Bomb Magazine 133

BOMB
CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARTISTS, WRITERS, MUSICIANS , PERFORMERS, DIRECTORSSINCE 1981
Start your free trial today. No credit card required.

WEBSITES DOMAINS COMMERCE + MORE
U S E T H E O F F E R C O D E B O M B M A G T O S AV E 1 0 % .
NUMBER 133 / FALL 2015
Build a beautiful website with Squarespace.
Conversations between Artists, Writers, Musicians, Performers, Directorssince 1981
BOMB
Number 133 / Fall 2015
BOMB 133 / FALL 2015
INTERVIEWS
32 ART NARI WARD
by Lee Jaffe
Wards Jamaican roots and home in Harlem have been recurring themes in his numerous installations. He speaks
with Jaffe about three key works.
42 MUSIC JIM OROURKE
by Jay Sanders
ORourke and Sanders go over the complex layerings
from lyrics to mixes to the LPs coverin ORourkes
recent pop album, Simple Songs.
48 ART DAVID DIAO

by Matthew Deleget
Diaos first comprehensive retrospective, at the Ullens
Center for Contemporary Artfittingly, in the painters
native Chinais the occasion for a conversation that
looks back at fifty years of artistic production.
58 FILM RACHEL ROSE

by Aily Nash
on the cover: Henry

Taylor, PORTR AIT OF
DE ANA L AWSON,
2014, acrylic on
canvas, 48 36 inches.
Courtesy of the artist
and Mesler/Feuer,
New York.
Rachel Roses video art creates palimpsests registering diverse personal and historical experiences. Nash
prompts the filmmaker to describe her process in relation
to the materiality of video.
70 LIT TONYA FOSTER and JOHN KEENE

Foster and Keene discuss the strategies for black
resistance in their respective new booksthe
poetry volume A Swarm of Bees in High Court and
Counternarratives, a collection of short fictions.
96 LIT ALICE NOTLEY

by Robert Dewhurst

Notleys body of work consists of over thirty-five
collections of poetry and prose. To consider her oeuvre,
in her interlocutors words, is to court cerebral and

sensory overload.
122 ART DEANA L AWSON and HENRY TAYLOR
Amid recollections of a joint trip to Haiti, photographer
Deana Lawson and painter Henry Taylor parse the art

of portraiture in each of their different mediums.
138 THEATER ANNIE BAKER

by Elianna Kan
New York sees two of the playwrights most recent
works performed this fall, The Flick and John. She talks
with Kan about her fondness for Chekhovs plays, writing
for certain actors, and the music of speech.
3 CONTENTS
EDITORS CHOICE
12 Skinscreen: Art and Poetry at the New Museums
Surround Audience Triennial

by Alan Gilbert
18 Pierre Huyghes Rite Passage and Human Mask

by Chris Chang
20
he Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life

T
of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth
Loffreda, and Max King Cap
by Timothy Donnelly
ARTISTS ON ARTISTS
113 ESTER PARTEGS

by Eduardo Abaroa
116 MICHAEL CHILDRESS

by Susan Jennings
119 CAMERON ROWL AND

by Ian Edward Wallace
BOMB SPECIFIC
134 K ATHERINE HUBBARD
22 Samuel Becketts Happy Days

by Amber Power
24 Matt Freedman and Tim Spelioss Endless Broken Time

by Ander Mikalson
26 Guillaume Apollinaires Zone: Selected Poems
translated by Ron Padgett

by Dylan Furcall
28

Actor, Playwright, Failure, Father, FagConrad

Gerhardt Strikes Again. Jeff Weiss and Richard
C. Martinezs And Thats How the Rent Gets Paid
by Jim Fletcher
30

Fran Rosss Oreo

by Rone Shavers
This issue is supported in part by public funds from

the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in
partnership with the City Council; the New York State
Council on the Arts with the support of Governor
Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature;
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Supporters include readers like you.
SUBSCRIBE: ONE YEAR / FOUR ISSUES
BOMBMAGAZINE.ORG/SUBSCRIBE
US PRINT & DIGITAL: $24
INTERNATIONAL PRINT & DIGITAL: $46
DIGITAL: $12
FIRST PROOF
67
77
79
81
88
90
103
106
Lori Ellison
Tyehimba Jess
Gabriella De Ferrari
Blake Butler
Albert Mobilio
Jen George
Jimmie Durham
Julie Carr
BOMB SUBSCRIPTIONS
US Print & Digital: $24
International Print & Digital: $46
Digital: $12
ONLINE: bombmagazine.org/subscribe
Visa, MC, and Amex accepted.
PHONE: 718-636-9100 x106
Monday to Friday, 10 am6 pm EST
FA X: send address and payment
details to 718-636-9200
MAIL: send check amount (see above)
made out to BOMB Magazine, and mail
to BOMB, Subscription Department:
80 Hanson Place #703
Brooklyn, NY 11217-1506
BOMB (ISSN 07433204) is
published quarterly in March, June,
September, and December for
$24 per year by:
NEW ART PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Periodical postage paid at Brooklyn,
NY, and additional mailing offices.
BOMB 133
POSTMASTER
send address changes to BOMB,
Subscription Department:
US NEWSSTAND DISTRIBUTION
Disticor Newsstand Services
EUROPEAN NEWSSTAND
DISTRIBUTION
Pineapple Media, Inc.
Central Books Ltd.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
CALL: 718636-9100 x106
EMAIL: ted@bombsite.com
BOMB is indexed in Humanities
International Complete.
The entire contents of BOMB and
bombmagazine.org are copyright
2015 by New Art Publications, Inc.,
and may not be reproduced in any
manner, either in whole or in part,
without written permission from the
publisher. All rights are reserved.
BOMB STAFF
INTERNS
PUBLISHER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Betsy Sussler
Gianni de Falco (editorial)

Dylan Furcall (editorial)
Tilhenn Klapper (archive)
Samantha Kohl (archive and distribution)
Kaitlyn Kramer (archive)
Thatcher Snyder (editorial)
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Mary-Ann Monforton
SENIOR EDITOR
Mnica de la Torre
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
WEB EDITOR AND ONLINE

LITERATURE EDITOR
Andrew Bourne
EDITORS AT LARGE
Carlos Brillembourg, Architecture
Saul Ostrow, Art
MANAGING DIRECTOR, MARKETING

AND DIGITAL PROJECTS
Ryan Chapman
ART
Tina Barney, Miyoshi Barosh, Ross
Bleckner, Cecily Brown, Adam Fuss,
Joe Fyfe, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Stuart
Horodner, Anthony Huberman, Judy
Hudson, David Humphrey, Roberto Juarez,
Shirley Kaneda, Deana Lawson, Zoe
Leonard, Nell McClister, Josiah McElheny,
Bruce Pearson, Lucy Raven, Legacy Russell,
Clifford Ross, Amy Sillman, Nick Stillman,
Mimi Thompson, and Kara Walker
ARCHIVE EDITOR
Richard J. Goldstein
ONLINE ASSOCIATE EDITORS
David Everitt Howe: Art
Chris Chang: Performing Arts
ANDREW W. MELLON FELLOW
Oral Histories: Terence Trouillot
CREATIVE DIRECTION & DESIGN
Everything Studio
DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT
Philip Langer
DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE
Amber Power
DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANTS
George Negroponte
WXY architecture + urban design
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Cary Brown-Epstein
Paul Cantor
Rosemary Carroll, Co-chair
Michael Coffey
Jennifer Clifford Danner
Eric Fischl
Rachel Lee Hovnanian
Heather M. Kirby
Ellen Phelan
Jane Rosenblum
Betsy Sussler
Lybess Sweezy, Co-chair
Mickalene Thomas
TRUSTEES EMERITI
Michele Oka Doner
Klaus Kertess
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Andrew Fierberg
Nicole Klagsbrun
Edward Tyler Nahem
Tim Nye
Alexander S. C. Rower
David Salle
Carolina Sandretto
Thomas F. Staley
Madeline Weinrib
COPY EDITORS/PROOFREADERS
Marianne Shaneen
Jeannette Williams
ARCHITECTURE
Stan Allen, Jos Castillo, and Deborah Gans
FILM
Liza Bear, Nicholas Elliott, Leon Falk,
Bette Gordon, Carlos Gutirrez, Andrew
Lampert, Mark Magill
PERFORMING ARTS
Jon Robin Baitz, Jenn Joy, Ralph Lemon,
Richard Maxwell, and Mac Wellman
MUSIC
David Byrne, Anthony Coleman, Keith
Connolly, David Grubbs, Lawrence Kumpf,
Clinton Krute, David Lang, George Lewis,
Alan Licht, Mike McGonigal, Marc Ribot,
Ned Sublette, Julia Wolfe, C. Spencer Yeh,
and John Zorn
WRITING
Ammiel Alcalay, Robert Antoni, Deborah
Baker, Madison Smartt Bell, Tom Bolt,
Carmen Boullosa, Amina Cain, Edwidge
Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, Scott
Esposito, Brian Evenson, Daniel Flores
y Ascencio, Roxane Gay, Alan Gilbert,
Francisco Goldman, Kimiko Hahn, Matthea
Harvey, John Haskell, Amy Hempel, A.
M. Homes, Gary Indiana, Patricia Spears
Jones, Chris Kraus, Rachel Kushner, Ben
Lerner, Tan Lin, Phillip Lopate, Jonathan
Lethem, Jaime Manrique, Patrick McGrath,
Mary Morris, Caryl Phillips, Francine
Prose, Daniel Shapiro, Christopher
Stackhouse, Lynne Tillman, Colm Tibn,
and Frederic Tuten
FOUNDERS
Betsy Sussler, Glenn OBrien, Michael
McClard, Mark Magill, and Sarah
Charlesworth with Liza Bear as adviser
ORAL HISTORY ADVISERS
Sanford Biggers, Thelma Golden, Kellie
Jones, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae
Weems, Stanley Whitney, and Jack
Whitten
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Adam Bartos, Sarah Charlesworth
(in memoriam), Sally Gall, Nan Goldin,
Ben Handzo, Elliot Schwartz, and
William Wegman
PRINTER
Printed in Iceland by Oddi Printing
BOMB 133
FALL EXHIBITIONS 2015
ADVERTISING ASSOCIATE
Melissa McGill
MANAGING EDITOR
Sabine Russ
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR
Ted Dodson
PAULA COOPER GALLERY
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY
THROUGH OCTOBER 17, 534 W 21ST
THE XEROX BOOK

THROUGH OCTOBER 24, 521 W 21ST
CLAES OLDENBURG
NOVEMBER 7 DECEMBER 12, 534 W 21ST
JUSTIN MATHERLY
NOVEMBER 7 DECEMBER 19, 521 W 21ST
192 BOOKS
WILLIAM BOYD
SWEET CARESS: A NOVEL
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 7PM
STACEY GOERGEN
& AMANDA BENCHLEY
ARTISTS LIVING WITH ART
OCTOBER
ETHAN HAWKE
RULES FOR A KNIGHT: A NOVEL
NOVEMBER
W W W.PAUL ACOOPERGALLERY.COM
W W W.192BOOKS.COM
Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based

artist and curator. He was included in
the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Deleget
co-founded MINUS SPACE, a gallery
based in Dumbo, Brooklyn, specializing
in reductive art, where he has organized
more than sixty solo and group
exhibitions.
Lee Jaffe is an artist and musician. He

has worked with Vito Acconci, Hlio
Oiticica, and Miguel Rio Branco, and,
as a musician, with Bob Marley and
the Wailers and Peter Tosh. He has had
solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet
(Stockholm) and The Irish Museum of
Modern Art (Dublin).
Robert Dewhurst, a poet and scholar,

holds a doctorate from the Poetics
Program at the University at Buffalo
(SUNY), and lives in Los Angeles. He
is coeditor (with Joshua Beckman and
CAConrad) of Supplication: Selected
Poems of John Wieners, out this fall
from Wave Books.
Elianna Kan is a freelance writer and

translator. Most recently she taught
literary translation in the creative writing
department at Columbia University.
Formerly senior editor of The American
Reader, she has published interviews
with The Paris Review, The American
Reader, BOMB, and forthcoming with
The Believer.
Tonya Foster is the author of A Swarm

of Bees in High Court and coeditor of
Third Mind: Creative Writing through
Visual Art. Her poetry, prose, and essays
have appeared in Callaloo, Tripwire,
boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts
Quarterly, the Poetry Project Newsletter,
and elsewhere. She is Assistant
Professor at California College of
the Arts.
Katherine Hubbard is an interdisciplinary

artist based in Brooklyn. Hubbard has
an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate
School of the Arts at Bard College and
is currently part-time faculty at Parsons
The New School for Design.
8 CONTRIBUTORS
John Keenes latest book, Counternarratives (New Directions), was released in

the spring of 2015. He is also the author
of Annotations (New Directions) and the
poetry-art collection Seismosis (1913
Press) with artist Christopher Stackhouse. He is Associate Professor of
English at Rutgers University-Newark.
Deana Lawson is a photo-based

artist living in Brooklyn. She teaches
photography at Princeton University.
Lawson has a solo exhibition at the
Art Institute of Chicago Museum this
fall, and has shown at MoMA and the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.
Her work has been published in The
New Yorker and Time magazine.
Aily Nash is a Brooklyn-based curator

and writer who holds curatorial positions
with the New York Film Festival and
at Basilica Hudson, and has curated
programs and exhibitions for MoMA
PS1 (NYC), FACT (Liverpool), Image
Forum (Tokyo), and others. Her writing
has appeared on BOMB Daily, in The
Brooklyn Rail, Film Comment, and
elsewhere.
Jay Sanders is Curator and Curator of

Performance at the Whitney Museum
of American Art. His recent projects
include DANCENOISE: Dont Look
Back and Anywhere in Time: A Conlon
Nancarrow Festival.
Henry Taylor is a Los Angeles-based

painter. Taylor has been the subject
of solo exhibitions at galleries and
museums such as Blum & Poe (LA),
Untitled (NYC), MoMA PS1 (NYC), and
The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC).
Bobbie Oliver
Valentine is pleased to inaugurate the new

space with a solo exhibition.
Bobbie Oliver: Paintings
September 25 October 18, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, September 25, 69pm
Teal Daylight, 68 63 inches, acrylic on canvas, 2010.
VALENTINE
581 Woodward Avenue
Ridgewood, NY 11385
718 600 9417
valentineridgewood @ gmail.com
FridaySunday from 16pm and by appointment
THANK YOU TO ALL 2015 BOMB PATRONS JOIN, DONATE, SUPPORT

VANGUARD
$100,000 and over
Lambent Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
LEADERS
$40,000 and over
Cary Brown-Epstein & Dr. Steven Epstein
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
Lybess Sweezy & Ken Miller
SPONSORS
$20,000 to $39,999
Anonymous
The W. L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable
Foundation
Fiddlehead Fund
Heather M. Kirby
The Leon Lowenstein Foundation, Inc.
National Endowment for the Arts
New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs
The Thanksgiving Fund
The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts
DONORS
$10,000 to $19,999
Amazon
Jennifer Clifford Danner &
William Danner
Deutsche Bank
Gladstone Gallery
Dorothy Lichtenstein
Diane & Adam Max
New York State Council on the Arts
Pannonia Foundation
Kirsten & Andy Pitts
Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Rory R. Riggs
Select Equity Group Foundation
Jerry Speyer
PUBLISHERS CIRCLE
$5,000 to $9,999
Rosemary Carroll
Rebecca Smith & Michael Coffey
Michele Oka Doner & Frederick Doner
Johanna & Peter Ashby Howard
The Kraus Family Foundation
The Lauder Foundation
Leonard & Judy Lauder Fund
Melva Bucksbaum & Raymond Learsy
Mimi Thompson & James Rosenquist
May and Samuel Rudin Family
Foundation, Inc.
Ellen Phelan & Joel Shapiro
Alice & Thomas Tisch
Candace King Weir
PUBLISHERS COUNCIL
$2,500 to $4,999
Acquavella Galleries, Inc.
Shane Akeroyd
Anonymous
Burt Barr
Douglas Baxter
Paula & Brian Dailey
David Deutsch & Shawn Gannon
Giuliana Bruno & Andrew Fierberg
Carol Greene
Agnes Gund
Kavi Gupta
Amy & Ronald Guttman
Steven Holl
Stephanie & Tim Ingrassia
Lehmann Maupin Gallery
10 PATRONS
Galerie Lelong
Ursula & Paul Lowerre
Edward Tyler Nahem
Cecily Brown & Nicolai Ouroussoff
Amy & John Phelan
Dianne Blell & David Ray
Susan & David Rockefeller
Brad Cloepfil & Lisa Strausfeld
Barbara Toll
PATRONS
$1,000 to $2,499
Shelley Fox Aarons & Philip E. Aarons
Susan Almrud
The Asen Foundation
Claudia Doring & Alejandro Baez-Sacasa
Elizabeth Baker
Donald Baechler & Kevin Baker
Mahnaz & Adam Bartos
Anne Bass
Bortolami Gallery
Karin Waisman & Carlos Brillembourg
Deborah Buck
William R. Bush
Helaine & Paul Cantor
Cheim & Read
Sadie Coles
Paula Cooper Gallery
Lisa Corts
Elena & John Coumantaros
Suzanne Dance
Jane DeBevoise
Lisa Dennison
JK Brown & Eric Diefenbach
Arlene Shechet & Mark Epstein
Arthur Fleischer
Carole Server Frankel & Oliver Frankel
Amanda & Glenn Fuhrman
Deborah Gans
Donald Moffett & Robert Gober
Marian Goodman Gallery
Anthony Grant
Gabriella Palmieri & Scott A. Harford
Ursula & Joe Helman
Jennifer Coates & David Humphrey
Lucy Winton & Bryan Hunt
Barbara Jakobson
James A. Johnson
JP Morgan Private Bank
Nicole Klagsbrun
The Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder
Foundation
Bonnie Englebardt Lautenberg
Cher Lewis
Robert Longo
Susan & Glen D. Lowry
Luhring Augustine
Lurie Family Foundation
Gregory R. Miller
Carolyn Louise Newhouse
The Nightingale Code Foundation
William R. Peelle Jr.
Mr. & Mrs. Benjamin M. Rosen
Jane Rosenblum
Lisa Roumell & Mark Rosenthal
Clifford Ross
Hala & James Salomon
Carolina Sandretto
Rick & Monica Segal
Ann & Melvyn Schaffer
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Cindy Sherman
Alanna Heiss & Fred Sherman
Melissa Soros
Ellen Donahue & Ronald Sosinski
Stonefox Architects
Stanley Family Fund
Michael Ward Stout / The Robert
Mapplethorpe Foundation
Carolee Thea
Lizzie & Jonathan Tisch
Marissa S. Tracey
Susanne Vielmetter
Suzanne McClelland & Drew Vogelman
Barbara & John Vogelstein
Christopher Vroom
Madeline Weinrib
Teresa Liszka & Martin Weinstein
Mary & Jack Whitten
Elisabeth Ross Wingate
Hendel Teicher & Terry Winters
Nadia Zilkha
BOMB GALA
BOMB extends heartfelt thanks to the
artists who generously donated work
to BOMBs 34th Anniversary Gala and
Auction, 2015:
BENEFACTORS
$500 to $999
Silent:
Derrick Adams
Michele Araujo
Estate of Dan Asher
Rosa Barba
Joseph Bartscherer
Sheila Berger
Ben Berlow
Dianne Blell
Katherine Bradford
Joe Bradley
Rosanna Bruno
William S. Burroughs Estate
Paul Chan
Nicole Cherubini
Edward Clark
Adger Cowans
Moyra Davey
Verne Dawson
Assaf Evron
Jens Fnge
Paola Ferrario
Angelo Filomeno
Sally Gall
Hope Gangloff
John Giorno
Estate of Michael Goldberg
Nan Goldin
Gianfranco Gorgoni
James Hoff
Bethany Ides
Samuel Jablon
Suzanne Joelson
Matt Keegan
Richard Kraft
Deana Lawson
Greg Lindquist
Chris Martin
Leeza Meksin
John Miller
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe
Wangechi Mutu
Sarah Oppenheimer
Ellen Phelan
Ugo Rondinone
Kay Rosen
Brie Ruais
Charles Simonds
Rebecca Smith
Joe Sola
Keith Sonnier
Billy Sullivan
Mika Tajima
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Estate of Alan Uglow
Juan Usl
John Waters
Matthew Weinstein
Christine Wertheim
Stanley Whitney
Martin Wilner
Rob Wynne
Elena Alexander-Uglow
Richard Armstrong
Larry Bell
Barbara Bellin
Susan & Matthew Blank
Holly Block
Carrie Bloxson
Pippa Cohen
Jonathan Durbin
Gail M. Engelberg
Mark Fishman
Coleen Fitzgibbon
Shelly & Vincent Fremont
Hugh Freund
Fredericka Hunter
Susan & Steven Jacobson
Cecily Kahn & David Kapp
Andrew Kreps Gallery
Carol & Sandy Krieger
Anne Hodge Livet
Low Road Foundation
Sylvia Plimack Mangold &
Robert Mangold
Doreen Remen
Hope Sandrow
Michael Selleck
Ira Silverberg
Judith Linhares
Dorsey Waxter
Susan Wheeler
FRIENDS
$250 to $499
Joanne Greenbaum
Frances Papazafiropoulos
Tracey & Phillip Riese
PALS
$100 to $249
Denise Adler, Tom Ashcraft, Camilo
Alvarez, Bethany Ball, Robert Bakst,
Nicholas Baume, Jay & Madeline Bennett,
Harvey Ronald Berg, Anney Bonney,
Seth Bradley, Alejandro Cesarco, Chris
Chang, S.D. Chrostowska, Moyra Davey,
Susan Davis, Barbara & Jim Demetrion,
Ellyn & Saul Dennison, Danielle Dimston,
Sara Driver, Susan Elam, Franklin Evans,
Lisa Phillips & Leon Falk, April Gornik &
Eric Fischl, Robert Formentin, Margaret
Foster, Daisy Friedman, Phillip Galgiani,
Roxane Gay, Eric Gerard, Estelle Greer,
David Jacobs, Denise Jones, Deborah
Kass, Rachel & Robert Krute, Dylan
Landis, Christian Marclay, J. Denny
McCoy, Guy Mendes, Joni Wehrli &,
Michel Negroponte, Barbara Nessim,
Jacki Ochs, Bobbie Oliver, Robert
OToole, Alex Papazafiropoulos, Lisa
Pearson, Mark Richard, Jo & David
Robins, Ed & Danna Ruscha, Jeanette
Watson Sanger, Jason Simon, Charlie
Smith, Nina Subin, Nick Tapper, Gin
Taylor, Maggie Leal Valias, Michael
Waldron, Carmen Boullosa & Mike
Wallace, Daniel Wiener, Holly Zausner
Live:
Walton Ford
Charline von Heyl
Tim Rollins & K.O.S.
EDITORS CHOICE
Skinscreen: Art and Poetry

at the New Museums
Surround Audience Triennial
by Alan Gilbert
The artist collective/branding consultants/trend forecasters known as K-Hole came to prominence in late
2013 for identifying the fashion trend normcore, in
which cutting-edge style entails wearing nondescript
clothes: faded and looser-fitting jeans (sometimes
known as Mom jeans), sweatshirts and hoodies,
T-shirts that dont flaunt logos and designer names. In
other words, what so-called regular people supposedly wear. In fact, normcore wasnt really a trend at all
(although New York Magazine seemed to take it fairly
seriously), or was no more substantial a fashion trend
than, say, pairing blue jeans with white Keds sneakers or 2015s suddenly ubiquitous nose piercing. A
more cynical reading might propose that the degree
to which the normcore style did exist was as a kind of
camouflage for the shock troops of gentrificationi.e.,
young artists and hipsters moving into disenfranchised neighborhoods. Examples of people sporting
normcore were much more likely to be photographed
in Bushwick than Peoria. Yet thats the brilliance of the
concept, or trope, or (in digitally saturated cultures)
meme: its an enticing canvas on which to project ones
emotions and desires, which is what advertisingand
not uncoincidentally, most artseeks to do. So that

when K-Hole conjures normcore, it tilts from artist to
advertiser and back again.
In the earnest and handwringing wake of 9/11,
the end of irony was loudly proclaimed, although its
unclear whether this ever quite occurred. The uniqueness of K-Hole is to be truly post-ironic, which means
they neither celebrate nor explicitly critique the products, trends, and lifestyles they analyze, synthesize,
and reprocess into corporate-looking reports in pdf
form freely downloadable from their website. (The
group has released four so far on topics that include
visibility, patience, anxiety, and freedomthe last of
these is where normcore appears.) More overtly political artists and critics will gnash their teeth about this,
yet viruses (both good and bad) need hosts, and some
of the most advanced art seeks to insert a story into
the landscape, be theyboth stories and landscapes
virtual or real. Moreover, if capitalism is the domain
under which most of the West works (or doesnt), and
nearly everywhere else as well, and if for more than a
century artists have sought to collapse the distinction
between art and life as a radical aesthetic and political
gesture, then isnt K-Hole just being more honest about
this and resetting the discussion for 2015?
Another option is to argue for the autonomy of the
art object, which isnt a fashionable position on the
left, but might be worth reconsideringthat is, the
ultimate intractability of the artwork, its own life as an
object (put in the service of profit, no doubt, but theres
always a remainder that escapes), as opposed to its
easy relationalism, its utility. Besides, do audiences
really need art for ethical (or worse, moral) uplift? Is it
really such a bad thing to have an art that steps a bit
DIS, THE ISL AND

(KEN), 2015. Photo
by Heji Shin.
Courtesy of the
artists.
12
BOMB 133
Installation view
of SURROUND
AUDIENCE. Photo
by Benoit Pailley.
out of this world, since there are more than enough opportunities to calculate political and ethical behaviors
throughout everyday existence? Can there be one activity that eludes the increasingly asphyxiating squeeze of
efficiency and rules and profitability (the last of these
defined in the widest possible sense)? Can there be
one domain of freedom left, while not remaining nave
about how unfree this freedom might be? At best, art
can inform, although even better is art that disinforms
dominantread, repressiveideologies and values, and
does so in a vernacular engaged less with play than
with absurdity and inversions. In a globalized art world,
this vernacular frequently translates as internationalism, which is something different, and is a product of
the pressures on artists to have their work translate
across multiplying sites on the global biennial and artfair circuit.
K-Hole created the advertising campaign for the
New Museum in New York Citys most recent iterationits third so farof its triennial exhibition
of emerging artists. This one was entitled Surround
Audience and was organized by New Museum curator (and former executive director of Rhizome) Lauren
Cornell and artist Ryan Trecartin. For its offline and
online ads, K-Hole developed an ovoid yellow figure
that looks like a cross between a pharmaceutical pill
and a Minion and put it on a beach, in a manhole, driving a car, etc., accompanied by slogans such as NO
PAST NO PRESENT NO PROBLEM, ILL TRIENNIAL
ONCE, IM NOT U, and HATRED OF CAPITALISM .
This cute little pill characterK-Holes report #2 featured designer drugscan also be downloaded to
smartphones for use as an instant-messaging sticker.
Along with designing the ad campaign, K-Hole is listed
as a group of artists exhibiting in Surround Audience,
13
EDITORS CHOICE
again blurring the lines between art and advertising. This strategy was also taken up by another artist
collective in the show, DIS, with its combo kitchenbathroom that partially functions as a Dornbracht
company showroom. Other artists in the exhibition
branded themselves, or were branded, within the exhibitions larger media campaignmost notably writer
and artist Juliana Huxtable, whose African American
transgendered body signaled Surround Audiences
techno-progressive demographics.
The title Surround Audience evokes the ceaseless
ambient noise of the digital age: not only social media
but the Internet at large as the general virtualization
and modification of human experience, physical bodies, and social interactions. Not that this should be
taken too literally, and to Cornell and Trecartins credit,
very little of the work in the exhibition was explicitly
about the Internet, and social media was used relatively sparingly as a device or motif. To be the product
of Internet culture but not make art that explicitly
references it is a general definition of post-Internet
art, and Cornell helped facilitate a useful discussion
of this concept while at Rhizome. Instead, one came
away from Surround Audience with the impression
that surfaces have gotten very, very thin and porous
to their environment. Much, though of course not all,
of the artwork reflected this. In fact, one of the most
materially substantive works in the entire exhibition
was Nadim Abbass set of three quarantine units made
with thick concrete and panes of glass, through which
to view a single thin bed and shelves upon which
small geometric items were neatly arranged. Portals
with thick black rubber gloves attached were the
only means of contact between internal and external
worlds, as Roomba-like devices patrolled the perimeter.
Abbass Chamber 664 Kubrick, Chamber 665

Spielberg, and Chamber 666 Coppola (201415)
strikingly show just how vulnerable anyone might be,
how susceptible to contagion, how close we ultimately
are to each other, and how fragile the surfaces connecting us. At the same time, the works reference the
power of political, institutional, and discursive regimes
to isolate, to incarcerate, and to interregimes that,
like the film directors invoked, construct reality around
a set of images, narratives, and myths.
But throughout Surround Audience, this dynamic
was generally flattened or emptied out. A number of
works framed empty space, most overtly Jos Lon
Cerrillos slender steel sculptures freestanding in the
gallery or climbing its walls. Stepping through them
or moving around them, museumgoers were thrown
into a rare cognizance of their own bodies. Viewers
watched Donna Kukama experience a similar body
awareness in a video of her standing still and applying
red lipstick while a crowd in Kenya celebrating the Mau
Mau Rebellion flows past hera twentieth-century
metaphor for the individual lost to and by history,
which the exhibition updated for the new millennium
and its avatars. Yet as history continues to collapse
into the perpetually present moment, its good to be
reminded for a moment that there was a century
with its social revolutionsbefore the current one.
In keeping with the empty-frame motif, Tania Prez
Crdovas We focus on a woman facing sideways,
Evening (2014) is a delicate open triangle affixed to a
corner of the walla bit like a Richard Tuttle but with a
small gold earring dangling from it. Kiluanji Kia Hendas
black-and-white photographs feature a group of people
assembling what could be Cerrillos frames into empty
cubesDonald Judds boxes without the volumebecause in the age of social media, its only the exterior
that counts. These echoes between works (the cleansing
bed in DISs installation and Olga Balemas mattress-like
plastic bags filled with water and decaying organic and
inorganic materials) created the kinds of metaphors and
associational logic for which poetry is famous. Oliver
Laric captures this beautifully in his untitled video from
2014, as it fluidly interlaces and remixes brief visual
samples from various animations. In fact, it turns out
that poetry was central to Surround Audiences conception. As Brian Droitcour writes in an essay entitled
Liquid Poetry for the exhibition catalogue:
In recent years the art world has rediscovered visual
arts proximity to poetrythe affinity of these fields.
. . . To think of poetry as liquid means to recognize the potential for poetic language in everyday
speech, in the ambient media of television, radio,
and the internet, as well as in the devices that have
increased the portability of these media and the intimacy of contact with them; but, more importantly,
it means seeing potential for poetry in the encounter
between audience and text. In the context of art
and the museum, liquid poetry isnt sculptural, like
Concrete poetry can be. Rather, it has an ambient
presence. . . .
14
BOMB 133
Theres not much of a leap, if any at all, from ambient presence to surround audience. And yet in this
leap (more on poetry, and the anthology of contemporary poetry Droitcour edited for the exhibition, below),
agency, that quickly fading buzzword of recent political
art, feels in short supply. I wouldnt be the first to ask:
Are we empowering the viewer and reader with all of
this open-endedness, these interconnected networks,
this ambience, this being surrounded by everything,
or are we aestheticizing the subject as consumer?
Similarly, there wasnt much investigation in
Surround Audience that went outside an artists
specific culture and history. The show may be international, but viewers wouldnt always know it. A rare
exception was Shadi Habib Allahs captivating video of
being smuggled among southern Egyptian Bedouins:
its ethnographic approach felt like an exception in the
expanse of work on display. But these are the tradeoffs
that are made when the Internet writ large becomes
the primary mode in which subjects are expressed
and the subject is collapsed into its immediate, virtually
enhanced surroundings. For instance, Li Liao may
have invoked Tehching Hsieh (or more recent Chinese
performance artists such as Zhang Huan) in his durational performance contribution to Surround Audience,
but its unclear if his form of submission is ultimately in
any way empowering (another one of those seemingly
outmoded critical-political terms) or particularly revealing: on the New Museums ground-floor gallery behind
the bookstore and caf, a uniform, work papers, and
an iPad mini were the remains of Lis stint at a Foxconn
factory inspecting iPad circuit boards during twelvehour shifts. The wages he accrued over the course of
forty-five days equaled the cost of the iPad mini he
then bought and displayed.
Next to Lis contribution, Lisa Holzer (born in 1971,
she would seem to be the oldest artist in the exhibition) was represented by a series of framed prints of
text fragments and nail polish swatches signifying the
feminine in the way that a subject or gender is hailed
by language as ideology. This engagement with normative gender roles was part of the exhibitions relatively
fluid approach to gender, which isnt a huge surprise
given how central this concern is to Trecartins work.
If anything, the centerpiece of Surround Audience
was Frank Bensons sculpture of Huxtable, a work
that greeted visitors when the elevators opened to the
shows start on the second floor, while a row of selfportrait and text prints by Huxtable ran along the wall
to the right (another self-portrait served as the banner
at the top of the exhibitions page on the New Museum
website). Featuring breasts, a penis, dreads, and a shimmering dark-green finish, Juliana (2015) escapes easy
classification in the way that much of the artwork on
display eluded formal categories: pieces about sound
that arent sound art, projected videos that could just as
easily be watched on smaller screens, installations that
functioned more like skeletal sculptureseverything
not so much appropriated as recontextualized.
In other words, Surround Audience wasnt the appropriative, collage-based aesthetic of the previous
decade, and in this sense felt welcomingly contemporary, if not particularly futuristic. Perhaps the heaviest
instance of this happened to be the piece with the most
immediate historical resonanceand might also have
been the most popular in the exhibition: Josh Klines
Freedom (2015). This ambitious installation featured
four human-sized, militarized Teletubbies sporting
small video screens at their abdomens. In the videos
presented on each screen off-duty police officers with
faces disguised by software programs read progressive political messages from social media feeds. The
rooms floor was designed to resemble the embedded
diagonal lights of Zuccotti Park, and a projected video
featured a digitized version of President Obama giving a more radical version of his 2009 inauguration
address. Freedom both anthropomorphizes and virtualizes power, andlike the best poetry doestreats
language as a set of signs to be contested (not simply
rendered indeterminate or retyped), by having cops
read literal messages of dissent, and by having Obama
deliver a fictitious politically progressive speech. The
whole installation surrounds its audience with images and figures ranging from childhood to adulthood
within a society where the marketand the national
security stateseek to monitor and extract profit from
every moment of life, from the cradle to the grave. No
wonder the art world romanticizes poetrys non-commodifiable quality, its fundamentally non-instrumental
conditioneven if some poetry (and poets) can of
course be instrumentalized.
If anything, Klines installation pointed a few years
backward in reference and technology. Critics and
audiences might have wanted to experience the exhibition as futuristic, yet theres very little that actually felt
or functioned this way (including Daniel Steegmann
Mangrans virtual reality glasses that immersed the
wearer in a rain forest), although Sophia Al-Marias
Sisters (2014) installation featuring three hanging
screens came close. Ghostly, flickering images of
young women dancing alone in their bedrooms blur
skin and screen, presenting the mirror most people
imagine social media to be as something that distorts as much as it reflects. On a small digital device
propped on a shelf, a reclining woman sings in Arabic.
Sampled from online media platforms, Al-Marias
female subjects merge with their ambient environment,
anonymously inhabiting its contradictions: a freedom
from the strictures of place and identity, and an absorption into a corporate-owned cloud with granular
powers of surveillance and datamining. I dont feel the
urge to walk in and out of Walmart every day to be
validated as a human being, and yet theres an incredible pressure to participate in social media in order to
be recognized as a subject, especially when entities like
Facebook and Twitter make frequent posting essential
to visibility, and social media is the fundamental tool
for small-scale entrepreneurs, which the vast majority
of artistsand writers, and a handful of poetsare.
Al-Marias Sisters both recognized and shatterd this
predicament in a way few other works in Surround
15
EDITORS CHOICE
Audience did. Another, and very different, exception is Eduardo Navarros modest-looking installation,
Timeless Alex (2015), which was among the most ambitious and perhaps even futuristic works in the show. It
consisted of a large tortoise shell hanging from the wall
next to a synthetic reptilian body suit with a tortoise
helmet head; they were worn at one point by Navarro
as part of a performance. Investigating alternative perceptual, temporal, and species modes, Timeless Alex
steps away from the virtual and into the Anthropocene
while resituating the human figure as one object, one
consciousness, one agent among many in the world.
In other words, is there a way to reconceive the human
partially away from the digital? Navarros contribution
was striking in being one of the only examples in the
exhibition to ask this questionand not a preposterous
one given that Object-Oriented Ontology and the larger
issue of the posthuman are sweeping through the art
world. Whereas Surround Audience presents most of
its subjects from the outside in, Navarros work moves
from the inside out. The sculpture quite literally has to
be embodied, which in turn shapes it according to vast
historical, evolutionary, and climatological forces.
As Droitcour mentions in his catalogue essay, over
the past few years the art world has developed a strong
infatuation with poetry, yet its still a pleasant surprise
that an anthology of poetry was published to accompany the exhibition. The Animated Reader: Poetry of
Surround Audience, edited by Droitcour, is, like the
show, not particularly futuristic but certainly captures
one strand of contemporary poetry. And like the show,
its international in scope, although, again, international
frequently means echoing Western, usually conceptual, forms, or text filtered through the voracious maw
of corporate social media. I suspect a few different
reasons (among many) for the art worlds newfound
enthusiasm for poetry: an awareness that the flattening
of surfaces and quick associational leaps ubiquitous in
a screen-centric, digital world are some of the primary
formal and structural modes of poetryand increasingly, of visual art; that poets themselves (such as the
Museum of Modern Arts inaugural Poet Laureate,
Kenneth Goldsmith) have increasingly embraced
art-world discourse; that the breakdown of mediums
and genres in contemporary art promotes more fluid
interaction with a variety of artistic disciplines, including
poetry. For instance, the initial scripts for Trecartins video works resemble poems; both Trecartin and Droitcour
have discussed this, and snippets of Trecartins poemscripts served as introductory wall texts to each floor
of Surround Audience. The renewal of collaborative
projects in the art world has extended to an embrace
of poetry. And I dont think its unreasonable to say
that the hyper-commercialized and monetized art world
admiresperhaps even a bit guiltilythe economic
unrecuperability of poetry.
The Animated Reader also includes Facebook
and Twitter posts, a couple of Kevin Killians brilliant Amazon.com reviews, little drawings, and
poetry produced for and by the Internet as part of its
expandedliquididea of poetry. In her foreword

