exhausted with my worldview, which felt like a pair of cloudy glasses glued to my face. I needed change, and art had always been a useful tool for transformation. I expect paintings and songs and books to change me, even if not for the better. Art is not always self-improvement. There are risks. It can scare you and scar you forever. It can also heal and fortify and free you from your own restrictions. I have experienced all of these, sometimes from a single work.

Fundamentally, what I want from art is for another consciousness to permeate my own and show me a fresh view of reality. This is what keeps me from becoming stagnant. Life is movement, and art, when it connects, encourages the movement of life.

“The loss of Altadena is a particular kind of grief. Rarely do we deal with the sudden and violent erasure of an entire place, a place filled with the vitality of every being who contributed to it.”

Since adolescence, I’ve enjoyed philosophies of negation—existentialism, nihilism, Zen Buddhism—and, over the years, some permutation of these became my attitude toward reality. For a while, this was useful, especially in a transitional kind of way. These -isms scrubbed away the film of neoliberal Catholic meritocracy that accumulated on my mind.

But eventually they eroded all my beliefs, and nothing remained: no self, no purpose, no god. I felt a dark hollow within me. I lost a sense of where to place meaning. Every ideology I came across became suspect, and yet, if I was honest with myself, I felt I still needed something. If I was being really honest, I needed something as potent as what religious people call faith–not a deity, exactly, but the kind of trust believers feel, the ability to know that I am being supported by the fabric of the universe.

Art had always been my best spiritual practice, so it seemed possible that making art could be a way of making a new belief. With this in mind, I began to consider how my own work could change me. If I was asking my paintings to transform viewers during brief encounters, what was the work doing to me over the weeks, months or years I spent staring into them?

So I began with a study of the smile. Smiles stimulate the kinds of mirror neurons and oxytocin dumps that people experience when they look at puppies and babies. The feeling is related to the Japanese concept of kawaii—a primal response to cuteness that fills the body with warmth—and to the effects of laughter, which even if forced can unleash joyful neurotransmitters. My idea was to weave together a tapestry of these joyful expressions—Levities, I called them—to create an image of what I wanted the world to feel like. What would it be like to stare at a patch of earth or sky and sense a reassuring presence looking back? If I could achieve this with enough intensity, even if for a moment, I hoped I could fundamentally alter my belief system. It’s like the old football adage: If you can touch the ball, you can catch it.

• •

In January 2025, my studio and home were destroyed by the Eaton Fire, which took hundreds of my works with it, including my five-year experiment in painting. Some of the individual paintings had sold already—one (The Yets) burned in a collector’s home—but most of them are now sprinkled in the soil, swirling in the wind, permeating the lungs of locals. This was the end of my experiment.

The feeling of this loss was not unlike a loss of life, in quality if not magnitude. There was, I believe, a life force in the things I lost. And, in a way, that had been the point of the experiment: to fill every work with enough energy to change me.

The loss of Altadena is a particular kind of grief. Rarely do we deal with the sudden and violent erasure of an entire place, a place filled with the vitality of every being who contributed to it. For more than half a century, Altadena has been shaped by artists (Paul McCarthy, Marjorie Cameron), including many Black artists (Octavia Butler, Charles White) who had been prohibited from settling elsewhere in the state because of racist redlining. The local reality we shared is now gone. Homes, parks and shops are in ruins.

Before this experience, I would not have described Los Angeles as a place known for its community. It’s a sprawling land of people sitting alone in cars, blazing individual paths. It’s famously difficult to meet people here, and one of Los Angeles’s secret pleasures is the satisfaction of a canceled plan. And yet, after this disaster, the amount of love and generosity I’ve received from this city is more than I’ve ever felt anywhere, at any time. I would echo this sentiment for the artworld, where the word community is rarely invoked without a cynical smirk. But at its best, the global artworld is a community of people who want to be changed by the power of objects.

Since the loss of our home, my family has received donations from everywhere. Internet acquaintances, total strangers, gallerists and companies I didn’t even know existed have sent money, art supplies, musical instruments, baby clothes, bedding, medicine. In the past, I bought the things in my life as any consumer would, with an impersonal click or swipe. Now all of the objects I own hum with a generosity, each of them reminders that kindness is always present, even in the most challenging moment of my life.

Fire is transformation at the most elemental state. It turns nearly everything to smoke and ash, leaving behind only the immaterial. This fire has done the same to me. My life and my worldview have been leveled.

Naturally, destruction is also creation. Fire stimulates growth, releasing nutrients into the soil to prepare for new life. The goddess Kali kills the world with one hand and gives birth with the other. A friend once told me: “To make a great work, an artist must be willing to destroy the work at every moment of its creation.” Anyone who is successful must become intimate with failure.

For a long time, I believed my painting experiment had been a failure. After hundreds of hours of painting, my worldview had only been nudged. Occasionally, moments of true ecstatic feeling arose, but I was unable to sustain those states, even with constant, daily repetition. It was not until the fire destroyed the last physical remnants of the project that its objective could be fulfilled.

The philosopher George Bataille considered sacrifice as a pathway to mystical realization. He believed that when the mind is in survival mode, hoarding every bit of food, it remains earth-bound. But when we purposefully waste our resources we transcend the material and enter into an essential reality. In fact, Bataille organized an entire secret society to perform such sacrifices as a way to experience the divine pleasures that awaited.

He knew that strong belief is generated both from within and without. You can pray for faith every night, alone in your bedroom, but being present at a communal ritual, collaborating with the people who share your belief, will make faith more vivid, more real. Religion is, fundamentally, community.

At the beginning of my experiment, this was not a thought I took into consideration. I enjoyed the art community, went to events, started an exhibition space, and like many artists, wanted to find my people. But I had not yet connected this desire with my project.

While a controlled experiment may be useful in science, I have no interest in an artwork that can be fully controlled. My experiment exploded, and what I tried to contain has now transposed itself to every thing around me. As I write this, the clothes I’m wearing, the room I’m sitting in, everything I have, was offered up by a world that wants to support me. It is as though the fire physically cast my paintings out into the world, freeing the feelings of levity I had ritually imbued in them. Like Frankenstein’s creation, my experiment was alive.

• •

In the months after the fire, I replayed the moments of the evacuation many times. Lying in bed, I would lose myself in my memory.

My muscles tensed in concentration as I retraced every choice I made on the night of January 7th. In my mind, I carried out family photos, instruments, art and everything that could never be replaced. Such dreaming became a nightly compulsion, as if I could change the past through imagination alone.

For a while it felt like self-torture, but I’ve come to think of it as just another experiment. In my nervous system, I have lived dozens of forking realities in which I save all the things that meant something to me. Even as a fiction, it has been physically relieving, a balm for my grief.

In the days after the fires, people often asked me how I was feeling, and mostly what I said was: “I can’t believe it’s real.” Today, both the future and the past seem more unreal than ever. The ongoing transformation of the planet is no longer a series of numbers and facts but a felt sensation, pulsing inside me. It’s a feeling that could turn a person bitter. But I don’t think this will be my fate, because I now believe I am living in a world that wants me to be here, and when I open my eyes in the morning, I am relieved to find it is still turning.

The above essay appears in the current issue of Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula Magazine

All the above paintings were destroyed in the Eaton fire.

For years, I’ve turned to Will Oldham for a nice emotional beating. Across his sundry musical incarnations: Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, etc. his music has carried me through whispering darkness and strumming, joyful light.

Over time, I’ve done my best to keep up with his Dylan-paced output, with twenty-four albums since 1993. He seems to be building his own American songbook in the pursuit of a robust, whole song for the people.

Oldham’s work as an actor is equally saturated in rich feeling.  I often think about his role in the John Sayles’s film, Matewan when he was sixteen years old, playing a fiery aspiring preacher, shooting guns, scowling with youthful devotion. About twenty years later, he appeared in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy as an earthy hippy, a performance as effortless as his music.

I reached out to Oldham, knowing that he’s generally resistant to interviews, but for some reason, he agreed. He requested an email correspondence, rather than phone, so we communicated  over ten days via email. We sent a few messages back and forth every day as Oldham negotiated parenthood and spent his days in the attic writing songs.

In this period, Oldham was generous with me: he bought some of my music, read my novel, and recommended another in response, The Song of the Earth by Hugh Nissenson, which I enjoyed deeply. As we wrote, I followed him on Instagram, where he performed songs with the direct gaze that is always at the center of his art. 

—Ross Simonini

I. AGITPROP

ROSS SIMONINI: Hi Will.

WILL OLDHAM: Hi Ross. I’m grateful that you are game for this multi-media approach to conversation. I know that I can speak, but I never know if the Lord will bless me with a nimble tongue or not when such a tongue is called for.  It occurred to me yesterday that I ought to think of my most rewarding conversation partner and speak with that person for an hour or so immediately prior to giving an interview, just to get up to speed. I just can’t think of that person right now.

RS: I’m listening to your new track, “New Memory Box right now” as I write. A lot of elements of this album, I Made A Place feel related to your new status as a parent to me. Has parenthood affected you as a songwriter?

WO: I am so thin-skinned, everything affects my songwriting.

RS: Would you say there was any kind of primary intention for this record?

WO: Nathan Salsburg and I worked on many projects together in 2021.  One of them was putting to music some abstract poetry by Max Porter.  I complained at one point about the willful senselessness of the lyrics (we were deep in the turmoil surrounding the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd). Nathan brought up the term “agitprop” to describe the kind of work I was after. And indeed, other than the records I’ve put together around the songs of others, I Made A Place is the most purposeful, agitprop record I’ve built (if I understand the term correctly).

RS: Agitprop is propaganda in art, right?

WO: Yes, propaganda in art.  Getting ideas across.  Influencing action. “Protest song” is too broad a term, like “Italian food.”

RS: Do you think music is good at influencing action? I mean, has any music ever done this for you?

WO: I live in music so almost every piece of music that I run into influences my action. I’m sure I hurt my physical self more than once under the influence of Jonathan Richman’s “Double Chocolate Malted.” A friendly reminder that the push doesn’t have to come from the lyric… the beat can lift us up, the power is there. Propaganda can be gently persistent. Don’t we listen to certain musics again and again because there is something about that music that we want to integrate more completely into ourselves?

RS: That makes sense: listening to music is actually a way of sculpting ourselves over time with sound. It reminds me of religious music and the way it uses chants to embed something into the body. Do you construct songs to influence action in this way? Is, say, a blues going to influence action in a certain way? Will a bridge?

WO: Right, chants. In today’s world, since the dawn of mass-produced music, we have in all of our hands the ability to repeat-play, which is what holy folk have dedicated good portions of their time to forever.  You try to engineer an ear-worm or two, to raise a provocative image, to present an interplay among musicians that will intrigue and then reward. And not fully from scratch, in fact hardly from scratch at all, all of the elements are repurposed from somewhere before.

RS: What about watching films? Does that ever inspire you to action?

WO: Yes, Jack Reacher inspires me to fold my clothes all the neater, and Love Streams inspires me to once again dedicate myself to the integration of music into every day life.

RS: Do you usually think pretty consciously and purposefully about what action you are trying to inspire in people?

WO: It is slow and deliberate. Earning trust. Encouraging listening. Contrasting one thing with another. I Made a Place in its entirety has much to do with storytelling, with accountability and sustainability, with “localism.” I value listening and loyalty; commitment. Trading today’s easy fix for tomorrow’s grace.  I try to work with artists who demonstrate excellence and compassion, and then together we record something and present it with minimal modification.  If it’s good enough, it will be taken like a tincture by the listener.

RS: Since you want to get ideas across, would you say you are an idea-based artist? Will you just sit in a chair and think and daydream for a while? Do you need thinking time?

WO: When I have time, I like to sit and think. Brainstorming can be hella fun. 

RS: Do you write songs in your head?

WO: I have to get an idea out of my head before I can understand that it is anything.  I’ve got to sing it, play it, hear it, see it. Watch it be heard.

RS: Would you call yourself philosophical?

WO: Philosophy has always stymied me.  Feels like one can always play the “it is what it is” card and win the round. Of course everything is pre-determined. Free will is a part of what is written. It would be wonderful, still, if more folks embraced their nominal power to act. My toes itch. I’ve always loved puns.

RS: Does intellectualism generally rub you the wrong way? 

WO: I can see the necessity for philosophical thinking in a concentration camp context. Intellectualism meaning thinking (or talking) about thinking? Or trying to get as far away from the subject at hand as is humanly possible and still pretend to be speaking about it? It’s painful to see brilliance interact strictly with brilliance, or depths explored and not shared or applied. Worse, not to see it, but just to know it’s going on somewhere, inaccessed.

RS: Do you read much?

