Category: interviews

Two Interviews With Dionne Brand About Salvage

Our oldest had to read Mansfield Park in 9th grade and very much did not like it, and so I’ve avoided it. Until I heard poet Dionne Brand talking about it with David Naimon on the Tin House podcast, Between The Covers. [youtube] Brand’s latest book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck, is a forensic return to a whole host of “classic” texts, including Austen’s Mansfield Park, that find Blackness where it has been omitted by the structures of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. But Brand goes beyond literary analysis to question the function of a novel, and how forms of writing—and thus thinking—perpetuate and protect the structures that spawned them.

Anyway, now I just read another conversation between Brand and Saidiya Hartman, from Bomb Magazine last fall. Here they discuss the larger goal outlined in Salvage:

[Dionne Brand] I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.

[Saidiya Hartman] I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful.

Even if I hadn’t heard Brand’s conversation, I like to think I’d have spotted the glaring anxieties of capitalism that obsess almost every character in Mansfield Park, as well as the many references to Antigua and, thus, the direct dependence on plantation slavery of the family’s fortunes—and their entire world. I’m only halfway through, and this book [Austen obv] is grim as hell.

Brand’s not through, though. Her and Hartman’s discussion of photography, visual art, aesthetics, and beauty continues to work away in my mind.

[meanwhile, in case you needed any evidence that this conversation happened in September: “Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)“

Dionne Brand: Salvage: Readings From The Wreck [tinhouse]
Dionne Brand interviewed by Saidiya Hartman [bombmagazine]

Riding Rail With Roe Ethridge & Mark Leckey

The Brooklyn Rail’s The New Social Environment is a daily artist conversation series, which is an incredibly ambitious amount of programming, but also the most natural-seeming thing in the world.

Anyway, tomorrow, Thursday, Feb. 6, Roe Ethridge will be talking about his current show at Andrew Kreps.

And on Monday, Feb. 10, Mark Leckey will be talking about his current show at Gladstone, which closes on the 15th.

They’re so quick with the uploads!

Registration is required, but free, though you could join me and donate to the Rail.

David Diao in The Brooklyn Rail

As his show of paintings from the 1970s until yesterday opens at Greene Naftali, David Diao’s lengthy conversation with Joe Fyfe is in the latest issues of The Brooklyn Rail.

Diao talks with Fyfe about his explorations of painting surface and technique, his search for imagery, his critique of monochrome and abstraction, and his long engagement with the history of painting through painting.

Open up the gallery’s list and installation shots to see and identify more of the pivotal older works Diao discusses.

David Diao: Put To The Test, 23 Jan – 22 Feb 2025 [greenenaftaligallery]
David Diao with Joe Fyfe [brooklynrail.org]

On Late Work

Last summer Copenhagen artist Henriette Heise held a seminar at the National Gallery of Denmark to consider artists’ late work. The artists ranged from Michelangelo to Lutz Bacher to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She discussed it with Pernille Albrethsen for Nordic Art Review:

When it comes right down to it, the late works are eyewitnesses from the edge, from the end of life. Many of them testify to a courage to dare to look at what scares us. We must somehow train ourselves to get better at going through changes without becoming paralysed, unable to act. I myself am of an age where I can remember the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Chernobyl accident, and other things. There are short periods of stability and then there are periods of great upheaval, such as the one we find ourselves in now. At present, I feel a great need to think about how I can use my voice in the current crisis without having to make art that has been somehow pre-ordered or could have been made by AI. So, yes, one of things I have learnt from many of the late works is a kind of unlearning, a resetting of what you think you know and think you can predict.

Quoting her takeaway here only makes me want to read and see it all; it sounds like it has only gotten more relevant in the six months since it happened.

How On Earth To Keep Going? [kunstkritikk.com]

Thomas Lawson’s Rabkin Interview Just Dropped

I listened to Thomas Lawson’s conversation with the Rabkin Foundation’s Mary Louise Schumacher on the way home this afternoon. I aspire to accomplishing so much and being so concise I can get it all done in a 31-minute podcast. He should win an editing award on top of the writing.

Lawson mentions his January 1988 essay in Artforum on the history and contemporary resonance of cyclorama paintings, and I just read it. The ending is absolutely eerie in its torn-from-today’s-headline vibe. And by today, I mean not just 1988, but 2024. How is that possible?

I wish I’d known of Lawson’s essay in 2010 when I was writing a series of posts proposing ways of saving Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg, which was under threat of demolition by the National Park Service. TBF I was focused much less on the cyclorama painting—which had already been moved to a new, purpose-built visitor entertainment center—than on how the surviving architecture related to the built and marked history of memorialization on the battlefield. [Spoiler alert: it was destroyed.]