to the anthology, Cornell writes that the volume is
essential to the exhibition and echoes its primary
concerns: self-representation, translation, identity,
agency, and fluidity of form. Yet to its credit, the
anthology does much more than echo: it extends the
exhibitions concerns and covers neglected territory.
For one thing, the poetry misbehaves much more than
the art does. Theres nothing in Surround Audience
thats the equivalent of Lindsay Beebes GO FUCK
THE BIGGEST ART DILDO EVER!!!! IM / OVER IT!!!!
from her poem I Dont Want To Make A Joke Of Art,
or the excerpt from Kim Hyesoons wild hybrid text Im
OK, Im Pig! (translated by Don Mee Choi) with its lines:
qqqq the words that Pig utters Youre Pig when you
turn around to / look at your mummy being taken away
// qqqq
most of all, the squeals of our nations pigs
that dont know that / Im Pig. Poetry gets the messy
body and emotions and the emotionally messy body
politics. Maybe thats why the only actual poetry on
display in the exhibitionSteve Roggenbucks YouTube
poetry videos (201112)was installed in the basement
by the bathrooms. (However much currently glamorized by the art world, poetry is still the dirty bottom
of artistic and literary genres.) Outside of work by and
about Huxtable and a mesmerizing, digitally rendered
stand-up comedy routine by Casey Jane Ellison, the
bodythat initially marked surface of othernesshas
been mostly shed throughout the exhibition, even as
questions around the visibility of subject positions in art
and poetry have returned with a force perhaps not seen
since the late 1980s and early 1990s. #blacklivesmatter
Moving from bodies to their ongoing disciplining and
containment at work, The Animated Reader expands
Lis experience at the Foxconn factory, as in Brandon
Browns post from December 2, 2010 at 8:53 a.m.
reproduced in the anthology: Thursday. Brown jacket,
yellow shirt, blue tie, brown pants, brown shoes. First
day at the new job. In the last week I read hundreds of
pages, wrote poems about cats and Gmail, saw almost
all of my friends, ate several kinds of fowl, and saw
Alvin and The Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel. Jobs are
jails, my friends. Jobs are jails. With debt, escalating
real estate prices, and the maximization of profit by any
means necessary, work has again come to resemble indentured servitude, or as Stefanie Sargnagel proclaims
in a social media feed from May 16, 2013 (translated by
Cory Tamler): The worst part of capitalism is that you
never get to sleep in. One could say much the same
thing about the art and literaryincluding poetry
worlds, with their increasing professionalization thats
less the fault of individuals than the system: one is
forced to get up early and go to work to pay off college
and MFA program debt. Its a vicious cycle of get-a-job
entrapment for the benefit of a financial system that
keeps the entire global economy afloat with its funny
money.
Formally, the work in the exhibition and the anthology may be similar, relying on an idea of translation
both literal and metaphorical, but the content frequently
diverges. For one thing, as some of the above examples
16
BOMB 133
show, its left to the poets to do most of the emoting

and to explore a surface-depth relationship the triennial frequentlythough not alwayseschews. Sawako
Nakayasus contribution to The Animated Reader consists of three translations, or creative mistranslations,
of the Japanese female Modernist poet Chika Sagawa
that situate masks on top of masks (Sagawas birth
name was Aiko Kawasaki, and Nakayasus versions are
described as collaboratively with Sagawas poetry
and not of it) as a means to explore and complicate
the (gendered) layers beneath, in language that reverberates with Navarros Timeless Alex installation (and
Al-Marias Sisters as well):

Now I hang my shell out to dry.
My scaly skin is cold like metal.

No one knows this secret half-covering my face.
The night makes the bruised woman, freely twirling

her stolen expression, ecstatic.
Yet even this relatively direct investigation of surface
and depth renders them amorphous. In both Surround
Audience and The Animated Reader, images and language have trouble sticking to a world whose surfaces
have been rendered slippery by human-computer
interfaces, by the collapse of the natural-artificial divide
in the face of the Anthropocene, by the borders blurred
by transnational capital and displaced persons, by the
collapse of traditional epistemological categories as a
result of cultural influx (M. NourbeSe Philip: I have no
mother / tongue), and so much more.
Relatedly, modes of transmission have become
integral to the artwork or poem itself, making itand
usproducts of the network as much as producers of it. This may be one of the strongest aspects of
both exhibition and anthology, as in Maryam Monalisa
Gharavis Bio poem composed from Twitter updates:
I placed a self on the internet and watched it spread.
And yet Gharavis piece also knows that not everything,
and everyone, is quite this fluid, this liquid; or, more
precisely, in the face of structural economic inequality,
racism, and sexism, much of this fluidity takes place on
the surface, a surface that nevertheless has become
reality, not as distracting spectacle but as the ingestion of a broken systembroken for everyone but an
elite. And ultimately alienated from them as well. This
isnt to propose something not of this moment. I happen to prefer K-Hole to much so-called political art. I
happen to prefer the future. Maybe Surround Audience
didnt include much performancethe art worlds prior
infatuation before poetry hit the scene (or maybe performance jumped the shark with Marina Abramovics
MoMA retrospective)because the most important
real-time performances of the past year were the
protests responding to the police killings of unarmed
African American men. Bodies in the street and on
screens.
Alan Gilbert is a poet and critic who lives in
Brooklyn.
Pierre Huyghes Rite Passage

and Human Mask
by Chris Chang
Pierre Huyghe currently sits on top of the art-world
food chain. His multi-dimensioned, tourist-perplexing
installation, Rite Passage, straddles the Metropolitan
Museum of Arts roof garden through November 1.
The work consists of three major elements: a signature
Huyghe aquarium, a displacement of a number of the
gardens rectangular granite paving stones, and a large
granite boulder. The spaces revealed beneath the
paving stones contain both liquid seepage from the
aquarium and runoff from New York Citys precipitation (and who knows what else). Crystallization, weedy
plant growth, and other natural processes are well
underwayas are the occasional intrusions of human
detritus.
Huyghe is forever fond of systems that try to take
care of themselvesregardless of whether they selfgenerate, naturally decay, or both. The artist has done
astonishing things with, for example, honeybees. His
somewhat ominous 2012 sculpture, Untilled (Liegender
Frauenakt), features a life-sized reclining female nude,
cast in concrete, with an active bee colony where
her head should be. She could be found, earlier this
summer, holding court under a shady tree in MoMAs
sculpture garden.
left: Installation
view of The Roof
Garden Commission:
Pierre Huyghe at the
Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2015. Photo
by Hyla Skopitz, The
Photographer Studio.
above: UNTILLED
(LIEGENDER
FR AUENAK T )
[RECLINING FEMALE
NUDE], 2012, concrete
with beehive structure,
wax, and live bee
colony; figure. The
Museum of Modern
Art, New York.
Copyright 2015 Pierre
Huyghe. Photo by
Jonathan Muzikar.
18
BOMB 133
Still from UNTITLED

(HUMAN MASK),
2014. HD video in
color with sound,
19 minutes.
Courtesy of the
artist; Marian
Goodman Gallery,
New York; Hauser
& Wirth, London;
Esther Schipper
Gallery, Berlin; Anna
Lena Films, Paris.
The glass used for the Rite Passage aquarium

employs specially designed liquid crystal diodes
that create alternating periods of visibility and opacity. The effect makes the apparatus feel somehow
alive. Through the tanks open-to-the-air top one can
seeif youre tall enoughthe tip of a paradoxically
floating rock that dominates the aquariums ecosystem. Beneath the buoyant rock sits a mound of silty
sand. Two discrete species inhabit this aquatic realm:
Lethenteron appendix (the American brook lamprey)
and Triops cancriformis (a type of tadpole shrimp).
If you happen to be a freshwater biologist you know
that these two breeds are evolutionary success stories.
That is to say: they havent evolved at all. According
to the geological record they appear the same today
as they did millions of years ago. Huyghewho often
explores the relationship between the animate and
its oppositewould obviously be attracted to living
fossils.
Two iconic figures need mention: Anubis, the ancient jackal-headed god of the Egyptian underworld;
and the archeological artifact known as the Copper
Man. The latter real-life human was a Chilean miner
trapped in the Andes circa 550 AD. He was found
nearly a millennium and a half lateapparently mummified by the copper that had bonded with his skin.
(Anubis is/was the god of mummification.)
Rite Passage pivots on one of Huyghes, and
Anubiss, favorite tropes: transmutation. Water
evaporates into the atmosphere or oxidizes with rock.
The sky, in the form of clouds and rain, returns the
cyclic favor. Life arises out of inanimate material. The
movement of stonesincluding a stone that floats
triggers human fascination. Living things can eventually become fossilized. Everythings connected (by
ooze). This can be frustrating. More than once, strolling
amidst Rite Passage, I heard a museum visitor exclaim,
I dont get it. More than once, like an existential non
sequitur, I heard a museum guard say, Please dont
stand on the art!
The Copper Man mummy lives in the American
Museum of Natural History. Thats less than a mile
away, across Central Park, from the Met. Huyghe, in
19
EDITORS CHOICE
a published conversation with Sheena Wagstaff (the

Mets Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art), remarked that the mummy would be too fragile to move
to the roof garden. However, as a poetic alternative,
Huyghe researched the creation of his own copper
mummiesmade from humanely sourced animal carcasses found in the park.
Another character thematically connected to Rite
Passage appeared on a wall in a windowless gallery
deep within the Met. Shes a monkey wearing a white
plastic maskreminiscent of Noh theaterand shes
the star of Huyghes twenty-minute film, Human
Mask (2014). Whereas installations like Rite Passage or
films such as The Host and the Cloud (2010) may seem
to revel in obfuscation, Human Mask presents itself
as plain as dayas long as that particular day occurs
within a post-apocalyptic nightmare. The film is set
in an abandoned Japanese city devastated by recent
disasterssound familiar? The action takes place inside
a desolate restaurant/bar thats inhabited by the
masked monkey. Her angst-ridden life has been reduced to ritualized boredom (lethargic grooming,
nail-picking, restless leg syndrome) and frustration
(frantic pacing about). Her companions include (and
may be limited to) a stoic cat, a scampering water
bug, and a seething clump of maggots trapped under
plastic. Relational aesthetics allegedly involves human relations and social context quoth Wikipedia.
Huyghes aesthetics of the self-generating system
appears, at times, antithetical to all things relational.
Again, in his conversation with Wagstaff, Huyghe
speaks bluntly: Whether the visitors [to Rite Passage]
are here, or not, the situation continues to grow,
indifferent to their presence [emphasis added]. The
monkey with the human mask is not indifferent to the
lack of human presence. The absence is clearly driving
her insane (or more insane). Perhaps the humans are to
blame for their own extinction. Perhaps the monkey
without the balm of social contextsuffers for our sins.
Regardless. Not only does the film summarize Huyghes
oeuvre, I suspect it is his masterpiece.
Chris Chang writes about film and art and is
BOMBs online performing arts editor.
The Racial Imaginary: Writers

on Race in the Life of the Mind
Edited by Claudia Rankine,
Beth Loffreda, Max King Cap
by Timothy Donnelly
FENCE BOOKS, 2015
I cant distill it all, Evie Shockley confesses in her
contribution to this vital and multifarious print offshoot of Claudia Rankines online Open Letter Project.
The issues, the history, and the possibilities are too
complex. Begun in 2011 after a highly visible public
exchange between Rankine and her former colleague
Tony Hoagland, the Open Letter Project aimed to divert
attention away from their dead-end dialogue (Rankine
called out Hoaglands poem The Change for being
ambiguously racist, Hoagland called Rankine nave
when it comes to the subject of American racism)
and toward what might be a broader, many-voiced discussion of race and the creative imagination. Rankine
posted a series of eight incisive questions on her website (e.g., If you have never written consciously about
race why have you never felt compelled to do so?),
inviting writers to answer in whatever way they wished.
The Racial Imaginary gathers a representative collection of these responses, a powerful introduction by
Rankine and coeditor Beth Loffreda (We are captive,
still, to a style of championing literature, they argue,
that says work by writers of color succeeds when a
white person can nevertheless relate to it), as well as
a corresponding assemblage of images of visual artists work curated by Max King Cap.
As a matter of principle, the editors adopted a
light-handed approach when assembling the material,
presenting it as a collective transcript of people who
were, in this time in this place, moved to respond to a
questionhowever imperfectly or incompletely. That
is, The Racial Imaginary embraces its origins as a virtual town hall meeting, setting side by side testimonies
and essays with variousand even discordantvoices,
themes, and structures. If this makes for a hodgepodge of a reading experience, it is a necessary one,
serving to hint at the pervasiveness of the issues at
hand, instead of proposing any spurious solutions to
them. To quote the editors: Its messy, and its going
to stay messy.
In effect, this means that Simone Whites unforgettable Flibbertigibbet in a White Room (I felt
inexplicably drunk and frustrated by the impossible
whiteness of the room I found myself in) holds hands
with anxious, swollen pieces by poets seemingly considering their whiteness for the first time. This means,
too, that personal upset over an invitation to a whitehosted Chinese New Year cocktail party shares the floor
with Joshua Wieners insightful critical collage on race
in Twain, Ginsberg, and Stevens, among many others,
20
BOMB 133
as well as with Farid Matuks trenchant inquiry: What

good are our gains in civil rights when they induct us
into a middle class that obscures . . . the racial caste
system on which it depends?
The Racial Imaginary reminds us there is no getting outside the multiplex maze of race in America. For
now the best we can hope for is to grow increasingly
conscious of the mazes contoursor for some, that
theres even a maze at all. Everywhere I look, Dawn
Lundy Martin writes, theres a whole bunch of white
people failing to recognize that nearly everyone else in
the room is also white. Its a fact that bears repeating
until its no longer trueuntil we have to point back to
this anthology to believe it ever was.
Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud
Corporation, a poetry editor at Boston Review,
and Chair of the Writing Program at Columbia
Universitys School of the Arts.
John Lucas, TONY

& E VERET T, 1996.
Tony Shalhoub
and Brooke
Adams in Samuel
Becketts HAPPY
DAYS at The Flea
Theater, 2015.
Photo by Joan
Marcus.
Samuel Becketts
Happy Days
by Amber Power
THE FLEA THEATER, NEW YORK, 2015
Winnie is buried to her neck in scorched earth. A black
revolver rests beside her chirping and disembodied
head. Willie, her companion, feebly scratches on all
fours at the impossible mound that separates them
at one point nearly rolling down its face into an empty
abyss below. Oh, cries Winnie, this is a happy day!
Samuel Becketts tragicomedy Happy Days was
revived in 2014 by veteran director Andrei Belgrader
and (married) actors Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub.
It recently completed a nearly year-long journey
from Los Angeless Theater at Boston Court (where
it originated) via the Commonwealth Shakespeare
Company at Babson College to The Flea Theater in
Lower Manhattan. The performance at The Flea can be
seen as part of a larger wave of recent Beckett revivals
in the New York area; actors Ian McKellen and Patrick
Stewart gave Waiting For Godot the big Broadway
treatment at the Cort Theater in the winter of 201314,
and BAM hosted four of the Irish playwrights lesserknown works during its Next Wave Festival last year.
Happy Days has long been considered a work of absurdist theater, as argued by critic Martin Esslin in his
1961 treatise on the subject, The Theatre of the Absurd.
What appears particularly resonant with contemporary
audiences is Esslins central claim that Becketts work
manifests the senselessness of the human condition by the open abandonment of rational devices and
discursive thought. Certainly, it is a senseless contradiction that haunts Happy Daysthat is, a woman sinks
22
BOMB 133
slowly into the ground over two acts while prattling

away to herself in the cheeriest fashion. Existence,
according to Beckett, is a nameless and desolate place
where time is running out and yet, impossibly, no end
appears in sight.
The seventy-four-seat capacity of the aptly named
Flea only serves to amplify the sensorial suffering of
the actors on stagethe heat of a cruel sun, the knifelike shrill of the waking bell, the exigency of rapidly
diminishing resources. Things get particularly raw
for Brooke Adams as she navigates her characters
physical immobility and loss of agency through the
seemingly boundless reaches of hope and blind optimism. Applying lipstick and hat, the sinking Winnie
seems to embody an entire generation of women who,
not so long ago, equated the smiling tolerance of an
intolerable suffering with a kind of godly grace. There
were moments during the performance when I yearned
to drag her out of that goddamned hole. But then she
would flash her megawatt smile or crack a joke, and
Id forget the urge to free her.
For his part, Willie is pure human animalnearly
mute, masturbating, and snot blowing. He roots in
and out of unseen holes and emerges occasionally,
with great bodily effort, to offer Winnie a peek at a
dirty postcard or to read the tidbits of his yellowing
Reynolds News. As Willie, Mr. Shalhoub plays in the
grand tradition of Becketts post-apocalyptic derelicts
(see Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot and
Hamm and Clov in Endgame). And while feral in the
handling of his bodily excretionsin one instance,
something viscous is spat into Winnies hairthe
actors dark slapstick offers an unlikely salve to the
anxiety of watching a woman being buried alive.
Amber Power is an art historian and BOMBs
development associate.
Matt Freedman and Tim

Spelioss Endless Broken Time
by Ander Mikalson
AN ONGOING PERFORMANCE SERIES
AT STUDIO 10, BROOKLYN, 2015
We gathered around you while you told ghost stories.
It was a familiar, reflexive, ancient act to draw close to
the beat and the voice. When the drummer tripped out
a beat, your speech became a song. The song in your
speech had been there all along, but we didnt notice
it until the drum called out its rhythm. The beat
stopped. Your voice sounded dramatic for a moment,
then small, stripped of its superpower. Was the drum
dictating the rhythm of the talk or was the voice summoning the beat? After a while I decided that it was
a little bit of both. Sometimes my thoughts careened
off. Thats how you know youre paying attention:
when thoughts careen instead of wander. I dropped
back in; your story was also careening. Frankenstein
and Roosevelt. Or was it a dog named Frankenstein
Roosevelt? You said, I sat down to sketch the building
because it was that time in my life when I had to draw
everything to confirm or affirm the fact that I was an
artist. Your body became a billboard, a white board,
a place for homework to be assigned or corporate
profits to be displayed. Instead you made crude, quick
drawings, outlined from above, your hands becoming
Video still of
Matt Freedman
and Tim Spelios
performing
ENDLESS BROKEN
TIME, 2015.
24
BOMB 133
increasingly blackened with charcoal. At one point you

wiped them on a crisp white sheet that could have been
a shroud. You pointed this out, I believe. It was part of
the ghost story. There was no script. But then, at the
end I saw the pages and pages of handwritten notes
in blue ink among the fallen drawings. The man in the
front row, who was on ecstasy or maybe acid, called
out And then what happened? You werent phased.
You told us about Houdini and roller coasters. You
drew a Venn diagram explaining humor as the overlap
between the benign and the violation. The drawings
were immediate, functional, made to get a point across,
like so many napkin or back-of-envelope diagrams.
Sometimes drawings need to be quick and dirty and
all over the floor. They get stifled in their frames. Why
dont we all wear drawing pads on our stomachs to
better explain ourselves? Art is an urgent message
reputed to outlast its messenger. Being skeptical of
that possibility you threw the art on the floor. At some
point you climbed on top of a wooden post and stood
there in profile, legs shaking. It was perilous and we
sat up straighter. We had gotten too comfortable.
Meanwhile the beat slowed and softened. The acid man
stomped his feet, loudly, to make up for it. Later, when
I came up to examine the drawings scattered on the
ground, the specters of moments, he reached out and
touched my leg. Between an artist and an object is a
third thing: a ghost. Is it over when the paper runs out?
You said, We make art because it enables us to haunt
the future.
Ander Mikalson is a New York City-based artist
HIGHLIGHTS
OF THE
FALL GALLERY
SEASON
LOWER EAST SIDE
11R ELEVEN RIVINGTON
11 Rivington Street &
195 Chrystie Street
elevenrivington.com
195 Chrystie:
Jackie Saccoccio
September 9October 18
11 Rivington: AVAF, Denise
Kupferschmidt, Shirley Jaffe
195 Chrystie: Jeronimo Elespe
October 29December 20
ABRONS ARTS CENTER
Abrons Arts Center/
Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand Street
abronsartscenter.org/galleries
Marie Klbk Iversen, Io/I
PARMER at Abrons
Arts Center
Families of Objects
curated by Marco Antonini
November 4December 6
BLACKSTON
29C Ludlow Street
blackstongallery.com
Hanneline Rgeberg
Off the Bone
James Case-Leal
solo exhibition
CAUSEY
CONTEMPORARY
29 Orchard Street
causeycontemporary.com
LESLEY HELLER
WORKSPACE
54 Orchard Street
lesleyheller.com
The Continuing Line,

Elise Freda
Opening Reception:
September 9 68 pm
Front Gallery: Helen O Leary

Workspace: Who
group exhibition
This Mortal Coil,

Jerold Erhlich
Opening Reception:
October 16 68 pm
October 15November 15
Inside Matters, Lisa Pressman
Opening Reception:
November 20 68 pm
THE CLEMENTE
Abrazo Interno Gallery
at The Clemente
107 Suffolk Street
theclementecenter.org
Surface Place
Curator: Ross Jordan
August 21September 25
Closed Paradise
Curator: Javier Ortiz Echague
October 130
Bori-Cuba 2 x 2
Curator: Miguel Trelles
Front Gallery: Elisabeth Condon

Workspace: Barely There
group exhibition curated by
Pamela Matsuda-Dunn
ON STELLAR RAYS
1 Rivington Street
onstellarrays.com
Julia Bland
Ryan Mrozowski
Todd Bienvenu
October 9November 8
Arnold Mesches
SCHEMA PROJECTS
92 St. Nicholas Avenue
schemaprojects.com
Nina Bovasso: Flat,
Baroque and Berserk
Sean Kennedy, successpool

Schema Sculpture
Opening October 30
SARGENTS DAUGHTERS
179 East Broadway
sargentsdaughters.com
Devin Powers: Train Drawings

December 4January 17
Roland Flexner and Japanese

Bronzes of the Edo Period
Clifford Owens
Donald Baechler
NovemberDecember
Brigid Berlin
STATION INDEPENDENT
PROJECTS
138 Eldridge Street, Suite 2F
stationindependent.com
Chip Hughes
SeptemberOctober
Alicia Gibson, Mandy Lyn

Perez, Karen Schwartz and
Agatha Wojciechowsky
Volume 2: Black & White,

3D works on paper in
black and white
Jordan Casteel
KERRY SCHUSS
34 Orchard Street
kerryschuss.com
LIFE ON MARS GALLERY

56 Bogart Street
lifeonmarsgallery.com
RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY

170 Suffolk Street
racheluffnergallery.com
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
89 Eldridge Street
invisible-exports.com
Vaginal Davis
BUSHWICK
ATOMS / STONES
by Megan Cump
Opening Reception:
September 12 28 pm
Discontinuous Space
Continuous by Kristine Marx
Opening Reception:
October 16 69 pm
STUDIO10
56 Bogart Street
studio10bogart.com
Elana Herzog
Meg Hitchcock
Guillaume Apollinaires
Zone: Selected Poems
translated by Ron Padgett
by Dylan Furcall
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 2015
In 1969, The New York Review of Books published
Vladimir Nabokovs famous condemnation of those
liberties taken by Robert Lowell in his adaptations of
the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam. Nabokov acidly
mused, I can easily imagine Robert Lowell himself
finding one of his best poemsadapted in some other
country by some eminent, blissfully monolingual foreign poet, such that Lowells phrase leathery love
would be bastardized to the football of passion.
Yet in Zone, Selected Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire,
Ron Padgett demonstrates that translators should
be willing to sometimes mistranslate in order to revivify a texts more distinctive formal characteristics.
Idiosyncrasies and dalliances abound in Padgetts
judicious sampling (as they do in Apollinaires oeuvre)
though they rarely overwhelm it. Take, for instance,
this passage from the iconic title poem: Shes the
daughter of a policeman on the Isle of Jersey // I
hadnt seen her hard chapped hands sticking out of
her jersey. In the French, Apollinaire makes no mention of a shirt (Elle est la fille dun sergent de ville de
Jersey // Ses mains que je navais pas vues sont dures
et gerces). Compare Donald Revells rendering:
Her hands Ive never noticed are hard and cracked.
Padgetts choice, however, is to reproduce the French
slant rhyme of Jersey and gerces (chapped)
through the use of an identical rhyme in English. Such
an insertion, though altering the imagistic sense of the
line, ingeniously retains, and even amplifies, the sonic
playfulness of a poem in which the lyrical, jaunty,
and jocular intersect.
One of the joys of reading Zone is discovering the
utter range of Padgetts stylings as both translator
and poet. Inevitably, some poems resonate with the
wry tonal registers of the New York School poets,
elucidating the influence that the Parisian flneur had
on the autobiographical poems of David Trinidad, Ted
Berrigan, and Padgett himself: We met in a cursed
basement bar / Back in our youth / Both of us smoking in bad clothes waiting for dawn (Poem Read
at the Wedding of Andr Salmon). Other verses,
like Padgetts highly melodic translation of Le Pont
Mirabeau, exhibit the metrical craft and decorum of
an old master: And our loves / Must I remember them
again. It All Depends, a poem from Padgetts newly
released collection Alone and not Alone (Coffee House
Press), bears these very lines in their original French as
an epigraph. Padgett writes, Its our chance to separate ourselves / into numerous pieces and have them
/ go in different directions, / reassembling what time
has dispersed / in the form of granules and mist. Form
26
BOMB 133
here can be read as physical manifestation, but also

as poetic form, the structural devices through which
the poet gives shape to abstract meaning. I think of
this imagined process of atomization and subsequent
reformalization as an analogy for translation itself,
the operation of reassembling a text that has been
dislocated to another language and era. Zone contains
Apollinaires ambiguous vapors and punchy crystallizations alike, though it also succeeds in materializing
what we love most about Padgett: not the adaptation
that Nabokov bemoans, but adaptivity.
Dylan Furcall studies English literature at
Columbia University.
Illustration of
Apollinaires Zone
by Louis Marcoussis,
1913. Courtesy of
the Bibliothque
nationale de France.
Actor, Playwright, Failure,

Father, FagConrad Gerhardt
Strikes Again
Jeff Weiss and Richard C.
Martinezs And Thats How
the Rent Gets Paid
by Jim Fletcher
Memories are made of fingers such as these . . .
Daddy (aka Conrad Gerhardt, aka Bjorn the
Finnish wrestler, aka Jeff Weiss in And Thats
How the Rent Gets Paid)
THE KITCHEN, NEW YORK, 2015
I was hearing about the return of this legendary serial
epic for a few weeks before it happened. People close
to me were learning their lines and meeting with their
scene partners. I was recruited late, to replace a performer who was unable to make it. I received my five
scenes by email, as well as the contact info for my
three scene partners, and a list mapping out the
sequence of the forty-eight scenes over the three
evenings.
It played out like a critical home stand in baseball,
or a ritual guided by pleasure and romance, with something terrible at stake. Director Brooke OHarra laid
out the strategy: performers and glee club members
remain onstage throughout the play, seated wherever
convenient, free to come and go for beer, to pee, or to
perform. Each night Jeff Weiss would sing a welcoming song to the audience; then we would all join for
the traditional opening number (Where and When by
Rodgers and Hart). Jeff said to clip off the final word
of the song decisively and he would say Blackout!
to end it.
Then the scenes would start. Each beginning with
1, 2, 3, Hit It! from Jeff, and ending with someone
(as indicated in the scripts) calling Blackout. Between
scenes either the glee club, music director Nicky
Paraiso, or a special guest would perform a musical
number, often songs by the great Richard Martinez,
Jeffs partner and the apparent mastermind behind
all of this work (who could not leave home due to
advanced Parkinsons disease). Every night would
end with the traditional closing number (Theres a
Kind of Hush, the Hermans Hermits hit).
for the picnic. Take a whiff. (Billy thrusts his fat dick
in his fathers face) Daddy: Stop! Youll knock-out my
caps again! . . .
Late on the final night, as I lay dead on the stage in my
underwear with many other corpses, through several
scenes and songs, hearing Greg Mehrten as Jiminy
singing When You Wish Upon A Star while lamenting that Jess Barbagallos Pinocchio was neither boy
nor puppet (I am both of these things and more. Im an
actor.), I felt the gigantic dark heart of The Kitchen was
holding still.
I figure at some point Jeff called the final
Blackout! and pulled the plug on the whole affair. Im
not sure how it happened. We were on our feet. A lot
of tears. Gary Indiana said it was too emotional for him
to write about. Dennis Dermody said he walked home
down the West Side Highway ten feet off the ground.
As I went to the subway I was thinking, wow that was
some trick... I felt like this bolt of lightning had hit, and
did a little dance to make sure you saw it, and had its
way with you for as long as it wanted, and then completely disappeared, denied itself. It never happened.
The lover absconded, like a Greek god after a divine,
amorous rape. Or was it murder? Id never had it happen
in such a tender, brazen way.
Jim Fletcher, a New York City actor, is appearing this September in Isolde by Richard Maxwell, at
Theater For a New Audience in Brooklyn.
The script of the first of my scenes begins like this:

28
DADDY & BILLY: THE PICNIC Billy: Daddy! Im

home! Daddy: Come-up, son. I gotta surprise! Billy:
Should I take-off my pants? Daddy: Do you think it
would help? Billy: Couldnt hurt. Daddy: Youre right.
We are in show-buziness. Billy (enters): Im stuffed
BOMB 133
Kate Valk, Jeff Weiss,

and Mary Shultz in
AND THATS HOW
THE RENT GETS PAID
at The Kitchen, 2015.
Photo by Paula Court.
Fran Rosss
Oreo
by Rone Shavers
NEW DIRECTIONS, 2015
Originally published in 1974 and the only novel written by Fran Ross before her untimely death in 1985,
Oreo walks the line between so many different worlds
(highbrow/lowbrow culture, literary/genre fiction, black/
white racial dynamics, and feminist/womanist gender
politics), that it can only be described as postmodern.
It seems an obvious precursorand feminist riposte,
twenty-five years before the factto the satiric works of
such contemporary black male authors as Paul Beatty,
Percival Everett, and Darius James, among others.
In general, Oreo details the attempts by half-black/
half-Jewish Christine Oriole (misinterpreted as
Oreo by all those around her) Clark, to discover the
secret of her birthknown only by Helen Clark, her
perpetually-absent, black mom (who wont tell her),
and Samuel Schwartz, her deadbeat, Jewish dad (now
remarried and living in NYC). Coming-of-age tales are
a dime a dozenas (of course) Oreo travels to find her
fatherbut Rosss novel differs from others in that its
also a feminist inversion of the ancient Greek legend
of Theseus, founder of the city of Athens, as well as a
clever take on minority race relations in 1970s America.
Its a thorough primer on how ones use of language(s)
signifies the interconnected social nodes of race, class,
and culture; a celebratory latticework of inter- and intracultural hybridity; and did I mention that the novel is
laugh-out-loud funny?
Rosss true genius lies in her use of language. Take
the passage where Oreo has just finished reading a letter from her mother, warning her about the dangers of
violent chauvinism:
Helens letter so impressed Oreo that it led her to
do two things: adopt a motto and develop a system
of self-defense. The motto was Nemo me impune
lacessitNo one attacks me with impunity. Aint
no nigger gon tell me what to do. Ill give him such a
klop in the kishkas! she said, lapsing into the inflections of her white-skinned black grandmother and
(through her mother) her dark-skinned white grandfather, as she often did under stress. She called her
system of self-defense the Way of Interstitial Thrust,
or WIT. . . .
No matter that Ross references both Edgar Allan Poe
and Theseuss role as the supposed inventor of
wrestling here, whats more remarkable is the authors,
yes, wit. Throughout Oreo, Ross moves from Yiddish
to Yidlish to Black American English to Standard
American English to the convoluted sentence constructions of applied linguistics and critical theoryin
other words, from specialized vernacular to specialized
30
BOMB 133
vernacularoften within the span of a single paragraph.