WO: I am in a precarious position as far as reading goes.  I had two books going, and got through reading them both yesterday.  As it happened, I loved both books and so feel at loose ends finishing both at once. One is Mary Oppen’s autobiography Meaning A Life and the other is Taro Yashima’s Horizon is Calling (also autobiography). Egad what will I do now.

RS: I’ve heard you talk about songwriting as a kind of sampling. When you’re repurposing music and lyrics, does it just happen intuitively?

WO: It happens intuitively. Once I become aware of it happening, I attempt to embrace what’s going on. There may come a time, soon, when, rather than use someone else’s material to make a record, I will paraphrase someone else’s record completely.

RS: When you say you are “thin-skinned” and that everything affects you, does this make being a public, touring musician difficult?

WO: Yes.

RS: Has the pandemic felt like a respite from that?

WO: Yes.

RS: Has the pandemic altered your sense of what you want your life as a musician to be?

WO: Three records to which I am a significant contributor will have come out in the past year and a half: BPB’s I Made a Place, the serial record Blind Date Party, with Bill Callahan, and then Superwolves with Matt Sweeney.  Each is fairly unique in its demands on me as a contributor.  In addition, during this past year I have sung on many others’ recordings, written free-standing songs, and helped bring musical life to sundry materials presented. The pandemic, at this point, makes me not wish to record anything further that might be considered a “cover” (strange concept; the assumption being that we all record original material when singers for much of the 20th century would more often record songs written by other folks), and further makes me want to more actively address the layers of a composition even as I’m less and less certain that there can be an audience for atypical musical constructions. My desire is to blow-up the song, or deconstruct it, but for the benefit of listeners, to keep them engaged and critical in their listening. The socio-political upheaval that has coincided with the pandemic has made me question even deeper the practices in which I engage and the content (literal and structural) of what I make. How far may I reach and still provide pleasure? How pleasing might I be and still connect my position of privilege with the rest of humanity?  I’m stating this in big bold questions with the idea that I’ve got to reduce it down into somethings as “simple” as songs.

RS: You once said “to get paid and not have an audience, that is my fantasy.” Why would you prefer to have no audience? 

WO: I’ve often wished to be more of a songwriter than a recording artist (whose persona is integral to the project). I don’t see that as viable, now, and I try to minimize the trappings of publicity to a manageable level so that I may continue making songs. My mother died a year ago and left some money so, for now, making a living has lost some of its urgency. The apparent need to make songs continues.

RS: But you clearly see music as a kind of communication.

WO: I do! Though I don’t see it utilized as such as often as I’d like!  Algorithm-generated playlists squander and squelch music’s capacity as a means of communication.  I feel communicated to by the music I listen to, and by the music I hear.  And I try to communicate many things, but since I’m not always explicit the messages go unheard mostly.

RS: Has this change in finances altered affected you as an artist in any other way? Is comfort seeping into the music?

WO: It was jarring at first to have money in the bank that I hadn’t earned.  My wife points out that it won’t last forever. The way that I approach making music has enough momentum that the effect of this windfall may never be felt in what I do. It’s also serendipitous to come at this time, when royalty revenues and live show income are seriously challenged.  Thanks, Mom (and Pop, who stashed the savings for his impending retirement and his and my mother’s golden years, neither of which came to be).

II. BANANA STICKER INTACT

RS: Do you also write songs to purposely change yourself in some way?

WO: By the time we record, I need to have a grasp on the song.  But just a grasp. I used to be intimidated by the idea of knowing a song too well and gradually I learned that songs can be made that are unknowable and still of use.  The music I like to listen to is music that I understand some small thing about, and each time I hear it or think about it I know more but the music will likely maintain its unknowability forever. And the lyrics I put into songs are meant to help me on my way and not highlight an occurrence or revelation.

RS: How would less traditional, experimental song structures change you?

WO: They would free me. Even white boys want to be freeee, in our pathetic way.

The unattainable goal is to become music. Letting go of structures and definitions and getting closer to a clearer understanding of what music really is leads one to a more unified relationship to music. It is a time machine, the closest thing to a time machine we have. The moments or hours or days leading up to any stage of any given song are effectively the overture to that song.

RS: Yea, It’s funny how “experimental” has become a genre. It’s true, and the innovation in that genre seems to have ended a while back. It’s been codified, and the experimentation these days seem to live outside of that genre. 

WO: And I do love a lot of music that is understood to exist within that classification!

RS: Anything in particular?

WO: Susanna and the Magical Orchestra’s List of Lights and Buoys. You can hear the world of speech from where she sings on these records, and it is a world left behind.

RS: Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos is a gorgeous record. Do you see traditional forms as a kind of conservativism in art?

WO: A song should sound like itself, like the sum of its parts, and the way a song works should reflect its uniqueness. These ideas you describe, what held the painters back from thinking this way before 2020, or before 2016 even? It’s nice that they are thinking this way now, but where have they been? We ought to be careful about what we call tradition. Conservatism can be represented at times by a necktie. And a necktie is traditional menswear that’s evolved from some kind of scarf meant to hold the collar closed. Eventually collars were designed with buttons that held themselves closed without the need for a tie, but the tie remained.  The tie is a stupid piece of cloth tied around mens’ necks.  It’s, in many ways, a big sign saying “I’m an idiot.”  

RS: In previous stages of your career, have you thought about yourself as upholding a tradition?

WO: There are traditions of exploration, of experimentation, and also of repeating things that bear repeating because they are elusive or continue to be ignored; and I try to uphold these! We record in Nashville often, with musicians who work within a tradition. We don’t do this to repeat something done in the past, but because these methods are still quite powerful. Clarinet solos aren’t over. Nor is recording without a click.

RS: You’ve been playing different songs on Instagram over the last year. Do you select these for any reason, relating to the state of the world, the state of your mind?

WO: It was my intention to step away from the IG account and the Twitter account after we finished telling the world about the release of I Made a Place. Then the pandemic became the monster behavior modifier that it is, and IG specifically was an obvious tool for reaching out (and being reached-out to). The songs I chose to perform came from a variety of sources. I recorded Prine’s “Mexican Home” because I’d heard that his wife had the Corona virus (and perhaps he had it as well by that point). “Mexican Home” is one of the first songs of someone else’s that I learned to play and I performed live back around 1991 or so (with the Palace Flophouse band). We rocked it out a la Dinosaur’s “The Lung.” Nathan Bowles and I engaged in a covers challenge, where we each assigned the other three songs to arrange and perform and release on IG. A big inspiration came from my friend Heather Summers, who recorded a song a day for the first hundred days or so of lockdown. 

RS: You released that song twenty-seven years ago and performed it with a different voice and period in your life.

WO: I don’t understand what you mean.  It is one life, and one voice. The chorus of that song was invented by my friend Bryan Rich, and I sang it because I love and admire him. So that’s still in there, every time I sing it I can wonder (and/or conclude) what he meant by that. I didn’t know much about building a song back then, so I continue to learn from those older songs things about my own ignorance, or anyone’s ignorance, and how ignorance/innocence has a power worth tending.

RS: I suppose I meant that you were playing the same material under a different set of life circumstances. I also think that the quality of your voice has changed, as has your playing, the level of production of recordings, etc. And I wondered if this different context altered the music for you?

WO: A changed voice, yes. But the same voice.  A changed life, definitely, but the same life. And so the music changes. Everything changes as we change. I try to be careful when building songs and records, when  assembling music groups and mounting performances, to include building blocks of some degree of substance, knowing that I’m going to be better off working with my past rather than ignoring it. Life’s too short for reinvention. I was a devoted Madonna fan growing up and I don’t know what she is anymore. But yes, AGE. It’s one of the greatest tools we have to work with. I can absolutely make things now that I couldn’t imagine decades ago.  It’s funny, someone sold me a pile of Velvet Underground records a month or so ago. They’re beautiful, near-mint copies of original pressings, banana-sticker intact and all.  And I do love to listen to them, it’s fun and fascinating.  But I can’t help but think “These are children making this music.”  It’s solid to a point, and then it stops. Superwolves is a strong record, and I could not have approached these strengths even ten years ago, in composition or performance.

RS: Is that the capitalist cynic in you speaking?

WO: No. I am not a cynic.  It’s actually a rosy realism. If we don’t accept the ugly we don’t deserve the beauty.

RS: You resist a sense of ownership over your music, right?

WO: The songs are mine to collect the royalties on, and to learn from, but ownership is a bullshit construct. I like owning a house mainly because I don’t have to deal with the whims or tyranny of some freak landlord. We own things for the same reason that there are contracts of any sort: we have proved ourselves untrustworthy and incapable of sharing.

RS: Why did you want to step away from Instagram and Twitter?

WO: Newspapers are unrecognizable and widely unusable as sources of anything. Twitter works for news. It works for humor. And it works for other forms of perspective-gaining cultural information and education. IG works for the sharing of certain kinds of information, primarily artistic and visual. I’ve learned about music, new and “old,” far too often to track.  Using either as a form of interpersonal back-and-forth is wrong-headed, doomed.  I really appreciated my experience on both platforms prior to folks becoming aware that these accounts are associated with me.  Since then, I’ve tried to figure out how to use them.  I don’t appreciate using email or social media to communicate (in back-and-forth) with people to whom I am vitally connected (friends, family, colleagues). There is too much lost.  It isn’t worth the “convenience.”  In my experience, people are generally believing the untruth that virtual life is real; that direct-messaging has anywhere near the value or power of direct conversation, either in-person or even over the telephone.  That this is unhealthy and dangerous seems wildly apparent. As rule, I “follow” very few people I actually know, and when I do it’s because their posts reflect the potential of the medium; their posts would not work in any other context than on Twitter or on Instagram.  Brief, fleeting, superficial, and lacking follow-up. 

III.  “THE DISHWASHER IS SOME OF MY BEST WORK.”

RS: Do you think people can get a sense of who you are, your personality, your life experiences, from your music?

WO: I’m not so sure that I know who I am.  Every listener’s experience will be different, and what she picks up from the songs will usually have far more to do with her life than mine, I would venture.

RS: How important is it to you that you enjoy the music you make? 

WO: I can’t think of another standard by which to work. A large part of my occupation is about curating the boundaries of my enjoyments so that when such standards get imposed onto a song or collection of songs, the song is better for it.

RS: Have you released any music that you disliked at the time of release?

WO: Um, no.  Why would I do that??

RS: As someone who rejects the idea of owning your music, I thought you might also reject the authority of your personal taste. I know many artists who don’t particularly love what they make. They see it more like their voice or face: “it is what it is,” which, I suppose, is quoting you from earlier on free will. I also know other artists who purposely release things they dislike or feel unsure about, as a way of actively relinquishing their ownership of the thing.

WO: There is a part of me that envies someone with such an approach to their music.  It could be wonderful if it were simply a job, and I could take off the uniform and truly be me. I build songs in order to interact and communicate, at first and crucially with collaborators.  I work on something until it is a wild and exciting representation of creative forces working for and against each other.  I’m thrilled about the music that gets released because I’m so chuffed to be a part of having made something together. And in the case of a record like the self-titled Bonny Billy record, the absence of others is the big signifier: something is missing, and something missing is its own thing.  I would guess that many artists who release shit they don’t actually stand behind either have a contractual relationship with a record label that pays them advances, or they feel disdain for their audience or, as likely, themselves.

RS: Could making music outside of your own taste is also a way to be vulnerable and raw in the work?

WO: How would you feel if your plumber said, after completing the work on your house, “The sink in the upstairs bathroom, it’s iffy, it might spray.  The hot water heater… I don’t know, I’ve never installed something like that before. I’m curious to see what you think. The dishwasher is some of my best work, though, totally worth the money you are about to pay me!”  Should an artist not try to know what s/he is doing?  But I will fuck around, say, on a track for a compilation; do something I’ve never done before to see if it works. 

RS: I know you generally dislike interviews. Does this relate to the whole illusion of authorship? 

WO: Yes. But I do caretake the music.

RS: Outside of songwriting, do you write?

WO: Letters, cards and emails… yes, bundles.  I don’t write prose or poetry as such, if that’s what you mean.  Writing lyrics serves the tendencies of my brain.  I can hack away at the detritus and flotsam and then bring the remains together with a melodic and rhythmic structure. My prose tends to be dense and messy.

RS: For me, the quantity of your album releases has always been a significant part of your work. For you, is it important to release music at the rate you do? Is the regularity part of songwriting? Or is this simply the natural rate at which you write songs?

