Hilton Als: “It’s always so moving to see how art claims us out of a kind of loneliness.”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses images, videos, and other fragments from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
I got to know Hilton Als as a writer through his 2013 book White Girls, a collective portrait of his cultural and affective lineage told through memoir, essay, criticism, and other forms of prose. Als made me understand that the task of a writer is to invent language, and his was one I learned as I read. A year later, I got to know Als as a teacher, through a course he led on James Baldwin at Columbia University when I was a graduate student. In class, Als made me feel like I had endless amounts yet to read, but that I could, despite that, find something to say. But it was only when I read Toni Morrison’s eulogy for Baldwin during the strange summer of 2020 that I found the words to describe Als himself, who, besides being a writer, is also an artist, playwright, curator, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning theater critic for The New Yorker. “Your life refuses summation,” Morrison writes about Baldwin, “…and invites contemplation instead.”
This fall, I met up with Als on Zoom for the inaugural live edition of this interview series, which was hosted by the Curatorial Practice department at New York’s School of Visual Art. As he talked me through the fragments of film, documentary, and performance that have shaped his life as an artist, he seemed moved by works he had seen over and over again, as if he was responding not just to the pieces themselves but to the patina of feeling that had accumulated over time. A lot has changed in the year since we started planning this interview, but it was clear the pieces Als selected continued to resonate deeply with him. Perhaps that’s a marker of mastery: the way a piece of art can remain unchanged, but still mold itself to the new meanings its viewers need it to carry.
Because this interview follows , where relevant I have included time markers to indicate which sections