Thomas Lawson 2024 Rabkin Interview [rabkinfoundation.substack]

Convened & Conversed: Diamond Stingily & Matthew Barney @ Gladstone

I missed this when it streamed live, so I was psyched to get the heads up from Gladstone Gallery that Diamond Stingily & Matthew Barney’s conversation from October 5, 2024, has been uploaded to YouTube.

I listened to it in the car and had expected to hear a lot of effusive praise for Carrie Mae Weems, in whose show the event was staged; for Precious Okoyomon, who organized the event; and for Bottega Veneta, which sponsored something. [Weems rather amazingly recreated some of her most iconic photos as Bottega ads, which, I’ve never wanted someone to get a bag more.]

Anyway, no, it has one of the coldest opens of any artist talk I’ve ever heard. A lesson to everyone. Also, Matthew Barney cut Barbara Gladstone’s hair, more than once.

Siddhartha Miter’s Rabkin Interview Dropped

I finished listening to Siddhartha Miter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation Executive Director Mary Louise Schumacher this morning, and it was insightful and sobering. They talked a lot about the art writing field and its precarity, and that was as depressing as you can imagine. But they also talked about the windows art writing affords into new, expanded views of the world, beyond the luxury object trade talk we’re inundated with, and it was awesome. Then I’ve been clicking through the sheer number of powerful pieces Miter has written about incredible artists, exhibitions, movements, and publications, and it’s extraordinary. A combination of vast treasure and barely scratching the world’s art surface.

If you need me, I’ll be filling up my reading list, starting with Jupiter Magazine, one of the art publications Miter namechecked. The theme of Jupiter’s latest issue, The Theater of Refusal, revisits and renews Charles Gaines’ foundational 1993 exhibition of contemporary Black art and its critical context. Its form was a series of readings and screenings throughout the summer, which I will now try to approximate in my head.

2024 Rabkin Interview with Siddhartha Miter [rabkinfoundation.substack]
Jupiter [jupiter-mag]

Emily Watlington Rabkin Interview Dropped

It has turned out to be an enlightening pleasure to listen to the interviews with the recipients of this year’s Rabkin Foundation awards, and none moreso than the conversation with Emily Watlington.

I’d already had the pleasure of working with Emily in 2022; she was my editor when I wrote about Mormon Architecture for Art in America, and I became a fan and follower of her writing work as well.

With Mary Louise Schumacher, she talks about some of the nuances and challenges of writing about art and disability. They also talk about Watlington’s attuned sensibilities brought to bear on the Venice Biennale, which purported to bring attention and critical consideration to many historically marginalized artists. Watlington’s diaries and in-depth review reveals that it often did just the opposite.

Rabkin Interview 2024 with Emily Watlington [rabkinfoundation substack]

Holland Cotter Rabkin Interview Dropped A Minute Ago

I got caught up on listening to it pretty quickly last week, but I have been slow to post a link to Holland Cotter’s conversation with Rabkin Foundation executive director Mary Louise Schumacher.

Cotter talked about growing up free range in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and picked the Met for his workplace photo. Which after so many years at the Times, is probably the place he’s written about the most.

Cotter and Schumacher did not talk about his donation of the prize money to the the International Association of Art Critics and the Forge Project, to support emerging and Native American arts writing and fellowships, for which mad respect. [As ARTnews notes, the NY Times prohibits its full-time employees from accepting cash awards, and these days a full-time arts writing job is rarer than even the most generous awards.]

2024 Rabkin Foundation Award Recipient Holland Cotter [rabkinfoundation substack]

Robin Givhan Rabkin Interview Dropped

Technically it was released yesterday, but I just finished listening to the second interview with a 2024 Rabkin Prize recipient, Washington Post critic Robin Givhan.

In addition to her own work and career, Givhan spoke to Mary Louise Schumacher about visiting the Equal Justice Institute’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Birmingham, Alabama; and the same searing kicker in Hilton Als’ profile of André Leon Talley that has stuck with me for 25 years, too.

TK Smith Sets The Rabkin Interview Bar High

And here I thought I could be chill and grateful and just acknowledge the congratulations as they came in, while I processed the shock of being included by the Rabkin Foundation among an inspiring but frankly daunting group of writers, but I guess not.

The first of the series of interviews Rabkin Foundation executive director Mary Louise Schumacher recorded with this year’s award recipients dropped, and it’s great. Curator, writer, and cultural historian TK Smith talked with Schumacher about hope and repatriation; the unsustainability of art writing; Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins [visited here last year for a NYT story by another Rabkin recipient Siddhartha Mitter]; Derek Jarman’s Blue; and much more.

If they’re all like this, I think I will have to post about each one, including, when the time comes, my own. I hope I make even half as much sense.

The Rabkin Interviews: 2024 Rabkin Prize winner TK Smith [rabkinfoundation]

Tom Burr Talking At Dia About Felix Gonzalez-Torres

A couple of weeks ago artist Tom Burr sp0ke at Dia about his and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work. Now that conversation is online.