WO: This is what I do. I’ve been frustrated and befuddled by the sparsity of most recording artists’ output during my lifetime.  It’s a quantity defined by the industry and business of music rather than by the natural flow of a maker’s creativity. I mean, this is what I do! Many musicians seem to wait for their labels, their managers, their booking agents, to give them permission to write and/or record. If you look at the model of recording artists of the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the 1970s… a period which in many ways helped us define what greatness can be in popular music… those artists were encouraged and/or allowed to make a couple of full-length records a year! With singles squeezed-in between LPs. If you make songs, if that’s what you do, and you aren’t working on songs with some degree of discipline and regularity, then what in god’s name are you doing?

IV. PET PROCLIVITY

RS: Does acting in films inspire you to action in the way songs do?

WO: When I work as an actor, I put myself into the hands of the filmmakers. It’s a release and there has to be trust.  It would be wonderful to work with actors who pay more attention to the rhythms and melodies of speech, but that is not common at all.

RS: I’d imagine that’s more common in theater, right? I guess I’m thinking of Mamet… 

WO: It’s been a long time since I worked in theater. Mamet’s known for his rhythm, absolutely.  Even the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is rife with exciting rhythms. 

RS: Do you remember the films that inspired you to be an actor?

WO: Singin’ in the Rain; The Maltese Falcon; Hair; Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings; Arsenic and Old Lace; Follow Me, Boys; The Man Who Would Be King; Julia; Silver Streak… these are early exciters.  James Earl Jones, James Mason, Holly Hunter (on stage). I was more inspired by stage actors than film actors when it came to forming the idea that an actor’s life was for me. Their work was more real. I sensed that film acting was related, but it didn’t seem as connected to real life, or as vital.  My idols were the big kids at the theater where I trained, and the actors who performed, either as part of the established company or as visiting artists, at Actors Theatre of Louisville. 

RS: Earlier you had this line “white boys want to be free too, in their own pathetic way.” We are both white boys and I wonder to what degree you see your music as being white boy music. Do you think about a lineage of so-called “white music”? Do you think your music expresses a kind of whiteness? Is that important to the music? Should it be? Is there a way to investigate that whiteness as a musician without it feeling dangerous to other people? As someone working with agitprop, I’d be interested to know to what degree you address this. 

WO: 2020 should help us know ourselves. I will always be learning, usually too slowly, about being white and about being not-Black. I’m not going to ever approach understanding what it is to be Black in the USA. I think about a lineage of white music at times with the distance of an ethnomusicologist and the presence of a practicing music-maker as I wonder where, truly, we could look for the roots of the music of Magic Sam or James Brown or Chuck Berry or, for that matter, Jerry Lee. Or Junior Kimbrough, Mdou Moctar, and Nick Drake. Where (and this is many places and times) the music I’ve been involved with demonstrates an obliviousness, it is not a willful one.  Same with heartlessness. Where there is heartlessness in the music, there is pain.  I’m not ready to address whiteness head-on in the music because I don’t know how to make it musical. I’m willing to be schooled! The best that I can do at this moment, within the scope of my work, is to make money from my whiteness and give it to (best case) Black-run music schools for the empowerment and education of young Black musicians.

RS: Do you think about the race of your audience? Or is this just beyond your control to a certain degree?

WO: Yes I think about it and yes it’s beyond my control. I can hope that what we do is inclusive. Given my own tastes, I figure that there’s a tiny subset of any given group of people (age, era, nationality, color, height, disfigurement, pet-proclivity, occupation, gamer/non-gamer) who might possibly truly connect with what I’m up to.

RS: Do you have a longview of being an artist at this point? Do you have an idea of what kind of artist you want to be at sixty or seventy?

WO: All I know is that I frequently have to check myself against the world and vice-versa in order to re-align.

RS: Are there any artists who you think aged well and who you regard as good models for making late work?

WO: In music? Ronald Isley, Jonathan Richman, Leonard Cohen, Susan Alcorn, Don Williams, Merle Haggard, Edith Kanaka’ole, Shirley Collins, Laraaji, the Mekons, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Wanda Jackson, Psarantonis.  People who continue to do their thing regardless of failures and successes, who wake up (or did until they didn’t), seemingly unable to not face the possibilities and responsibilities inherent in their relationships to how and why music is made in this time.  

Originally published in The Believer magazine

Jesse Ball is the author of three novels, an omnibus of various prose (novellas, fables), a book of drawings and several collections of poetry. With Samedi the Deafness (2007), his first published novel, Ball became known for his snaking, intuitive sense of narrative which is easy to follow but difficult to summarize. The prose is lucid and light, with the dreamy momentum of a mind in pursuit of answers where there are no answers to be found. It’s a style that is encouraged by his process: short, focused bursts of writing that Ball considers to be private ‘performances’ for which he is constantly in preparation. His work often expresses a fascination with nostalgic curiosities – the art of memory, parlour games, secret documents, pseudo-science – and evokes the satisfyingly vague paranoia of a good conspiracy theory. Ball’s stories often exist in a distinctly non-American mood, his characters duelling in 19th-century-esque villages or tiptoeing through dark, foggy alleyways – the sort of atmosphere Daniil Kharms and Bruno Schulz knew how to lay on thick. Ball teaches courses on lucid dreaming and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His new novel, The Curfew, is published by Vintage. The following interview took place in a Brooklyn teahouse.

Ross Simonini You wrote your most recent novel, The Curfew, in six days and have described the act of writing as a ‘performance’. Can you describe what you mean by this?

Jesse Ball I think that there are two distinct way to go about creating something. One is to try to form each part individually and then fit it with other parts that are similar until you have a whole, enormous piece constructed perfectly. Then the order of creating it doesn’t matter so much as the time it took to make. It’s like making a clock. Some people perform that kind of operation. That has a connection to the idea of a book as something separate from people, as if it’s a made object, existing in its own space. But the way that I go about it, I’m trying to be as clear as I can. I want to take the least amount of time possible. I want to be deliberate. I don’t want to take any missteps. I want to have a genuine technique that allows the things that I say to be clearly said and I want to say them in the order in which they are meant to be said, to most clearly elucidate the idea. The reader should be able take the same path that I took. In this case, the book is less an object apart from myself or the reader, but just a brief moment of transmission. In that way, it tries to mimic a pianistic performance.

RS This couldn’t be achieved over extended periods of time?

JB The basic problem that I’ve found from writing over a long period of time is that the words change their meaning. The words can’t mean the same thing to you five years later. That creates a muddy haze. The writer can’t know exactly what the writer means. Of course, writing a book should change you, so the words should mean something different at the end – and if the reader is with you throughout the whole book, then they’ll also be potentially changed in that same way. But the imposition of a passage that was written many years before could easily make the whole thing unintelligible. However, as I have said elsewhere, such a conception might be an excuse for all sorts of nonsense, including inexcusably bad writing.

RS I think it has been, in the past.

JB So, one must keep the technique sharp, and that is done, I believe, through a rigorous reading practice. Writing requires a rigour on the part of the person who’s decided they’re going to do it. That person has to make it their life’s work to prepare for such a performance. If you’re used to being able to revise things and cut things out all the time, then your faculties for choosing what you write won’t be correct for the endeavour because you’ll be accustomed to putting things down you would want to take back. That will be a problem. A model for this is Japanese court poetry: a person was a poet because they could produce a poem. In mediaeval Japan, they would have poetry contests between, say, a courtesan and a warrior. Someone would make up a poem and then someone else would have to take up that theme and make another one.

RS On the spot?

JB On the spot. And in that case, you are a poet because, when it is necessary, you can produce a poem. You’re not a poet because you’ve written poems. Having written poems is a fine thing to have done but it says nothing about who you are at that moment. Similarly, because a person was an athlete and could run very fast doesn’t mean they can run fast at this moment. In this way, you should be able to engage with and produce a story when it is necessary.

RS How do you prepare for a particular book?

JB The preparation is about paying attention to what you love and to be able to see as clearly as possible. It’s a matter of your whole life’s regime, so it’s not taken up with a particular book in mind. If I have a concept for a particular form then I’ll have suspicions about the form and about whether the shape is large enough for a particular book. Sometimes it’s just an image. With Samedi the Deafness I was in bed and I saw an image of a man turning in the street and I knew what the book could be, I knew how I could make it happen. It was a matter of putting it down. I didn’t know every single particular but it was as though, at that moment, there were provided for me the rules that would allow me to extricate all the details when I was ready for them, when they were necessary.

RS The logic of the story.

JB Sometimes I’ll tailor my reading during a time when I’m working to add a dimension to the book. I read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent [1907], which I’d read before, and which I just adore. I read that during Samedi … because I wanted that feeling, that thickness of prose to be a part of the book. My writing is thin and clear, like Richard Brautigan, but I wanted some of the weight of Conrad, so I just let it naturally filter in. What I love about Brautigan is that you can read a whole book of his in one sitting and understand everything. Such a clear mind. He could’ve been a great engineer.

RS But as a writer, you don’t always look for clarity. Sometimes you deceive your readers with narrative tricks.

JB There is deception, and that is a part of a good tale. However, I never trick readers without purpose. It would be silly to do so, as it diminishes the effect of the actually crucial sleight, when it does come, whenever it does come.

RS What is the purpose of this kind of deceptive sleight?

JB I would say there are many purposes. A book has the potential to be simultaneously: a feeling of having lived through an era, a method for living day by day, an involved flight through physical dangers, or a recollection of any of the above. Deception is one of the many tools that allows the writer to handle the order in which realizations arrive. This can permit an element to be entered into the account prior to its visible arrival.

RS Deception as a means to clarity and coherence?

JB Clearness is the most important quality of writing but it’s the most overlooked. People think being complicated or ambitious is the most important part of writing, but the mind is so raw and complicated itself that being clearer will always create a greater depth of complexity. It never leads to reductiveness. I was just reading one of my now favourite books, which is Julius Caesar’s account of the conquest of Gaul, and he’s so clear. I love his writing. He must have been quite a fellow. He was praised by other Romans at the time for having a style that was so plain and perfect and inimitable.

RS What do you think the shifting of forms and styles does to a reader’s experience of narrative? Is Italo Calvino tricking the reader when he consciously changes the entire nature of a book for chapter to chapter?

JB Well, I wouldn’t say people read uniform narratives straight on anyway – since the mind careens here and there, back and forth from what we know, to what we thought we knew, to what we hope for, to what we hoped would happen but didn’t and now, suddenly, here we are, and then we’re off again! It is all imaginary! I love Italo Calvino – most of all for the delightful spirit that informs his work. He doesn’t give in to the pressure of cynicism.

RS While it’s true that people may not read in a perfectly linear way, there is a sense of linearity inherent in writing a book, especially a novel with a distinct beginning and an end. If people read in chaotic ways, why adhere to certain aspects of linearity at all? Why not abandon linearity for a slathering of collaged words? Where is the line?

JB Oh, I try to hold to a distinct line. If I tell stories that are incomprehensible then I might as well just mutter them to myself. As to the purpose of holding to a line or fracturing something into bits – well, I suppose the nature of the tale would determine how the plot should be orchestrated.

RS How does memory play into the reading of fiction? How is a reader’s memory of what has happened in the narrative something that you as a writer address or manipulate?

JB One assumes that when one does one’s job it is natural for the reader to remember the details properly. A person doesn’t usually forget things that make sense to them and follow through with consequences. I believe that most good works are not spent after a single reading. They can mostly merit rereading, and rereading and rereading. I have certain books that I like to read again each year, in order to remind myself of who I am.

RS Your writing is often timeless and placeless. Why do you avoid these specifics? What can be created in their absence that can’t happen in their presence?

JB It is a matter of avoiding words that have been pounded into submission by money. Many adjectives have this trouble, many good nouns, and even (sadly) place names. Certain people spend a lot of money to have a word mean what they mean by it. Rather than fight with these people, I just use other words, and then their money doesn’t earn them purchase in my worlds.

RS How so? How does money control proper names of towns and individuals or time periods?

JB Because money pays for these words to be splashed across billboards in 100-foot letters, to spout from the idiotic lips of celebrities, and from those locales, to emerge again from the mouths, pens and keyboards of millions of deluded souls, whose principal interaction with these words has been a regimented one obtained through money by a corporate decision.

RS How do feel about the process of editing?

JB I don’t personally like editing. But not liking it is not enough; you have to be able to do the work that makes editing unnecessary. Most people don’t want to do it. If something needs to be edited then it needs to be edited.

RS You have taught lucid dreaming to writers and I wonder if your process of writing a book in such discrete periods of time is a method for connecting to the subconscious without discursive thinking, a form of automatic writing?