Thats not even mentioning the satirical and farcical equations, menus, and charts that litter the text.
Oreos search is enabled by clues her dad left on how
to find him, but the clues, as is the search itself, are a
construct. Ross spells this out by providing the sort of
ending that once again proves that postmodern fiction
wasnt written solely by a demimonde of white men for
a cabal of like-minded white men.
Still, despite its verbal fireworks, there are indeed
times in the novel when the codeswitching feels too
intrusive to read like anything other than the showing
off of Rosss impressive skills. Oreo sometimes sacrifices
plot development for clever wordplay, but in a first novel,
such traits are to be commended. Rosss novel is evidence of a unique, distinctly American talent, and Oreo
should be recognized as the innovative, groundbreaking
text that it is. Its on par with Ishmael Reeds Mumbo
Jumbo in terms of its importance to the black literary canon. If you want to see how far literature can go
when questions of racial and gender identity are overtly
addressed without ever seeming didactic, then go no
further than your nearest bookstore to pick
up a copy.
Rone Shavers is Assistant Professor of English at
The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where he
teaches creative writing and contemporary literature.
Nari Ward
by Lee Jaffe
32
BOMB 133
opposite:
SUN SPL ASHED
R AMBALDI
SALOT TO, 2013,
C-print, 65 49 5
inches. Performance
by Nari Ward,
photography by
Lee Jaffe. Courtesy
of the artists and
Galleria Continua,
San Gimignano,
Beijing, and Les
Moulins.
I met Nari Ward in San Gimignano, Italy, at a sit-down

dinner that Gallery Continua was having for the opening
of their Ai Weiwei exhibition in 2012. Ward came up to
me and said, I think you are in a movie I just saw! Of
the 300 odd invitees to the dinner, he was the only one
who looked Jamaican.

I had lived in Bob Marleys house in Kingston for
three years in the 70s, initially working to arrange his
first two North American tours and eventually playing
harmonica in his band. The documentary Marley, directed by Kevin MacDonald, had just been released and parts
of an interview with me appear throughout the movie.

I surveyed the vast, immaculately restored, medieval room and its lily-white crowd and nodded, Yes,
that was me.

At the time, Nari was living in Rome for a year, being the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American
Academy. As I was residing in Florence, we exchanged
contacts and a few months later he called and invited
me for a visit. The American Academy in Rome could
be called The American Academy Above Romeit is
housed in a palatial villa situated on a hill looking down
on the Pantheon. As we sat in the grand dining room
with its cathedral ceiling and tapestried walls, after an
elaborate eight-course dinner (not for me as Im vegetarian), Nari began discussing plans for his upcoming
exhibition at Continua, and mentioned that he needed a
photographer to document a performance piece for the
show. When he explained that the work was based on
his uncle, a Jamaican musician, I knew I was qualified
to help realize his vision. A few months later we shot the
photo series Sun Splashed in twenty residences in Rome
and Florence. Naris only stipulation for the locations was
that there be an existing houseplant on each premise.

Active as an artist since the early 90s, Ward has
created countless large-scale sculptures and imposing,
provocative installations, many of which involve found
objects and complex layers of historical and contemporary references. In this conversation we decided to
discuss three major works of his that I felt a particular
affinity with due to my own involvement in Jamaican
culture.

Lee Jaffe
33 ART NARI WARD
Installation
views of HAPPY
SMILERSDUT Y
FREE SHOPPING,
1996, awning,
soda bottles, fire
hoses, fire escape,
salt, household
elements, audio
recording, speakers,
and aloe vera plant,
dimensions variable.
Courtesy of Deitch
Projects and
Lehmann Maupin,
New York, and Hong
Kong.
34
BOMB 133
L E E JA F F E : We are looking at one

of the works to be shown in your
upcoming survey at the Perez Art
Museum in Miami. Its called Happy
Smilers and its from 1996.
N A R I WA R D : I made it for my first
gallery show. Prior to that I was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum
in Harlem, and I did a project called
Amazing Grace in an old firehouse in my
Harlem neighborhood.
N W : Theyre very colorful. You get

them in the corner stores of mostly lowincome neighborhoods.
L J : Its a remake of the candy shop
in a way.
N W : Exactly. Its like, Hey, this is all very

safe and fun, and maybe a bit disturbing
if you consider that the bottles are basically colorful sugar water.
L J:
L J : Lets talk about Happy Smilers first.

(siren noises from the street) Can you
turn off that siren?
And they were the colors of the

Jamaican flag.
N W : This is Harlem, man! But let me run

out to them. (laughter)
N W : Tropical Fantasy soda probably

had that inherently in it. But there was
also the reference to the original Happy
Smilers album.
L J:
L J:
Youre gentrifying the neighborhood!
N W : Ive been here long before all this

gentrification.
L J:
No man, thats why its getting gentrified, because you were here first.
N W : The building that is my studio now

used to be the exhibition space where I
did Amazing Grace.
L J:
This was the old firehouse?
NW:
Yeah. Now its very different, of

course. In the mid-'90s, when Jeffrey
Deitch, who had just started Deitch
Projects, invited me to do an exhibition,
I thought, A white cube is a really tough
space! I wanted to reference this situation I saw: the owner of my old studio,
on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue,
was running an illegal gambling business behind the fake front of a candy
store. People would come in and play
their numbers among all the paraphernalia of a candy shop. Everyone on the
block knew, including the police, but
they had other things to deal with. So
it was this sort of known fiction, this
almost normal situation. So I decided to
use this idea of a lived fiction at Deitch
Projects. I wanted to make a kind of
happy, jovial experience so I had a yellow awning, saying Happy Smilers
and then you had Tropical Fantasy soda
bottles
N W : I grew up with that album; my

father played it all the time. I had two
uncles in the Happy Smilers group,
Uncle Euton and Uncle Robin. They
were an original mento band, a kind of
Jamaican folk.
The show was also about the idea
of the artist as entertainer, and maybe
a kind of place-keeper for other expectations. Its like, We know this guy,
hes supposed to be happy and jovial.
However, if you put him into another
context that is ambiguous, would he
become something else? This piece is
all about the altering of context.
L J : This is the Jamaican diaspora in
Harlem, integrated into a traditional
fabric of Harlem.
N W : But its any space outside of home,
outside of the original context. Thats
the side of dislocation I was talking
about. Its these two spaces combined.
I wanted a certain experience as you
enter the space, I wanted this moment
of, Oh, this is great fun! Island music
is playing, the walls are all yellow,
and right away youre probably smiling. But then you go inside, and your
mood changes. You walk into a strange
tapestry of household material, woven
together with fire hoses. Almost like an
abode, or a ceremonial space.
L J:
L J:
When did you discover the album?
It looks like compacted trash.
hanging from the ceiling.

NW:
35 ART NARI WARD
Theyre all so-called discards,
familiar things that were given another

kind of presence, a special moment
in the narrative. The fire hoses that I
had gathered for this installation were
all ruptured and no longer functional.
Nothing there is functional, it's now
serving a different purpose.
L J : And theres a fire escape hanging
from the ceiling.
N W : Yeah, its no longer just a fire
escape. Because once you take it away
from the building its actually a sculptural object. From one side it reads as
a fire escape, and from the other side it
reads like a jail structure.
L J : A fire escape, for escaping from
nowhere to nowhere. Its suspended. Its
a spectacular image.
N W : An important element on the
hanging fire escape is the aloe vera
plant. Most people know that aloe vera
is a healing plant. I wanted to bring in
this element of nature that was about
rejuvenation and healing.
L J : A kind of optimism, a possibility.
And the speakers in the middle of the
space, they are like an altar.
N W : Exactly. When you go from the
Happy Smilers soundtrack to the big
speakers in the center of the room,
you hear what I remember hearing in
Jamaica as a small childthe sound of
rain hitting the tin roof. I would go to
sleep hearing this sound. I recorded that,
but when I played the recording
in the space with the fire hoses, it
was really strange, because instead
of sounding like rain it sounded like
the flickering of flames. I would never
have gone there with the association
of rain becoming fire if it wasnt for the
presence of the fire hoses and the fire
escape.
L J : So its the rain, which is a symbol of
regeneration, and at the same time its
the sound of flames. And theres the fire
escape, a kind of prison, an enclosure.
N W : I guess thats exactly what I felt,
this notion of confinement and limitation. Thats why the aloe vera plant
came in as this symbol of light and
potential that gave hope to the piece.
L J : And then you got your uncles

entertaining.
N W : Yeah, the Happy Smilers are there.
I recently visited my storage facility to
inspect the piece for my museum retrospective this year. I felt very aware of
the amount of repetitive work it took to
build the piece. Now I have a little bit of
success and I can hire people to
help me.
L J : Back then you had to make that
whole thing yourself?
NW:
I was there like a true Jamaican

immigrant, working twelve-hour days
nonstop for a month. Happy Smilers
became also about labor as a transformative force.
L J : Youre the slave and the slave master
at the same time.
N W : I guess that could be one way of
putting it. But the idea of transformation has always been something that
I romanticize in a work. Im cautious
of it but I also need it to connect my
thoughts with the process of making.
Thats really important.
L J:
How did you get the fire hoses?
N W : From the New York City Fire

Department, just across the street from
my former studio on 125th Street. One
day I had found an old piece of fire
hose, and I was like, Wow, this is great
material. So I went over to the firehouse
and said, Hey, guys, do you have any
extra fire hoses? And theyre like, No,
but why dont you go to the hose room
in Long Island. Whenever a hose is
busted, it goes there. They gave me the
address and sure enough, this is where
all five boroughs bring their busted fire
hoses. The guy there explained to me,
We have a big problem here. We used
to repair the hoses ourselves, but now
the insurance companies dont allow
us to do that anymore, and so we have
to toss them. But the sanitation dont
wanna take them. I want them, I said.
And theyre like, Oh, good. Well bring
em to you. After a while, I was getting
fire hoses delivered to my studio. Soon
I had no more room and I had to say,
Stop! I did three major projects with
the material! I could have easily become
36
BOMB 133
the fire-hose artist, you know. Its a very

seductive and resilient material.
Id love to do an entire line of housewares out of this stuff. Its strong and
so weighted symbolically, but also very
comfortable and soft. Its an industrial
material that can become organic; you
can twist and turn it like a vine. And its
a material that comes with these two
relevant signifiers, fire and water, both
elements of regeneration.
L J:
Lets return to Amazing Grace.
N W : It was an installation of about 365

baby strollers that I had collected from
the streets. I picked up the baby strollers that were discarded by so-called
marginalized folks. That piece was a
reference to what was happening at the
time; you know, a community in crisis.
L J:
Right, and you just captured the

space, the abandoned fire house.
N W : I was fortunate, though, because
the woman who allowed me to rent the
space wasnt interested in making a
profit. She just wanted me to pay for the
upkeep. She was very generous and a
supporter of art.
L J : I saw Amazing Grace at the New
Museum two years ago. The context,
the topology, were so radically different.
NW:
Its been shown in at least five

different locations now: Paris, Athens,
Vienna, Torino, Geneva. Ive been
intrigued with the change of context
because in every situation, people bring
their cultural experience to the piece.
In Athens, I remember people talking
about the baby chairs like remnants,
almost from an archaeological perspective. In Vienna, we showed the work in
a former horse stable of the king and it
was viewed as a dialogue about class. In
Geneva it seemed even more vulnerable
since it was installed next to automobiles in a parking lot of the World Health
Organization headquarters. For me its
not problematic to shift with these different referencesin fact I learn from that.
L J : And seeing it at the New Museum in
this white cube
NW:
It was actually on the ground floor,

in their adjacent storefront space. It was
next to the New Museum, but it wasnt

in the museum. But the context of the
Bowery was important for the piece.
L J : Yeah, the history of that neighborhood and the homeless people, its
inseparable from the work.
N W : The piece is echoing the margins,
and so it works on that level. But then
you dont want to be the poster child of
the margin, the marginal artist, right?
(laughter) You dont want to be the crazy
guy shouting outside the house. You
want to effect change by getting in the
house. Amazing Grace will be shown
next in Milan; an exhibition this fall that
deals with motherhood. Very exciting!
L J:
Well, you know so much about that.
N W : Its the life cycle of this object and

how it reflects on human conditions that
really interests me. Its like a first-world
vehicle, its the first time the baby leaves
the mothers, or the parents, arms and is
pushed into the world, experiencing the
world in this new way. Thats a powerful
moment. Theres this idea of protection,
and nurturing, but then, the strollers are
discarded and get used by marginalized
individuals who pick up bottles and cans
to make ends meet, people who are perceived as being failures.
L J : Lets talk about the music with
Amazing Grace.
N W : The sound is equivalent to the aloe
vera plant that was in Happy Smilers
this element of hope, of light. When I
was putting together all these strollers,
the piece became so heavy and dark;
there was this sense of despair, and I
wanted to pull that back. I needed to
find a sound to do that. I grew up with
my father playing Mahalia Jackson
soundtracks. He was a big fan.
L J:
I grew up with that too!
N W : Yeah, beautiful powerful voice,

man. So I said, Im sure Mahalia could
save this work for me. One of my
favorite standards is her rendition of
Amazing Grace.
L J : Shes the first black person to sing
Amazing Grace at the Grand Ole Opry
in Nashville.
SPELLBOUND,
2015, salvaged
store, piano, used
keys, Spanish moss,
light, audio and
video elements,
55 30 62 inches.
Videographer:
Steven Rose;
audio composer:
Austin Nelson.
Commissioned by
SCAD Museum of
Art. Courtesy of
Lehmann Maupin,
New York and
Hong Kong.
Installation view of
AMA ZING GR ACE,
1993, Harlem.
Approx. 300 baby
strollers and fire
hoses, dimensions
variable. Photo
by Fred Scruton.
Courtesy of the
artist.
37 ART NARI WARD
N W : Oh, I didnt know! That song was

written by a white slave owner, its
basically a song about his transformation and repentance. He was on a slave
ship, in a furious storm, he felt that the
ship would be tossed and broken up.
And he got on his knees and prayed to
God to spare him, and promised that
he would stop being a slave owner and
slave trader. And apparently he was
spared, and this song is a result of that
experience. Its about him awakening,
becoming a sort of abolitionist
L J:
So he freed all the cargo?
N W : I dont know if he freed the cargo,

but he promised God he was going to
live a different life.
L J:
So he wrote the song.
N W : Yeah. So when you walk through

the Amazing Grace installation, on the
exterior of the piece the strollers are like
frozen in time, and then in the interior they are intertwined with the fire
hoses, knotted and tied. Its almost as
if theyre chained. But I was thinking of
them more like being entangled in their
own growth. The twined and wrung
fire hoses are like roots piercing each
stroller. So the idea was that the strollers on the interior are overwhelmed by
some kind of energy, and then the strollers on the exterior are sort of watching
their situation. And you, as the viewer,
participate in that theater by walking
through.
L J : In Amazing Grace at the New
Museum, the sound goes into the street
and the street becomes part of the
experience.
N W : Exactly. If I were to reinstall that
piece, I would have more of the sound
outside so passersby would wonder,
Whats going on here?
L J : Mahalia Jacksons Amazing Grace
recording was very important during the
civil rights movement in the 60s and
70s.
N W : She had a major role. She was a
big supporter of Dr. King and a real rock
for him.
L J:
38
Sound transcends the constraints of

BOMB 133
space and time. Mahalia Jacksons voice

transported me to a time inextricably
linked with the civil rights movement.
Her transcendent voice commingling
with the detritus of abandoned strollers and punctured fire hoses, arranged
on the floor in a shape reminiscent of
a slave ship, transformed the museum
into a sort of storefront cathedral. And
right next door is the Bowery Mission,
a homeless shelter created in 1879
through a Christian organization.
So were confronted with the paradox
of a work of modern art, which is such
a product of the Enlightenment, and
specifically Christian. Which leads to
the next paradox, as Christianity is the
root of colonialism, and intrinsically of
race theory, which was used to justify
the African slave trade and the genocide
of indigenous cultures in the Caribbean
and the Americas.
Seeing your work brought me back to
a song of Bob Marleys, Talkin Blues.
I was at his wifes Ritas house in 1974
and I slept on the floor on the porch.
When I woke up, Bob had a bowl of porridge for me and started singing: Cold
ground was my bed last night, and rock
was my pillow too. Talkin Blues. Your
feet is too big for your shoes. And
then it has the line, I feel like bombin
a church now that you know that the
preacher is lyin.
NW:
Pretty radical, blowing up a church.
L J : And its the frustration of an island

where there are more Christian churches
per square inch than any country in
the world. And all the hypocrisy of the
church.
N W : For me, the connection between
Harlem and Jamaica is also the church.
In the book of Guinness World Records
it may even be Jamaica and Harlem that
have the most churches per square mile.
Religion has a dual component of being
an opiate for the people, as Marx would
say, but on some level it can also, at its
best, unite, as in the civil rights movement. So I never really want to discard
the importance of faith. Faith, wellplaced, is a powerful tool. And thats the
problem, it allows for manipulation.
L J : So then the question I have is:
Does the sculpture Amazing Grace
turn the religiosity of the recording into
something profane? Is it addressing the

failure of religion sixty years after the
Mahalia Jackson recording? Here we are
walking into the New Museum on the
Bowery, and right next door we have all
these homeless people, and almost all of
them are people of color.
N W : Yeah, yeah.
L J : So in a way, your piece was addressing this failure.
N W : There is lack of change and a breakdown in support, but I keep getting
back to that notion of hope. Yeah, Im
super-critical of religion and its limitations, but there is also the possibility of
effecting change. I have a very complicated relationship with my faith, being
a Baptist. Im not a devout Baptist by
any meansI live next to a church and
thats the closest I get to going there.
(laughter) But I always feel it gives
a perspective. Religion can give you
distance from your situation, and I think
thats what I want, distance even from
the contemporary art experience. Its
about having you step back, having you
pull outside of the tendrils of connection
and murkiness that life offers. It gives
you this other position to view reality.
Within a good preachers sermon theres
a lot of repetition. And all this repetition
is about reinforcing ones relationship
with the moment. In my piece, Mahalia
Jacksons voice was pulling you into
another space, a space of devotion, or
of just beauty perhaps, of power and
empowerment.
L J : Heres something that I grapple
with constantly in my own work: How
does one infiltrate the market without
denigrating the underlying aims of
whats ultimately a subversive practice?
Because without a venue, such as a
museum, to draw a large audience, the
work is kind of neutered. In fact, one
might say that only when perception
occurs does a work become an artwork.
In your case, until you were able to penetrate the art market, the work would
have never been able to be realized in
that museum space.
opposite: SUN
SPL ASHED LISTRI
LIBRERIA , 2013,
C-print, 65 49 5
inches. Performance
by Nari Ward, photo-
graphy by Lee Jaffe.

Courtesy of the
artists and Galleria
Continua, San
Gimignano, Beijing,
and Les Moulins.
39 ART NARI WARD
I want to acknowledge that other predicamentyou cant necessarily

go back to being Other anymore. You have to figure out how to be
different within.
N W : You are correct in that I made it
as a conversation with my neighborhood, about identifying a crisis that I
saw within the community. That was
the impetus and it never occurred to
me that the work would survive beyond
that. At some point I thought I could
make it smaller for some future iteration but then a collector saw the piece
in Harlem, and said, I want this entire
thing, I love it, I want it. And right away
that changed the piece. It got a chance
to live in these other placeson three
continents and in five different venues.
Its interesting to think about the market. I went through the Studio Museum
in Harlem as an artist-in-residence, and
thats actually when Amazing Grace
was built. A lot of people dont know
this because the program is so successful now, but one of the museums early
mandates was to acknowledge and give
a platform to artists of color who had
been overlooked by the market. And
even now, when we have many artists
of color being snatched up and brought
into major museums and so-called blue
chip galleries, theres still this oversightall these artists from the '70s to
today, who never got their support, are
still being left out. Im fortunate enough
to be making work in a time when the
market is hungry for that other voice
that theyve sorely overlooked.
I remember my first art history
book when I was going to school in
the mid-'80s. It was Jansons History
of Art. The only African American artists in this huge book were, I think,
Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden.
Museums are now trying to get artists from the 60s and 70s, maybe the
50s, and even more so young African
Americans. So weve come a long way,
but still a lot is being overlooked. The
market is a wild card that you cant
run afterI just do my work. There
are works that function in the market
and then there are things that I make
that could never be consumed readily.
I mean it takes a very unique person
curator or collectorto want the more
politically driven works. Thats a reality
that Ive come to live with.
40
BOMB 133
L J : Lets go to Sun Splashed. In this

photo series you are wearing your uncle
Euton Wards performance outfit. In
channeling your uncle youve elevated
him to a heroic status, but at the same
time youve exposed him to his own
vulnerability. You have him drenched
in sweat in this costume, a type used
in the 50s and 60s for entertainers
who would be performing for tourists
in Jamaica. By accepting to wear this
costume your uncle was accepting the
myth of the Happy Smiler.
NW:
He was a survivor just like the

African American minstrel charactera
nice, entertaining guy who was in some
way disparaged but found a way to feed
his family and survive. To add another
layer, the hotel that made the Happy
Smilers album for my uncle was called
The Plantation Inn. Its the plantation
legacy.
L J : The hotel owners had to make the
tourists feel comfortable and they tried
to dispel the racist image of the black
African savage.
NW:
L J:
The angry savage.
So they put them in these costumes.
N W : Most of the tourists to Jamaica

were Europeans, they wanted the
benefit of the plantation without the
undertone of that horror and oppression.
So these guys sort of fulfilled that, they
were happy entertainers.
L J : And in the early 60s, being from
Jamaica, if you wanted to survive by
making music, this was one of the only
ways.
N W : I remember Uncle Euton being very
charismatic. He was able to travel, they
even did a tour to Germany, and when
he came back he was a bit of a star,
even to regular Jamaicans he was this
special character.
L J : And that was before ska, before
reggae, and around the time of
independence from England. Before

the first Bob Marley and the Wailers
hit record came out, in 1964. That was
called Simmer Down, and you had the
music changing from mento, which was
a slow, relaxing, folky kind of music,
to a much more intense, faster rhythm.
And the lyrics were saying, Simmer
down, the battle will get hotter.
N W : Yeah. That was almost a premonition of what was to come.
L J : Exactly. And here you had the
euphoria of the independence, and
now youve got the realityit really
isnt independence. Its independence
in name, but the economic and
social-political conditions havent
changed.
N W : Right. When I adopted this character in the 90s for the Happy Smilers
show at Deitch Projects, it was about
the issue of power. There was a narrative of the immigrant, but it was also
about the sub-status quo for the individual. I was reacting to what I experienced
in my community in Harlem. But it was
a difficult time in America in general,
there was the crack epidemic hitting
full force, and AIDS. So there was a real
sense of crisis in these different areas:
in health, in social justice, full-on, especially for people who were vulnerable,
people who were poor.
L J : Yes, and now we have emigrated
your uncle into this new surrounding.
Now hes in Europe, in Italy.
N W : Yeah. This character no longer
needed to be home, because it was
about a psychological state of being disconnected from place, this sense of not
belonging, but at the same time being
okay. For me it was really important
that I not play this character as a victim.
When you look at the image, theres
ambiguityis he a pathetic, dependent
person, or is he, in some ways, particularly dignified? Thats something you
brought to it with the image you took
of him. In the photographs, he seems to
be sweating, or wet, he appears out of

place, but hes the plant in this pot, very
much dependent but at the same time
surviving. That surviving component,
surviving with your dignity, was really
important in balancing these portraits.
L J : I felt that the sweating was
significant of someone whos working
really hard, but also someone whos not
accepting of the situation. Theres an
underlying
NW:
anxiety.
L J:
And the intensity of your gaze as

you posed in character; I worked on that
in all the photos. Your gaze made me
think of Frantz Fanons study Black Skin,
White Masks, when he talks about the
light-skinned guy from Martinique who
goes to Paris. In Martinique hes in a
kind of elite class, because of his lighter
skin, but when he gets to Paris people
are looking at him completely differently, and its shocking.
NW:
L J:
Hes the Other.
The savage.
N W : I wanted my character to be more

like a domestic wild and unpredictable element. He is easily understood
as coming from another place. But I
wanted him to seem to fit into this context. Perhaps he doesnt. So the tension
is not necessarily that hes coming from
somewhere else when hes there, but
that maybe he belongs therelike the
plant. Hes come to terms with being
the potted plant and hes got his own
set of problems that relate to that situation. The untamed is the wild growing
foliage and you can imagine the realities of that. The potted plant is much
more anxious because it may want to be
wild and unhindered, but it cant! Hes
got to make a living. I want to acknowledge that other predicamentyou cant
necessarily go back to being Other
anymore. You have to figure out how to
be different within. Thats why this work
made so much sense in Europe, because
there is a whole set of problems that
comes with immigration. People coming from other countries never really
assimilate; they cant because of the
strong tradition of the host country, so
they feel as if theyre under siege. In
41 ART NARI WARD
America its different, because there is

this notion that everyone gets absorbed
and becomes American.
L J : Yeah, the cameras fixed, so the camera becomes the white person. And me
being white, being the photographer, Im
taking that position. In all the images, I
was careful to be facing slightly upward,
to give a powerful presence to your
uncle and his transformation.
N W : I guess thats why theres this element of that persons dignity. And its
finding the line between a sense of anxietyyou mention the sweating and the
laborand this almost heroic persona
thats parked within that.
hotels and all-inclusive resorts on the

island, mostly not owned by Jamaicans,
but by foreign corporations. People
pay abroad with a credit card and the
money doesnt go to Jamaica. Theres
huge unemployment in Jamaica, so they
can hire people for slave wages.
N W : The funny thing is that Jamaica
created the notion of the all-inclusive
hotel experience, but now its destroying the island, because the commerce
doesnt go into the community.
L J : The hotels are importing all the food
into Jamaica although everything grows
there.
NW:
Yeah, how is he surviving in this

situation?
Its a real problem.
L J:
N W : Right. Which is the premise for

what I want the viewer to think about:
How is this person surviving? How is he
belonging?
L J : Also, we were in Italy, the birthplace
of the Renaissance, and Europe is where
race theory was first formulated. And
now in the twenty-first century, being so
informed by the cultural theorist Stuart
Hall, a Jamaican who immigrated to
the UK and revealed race to be a social
construct and a floating signifier. We
are left with the nasty residue of those
earlier racial theories.
N W : With the whole European Union
experiment, one of the hard things
for them to figure out is how to deal
with the Other. Its okay to be able to
have this conversation and commerce
between these several European countries. But what happens when you have
an influx of people coming from Asia
or Africa, how does that change the
dynamic?
L J : Jamaica being an island, its a whole
country of dispossessed people. The
Spanish annihilated all the indigenous
people. Everyone is a displaced person.
NW:
That model has been fortified by

the business of slavery, the business of
colonialism. All of these businesses created this entity.
L J:
And now you have the multinational
L J : But I think theres hope for change.

Im feeling it. The island will be self-sufficient one day, which it can be.
N W : One of the problems that we talk
about in any of these so-called thirdworld countries is that the local people
of wealth dont support their own cultural institutions. Theres a contentious
history to business being contingent on
manipulation and on taking advantage
of the other. There isnt a notion of civic
responsibility. People who are really talented leave, because they cant survive
under those conditions. I want to go
back and participate in the visual-cultural life in Jamaica and try to develop
an art residency on the island.
L J : When you talked about your teaching experience there, it sounded as if
there are really smart people coming
out of art education.
N W : Yeah, I feel like the Edna Manley art
school there has some excellent instructors and produces very skilled artists.
However, there isnt enough support for
artists to develop visions to help transform their communities. The pervasive
model, like everywhere else, is to follow the market standard of success,
which is selling your work to support
your practice. And thats the struggle
and challenge for artiststo keep that
creative flame active while creating
resources that can effect change within
their communities.
Jim ORourke
by Jay Sanders
Jim O'Rourke is one of those rare artists who, in his
own work and through his keen perception and fanatical boostering of the many things that motivate and
excite him, has fundamentally altered the parameters
of the art form in which he works. At every moment
he challenges his audience to rethink the expectations
and categorical distinctions they bring when listening
to music, exploring these constructs in order to rewire
their semantic codes in astonishing and unforeseen
ways.

ORourke is consistently setting new terms for
originality and an independent vision, with a spirited
sense of humor at every turn. He imbeds sophisticated compositions and conceptual-artistic intent in
the semblance of pop albums, continues to reimagine
the possibilities within electronic music and musique
J I M O'R O U R K E :
Horrible weather here

today. There was a typhoon last night,
so it's really hot and sticky.
JAY S A N D E R S :
Has it been a rough
summer?
JO:
It's been gross.
J S : We just finished the Conlon

Nancarrow festival at the Whitney. He's
such a great artist, but I had no expectations for how it might all be received by
a broader public.
JO:
A lot of people came, right?
J S : It was eleven days long and it

built like a snowball rolling down a
hill. The first couple days it was my
co-curator Dominic Murcott and me
in the theater during the day as people
would wander in. We'd play some piano
rolls, and then we'd have these more
formal evening events and gigs. It developed a kind of cult following by the end
of the series. The last day we played
all the Studies for Player Piano, number
one through fifty-one, in order. It took
seven and a half hours to do it. We had
tequila in the afternoon since Nancarrow
served tequila in his Mexico City studio
when guests came and listened to his
music.
42
BOMB 133
concrte to organize sound and surprise us with its

manifestations, and forges a deep connection between
American Minimalism and the open tunings and modal
fingerstyle playing of blues and folk.

Since moving to Tokyo eight years ago, his albums feel increasingly like dispatches from another
orbit, as they plunge ever deeper into their own vocabularies and concerns, unfettered by the need for
explanation, promotion, or tour support. The Visitor,
his 2009 instrumental tour de force, takes its title
from the fictional album made by David Bowies alien
persona in The Man Who Fell To Earth, an improbable
communiqu meant for a faraway planet. This year
saw the highly anticipated release of Simple Songs,
his first vocal song record since 2001s Insignificance
(all on Drag City Records). To satisfy at least some
of the demands that he materialize, he will present a
rare two-night concert series, entitled two sides to
every story, at the Tokyo Sogetsu Hall later this fall.
For countless reasons Jim has been an inspiration to
me, so its a great pleasure to have this opportunity to
check in.

Jay Sanders
You and your work were on my mind

around Nancarrow. He was an American
artist, but lived outside the country.
Also, he found a way to do the music he
wanted all by himself; he could jettison
the need to rely on other people. Not
that you always do that, but thinking
about a record like The Visitor, you sort
of had to invent a way to do something
that gets outside the conventional reliance on players and score.
JO:
Well, with him it was need. With

me, its the remaining fumes of a
Catholic upbringingfeeling guilty
making anyone else play this nonsense.
J S : There's a humility in his work

that relates to yours: he uses pop
forms, whether it's boogie-woogie or
jazz, but through hidden complexities,
he creates this work that goes to the
stratosphere. It goes somewhere that
you couldn't get to in any other way,
with its use of musical genre, canon
forms with multiple voices and melodic
lines, and these completely unheardof tempo and density shifts. And his
manner of experimentation is so unpretentious. The weight of a lot of music
history, or avant-garde history, isnt
felt in the work. He seems to be
able to tuck a lot, I don't want to
say hide
JO:
but he does.
J S : Yeah. Through modest means,

he makes something that transfigures
itself in the making, in the grist of
the material. And thats a way I think
about your work too. There's humility
also, though the effort goes to these
extremesmore, probably, than anyone
would ever know. The effort and the
compositional strategies are embedded
in ways that are not calling attention to
themselves.
JO:
Ill talk about Nancarrow instead of

me. (laughter) I mean, to us Nancarrow
is a composer, of course, but he wasn't
understood in that historical context,
really, except to the handful of people
like Charles Amirkhanian, who somehow discovered his music and took
him very seriously. So now it's sort of
running after the tail of a bird that's
already taken flight. Nancarrows work
is still very hidden. The context decides
how seriously something is taken,
especially within academic circles. So,
for example, any composer going to
Darmstadt [where countless twentiethcentury avant-garde composers such as
Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono
studied and taught] knew their work
was going to go through that filter and
was going to be perceived in a certain
Jim O'Rourke in
Tokyo, 2015.
wayits heard by the ears and its

heard by the eyes.
There are just certain peopleand
Im not saying Im like Nancarrow at
allwho dont care about what those
people think in order to validate what
they do. I know whats in what I do. If
someone gets it, thats great, but Im not
so insecure that I need to have my name
in some gilded book with brown fake
leather and gold stamping. Its never
gonna happen and it doesnt matter if it
happens. I just cant imagine spending
any part of the day pursuing and nurturing ones place in that world. Thats
gotta be soul death. Wheres the work?
J S : Have ideas of context drawn you to
different types of musical material over
others, or is it all taste and interest? Is it
ever a political decision to work in one
rather than another?
JO:
I definitely can't work with music

I don't respect in the first place. I can't
use something to refer to that musical
history for the sole purpose of referring. And I definitely don't want to
work with anything that I don't have
an actual understanding of. If I don't
have the understanding, I spend a lot of
private time learning about it. If I have
to brush up on my counterpoint, I have
to put time aside for that. You could call
it research, but it is also a question of
having these things at your disposal and
not finding out they are all rusty and
falling apart. But that should be done in
private, and shouldnt even be noticed,
if all goes well.
I don't even know, at this point,
what the point of making something
public is anymore. Just because you've
done something doesn't mean you have
to make it public. This is something I
learned luckily very young when I was
working with some people who would
put out anything they recorded, back in
the 80s, in the cassette and noise days.
For some people thats great. More and
more, I couldn't do that. You know me;
one of the fundamental things about
me is my allergy and my disgust with
narcissism. Some would say its a wall
holding me back: my reluctance to do
things that smack of being about me as
opposed to being about the work. Just
because I did it doesnt mean anyone
has to hear it. It hasn't bothered me for
a long time to work on something for
years and then decide that it's not good
44
BOMB 133
enough to make public. All that matters

is the final result.
J S : I really liked that dialogue we did
for John Zorn's Arcana book series
(2007). I remember you saying then
that holding on to material for a long
time might be an important way to let
the context shift so the work could
emerge in a new light, and to get you
out of yourself and out of the present.
So, with this new record, Simple Songs,
I was thinking about what it might have
been like to take fourteen years since
Insignificance and six years now since
The Visitor. Was the time between both
albums important to the project or did it
just take the time it took for you to want
to put out a song record like this again?
JO:
It definitely took that much

time. I would have liked to keep working on it. Putting out a record like that
is different from putting out a record
for Editions Mego, or labels that are
under the radar. It involves a machine,
you know? And I had sort of gotten the
machine out of my life, when I moved
here, and I wasnt producing for or
playing with the groups I had been
collaborating with before. Its not that I
didn't enjoy the work; I just didn't want
to be a part of that machine anymore,
where things get taken out of your
hands. Once this record looked like
it was close to being done, and I got
involved in getting the artwork and the
mastering ready, I started to get that
smell of it's happening again. Having
to do press for it was really weird on
several levels. First off, I hadn't done
interviews for a long time. Even with
The Visitor, I only did two or three.
Having to talk about an album in
the context of Oh, this is my new
record is so odd. Its hard to get
people to understand why it took six
years, and that this is normal for me.
What shocked me the most, because
I'd been so out of touch with normal
culture, was how much the world has
changed since I'd last visited. Even magazines or big websites that had always
been really supportive were like, No,
were passing on it, and I wondered
why. I mean, its fine if they don't want
to do it, but I was curious. It seems that
everything now has to have some sort
of viral capability for them to have interest, which is fascinating to me because
a lot of the lyrics in Simple Songs
have to do with aspects of that. From

the moment you met me, youve known
of my fear and distaste for the Internet.
And its not like an old man kind of
thing. I just saw where this was going.
I can't even imagine how hard it must
be for someone to do something seriously at this point. Its such an uphill
battle to keep your position in relation
to your work, for it to be about the work
and not about all this nonsense around
it, which is going to be over in
a couple of days and replaced with
other nonsense.
J S : Theres a noise of things that
bounces around. It's not even reception.
JO:
Refresh noise. It's like the world is

filled with this continuous clicking hum
of people pressing the refresh button,
and I know there's not a refresh button,
but, you know. . . .
J S : The opening song, Friends With

Benefitsits something weve talked
aboutI immediately think of that very
funny Facebook episode of South Park,
You Have 0 Friends. Or later in the
record, the song These Hands. The
way I hear it, it sounds like a cynically
prophetic update of that old Yellow
Pages slogan, Let your fingers do the
walking.
JO:
In a way its like that classic

routine in Burroughss Naked Lunch
about the talking asshole. Eventually it
didnt need the human at all and all you
see is dead eyes staring. Im paraphrasing, of course. It also reminds me of the
time in the late 80s and early 90s when
I was mostly in Europe, and I saw so
much of this artwork by Peter Weibel,
Stelarc, and folks like that, who were
looking toward this body/machine integration of the future, some for utopian
reasons, some for others. What struck
me then was not so much that I had
any personal feeling for or against their
work, it was more a feeling of ha-ha,
when this comes youre not going
to like it.
J S : Last week, while I was driving out

of town, I was re-listening to your previous song record, Insignificance, which
I hadnt put on in a little bit. Its such a
guide to insults, a litany of new ways to
insult someone, but also a study of perversions and strange characterizations.
Every day I'm faced with this existential problemI wish I could be
more of a jerk, because I would get a lot more done in life.
(laughter) The lyrics are fantastic start
to finish. With the new record, there
are lots of different kinds of characters:
a psycho neighbor, the Grim Reaper, a
corpse. . . .
JO:
Those always seem to show up,

don't they? (laughter)
J S : Is everyone already dead in your

music?
software to make your own reverbs

by recording a space, analyzing it,
and then using that space, whats called
the impulse file, as a reverb.
So to amuse myself, I actually went
out in the forest and recorded it. So in
the middle sections vocals the reverb
is an actual forest.
JS:
It lends some authenticity.
JO:
J O : Probably, yeah. In Insignificance
it's mostly people who are about to
die, but in Simple Songs most of
the people are dead. The Grim Reaper
always shows up. He's always there. I've
been surprised that no one has caught
on. I mean, I was worried that it was
going to be too obviousthat Last
Year is Get a Room part two. I guess
it is really only funny if you think of it
in that context. I just love the idea that
the song fades out, but this woman has
to wake up to find this dead guy in bed.
(laughter) So what's she going to do? Of
course, she's going to dump him in the
forest, you know? The thing is I didn't
say she lived near a forest in the previous song. I screwed up.
J S : There are a few songs over the
yearsGet a Room, Last Year, and
I think Eureka, toowhere there are
two voices in a dialogue. Two characters, and you sing the parts differently.
Whenever there's a dialogue like this,
there's about to be big trouble for one
of them. (laughter)
JO:
I emphasized it this time more

than before. I'm very picky about
when to double the voices or when
to use a chorus, because that implies
that its not an individual but either an
abstract third person or a group. So
in Last Year, I only let there be
harmonies or a chorus when the joggers are running by the guys body each
year. But also in the way I mixed it in the
middle section, when the dead guy is
singing to them, it's a different sound.
J S : Yeah, you hear it. It's a different

voice.
J O : This is really stupid, but theres
Well, it sounds different and I

thought itd be funny. It amused me
and only me. I mean, overall I did go a
little bit further than I have before to
delineate these kinds of things within
the songs. I felt that no one had gotten
it before, so I must have done it wrong.
And I did it wrong this time tooI can't
get anything right. (laughter)
JS:
Did you think of the songs as autonomous missives, or was there some sort
of overarching shape to the record?
JO:
Part of the reason it took so long is

that it just wouldnt feel right as a record.
The overall arch of each songs story and
where that left you, and picking up to
the next one and where that takes you, it
had to work. Basically it did end up being
what I had imagined. The songs sort of
happened. That's, of course, just when
they start. Eventually they have to get
molded by everything around them and
theyre affected by that.
I re-listened to The Visitor too.
There's something so astounding about
that record. It has so much of everything you've done before in it. And it's
wild, how you get from one section to
another, what changes underneath it
and what instrumentation emerges or
recedes. So many balls are hovering in
the air at any given time, throughout the
whole thing.
JS:
JO:
Dont get hit!
JS:
The more you hear it, the more you

hear, for sure.
JO:
themselves. When I was a kid I was

going to see a movie and my dad said,
Didn't you see that already? Why do
you need to see it again? I remember
saying this even as a kid: People put
years of their lives into this; there's so
much in there. How do you think you
can understand years of someone's life
in two hours?
I would hope so. There are a lot of

relationships, rhythmically and harmonically, going on that hopefully reveal
J S : There's this way that you subtly

build your own context with all your
work. Some of it expresses or pays
homage to the different music that
inspires you, but it's very much transfigured through the way you handle
the musical material. In some ways,
The Visitor feels like a real apotheosis,
in that all these things that you care
about and study deeply are brought to
bear and then can actually change form
through the work you do with them.
The idioms and forms you work in, and
all your compositional decisions, always
take the whole somewhere further than
the sum of its parts.
JO:
That's very nice. I mean, I hope so.