Burr was in a 1989 group show with Gonzalez-Torres, Michael Jenkins and John Lindell at Paula Allen Gallery (no relation). One piece Burr showed, Jones Beach State Park, was from a series of bulletin boards outfitted with the texts, flyers, and notices from a specific public place.

Gonzalez-Torres showed two magazine rack sculptures with an endlessly replenished supply of handouts, which, based on the Foundation’s images, turned out to be a paragraph clipped from the front page of the NY Times on November 26, 1989, the weekend before the show opened. Between that and the bulletin board, it sounds like the show had a real community center vibe, or what Dia curator Jordan Carter called, an “aesthetics of administration.”

installation view of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ [non-work and] work installed at Paula Allen Gallery, 1989. Left is White Legal; right is “Untitled” (White Legal). photo via FG-TFoundation

A few years later in his catalogue raisonné, Gonzalez-Torres adminstered a dropkick to one of his magazine racks. The one mounted on the wall, “Untitled” (White Legal), remained a work, while the freestanding rack, then known as just “White Legal,” was demoted to “non-work.”

None of this is in the talk, btw; it’s just me nerding out. And it’s my way of resisting the urge to just type out the entire conversation about Burr’s Deep Purple, whose form is a 2/3-scale reference to Tilted Arc. Choice stuff.

Live From The Gagosian Platform

In the Nota Bene boys’ rocking conversation with Antwaun Sargent, they discuss Gagosian’s ability to present work by younger Black artists in the context of their white elders who are also represented by the gallery.

On L.A. artists Lauren Halsey and Ed Ruscha: “You wouldn’t necessarily think of those two artists together until you sort of—’There’s an Ed in the booth and a Lauren in the booth’—and I use a booth because that’s where all of our artists often meet.”

“…Those are the sorts of things that become really interesting to me, where the collector has the Lauren and the Ed, or the Rick [Lowe] and the Brice [Marden],” Sargent continues, “…and they might send a picture and show it installed, and you can send that to the artist, and you can have that moment.”

I think I flagged these two mentions from an hour-plus insightful discussion because they recognize two sites of art interaction—a fair, a collector’s home—that typically don’t get consideration, at least in public discourse. One of Antwaun’s superpowers is his sensitivity to an artist’s experience, and that artworks travel to places that artists often do not.

On Making A Galliano Documentary

Josh Slater-Williams has an interview for Mubi with a very thoughtful Kevin Macdonald about the implications of making High & Low — John Galliano, a documentary that about the designer’s career, his conviction for his vile anti-semitic outburst in Paris, and his not-uncontroversial return to fashion afterward.

Coming from outside of the fashion industry and its norms is probably Macdonald’s greatest superpower here; he’s able to recognize the self-delusions that haunt the field and its most intense and talented figures, and to put them on view. What I didn’t expect was to hear how Galliano handled his own role in a situation where he ceded all editorial and creative control:

He wanted to achieve various conscious things, but I think also this is part of his therapy, I suppose. It’s part of his trying to figure things out for himself. That was really apparent to me when I went to the Margiela show that we filmed, that begins and ends the film. I realized as we were watching it: my God, this show is about having a documentary made about your life. It’s about his life filtered through film, because he made a fashion show that is a film at the same time.

A Psychological Detective Story: Kevin Macdonald on “High & Low – John Galliano” [mubi]
Previously, related: Margiela Artisanal Cardboard, Rover, Bunny, Beanie

“How To Make Films The Ken Loach Way”

I don’t think Matt Zoller Seitz even knows how to do a bad interview, but his discussion with Ken Loach on the occasion of the release of The Old Oak, which Loach, 87, has decided will be his last film, is really excellent. Part of that is their discussion of the experience of filmmaking, Loach’s process, and style, something the famously naturalistic, un-stylish [sic] filmmaker apparently never gets to talk about:

If you were to distill “How to make films the Ken Loach way,” what would be the most important rules?
Camera at eye level. Natural light. Lens like a human eye. No great wide-angle lens and no extreme telephoto effects. Don’t intervene in an actor’s space, you know? Respect their space. Within those parameters, light is critical because it can tell viewers whether you’re gonna treat somebody like a suspect in a hostile interview or whether you’re gonna engage with someone sympathetically. I’ve learned a lot just looking at old paintings. First thing when you look for a location is “Where’s the light?” It isn’t about the place. If the light doesn’t work, we needn’t see any more of the scene. It’s not only useful for lighting performers, it’s just immensely beautiful for shots. And then you consider the balance of people in the frame, the balance of architecture, the rhythm of cutting. Bad cutting can destroy a sense of reality.

What is bad cutting?

I wish him a long and healthy life, but can we get more interviews on process with him quick, please?

Ken Loach on his last film, ‘The Old Oak,’ Power and Hope [vulture]