JB I don’t just let something flow out. I choose carefully. There are some passages where I get to a point where what is about to come is more than I know personally. If I enforced my will it would become less than it could be. Dreams, in general, confront us directly with the meanderings of our minds. Lucid dreaming gives me courage. There is always a world of endless textures and brilliances to escape to, if things go badly hereabouts and lucid dreaming allows one to take existence in general a bit more lightly. The Tibetan dream yogis felt lucid dreaming could help one to see that one is deceived in all lives, in dream life, in real life. Do not be deceived. Jesse Ball was a court stenographer in Irkutsk for 25 years before publishing his magnum opus, the 3,500 page novel Hatters, about a cat that impersonates a hatter and comes into a great fortune. That book has never been translated into English, but many of his lesser books have.

originally published in frieze magazine

Also:

my new EP, Quarters, was released on the summer solstice. Listen on any platform.

The addiction to our own taste begins in adolescence and thrives in teenagehood. Tupac posters on bedroom walls, Vonnegut spines on shelves, Siouxsie t-shirts, Air Jordans, Uggs. We establish our identities by staking out a cultural corner of our own. This is the way of our society: specialization.

Later, we learn to drop the right reference into the right conversation, to avoid the hit songs, the blockbusters, and favor the b-sides, the cult films. Secret information is coveted. Acquired taste is the goal. If less people like the music you like, you identify more intensely with it.

As time goes on, the fan can become the aesthete. Negative tastes grows exceedingly important, even more than praise. The aficionado is certain about the work that is impossible to enjoy. We learn to defend our ever-shrinking corner with hatchets. Everything else is unlistenable, unreadable, unwatchable.

Fandom taught me how to become an artist. I spent most my youth attending to the expression of my taste, which is to say, my artistic style. I’m this kind of an artist, not thatkind. I became sensitive to all my likes and dislikes, to the world’s opinions, to anything I considered worth considering. The articulation of a note, the weight of brushstroke, a punctuation mark—I could judge it all.

In this way, I slowly constructed my artistic self. I accumulated enough opinions to feel like I could make a good argument for/against any artwork, including my own. I took on the role of critic-as-artist. When taking in new work, I’d scour for triggers: word, color—anything that gave me an excuse to flick another work of art into my ever-growing blacklist of unsuitable art. Anything that didn’t annoy me could stick around.

At that time, my goal was to move beyond that first, rudimentary level of taste refinement—what could now be called “basic”—and build a configuration of preferences that would identify me as a singularly profound human being. I’d mix my fancy tastes (foreign music, experimental video, high fashion) with some mainstream pop culture and arrive at a nice, diverse ecosystem of flavors. My own little fortress of well-rounded taste.

I blame this ridiculous goal, in part, on school. The academy demands us to accept that whatever work they have put before us is legitimate, as if legitimacy could really determine appreciation. From junior high through grad school, I learned about classic movies, so-called “serious” music, canonical literature, and important art. I also learned, through the many glaring omissions in the curriculum, the works that were unworthy of study. These included the lowbrow guilty pleasures we could obsess over in our private time, and the works that were historically ignored (i.e., anything outside the hetero-Euro tradition). If you wanted to be a good student, you learned to have scholastic taste.

School also (primarily) teaches you to navigate social taste. By high school, social groups are best understood by their choice of cultural signifiers: jock rock, Kerouac, Plath, goth, punk, The Dead, Cardi B., Philip K. Dick, Tori Amos, Skyrim, and on. Most kids fulfill their hipness quota by selecting the appropriate cultural artifact for their group, while the more aesthetically-obsessive types learn to gently rub against expectations and reach new levels of unexpected para-hipness.

Perhaps it all seems shallow when described like this, but looking back now, I see myself using art as a symbol, a way of giving myself context. This is how the youth has been defining itself for years, and I knew no other way. I wanted the American dream of liberal, individualistic cultural consumption.

Now, eventually, most people stray from this path. They get older, stop caring. But some keep going, digging deeper into their navel until anything beyond their taste offends them. You’ve seen these curmudgeons—calcified, trapped in their corner, afraid of contradicting themselves for fear of invalidating their entire life. Others go in the opposite direction, allowing their taste to be entirely dictated by whatever mass culture decides to serve them.

Maybe it was after seeing enough cases like these when something in me snapped. One day, I became suddenly, profoundly sick of all my opinions. More importantly, I could no longer accept the idea that my identity was just a group of likes and dislikes. Facebook, OkCupid—our social and romantic connections are determined by our cultural signifiers. We like those who like what we like. If we don’t know what we like, Pandora and Spotify tell us what to listen to, and Google anticipates our opinion based on insidious algorithms that interpret our age, class, gender and race. and yet, without my top-ten lists, I wasn’t sure who I was. Nice? Funny? Italian?

*

So, once college was behind me, I began to actively dissolve my taste. I’d seen enough “good” art for a lifetime and wanted to explore the dark side. I’d begun to feel ashamed for ignoring vast swathes of life experience. How much of the world had I missed in the name of sticking to my position?

To remedy this, I created an experiment that would last many years. It began with a simple declaration: I will do what I dislike.

Perhaps it’s not the most original thought, but nobody around me was making this choice, and to me, it seemed like the most direct way to reverse my condition. I would move toward whatever repelled me.

It began, of course, with art. I listened to music I had previously considered unpleasant—polka, Chinese opera, mariachi. I dove into film genres I’d rejected or ignored—Bollywood, rom-coms, Hallmark movies, Eastern European melodramas. I read books written in styles I thought were artistically empty—mysteries, erotica. I watched performances that bored me or insulted my attention to the subtleties of human drama. I wanted to take on the high, the low, the hideous, the glitzy.

Time-based forms were especially useful, because, unlike a painting, they required endurance. I couldn’t turn away. I had to go into the work to find relief from my own gnawing disgust. This was how I’d reprogram myself.

*

I realize that the whole process sounds a little masochistic, but, in fact, I wanted to stop all the silly suffering of living as a “cultured” person. That, to me, seemed masochistic: a vast population of educated people who purposely cultivated their own discomfort. Surely, these are the actions of a society that has lost all perspective in life, and I wouldn’t let it get me down too. I’m an artist, and if I’m not absorbing as much pleasure from art as possible, I’m sabotaging myself.

When I stepped into the world, I wanted all the billboards and street musicians, the newspaper articles and unfashionable outfits to become like the trees in a forest. I wouldn’t sit around considering my idiosyncratic reaction to each individual tree. That would be exhausting. Trees didn’t need my approval or rejection. I’d just enjoy the forest, occasionally regard a leaf, and then move on. In this way, I planned to mentally transform the man-made artifacts around me into an environment that might, from time to time, engage me, but would otherwise not draw upon my mental energy in any significant way.

After a few months of following this approach, I realized that my experiences of art had long ago been reduced to a series of footholds for my judgments. Instead of listening to a lyrical melody, I only heard my own opinion of it. I couldn’t really see a painting, I just saw my impression of it. I was trapped inside my own velvety Platonic Cave. It was how I could stay comfortable and certain, which was unfortunate, since one of the great pleasures of art is its ability to surprise. In a world of air conditioners and central heating, art provides the uncomfortable but necessary gust of uncertainty.

*

As my experiment moved along, I expanded into the visceral. At restaurants, I ordered the least appealing dish on the menu. The foulest thing I saw. The foods I had avoided for years. But as I ate, I often found myself surprised to learn that my disgust was not, in fact, built into my taste buds. It was a decision, a stubborn association I had made in my past without even knowing it. Maybe I’d once eaten a bad plate of potatoes au gratin, had vomited lamb, heard a nightmarish anecdote about lima beans. These were perfectly fine foods for which I’d constructed fictional biases, and I’d done this because I thought it was beneficial to dislike something. It showed I had boundaries. And yet, when I actually put the food in my mouth, I didn’t dislike it. I didn’t even have to acquire a taste. I just had to stop hating.

Same went for questionable smells. I took a big whiff. When I heard shrill music, I focused on it. I was eager for the unpleasant, and bored by the unconflicted experience. Discovery felt better than satisfaction.

Encouraged by my small success, I applied the experiment to my social life. I found people who bothered me immensely, for no good reason, and I spent hard time with them. When they did something intolerable, I faulted myself for being unable to see their good sides. Sure, if they tortured a rabbit, or told a xenophobic joke, I’d feel justified in walking away from them, but for the most part, these people were fine. I’d only been nitpicking their facial expressions, the treacly phrases they dropped, their cringe-worthy avocations, or most likely, their uninspired taste. But when any of these subjects arose, I just asked myself: who was I to judge?

And the more I pushed, the more my sharp senses smoothed. I didn’t love all foods, but by then, I didn’t dread eating anything. Why should I feel distress (or even pain) when eating something nutritious? Or reading a book? Or spending time with a jerk? I could find ways to tolerate them all, and I did. None of these experiences were tangibly harmful to me, so why should I act like they were?

I had to remind myself that taste itself could become dangerous. It could keep me at a distance from the world around me, and transform every aesthetic experience into internal masturbatory conflict.

And so, the inner drama of my taste quieted. I gradually undermined my fragile identity. I grew disoriented and became pleasantly child-like. My taste became a malleable material to use for play. I reverted back to the stage in life where opinions were like alien parasites that inhabited the people around me—extraneous, toxic. I took none of my preferences for granted. If I wanted an opinion of my own, I’d have to actively make it, and then codify it into my personality. It would take time and consideration, so it better be worth it.

Unlike being a child, though, I now knew I had the ability to create as many shiny opinions as I wanted. I could spend the rest of my life building a great collection of opinions, or live lightly, vagabond-like, not a single viewpoint to call my own. For the first time, I could choose.

Eventually, I escaped my pattern of reactive, thoughtless opinion-making. And where all those opinions had once been crammed, I now had an empty space. Over time, this was filled with curiosity, a compulsion that thrived in the absence of certainty and inevitably nudged me out into the expanding unknown.

*

As I neared the end of my experiment, I decided to, once again, test my boundaries. In the beginning, I had been vigilant and jacked up on the power of my will. I wanted nothing pleasant around. Eating a tasty meal, I thought, might corrupt my delicate state. But as I entered my second year, I allowed old, easy joys to creep back in. I’d listen to the Bonnie Raitt album my mom used to play around the house. Eat a grilled cheese sandwich. Watch a film that let me feel like I’d seen humanity flex its artistry as well as it ever would.

Thankfully, these simple pleasures didn’t disrupt me. I didn’t feel less pleasure, and I didn’t return to worshipping at the altar of good taste. So I allowed my experiment to fade. The world grew a little more pleasant and every so often, I’d find a nice, hateable chunk of culture, so I could savor my repulsion in full bloom. After all, it’s the natural human condition. Just another way to stay amused.

Giulia Cenci creates sculptural beings struggling into and out of life. Like feral beasts, they can be thin and sinewy. Like livestock, they can be plump, dismembered and displayed like taxidermy. More and more, Cenci places her creatures in silvery environments, in relationship to other pseudo-lifeforms, suspended in grids of cold metal. This work is clearly in conversation with other emerging sculptors and with climate activism, but Cenci is particularly mining ideas posed in the twentieth century, by Yves Tanguy, David Cronenberg, H. R. Giger and Lee Bontecou – artists offered shockingly new speculations on technological life. Cenci’s imagination, she says, has been stimulated by science fiction, and her practice has been a parallel process of world-building.

In her daily life, Cenci is fiercely independent, leaning towards the lifestyle of an off-the-grid doomsday prepper. She seems to have thrived in the pandemic, creating her most ambitious and widely seen installations yet, including dead dance (2021–22) at this year’s Venice Biennale, a 150-metre alley of hanging sculpture, inspired by agricultural equipment, and evoking the dread of an abattoir. Cenci is generally suspicious of urban culture, and she recently moved to the Italian countryside, where she is freeing herself of corporate food sources and industrial fabricators. On her farm, she has spent the last few years alternately living alone and opening her doors to a kind of intentional community. Along with these friends and coworkers, she is now at work on a summer camp, which will, among other things, teach people how to be sovereign.

A Kind of Anarchy

Ross Simonini Where are you now?

Giulia Cenci I’m in the south of Tuscany in the countryside, stealing internet from a friend because I have no internet at home.

RS And you grew up in that region, right?

GC Yeah. I left when I was 15, and I went to a small city, Perugia, to study art. Then I went to Bologna for the fine art academy, and came back here after 15 years away.

RS Is your studio still in an old slaughterhouse?

GC Yes. It was a farm. My father moved here from the area of Milano in the 60s. His parents were intellectuals – the father a journalist and art critic, the mother an illustrator – so they had nothing to do with farming. But he decided to buy this piece of land, which was extremely cheap, and start a farm with animals and a plantation.