Thats the way I look at it. I'm not doing
this to entertain myself. I can't make
work that isn't that. Its unfortunate
but it seems like I'm la carte for most
people. There's got to be only a handful
of people out there who have heard the
bulk of what I've done. Those who only
know the Drag City records don't know
the other stuff so, unfortunately, that
particular aspect of what I do gets lost
for a lot of listeners.
Most people don't look at a musician
as someone who's thinking with these
big plans. When people think about
the work of film directors, it's natural
to think of their body of work as a life's
work. Theres only a handful of musicians like thatsomeone would think
of Neil Young or Bob Dylan that way.
I'm not comparing myself to them, of
course, but its unusual to think about
music that way, or anything that touches
on pop music. If you do make claims to
that, you're called pretentious. But I'm
like, Well, why not? Is it because the
musics in this format, or this genre?
Who says it doesn't have those possibilities? If youre saying that, then youre
the one insulting the form.

J S : You work in many ways at once.
In the last several years, youve created
these different distribution lines for
your work: the Old News series of LP s
through Mego, which is primarily your
electronic music; the stuff you're putting
on Bandcamp which includes reissues,
live recordings, soundtracks, and studio
work; the song-oriented Drag City
records; and the collaborative projects.
Has that sort of approach been helpful?
With regard to Old News, does having
a consistent line or platform on which
to release stuff give you an additional
context to work in? Is there a conceptual
strategy?
JO:
There is, because with the way

things have changed, I don't want any
of those LPs to be looked at as my new
record, because they arent. It's something I'm working on constantly. With
Old News, each new one is released
only once the previous one is completely
sold out, because I dont want to hurt
Mego by encumbering them with continuing to put these things out, which
is why the LPs have been coming out
slower and slower. It's been about
a year and a half since the last one.
With Old News, the deprecatory

title, the drawing on the album cover
that disappears line by line with each
subsequent release, the fact that you'll
pair something from twenty years ago
with something newit all does a lot to
circumvent and muddle that idea of
the next fresh slice of your work.
JS:
London, and then I just did another for

this festival in Australia. The audience
gets mad, because I'm not there, which
I find baffling. Like, Conlon Nancarrow
wasn't there.
J S : No, and he apparently preferred the
tape recordings to the live piano for
concerts.
JO:
Why are these doors closed? What's

happening that is causing this disjunction, insisting on deciding somethings
value based on its value? It's bizarre.
It's the endgame of capitalism, that's
what it all comes down to. (laughter)
J S : As you said with Old News, and definitely with the song records, there are
parallel lines with the design decisions;
the conceptual, visual aspects of the covers; the album and song titles; and even
some of the promo photos you've done
around the records. These lines are key
to creating connectivity. With the Drag
City stuff, if you look closely, there's a
kind of visual algebra thats formed, in
a quiet but clear way, between all the
records, starting with Bad Timing.
JO:
Definitely. With the earlier ones

I was being driven by this idea, but I
wasn't being so eloquent about it. As
time went on, I had a much sharper picture of what I wanted to do, and of how
to do it. So, for me this record's cover,
and more importantly the back cover, is,
in a way, the period. That's it. That's the
end, right there. The printing process
that was used to get what I wanted
JS:
Yeah. The disappearing cover is

definitely part of the idea. I don't even
know if I'll ever get it to be blank.
With the amount of people interested,
I'll maybe never get another one out.
Occasionally, some people ask me to
make some electronic music for a festival. In Europe, and especially in France,
there's been this long history, since the
'60s, of playing tape music at a concert.
The composer . . . I don't want to use the
word composer . . . the person is only
sometimes there. This is very normal.
There's been a resurgence of interest
amongst the people who want to put on
performances like that, but the audience
isn't used to it. So, I've done one or two
of these things: one for Cafe OTO in
that black mirror reflectivity.
JO:
46
BOMB 133
JO:
Yeah. In the end, it's just you that

you see. Years ago I was complaining,
as usual, about the Internet or something, and I said that the only time your
computer screen is a mirror is when you
shut it off. That's the sentiment, though
not in relation to computers, that's
stayed with me. The back cover has
something to do with that.
J S : I agree that the whole record itself
feels like a way out. The extra-musical
aspects, like the cover, are intrinsic
to the project, but could also be part
of an exit strategy, in a way, or might
open onto a whole different field
whether that opens this project up, or is
punctuation for it.

J O : I definitely feel its punctuation.
And also, I dont like how these records
overshadow everything else. If the work
was looked at in the ways I wish it was
looked at, that wouldnt bother me, but
if an album like this is just a product, it
isn't worth my time. The wider context
is a black hole. No matter how hard you
pull it's going to go in that black hole.
I felt that way when I did Insignificance.
The thing is, it's not worth six years
of my life. The other things that I can
do by myself in my room every day
maybe take me eight months or a year,
it doesnt matterand I get something
out of doing them.
J S : I feel like there are enough people
who see your work the way it should
be seen, see the potentiality in it. In
truth there arent that many artists in
any medium that are really working on
the deep realities of their formcreating problems for themselves. I would
think that in the long run these things
do become more visible to more people.
When that reception happens, and how,
is complicated, because your work, by
its nature, problematizes itself all the
way through.
JO:
Theres the reality of my day-to-day

life. Making a record like that, its like
guerrilla recording: You guys can come
in for a few hours. So we run in and
hopefully it's a good performance, and
you spread that out over six years. And
I can't give the musicians much money.
I'm not making anything on it, you know?
Those records just put me in the red.
I'm not doing it for the money. I mean,
what's the point, really? It's like if you're
working hard to make cheesecake but
they keep putting it where the mozzarella
is. You're not going to be encouraged to
make cheesecake anymore.
It's a tough time for anybody making
music, of course. Its not about doing
shows. Especially the song stuff's not
meant to be played live, because the
mixing and everything else weve been
talking about is so much a part of what
I'm trying to do. It's not meant to be
played live, so that's strike one. Strike
two is that I don't want T-shirts and stuff
like that.
JS:
(laughter)
JO:
It sounds funny, but that's how

people get by, which I think is insane.
That makes sense if you're talking
about Paul McCartney and Wings,
but you've got small little groups of
people who are paying their bills from
T-shirts. The stress of how difficult it's
going to be to make it happen really
dampens your energy for wanting
to do it.
J S : It's such a dopey question, but,

what have you learned from the past
project, and what is your position artistically in terms of the questions you want
to have answered, and the difficulties
you want to get into in the future?
You're always propelled to be working
on something.
JO:
One thing I have to do is learn

to find a way to work with other people
without feeling horribly guilty about
it. I don't mean playing with other
people; I mean asking other people
to do things for me. That's where the
guilt comes in. I'm totally happy to play
with other people. I love playing with
Oren Ambarchi and Keiji Haino or Eiko
Ishibashi. I love all that. But, that's not
my work, you know? Luckily that's
something I enjoy doing, that I can learn
from, and of course does have something to do with what I do. But, when
I ask someone to do something for me,
the guilt is insurmountable. I just had
this meeting the other day, because I
had to get a string quartet together for
the thing in October. Atsuko, who plays
the strings on the record, found three
people, and she brought them here,
and I explained what I was going to do.
Just having to meet these people and
talk to them for a few minutes, I was
fucking panicking. I'm going to pay
them as much as I can because it's
their livelihood, but they deserve better
than that, you know? It's a fundamental
flaw of my character that I can't shut
off the empathy for other people.
Every day I'm faced with this existential
problemI wish I could be more of a
jerk, because I would get a lot more
done in life. If I could just be like,
Yeah. Whatever. Just do it.
JS:
(laughter)
In my early twenties, out of ignorance, I could do that, which is why I

got a lot more done then. It's not that I
don't want to work with other people,

because obviously I do.
I really have to go back and just
study again. I've been saying that for
a few years, but I just really have to hit
the books again. Because things are
getting rusty.
J S : You mean like listen to records, or
reading?
MostlyI hate to say itplaying

the instruments better. Basic things
like harmony and counterpoint, which
I understand and can obviously do, its
just that I don't have the agility at them
that I'd like, because I'm so bad at math.
It takes me a little bit longer; I have this
problem where if you put one number
in front of me and then another number
next to it, when you put the third number in front of me, I can't remember the
first one, so I get lost. Ive got to really
work hard on it. That's all. That's what
I've been doing for a while now, since
that stupid record's been done.
JO:
JS:
It freed you up, hopefully.
JO:
Well, I hope. I've got to figure out a

way to pay the bills, in the meantime.
J S : Hopefully those upcoming concerts

help with that.
JO:
With the amount of people who are

playing on it, Ill probably have to sell a
whole bunch of stuff just to make those
shows happen. And it's all because of
this new record; it's that kind of record
where you have to do the show, and this
and that, and I never intended for this to
happen.
J S : I get it. It's ironic; the thing is

the thing, but because youre singing
theres a voice and an artist attached
to that voiceit feels like a band, then
that should be something you can
deliver live. But of course thats one
of the conundrums the work itself is
bringing up.
Whether or not it's the song records
or other stuff, do you get something
out of going back to older work and
revisiting it or working it up again?
Does it lead to other approaches to
the material?
JO:
back to the old stuff at all. It just seems

cheap to me, like cheating. Remember
this classic. . . . It was never a classic.
Remember this thing you immediately forgot. . . . What was that thing I
used to do? Once at Sear Sound when
I was working on somebodys record I
made these Classic Notes. (in a radio
announcer voice) Lou Reed, 1976, The
Palladium: F#. This has been Classic
Notes.
JO:
I try to make it new in how I

approach it. I don't really enjoy going
J S : This might be a good end point.

(laughter)
JO:
This has been Classic Notes.
David Diao
by Matthew
Deleget
48
BOMB 133
TRIP T YCH, 1972,

acrylic on canvas,
85 198 inches.
Images courtesy
of the artist and
Postmasters Gallery,
New York.
DA HEN LI CYCLE,
FROM WHAT I CAN
REMEMBER, 2013,
acrylic and marker
on canvas 42 78
inches.
opposite: SALES
1, 1991, acrylic on
canvas, 42 36
inches.
49 ART DAVID DIAO
I first encountered David Diaos paintings more than

twenty years ago as reproductions in art magazines. I
was an undergraduate art student at Wabash College
in Crawfordsville, Indiana, about as far away from the
downtown New York art world as one could possibly
get. Diaos work has captivated me ever since.

I was thrilled to show alongside him in the 2014
Whitney Biennialin the section curated by Michelle
Grabnerand I intentionally included a direct reference
to him in my installation for the exhibition, Zero-Sum. I
thought he would appreciate it as someone who commonly references other artists in his work. You may not
know this, but Diao was also included in the very first
Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1973. For someone who
describes himself as having a mania for congruence,
it seemed remarkable that (in a period spanning my
M D : We're at your studio on Franklin

Street. The impetus for our conversation
is your upcoming retrospective. This
may be an obvious place to start, but
you were born in China in 1943 and
cousin who was the captain of the

lacrosse team at St. Paul's Prep School.
Hed been rejected at Kenyon. I got in
with a good scholarship.
MD:
I was in China until I was twelve, but

I left my home city, Chengdu, Sichuan,
at the moment of the revolution, in
October 1949.
entire lifetime) hed been at the first and last biennials

to be held at the Marcel Breuer building.

For the 2014 biennial, David showed the painting 40 Years of His Art, depicting an invitation to a
fictitious forty-year retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. In his work, David often analyzes his own artistic production, as well as the arc of
his professional career, and a full-dress retrospective
has remained elusive. That is, until now. The Ullens
Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is mounting the
first comprehensive retrospective of Diaos work, set
to open this September.

I dropped by Davids loft in Tribeca, where hes
lived and worked since 1974, to discuss his upcoming
survey and to look back at fifty years of his art.

Matthew Deleget
What did you study?
DD:
MD:
Your family needed to flee?
DD:
My grandfather was on the losing

side; he had his name on the blacklist,
so we sought a way to escape.
MD:
I went as a dutiful son to maybe

study pre-med. I did very poorly and
lost the scholarship, and had no chance
to transfer anywhere. So I was stuck
there, but was rescued by the philosophy department. I managed to learn a
lot of analytical philosophy early on.
M D : After graduating in 64, you moved

back to New York City.
Where did you escape to?
DD:
To Hong Kong, on one of the last

planes available. My father was in
America, and at the last moment of the
crisis, my mother had taken my younger
brother and sister back to her own
parents home. While she was gone,
my paternal grandparents were given
the chance to evacuate, and there was
simply no time to fetch my mother. So
my immediate family was broken up for
thirty years. I didn't see them until 1979.
My father was in America as a student and later as a structural engineer.
I was able to join him in New York City
at age twelve, in 1955.
M D : You studied at Kenyon College in
Ohio, a liberal arts school.
DD:
It was a strange choice. You never

know why you pick something. Maybe
it was some secret rivalry with a distant
50
DD:
BOMB 133
D D : Yes, but immediately took an apartment on my own. I found a four room

rent-controlled apartment on 25th Street
for $43 a month. It was a fifth-floor
walkup.
M D : And you took a job at the
Guggenheim?
DD:
First, I took a job as the sweeperupper at the Kootz Gallery. Sam Kootz
had been one of the first to show
Abstract Expressionist work. He was
a true businessman, and had exported
a Cadillac as a present to Picasso after
World War II. Hence, he was the only
dealer in New York to have yearly
access to Picassos work. He also had a
lifetime commitment to Hans Hofmann.
Hed always said that he would only
keep the gallery open while Hans was
alive. I was there during the gallerys
last year.
MD:
Hans Hofmann died
DD:
in February 66. Then I worked

at the Guggenheim, hanging shows
when they needed extra help. It was a
small institution then, like family. Ward
Jackson, whom you showed, was the
archivist. It was a nice way of entering
the art world for me.
M D : You helped hang Barnett Newmans

Stations of the Cross in 1966.
DD:
I remember that vividly because

I already had a certain respect for
Newman. I was also sitting in on
Lawrence Alloway's seminars at New
York University. I even had Alloway to
my studio, which was a great coup.
He kept saying, This is first-rate. It
sounded like what hed say just to be
encouraging to a young artist. Hed
done the Systemic Painting show [at the
Guggenheim], which was highly important to me. A lot of us then thought,
crudely, that if you found the right
format, you would have a body of work.
That exhibition was based on this idea.
M D : Did you meet Newman at the

Guggenheim?
DD:
Yes, though I was a low man on the

totem pole. I got to know him a little
better as a bartender. We were able
to cobble our lives together with parttime jobs, mostly to have studio time.
I worked as a waiter, bartender, a grip
on movie shoots, and what have you.
One of my jobs was at one of Mickey
Ruskin's restaurants. It was across the
street from Max's Kansas City on Park

Avenue, near Donald Judd's studio on
19th Street. Newman came in several
times. Id see him at openings too. He
was always willing to engage, but I
was too shy to really speak to him.
MD:
When did you start making work?
DD:
Literature was big at Kenyon,

but they offered some art classes.
In fact, Kitty Rice, the widow of
Professor Rice, the previous head of
philosophy, had been a student at
Cleveland Art Institute. She offered a
few art courses, which I took. By my
second year, theyd hired a guy named
Joe Slate, who studied with Josef
Albers. This was the beginning of my
art education. He offered the famous
Albers color course.
It was useful to work at Sam Kootzs
gallery. I also had a brief stint working
at Richard Feigen Gallery. Feigen was
showing adventuresome work. I saw
that close-hand and realized that what
I was doing in my own studio was not
less ambitious than some of this work.
Also, Ray Parker, the youngest artist
at Kootz Gallery, was a touchstone.
Hed been one of the key figures in
Greenberg's Post-Painterly Abstraction
show. He invited me to his studio, and
I helped hang his show. I admired his
earlier work with big color blobs. Then
there was Bridget Riley at Feigen, along
with Chuck Hinman. Hinman was doing
amazing work with his shaped canvases,
and I actually babysat for him. Through
him, I met people like Robert Ryman
and Lucy Lippard. The New York art
world was quite small. Everyone knew
everyone. Those jobs gave me access
and community, and also a load of
confidence that I was doing something
possibly as interesting as the work of
some of the people I admired.
MD:
Was that in the mid-1960s?
DD:
We're talking 65 to 68. In 66 I

moved to a gigantic loft at 305 Canal
Street. It had a thirty-foot-long skylight
that reached up to twenty-five feet in
the middle of the spaceit allowed me
to do a lot of that large work. My actual
main studio wall was 110 feet long. A
fourteen-foot painting was no big deal.
M D : Many artists then were making

extremely oversized paintings.
51 ART DAVID DIAO
DD:
That was the unconscious legacy

coming from Abstract Expressionism.
They talked about big scale. We didn't
question it much. I'm still beholden to
having all that space in which to flail,
if nothing else. A space not so much
to occupy but just to beit's a way of
canceling out the surroundings.
MD:
M D : Yes, it's all-enveloping. There were

things about painting you did question,
though.
MD:
DD:
Very early on I understood artmaking as critique: to move forward is

to critique.
MD:
Tell me about that.
The first paintings were straightforward paint on canvas but, by the time I
came to New York, the work was basically soak and stain. I accepted that
notion of the paint being part of the surface. Touchstones were people like Frank
Stella, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and
even the stained paintings of Alexander
Liberman, whom Alloway always liked.
Edge to edge, corner to corner.
DD:
These were all soak and stain, done

with brushes and sponges. The whole
phenomenon was a reaction against the
exuberance of de Kooning and Franz
Kline, against that expressive hand, the
painterly touch, and so forth.
The signature.
DD:
The bravura. A way out of that was,

for many of us, to come up with other
means of getting the paint onto the
canvas. People used rollers, others used
scrapers, sponges, turkey basters. I was
mostly using a six-inch squeegee, a car
washer, since it gave me a two-and-ahalf-foot extension.
DD:
MD:
But you developed larger squeegees over time too, right?
M D : Libermans work has fallen by the

wayside in people's memories, but it's
so good.
The paintings physically got larger.

I realized that the specificity of that sixinch scraper determined the paintings
scale. It came to me that a way to make
the scale bigger was to actually make a
bigger mark. That's when I came to pick
up the cardboard tubes that were strewn
all over the streets of SoHo; I used them
as enlarged scrapers.
DD:
MD:
His earlier geometric circle paintings

are his best. So Stella provided me with
an example of what art-making is about:
what had been done, what you could do,
what you could take out.
My first work, around 66, was
done in series, with a format in which
to deposit shape or color. These were
square canvases, all constructed like Xs.
Id paint one side of a diagonal one color,
turn it ninety degrees and paint the other
half, radiating around the center. This had
to have been informed by statements like
Noland's, I couldn't get to do my work
until I found the center of the canvas, in
reference to his concentric circle paintings. Ad Reinhardts five-by-five canvases
were very important too. Between
Reinhardt and Stella and Noland, I came
to do these square canvases.
I had this ridiculous youthful arrogance. Noland said he needed to
discover the center to do his work,
but he forgot the corners. Here I was
going right to the corners, covering the
whole ground, including what my elders
missed. That thinking is very Stella: his
so-called deductive composition.
DD:
Old fabric tubes?
DD:
Every night there would be bundles

of them. It was great; I didn't have to
buy brushes, nor clean them.
MD:
DD:
The materials of your environment.
Yes, I've always had a sociological connection to my surroundings. At

first, they were random sweeping, curvy
marks, and Id sometimes roll the tube
as well, not just scrape. But at some
point, in the interest of deductive logic,
I wanted a correlation between the mark
and the substrate of the canvas, so I
thought I would make paintings that
used an instrument of a certain size to
make paintings the same size. It would
only be oriented one direction: up and
down or left to right.
I had a studio for a year or so on
Broome Street, which had a sloped floor.
These paintings had to be done horizontally in order to have the paint not run
off the edge. I made a very large table
and thought I could stretch an eight-bytwelve-foot piece of canvas to do two
paintings at once. As I was doing that,

the two sides began to interact visually.
MD:
To this building?
DD:
MD:
These were the bilateral paintings?
DD:
Like open books. I couldnt control what was happening at the far end
of the canvas, so I let whatever paint
spilled out do what it did. My job was
just to decide if it worked or not. Also,
I wanted to supersede the convention
of keeping paintings abstract by calling
them Untitled, so I started titling the
paintings with names that came from
books: Wealth of Nations or Tigers Eye,
for example.
M D : Lets talk about the first opportunity you had to show your work. You
were part of a group show at Park Place
Gallery.
DD:
Frosty Myers, still a good friend,

invited some of usLee Lozano, Rosemarie Castoro, and othersto be in a
group show there in 1967. Paula Cooper
was the director at Park Place, and she
was beginning to think about opening
her own space. I became one of the first
eight people she showed in her inaugural show, which included Lynda Benglis,
Bob Huot, Harvey Quaytman, Richard
Van Buren, Bernie Kirschenbaum, Frosty
Myers, and Leo Valledor, too.
MD:
Valledors another very good artist.
DD:
He died too young. Paulas space was

at 96 Prince Street. Initially her idea was
to represent a group of artists, and whenever they came up with new work she
would show it. I proposed doing a show
with sheetrock, plaster, and Homasote,
using industrial materials as art materials.
The so-called death of painting scenario
was ongoing. A key thought for me was
Wittgensteins idea that if you look at
something with a certain lens, you see it
in a certain way. With a blink, you see it
in another way. Its looking at the world
as a painting. Viewers were invited to
see what they might normally see as an
unpainted wall as a painting.
Yes. Id had a studio on the Bowery

for three years, right next to where
the New Museum is now. It had tenand-a-half-foot ceilings, but given the
expanse of the floor space, it felt low. Id
been working on the floor, which was
something I took from Pollockit was
a convention then. Things had become
mechanical, and I wanted a way to engage with the canvas again in a more
direct way. I luckily found this building on
Franklin Street, completely empty. I negotiated to rent basically the whole building,
and ended up sharing it with Ron Clark
and Yvonne Rainer, my colleagues at the
Whitney program, where I taught from
19702000. I have lived here for more
than forty years. This building has beautiful wood floors, which you wouldn't want
to mess up. My loft has fifteen-foot-high
ceilings. That gave me a chance to get
back to working on the wall and to deliberate shape-making again.
That was coupled with meeting Al
Held. In 73 or 74, I was a visiting critic
at Yale, and would drive up there with
him once a month. If you knew Al, you'd
know that he loved to talk about art, and
he was always argumentative. That was a
Yale education in microcosmic form.
I preferred his work from 65the
big letter forms overlapping, the half-circles. He did them in a kind of intuitive,
immediate way, with big brushes and so
forth. So when I came to think of making paintings with overt shapes, I would
do them with rulers and compassesby
that I mean a nail with stringand taping everything off.
I did not want to make shapes that
came out of the unconscious. I wanted
something accessible. I would use the
kind of tricks that Al Held did in his
paintings. He would show you part of
a circle, with another bit peering out at
the other side of the canvas, and your
mind would complete that circle even
though it may be behind a plane.
MD:
Simple geometries, but not patterns.
MD:
easel painting.
DD:
Yeah. I came to see that geometry

is also a form of representation, and
that there are certain conventions you
cannot balk. I had tried to combine the
spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism
with Constructivism, but it didn't work.
MD:
Why not?
DD:
Because of the prior meanings

already accrued on those forms. The
minute you see those constructed forms,
you think, Ah, geometric painting.
MD:
Did you take time off then?
DD:
Production really slowed. Also, in

modernism, you have the idea that you
can do a painting that nobody has seen
before. I realized how impossible that
was, yet I still wanted that somehow. So
I went off to Paris for a year. I was reading all of these French people anyway,
so why not go and read them there?
When I came back to teach at Bard in
the summer of 84, I didn't quite know
what I was going to do. This was the
moment of big debates in the art world
about appropriation, original versus
copy. This allowed me to go directly to
Malevich. In the first painting I made
after not working for a couple of years,
I placed the Palestinian flag next to a
Suprematist Malevich drawing. They
both have an inverted black triangle. I
then referenced Malevich's directly by
using that famous photograph of the
0.10 [Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings]
show.
DD:
MD:
Moving forward a bit, tell me about

the work that you made during the early
70s.
DD:
Moving to Franklin Street in 1974

was a big thing.
52
BOMB 133
I was already thinking of how to

stay away from the grid. Not having a
proper art school education, I've always
had a lot of diffidence about my abilities.
Using plane geometry to make these
paintings was a way to learn about color
interaction and composition. I took to
heart Newman's advice that everything

has to be done prima facie. You don't
blow something up, you do it right there
in that space. I would do these big paintings completely without any sketches.
It was clear in my mind that by doing
geometrical paintings I was going back
to European Constructivism, to the
1920s. Yet European painting, in everything that Don Judd, among others,
wrote, was debased
M D : What was it about that photograph

that intrigued you? It was the basis for
an entire exhibition.
DD:
It's the canonical photograph that

supposedly announces the origin of
I was using myself as an example of a large class of people:

late twentieth-century artists.
LIT TLE
SUPREMATIST
PRISON #16, 1986,
acrylic on canvas,
32 16 inches.
53 ART DAVID DIAO
abstract art. It's so ubiquitous it's invisible. I thought it would be an interesting

image to use given the contributions of
people like Sherrie Levine and Richard
Prince, who were reframing and presenting existing images in a new way.
DD:
By 86 or 87, I was using exclusively

a palette knife totally out of expediencyno brushes to wash. It allowed
me to really compress that paint onto
the canvas.
MD:
MD:
Pushing it into the weave?
That got you back working again?

DD:
DD:
Yeah, I would do one and I would

get an idea for using that image in another way, by flipping it, doubling it,
off-siding it, sliding it. I ended up with
a whole show at Postmasters.
M D : This was a radical departure from

your earlier process-based work. I arrived in New York in 94, so in my mind,
I identify you with these works from the
mid-80s.
DD:
Did you actually see that show?
M D : No, I was too young; I saw those

works in reproduction.
DD:
Like ten years later.
MD:
Yes, in books about new painting

in New York at that time. I didnt know
about your earlier work until the High
Times, Hard Times 19671975 show,
curated by Katy Siegel, with a group
of collaborators including David Reed.
In the mid-80s, you continued painting. This was another moment of crisis
for painting, with a lot of photography
DD:
This certainly was not an issue.

To pick the Malevich photograph from
the 0.10 show was an overt acknowledgment that photography was part of
the visual culture. I was making paintings based on something that already
existed, whether it was another painting, an image, or an advertisement. It
wasnt just Malevich who got my attention; even more so it was Rodchenko
and Lissitzky. Remember they did their
Constructivist art alongside publicity.
M D : What was it that grabbed your

attention?
I dont even begin with color until

I have filled up the canvas texture with
paint, so its as smooth as possible. It
has that sense of being honed, waxen,
sensuous. Brice Mardens early wax
surfaces I admired very much.
quickly I hit upon Robert Motherwell's

Little Spanish Prison. Given the history of New York painting, it's highly
importantfor Frank Stella, Sean Scully,
and anyone who does parallel stripes.
I decided to conjoin Malevich and
Motherwell, the European avant-garde
and the New York School.
M D : Were you looking for a certain kind

of surface?
DD:
Yes, workman-like. In 1987, I was

making a painting based on Vilmos
Huszrs 1917 De Stijl painting of stylized, geometrical figures. He designed
one of the original Bauhaus logos and
was one of the key figures around van
Doesburg. This painting of his references the sixteenth-century Dutch genre
painting of skaters on a frozen canal. I
thought itd be great to take that and use
it in another way. I scaled it up to eleven
feet wide, and the ground became a kind
of grey greenish ice. The figures were
the same colors as his.
People first see this painting as random geometrical forms, and then, if they
look closer, they can see figures skating on ice, or lifting a leg up and doing
a pirouette. That funny contradiction
between recognizing an image and having it stay abstract was what interested
me. The steel blades of the skates and
my palette knife had a correspondence.
I was very aware that most of my
work, given my lack of training, has
been stuck in the realm of hard-edge
geometry. And so I ended up calling that
painting Skating on Thin Ice.
MD:
DD:
In a way, which is also why I

ended up doing that group called Little
Suprematist Prisons.
MD:
Their revolutionary, political, social

aspirations. I admire that they didn't
think of art as this thing off by itself, but
as being ingrained in life.
As a reference to yourself?
When?
DD:
M D : What about your surfaces at this

time?
54
BOMB 133
DD:
In 86. It was the show after

the Malevich photograph one. I
wanted to come home. Research on
Constructivism was taking me further
away from New York and I wondered
if I could dissolve that distance. Very
M D : Funny, I always read your prisons

in relation to Peter Halley.
DD:
There's also a Halley reference. The

problem with my work is that it has
multiple references. In 86 Peter Halley
had already written his brilliant essay
The Crisis in Geometry, from which
I learned. He put into play the word
prison.
M D : This is the beginning of a generative

process where you reissue and reuse
works that you've made in the past.
DD:
That's the way I work, against the

notion of starting from scratch each time.
M D : Lets return to Newman for a

moment.
DD:
By chance, I happened on a book

by Brenda Richardson from the Baltimore
Museum, which includes a list of all the
works that he did, by year, under different categories: paintings, sculptures,
drawings, prints. To my astonishment,
I noticed that in his twenty-seven year
career, on average, he made less than
five paintings a year. The convention is
that important artists are highly productive, that they can't stop their brush from
moving. And here this guy, who means
so much to me, did so few works. So
based on his series Who's Afraid of Red,
Yellow and Blue, I did a big red Newmanesque scale painting, with my palette
knife-honed surface. The information I
wanted it to present was so dense, that
I could not paint it by handI decided to
use computer-generated vinyl signage.
The best thing about art-making
is that you plan everything, but once
the work is done, you're surprised by
accidents that make it more interesting. If you were making a poster as a
graphic designer, you would know not
to put blue lettering on a red ground.
You get dizzy. In this case, what resulted
is a thirteen-foot-wide canvas with its
simultaneous contrast making you dizzy.
Newman talked a lot about the sublime,
top: Installation
view of SHEETROCK, 1969, Paula
Cooper Gallery, NY.
55 ART DAVID DIAO
bottom: ALL THAT

I REMEMBER, 2013,
acrylic on canvas,
42 78 inches.
and here I was presenting my optically

induced sublime.
M D : Again, it's this double read: you're
seeing the piece both as an image that's
reminiscent of a Newman painting,
and on second look, you read it as an
information diagram. What I find so provocative about that work is that it doesn't
sit in one canon, in one point of view.
DD:
I used the conventions of charts,

but what I do is never pure in any way.
Its hybridized.
M D : You've done diagrammatic works

about your own exhibition history too,
your rsum, your sales history, studio
spaces you've occupied.
D D : I started by using my own CV as
a work around 90 or 91, cued by the
paintings about Newman.
M D : You became the subject matter of
your own work, but not in an autobiographical way.
DD:
That's it. My thinking was, What

would I do if I were to make some
work about being an artist in the latetwentieth century, without talking about
the artists private life, just presenting
the public life? I was using myself as an
example of a large class of people: late
twentieth-century artists.
M D : So you present yourself as a case

study.
DD:
Exactly. I used my twenty-two-year

CV in one of the paintings to show the
ups and downs in the career of the average yeoman artist. The CV begins with
a lot of shows, peters out to nothing,
maybe has a start or two again, peters
out to nothing again, and then gradually
maybe has more shows. Its the stop
and go that interested me.
M D : Its similar to the works you've done
about your sales history as well.
DD:
Thats a big taboo; people don't

talk about sales. So I made work using
red dots, with the charge of the forbidden around it. Another painting I did
has the footprints of every studio I ever
had, in the scale of one inch = one foot.
Its a way to image a life in the arts. I
56
BOMB 133
top: MINUS,
1991, acrylic and
silkscreen on
canvas, 79 127
inches.
bottom: WE WERE
NEIGHBORS, 2014,
acrylic and paper
collage on canvas,
88 68 inches.
named that show at Postmasters A Real

Allegory: 1969 to 1991, which was the
name Courbet gave to his painting of
himself in the studio, and theres the
muse, the innocent boy, the faithful dog,
and he's surrounded by his collectors,
his critics, and so forth. That's where
Plus and Minus came in.
MD:
Tell me about that pair.
DD:
in his characteristic hat. I didn't want to

use my own image, so I came up with the
idea of using Bruce Leethe most visible
Asian person in the world.
MD:
DD:
Remember, I am the immigrant boy

who came at age twelve and wanted
to assimilate. I basically jettisoned my
whole Chinese background. But then
issues of identity were very much in the
air. In adjusting to that, I started to do
work using those references.
Part of an artists life is the work

and its reception. I took two 70s paintings of mine. On one I plastered positive
reactions, and on the other I plastered
negative reactions.
MD:
MD:
DD:
These were reviews of some of your

hard-edge, geometric paintings?
DD:
Yes, I reemployed the paintings as

the substrate for new paintings entitled
Plus and Minus. I screen-printed actual
reviews and articles on them. Theres a
mania for congruence.
M D : One of the works you showed in

the 2014 Whitney biennial is a painting
of a fictitious invitation to your retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Yeah, after A Real Allegory in 1991,

Id already, shamefully, revealed my
sales record. I had screen-printed good
and bad reviews directly on paintings,
so I wondered, What could I possibly do
next? I thought, MoMA will never give
me a retrospective. I should just give
myself one.
Given my custom of making sure
that my references are direct and not
invented, I visited the MoMA archive,
where I saw the invitation card for Pablo
Picasso: Forty Years of his Art, in 1939. I
took that and made myself an invitation
to my fictitious show at MoMA.
DD:
M D : In the 90s, aspects of your personal background entered your work.