I moved back here because, when I had to produce the work for the MAXXI Bulgari Prize in 2020, I needed space. There was this stable, which was used for pigs and is quite big and very nice, and which had been empty for 20 years or so. So I decided to turn it into my temporary studio. There is also endless space outdoors. I can try anything. So I started my own foundry, where I melt aluminium. I use old car parts and everything is extremely cheap and easy to do, especially for me, because I like to do things by myself. The plan was to be here for a few months, but then I was kind of stuck because of many situations, including COVID.

RS Are you alone out there these days?

GC The studio and the foundry are mine, but I had many people working with me. If anyone wants to melt, like, a piece of aluminium, they can just come here. Eventually this turned into a place where everybody lives together. We started to garden and eat together and have our own chickens. We wanted to be independent, especially in 2021. We can just use the food which is around us, and the same goes for the aluminium. We don’t buy pure aluminium, only leftovers. But after a while, the work became a little bit more insane in terms of production. So I moved away. I took a small house on the mountain, while the studio is in the valley.

RS How did you go about building this community?

GC The nice thing was that, because of the pandemic, the universities were all online. So the cities were all empty. And then through Instagram and other socials, I started to look for people who were based around here. And it became like a school, because if you didn’t know how to weld, we would teach you. You become quite independent in this sense, which I believe is nice. I personally really like to know how to do anything that is part of my process. And now we make everything at the place. We never ask third parties.

RS Independence seems to be a crucial part of your life and work.

GC Yeah, quite a lot. I mean, we live in a society which is trying to erase our own ability. We are overwhelmed by premade products, services and platforms which are telling us how to be, how to act, how our profile picture must be, or how incorrect our words or images can be. I believe that when you are isolated and able to do things yourself, you get a little bit of freedom, a kind of anarchy, which I think is quite necessary in these times.

Organised Nature

RS The work has been expanding over the last few years. Your works lento-violento [2020] and the Venice piece are like sculptural communities, filled with many bodies and heads. Is this related to the communal way in which the work is being produced?

GC Absolutely. Recently I started to realise that I grew up in a very rural environment, but rural in a sense where nature is manipulated by humans.

So it’s organised nature. I will never forget the first time I went to Milano by car and I saw buildings and I thought, OK, this is truly weird. And then I started to realise there is all this huge infrastructure around me, which is the city itself, with so many rules and constructions, which is gonna make my life somehow quite precise. And the cities are also full of this animal population, called pets, and all of a sudden, a piece of nature becomes another product. And then you got your dog, and this dog is just amazing because this is your own dog.

But we’ve forgotten the wild side of our behaviour. And I started to wonder a lot about how to create kind of wild habitats, and how
to make environments which are not so divided into animal, human and object. I wanted to build up, not just like an object, but an environment, because I felt so, uh, disconnected. We create a difference between a pet animal, which is precious and necessary, and an animal that can just be killed. And we do the same with humans. There are humans who are more important or powerful or even who have a different value. And all of that made me try to think about a new population where these kinds of hierarchies are not so strong.

RS Do you dislike civilisation?

GC I just hate the idea that everything can just be a product, an economical value. And if it’s not sold, it’s trash. This makes me incredibly crazy somehow.

RS There’s a human hierarchy imposed on the natural world that you seem to hint at in the work: plants are lower than animals, and minerals are less than life. But, of course, minerals are at the foundations of life – and your work.

GC And what happens when you start bringing in things like plastic and things made by humans into that hierarchy? I really don’t understand the term ‘artificial’. I don’t get why the product of an animal is natural and the product of a human is unnatural. It’s really this attitude of bringing ourselves among all the rest. It’s imperialistic. Compared to us, minerals are inert. They appear still, but actually, if you look at them from an energetic point of view, something is moving inside, and this cannot be defined as stillness. And they also come from life.

Plastic, too. What I always love to think about with plastic is that to make it we need oil, and oil is made by probably the oldest forest of this planet, which in thousands and thousands of billions of years became oil. So when I see a plastic bag moved by the wind, I have to think about a little piece of that forest.

So I guess we need to rethink categories. This is also something which, to me, became quite clear from making sculpture. It’s always the same. We are all made of the same thing. It’s incredible. And if we look at our home environment and ourselves from a very distant point of view, you see that this is even more evident. You can see it even by looking at the landscape. The plant doesn’t exist if there isn’t an insect. This is something that you learn at elementary school. Life is interdependent.

RS Do you think about the longevity of your work in these terms? What will your objects become when nature swallows them back?

GC I really like to think that at some point things will merge. But I also could never really work with bronze because for me it feels just too endless, you know? It’s so related to this idea of making a monument or making something which has to last forever. Time in the work is quite funny because we compare it to our own life. So if something is gonna last more than, like, 80 years, this is a long-term piece. But actually if you look at life on Earth, that’s nothing. Even plastic is turning into something else and is gonna be eaten and is already in our water system. So it’s all related to our own point of view, which for the planet is almost nothing.

RS Right, a lot of the dialogues around climate change are about the ‘planet’ in an abstract sense, which I think confuses the idea for a lot of people. The real conversation is about humanity hurting itself.

GC Yeah, it’s like a suicide. I don’t think the planet is really gonna have a problem by turning into something else. Maybe we are gonna see the end of our own civilisation or the end of certain kinds of lives, but that doesn’t mean the planet is gonna die.

Pathetic and Beautiful

RS Are you interested in using your work to evoke certain feelings about nature in people?

GC I’m not sure that mine is a precise message. It’s not an answer to anything, nor a definition. For me, sometimes the feeling comes from behind your neck or in your belly. It’s about the freedom of imagining and about everything which cannot be killed by contemporary society.

RS Is this the same kind of thing you’re looking for in other works of art?

GC I like art that is capable of letting me travel and abandon my own life, to bring me to another habitat. If I think about my favourite movies – Tarkovsky’s Solaris or [Yorgos Lanthimos’s] The Lobster – those are all situations where I experience a new world in which rules are destroyed and new rules are made by the artists.

RS Do you read much?

GC I love poetry. One of the most important books of my life has been The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot. It’s a book which is able to get
so much material from others and put it together to create a new narration, which leaves you so open, and so able to put yourself in it. It’s so experimental for me. I also love science fiction.

During COVID I enjoyed The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London, a pretty amazing short book. He’s talking about the end of culture from a fever, and actually what happens in the book is that the people who are gonna survive this fever are the ones away from the cities, who didn’t go to school or didn’t really have a cultural life. So they’re all super wild people, and they’re gonna grow this new society where they don’t even believe that something like a university should exist. But then there is this old man who survived who was a teacher at university, and he’s trying to tell people about painting and philosophy. He is both pathetic and beautiful, and for me there is a character like this in many of my works.

RS Your work is often described as apocalyptic and dystopic. How do you actually conceptualise a word like ‘apocalypse’ at this point?

GC I think it’s something that refers to another period of human history, but not now. I mean, I remember when the Twin Towers collapsed and I was watching television and I could see it in front of my eyes. I was twelve years old. And I called my mom and she couldn’t believe it, because she was like, “You cannot watch this on television. It’s fake,” and I was like, no, Mama, I think that’s real. It’s like everything is so present. And even when things are very bad, we are watching it from a screen. And this isn’t the apocalypse, because you cannot get at it as an event.

RS Is your art ever politicised as a tool in the climate-change conversation?

GC To be an artist is already quite political to me, because I really had to decide on it. There were no artists around when I was growing
up and it was not something common at all. But I would have to go to church a lot with my parents, and when I saw paintings in church, these were the most meaningful experiences I’d ever had. It’s such a beautiful thing to me. You decide to make something that no one else is making. You try to add something to the human view. For me, this is political. If one of my works could do what those paintings did for me, that would be something.

Originally published October 2022 in ArtReview

My new album, Themes Vol, 1 is out on Bandcamp, Apple music or Spotify.

In the golden era of rock and roll, originality was the only true goal for an honorable musician. But now, when the Beatles have lost their dominance over pop, the few bands that still thrive seem compelled to retell the story of music, to keep the tradition alive. For them, the illusion of reinvention is just a frivolous obsession, and the true aim is simply to produce great music. 

Many artists might fit this description, but among the most ambitious are Britain’s the 1975, who offer up expertly crafted pop songs, each in a tightly packaged, discrete style: acid jazz, Huey Lewis synth anthems, ’90s grunge, emo ballads, garage punk, auto-tuned experiments, et cetera—though not so many nods to the ’70s as their name would suggest. Their influences are transparent, which seems to be their point. They collage genres like other artists arrange chords, evoking subcultures, fashion, and ideologies as needed. For the 1975, nostalgic satisfaction is the Trojan horse that sneaks subversion into the mainstream. 

The singer, primary songwriter, and most public persona of this band, Matt Healy, is a self-aware, postmodern front man. He seems to relish playing a role that the rest of us thought was archaic. Onstage, he peacocks like Jagger and projects the blinding bravado of Bono. His band has won some of the industry’s biggest accolades and are undoubtedly one of the most prominent British rock bands of the last decade. All of their albums have reached the number one slot in the UK, and their most recent projects have led them away from their emo roots and further along the deconstructed art-rock path once tread by Radiohead. These albums, and many by their collaborators, are released on Dirty Hit, the band’s co-owned label, which Healy calls a “free-form creative environment” for his larger vision of music.

Like his music, Healy’s personal style is protean. His hair and clothing change radically from picture to picture, as if he’s picking trends at random from the last forty years of pop culture. Online, he posts provocations and sententious jabs, and recently he started a podcast (with The Face magazine) in which he speaks with his musical heroes Stevie Nicks, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, and others. In some ways, the blazing confidence he displays in all these outlets is his primary art form, and the aesthetic choices are simply the ornamentation. 

I spoke to Healy on the phone moments after he had finished another interview in his harried press slalom. Despite this, we spoke for an hour and a half. At times he was deeply engaged, unabashedly opining; at others he was blatantly distracted. He shuffled around the house where he was then living and working with his bandmate George Daniel, perpetually fiddling with things in the background. He yelled at his dog, then spent a few moments looking for it. At the end, he sat down to a meal and responded between bites. 

—Ross Simonini

I. REALITY IS CHAOS

THE BELIEVER: How do you normally deal with releases? Do you experience the Phantom Thread postpartum letdown?

MATT HEALY: Yeah. I’m normally having a manic breakdown. I am the stuff that I have within me, and when a record is out, that isn’t anything at the moment. So I tend to start harassing people about new creative ideas right about now, because the energy of the release makes me feel stuck.

BLVR: New work is a distraction. 

MH: Yeah. But, fortunately, it always materializes in some way as my next creative statement. 

BLVR: Does it feel strange to release something in a pandemic that was created before the pandemic?

MH: That record [Notes on a Conditional Form], it’s a time capsule of that old world we’re no longer in. I think my past two records have really been just asking the same question: Can we sustain on an individual level, on a wider societal level? Can the center hold? And it seems like that’s been answered for us: no.

BLVR: How has the release reached people differently during COVID?

MH: I think I’ve made a real allegiance with the online world. For me, it is the world now. I’m so invested in it, and I suppose, subconsciously, I don’t really think of a world outside of it. I think of things being released only, like, on the internet. I’m sure there’s TV shows I can’t be on, but no one can be on them. So it’s all in the context that everyone’s doing the same kind of thing.

BLVR: No more FOMO. 

MH: Exactly. And if you’re going to release a twenty-two-track record, it’s cool if people can’t leave the house.

BLVR: You sound comfortable with the internet consuming the world.

MH: I don’t think I am comfortable with it, but I accept it for what it is. Is this healthy? Probably not. But I’m just obsessed with, like, how it can be utilized to expand human experience. Reality is chaos, and we’ve created an algorithm that keeps us informed of as much of that chaos as possible, from the second we wake up to the second we go to bed, and then we wonder why we’re anxious. I’m not saying that, like, freedom of information is a bad thing. I’m just saying you’re going to have less anxiety if somebody chooses the news you get. If somebody’s curated reality for you, you won’t feel like you’re spinning around in an abyss of chaos and nothingness. You’re not supposed to understand that much stuff. 

BLVR: What’s your internet diet like? 

MH: I watch a lot of documentaries. I didn’t really go to school, because I was fucking about, so I suppose I tried to educate myself over the years, and I suppose the stuff I really enjoy is stuff I find helpful and informative. But when I was making A Brief Inquiry, my YouTube was a cesspit. It was a nightmare. I was trying to have this centrist view, and was watching everything: all the far-left shit, all the far-right, and all this stuff in between. I was interested in how we were communicating in this space and what dialogues were being had. So I also spend a lot of time looking into, like, weird parts of Reddit or 4Chan and seeing what exists in those subcultures. Otherwise, all my internet presence or the places I go on the internet are about me as an artist. It’s like my relationship with social media, for example—this is what I do, whereas most people are like, This is who I am. And they’re two very different things.

BLVR: So are you saying you don’t identify with your persona as a musician?

MH: To be fair, I suppose my record is very much who I am. The fact that I don’t actually have a constructed presence in the media—well, I don’t have that mainly because it would be too stressful for me to try and uphold some kind of constructed image that wasn’t real, that required loads of maintenance. I just try to tell the truth, because then I don’t have to worry about what I’ve said. Then I don’t have to intellectualize it. So I suppose on the internet, I am, in fact, myself.

BLVR: Your stage presence is quite flamboyant. Do you see that as the same personality you display online? 

MH: Over the past couple of years, my social media presence has become just jokes or information. I don’t express opinions on social media anymore. I’m not really interested in short-form expressions. So I suppose I’ll just fuck around a lot on social media to draw people’s attention to my releases. When I’m genuinely expressing an opinion, I save it for long-form statements, whether it be a proper interview or my work, like my music or my podcasts.

BLVR: How about this conversation?

MH: Yes. Exactly.

BLVR: And you see your songs as expressions of opinions? 

MH: No, I don’t. For me, my records are anathema to that idea. My records are just asking questions. I think that’s how I get away with it. Especially “Love It If We Made It.” I couldn’t have made an opinionated song, hectoring like that. It had to be more of a reflection. So you’re right to call me up on that. I don’t express opinions, but I still manage to bring subjects to the table. There’s no position in that, whether I’m giving a direct opinion or not.

BLVR: Do you dislike art that expresses opinions?

MH: Honestly, I love art that expresses opinions. I just want to save important subjects for long-form environments, where I can actually say my piece.

BLVR: And podcasts offer that long-form space for you.

MH: Yeah. And I’m going to do more. I think the podcasts were nice because they were literally talks with people I’d wanted to talk to my whole life. I could have talked to them for two hours and never made it about me. Even in the moments when Stevie Nicks or Brian Eno would try and turn it around and talk about my music, they almost had to stop me from gushing. And I think that’s the perspective I want to be coming from: [that of] a music fan.

BLVR: Do you have a separate, private self you’re hiding away from the world?

MH: I don’t think so. To be honest with you, I’d like to say there is a big divide [between my public and private selves], because I think that would be a healthy place to be, but I also don’t like oversharing, ’cause that can be a fucking schtick in itself. It seems like every time I made a record, I put everything into it. And with this last record, I remember writing down either stuff that made me laugh out loud or stuff that made me feel fucking seen. Like, Oh shit, that’s not a good part of me. I really do believe that’s a good approach, as long as it’s not in a fucking soft-boy kind of way. If there’s something in me that thinks: I should take that out because it’s not good for my ego—well, that’s probably the stuff I should leave in. That’s usually true: the stuff you think you should take out is probably the stuff you should leave in. If it’s too true, I think that’s where real communication lies.

II. THE UNIFIED, NONLINEAR CONSUMPTION OF CONTENT

BLVR: You’ve referenced David Foster Wallace in songs, and I know Vonnegut was important to you. Are you a regular reader?

MH: During all this, I’m buying a lot of books and then putting them in a nice order and then saying, I’m going to read that tomorrow. And then I’m going to read that one after it. But I actually am reading Brian Eno’s old diary A Year with Swollen Appendices, which is really great. I am reading this Daniel Boorstin book, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. It’s about the dawn of creation and the great minds of our time. And that was always a fundamental thing I wanted to read. I’m reading a beautiful but quite heavy book called The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić, which is a classic book about Bosnia. I find European history really interesting. I’ve been trying to read a lot of history and just see how and why things arise. And a lot of sound-art books, like Alan Licht’s Sound Art Revisited.Music as art has always inspired me. I think, like, my love for Eno is an obvious example of that, and I keep talking about this thing called “a new experience.”

BLVR: What’s that?

MH: OK, stay with me here. So I find there’s always this kind of hierarchy when it comes to media forms [in an interdisciplinary context]. There’s always a primary one and a secondary one. So you’ll have a film and then you’ll apply music to the film, but you’ll be applying music to make the film better. The film is primary. And then, if you make music, you’ll make a little music video, but the film is there to exaggerate the music. Music is primary. If you’ve got a video game, you’ve got music to exaggerate the game and you’ve got a scene of film to exaggerate the game. The game is primary. But I want to create an experience that’s not based on [a hierarchy]. Music touches us in a way that film doesn’t; film touches us in a way that games don’t; games touch us in a way that literature doesn’t; literature touches us in a way that music doesn’t. Reversing all of those doesn’ts with a positive is what I want to do. That experience is out there, in the ether. It’s a possibility: this unified, nonlinear consumption of content. Because we’ve separated content into certain [categories]. We’ve invented cinema. We’ve invented albums. They’re all just constructs.

BLVR: Right. Way back when, music wasn’t performed as a concert; it was part of an event where many different elements were present: dance, ritual, story, religion, community. 

MH: Yeah, and I think that with the internet, we have an opportunity to really challenge our ideas about this.

BLVR: Is VR an example of what you’re talking about?

MH: Yeah. I think so. A lot of people get down on VR, and it’s because VR hasn’t come into its own yet. At this point, it’s not actually that incredible, but it still fucking works. Like, if you can manipulate people’s eyes, you can make them feel so many different things. So when that technology gets better and you can integrate memory or nostalgia, and you can take an old man back to that beach where he met his wife and the temperature’s the same… If we don’t die of a disease—lol—this will happen, because technology gets exponentially better. That is the nature of technology. We will approach a place where we can’t decipher the difference between a virtual reality unit and our reality. That has to happen. Logic would dictate that.

BLVR: Elon Musk’s Neuralink seems like it would ostensibly be able to do what you’re speaking about. He’d plant a chip in your brain that could control your entire experience. Is that of interest to you?

MH: Bring it on, man. Do you know what I mean? I’m so into this kind of shit.

BLVR: You are fully embracing the future of technology. 

MH: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. 

BLVR: Is there any specifically musical technology you’re working on right now?

MH: I’m into making some. I keep referencing Brian [Eno], but he’s kind of the person we’ve been in close contact with, and he’s made, like, this humancipator, these MIDI randomizers that I think about a lot. But right now, for me, white noise and sounds from, like, our objective reality are emotional. And I feel like I spend a lot of time in the modular synth world, trying to bring those sounds out. The 1975 creates this digital utopia, but by using real sounds or real white noise or real things from obscure environments. Like, we use the Miku stomp box, where you can play into it and transform your guitar into a fucking Japanese virtual pop star voice. That’s fucking sick.

BLVR: “Digital utopia” is an interesting phrase. You and I both grew up during the “change the world” era, when there was a certain kind of ambition that pointed toward utopia. Do you still feel that way?

MH: Yeah, totally. I mean, I came from the later end of punk and hardcore, where it was like, Change your fucking self. Like, let’s change this world in the venue, and then let’s spread that vibe. It was very much about, like, if you can go onstage, you fucking better tell me something about yourself or tell me something about the world. And we would all stand against ideas that promoted inequality. That’s why we’re here. That’s the fucking vibe. Soul music was like that too—people like Wilson Pickett or Donny Hathaway or James Brown. Or Coltrane. People that fucking meant it. It’s always just been about meaning for me. Everything else is surface. 

BLVR: Your music is quite different from soul and punk. Do you feel it’s still well suited to this goal?

MH: We are a heavy band; that’s where we came from. We started out a heavy band and we watched heavy music die in our hands. By the time you get to, like, Limp Bizkit, heavy music was no longer rebellious, really. It was commercialized rebellion. It was the opposite of what the impetus was. So I wanted to make beautiful music because its beauty would be the sharpest tool in the box. If you want somebody to pay attention, present them with something beautiful. Then they’ll sit up and listen and you get the opportunity to truly subvert ideas. If you make something beautiful that people want to listen to because it’s beautiful, and then you present them with ideas that aren’t beautiful, you present this ethical dilemma that you don’t really get to do in heavy music nowadays.

BLVR: You often say you want to make only positive art. Is this what you mean when you say that?

MH: Yeah. I think so.

BLVR: The genre of heavy music once had a particular community around it. Now, when music has exploded on the internet, genre doesn’t seem equal to community anymore. 

MH: Finding your tribe is a formative part of being young. And a lot of these movements are based on youth culture, so they become quite tribalist, and back in the day, you could, like, walk down King’s Road in London and there’d be all these different subcultures. And I think the internet has created this individual subculture where people now are their own subculture. Because back then you had linear, curated forms of media. So NME [New Musical Express]would, like, put a band on the cover, and then there’d be this new fucking scene around them. But you don’t have those linear constructs anymore, and people are discovering stuff for themselves and they want to feel like individuals. And individualism is the thing that consumerism is trying to serve. That’s the game we’re in. We’ve been taught to be individuals, but we don’t actually have much framework for that, spiritually or socially. So we just adopt a model. And consumer capitalism says, Oh, you want to express yourself? We’ve got loads of things that can help you do that. Here’s a fucking car.

BLVR: Do you try to address that problem in your music?

MH: Um. [Long pause] That’s not my job. I just point toward the utopia. I can’t devise it. 

BLVR: Do you have an idea of what this digital utopia is? 

MH: Actually, I don’t know what I really mean. I call it, like, a digital utopia, the stylistics of my band, because I don’t know what else to call it. It’s not for me to judge. I’m interested in the result of humankind. Everything is just an effect of who we are. Maybe this is the utopia.

III. “WHAT IS MY INSTINCT?”

BLVR: The aesthetic of your records suggests they are built around a theme, but the music is often so disparate. Do you see your albums as unified artistic statements or simply as collections of songs?

MH: Well, Brief Inquiry and this record [Notes on a Conditional Form] are opposing in a way. With Brief Inquiry, I told people about the thing in the title: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships. Like, is that a title of an essay? I was basically telling people, This is what it’s about. Formulate your opinions based on that. I gave them a frame to hang opinions on. Whereas Notes on a Conditional Form was the most open-ended phrase I could think of. So it’s to be interpreted openly. I think some people are really struggling with Notes because I’m not telling anybody what to think, even remotely. You have to make up your own mind. And it’s so long and it’s so messy and people don’t get it, which is cool.

BLVR: People are struggling with it? 

MH: It’s splitting people down the middle. We get these five-star reviews and then we get, like, a bunch of two-out-of-ten reviews. It’s a divisive record, but I don’t imagine I could make a record that’s this odd that’s also universally palatable. 

BLVR: I always look for Rotten Tomatoes scores that are exactly 50 percent, because then you got the lovers and the haters, which means you might get something electric.

MH: Exactly. 

BLVR: You consider these last two albums part of a series called Music for Cars, and the previous name of the 1975 was Drive Like I Do. What’s the deal with cars and driving? 

MH: That’s where my subculture existed. Most of the shit that happened—before you could go to a bar—happened in cars. The music we listened to or the weed we would smoke, it would all be [experienced] in cars. And I think it’s about this kind of romantic ideal of that time. And Drive Like I Do was an emo band. So the name had to be “Drive Like,” or “We Are,” or “the Early,” or “the Late.” [Laughs]

BLVR: Car culture encourages individualism too. You exist in these little bubbles. You and your three friends create a microculture.

MH: That’s so true. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, it’s even in the psychology of how when we’re in our cars, we’re in our own little world, and we scream and shout at people we would never scream and shout at if they stood next to us.

BLVR: Are you making coffee? I hear noises over there.

MH: I’m just sorting out my food.

BLVR: What are you going to eat? 

MH: Chicken satay. But I shouldn’t be eating chicken, really. 

BLVR: Why’s that? Environmental reasons?

MH: No, ’cause I fucking hate chicken. I hate them. 

BLVR: You don’t like them as animals?

MH: No. George [Daniel] doesn’t care about eating chicken ’cause he says they’re dumb. But that’s not a moral position on chicken. I am going to eat it. 

BLVR: What are you working on these days?

MH: Producing a couple of records. And for 75 stuff, I spend a lot of time just thinking and prepping, so I’ll probably spend the next six, seven months thinking of what I want the next thing to be, and then start it.

BLVR: What kind of thought emerges from that process? An aesthetic? 

MH: Yeah, maybe it’s an aesthetic place. I just start writing and letting myself be inspired by stuff and not thinking, Oh, well, this doesn’t match up with this or anything. I don’t actually have that many stages where I sit and think, like, What is the record? I just do it. It’s the only option I have, because we don’t have a blueprint for what a good 75 record is. So I just have to basically trust my instinct. I have to think, Fuck, what is my instinct? 

BLVR: How much material do you throw away?