You started referencing elements of
Chinese culture, such as Bruce Lee or
the word yellow, for instance.
DD:
Having given myself a show at

MoMA, I said, Why stop there? Why not
have shows in other major museums?
So I referenced a posthumous retrospective for Joseph Beuys curated by Harold
Szeemann at the Pompidou Center. The
card is just a big portrait of Joseph Beuys
57 ART DAVID DIAO
An icon.
Chinoiserie.
That painting [Pardon Me, Your

Chinoiserie is Showing, 1993] has an
interesting backstory. I visited Catherine
David at the Jeu de Paume on a wintry
day sometime in the mid-90s. She was
peering at these four-by-five transparencies against the darkening sky of Paris.
We talked desultorily about this and
that. In leaving, as I was going down the
stairs, she said, Well, you're not really a
Chinese artist. I didn't know what that
meant.
When I came home, in lespirit
de lescalier, as they say in French, I
made that painting Pardon Me, Your
Chinoiserie is Showing, a play on pardon me, your negligee is showing.
M D : We're having this conversation
because of your upcoming retrospective
in Beijing. It's your first actual retrospective, not a fictitious one.
DD:
The house had a tennis court, whose

measurements are constant. So thinking about that, I recreated the house for
myself by using the dimensions of the
tennis court. I had the chance to engage
my uncles and aunts, who, being older
than me, had more precise memories
of the place. I made drawings based on
their memories and combined them with
my memories, interweaving them with
the history of post-revolutionary China.
That was the germ of the idea, and just
like in the Little Suprematist Prisons, it
started with one or two, and before I
knew it, the series grew into dozens.
My work just fell flat in China before

a show I did in 2008 called I Lived There
Until I Was 6... or Da Hen Li House
my childhood homes address. It's the
kind that doesn't really resonate there.
They tend to like universal themeslife,
death, transcendencewhich my work
is anything but. But part of what they
value is that I have this long history in
the international art center of New York.
The drama of leaving the country in
1949 has always been in the back of
my mind. I Lived There Until I Was 6
was my deliberate attempt to meet the
Chinese halfway. In brief, the idea was
to bring back that house where I was
born that I never saw again. I was there
thirty years later, right after the house
had been demolished. Since we left
very quickly, there are no photographs.
M D : I saw a recent painting that overlaid

images of an aerial view of Hong Kong
on an aerial map of Manhattanwith
connections between places in China
and New York City specifically.
DD:
When I was offered this show at

Ullens, I wanted to update the Sichuan
house paintings with something a little
bit later. I lived in Hong Kong for five
years before coming to New York, and
it seemed like a good segue to deal
with the period between 49-55. I have
some memory of living in Hong Kong in
absolute depression, surrounded by my
grandparents and young uncle and aunt.
Wed lost everything. My grandfather
was just staring into space smoking
away, completely demoralized. I remember walking down the stairs and passing
the open doorway of the neighbor, who
happened to have been a very famous
movie star, Li Lihua. In contrast with our
squalor, her place would have perfume
wafting out, servants paddling around in
white uniforms, polished wood.... I overlaid on a map of Hong KongKowloon,
actuallya movie magazine cover with
her image, and an image of me as a tenyear-old boy. The paintings title is She
Was A Neighbor.
For other works, I juxtaposed
Manhattan and Tsim Sha Tsui, a particular neighborhood in Kowloon, which was
open to the sea when I lived there. Now
its completely surrounded by landfill,
and you dont see anything but tall
buildings.
M D : Do the Chinese think of you as their
own now?
DD:
They love to reclaim what they think

of as their own.
Rachel Rose
58
BOMB 133
by Aily Nash
59 FILM RACHEL ROSE
below: still from

PALISADES IN
PALISADES, 2014,
HD Video, 9 minutes,
31 seconds.
previous spread:
still from A MINUTE
AGO, 2014, HD
Video, 8 minutes,
43 seconds. Images
courtesy of the
artist.
Rachel Roses videos investigate many compelling

ideas (mortality, global warming, history, technology)
and locations (a cryogenics laboratory, zoos, Philip
Johnsons Glass House, the Palisades Interstate Park).
But thats not where the brilliance of her work resides.
She creates deeply experiential pieces that convey
the sensorial aspects of these ideas, and this is what
makes the work salient; I feel them before I think about
them. Rose has the rare ability to impart an experience
of materiality through the moving image. Manipulating
sound and image, she translates what a place or an
idea feels like by collaging and layering. Her camera
pans and glides through an exterior space, conveying
an interior mooda tremor or apprehension, seamlessly transposed from one environ to another. The
fear and unease felt with sudden severe weather or the
complicated layers of history intrinsic to a particular
landmark are expressed formally.

In Roses first video, Sitting Feeding Sleeping,
there is a line that resonates with me as a way to think
about her work: All you are is means to mutate material. Rose is deeply engaged with the materiality of the
digital, and she extends this to how we perceive our
60
BOMB 133
relationship to the world. For Rose, material is linked to

the notion of a spectrum of time in which living beings
continue to mutate materials. In her videos, disparate
histories and eras coexist and come together within one
image. In a sequence in A Minute Ago, with a continuous right pan, two disparate locations are unitedwe
are transported from the midst of a sudden summer
hailstorm on a Siberian beach to Philip Johnsons Glass
House in Connecticut. The latter was shot on two separate occasions, while the Siberian footage was pulled
from YouTube. Overlaid are the effects Rose created in
postproduction so that all these elements coalesce in a
single moment, or a single frame.

Rachel Rose has made three moving-image works
to date: Sitting Feeding Sleeping (2013), Palisades in
Palisades (2014), and A Minute Ago (2014). With many
new pieces in the works, Rose has forthcoming solo exhibitions this fall at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, the Serpentine Galleries, Castello di Rivoli, Frieze
London, and the Aspen Art Museum.

Aily Nash
A I LY N A S H :
You started out as a painter,

then you studied art history, and youve
transitioned into making moving-image
work for installation. How did you land
in this current mode of operation?
R AC H E L R O S E :
I was trying to expand

what I thought I could do, or was interested in. In that process, I developed
doubt about making art. Robert Irwin
says that the key to the tool that you
use to make something is whether it has
the dimensions to deal with your questions. I was looking for a tool. Idealizing
documentary films led me to learn how
to research, write, shoot, edit, and
design sound. That combination right
now has the dimensions to deal with my
questions.
A N : What inititally led you to make

documentaries?
RR:
I didnt understand how I could

be an artist and also care deeply about
the things around us that affect how
we live and think. Art felt like a vacuum,
so formal. Documentary film, to me,
symbolically meant going out into the
world, being openly curious, and then
trying to make work that produced
meaning from that.
AN:
You could investigate something?
R R : Yes, going outside of myself and

outside of the conditions that I thought
made a thing a thing. But when I actually
learned how to shoot, edit, put together
a projectcold-calling people, traveling
to shootI found that what I loved most
was piecing those materials together.
That itself also was meaning. Then I
thought, I cant be a documentary filmmaker. Im too attached to the surface
and the materiality of putting a work
together and unfolding how that connects to the feeling within the work.
So I guess Im an artist.
A N : Through researching and organizing a film project, you found that you
were making meaning in the way you
brought together disparate elements
and thats palpable in the experience of
the work itself. In A Minute Ago, you
combine various distinct places and
occurrences into a single image. Can
you speak to your approach of colliding
not only images but also time through
this technique?
61 FILM RACHEL ROSE
R R : In A Minute Ago, the quick shifts

in time are brought about by collage.
When something suddenly comes in,
like a hailstorm or a larger catastrophe,
it feels as though that things been
cut and pasted into your reality. Thats
akin to the cut-and-paste structure of
collage. I tried to infuse every point of
reference within the work with collage:
from compositing the hailstorm to the
outside of the Glass House, to suturing
the Johnson of the past with the house
in the present. When I shot in the house,
I replicated the camera movements
from that original Johnson footage, so it
felt like the two times were one. Thats
another kind of collage in the edit itself.
With the sound I brought together pretty
disparate times, too. For example, in the
opening sequence you hear the sound
of Pink Floyds Echoes, a concert they
played in an empty amphitheater in
Pompeii in 1971. At the end you hear the
sound of an audience at a Big Sean concert in 2012, erupting with no performer.
Like Johnson being back in the current
house, together these two sounds form
one space.
A N : We experience all those layers of

time through sound and images.
R R : You might not identify the image or
sound, but you get a sense that things
are shifting, and that they are sutured
together. And thats integral to the
design of the Glass House itself and to
the property, its one giant physical collage. You have a Mies van der Rohe chair
next to a Nicolas Poussin painting inside
this steel and glass structure situated
within an artificially pastoral landscape.
AN:
Materiality is very palpable in your

films; you have us vacillate between
experiencing the image-ness of something and the material-ness of it. For
example, in Palisades in Palisades were
flowing through materialsprint textures, canvas, and fabricstrobing back
and forth and rhyming with each other.
RR:
I had the woman in the video wear

a canvas jacket to connect the canvas of
the painting to her body, and then also
to the grayness of the rocks. Although
everything she wears seems very
casual, it was considered from the perspective of the materiality of the edit.
Shes like a throughway for the cuts.
I was thinking about that landscape and
the history of its representationfrom

the cross-hatched canvas of the painting to the cross-hatch of an engraving
to the pixel in the video, which has a
similar geometry. The jacket was this
weaving that runs through everything
in a way.
In A Minute Ago, you shot Poussins
Funeral of Phocion with the glare of the
glass over the image, reminding us that
its a physical object in a specific place.
Were seeing more than just an image,
but an object in space.
AN:
R R : Sometimes those choices are

artificial. In Palisades in Palisades, the
glare of the flash that pops up on the
Revolutionary War painting of soldiers
before a battle, thats fake. I added it in
the edit.
AN:
Why?
R R : I was placing the painting in two different moments at once. It was a

way of saying, You can be there then,
with these soldiers, who, in the painting, are depicted in the Palisades where
my protagonist stands in the film, but
you can also be here with me now,
making these connections. You can be
in both times at once. One of the other
paintings I use, of George Washington
with his wife and his daughter, first
appears on the screen as a painting, and
later as a paper print of that painting
submerged in the water in my bathtub.
Of course, you would recognize it as a
reproduction before, but showing its
flimsiness as a sheet of paper at the
end expresses more fully this sense of
impermanence. In the beginning of the
video, there are these little specs that
float around on top of the frames. You
might think theyre flies, but theyre
specs of dried ink released into the
water from that same print in the bathtub. I was trying to have the materiality
cycle in on itself.
A N : The way you zoom in on these
prints really accentuates their surfaces,
as much as the womans pores and the
wrinkles in her skin. And at this point in
the video you also make apparent the
apparatus; your edits indicated to me a
leveling of objectsthe tool/camera and
its objectness with that of the subject.
Why was it important for you to give the
equipment presence?
Im thinking about how we experience, or try to experience, infinite

space and time through the most finite, basic methods.
R R : I wanted you to be aware of the
moment in time when Im recording it,
bringing you into that present. But also,
I was excited about the camera, which
I worked with through this remotecontrol rig. It was three of us operating
it togethermyself, the camera assistant, and the camera operator who had
the rig on his body. We moved together
over pretty far distances, as you can
see in the video, constantly focusing
the lens by hand. As a result, you get
these movements from very far away
to this super up-close materiality that
you described. There are no cuts in
between, so the scale shift almost feels
animated, even though its totally real.
More than realits actually how we
experience distance change all the time.
So the camera movement is central to
the meaning, its like a silent verb in the
work.
A N : In all three videos, A Minute Ago,
Palisades in Palisades, and Sitting
Feeding Sleeping, place seems to be the
foundation for the work.
Sitting Feeding Sleeping was

about taking an internal, emotional
experience and attaching it to these
exterior placesthe cryogenics lab, the
robotics perception lab, zoosthat I
projected as sharing my emotion. It was
like latching on for some type of communication. In Palisades in Palisades,
I wanted to invert that process and the
positioning of the site. I focused on one
space, the Palisades Park, and seeing
what was within it, what was already
integral to its present and its history. Id
done a lot of research on the effects of
park design on film. The park circuit, the
pathway, has been linked to the development of narrative in the novel and
from there to narrative in conventional
film. Looking at the design of a park
now, theres this re-creation of narrative
back into nature.
RR:
A N : It also creates a time-based

space, where we are guided through
a narrative.
R R : Exactly. Along the pathway
there are, naturally, all these little
62
BOMB 133
vignettesheres the boulder, and heres

the river, and theres the tree or whatever, and they all carry their own interior
narratives.
I wanted this park to be belittled by
a deeper time. So I needed a park on
top of a cliff, a place where you have a
sense of literal depth, like it drops down,
and where one can feel how liminal
and short its existence is in relation to
a deeper time. Once I had decided on
the Palisades, I researched its history.
Fort Lee in New Jersey wasnt only a
major site for the Battle of Fort Lee during the Revolutionary War, it was also
the location of the film industry before
Hollywood. The term cliff-hanger comes
from that specific cliff. I had no idea
the park had such significance when
I chose to work with it.
A N : There are shots of Anna Karina
intercut with your protagonist, Diana.
And the Nancy Sinatra song Bang
Banghow can we not associate it
with Kill Bill and Tarantino?
R R : Well, its Tarantino after Godard,
which is Anna Karina. And in the
beginning, theres the voice of Meryl
Streep, saying, I am the voice of dead
people. Its dubbed from an interview
she gave, describing what it was like for
her to play in Brechts Mother Courage.
So thats another layer of women in film
history. Nancy, Anna, Meryl, Diana
in each instance Im working with
replaying time.
A N : Is it because of the cinematic history of the location that you wanted to
bring those connotations in?
R R : Yes, and this closeness between
park design and film narrative. Because
the first film serial (similar to a TV show)
was produced on todays site of the
Palisades park; its landscape has seeped
into this history too.
AN:
What was this film serial?
R R : It was called The Perils of Pauline

(1913). In each episode, this character,
Pauline, faced different obstacles. And
in one, she hangs off that cliff I shot
in the Palisades; that's the scene from

which the term cliff-hanger came.
A N : I Shazamed a musical clip from
the beginning of Palisades in Palisades.
It was from a portion of the opera
Tristan & Isolde, but used in Lars von
Triers Melancholia soundtrack, right?
Another layer of tormented women in
cinema history
R R : Yes, its not a random piece of classical music, its one that you recognize
from movies.
A N : These layers of cinema history are
being sampled, referenced, and recycled
both in sound and image. Lets talk more
about the sound design in this work.
Beyond these clips from the movies,
there are also sounds that we associate
more with animation, or that function
like uncanny sound effectslike when
Diana blinks her eyelashes and you hear
these distinctively incongruent metallic
clinks.
RR:
My approach to sound was similar to the camera movement. It was

about transitioning from really far away
to really close up, and in that respect
from something being metaphorical to
it being purely material. For example,
amidst the camera movement around
the boulder into the small rock, you hear
birds, wind, some squawks, and bullets
ricocheting throughall the sound is
artificial, even when it sounds like its
not. Or, when youre up close to her eye,
you hear the sound of metal jangling
together, which is like animation, but
theres also this Revolutionary War past
in the work, and you cant quite place
the sound. So the audio is really scripted
to bring up different moments in time
for you.
A N : Im curious about your work

process. You said that in the initial
stages of your earlier videos, there was
a collision of a personal or conceptual
question that you were investigating,
alongside a formal technique or a new
image-rendering process that you would
work out in tandem. Can you speak
about that?
top: still from A

MINUTE AGO, 2014,
43 seconds.
63 FILM RACHEL ROSE
bottom: still from

SIT TING FEEDING
SLEEPING, 2013,
49 seconds.
R R : Usually a work starts with

just a subtle basic feeling, which
translates into a question like, What
the fuckI feel really uneasy about the
state of weather now. Its something
basic that I feel, but dont really have
room to pay attention to because of
the nature of living. Its in the back of
my mind, yet it keeps coming up. And
then I try to think, What am I projecting
onto this? What am I feeling about it?
So in the case of the weather, Im feeling unease.
A N : By weather you mean global warming? Climate change?
R R : Exactly. I dont describe it that
way because I want to address it not
politically, not morally, but through its
underlying structure and the feeling
associated with it. In A Minute Ago I
approached it from that perspective.
But in all of my work its like thatIm
first marking the general feeling, the
general territory I want to work in. Then
I try to hone it down more specifically,
maybe to some tangible experiences
Ive had with that thing. I sort of hyperbreak it down for myself. For example,
with A Minute Ago, it was an experience
I had in a coffee shop when all of a sudden this crazy storm came in. There was
a gust of wind, and then it went away.
Everyone in the coffee shop paused
and a few minutes later we just went
on with our lives. I kept thinking about
that and about glass as this barrier. So
I looked into the history of glass and
glass manufacturing. Looking around
New York City, so many buildings are
conceived around glass, and how did
that come to be? My research led me
to Ohio and I shot in a glass museum
in Toledo. In the end I didnt use that
footage in the film. My research tends
to be sprawling. Its exploratory, very
free-form, but Im also simply trying
to figure out what Im going to do. The
glass question led me to think about its
equivalent in technologycompositing,
which is basically collaging within the
frame. I wanted to learn compositing
in postproduction, and then I thought
about compositing in-camera, which is
how I arrived at the method I used while
shooting in the glass house.
A N : Your installations are usually singlechannel, have no seats, no booth, and
the apparatus is always visible, laid bare,
64
BOMB 133
with the projector and player on or near

the dark-colored carpeting that youve
designated as the seating area on the
floor. And the projected image is low to
the ground. Is it important to you that
the work functions in space sculpturally?
How did you arrive at this setup, and
why are these the ideal viewing conditions for the work?
R R : In making an installation, Im not
interested in conventional cinematic
space, where you're sitting upright
and in the dark to watch something. I
want to have more flexibility with how
you absorb the work. Each piece has a
different set of conditions for how its
shown. In postproduction, Im imagining how the edit will appear in space.
I always think about natural versus
artificial and projected light, about how
youre hearing the sound, how youre
sitting, about the scale of the screen
and from what distance you watch.
I think about weight and weightlessness, reflection and opacity. At the
Serpentine, Ill be showing A Minute
Ago and Palisades in Palisades, distinctly but within a larger installation
that brings the works together. Im
opening the barrier between inside and
outside of the works, taking Palisades
in Palisades and stretching it around
A Minute Ago. The inside of Palisades
in Palisades is A Minute Ago, and the
outside of A Minute Ago is Palisades in
Palisades. The Sackler Gallery, where
Im showing it, was actually an artillery hub for the British Army. Its within
Regents Park, designed by John Nash;
Olmstead was looking at John Nashs
work when he influenced the designs of
parks all across America, including the
Palisades Park, where I shot. So theres
this cycling inversion inside the work
too.
AN:
I was thinking about the countdowns, and how they function

differently in various spaces. In a linear
screening setting, or even on ones computer, the countdown would be at the
end of the work, but in an installation,
in some sense, its the beginning.
R R : Yes. The countdowns are fun to

make. I think of them differently for
each video. In the new one, there actually isnt a countdown. It loops naturally,
the end is the beginning.
A N : Can you tell me about your new
video, the one youre working on for

the Whitney?
R R : Its based on an interview I did
with an astronaut about the experience of his body in outer space and his
body back on earth again. I shot it in a
neutral buoyancy lab, which is where
astronauts once used to go to practice
doing payloads on the outside of the
space station. Neutral buoyancy labs
are five-story pools filled with water
that have sections of space stations
built into them. Its the water that most
simulates what its like to be in outer
space. Now, theyre used for space
robotics research. Im thinking about
how we experience, or try to experience,
infinite space and time through the most
finite, basic methods. Even as sublime
an experience as being in outer space,
in pure darkness, floating away from
a space station, comes about through
the barriers of metal, glass, and skin.
In the installation, Im working with the
transparency and the opacity of the projection screen in front of a large glass
window.
AN:
The window looks out into the city?
R R : Yes. The idea is that at certain

moments youre fully in the video, and
then in other moments youre aware
that its just light being projected on the
scrim. Behind that scrim is the city. As
youre watching the video, Im trying to
modulate your sense of being weightless or, at the next moment, fully aware
of yourself as being within the limits of
Earth, looking out at the Meatpacking
District.
First Proof
BOMBS LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Contents
Portfolio
67
on the cover: Lori

Ellison, UNTITLED,
2014, ink on notebook
paper, 11 8 inches.
Courtesy of the artist
and McKenzie Fine Art.
Lori Ellison
Interviews
70
96
Tonya Foster and John Keene

Alice Notley by Robert Dewhurst
Fiction
79
Piero
81
Blake Butler
Outline for Novel I Will One Day Be Struck Dead
While Reading
90
Jen George
The Babysitter at Rest
Winner of BOMBs 2015 Fiction Contest, selected by
Sheila Heti
106 Julie Carr

from What do we want to know and how far are we
willing to go to get it?: An epistolary novella
Poetry
77
Tyehimba Jess
Blind Boones Pianola Blues and 100 Times
88
Albert Mobilio
Four Poems
103
Jimmie Durham
The Center of the World (The Direction of my
Thought)Direct from my New Home in Eurasia
and Apocalypsis, or The Dragon in Her Cave
66
FIRST PROOF
This issue of First Proof is funded, in part,

by Amazon and the Thanksgiving Fund.
Additional funding is provided by the New
York City Department of Cultural Affairs
in partnership with the City Council, the
New York State Council on the Arts with
the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo
and the New York State Legislature, and
readers like you.
UNTITLED, 2013,
ink on notebook
paper, 11 8
inches.
67 PORTFOLIO LORI ELLISON
UNTITLED, 2013,
ink on notebook
paper, 11 8
inches.
68
FIRST PROOF
UNTITLED, 2014,
ink on notebook
paper, 11 8
inches.
69 PORTFOLIO LORI ELLISON
Tonya Foster
and John Keene
Fosters A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna)
uses haiku to present a piercing portrait of contemporary Harlem. In contrast, the fictions in John Keenes
Counternarratives (New Directions) traverse geographies and eras, and their attending narrative conventions,
to undo historys racist exclusions. This past July, while
participating in Image Text Ithaca, a multidisciplinary
symposium and workshop at Ithaca College, the authors
discussed their recent books far-reaching implications.
T O N YA F O S T E R : Your new book, structured in three parts,

moves from Counternarratives to Encounternarratives
to Counternarrative. I wonder about that move, which
might be seen as an extended meditation on meaning
through form. All the formal shifts and strategies that you
employ articulate, rearticulate, and reimagine subjectivities that arent necessarily standard. They dont operate in
only one realm of being. What is it that form articulates?
JOHN KEENE:
I was aiming at a sense of movement on

many levels. Movement in terms of the transition between
forms, narratives, geographical and imaginative spaces,
and between subjectivities. But theres an associative
movement as well, involving connection and contiguity.
I wanted the forms, as much as possible, to emerge
out of the subject matter. The narratives and their
attendant characters, as well as the historical-socialpolitical-economic spaces that are being dramatized,
informed the shapes the stories took.
The word narrative in the second part is grayed
out so that the section title can read as both
Encounternarratives and Encounter[ ]s. The stories
in this section are mostly first-person narratives depicting the connections these characters are making with
othersand Otherswith the speakers telling their stories directly. A shift in person and perspective starts to
emerge at the end of the first section, and then the final
story in the third section, The Lions, functions as a
counterpoint to and culmination of the first twelve.
TF:
These stories are connected thematically and in terms

of the investigation of form that holds across the collection. Its like seeing different poses as possibilities for the
shapes subjectivity might take. Its dynamic. It seems
that the organization of the collection moves through a
variant of the historical, omniscient third person toward
a reconfigured first person. Whats your vision for the
movement across time and place in the book?
J K : The organization is roughly chronological, but also

follows an intellectual-historical trajectory. I had originally placed An Outtake from the Ideological Origins
of the American Revolution before On Brazil, or
70
FIRST PROOF
Dnouement: The Londnias-Figueiras, and my editor

at New Directions, Barbara Epler, suggested I flip them
because the Brazilian narrative temporally precedes the
US one. But theres also something imaginatively crucial
about having these two stories reversed, since the Brazil
story formally starts in our contemporary moment and
cycles back, suggesting one way to think about our historical continuum. It charges, so to speak, everything
that follows.
The first story I wrote was An Outtake, which felt,
when I completed it, like a revelation. It was one of the
final stories I wrote while in NYUs MFA program, in a
workshop I took with E.L. Doctorow; I published it in
1999. Then I had this idea that I was going to write a
story in tribute to the 200th anniversary of the Haitian
Revolution, which was in 2004. I lost the full drafts of it
and four other stories when my computer crashed that
year, so I had to reconstruct them. I subsequently filled
out the collection, particularly over the last few years.
The new stories are, I feel, in conversation with the
earlier ones. Counternarratives really is a series of conversations amongst the narratives, but also with history,
literature, politics, and so on.
To shift gears, Im thinking about your new poetry
book, A Swarm of Bees in High Court: in the notes at
the end of the book you describe it as a biography of
life in the day of a particular neighborhood, and you
use the phrase the multiple as subject and as swarm
of actors. Based on those descriptions you could have
written a nonfiction text or a more literal reflection, but
youre capturing this world in a lyric mode, undertaking
Wangechi Mutu,
LE NOBLE SAVAGE,
2006, ink and
collage on Mylar,
91 54 inches.
Cover art for

A Swarm of Bees
in High Court.
Courtesy of the
artist.
compelling things with form. Through condensation

and concision you achieve that multiplicity youre talking about, a surplus of meaning. The book is a model of
the certain kinds of work that can only be performed by
poetry, particularly lyric poetry.
What really comes through is a play of both the
earsound, music, and noise, in the positive sense of
the term, as distortionand also the eye. Could you talk
about how you decided to go with the haiku-like form,
which you stick to at certain points, and you break in
others? At the very end we get a little section of prose,
almost like a fable.
TF:
The first thing that comes to mind is Amiri Baraka

saying, You know, I would read poems in The New
Yorker and think, I cant write poems like that. (laughter) The work of the book began when someone asked
me to write about 9/11, and I thought, What? It just
seemed bizarre.
How do you write about grief when youre in the middle of it? How do you imagine or traverse that necessary
distance? I had been writing erotic haiku to a man I liked.
And someone else said, Why dont you write haiku
about 9/11? I thought, Okay, I could do that and not
weep, right? I could write these little condensed pieces
about New York at that period. It was a time when there
were these condensed, very tense encounters with the
images of people who were missingbut not only with
them; you were also encountering the people missing
them, looking for them.
JK:
Their grief, right?
TF:
Yes. I also began thinking about Harlem in a different

way. There was this incredible silence. This neighborhood where I have lived for a long time is a very noisy
place. One Detroit friend said, This is the noisiest place
I have ever been. And on that day there was this hush.
Somehow, there was no picking up of the strain of grief
evidenced in the silence. So out of the question, What
does it feel like in this space? I started writing these
haiku (even the books long lines are, for the most part,
seventeen syllables or fewer) about Harlem, and this particular two-block stretch on St. Nicholas Terrace.
Indirectly, Im always writing about my hometown of
New Orleans, as NOLA is for me what Venice is to Calvino:
that a first city that remains implicit. New Orleans is
implicit in everything that I write. And Im often wondering how NOLA has trained and tripped up my tongue. Id
been thinking about the language that conjures an experience of a particular place. I think of it necessarily as a
body or a group of bodies, this multiplicity of subjectivities narrating place through interactions, through sounds,
and through grief. Weirdly, I couldnt see that A Swarm of
Bees in High Court is a book about grief until after it was
done. I was stunned and stung by that.
J K : I started to think, as I read it, about place as hive. The
hive of sociality and experience comes through. There is,
I wrote in my notes, in/action. At the level of language,
you have all these linguisticmorphemichinges that
71 LITERATURE TONYA FOSTER AND JOHN KEENE
give the poems a powerful depth. They convey the

silence and the hum, the quiet and the buzz. This brings
us back to bees, be...es as you write in the books epigraph: It be...es that way, sometime. So perfect! There
are so many lines like that, encapsulating the work
youre doing here.
Theres also something about the ontology of grief,
of living in this space that is both part of that post-9/11
world but also viewed as not part of it. The ontology
of this location and dislocation: Harlem. New Orleans. I
love how you talk about the origins of your use of haiku,
the erotic trigger. You stick with this form for the most
part, but ring changes with it. You also have as always
as a refrain. This pointed me to one of your strategies
in the book: repetition. I see it as a rhetorical gesture
and a formal strategy, but it also relates to thematic content, right? Things repeat, they continue, and I see that
connecting to desire and also emotion, want. Talk about
sticking with the haiku-like form and its relation, for you,
to desire and grief.
Listening to what youre saying, I think about your
work, and language, about making work and art, and
the ways that sometimes being is sufficient. You keep
coming back to people who are artists in untenable circumstances. Part of their artistry is asserting that being
is sufficient, and the formal shifting becomes a way of
continuing to be when everything else attempts to annihilate you.
So to try to answer your question, I learned, after I
started writing them, that haiku are often about loss.
The space of wanting is one of absence, but also of the
presence of what one wants. The book had to be landscape rather than portrait view because as I wrote the
poems, I realized there was something about that orientation that emphasized the words as central, as these
little moments of being, amid an expanse of silence. So
what is it to imagine that these little words on the page
are sufficient? I dont know.
TF:
J K : In my book the words are really packed on the page,

for the most part.
TF:
Well, there are columns, and then little letters, journal entries...
J K : The density and expansiveness of prose! What

comes through with the expanse of space in A Swarm
(Im not going to call it white space because I dont
think its white space, but more ground and commons,
y/our commons) is presence and negation. A number of
your poems are registering negative emotions or negative responses. Not negative in the sense of bad, but
because the speaker has desires and needs; the speaker
lacks and wants things. This poetic speaker is deeply
aware of the gendered and classed space, which is to
say, politicized social space, in which she speaks. Or not
just she, of course, because there is your and our,
invoking the apostrophized individual and communal.
Theres a negative capability on a formal and rhetorical level, and on the level of language, holding these
Cover art for

Counternarratives
by Ike E. Morgan.
Courtesy of the
Webb Gallery,
Waxahachie, Texas.
72
FIRST PROOF
sometimes opposing ideas together in tension. I guess

the technical term for that is polysemy, as well as homonymy. You have all of these words that can be read in
multiple ways. Sounds run together, allowing you to ring
these changes. That got me thinking about strategies of
survival.
that she is not going to be addressed as the subject of

this story, or this world. She was ready to take her rightful place in the power structure. (laughter) And here you
have this black female child who has, on some level, no
power, but also tremendous power. To not speak can be
incredibly powerful.
TF:
TF:
Thats it. There are these strategies that assert

beingnot in the face of absolute abjectionthats too
easy. Perhaps there is no absolute abjection when one
continues to live.
Maybe its time to retire referencing Frederick
Douglass, but theres that moment in his narrative
where Mr. Covey has beaten him, and Douglass has had
enough. He says, [H]owever long I might remain a slave
in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a
slave in fact. Hes choosing something else, perhaps
even death, to slavery. So, in our work, theres always
this moment in which the different characters (and readers) are making this other choice, have this other way
of asserting being (and understanding), when the white
people around them are suggesting to them that in fact
they have no other choice. And so they say, No, Im
asserting my being in this other way. Here, I think of
Sandra Bland and the costs of that assertion.
Ive been turning over something of Fanons, from

The Wretched of the Earth: [W]hen I was there, it
[Reason] was not; when it was there, I was no longer.
In your book theres this challenge to the notion that
knowledge is only produced, or evident, in identifiable
forms of reason. Can you speak to that?
J K : The Enlightenment is the backdrop to a number of

these stories. One movement throughout is from the
dawn of modernity forward into modernism, which
is why we have the later stories with W.E.B. Du Bois,
Langston Hughes, and Mrio de Andrade at their center. I think about Paul Gilroys famous, eponymous
statement on the Black Atlantic as a counterculture of
modernity. The science of race is born with
(Man walks in and says Oops, sorry!)