MH: There were probably about ten songs that didn’t make it, but also we’re at a time now where if we take an idea really seriously, we normally finish it. But, you know, then a lot of stuff will turn into other things and there’ll be a song that just gets cannibalized. Like every time you work on a new song, you go back to this song, you steal something out of it.

BLVR: You’re producing records for other people. Do you want producing to be the future for you?

MH: I suppose I kind of am doing that anyway. It seems like a natural evolution for me. I don’t know if that means it’ll stop me from doing anything else or that it’ll become some primary statement.

BLVR: Producing can mean so many things. What does it mean for you? 

MH: Just facilitating other people’s ideas and visions. Curating stuff and bringing that to the artist and getting excited with them and letting them do whatever the fuck they want. Me and George work as a team. I’m a hands-off producer. He’s the hands-on producer. I just love music and it’s nice to have people who are genuinely exciting around you.

BLVR: You work with your own label, right?

MH: Yeah, the band co-owns it. So it’s our baby. We signed ourselves, really, and now it’s just this free-form creative environment. 

BLVR: It sets up a 360-degree life as an artist.

MH: I’ve tried to keep my finger on the pulse of the direction I’m going. [Chewing]

BLVR: You don’t want to be stuck as a performer forever if you don’t want to be. 

MH: We all just want the freedom of choice. I think that’s what real freedom is.

BLVR: Do you have any models for that?

MH: No, not in music, and I don’t really have any heroes in business. I never was, like, a budding Steve Jobs or anything like that.

BLVR: No Kanye West ambitions? 

MH: Well, that’s different. That guy lives like he’s going to die, which is a way that none of us live. And it’s pretty inspiring to watch him do that. But Kanye is on another level. I don’t know if I want to go to that level of commercial entrepreneurship. It seems like a quick route to burnout, which it seems like he struggles with, for sure. And, you know, this whole thing where he’s going to try and get in tax breaks… [Chewing sounds]

BLVR: Are you still eating the chicken?

MH: It’s a French toast now, for dessert. With strawberries and a bunch of shit. 

BLVR: Do you have a chef making this for you? 

MH: Yeah.

BLVR: It sounds like a pretty heavy combo. 

MH: Yeah, a bit heavy.

BLVR: Can you sing after all this food? Or are you just zombied out? 

MH: Maybe I’ll just make some ambient music and lie on my back. Just tonal shit. Bliss out. Or I’ll probably just hang out and watch George play Grand Theft Auto, which is what I’ve been doing for ten years now. I don’t play video games that much, but I love them for inspiration. They’re a model.

BLVR: And entertainment while you digest.

MH: That’s right. I am feeling heavy now.

BLVR: In traditional Chinese medicine, they talk about how you absorb the energy of what you eat. So chicken energy is quick and peckish. I guess French toast would be egg and bready energy. 

MH: Is this your thing? Have we found your thing?

BLVR: It’s like food, clothing, and architecture are the basic art forms we all can’t escape. Everyone engages with them.

MH: Yeah. That’s so true. The trifecta. You’ve given me an idea. I’m going to steal your ideas. 

BLVR: OK. But credit me if you can.

MH: I will. I’ll do it when I’m giving my Nobel Prize speech.

Originally published in The Believer Magazine

‘I’m mostly interested in art that excavates from the psyche – not the frontal lobe, not the intellectual, not the speakable, but the unspeakable’

Tala Madani’s paintings depict a universe of splendid transgressions. A brood of babies feasts on a mother made of crap. A toddler wields a penis the size of a go-kart. A man is levitated by the power of his own glowing ejaculate. It’s a funny, horrifying and often hypermasculine place, animated by the mythic logic of the subconscious. To suit her subject, Madani depicts many of these activities in the dark, lit dramatically by flashlights and projectors, as if they were scenes in some sordid farce. Light is a primary force here, just as it is for all painters, but these lights are artificial, invasive beams of unwanted exposure.

Since 2006, Madani has created these paintings (and also animations) with the quick brushstrokes and informal attitude of cartoons. But behind these easy lines is a conflict with the whole programme of our socialised selves. Her buffoonish characters seem to be couriers of a bitter message about human nature.

I spoke to Madani on a videocall about these ideas and others. The feeling of the talk was comfortable enough that I questioned if the two of us had met before, but we had not. As she spoke, her voice rested at a deep, relaxed pitch, with a clear confidence that underlined everything she said, even her contradictions. Sometimes she switched midsentence into a mode of high-intellectual intensity, and began teasing out the sociophilosophical implications of her work. On a few occasions, she paused the conversation to criticise her choice of words, and after we finished, she made a few edits to her initial responses that she felt had been “un-succinct”.

Transgress Yourself

Ross Simonini Your work has a nice, transgressive bite to it. Is this a form of resistance? Would you say that you feel repressed by society?

Tala Madani If I was feeling quite repressed, I’d probably make works that reflect repression. So, in a way, the transgressive work allows me to feel quite free. But of course everyone feels repressed. I mean, right now I’m feeling repressed because of COVID, but it’s necessary.

I think you are who you are based on the first five years of your life and how you were treated and how you were allowed to be. And you live within that for the rest of your life. Trump’s behaviour might be totally indicative of how his psychology was formed from a very long time ago, but not necessarily reflective of his current position. But when you say my work is transgressive, I think my work needs to become so much more transgressive.

RS In what way?

TM To make anything, you have to really believe in it. You have to have total faith in it, at least in the moment of making it. And sometimes I wish I believed in other things than I do because I want those things to become magical to me. That’s where my own limitations are in my transgressing, the limitations of the faith that takes art from an object to a magical object.

RS So you want to transgress your own ideology.

TM Yeah, that’s the constant project basically.

RS Where do you get stuck?

TM Anything that you don’t see in my work is where I’ve gotten stuck. So whatever you see is where the faith is.

RS Do you think the limitations evolve from your childhood?

TM I think they’re based on experiences which create your connection to everything. You can’t really believe in something that you don’t know. The limitation is one’s exposure. It’s the lived life.

RS When you were a teenager, you moved from Tehran to Oregon in America. How did that affect you?

TM Well, in Tehran America is perceived in a very particular way through its own cultural outputs. At that time it was Hollywood, MTV, Tom Cruise, Schwarzenegger. And then Oregon was very different to that idea of America: beautiful, but also secluded. I lived in a small town of 6,000 people, and it was a dry [no alcohol] town, which was actually like Iran… But the big shift was the surprise of how little Americans understood Iranians. Iranians were so involved with American pop culture and I thought, for no reason at all, that America would be somehow aware of Iran. So the big shock was that gap. I became much more Iranian in Oregon.

RS What did that mean?

TM In Iran, I thought I was Madonna. I wore a blonde wig and identified with things that I was watching on TV. But then when I got here, I missed home. I think Iranians are actually some of the happiest people, despite all the economic and societal problems. But they just don’t know it, because they’re not allowed to travel and see the rest of the world.

RS Why are they so happy?

TM Interpersonal relationships. I live in Los Angeles and homelessness is a huge problem here. And I think of so many people in Iran that would be homeless if they didn’t have a family net. So I just think about that dependable net that you have as an Iranian, which has disappeared in many Western cultures: family, extended family, friends.

RS Are you happy?

TM I’m happy. I mean, I’ve had coffee and I think caffeine makes you happy. So I’m happy, unless things are really terrible. I also keep the shit to myself. I don’t feel like I need to project onto you right now. This is not an appropriate venue for me to release it.

RS Well, if you need to…

TM Ah, you’re sweet. But actually, this is a new cultural norm and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Like, how do you use your own shit? How do you use your depression? How do you use those feelings? If I’m constantly releasing them, I’m not using them, and as an artist you need to use everything.

RS You don’t want to give me your fuel.

TM If I were to air these feelings and they were to go to an interesting target, that in itself would be interesting. But just to air them does nothing.

RS Is your art a way of airing feelings?

TM Possibly, for me. But it’s really hard for me to know how people read the work, because it’s purely subjective. I think generally whenever you’re faced with an artwork, film, music, you use it for your own needs and what it can do for you. But I’m not a consumer of my own work, right? So I don’t really know how that registers. I’m only interested in my own experience as I’m making it.

RS The paintings often depict a literal expulsion of fluids, which certainly suggests a release.

TM Definitely. There’s a few paintings I’ve painted where a guy has cum on a chair and then he’s shooting it with a gun.

RS Cum Shot [#1, #2 and #3, 2019].

TM That’s right. Terrible titles. But I was thinking about the sperm being half the child, and the guy’s relationship to ‘the new’ is that he just wants to shoot it down. His own relationship with the future is a bit fearful, and the minute the cum is out of him it’s no longer himself.

RS Are you thinking about this before you paint? Or is this in retrospect?

TM I was painting the Shit Mom series [2019] at the same time, with lots of children around this figure of a shit mom. And I was thinking, what is the paternal experience of that? What is the mirroring male experience of that? But these paintings are not totally pre-understood. They’re a curiosity that I followed.

New Expectations

RS Has the Trump/COVID era changed people’s interpretation of your work?

TM I think the pandemic has created so much limbo and confusion right now that it’s difficult to actually make work that is directly about something. And of course, thank God Trump didn’t get reelected. I mean, who could have ever made anything had he gotten reelected?

RS Are those internal transgressions you mentioned harder to perform during the pandemic?

TM I think whenever something is in limbo, you become conservative. You’re on a tightrope. You want to hold onto something. I think it’s really important for us, for all our sakes, to weed out strains of conservatism, because they’re rooted in insecurity and they’re rooted in fear and they get propagated because a lot of structures are comfortable with it. And if artists are invested in ideas of nostalgia, where they actually are interested in harkening – oh, that comes from that! It looks like that! Yay! It looks like this! – and celebrating, then they are not any different from Trump or Boris Johnson. Any kind of investment in nostalgia is really fighting for the same conservative positions of these politicians. And these ideas are put out there and it doesn’t get checked in the artworld. But we should expect more from cultural makers.

RS How does this conservatism manifest in art?

TM When you can’t have a direct experience with the artefact in front of you as an object, and instead you’re having an experience of it in relation to the past. But that’s very different from the way, say, David Lynch uses nostalgia. Because he’s outputting something purely fresh, challenging and compelling.

But our expectations are not ubiquitous. There could be someone who sees art for the first time. And so their experience would obviously be very different from someone who knows the history of art. But as creators, if one’s mental work is involved with nostalgia on a personal level, then you are involved with something that’s not quite different than a political ideology – which that same person might be critical of. And I think the recognition of this is important. Otherwise we’re becoming sloppy and we’re not creating a stepping stone towards something greater.

The Artist Is Irrelevant

RS Do you perform transgressions in your life?

TM Forget me! Who cares about me! It’s irrelevant! The days of ‘She paints in her underpants and that’s why the paintings are so interesting!’ need to be behind us.

RS So you probably dislike the now-popular mode of looking at someone’s art through their identity markers.

TM I think it’s a disservice to all parties involved: the maker, the work, the viewer. I’ve always fought the read of my work in relation to me being from Iran. But here’s the issue: right now, this is hot, the gender-race thing. It might not be hot in ten years. But the work is the work. The paintings become entities. They become personas. They become objects with souls. They become something outside of anybody who made them. That’s the idea of transcending for a viewer. Now, if I’m going to pull you down with my personal stuff, you’re not transcending anything. I think everyone’s work should be as personal to them as possible, but that’s going to be in the work. The artist is irrelevant.

RS What do you mean by ‘soul’ in respect to the artworks?

TM The works that work have power. You make a hundred things and maybe three of them work on that level. Some things have intelligence, like electricity. It knows where to go. You can ground it. I think artworks can have that kind of intelligence because there are moments where someone’s energy has gone through something into another object. If you’re following a painting, you’re following the artist’s thinking with that. So the ones that work have that presence of the artist’s brain.

RS Considering this rejection of identity, do you think this interview is a problem, since it’s exposing people to your personality?

TM Well, we’re trying not to inform them. We’re trying to actually talk about ideas.

RS But your personality is revealed in your words…

TM No, you’re quite right. We have to choose to talk about things around the work, right? Because we’re never going to give someone an experience of the artwork through an interview. But this is my position and I’m putting that forward. You are putting a philosophy into the work. Artwork is philosophy.

Making My Own Porn

RS Taken all together, your body of work feels like a unified world, almost a mythology. Is that how you see it?

TM I’m happy that that’s how you see it. I guess I’ve painted now for about 15 years, and when I started painting I became really aware that I couldn’t express my full position within one or two or three paintings. And so I trusted that, if I continue working, a perspective would become clarified. If I’m fighting for something, I don’t have to show all that fight in one painting. But I don’t go into a world in my head. My internal transgressions would always fight against any kind of a programmatic process like that.