JK:
JK:
And how do we do that without saying it? There is

a profound irony in that we have the capacity to write
those silences. Theres this old fiction chestnut: showing versus telling. But there was so much I wanted to
tell in Counternarratives. I was very interested in storytelling as a practice, but I also wanted to show those
moments, before a character acts, when there is another
kind of nonverbal recognition. Its not uttered at all. In
their physical and emotional responses its clear that
something is about to change.
TF:
Wow. Maybe this is related to the negative capability. Theres this beautiful moment in your story Gloss,
or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows, in
which Carmel (the daughter of an artist and a talented
resistance fighter) is introduced to the Americans whove
inherited the plantation. Carmel is silent, and Madame
de Lcart is freaked out by her when they meet. Why is
silence unnerving?
J K : Because Madame de Lcart was expecting verbal

acknowledgment of her power and her status. Carmel
upends the usual power relationship through her silence.
We dont know why Carmel doesnt speak. Its a literalization of the idea that no one cares what Carmel has to
say; she is not expected to speak. In fact, theres an earlier moment where the brother-in-law, whos the owner
of the estate, couldnt even remember that Carmel, the
storys protagonist, existed!
I described Carmel as someone who has a powerful
inner light, yet shes virtually invisible, and part of that
invisibility is her seeming inability to articulate her selfhood. So, the story starts outside Carmel, and slowly it
moves into her consciousness, into her speaking.
For Madame de Lcart, the hardest thing is to accept
That was the specter of the past bursting in! (laughter) The science of race and the human sciences are
born at this powerful moment of un-freedom for millions
of people. And also capitalism. Capitalism being the
quintessence of reason, in one way, and of unreason, in
another. Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, Edward Baptist, and
so many others have written about how central slavery
and black bodies were to the development of capitalism.
So I wanted to try to write into and against a certain
understanding of reason in relation to race, which brings
us to what Fanon is saying. But I also wanted to play
with that, because, for example, in that Gloss, or the
Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows story, one
of the humorous points is that the nuns are trying to
escape the depredations of reason in Europe, which is to
say the French Revolution, and they come to
TF:
Kentucky.
J K : Right! They think of it as a kind of safe harbor, and they

end up finding themselves the victims of unreason! One
could view religion as unreason too. I am interested in the
idea of competing rationalities, which is also what Fanon
is getting at: What is reason? What is rationality? How
do certain systems of belief sometimes coexist, or not?
This is really interesting to think about today, because we
often hear, particularly in a kind of neoliberal world, that
reason has triumphed. And yet, you turn on the TV
TF:
I received an advance copy of your book just as I was

watching the news of Freddie Grays murder.
J K : I mentioned struggle earlier, in relation to both of our

books. I was very interested in thinking about the kind
of fore-life and afterlife of social, political, and economic
violence. How does one convey, in fiction, the social and
political economy in which we live? I was thinking, for

example, of the story of Zion in An Outtake. Its almost
eerie how predictive it is of the murders of Trayvon
Martin, Walter Scott, Michael Brown, these precarious
black bodies
TF:
Renisha McBride.
J K : Rekiah Boyd, now Sandra Bland. Exactly, its not just

black men. Theres a way in which that story, which precedes all of this, but of course obviously was written
in the wake of many earlier state murders, like those of
Eleanor Bumpurs, Sean Bell
TF:
Emmett Till.
J K : Exactly. Theres this official public discourse about

how things have changed, how were in a different,
post-racial spacebut there is this powerful continuity. It struck me, after Id finished some of these stories,
that they couldnt take place today because of these cultural changes, but, on an emotional level, on a level of
historical resonance, they speak to where we are today.
TF:
Thats right, that history is not past. What happened? I mean, on the most basic level. But your texts
also ask: How do we activate these alternate possibilities for being? Theyre not just about surviving I dont
want to go to thriving.
J K : I love that. It is surviving, but its also living and

thriving. Central to that is resistance, you know?
The polysemy and homophony in your poems model
resistance in action, at the level of language. Its exciting
how the poems are talking to themselves, and talking
back to the reader.
academy is amazing (and sometimes aggravating) to me.

Necessarily, language conjures audience. I often think,
Whos in that crew? Who is one talking with, and in addition, who is one talking to? In the way that I talk about
multiple possibilities for the self, or multiple selves, Im
also interested in multiple audiences. How do those
multiple audiences theorize being, theorize to (and next
to) one another what it is to be? Thats what I want to get
at. Theres a point where [Nathaniel] Mackey explains
that to greet someone with Hello is profoundly different from greeting with Whats up? or, Where you
at? Is that the phrase he points to? I need to go home
to the Mackey wisdom. The greeting and question are
meant as acknowledgment, but something very different is called.
J K : Thats right, because its a talking with and to. Youre
starting from different premises, even though its basically your salutation.
I want to read a little bit more from your book; as
I was saying earlier, youre showing what only poetry
can do. Youre activating those multiple registers: To
know is to be a spoon in a kitchen drawer, wearing
expertise. / To know is to be a spoon, bent burnt, crystalline skeins, shining held hollow. So you bring in the
domestic, drugs... To know is to believe. / To know
is to be made infinitivegrammar and psychology.
Psychology, agency. To know is to be? This a math of
blood, a math of bodies, a (map of the math of bodies).
// To know is to be conqueror Power, domination. To
be light infiltrating, descent. / To know is to be boundary, boundedcity/lover s/hell leave. You are breaking
down what it means to know. A great deal of academic
philosophy doesnt even acknowledge this richness of
how we come to know things.
TF:
TF:
One has to talk back. Thats the impulse in becoming a self, right? If youre raised in the South, its sass,
its to give some lip. If youre raised in the city, its to
assert in a way that says, No, this is distinct, and part
of a tradition you may not know about.
J K : We used to hear that all the time, Dont give me no

lip. And, You better tuck that lip in.
TF:
Yet survival depended on being able to give some lip.
J K : Lip, but also lip service, which makes me think of

epistemology. I want to talk about the idea of the poem
as a vehicle of knowledge. You find fascinating ways to
show us different ways of knowing. First of all, you write
on cognition as social, To know is to be / thought
known. (Re)cognition is invoked. Friend A. says, They
see / my clothes, think I got cash. Youre playing with,
bringing in reflexivity. But its also the vernacular, right?
Its not some abstract exchange, but everyday speech.
Realness.
TF:
Philosophy comes in different registers. As someone whos finishing a PhD program, the language of the
74
FIRST PROOF
And how important, at the end of the day, is knowledge from the spaces were killing off, the people were
disappearing. It may ultimately save our asses. Whats
mind-blowing in your writing is that the knowing of the
world takes different forms, right? Thats ultimately
what saves the lives of some of your characters.
If were going to read each others work, how about:
An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution? I love this story about the criminal Zion,
who is resistant. One does say, Zion, whats your home
training? It makes a lot of sense that a slave who is
subjected to slaverys brutality would act out that home
training. Zion is a product of his home, but hes also this
brilliant musician whos not allowed to play music. I like
the simplicity of description of this last section of the
story, subtitled Eclipse:
On the morning of April 1, 1775, the authorities did not
find the Negro named Zion in his cell. Given the severity of the crimes and the necessity of preserving the
ruling order, another Negro, whose particular crimes
are not recorded, was hanged in the Worcester Town
Square, surrounded by a sparse gallery of onlookers, among them the widow Shaftesbone; and the
newly-married Sarah Wantone Fleet and her husband
George, of Worcester, a Lockean and member of a

local militia. Also present was Jubal, now calling himself Mr. John Cuffee, a free laborer and leader of a
Negro brigade in Boston. Of their response there is
no record.
Its funny how you mark the absence: The rest of
the town, absent from the proceedings, was preparing,
one must suppose, for the swiftly approaching conflagration. Theres so much going on in just this tiny
description. Basically its, Any Negro will do. Even
with all of the awful things that Zion has done, the particular nature of his crimes, he is invisible. Theres also
the wonderful mystery... Hes gone! Perhaps he was
never there.
JK:
Hes gone, right! (laughter) Last night we were talking about humor as a survival strategy and a means of
protest. You were listening to Richard Pryor. Humor can
be deeply subversive. In that passage you read, theres
something so horrifying about substituting one black
body for another, which happens
TF:
all the time. They fit the description.
J K : They fit the description. Injustice in the execution

of justice! This story also has to do with the multiple
ironies of the idea of freedom. On the one hand, were
talking about a country coming into being based on a
constellation of ideas around libertyand yet you have
these masses of people who are un-free, like Zion, who
keeps trying to live ideas of freedom. Hes also doing
many of the same thingsthink of the thefts, the sexual
actsthat his master is doing. Both are actually subject
to this larger ruling order, because Britain is trying to
assert its domination over these resistant colonies, but
Zion has no leeway. He embodies this quandary, eluding
their grasp and ours.
I was trying to think of different ways in which humor
might factor into these stories; sometimes its obvious
and sometimes not. Theres the W.E.B. Du Bois story,
Persons and Places. He is so serious, I thought, I have
to stay serious when Im talking about Du Bois and
George Santayana! (laughter) But, in general, humor is
another way of conveying the reality of black existence.
Where would we be without it?
Speaking of humor, you have a lot of it in A Swarm of
Bees in High Court. Would you talk a little bit about this?
TF:
I am interested in humor that is not light one,

because I didnt grow up to become a cabaret singer.
(laughter) I fantasized about growing up to be a comedian. In comedy theres a refusal to absent oneself from
the conditions under which one livesthis interests me.
Comedy makes me think, Okay, heres a space to look at
the fact that living is not easy, nor for the faint of heart.
A space to grapple with that, and not to avoid it, but also
not to be caged by it. I was watching Live on the Sunset
Stripthis is after Pryors caught on fire while smoking
a crack pipethinking, How do you move from that to
being that naked on stage?
Comedy makes me think, Okay, heres

a space to look at the fact that living is
not easy, nor for the faint of heart.
A space to grapple with that, and not to
avoid it, but also not to be caged by it.
Tonya Foster
J K : People talk about black folks comedy. Im thinking
about people like Redd Foxx, MoNique, Eddie Murphy.
Their lives are always in there. MoNique, how she talks
about herself and her looks and othersshe goes for
the jugular. Youre laughing, but griefs in there too.
Sometimes they have you laughing to the point of crying.
At the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race and
Creative Writing in Montana, Jess Row showed us that
clip where Dave Chappelle is with the white family called
The Niggars. Chappelle at one point says, This racism is
killing me inside! And hes laughing. Every time I watch
it, Im going, thats truth, that doubleness. Its funny,
and yet a truth thats so devastatingly, destructively
absurdits the physical embodiment of unreason, an
absolutely ridiculous, incredibly powerful system that is
shaping our existence in the world.
TF:
Thats the consciousness that shapes black existence. The only way you survive is through knowing that
youre ducking bullets.
J K : Exactly. You have this section in your book called

Bullet/In. I love the serious play: bulletin and bullet in, the news of whats happening and the everyday
violence that shapes how people live in Harlem, and all
over the country. Your poetry is capturing the realities
and unrealities of everyday existence, right?
TF:
Ill approach it from the autobiographical first. A few

years ago a kid was killed across the street from my
apartment building; one Mothers Day, a young man was
killed; years ago, a woman was found in a suitcase in a
park across the street; on the corner, someone was shot;
and in my building, a hairdressers roommate was shot.
More recently, after the manuscript for the book had been
turned in, a bullet came through one of my windows.
For a long time, Id walk around as if these things
didnt have an impact. Id feel bad, be a little cautious,
and then just kind of go on. I cant imagine that these
things dont impact the community or the body. Theres
an accumulation of grief within defined spaces. Whether
or not we know the particular people, we experience
that loss and violence. I couldnt stop thinking about the
blood on the sidewalks and about cleaning it up. If I had
kept writing this book, I would write about the global
blood spilling that connects the boy in Harlem to the boy
in Palestine, to the boy in
J K : This is a kind of news about trauma, which is intimately related to loss.
TF:
Its not only trauma. When I think of my block, I

think of standing outside with people whove lived there
since 1964 or before; or walking down the street and
Mr. Charles stopping me to talk to me; or the woman
hanging out of the window, talking to different people.
Theres this tremendous life, people smiling, kids on the
basketball court. All of that is going on, and simultaneously theres this current of trauma and danger, and the
moments in which it appears. Every summer, at some
point, there is an altar set up for someone whos been
killed. These altars are beautiful, but somebodys dead.
J K : Youre not aestheticizing trauma, but showing that

through poetry and the materiality of language it can be
made visible.
TF:
Thats my hope. Though I want to acknowledge that

there is an aesthetics to American violence that is tied
to notions of masculinity, success, and power, which are
performed for us (and by us) constantly. Its the insanity of capitalisms logic to not acknowledge the violence
underwriting beauty and order.
J K : Speaking of ideas of masculinity and power, I am

thinking of my story Acrobatique, which hasnt been
discussed very much in reviews. I was fascinated by the
sole human figure in the 1879 Edgar Degas painting Miss
La La at the Cirque Fernando. She was one of the most
famous and beloved circus performers in late 19th-century Europe. She was born in Germany and was mixed
race. In a letter Degas actually calls her ma ngresse.
Miss La La cannot fully escape Degasshe wants to
ascend into the rafters so that his eye and hand cannot
capture her. The true story behind the painting is that he
did a number of studies, and then had to bring in a structural engineer to help him paint the ceiling of the Cirque
Fernando. Its also his sole painting of a black person,
despite the fact that he had relatives who were African
American in Louisiana.
TF:
Yeah, New Orleans!
J K : New Orleans, exactly. We cant fully see her, she is

elusiveand yet this image circulates widely. Miss La
La is escaping but not really. In the case of Degas, he
wants to possess his ngresse but cant. It all ties into
the logic of capital, because this is one of Degass most
famous paintings, and when people talk about people
like him, theyre talking about technique, but theyre
also talking about money. So this takes us back to capital and the violence it wreaks.
TF:
I wonder if the breakdown of genre in your stories

and their open-endedness is a resistance to a logic of
capital marking a clear beginning, middle, and end that
one can package. We even mark history as having a
clear beginning, middle, and end.
J K : The stories in Counternarratives are anti-teleological;

they defy progressive history and master narratives,
suggesting possible ways that art might respond to
76
FIRST PROOF
capitalisms effects. I also see these stories doing something deeply queer (or quare to use E. Patrick Johnsons
version of the term), by opening up spaces within and
across their thematic and formal connections, to suggest
other ways of thinking about and assembling the world.
In part to disorient; its a kind of warping, an attempt to
defamiliarize, and thereby reshape, our thinking.
Were running out of time and there are just so many
questions I have, but a key aspect of this book is, obviously, gender, and the perspective of a woman who is
viewing, seeing, thinking, knowing, writing. A black
woman of a certain background. Can you talk about the
many possibilities of that perspective?
TF:
I remember making a lunch for my grandma

Cardella, my grandma Dorothy, my cousin Butsie, and
Miss Anniethey were the oldest women in the family, and theyd known each other for most of their lives.
I asked them, What do I need to know about being a
woman? My mom was there too, but she wanted to
stay in the background. They talked about love, about
self-care, about spirit. They wouldnt talk about suffering, but focused instead on survival, on thriving despite.
I think about the basics of being in this body. Like,
going for a walk in the middle of the night. The men I
know can do that, I cant. Or I could, but Im in a different kind of danger. I dont know any other way to be
in the world. To my mind, its very much about being
reduced to flesh. And in my work Im not mourning that,
but saying, Okay, let me look at that. What is it to be
reduced to flesh?
J K : And yet the poems also convey, I will not be reduced
to flesh. I will not be reduced.
You have this stunning Wangechi Mutu painting on
the cover, and the title itself riffs off of Max Ernsts A
Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice. Even in the title,
you are showing how rewriting, riffing off language, and
taking ownership or control of it allows you to tell other
stories. Youre putting things in conversation that might
not otherwise be in conversation.
TF:
Yes, although they are in ongoing conversations

about art. Will you talk about your cover?
J K : Barbara Epler actually found that image. Its by Ike

Morgan, an African American schizophrenic vernacular artist living in Mississippi. He has a whole series
of paintings of President Barack Obama, and a series
featuring other presidents. I love this painting in particular because its somewhat mystical and suggests and
shows rather than tells. Would you say something about
the Mutu?
Its a well-known work of hers, The Noble Savage.

Its a female figure, and there are these strands and palm
fronds and birds around her. She wades in the motion
but also gathers pieces together. That struck me as
being part of how the book moves: its a gathering of
these different strands, and its wading in all these very
different movements.
TF:
Tyehimba Jess
Blind Boones
Pianola Blues
They said I wasnt smooth enough
to beat their sharp machine.
That my style was obsolete,
that old rags had lost their gleam
and lunge. That all I had
left was a sucker punch
that couldnt touch
their invisible piano man
with his wind up gutless guts of paper rolls.
And so, I went and told them
that before the night was through
Id prove what the son of an exslave could do: I dared them
to put on their most twisty
tune. To play it double-time
while I listened from another
room past the traffic sounds
of the avenue below.
To play it only once,
then to let me show
note for note how that scroll
made its roll through Chopin
or Bach or Beethovens best.
And if I failed to match my fingers
and ears with the spinning gears
of their invisible pneumatic piano
scholar, Id pay them the price
of a thousand dollars.
And what was in it for Boone?
you might ask...
Might be the same thing that drives men
through mountains at heart attack pace.
Might be just to prove some tasks
aint meant to be neatly played
out on paper and into air,
but rather should tear
out from lung, heart and brain
with a flair of flicked wrists
and sly smile above the 88s
77
T YEHIMBA JESS
and, of course, that ever-human

weight of pride that swallows us
when a things done just right
But they were eager to prove me wrong.
They chose their fastest machine
with their trickiest song and stuck it
in a room far down the hall from me.
They didnt know how sharp
I can see with these ears of mine
I caught every note even though
they played it in triple time.
And when I played it back to them
even faster, I could feel the violent
stares heard one mutter

Lucky black bastard
and that was my cue to rise,
to take a bow in their smoldering
silence and say, Not luck,
my friend, but the science
of touch and sweat and
stubborn old toil. Id bet
these ten fingers against any coil
of wire and parchment and pump.
And I left them there to ponder
the wonders of blindness
as I walked out the door
into the heat of the sun.
100 Times
I say nigger a hundred times before breakfast every morning just to keep my teeth white.
Paul Mooney, Comedian
Of course, I was skeptical, but because theres often wisdom in the hardest humor, I
stood before the mirror one sunrise and began my morning chant. All repeated calmly
for the first week, but with flavors added on as the regimen continued into the second.
50 with er and 50 with a. 1/4 as question, 1/4 as surprise, 1/4 as anger, 1/4 implying
the complaining please. All alternately whispered, shouted, laughed, snarledall in
search of the ideal whitening formula. After four weeks I remained skeptical. However,
perseverance paid off by the sixth, when colleagues remarked on my brightened, hazeless smile, when friends alerted me to a steely glint in my grin.
I doubled the regimen to maximize results. Week eight saw a 2/3 increase in brightening,
with a luminousness approaching diamond quality, particularly in the lower incisors.
The uppers were sun white, never leaving room in their shine for shadow. Side effects
became audible as well as visual: a small echo became perceptible after each repetition
in my mantra, such that the cadence assumed a wondrous worksong rhythm. Upon
closer examination, magnifying mirrors revealed one (1) small, brown man peering into
the side of each tooths mirror-smooth enamel, each one appearing only briefly before
each utterance. Alarmed but intrigued, I enhanced my treatment. Various gesticulations
were added to the morning litany. Sneers, chuckles, sighs, and facial contortions were
enhanced throughout. As a result, the echos intensity increased from slight windy whisper to low murmur, to small and steady chorus each morning, a daily affirmation of my
will to shine. A halogen glare burned from my mouth throughout the day. Ive become
a walking lighthouse of shinethe ritual has grown above and beyond and through me.
I wake each morning to stand before my mirror, and before I open my mouth I hear the
chant begin above and around me, as if I were in the middle of the mantras core, as if
Im one in a circle of prayer. Ive found others who hear the chant with me, or theyve
found me, those who rise up with me each morning to stand before our mirrors with the
diamond-sharp sound of ourselves polishing each tooth until we gleamour number
grows daily. We shimmer and shine inside the bulging head of our chant, polishing our
glowing mirrors, staring into the glare until we shield our eyes.
Tyehimba Jess, author of Leadbelly (Wave,

2005), is a Whiting Writers Award winner,
a MacDowell fellow, and has been awarded
fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the
Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown,
and a Lannan Writing Residency. His next
book, Olio, will be published by Wave Press
in spring 2016. He is associate professor of
English at College of Staten Island.
78
FIRST PROOF
Gabriella De Ferrari Piero

Where he grew up there were no museums,
or art collections, or the possibility of being
exposed to any form of art that was not
reproduction. Even the reproductions were
of poor quality, mostly black-and-white,
postage stamp-size shadows of the real
thing. The beauty they represented came
to his life in other ways. It came mostly
through the voice of his mother, who had
grown up in Italy, where the existence of
art had permeated every aspect of her daily
early life. Instead of fairy tales, his mother
would tell him about magnificent churches
with delicately carved portals and aspiring
campaniles that pierced the blue sky and
crowned little hill towns. She described
to him paintings of submissive Madonnas
visited by angels, suffering Christs, arrogant noblemen, and Umbrian landscapes
of manicured beauty. She missed being
surrounded by art and her longings were
transferred to him. Listening to his mother
he wondered if it would ever be possible
for him to understand the kinds of things
she was talking about. The possibility that
he might actually see these things himself never occurred to him. He loved his
mothers voice with its soft Italian accent,
it caressed the space around him and it
made him feel safe and warm. Her nostalgia for the beauty of her past filled him
with longing.
While his friends imaginations were
dictated by movie stars and comic books,
his was fed by images created by people
who existed centuries ago and now resided
in magnificent churches, ducal palaces, or
places called museums. Once he made an
effort to explain to some of his friends the
kind of beauty that his mother described
to him, but they were not interested. He
tried to look at the movie magazines with
photographs of Elizabeth Taylor and Ava
Gardner and they appeared different
from the way he envisioned a Piero della
Francesca or a Leonardo Madonna. His
was an abstract sort of vision because he
could not imagine specific features or colors. When he was older he thought about
it as a mood of beauty, a hope that someday he would encounter the reality of that
nebulous and wonderful feeling that emanated from his mothers descriptions.
The stories behind the paintings were
also very different from those of movie
stars, their lives and their quests for attention, or comic books and their desperation
for obtaining a quick laugh. His mother

told him about the myths that inspired
artists like Piero and he thought of otherworldly creatures like Saint Jerome, whom
God ordered to be f logged for reading
pagan texts, and archangels providing
Adam with a miraculous oil which would
save his life.
His mother died before they were able to
take the trip she had planned for them. He
inherited from her all the embroideries she
had made during her life, a private legacy
of beauty as important to him as her love
for art. They were beautiful tablecloths
with intricate patterns that she designed
herself in large sheets of paper and transferred to the cloth. His favorite was the
one with the garland of pomegranates; its
flaming red and purple shades made up of
tiny stitches glowed on the New Years Eve
dinner table. His mother told him about
the delicate taste of pomegranates and
lamented that she could not find them in
any of the local markets.
He was thirty by the time he went to
Italy, and by then he possessed many
books with good reproductions. Of all
the masters, his favorite continued to be
Piero. His work encapsulated the enigmatic ambiguity that inspired in him the
same kind of sentiments his mother had.
It was natural that his first trip to Italy
would be to visit Pieros work.
The travel agent with whom he booked
his trip was surprised that his first visit
to Italy did not include Rome, Venice,
or Florence; that instead he was going to
Borgo San Sepolcro, Arezzo, Monterchi,
and Urbino. To him this was Italy, the
places near where his mother, like Piero,
had grown up. By this time in his life,
Piero had become almost like a friend of
his and although the details he knew of
the artists life were sketchy, he felt he was
on his way to visit someone who had continually kept him company.
He had waited for so long to take this
trip and was surprised to discover that his
anxiety had turned into tranquility. He
drove his small rented car through busy
wide autostradas trying to stay in the right
lane and turning a deaf ear to the other
motorists who, irritated by the slowness
of his driving, constantly sounded their
horns. Soon he found himself on small
curving roads through the Apennines and
the Tiber Valley. Small towns appeared,
The reflective face of the

Madonna with her heavy
lids concealing eyes lost
in thought preoccupied
him. He could not decide
whether she was submissive,
peaceful, or discreetly
happy.
towns that had not changed for centuries and seemed to proudly cling to the
past. Everything was green and every
tiny plot of land lovingly cultivated. The
scale was minuscule compared to the vast
landscapes of the Midwest where he grew
up. Every little town had a church with a
steeple that echoed the pine treesthey
aimed at heaven. The churches were large
in relation to the size of the towns and
women covered their heads when they
entered. He knew from what his mother
had told him that these churches were
objects of great pride built by generosities that went as far back as the history
of the town itself. They were always the
most beautiful buildings in the town. He
assumed the people who lived there had
intense spiritual lives. The churches that
he stopped to visit were adorned with
beautiful art and candles were lit at the
foot of every image. People of all ages
came in and out. Some sat in silence as if
talking with God. The light was pallid in
these churches and the quietness induced
in him memories of his mother asking him
to pray the rosary with her. It was always
in the late afternoon when she had finished the days labors and the sun was setting and the light in the prairie was timid
too. He wondered why his mother did not
attend church at home. Now he realized
that she must have found the churches
of the American Midwest bare and cold,
devoid of the mystical feeling that these
small churches effused. At the end of the
day, before he went to dinner, he stopped
at a church, lit a candle, and in silence
recited the prayers he remembered.
In the mornings, as he continued his
journey, he felt elated to observe how fast
the landscape changed. He often stopped
to take photographs. He treated himself
to the kind of food his mother used to
make and, as he experimented with new
flavors, he realized how many foods had
not been available to his mother and how
much she must have missed them. In the
country markets he could smell the sweet
scent of herbs, fruits, and flowers, smells
that did not exist in the sealed packages of
the markets at home. He observed that the
offerings were limited to what grew seasonally and he smiled to himself remembering how his mother would declare in
April that it was sweet pea season, pretending the frozen peas that were available to her were as fresh as the ones that
grow in the spring in the Mediterranean.
At night he enjoyed a glass of wine. His
first stop was to be Monterchi to visit the
80
FIRST PROOF
Madonna del Parto. He chose her first

not only because he had always associated this image with that of his mother,
but because he felt it would be easier for
his first encounter with Pieros work to be
with this Madonna he had imagined every
day of his life.
Early one afternoon, he made his way
to the isolated chapel in a cemetery that
housed the painting. He was the only visitor and the caretaker reluctantly opened
the door for him. By the time his eyes
adjusted to the interior light, he was
standing in front of the Madonna.
He stood in front of the image every
afternoon for the remainder of his trip.
In the mornings he took long walks in the
landscape from which his mother and the
Madonna had sprung and tried to meditate on the many queries his journey and
the presence of this sublime image elicited. His thoughts were abundant and
often unrelated. The angels in the picture that pull away the curtains revealing the frontal image of the Madonna,
whose womb engenders Christ, inspired
him to ask: Are they her angelic protectors, or a mere painterly trick of Pieros
to add to the drama? The reflective face
of the Madonna with her heavy lids concealing eyes lost in thought preoccupied
him. He could not decide whether she was
submissive, peaceful, or discreetly happy.
Her pose appeared ambiguous. Was it one
of humility or of daring? Her right arm
with its long slender fingers tenderly
touching her bare large belly as it bursts
from the open seam of her pleated gown
appears so contradictory to the gesture of
her left arm placed on her hip in a gesture of seeming defiance. The Madonna
seemed to be so alone, just as his mother
must have been when his father died
shortly after he was born, or when she
arrived from Italy as a young bride and
knew no one except the man she loved.
Sometimes he just got lost in the grace
and beauty of the paintings colors and the
glorious pomegranates in the background
of the canopy that the angels held just like
the ones in his mothers tablecloth. There
was a sense of friendliness among them
that gave the painting cohesiveness and
peace. Other times it was the details that
absorbed him, the fading pattern of the
curtains or the haloes that rested on the
angels heads.
As the days went by, he began to see
the painting in different ways. He began
to think of Piero himself and how he
thought about its structure, so profound
in its simplicity. He wondered why Piero

had painted this Madonna about to give
birth for a chapel in a cemeterya place
of death. Maybe Piero wanted to tell the
viewer that life does go on, like his had
after his own mothers death. He thought
of the day when Piero put down his first
brushstroke, and the next, and the one
after. Sometimes the images dissolved
into brushstrokes; other times into a massive series of decisions. What did Piero
feel for the Madonna? Did he admire her?
Did he marvel at the mysteries of motherhood and the fear and joy of becoming the
mother of God? He thought of his mothers
beautiful embroideries and wondered if on
some level she made similar decisions when
she created a pattern or chose a color. He
remembered his mothers sewing basket
filled with threads of every color and the
intensity in her face as she looked through
them to find the right one. Piero too must
have studied his palette searching for the
perfect pigment. These kinds of thoughts
absorbed him completely.
His last visit was late one afternoon,
when the Madonna was filigreed with
late sunlight, pale and even more mysteriousan image he carried with him
forever.
He never visited any of the other Pieros.
When he drove back to meet his plane
in Milan, his life had changed. He had
discovered that what he had come to do
was not so much to visit Piero, or to experience what his mother had taught him to
love, or to reach a moment of exaltation.
He had come to discover a part of himself.
He knew now that what he wanted to do
more than anything was to produce something that would reflect his own sense of
beauty, something that he could slowly
make appear in a space of emptiness and
blankness, something that would absorb
him completely. He had found in himself
the courage to make a plan, to take the
risk, and to place the first brushstroke.
Gabriella De Ferrari is an art historian,

curator, and writer who lives in New York
City. She is the author of two books, the novel
A Cloud of Sand (Knopf, 1990) and the
memoir Gringa Latina: A Woman of Two
Worlds (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
Blake Butler
Outline for Novel
I Will One Day Be
Struck Dead While
Reading
I Invocation
Blue window where we waited for you.

[Limited third person invented regional dialect,
occasionally slipping into omniscient mode; gender
unclear; no dialogue tags to distinguish inner speech
from exterior description; speaker has only recently
awakened after an inordinately long sleep; content
of dictation revolves between the remembrance of
speaker having known that they were sleeping and
yet were unable to wake up, alongside observations
of the anesthetic tenor of terrain beyond the windows glass through which stands a field of silvered
panels meant to deflect all would-be incoming sound
and light back at the sky.]
A shuddering expanse of warm blood in no wind.

[Shift to POV of oval camera network observing terrain
from overhead; pan upward to reveal brightly colored
cluster homes in monotone quarantine complex;
amongst the homes, violent, animate bloodclouds
populate the terrain irregularly absorbing signs of
life; narration will occasionally make note of previous
narrator having been consumed in such bloodcloud;
alternatingly, the blood itself will also speak; but the
blood knows nothing.]
Cold foam.

[We learn foam comes from remainders of the dead;
notation of specific texture, tint, and smell of foam
and its dispersal among the climate as indicative of
the nature of the originating humans demeanor. All
that exists now is rendered from this foam; none can
remember otherwise.]
dead crammed in their eyes. One begins to get the

sense the book is aware of the reader, or can react
to the readers proclivities, though one is unsure precisely how or why or given over unto whom.]
Dark powder thrown onto the translucent newborns without digits.

[Explicit depictive study of effect of foreboding control
of governmental body, one whose present operating
nexus is unclear, and yet its operation remains swift
and omnipresent; citizens will appear at times wandering out from patches of disrupted architecture
having been manipulated, filled with speech; their
interjections fill the margins, form its whitespace.]
There must be no mirror remaining here.

[Lengthy description of the destructive properties of
our only common light.]
II Person
Ants from outlets engorge a womans hands holding a
Holy Book in bed.

[Introduction of primary protagonist via objective
passage detailing a particular night alone in foam
house (foam should be made of the womans plaguedead son); inclusion of passages from National Holy
Book may be interspersed casually, employing a
peculiar language not common to holy books reader
may be familiar with; nonsensical, brain-damaged;
true.]
Orb hovers inches above the face of the fields.

[Somewhere just above the womans house; the Orb
will appear in the background of many forthcoming scenes, though often without actual referent or
resolution, thus establishing an unspoken lurking
presence (it also appears in historical descriptions
in said Holy Book, and so had existed through all
time).]
3D slave pornography.

[Explanation of homes interiors as state-decorated,
beyond the inhabitants control, including violently
graphic scenes of sexual degradation and imprisonment; torture; altogether, so much wallpaper.]
Fire, laughter.
Bending birch trees spurting leather.

[References to rampant burning and peals of disconnected human voicework through the aural
foreground interweaved; the voices on open land
enforce a pale mirage of hordes appearing traced into
the history and present combined, which continues
to appear there also in the emotional imagination
of the reader even after; looking at ones loved one
across the room, for instance, seeing legions of the

[Scenes of the woman tending her home and yard
among its melt, in hellish winds that rake her face;
she appears calm and diligent and contented, her face
now somehow described in such a way it matches the
readers own understanding of their own face.]
Whole square miles of glass.

[Passage detailing surrounding vectors of locale
where foam or wind have hardened to impenetrability; consideration on the persons lost inside the space
and whether or not they may ever be unlocked and
how that would feel to both sides and what could be
wrong with them or changed; how it could come for
any of us at any time now, whoever we are.]
I searched for you among the leaving from above.

[Conflicting use of first person spoken by authoriallike voice above the woman watching not only her
but the thousands of others living on the glasss
perimeter all thinking identical thoughts.]
[Pan back to reveal a bank of screens amassing all

the visions into a single visual database, each being
recorded, unobserved but by the reader.]
The men on the video recordings keep touching at their

faces.
[A bank of monitors wider than visible understanding; in catacomb of winking screens, often cutting so
quickly from one to the next it is difficult to follow,
though frequently the subject will suddenly turn to
look directly at the screen.]
Coal glistening in pitch while a person who looks like you

flails at a painting of a person flailing at a painting...
Now all the forests without color.

[The tone and texture of various elements of the terrain as reflected in the glass flickers through stations
as if being altered by software allowing clickable
manipulation of disposition; the woman faints frequently, from which she stands and continues on
about her business until it turns and stays so dark
she cannot see her hands.]
The computer learns to worship in reverse; it speaks.

[While the woman sleeps, again inside, a white
machine much like the Orb but smaller directs itself
around her home; it prepares food the woman will
eat on waking; it fills the air with prayerspeak of its
design, to a god of the inanimate, along with which
the woman in her unconsciousness also prays.]
III Interior
Unending skin.
[Close description of a place much like one someone
would recognize from a place fondly remembered; a
relic of memory made real, linking the reality of each
memory to the dreamlife of the novel, which sleeps
and wakes alongside the reader; as in sleep all skin is
seen to touch here; all bodies blend together under
fear.]
I had been walking through the village as I always would when

a man I did not recognize came up to me and looked into my
head. He took my hands and squeezed them. I did not stop
him. He asked me where I was going. He spoke in a voice
that seemed destroyed. I could not speak. He began to drag me
through the street now and I felt like iron, as if the only way
I could move was to be moved. The wind was all around us.
He left me in a clearing where there were all these others like
me standing motionless. It began to grow dark . . .

[All memory sharing a central codex, bled together,
interspersed.]
Synthetic casing over a clean and natural expanse, hiding

the plot from view.
82
FIRST PROOF
[The narrations attention suddenly falls on one particular screen among the millions, which then becomes
the scene itself; a voice describes the insuppressible
unconscious desire in extant persons to create replicant images of their own body while at the same
time despising the memory of any prior image; for
instance, the man appearing here has made a million
images of the woman, throughout years and years
of work, using contraband art materials, though he
does not know her, nor does he know why he painted
what he has; the mans house or wherever hes been
stationed looks oddly like the womans house.]
Seven sweating crosses.

[Noise permeates the room inside the screen; the
sound is explained as a byproduct of local process
of machines harvesting milk-like substance from
the seven identical black crosses planted in black
soil contained at an inaccessible location; the milk is
known for its complex hyper-sensory effects; it fills
the bloodstreams and the groundstreams alike; it fills
the heart.]
I need to see death.

[Monologue from woman upon waking remembering
nothing as it was; she goes at once to gorge herself
in a pantry-area on strangely labeled oil and chunkbased substances in matte white packets, the taste
and nutritional benefit of which are then described
for hundreds of pages in deformed corporate language provided by the manufacturer.]
IV Infestation
50 wolves with eyes sewn shut.
[Series of photos of wolves (actually once humans)
shot from the face head on against a black surface;
the veins or pores held in certain wolves heads glint
and weave; as if beneath the forced lids they watch
the reader.]
A flat blue altar hums.

[Description of altar-surface that appears unpopulated among a massive expanse of bright white sand.
Markings on the face of the altar describe physical
laws of any fiction. Man referred to in second passage of section III appears and kneels; he cuts himself
and bleeds upon the altar.]
and in the imagination, time and faith and want and

space; He who has appeared in no such way here but
on paper; while the woman believes she is faithfully
reconstructing the book as she had read it, these
words are her own.]
Soil-colored cake on crystal plates.