In terms of mythology, they seem more like fables, right? I’m reading this book called Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, from the 1700s. It is by Pu Songling, who wanted to be a literary master, but he was rejected. So he had to just teach Mandarin in local schools. And then he wrote these amazing ghost stories.

RS You just described an artist as a way to describe their work…

TM Did I? [laughs]

RS You have a pretty distinct style, but if you fight against a programmatic process, do you also try to push against it?

TM I mean, one’s style can depict their attitude obviously towards the thing. So style is attitude. My problem with style is that style can become familiar. If you can recognise someone’s style, then you might not look at the thing anymore. I’m very interested in communication through the paintings. So I do fight against my style sometimes because I want to surprise the viewer into looking again and not recognising my work in some kind of a shorthand. Or even recognising myself. Forget the viewer! I mean, I guess I’m retracting what I said before. I am the viewer of my work, in moments. And I’m not interested in having a shorthand experience.

RS Are you saying that all your paintings are based on a communication of ideas?

TM Yes. I think all painting is conceptual. Painting is thinking and painting is a language. In a way, the more you paint, the harder it becomes to paint. You can say painters are like very, very addicted heroin addicts. You want to have an experience every time you’re making something. Every time, I’m looking for a high. But that is antithetical to having an idea. And it might lead to unsuccessful paintings. But at the moment that’s what I’m looking for: pure experiences.

RS When you started making art as a child, were you looking for experiences like this?

TM I think as a child it was purely about communication, I drew a screaming child and gave it to my mother when I was angry once. I had taken art classes in grade school, but the work all seemed not to be mine. Then, one day in eighth grade, I drew Mario from Super Mario Bros. And I made it look like Mario. And that was a revelation: you can make something look like something! And that was my first turn-on. And then I was in love with someone and I just started drawing naked Roman statues from books. I couldn’t buy porn so I just made my own. So then there was that turn-on: they’re naked, and I’m going to put them next to each other. And I think that was it, basically. That just got me hooked: sublimating sexual desires was how I started drawing.

RS Transgression.

TM Yeah, and lack of porn accessibility before the internet.

RS A lot of boys draw violent things, which is probably a similar impulse. If you can’t act something out in life, do it in art.

TM Exactly. Guns or tanks or something. That’s what they were doing in Iran, too. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. For children and adults. I’m mostly interested in works that have that component. Art that excavates from the psyche, not the frontal lobe, not the intellectual, not the speakable, but the unspeakable.

RS Some people would say abstraction is the most obvious example of that.

TM No form has primacy over another form, abstraction, figuration, comic stripes, doodles. It’s only as good as how true it is to the maker. I do think that some forms were transgressive at one time, but not anymore. Right now abstraction is very conservative. You have to work really hard to make a transgressive abstract work. I think it should involve real poo.

The only objects I’ve ever collected are books about the German artist, Joseph Beuys. Monographs, interviews, biographies, criticism. Usually, I look at art books for the pictures but I’ve read all my Beuys books, cover to cover, and somehow I still remain mystified by both the art and artist. This is what keeps me engaged in a lifelong study of his work.

On February 8th, I was supposed to visit the newest Beuys exhibition at The Broad museum in Los Angeles, but that morning, my home and art studio burnt to the ground. Instead of seeing the show, I was staring at the news, feeling the shock of every layer of loss: my community, memories, art, archives, and of course, my collection of Beuys books.

Beyond culture, the Eaton Fire took great swathes of wilderness. Wildlife died. Street trees were cooked alive. On my property alone, we lost two toyons, a sweetgum, three palms, and six fruit trees. The blood orange is now a burnt limb reaching from out of the earth.

After seeing the ruins of our home, I have assumed all the plant life in the area had been destroyed, but this is not what happened. Hundreds of oaks are still in Altadena, alive and well, growing amongst a landscape of grey rubble.

*

“I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heart wood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the Druids, who are called after the oak. Druid means oak. They used their oaks to define their holy places.” — Joseph Beuys

In 1982, Joseph Beuys planted 7,000 oaks across the city of Kassel. The project took five years and was only completed after his death. The Broad show is centered around the mission of this work. The exhibition takes its name, In Defense of Nature from an ecological activism campaign that Beuys, his university students, and his dealer, Lucrezia de Domizio, began in the 1980s, involving pamphleteering and digging.

I learned about this from a now-burnt book of the same name written by de Domizio. The book chronicles a trip Beuys took to the Seychelles in his 60s, near the end of his life. There, he studied the landscape and planted two trees. By the end, he was creating art by creating life.

I came to know Beuys through books, not exhibitions, which, for me, suits the slow unfolding nature of his work. Long before I saw his sculpture in person, it filled my imagination from images on pulped trees. Generally speaking, I don’t need to read more than a book or two about any artist — too much knowledge muddies the work — but reading about Beuys has only deepened the mystery.

I think everyone, including the artist, has worked to keep it that way. Perhaps this is because Beuys’ body of work is a complex and messy, and involves a constellation of elements: pedagogy, fluxus performance, sculpture, music, philosophy, politics, Celtic mythology, and ecology. He revolted against the university where he taught, founded an alternative political party and a free university. His identity is equal parts teacher, shaman, activist, and scientist, and he nearly always dressed in his fisherman outfit, suggesting that his real work was out in the wilderness somewhere. The Broad attempts to organizes all these elements of his work into separate rooms, and still, it is nearly impossible to make a sensible whole from the parts. Beuys refuses to be reduced.

Some people might consider this unknowability a failure, or an annoying affect in the work — obfuscation for its own sake. There’s truth to that. Beuys lied about his biography, famously telling myths about his rebirth at the hands of indigenous people in Eastern Europe. He usually spoke with a frustrating, poetic syntax. His drawings invokes opaque, metaphysical concepts, and the sculptures look like archaic relics, built of stone and fat. In one performance, he covered his head in honey and gold leaf, and explained his art to a dead hare — an apt expression of his approach to clarity.

This is an artist who is clearly and actively creating mystery. For me, this intention does not diminish the work’s hypnotic effect, because the art is the mystery, and he builds it well. True mystery is endlessly generative. Superficial mystery, like that of bad TV show, fizzles after a season. Beuys has been generating curiosity for long after his death, which is why his work continues to inspire artists, exhibitions, and new books.

If there is any concept at the heart of Beuys’ work, it is the immateriality of art. For Beuys, art is in all of us, around all of us, and we are all artists. It is the vital force of the universe. Through his suggestion his objects becomes portals into the primordial cycle of energy as it flows from the earth to animals to humans. The material becomes alive.

*

I am not usually a sentimental person, and yet, total material loss has felt distinctly like the loss of life. The emotions may be different in magnitude but strangely similar in quality. As with the death of a person, the pain is not really from the physical loss but from the loss of an immaterial presence. We miss what the physical thing did for us. When I passed my Beuys shelf, a single glance at a spine could give off just enough mystery to realign my thinking.

Throughout the grieving process, people have repeatedly reminded me that what I lost are “just things.” I know this is their way of cheering me up: pointing out the deadness of inanimate objects and the aliveness of my family. I have tried to believe this, but ultimately, I’m not sure I make this kind of distinction.

I lost of the guitar my mother gave before she died. This is the instrument I became a musician while playing and the primary guitar I’ve played in hundreds of concerts around the world. I do not miss the wood and strings, but the feeling that the guitar contained. This was a tool for inspiring something within me, and its presence was better at doing so than my memories alone.

This is what art does. Perhaps it would be best if none of us needed objects and we could use only our mind to conjure up our feelings. Like Buddha, we would be sovereign. But I love art precisely because of it’s capacity to transmit such experiences that I can not invoke on my own. I have dedicated my life not to beautiful objects but to the unseen forces they transmit. For me, art is not a thing; it is a feeling, just as mother is a feeling, just as home is a feeling.

*

Beuys immaterial interest does not diminish his fetish for objects. He’s a contradiction. He loves stuff. His vitrines are tableaux of curiosities — a chunk of raw stone, a strip of felt, a little dusty bottle of oil. These are the remnants of a man sensitive to the vital energy humming in things. He collects what nobody else notices. This is the same objectification that continues to pump out new Beuys books, 60 years after his death, and what inspired Eli Broad to collect Beuys’ series of “multiples,” which are the primary subject of the new show.

The multiple is Beuys’ word for an edition. It’s his way of filling the world with more things. A multiple could be a poster, print, sculpture, drawing, or fetish, sometimes finished with his stamp or signature. These objects are made in large batches, and are inexpensive in comparison to his sculptures. They suit Beuys’ populist philosophy: everyone gets an object.

One iconic multiple is the Capri Battery: a yellow lightbulb plugged into a real lemon, which needs to be regularly replaced to avoid rotting. It’s an elegant distillation of the energy transference at the heart of Beuys’ work: from the organic to the technological, the material to the immaterial. Beuys once said, “If you have all my multiples then you have me completely,” as if he had magically imparted his life energies to his objects. If this is true, what would happen if they all burnt?

*

When I evacuated on January 7th, the only book I brought with me was “What is Money?” a roundtable conversation with Beuys on the book’s titular question. I packed the book just as a way to get myself in the headspace for the show the next day, when I still thought I might go. I also think I wanted to have some small part of Beuys with me.

I had not read the book before and have not had the time to read it since. It now seems to have been an appropriate choice, preparing me for the future of financial upheaval. Money has been a charged topic in this post-disaster moment, and I am looking forward to getting the Beuysian perspective on replacing money with art.

I often turn to Beuys when I’m need an abstract perspective on a topic — persona, teaching, death. Since the fire, I’ve thought about his trajectory as an artist. His career, as we mostly know it, began in his early 40s. Work before this is scant and rarely discussed. Knowledge of his emerging years is more novelistic than biographical, built from Beuys’ fanciful tales rather than factual documents. Some of this is by design, to transform his youthful involvement with the Nazis into something mythological. But also, he was just a late bloomer.

Now, with nearly all my early work and archives erased, the first half of my life is an abyss. Paintings, journals, notebooks, and childhood work — gone. When I look to the future, it has helped me to remember that with his late and brief period of making work, Beuys created an entire world.

*

Beuys began creating his multiples in 1965, when he was 44, which I learned when I finally visited the Beuys show, six weeks after the fire. The show begins with a timeline of his life, the first two thirds of which, is barely discussed.

The work in the show was quiet and subtle — photographs of his performances and prints of his drawings, scribbled in shit-brown and rabbit’s blood. Unfortunately for me, my viewing experience was accompanied by the roaring din of pop music reverberating through the museum. A wash of Katy Perry’s “fireworks” was punctuated by applause and a blurred shrieking. As I looked at each work, I could not help but wonder what could possibly be producing such a terrible sounds.

When I reached the end of the exhibition, I saw that an aerobics class was being held beside a silent video of Beuys planting his first oak trees, and that the class’ instructor was using a piercing squeal to direct her students. The Broad often colors their exhibitions with “fun” programming, and for some unknown reason, they decided some cardio would pep up this gentle, introspective show.

Sometimes I prefer books to exhibitions. I’ve entered much of my favorite art through the page and not through the gallery, where, for example, one woman might take a selfie in front of Beuys’ work about free education, while another woman photographs her professionally. Like a good novel, a book allows for a unfettered, immaterial fantasy in the mind; and like multiples, books are affordable. Among the first items I replaced were a few items from my Beuys library, the newest of which was the catalog for the Broad show.

Nearly half of the In Defense of Nature monograph is dedicated to The Broad’s continuation of 7,000 Oaks. The museum has planted 100 new oak trees in Los Angeles’ Elysian Park. It’s a presciently timed and well-needed work. Trees are air purifiers. They filter toxic smoke from urban fires and pump out oxygen to lift our mood — all of which Beuys clearly understood. He saw himself as a healer.

Altadena, where I lived, was one of the great tree-lined neighborhoods of L.A., and therefore, had some of the cleanest air in the city. This was due to the aquifer beneath the town and the orographic effect of the San Gabriel mountains to the east. This created enough moisture to grow the mile-long line of towering pines on Christmas Tree Lane, and the grove of coastal oaks in Cobb Estate, where the Marx Brothers once lived.

Live oaks are native trees, familiar with California fire — maybe even invigorated by it — and they can thrive amongst our tragedy. Human intelligence has made flammable homes that fill the air with toxic fumes, but plant intelligence has made oaks robust with vitality and heartwood.

Without calculation or language, these beings have forged an ongoing relationship with fire. How have they done this? How has the Pechanga great oak, not far from Altadena, lived to be 2,000 years old? How have oaks been surviving on this planet for 56 million years, through the ice age and every other upheaval of the climate? These are true, indelible mysteries and they are worthy of holding our attention forever.

A different version of this essay appeared in Cultured magazine.