I begged and begged for you into the fires while all Dogs gathered at the smell; the Dogs all flooding through the pictures of
the light; eating everything; fucking everything.
[Spasms in the curvature of the landscape cause the
animals to go insane; pets, bugs, boys, fish, foul, bacteria, the caged; this as well affects the buildings and
the mouths in the earth; descriptions of the wilderness flooding over the face of all.]
Some bluebirds skulls bury the Mall.

[The only single sentence paragraph in the novel,
which does not refer to the birds or the Mall at all,
only the color of their muscle; how today the sun is
white and seems to eat itself.]
The ceilings in random rooms lowered so low even a child

must stoop and wriggle.

[Passage describing the woman moving through
the house, suddenly much smaller, on her stomach
forcing forward after an exit; at any window she
does find, the infestation through the glass is overwhelming; animals clawing and chewing; she keeps
believing she hears a child she once miscarried in her
sleep within the walls; arrhythmia, chest pain; in and
out of her exhaustion she passes out and sees herself from above. Passage ends with her coming into
the one room of her home where the ceiling has not
lowered, the library, and finds the text in all the books
has been erased.]
Where what was asked of us inside our brains in machine

language.
[Clinical report of blood content of woman, including index of densely populated menu of artificial
substances and their deleterious mesmeric effects;
verbiage should call into question her understanding
of the real, while also addressing possibility of similar
substances in the bloodstream of the manufacturers,
the bodiless narrator, the author his or herself, this
outline and the maker of this outline.]
You will not find me.

[Lengthy passage as written by the woman in one of
the now-blank books, as she attempts to reconstruct
from memory the gospel of her Holy Books Christfigure as she recalls; He who was said to be a human
who is still alive and walks the earth appearing the
same as any, whose gospel corresponds with how to
knit the states of waking and dreaming, the everyday
83
BL AKE BUTLER

[Empty, lavish ballroom w/ black on black on black
dcor, set with a dining table down the middle lit in
silver; a massive chrome machine gesticulates inside
the overhead space plating sizeable portions of what
seems a loaf of manicured sod onto each setting,
dumping the stuff onto the plate haphazardly, often
spilling off the table; as the arm moves we notice in the
background a translucent wall containing an onslaught
of coal-black dogs who gnash and gnash at the glass
in silence as a monotone orchestral choir takes the air.]
Mirrors full of women smearing cream into their hair in

celebration.

[Contraband storage devices found carried by
nameless passing characters or lodged in certain
unpopulated sections of the landscape allow a link
inside this book into other books: connective tissue
in the form of altered light bent to imbue the work
with ulterior fictions. In this way scenes or ideas
from other books familiar or unfamiliar to the reader
may appear in the context of the new; every plot and
character in our history contained, if under cover,
incommunicative, motion-sick, bereft.]
The machines mark small sections of the ground with

unique numbers.

[Unstable locations in the soil are shifting too frequently to maintain; pixels shifting from one portion
of the ground to one miles away; standing anywhere
for too long might lose a portion of a neck or arm; the
newly born are going blind; what is is what it is only
so long enough to not recognize the instant of itself
before becoming again changed; the machines flex
silent in the night, themselves all slowly transmutating their own drives even while writing the data.]
Knives off mowers come up through the grass over and

over.
[The dead wish for more dead; they do not like the
sounds of the living beating the soil up all above
them and deforming the terrain they still remember
as their own; what lurks there behind your back just
now could any minute come alive and take your head
clean off your body.]
Blood Boy.
[Passage describing a popular hyper-animation childrens action film played over the sky during the
daylight to keep whoever calm; where that any other
viewer will see their own faces projected onto the

body of the lover of Blood Boy (who resembles the
reader his or herself underneath his costume, one
would find); a brutal, sickening maniac, but one with
limitless passion reserved toward his one true love;
where only upon rereading will a careful reader find
evidence of the entire novel taking place in a wet
dream by a walk-on character killed by Blood Boy
in the first fifteen seconds of the film; our dream a
dream of graves not even ours, the quickest fiction,
and totally hilarious, great CGI.]
The steaming sea only remaining where you were born

inside our electronic church.
[Under the soil the pews are crowded full; the captive audience (obscured each by a metal box around
their faces) stare into a wall where on smaller screens
surrounding Blood Boy, an array of 3D projections
replay each viewers artificial birth all overlaid on one
another, in a loop; the mothers in the film are soft
and pale and breathe with their whole faces; the children do not scream; an emblem like that pressed into
the lands coordinates is etched into the backside of
each childs head with a pink laser, which blinds each
unknowing viewer into a state of unrelenting light.]
All the horses killed at once in a new sunlight.

[Passage describing Ark-like containment center
where various strains of rare remaining creatures
have been stored; inside the quarters these coal black
horses buckle and spasm; once theyd been gods;
their blood will be evaporated, fed into all breathing.]
pattern; the hallways seem to lengthen; the furniture

all covered in sunburned skin; in each room is hung a
photo of the reader, as they were, dressed in a heavily
decorated black military costume.]
The wall of fingernails unveiling.

[In the bedroom, you find a door that had not previously appeared there; the door is warm and black and
has no knob, but opens easily when pushed on; as
you enter the hallway and begin along it, you find the
hallway keeps extending; the light at the end of the
hall is always so far away; where by concentrating
hard on any section of its glow you can see into the
heart of any person held alone in their own station
experiencing the surviving world as theirs alone.]
Birds burst from a childs bite into chocolate, down the

childs throat, out through the sun.
[The Orb in your heart explodes, absorbs your history,
reforms.]
This had happened once before and was erased.

[The hall ends with the light at last arrived; it has
been lifetimes; now, a door; the woman (you) goes
through the door and comes out into a bedroom
exactly matching the one youd come in from; the
house is exactly like the other house, though the air
is warmer, slicker; in the library all the books are the
same book, each filled with the words of this novel
once it is written, up to this point; no way back.]
There was never enough water.

Ticks.
[Description of layer of thick white ticks that form
out of the horses blood condensed; each shaped like
buttons; they cover the landscape every inch.]
V Silence
[In the library now there are two windows, side by side;
at one window water covers all, no land; the water is
black and crystalline; it goes on forever; through the
other window the world appears the same, but instead
of water, it is sand; the woman looks through one window with one eye and the other with the other, winking
one shut then the other, against some center.]
I hate all art.

[Darkness in which nothing can be seen or felt; like
something larger has moved before the moon; our
perspective through the space is the only movement.]
When you woke, the earth was just above you waiting to
crane down.

[Second person passage placing the reader in the
body of the woman having woken in the smokefields
far from her house covered in blood; You know the
blood is yours but you are not wounded; you walk
for hours through the smoke, seeing many houses
here on fire, carcasses of animals and children; you
return to your house to find the ceilings in the rooms
have returned to normal, though the dcor in each
is changed; the walls are gold and have a shifting
84
FIRST PROOF
The sky sheds colors like a babys imagination being

crushed before it sees.
[All else but the Orb is fully blurred; daylight billows
as if magnetic, swarming over filled with vision.]
VI Interpolation
Secret lairs full of bodies fill with cold oil.

[Relation of a sect of humans who had built unlit
catacombs under the earth for their survival; an only
hope; no explanation of what causes the oil to begin
to hiss out of their pores, sucks as if by magnets, all at
once; it fills their air so fast; thousands of chambers
sealed full of death in any instant without a glimmer
aboveground.]
Suddenly difficult to tell the texture of blood from what

were being fed.
[The book becomes a knife clasped in your hands; it

becomes a fountain, then a stairwell; then a hole.]

[Montage-style series of infants faces sucking on
their masks; then, older children; their skins seem
hardened, pale and patchy; then adults, bearing the
same placid complexion, dead-eyed, inhaling.]
The beeping.
I didnt mean to quote the Forbidden Book in your presence, the doctor whispers.
[Transcribed dialogues between woman and hologrambased medical practitioner who arrives unannounced
for forced assessment by the state; it is clear the
machine is glitched; it continues to try to bend the
womans answers towards participation in insurgence;
it babbles plague-code and portends worship of the
moon; it begs her to mate with it and feed it pizza; the
woman maintains composure, breathes into the tubes,
offers her blood; the hologram injects her with new language, into eyes, pores, fingers; then it disintegrates.]
A long white-crepe parade of murdered famous persons;

the streets are silent.
[The woman thumbs through event photos that she
has kept hidden under the floor; the photos should
have been burned during expungement; she does
not know why she kept these, of all things; the photos may be activated into video loops when pressed
down on; she watches the parade go by in silence,
recognizing passing personalities she grew up entertained by, none that the reader should know; she rubs
the moving pixels with her fingers, watches them
become smudged, crumple.]
The website that consumed you through the worst periods

now redirects to a reflective surface.

[The woman turns to face the reader, eyes alive,
online; she addresses the demolition of the timegap between the present setting in the novel as it
is read and the era in which the reader his or herself
feels entrenched; how really though it may seem the
two are distant they are actually quite near, as to be
touching; Touch me. Please touch me again.]
Mile-long eyelashes on a dog that you had loved.

[Invocation of the readers memory; passages describing what is remembered and what is not; what you
have deleted and what you held dear and still do; where
you allow your brain and the illusion to become fused.]
Blue machine gun tattooed on the scalps of all dead mothers, furiously.

[Press the page and feel the emblems in the letters
lather, blister.]
Gold foil sunset, no return.

85
BL AKE BUTLER
[A short clipped noise not so loud as to deafen or

shake surfaces but just enough to distract any mind
from forming thought; so omnipresent as to seem
like another part of ones own body.]
Priests in line for miles to become reinstated after the

.gif of a particularly white levitating baby revitalizes faith.
[The state-displays in all the houses flip at once onto
the image of the Child, whose facial features are flat
and unpronounced enough to resemble anyone; the
screaming fills the hour.]
They invent the Pleasure Prison and then destroy it.

[A windowless white building on the horizon; visual
annotation displays the crimes of those imprisoned;
hunger, desire, wisdom, pleasure, fury, sight. The
woman leaves her home and runs toward the building in
the dust for hours, in the name of finally knowing other
life (already having forgotten about you); no matter from
what angle it wont grow nearer; the land beneath her
turning into mush, up to her knees, her neck.]
Great Rivers of salad dressing, rivers of lotion.

[Upon giving up, returning, home the woman finds
the landscape ruined with lakes and valleys where
before thered been homes; in place of any point of
local recognition now only the ongoing sound of the
ground breathing, bearing its sickness.]
Glaucoma, leukemia, emphysema, Parkinsons, arthritis,

diabetes, diarrhea, eczema, gastritis, carcinoma, AIDS, etc.
[Mile-long black placards set into the earth; pages
and pages of lists of names appear inside the novel,
bearing the dead forth; the reader inadvertently
scrolls among them searching for their name; and
then there it is, misspelled.]
It was nice to see you when I could.

[Catalog of recalled deaths witnessed by the omniscient narrator in its lifetime, of every one itd ever
loved; it cannot picture the faces of the people, or
what their names were; only how itd seen them
dragged on through the dirt beyond its own home; no
memory but what lies buried in the people.]
Hyperventilating sand.

[The woman cannot see the ground beneath
her shifting; she is descending; her eyes are closed
but not asleep; the inside of her lids are tiled with
faces.]
No matter how long you go on there is an end.

[Section ends midsentence as the woman opens her
eyes, finding more dark.]
there a ream of tattooed code; beneath the name

there, in a gold font, is your name, your birth and
death dates, then a third.]
VIII Inculcation
VII Location
It is today.
Blue sunshine underneath the sound.
[Close second person physical description of the readers person; their chest, their scalp, their face, their
fingers; casual admittance of details relating to the
readers recent life, their triumphs or troubles, terrors.]
[Anywhere you look to try to read now the words will

fill the room with fuzz.]
I tried to remember the day you told me you wanted to not

be near me but theres all this sound in my complexion.

[Passage dictated to the reader from the voice of
someone the reader had once loved; someone gone
now, buried or elsewhere; the voice is carried on with
fear, of having known what would come upon them.]
The hissing filled the beds; there was no one left whod
not partaken.
[You feel someone standing underneath your feet; like

where you are there parallel beneath you is another;
the room is solid black, impenetrable; it had always
been this way; a whole other life you lived youll never
know a single thrust of, and yet must pay the price
for.]
Blood Boy 2.
[Proto-textural transcription of sound of massive skin

on skin; voices boned inside a syllabic interference;
the noise electric in the head, from which inside the
noise there the reader feels a sort of bridge or pulse
through which inside the colors from the light on
skin arriving bright alive the reader finds someone in
there clasped inside the sound on the far side touching back; becoming.]
[All the actors appearing from the previous film commit suicide still wearing makeup; the film goes on;
the camera scrolls over old locations in still silence,
unto an ocean, from out of which men clad in allblack riot gear are marching on half-melted.]
Skyscrapers filled with gasoline and flowers always.
[Limbs and lids shift through reams rising foam bloat,

destroying every inch of what could be creatively
described; the night goes on; omniscient narration
drifts into the woman talking about herself in the
third person, what she would like to eat for lunch.]

[Onslaught of singular images sprawled through
unpunctuated pages, misspelled and without bone,
like being peeled apart in language; as if the front
piece on the speech to this point fell off like skin to
show the junk behind.]
Kissing the masks brain.

[Series of black pages as long as the book has been
so far.]
I believe that you believe I am alive.

[Always outside the set of selves there must be
another there waiting, creating the world as it is read;
our skin spread all through all extant and potential
eras; infinite prisons.]
0 from 0.
[The text against now disappears; the text is black
as well, cannot be read; the black pages continue on
through another ream of pages again equal to the
books length thus far twice again, ending with a
close-up photo of someones head; the hair has been
shaved off of the head to reveal a cut in the scalp
86
The wives come bearing hammers and demand to speak

to the Canopy of Limbs of Those Whod Never Touched
and I have sex with them and feel them die.
FIRST PROOF
4 + 4 is however many of the armies marched draped in

their own come.
A bright vibrating satisfaction.

[The book itself begins to speak; no text; the lengths
of buildings and the rubble and the coal powder
blowing; the day is warm and under friction edict
flames; large areas are burning; it is difficult to see or
breathe while continuing through the section, and yet
the reader feels condemned; as if to miss an instant
could be a keyhole out, a glimmer in the baking.]
There were crystal gorges all around us, we could not touch
them, there was a stammer in the sunlight, all the ridges of the
veins of God had counted us to plug the holes in what anyone
could walk through, never imagining the way wed cower, even
as we stood up and raised our arms; I wanted to let you know
that you were a gift to me even in knowing how wed both be
very soon all entered into wind; I wanted at the least to remind
you all the ways that I was never there.

[Language appears inscribing itself up along the
readers arms; the pages of the book now made to
match the skin, into the brain.]
The darkness splitting into twins, and the twins again to

twins again.
[You can see the woman in her home way up above
you, standing at the window from the beginning on
the inside looking out; you realize that the house
is melting, its pixels are being torn apart from the
inside; a shrieking sound that fills the eyes; you wave
your arms and shout and can hear nothing; she will
not look; her attention is fixated on the sky even further still above; you crane your neck to look up too,
then it is like you have gone blind.]

[Voice like the womans voice but badly damaged
in manner of syntax; the voice describes you there
now in the room; you take the Holy Book from the
bed; the floor is also mirrored, as are the walls, making it appear as if there are several dozen at least of
you. You begin reading in the book then, turning the
pages, speaking it aloud; the woman does not want
you to go on; she knows what is yet to come; she
tries to enter through the glass and cant remember
how, instead banging her head over and over on the
surface above you as you read.]
Blood plumes bloom one after another.

The words together have no meaning.
[The next 400 pages of the book are blank; as if you
are meant to fill them in.]
[Like being beaten with a pillow in the darkness; wet

shafts and weird globes of light; on each point of
impact, the continued expectation of a new unknown
narrator about to speak, and yet who wont.]
IXPosition
A glove of bubbles where the sun was.
If there ever was a world
[Rising grasses split through white sand over long miles
up to beaches blocked with walls; trees organized by
wire held together to form rows on rows forever parallel; the sun rises and sets in different colors; a kind of
drying glass holds over lakes; there is a wind at times
that stirs no dust; no markers and no homes; no mention of sound here besides to say that there is a sound I
cant describe, one moving differently than sound had
as I remembered; where against the far northeast horizon a sky-wide mirror shows the world back at itself.]
XNo
They divided our limbs with wishing pins and photographed them without light and spread them copy upon
copy through the database to all graves.
Face cartilage multiplying.

[Several hundred thousand fields; behind each of
those a mass of self enslaved; remembrances and
ruptures; each mass seems deeper than the one
before.]
The oceans floors collapse at once and underneath it

there is nothing.
[Body of the woman (you) spread on a table and manipulated; unclear if she (you) is alive or dead; blood pours
from her like a fountain, fills the perspective, makes it
scroll beneath cold color beyond imagination.]
[Omniscient description of a contextless mass parting through darkness as each new black edge around
it bends, blows wide.]
Our charcoal moaning in the keyholes.
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. 300,000,000 (Harper Perennial)

is his most recent novel.
[The scrolling moves now beyond the color, through

the endless rows of matching homes; the homes
have been removed of all the objects, now been
replaced with mirrors; occasionally men in black costumes appear inside the houses holding weapons or
black boxes or a metal eye that ejects light. In a bedroom exactly like the bedroom of the woman, where
we first found her, still on her bed, the Holy Book; it
is open to two pages, which from a distance appear
blank, though as we move closer to the bed there is
a picture of the room; you see yourself move into the
image, matching your movement.]
In the dark I touch the mirror and I can hear you breathing seamless lather.
87
[If you could open up your eyes it might be different; the darkness like so many of the Orbs and walls
of worlds at once; there is nothing left to touch;
you move your brain toward the next incoming sentence and summer happens and then it is no longer
summer and then it is summer now again; the air is
burning into no air.]
BL AKE BUTLER
Albert Mobilio
maybe
a joke
you had to laugh,
say this was
impenetrable, bent
Maybe it started
Maybe it started as a joke the apparitions, the decorative
locusts no beast could resist you had to laugh
didnt you say this was a good sign brought
forth out of otherwise impenetrable noise, two bent
horns thats spike jones at the bandstand please
raise your eyes to comprehend every creeping
thing that seems, yet seems not so flung as wind
I had to guess what my god would look like all done
up in sunday best really smart with skinny
tie & cufflinks shiny even in home movies
where you play kamikaze & only ten were left
out of thousands who began with worshipful minds
but ended up beneath the stage their grim science
just some reed they hope will tuneful lie
A nod in the right direction, the soiled bed the flooded
expectation my device is telling me cover
those tracks never give details your eyes cloaked
in discouragement how can you stand such solitude,
no haunting face to put your heart to work you
scratch, kick & bite imagine an altar that reveals
the depth to which you fall when falling
88
FIRST PROOF
please
comprehend every
thing as wind
my god
smart,
shiny even
where you play
with worshipful minds,
but the stage grim:
some hope
in soiled bed
my expectation
your eyes cloaked
in solitude
haunting you
imagine an altar
falling
I make electricity work
make electric
you can strike
the dark
well
the hymn untouched
your own warmth
you know
is required
pieces
of what was said
turn in a boy
sailing off, bound
close long after
they wave
sounds
marked by naturalness
I make electricity work for you or you can just strike

matches & curse the darkness too theres physical
effort involved in leaving well enough alone outside
the hymn of the pale sea its particles of untouched air
swarm with your own inhalations the warmth
spent quickly & you hesitate, dont you know
how much indefiniteness is required to breathe
Puzzle pieces scattered on the floor why try solving
when only lunatics keep track of what was said or who
did that dismal turn in a boys club rec room waving
as if they were sailing off bound for remotest
zanzibar close-up shot of ships horn added long after
the extras cashed their checks they waved big bon
voyages quite bored & shuffling on the soundstage floor
The story is marked by a naturalness thats okay to get
us started but a childish method shouldnt be set
against a tactics of need so youd better not be adrift
in some half-remembered dawn eyes veiled
in cigarette smoke that wont be the waking up youre
looking for the blood beat switched on & mindlessly
alert you hear the voice & know the expectation
a child shouldnt be,

better not be, adrift
eyes veiled,
waking
mindless:
you voice the expectation
89
ALBERT MOBILIO
Albert Mobilios books of poetry include

Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me
with Animal Towering, and Touch Wood.
A volume of short fictions, Games and
Stunts, is forthcoming.
Jen George
The Babysitter at Rest

Winner of BOMBs 2015 Fiction Contest,
selected by Sheila Heti
Ive been given a fresh start, a new beginning. Its almost like being reborn, but
without birth and childhood. I get to start
as a young adult, when you are capable of
looking after yourself and making decisions. When your body is in its prime.
The only rules are you start pretty broke,
and you have to have roommates. There
are six of us in the house. I share a room
with a guy named Lorry and a girl called
Susan. Allen has his own room and Diana
and Horse share a room. What people do
most is sit in the house and watch television. There are things we can learn, like
Im interested in painting and gardening
and possibly fishing.
My memory is mostly gone, though
not entirely. Whats left is the impression
of fullness; for example, the supermarket. Here it contains a limited number of
items, but memory fills in the blanks
brands, flavors, packaging, etc. Memory
has proven to be useful for livening things
up in the town; filling leaves in the trees,
reading expressions on other peoples
faces, seeing trash on the streets. Its good
to have reminders like that, that life is
more detailed than it appears here, though
not too many.
I meet Tyler Burnett at a party Ive
been invited to. People in the town have
parties often. Tyler Burnett wears dark
sunglasses always, even at night. I cannot
see through his sunglasses. Some people
say they might be painted black. I think
he may have no eyes. Nevertheless there
is a romantic energy between us. Its still
somewhat difficult for me to understand
people when they speak here, but I understand much more than I did in the first
few days. Tyler Burnett says Chemicals
and fishing, the water. Yes, television. Art,
no. A walk. To swim. Jokes and such are
not my kind. Sexy and rubs are my sort of
thing. With you, something distracting.
He is the most interesting person Ive met.
After the party I ask Allen, my roommate, about Tyler Burnett. Allen tells me
he owns the chemical plant. Allen tells
me that Tyler Burnett is married and that
90
FIRST PROOF
he has a baby. They live in the big cliff

house at the beach. Tyler Burnetts house
is the last big house at the beach, a relic
from when beach living was the symbolic
height of wealth in town, before the rising
ocean and strong waves destroyed most of
the area, making the mountains prime real
estate. The house had been his fathers, his
fathers fathers and so on. Tyler Burnetts
father died amidst his mid-life crisis in
a localized gas station earthquake while
simultaneously being given head by his
young girlfriend and filling up his tank.
Tyler Burnetts father then became a ghost,
after which his relationship with his son
disintegrated. Ive seen Tyler Burnetts
house when Ive gone down to the beach.
The cliff erodes daily and the property
depreciates in value yearly, though the
grandiosity of the place is not diminished
by its crumbling foundation. Allen says it
shows that Tyler Burnett is the richest person in town that he doesnt care if his whole
mansion falls into the ocean.
Here you must work. Jobs have titles,
but duties are vague. Im interested in the
arts, so have taken a job at the newspaper
instead of government or business. As a
young person you must choose one or the
other. I get rides to work in the morning
with a woman who always speaks about
needing to make a hair appointment. At
work it is almost like I do nothing. Some
papers. Running errands. Computer stuff.
I talk to a guy named Jimmy who does
something like research on the computer
all day. Hes into the arts too; he plans
on being a singer and performing to large
audiences. Jimmy goes out to lunch with a
young business type guy who works at city
hall named Cass. I eat no lunch at work. I
eat very little in general.
Communication is getting easier. At
first, when I could understand nothing, people were either happy with me or
offended by me often and I did not know
why. Now speaking with other people is not
the stress it was just a few short weeks ago.
What Ive learned is you dont ask questions and then things begin to make sense.
Hobbies are essential; without them,

people get bored and turn to loitering and
vagrancy and vandalism. I go to the little farm near our home and plant tomato
seeds since theres a packet of seeds and
a patch of dirt. I read books in the farm
tool shed by local authors with titles like
If Your House is Yellow and Other Problems
of Interest, or How To Make Apple Salad
For Parties, or, Three Ways to Fix Broken
Toilets, or Clean Your Room, Cook Your
Food, Go to Work and Do Hobbies: A Life.
I take up painting in my spare time
and paint little thingsideas of a sunset,
a birdthat I sell for ten to fifteen dollars
apiece to people who also work jobs and
live in houses, possibly with families. Here
quality does not matter. Its a tremendous
relief when attempting to make something.
It was harder before, but here I can paint a
blue sky and black V shape for a crow, and
a tree in the distance, maybe an undetailed
person walking on the street. Everything
here goes into a category depending on
intention, so if I paint something and then
paint something else, Im gaining experience in the category of painting, despite
the absence of any stylistic progress, artistic vision, or knowledge of what Im doing.
The only classification that matters is time
spent doing the thing; here god is a clock
with memory, logging hours.
Time here goes quickly and little is ever
accomplished. Its unclear if there is just
nothing to accomplish, or if there are endless things. I go swimming often. I spend
hours at the pool. I meet people, older
women and kids, who like to play water
games like splash-in-the-face, drown-abitch, and punchies-and-kickies. A man
with silver hair sits on a chaise lounge
and watches me several nights a week.
Im unsure if he comes here to watch me
swim, or if hes always come here and just
watches me because Im new.
Horse is throwing a party. Hes invited
people from his gym and from city hall.
Hes invited the neighbors. Horse tells me
I can invite whomever I want, but I dont
have anyones phone number. Everyone
cleans the house and I make a salad for the
party. I say, I hope you all like apples, to
my roommates, since its an apple salad.
They watch the television and dont say
anything about liking or not liking apples.
People come in and out of our house for
the party; children, grandparents, people
whom Ive seen in town, people Ive never
seen. People leave their dishes on the
floor. Someone breaks the toilet. Jimmy
from work comes and plays the guitar and
sings in the front yard. The oven catches

fire and the fire department is called.
Everyone goes outside. A female firefighter comes in with a hose and puts the
fire out. Recklessness, she says. The fire
truck leaves and she stays behind, dancing with Horse to tinny music coming
out of the boom box on the floor. A smell
of burnt plastic comes from the house.
Outside, the man with the silver hair I
see down at the pool hides in our hydrangea bush. The bush shakes. A stream of
urine trickles down the ground from the
bush. It smells strongly of asparagus. Its
you, the voice from inside the bush says.
Jimmy plays a song that everyone seems
to know the words to. Its up-tempo.
Some girls have love in their eyes as they
watch Jimmy. A loud sigh comes from the
hydrangea bush. Relief, the man inside
the bush says. I look inside the house
through the partially blackened kitchen
window to see Lorry either playing a mirror game or fighting with a child; they
both stomp and fold their arms and stick
their tongues out. Diana is going at the
toilet with a plunger, but it is only making
things worse. Susan lip-syncs to the boom
box music. The female firefighter grinds
on Horses hip. Horse has a giant erection that is visible through his track pants.
The female firefighter licks her lips and
waggles her tongue at Horses erection.
Oh, the man inside the hydrangea bush
says, very close to my ear, All I want is to
be with you. The mans words or voice
remind me of something from before.
Jimmy begins smashing his guitar. People
clap and jump up and down and chant
Jimmys name. Jimmy puts two middle
fingers up and f lails his arms around,
flipping everyone off. The people cheer
louder. The female firefighter comes out,
Stop! she says. Horse is directly behind
her with his erection sticking out of the
flap in his track pants. Everyone goes back
inside. No one seems to be bothered by
the burnt plastic smell or the dark smoke
that fills the house. They continue the
party. Horse and the female firefighter
go into the bathroom and screw loudly.
The neighbor, Mrs. Olson, is snorting
ketamine off the kitchen table while her
husband, Mr. Olsen, takes photos. Their
daughter, Lizzie Olsen, is assembling a
nail-shooting gun from a kit. Susan has
taken out my paints and is doing portraits
of the reveling party guests. She hands me
a vulgar portrait shes painted of me
done with my paints on my canvasof
my legs spread wide beneath a ceremonial
robe to show a little pink heart covering

my vagina. The heart is surrounded by
pubic hair. Susan laughs. Its so you,
she says. I feel something like envy over
Susans natural talent in so accurately representing the figure. I thought Id left such
feelings behind.
The man with the silver hair stays outside in the hydrangea bush, at least I think
hes still there, since I see someones eyes
flash from time to time. Its very late and I
am drunk. I eat some apple salad. Around
midnight Tyler Burnett comes through
the door wearing his shiny grey suit and
black sunglasses. His hair is slicked back.
His lips are thin. His nose is sharp; all of
his features are sharp. He looks as though
his bones dont fit in his skin. I didnt
know you were coming, I say.
I hear you look nice in a swimsuit, he
says.
Where did you hear that? I say. I
realize this is exactly the kind of question
I should not ask. Its the kind of question
that makes everything here fall apart.
I go to my room and put on my bikini.
When I come out, no one seems to notice
that Im in my swimsuit; no one seems to
notice me at all. Tyler Burnett is sitting on
the burnt counter that is still smoldering
and glowing hot under the ash.
Youre going to burn your rear ass,
I say. I sometimes say odd things here,
but I forget quickly and no one seems to
notice. Tyler Burnett seems to have not
heard me and continues to sit on the burning counter.
How old are you now? Tyler Burnett
says.
Seventeen. But I might be anywhere
from seventeen to twenty-two. I think I
have a birthday soon. I heard talk of a cake
at work. I may know more then.
I am between forty seven and fifty
twoIve just had a birthdaythough
some days I feel ancient, as the saying
goes.
Ive not heard that saying. Anyway,
you look younger.
Its the shoe polish I use on my hair.
Its the truest shade of black and it can
only be achieved with shoe polish, he
says. Now child, would you like to get
some ice cream?
I look around at our house, the party.
Another fire starts near the television. The
female firefighter runs out of the bathroom
in only her helmet and boots and puts the
fire out with a mini-fire extinguisher that
she has in her purse. This is the last goddamn time, she says. This is my job,
idiots, and in case you havent noticed, Im

not on the clock right now. Music continues to play from the boom box. Suzanne
looks at me and makes a V with her fingers
over her mouth, sticking her tongue out
and gesturing toward Tyler Burnett.
Yes, I say to Tyler Burnett. Id like
some ice cream.
The beach is freezing. Tyler Burnett
brings me an ice cream cone from the vendor at the top of the hill. Tyler Burnett
watches me eat the ice cream in the moonlight. He pats me on the head. You like
that? He nods his head. I nod along.
My house will fall into the ocean one
day. Possibly soon, Tyler Burnett says.
He points to the cliff where his house is
located.
What a beautiful home. Itll be a
shame when it goes.
Tyler Burnett takes a tennis ball out of
his pocket and throws it to me. I throw it
back. He throws it to me again. We play
catch. Use your whole arm to throw, he
says, not just your wrist. When were
done playing catch, I see the lights go on
in his home atop the cliff. Tyler Burnett
pats the sand for me to sit next to him.
Did you get homework today?
No. Im not in school.
If you ever get homework and need
help with it, we can arrange something.
Its been a while, but Im pretty good with
homework. Arithmetic specifically.
I almost repeat that I have no homework, but I decide against it. Thank
you, I say.
My wife, he says, is up there in
the big house. Shes writing an autobiographical opera. I have no idea what itll
be about. Shes an actress as well, and a
painter. In the day she paints the interior
walls and courtyards of the house. In one
of our courtyards shes painted two hundred different versions of herself in various wedding dresses, different hairdos.
The dresses can be described as ethereal.
The hairdos can be described as fingersin-an-electric-socket. There is no groom
to be seen anywhere in the mural. It is
called The Brides Courtyard. In our dining
hall shes painted a sea of wild horses, very
life-like, called The Wild Horses Dining
Hall. Shes considered a Great Artist in
the town.
She sounds lovely, I say.
Tyler Burnett sits closer to me. Please
take your top off, he says. I take my top
off. Tyler Burnett puts his head on my
chest and kisses my breasts. The waves
crash against the cliff below his house. As
I lay down, I see pieces of earth falling

from the cliff. Tyler Burnett pulls his erect
penis out of his shiny grey pants. Child,
I would like you to suck my dick.
Alright, I say. I suck Tyler Burnetts
dick for a little while.
Child, I would like to titty-fuck you,
Tyler Burnett says.
Alright, I say. Though its as if Im
coated in a thick layer of plastic, Tyler
Burnetts penis thrusting between my
breasts is nice.
Child, I would like to fuck you vaginally or possibly anally. Climb on top of
me backwards with your bikini bottoms
pulled down to your knees so theyre
stretched wide, lower your chest to my
knees so that your ass is up high then
lower yourself onto me.
Ok, I say.
At work Jimmy talks about his performance at the party, how everyone loved it,
how he logged four solid hours of singing
and playing guitar the night of the party
and would now get offers to play other
parties. Jimmy says, My dreams are coming true. I make copies, buy pens, and
order lunches for the people with desks.
Im not sure what all this has to do with a
career in the arts, but the people around
me seem to be making progress.
Whenever I am not at work, Im in
my bikini. Its convenient for most of the
activities I do outside of work, like fishing
with Tyler Burnett. Or eating ice cream
sundaes at the ice cream shop with him.
Or playing catch with him. Or holding a
balloon hes bought for me. Or babysitting his baby. Or going to the swim club
on weekday evenings. Tyler Burnett says
I look like the cutest kid in my suit.
Tyler Burnett buys me a stuffed animal; a pony. What will you name him,
child? Tyler Burnett says. Pony? I
say. Wonderful, child. Excellent. Youre
a beautiful child. He gives me a bag of
candy from the grocery store and pats me
on the head. At times I forget if we are lovers or if hes my father. He does not feel
like a father.
Tyler Burnett buys me a pair of saddle shoes to wear on our walks. I think
they look bad with my bikini, but Tyler
Burnett thinks the saddle shoes are sexy.
The shoes blister my feet. Tyler Burnett
dresses the blisters with smiley-face bandaids. He kisses my feet. Thats better,
he says. The sores will heal and you can
continue wearing the shoes. He kisses my
saddle shoes.
92
FIRST PROOF
At the beach, where we go at night to

eat ice cream and have sex, Tyler Burnett
looks up to the nursery window of his
home. My baby does not grow. He never
will, Tyler Burnett says. I had noticed
something peculiar about the baby now
that he mentioned it. The baby will
always remain a baby, he says. It is a
curse to have a forever baby. The baby will
not inherit my property, my good looks.
I thought the point of having a baby was
so you could age and die. You could be
released after cursing someone else to
this existence. With this baby sealed in
infancy, I fear I may live a very, very long
time. I age, but Im not dying. I can think
of nothing worse. Rotten pineapple
cake, I say. Pineapple cake is the favorite
dessert in town. Ive noticed that people
are disgusted by the idea of rotten pineapple cake. Yes, Tyler Burnett says. He
takes out his bag of ketamine.
When Im not with Tyler Burnett, I
think about him often. His image comes
to my mind and I have a fantasy. In the
fantasy I am decorating his new mountain house. I imagine painting. I imagine
becoming a Great Artist. The fantasy is
in prime-colored symbols; a star, a heart,
a palette. He seems to enter my thoughts
the same way logging hours doing anything else does. I wonder what category
the hours Im logging with Tyler Burnett
go under; sex, sexual positions, sore buttholes, chaffed nipples, vaginal hickies,
blisters. Things that are not mine. It could
also be ice cream, or swimwear. Youth.
Forever babies.
Tyler Burnetts wife speaks of the baby
when Im to babysit. My baby does nothing but gurgle and shit all day, she says.
Have you looked in his eyes? I look in
the babys eyes. They are quite pretty
eyes. At first it was like, Great, a baby.
But then the baby stopped growing, and
it was like, Whoa, a baby. Like forever.
Youre supposed to give all of yourself to
a baby if its going to grow up and use
the things youve given him out in the
world. The whole point is for your child
to transcend what came before him with
the benefit of your experience. But when
you know there will be no adult form of
the baby, it changes the relationship. For
the first two years I worried a lot and then
the doctor told me, Id say youre lucky,
many women want only a baby, not all
that other shit that comes after. Then he
said, Look at it this way; your baby will
probably never hate you because he wont
be able to feel things like disappointment

or resentment that develop with memory
and time. At least you dont have to worry
about damaging him in any way hed be
cognizant of. His words helped, but I was
not one of those women who wanted a forever baby. Anyway, were used to it now,
its been a long time. Im making corn on
the cob and pineapple salad when I get
back from my archery lessons. You may
stay for dinner if youd like.
The thing about forever babies is that you
know they will never get older, so you must
treat them differently than other babies.
You have to suppress your natural urges
to point to your nose and say nose or teach
them anything like language since theyll
never speak. You dont say no or dont do
that to a forever baby because there is no
lesson they can learn from it. No knowledge is retained. You have to remember
to do stuff like tickling and peek-a-boo
and cuddlingloving, comforting stuff.
Mostly I say, What a good baby, or
What a beautiful baby you are, and I get
paid ten dollars an hour to watch you, to
remind the baby that I am not his mother.
I hug the baby all day, I kiss him and tickle
his belly with my eyelashes, but I catch a
strange look in the babys eyes often.
At dinner, Tyler Burnett watches me
as I eat corn on the cob. A corn kernel
falls into my bikini top and Tyler Burnett
stares at my chest. He eats his pineapple
salad. The baby looks at me from his high
chair. He looks very much like any baby.
Ooh, I say from across the table. The
baby coos. You are a sweet baby. I get
paid ten dollars an hour to watch you. I
love you baby. I detect cynicism in the
babys eyes and wonder if even though
youre a forever baby, cynicism develops
over time, after hours logged watching
people and seeing the things they do.
Child, please dont pursue obscure
aspirations of becoming something,
though I know you wouldnt know how
to even if you wanted. Itd spoil you. You
are better the way you are, Tyler Burnett
tells me before I leave for the night.
I decide to log hours at reading places or
art places because Ive learned my comprehension level is basic. At the library,
the silver-haired man watches me between
the shelves as I read Being Regular in
Town and How To Spot Irregularities. At
the art gallery the man with the silver hair
watches me from behind a sculpture of a
large nose. I am used to the silver-haired
mans presence, but it is better to not say

hello. At the grocery store hes inside the
freezer as I go down the freezer aisle; at
the coffee shop he sits under a bench with
binoculars pointed in my direction.
Diana has become ver y pale and
watches television most of the day. Shes
unemployed and Ive seen her eat rancid food from the refrigerator. An almost
visible stench comes off of her. I suspect
Allen is the pyromaniac among us whos
been lighting the fires around the house.
Lorry has become a chronic masturbator
and keeps me up all night with his moaning and grunting. The smell of semen is
heavy in our room so I need to keep the
window open. Allen has moved into my
and Lorrys room, and Susan has taken
the big bedroom since she makes the most
money. Susan is excelling in her career as
a businesswoman; she gets a raise almost
weekly and has the type of personality at
work that makes her colleagues like her.
Shes also a party animal and can drink
like a fish. Shes seeing a widower named
Johnny whose wife died in a localized mall
earthquake, but she says its non-exclusive since she has the type of personality
that likes to play the field. The house is a
mess. There are pizza boxes everywhere;
the bathtub is covered in dead skin and
several spots in the house are blackened
because of the small fires. Susans bought
a new TV and a new oven and a new toilet for the house. The new things look odd
amongst the mess of the house.
Tyler Burnetts wife has gone to give a
public lecture on how to write autobiographical operas and shes asked me to
babysit for the day. I show up in my bikini
and take the baby to the beach. At the
beach, the baby eats sand and rocks. The
baby picks up a crab and the crab pinches
the babys nose with its claw. The baby
then crawls into the ocean and gets pulled
out to sea. I go in to get him and the baby
coughs up water once were on the shore.
Funny baby, I say, you might drown!
The baby giggles then his face turns red.
Flies begin to buzz around the baby, so I
change his diaper. Inside his diaper there
is an enormous shit that is composed of
a good deal of sand, some string, and a
large crab claw.
There was a major meltdown at the
plant, Tyler Burnett tells me when he
returns home from work. His wife is still
giving the public lecture. Its pretty
much a disaster over there. There was a
localized earthquake and it launched the
security-setting thing into annihilation

mode or whatever. Luckily an engineer
knew how to shut it down, but the radiation that leaked may cause some serious
damage. Or it might not. But I think these
types of things are generally serious. He
looks at the baby in the crib.
Welp, I say. I think this is one of
those things that should not be discussed.
I know questioning him will be wrong.
Thats the way the pineapple cake crumbles, I say. Here this is the only thing to
say.
Precisely, Tyler Burnett says. Tyler
Burnett pulls the strings on my bikini
bottoms and they fall to the floor. Tyler
Burnett gets on his knees and sticks his
head between my legs. The baby watches
us from his crib. He keeps his eyes on his
father.
Child, Tyler Burnett says with his
face half immersed in my vagina, When
I was young, I didnt fully appreciate
young, beautiful pussy. Though I liked it
very much, pussy was just pussy. But as
men age we are given the gift of young
women being attracted to us, before we
are decrepit, while we are still able to
get decent erections so that we can fuck
them. He takes his head out of my crotch
and stands on the little podium the baby
uses to balance himself when attempting
to stand. We come to love screwing more
than ever before and we screw young girls
a special way, with the intention of forgetting everything weve ever been. We fuck
with a potent desperation that makes us
good lovers. We know its a frantic stab
at immortality in an attempt to destroy
everything before it, but its still wonderful. At least for a while. Thank you for the
gifts of your young pussy and your tight
ass. Its as though Ive had a mind-erasing
serum or a vibrancy elixir or like a really
strong energy drink.
Youre welcome, I say. The babys
face turns red. Flies begin to swarm
around him.
Please change t he baby, Tyler
Burnett says. The smell is nauseating.
Everybody has started to leave dishes or
trash on Dianas bed. Diana does not seem
to notice. She sleeps on top of the dishes
when she is not watching television or eating spoiled pineapple cake. The garbage,
rotten food, fart, and semen odor, along
with the now permanent smell of burnt
plastic, permeates the house. Diana, I
say. Would you like to go to the farm for
some fresh air with me? Invitations are
acceptable forms of questions and rarely

create confusion. Diana declines the invitation with a shrug then takes a nap.
It is Susans birthday soon. Her birthday seems to be a guarantee. She speaks
about her birthday party. She wants it
to be big; she wants everyone in town
to come. I suspect she has ambitions at
being popular, but maybe shes just a
naturally social person. She talks about
balloons and banquet tables and samovars and candles. Id like it to be a pool
party. Ive been honing my masonry skills
and Im thinking of building a pool in the
basement.
We have a basement? I ask. No one
answers since this is a question Im not
supposed to ask. I wonder where shes
logged hours doing masonry as Ive not
heard of masonry practiced anywhere in
the town, but I know better than to ask.
At the farm I put manure on the tomato
plants that are starting to come up. I dont
know what Im doing. Theres a scoop in a
pile of manure next to the tomato plants,
just as there were seeds the first time I
came, so I think Im just supposed to
dump more manure on every time I come
and that way hours are logged.
Through the corn stalks I see the silver-haired man from the pool. Ah, there
you are, he says. All I want is to be with
you. I assume hes talking to me since Im
the only person at the farm. Urine streams
out from the corn stalks. Ah, the silverhaired man says. Relief.
Tyler Burnetts wife buzzes around the
house finishing her latest mural on the
back terrace. The mural depicts the
Burnett home after its fallen into the
ocean. Its called The Fall of the Burnett
Home. She has buckets and rags and rollers and brushes. She wears her long hair
down. Her face is splattered with paint,
which is something I think every artist
should have on them whenever theyre
working. Tyler Burnetts wife is full of
purpose. It comes across in everything she
does. She says, Child, the baby needs to
be washed today. Have you smelled him? I
can smell him from my wing of the house.
Its putrid. Yes, I say, what a stench,
though I never smell the baby, I only know
he smells because of the flies that swarm
around him. She says, Tonight Ill be
debuting my new mural. Well be dining
in the cliff gazebo with guestsintellectuals and artists, as well as my husbands
colleagues from the plant. Id like the baby
to be quiet. Quiet and clean.
I cover the baby in baby powder. I spray

perfume on the baby. I stick lavender and
rose petals in the babys diaper. I rock the
baby. I give the baby warm bottles with
a thimble of brandy mixed in. I remain
in the babys wing as the guests arrive.
From the nursery window, I watch Tyler
Burnett sit at the table inside the gazebo.
Big men in grey suits like Tylers gesture
with their arms and speak loudly. The artists watch the men in suits. Tyler Burnetts
wife drinks heavily. Caterers serve food
to the guests. After dinner, Tyler Burnett
snorts ketamine on the dining table. The
men in suits nod and gesture and snort
ketamine off the dining table as well. Tyler
Burnetts wife drinks more. One of the
artists knocks over a wine bottle. The bottle rolls off the cliff from the gazebo and
lands in the water. The baby sleeps. The
men in grey suits put stacks of money on
the table. The artists take the money and
stuff it in their pockets. Dessert is served.
Pineapple cake. After dessert, the artists
begin to throw their plates off the cliff into
the ocean. They light their napkins on fire
and toss them over the side of the gazebo,
then they light the tablecloth on fire. They
begin to smash glasses. One of the artists
lights the gazebo on fire. Everyone laughs
as though they are wild. Tyler Burnett
doubles over, slaps his knee, then falls on
the grass and begins to roll around. His
sunglasses stay on perfectly. We all watch
the fire. The baby sleeps.
Someone has burgled our house. They
took the TV, the new lamp, and Horses
computer on which hed been writing a sex
drama. Horse says, What will become of
Vaginal Teeth? Big whoop, Susan says.
Well buy new shit. I can barely pay
rent, I say. Diana calls the police. The
police arrive and they eat fresh pineapple cake from our refrigerator. Horse
wiggles his eyebrows at the female police
officer. He puts music on the boom box.
Diana lies where the TV had been and
cries. Lorry watches Horse and the police
officer grind on each other. Allen reads
a book at the kitchen table. Susan takes
my paints out and begins painting. She
hands me the painting when shes done.
Its me, on the beach, topless, with one
crab pinching my left breast and another
crab crawling into or out of my vagina.
Its you, she says. Susans skill level has
accelerated greatly. The painting is beautiful. Im having a show at the gallery in
town, she says. All of the paintings have
already sold.
94
FIRST PROOF
Im pretty sure I was supposed to have

a birthday, but it has not come. It was supposed to be some time ago, but some time
has passed and I definitely did not have a
birthday.
Susan has completed construction on
the basement pool. I go down to the basement in my swimsuit. There is a large
stack of unused bricks, a trowel, and a
cement mixer. The pool is above ground,
almost more like a tank than a pool. Or
like a pizza oven filled with water. The
structure goes up very close to the basement ceiling so that you have to flatten
your body then scoot in on your back or
stomach in order to get into the water.
Once youre in, there are only about six
inches for your head above the water.
Tyler Burnett has gone on a family vacation. I dont know where he went. With
Tyler Burnett away I spend a lot of time
at the town pool. I swim for hours. The
silver-haired man watches me from a
chaise lounge. I play punchies-and-kickies with Lizzie Olsen. She socks me in the
nose then kicks my stomach above water
in the shallow end. I punch her shoulder.
I kick her knee in. She pummels my ear
with her fist then with her free hand drags
me down by the hair and kicks me in the
neck. I cough and choke. Good game, I
say when I catch my breath. Injured and
unable to swim, I go into the clubhouse.
Inside, the silver-haired man rests naked
on an oxblood leather couch near the pool
table. He is a very large man, very tall; he
takes up the length of the couch. Oh,
he says. To see your face again. Relief.
Please sit. Only for a moment. To be with
you. Ive come so far. I sit in a chair opposite the silver-haired man. I watch him
masturbate. I watch him as he comes. He
rubs his come onto his stomach. Please,
he says. Please lay here. I walk across
the rug and lay on his naked come stomach. It smells of bleach. Its okay, he
says, I do not want you to remember. Just
lay. My nose stops bleeding. Pain leaves
my throat where I was kicked. My skin
sticks to his come. The man begins to cry.
Hes very quiet about it. His stomach only
trembles a little bit. Relief, he says. I
kiss his stomach only once, very lightly,
before going back in the pool.
Tyler Burnett climbs into my bedroom
window late at night. I have work early,
I tell him. Im the only person whos not
gotten a promotion at work. In fact, I only
get coffee and take lunch orders now. Its
After dessert, the artists

begin to throw their
plates off the cliff into the
ocean. They light their
napkins on fire and toss
them over the side of the
gazebo, then they light the
tablecloth on fire. They
begin to smash glasses.
One of the artists lights the
gazebo on fire.
possible Ive been demoted. I think my

boss doesnt like me, maybe because I
dont sleep and look tired at work. I tell my
boss Babysitting and swimming take up
most of my time outside of work, so that
she may understand, but she only says,
Turkey sandwich with cheese. Lorry
masturbates under the blankets on the
bed next to mine. I took a night off of my
vacation to be here, Tyler Burnett says.
Where is your vacation? I say.
Tyler Burnett becomes rigid. He is usually somewhat rigid, but now more so. I
must be going, he says. The baby.
Do you need me to watch him? These
questions are a failing. I should know better. There is no point if I am going to continue to think and act this way. But I cant
stop myself. One quick blow job, Tyler
Burnett says.
Jimmy is no longer at work. Hes singing full-time now and making a record
in town. I see flyers for his concerts. Ive
been cleaning the toilets and emptying the
trash. When Im finished cleaning the toilets I sharpen pencils and dust the ceiling
fans. I water the office plant. I think Ive
been demoted again. A new girl takes the
lunch orders. Shes recently arrived and
lives with roommates by the lake. She goes
around to every desk and says, Lunch?
which is very different than my style, where
Id say, What do you feel like today? or
Tuna again? or Extra ketchup? I can
see now how those kinds of questions lost
me that particular duty.
Susans rented large buffet tables and
the house is filled with balloons for her
birthday party. Everyone is dressed up.
Somehow the only clothing I have left is
my bikini. Id forgotten Id had other clothing at one timeworkout clothes, formal
wear. I have no idea where my formal dress
went. Everyone in town comes to Susans
birthday party, guests spill out onto the
front porch and back lawn. I see Diana in
a swimsuit, headed down to the basement.
Tyler Burnetts wife arrives to the party
wearing one of her wedding dresses, which
can be described as ethereal. Her hair is
done up in a fingers-in-an-electric-socketstyle bun. She is stunning. Apparently she
and Susan are good friends. Susan shows
Tyler Burnetts wife her paintings. Tyler
Burnetts wife nods and claps and is very
animated in her admiration of Susans
paintings. Tyler Burnetts wife sees me
and says, The child, our babysitter. She
comes over to me at the doorway of my
room. I remember houses like this, she
says. Please show me your room. I show

her the three beds lined up in a row. I show
her the paintings I keep under the bed.
Im also growing tomatoes, I tell her.
And Im in charge of caring for the plant
at work.
Well, she says. Thats something.
People dance and drink. Lizzie Olsen
shoots people with nail bullets from her
wooden gun while her parents snort ketamine on the banquet table. Jimmy shows
up in a limo with Cass, who is now his
manager. A stage is set up in the backyard.
Everyone goes outside to watch Jimmy
play. Jimmy does not remember me from
work, but he is familiar with Susan because
theyre part of the same social group.
Outside, I stand near the hydrangea bush
but the silver-haired man is not there. Tyler
Burnett shows up high on ketamine and
we screw under the bed in my room. Do
you need me to sign your permission slip?
Tyler Burnett says before leaving. Im not
in school, I say. I dont want the truancy
officer showing up at my door, he says.
Dont worry, I say. Im not in school.
Im between seventeen and twenty-two.
And I hope to have a birthday.
In the morning, the house is destroyed.
Horse, Allen, Susan, and Lorry sit at the
kitchen table eating cold pizza. Susan,
why do you still live here? You are very
successful, I say. Horse belches then says,
Wheres Diana? She died, Susan
says. When? I ask, How? Susan
sealed her into the pool, Allen says. I
got pretty drunk last night, Susan says.
I wanted to show off my masonry skills.
I didnt know she was in there. By the
time anyone realized it, it was too late and
the quick-drying mortar had dried. She
couldve cried out or something before
I was done. In the backyard, there is a
small headstone with Dianas name on it.
The woman who drives me to work has
finally made her hair appointment. She
got long extensions that were then made
into a hundred little braids. At work I go
to water the plant. I lost my work clothes
at some point, as I did with my workout
clothes and formal wear, so Ive been going
in my bikini. I hardly recognize anyone in
the office anymore. My boss, or someone
who is my superior, approaches me. Your
services are no longer needed, Child, she
says. Has the plant already been watered
today? I say. Your position is being terminated, she says. For watering the
plant, or for cleaning and dusting too? I
ask. You are fired, she says.
After Im fired I go to the farm. My

tomato plant bears no tomatoes. I take a
scoop of manure and dump it on the plant.
That wont help, Lizzie Olsen says from
a hammock. She shoots her nail gun at
me and gets me in my rear ass as I run
away through the corn. I go to the beach
and then I walk up to Tyler Burnetts
house with my rear ass bleeding through
my bikini bottom. Tyler Burnett is at the
plant. Tyler Burnetts wife is conducting
a sance in the Wild Horses dining hall.
Youre late, she says. The baby is in
his wing and you really shouldve been
here hours ago. I had work, I say. I
see Susan and Jimmy sitting at the large
dining hall table waiting for the sance
to continue as I go upstairs to watch the
baby.
Youre such a sweet baby, I say.
The baby throws blocks around. Tyler
Burnetts wife has painted a new mural
in the babys room with the title written
in gold paint at the bottom: Gazebo in
Flames. She has also painted the babys
changing table with a scene that appears
to be me in my bed at home, lying on the
last of the three beds in my room, in my
bikini, staring at the ceiling. Above Tyler
Burnetts wifes signature it says, The
Babysitter at Rest.
I get paid ten dollars an hour to watch
you, I say to the baby. I am not your
mother. I give the baby kisses on his
belly. When is your birthday? I ask him.
He supports himself on his little podium
then falls to the f loor on his rear ass.
When is my birthday? I ask. The baby
swallows blocks. Funny baby! You might
choke! Flies begin to swarm around him.
I change his diaper, which is full of shitcovered blocks and whole tomatoes. I
wash his blocks and the tomatoes, then
I stuff bay leaves and sage and cedar into
his diaper. I cover him in sandalwood oil.
I polish his tooth with baking soda. I put
a tiny bit of mascara on the babys eyelashes. I put clear polish on his fingers and
toes. I put a thimble full of absinthe in his
bottle and wrap him in a sheepskin then
I put his little gold crown on his head. I
rock the baby in the rocking chair, looking out over the cliff. Your fathers good
looks and his property will never be yours
because you will always remain a baby, I
say. It is better this way.
Jen George lives in New York City. She is

currently working on her first collection of
short stories.
Alice Notley
by Robert Dewhurst
Alice Notley is my favorite living poet. To consider her work, in toto,

is to court cerebral and sensory overload. She has published over
thirty-five collections of poetry and prose in a career spanning four
decades, which together display a bedazzling variety of forms, musics,
voices, measures, ideas. A central figure of the New York Schools
precocious second generation, Notley has lived since 1992 in Paris,
France, where she has cultivated an iconoclastic autonomy from any
one poetic school or set of associations. The biographical note in the
back of her most recent book, Negativitys Kiss (Presses Universitaires
de Rouen, 2014), states plainly: At this point I consider myself to be
an internationalist and certainly of my own poetry school . . . As far
as Im concerned my books are the embodiment of everything I am
and think, they are my accomplishment and identity. I am a poet and
little else.
I spoke with Notley ten days after she was awarded the Poetry
Foundations Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime accomplishment.
This award follows a significant symposium on her work, Alette
in Oakland, convened by poets in the San Francisco Bay Area last
October. While Notley thinks little of pat formulas and theoriesI
dont have a poetics, she has said, I think thats bullshit . . . poetics
is an industryshe is a great talker and extempore intellect. What
follows is barely edited from our phone call, verbatim.
Robert Dewhurst
96
FIRST PROOF
R O B E R T D E W H U R S T : When we were e-mailing before

this conversation, you remarked that people rarely ask
you questions, really, about your poetry. What did you
mean?
A L I C E N O T L E Y : I was thinking that they never ask me
about what they personally care about in regard to it.
They usually have an idea about what questions should
be asked and what topics should be covered, but they
never say to me, like, How do you get such-and-such
an effect? Or How did you stay alive all those years?
Those are two different kinds of questions, and no one
ever asks me either kind. So you are permitted to if you
would like to.
R D : Well, in the essays in Coming After [University of
Michigan Press, 2005], youve written so clearly about
things like prosody and voiceabout poetics, a term
I know you consider suspectand Ive also noticed that
youre sometimes asked to repeat yourself. So Ill try not
to do that. As for real poetry questions, I find something
like prosody almost embarrassing to address, because
its so hard to talk about.
A N : Its impossible, unless you use set forms. I tend
to set my own forms. And they usually dont have to
do with how the line is measured, but have more to do
with sectioning poems, and things like that. Sometimes
theyll have to do with a general length of line. The last
few years Ive actually been working with classical
meters, but Im trying not to signal it. I dont want anyone to know.
Prosody is really about your own voice, your own
physiology, your own vibrations. Prosodys about how
objects and voices vibrate, and how theyre packaged,
made compact, but not compact, at the same time
how they spread and become small and then dense. My
second husband, Douglas Oliver, did these experiments
where he put electrodes on peoples throats and got
them to read poems, and then he compared graphs he
got of what it was like for them to read a certain poem
say, by Alexander Pope. The graphs showed the shape
of the poem, because they would always be similar. I
was never very interested in the comparisons, but in the
idea of the raw shape of the voice. That was his idea,
that prosody is what you see on these voice graphs. The
rise and fall of the voice. A great poet is somehow in
control of that and makes it orderly, and when its disordered is actually in control of the disorder as well. And
thats impossible to talk about.
R D : But in your essay Voice, while you consider the
relationship between a poets poem voice and person
voice, you dont reveal how you discovered your own
reading voice. Its very swift.
AN:
Its always been the same.
RD:
I know! Even though the books are so different.
AN:
Its always been the same, no matter what my style
97 LITERATURE ALICE NOTLEY
has been like, no matter how old I am. I remember my

first reading: I was invited by Ted [Berrigan] to read at
Yale, and I read in a kind of chapel. There were hardly any
people there. A few people who later became Language
poets. Ted was teaching them. In a class that Bill Berkson
had done the previous semester. There was a reading
series, and I read with Tom Veitch. It was my very first
reading and I didnt have that many poems. I remember
rehearsing for the reading; I was twenty-five, perhaps.
I rehearsed and rehearsed, and I knew exactly how the
poems were supposed to sound, I knew what my voice
was supposed to be like. And I was somewhat dramatic
I read like a person standing on a stage projecting voice
and feeling, but shaping it all at the same time. Ive never
changed from being that kind of reader.
The speed was part of my own voice, but its part of
what I do in the line, and its part of where I come from,
which is California, where you are. Its something Doug
told me was an American thing. I can keep my throat open
for a very long period of time in a line. You use letters
unconsciously, automatically, to keep your throat open,
and you keep going, you keep talking, and youre not
caught by the letters that make, I think its called, a glottal stop. You dont use those letters, you use all the other
onesand you can get faster and faster as you do this.
I had also had musical training, so I could do the sound
of the keyboard and I knew what it was likeand I knew
what it was like to match your voice to Bach or to some
nineteenth-century composer. I understood exactly what
Frank OHara was doing when I encountered his work,
and how it was that sort of thing as well. Although when
he read aloud, he didnt read as fast as I did, because he
was from the East and I was from the West.
R D : Thats interesting. Ive done a lot of work on John
Wieners, from Boston, and in his best readings he has a
lovely, slow lilt.
A N : He was very Elizabethanhe made that sound.
I was teaching a workshop about seven years ago, at
Poets House, and no one in the class knew who he was,
which was amazing; he disappeared from the radar. But
hes one of my continuing influences, and its nice to
have him to myself.
R D : You studied piano. Heres one of my favorite images
of yours, from the early poem Desert for All of Music
to Take Place [1979]: Inside me a person is playing the
piano perfectly / While I play notes. Even though your
poetry is so musical, I sometimes hear another layer
thats unmusical; an undercurrent, maybe, that tries to
twist or upturn the music. Is that just the variable foot?
Does that sound right to you?
AN:
No. Can you say a little more about it?
R D : Im thinking of how in Reason and Other Women

[Chax Press, 2010], for instance, the poems become
denser and more difficult as the book goes onisnt
the music altered?
A N : Well, it becomes more orderly, and I was fighting

it all the time. I was fighting the order. Im not sure Im
always doing that, but I was definitely doing it in Reason
and Other Women, because I was trying to find out
what my mind was like. But what my mind was doing
was reaching out for cadences that it already knew, and
that was the only way that it could make sense. Music
is the only way you can make a poem make sense. But
you fight the music sometimes, because if you give into
it, you tend to be giving into somebody elses sound. I
was slightly giving into the Gertrude Stein sound, and it
was really bothering me, because I knew that wasnt the
structure of my mind. But in her work she had made a
really wonderful structure... Shed presented a structure
for her mind, and a very plausible structure that stood in
for how the mind works. Its very seductive, and its also
the sound of CaliforniaCalifornia and France together,
you know, which is me. I had a lot of trouble with that.
Then I just kind of gave in finally and let it do it, and the
poems became more and more structured. Then I found
out more things, which is what happens when you give
in to formthings that you would never think to say
come out of you, and then you have them, theyve been
brought to light.
R D : Does that come out of form or music? Or are they
really the same thing?
A N : It comes out of the struggle with form. So I always
have a struggle with it. The first really formal poems I
wrote were 165 Meeting House Lane [C Press, 1971].
I wrote them under the influence of Edwin Denbys sonnets. His sound was utterly unlike mine, and I knew this.
He wrote in short lines and he had a very clipped way of
speakingI knew what he sounded like, and there were
these poems. His poems present to you a method, for
perceiving the material world as you are moving around
inside of it. I was quite caught by that, and also by their
brevity. I could get the form that wayI could look at
things and sort of translate them into something like
what Edwin did. And the more I did that, the more I surprised myself by what I was saying. Partly you write for
that surprise.
R D : Yes, and theres also a playful, self-propelling effect in
your poems, that comes out of soundhow often a new
word will be one that was nesting or hiding inside an earlier word, and this will then permute into further words,
and so on. The language always sort of leapfrogs over
itself. Your poems are filled with that kind of surprise too.
A N : Well, thats what poetrys like! Thats the most basic
description of how it works, I think. You hear yourself
say things, and they keep coming up. That was one of
the things that Dougs graphs showed. The rise and fall
of the voice, its intonation patterns, repeated. You catch
something, you catch a vocal shape, and the way to
make form is to repeat it, but maybe a little bit differently: so therell be an arch, but then in the next line an
arch and then a dip and then a little arch, and then in the
next line maybe the first arch will be a little lower and the
98
FIRST PROOF
second one a little higher. So it wont be too boring... and

so you can keep yourself amused while youre writing!
RD:
Well, put that way, it sounds exactly like piano.
AN:
Yes, it is.
R D : Going back to classical forms, one thing I love about

Negativitys Kiss [Presses Universitaires de Rouen,
2014] is its tone of malediction. Can you speak about
thatthat Alice Notley tone of negation, contradiction,
invective? It feels very classical to me. It reminds me of
Archilochus or Catullus.
A N : That book is influenced by Wieners. I dont know
how to talk about it exactly, but Im in touch with his
vocabulary. Something about how his vocabulary is
polysyllabic got into the poem. That kind of pushes it
along, and that helps me with malediction. Its that kind
of diction that helps you do thatits elegance that helps
you curse well.
R D : What you call garble in the book, the surfeit of
information were now bombarded with
A N : Garble is the web. Its everything, but somehow
when I invented that word for all of media and gossip
and telepathy, I thought it applied especially well to the
Internet. I wrote the book in 20052006, and the Internet
wasnt quite what it is now. But I still knew what it was
the garble.
R D : Was your turn toward longer and denser forms in
the early to mid-90ssomewhat synchronous with the
advent of the Interneta response, on some level, to this
new condition of information overload?
A N : No, it had to do with two things. One is that Ive
always preferred reading long poems to shorter poems
I really like to read Chaucer, Dante, Milton. In the 70s
I had piles of books of long poems on my desk and I
really enjoyed reading them. I really enjoyed Troilus and
Cressida. I keep wanting to create the effect of that pleasure, to make it exist again in poetry. I also think long
poems do plot and story better than prose does.
The other reason had to do with the fact of the computer, but I got rid of that slightly. When I first started
writing at the computer, it seemed as if I could write
endlesslyso fast and so many words would come out
of me! Reason and Other Women, and this forthcoming book called Benediction, and Alma, or the Dead
Women [Granary Books, 2006], these were all written
at the computer, with no notebook. Since then Ive been
writing in notebooks again, but I still seem to write very
much at length. But Im lonely! I write.
I wrote The Descent of Alette [Penguin, 1996] in
notebooks and typed it on the typewriter. But it was
written with the typewriter in mind; I always knew
what it was going to look like, and my notebook and the
typewriter were hand-in-hand. Then I wrote Mysteries
of Small Houses [Penguin, 1998] by hand, and when I
wrote Disobedience [Penguin, 2001] I would write in a

notebook, when I woke up, in bed. After about five days
I would have one of those poems and I would type it up.
I had a computer then, but I knew what it was going to
look like at the point when I got it onto the computer
page. The computer at that point was still like a typewriter. And then in Reason and Other Women it became
the computerit became the keyboard, the piano keyboard is what it became.
RD:
How do you write presently?
A N : I write in the morning and it doesnt take very long,

and then I spend the rest of the day fretting and reading
and going for walks. I jog. Im sort of immersed in the
world that appears as what Ive written each morning.
Sometimes its not very many lines at all, but Im always
working on it. Then sometimes in the afternoon I do
something very obsessive about it. Im never quite sure
how its going to turn out, but I have to have the moment
in the morning when Im with it, or I just feel terrible for
the rest of the day. I dont have a life! This is my life. But
thats probably not true, since if I had to describe my life,
I would be the one person who probably has the life,
but it doesnt seem to me like I have itit just seems to
me like I have this writing experience, and thats all Ive
ever had.
RD:
Youve made poetry synonymous with life.
AN:
Something like that, yes!
R D : You wrote Negativitys Kiss in 20052006, and it

came out last year. It seems like youre always sitting on
a lot of manuscripts, from all eras: Benediction is coming
out this year, and thats fifteen years old, and last year
you published Manhattan Luck [Hearts Desire Press],
which collects four previously uncollected texts from
the 70s, and theres another book forthcoming next
year, Certain Magical Acts. How do you make decisions
about what to publish and when, or is it all contingency
and chance?
A N : Its mostly contingency and chance. It has a lot to
do with who asks me for a book and what they want. I
just did a set of proofs of Benediction and its 274 pages.
Penguin would simply not do anything that length. But
Joshua Marie Wilkinson, who edits Letter Machine,
asked me specifically for a book like thathe told me he
wanted a book like Alma or something like that. And I
said I had one. So I sent it to him and he liked it.
Its a very complex book. And its also a very emotional thing for me, because my husband became sick
in the middle of it, and the whole second part of it goes
with his illness. He died right as I finished. Its been
difficult for me to face the book, and thats one of the
reasons why its been sitting there for fifteen years. Its
very experimental, on the other hand, so theres a lot of
weightits very heavy for me.
Certain Magical Acts, however, is a book that I
didnt expect to make. Most of my books now are each
a separate project, but this one is composed of these

pieces I wrote between 2005 and 2011, these sort of
middle-sized works that didnt seem to be turning out
to be longer books, but on the other hand were really
good. Theres something in it thats like a novella, like a
spy novel, and there are these two works that sort of told
me to write them in the summer of 2010theyre each
about twelve pages longand theres a series I wrote in
2009 called Voices thats actually quite long. Oh, you
published some of those in Animal Shelter. There are two
or three sonnet-y works, and there are several two-page
worksand they all fit together. Theyre all magical acts.
R D : In your earlier poetry theres a great sense of wonderevery experience is a mystical / one, you once
wrote. Are the poems in Certain Magical Acts a return
to some of that sense of wonder?
A N : I dont know if they have that sense of wonder, but
it seemed miraculous to me that I wrote them. Each of
them came from nowhere. I didnt try for them, exactly.
Voices went through some changes. It was once interwoven with a kind of fictional prose diary, which I took
out because I thought the sequence was better without it. So Im not sure that those poems no, they are;
theyre magical acts too. I can never tell, if I write something fast, if it works. These ten-to-twelve-page poems,
they came out of nowhere, it was like voices came up
from under the ground and said to me: Write these
words. I wrote each of those poems quite quickly. One
of them is called I Went Down There, and I read it a lot
now at readings. Its full of all these voices saying different things. When Im writing a poem like that, or like
Voices, its never clear to me where my voice and the
voices that are being dictated to me overlap and separate. I get very queasy in there, like I dont know if Im
being myself or somebody else. And Im wanting to be
totally the other person.
In the introduction to Close to me & Closer [O Books,

1995], you say something to the effect that your fathers
voice upstaged yours; that his poems in the book were
better than the poems written in your voice.
RD:
A N : In that sequence they probably were. His voice in

that work is more interesting and quirky than mine. But,
that was quite magical, to hear his voice like that.
R D : Besides music and voice, theres a lot of color in
your poems. Theres especially a lot of light and lightnessit makes perfect sense to me that your selected is
titled Grave of Light [Wesleyan University Press, 2006].
Would you talk a little about color in your poetry, or that
sense of lightness? The word light reappears in so
many poems.
A N : Well, it comes from the desert, but it comes from
the New York School first. Then I went back to the desert to get it and realized things about light from both of
those places. Paris has no light at all; Paris is a terrible
place for light.
The color part is something I picked up from Ted,

when I first connected with him. He would go into his
class and tell people to write poems, and he would say
things like Put some colors in your poems! Or Let
your poems have a color scheme! And I thought that
was a really great idea, so when I wrote 165 Meeting
House Lane I put so many colors inI just put in every
color I saw! Im very color sensitive, but I was also looking at a lot of art at the time and I was educating myself
about art and poetry.
New York has just the most wonderful light, thats
why all the painters live there, because you can paint
in that light. Theres no light like that anywhere else on
earth. But in the desert theres this vast, sort of killing
lightthis amazing light, and thats the light I grew up
in. I write one kind of poem when I write out of the city,
and I write another kind of poem when I write out of
the desert. When I write out of the desert everything
is very clear. When I write out of the city, it would be
clear, but everything is going so fast that youre not sure
if its clear or notyou know, its clear like a Duchamp
or something, like the Nude Descending a Staircase.
When I write out of Paris theres just no light and I have
to manufacture it all the time. But I still say what color
things are.
R D : The city poems are much noisier than the desert
poems too, of course, in terms of sound. That poem
I mentioned earlier, Desert for All of Music to Take
Place, has a beautiful serenity or stillness.
A N : The desert poems are more contemplative. Although
I started Alma in the desert, because I had the basic
dream for it when I was in Needles. Almas Forehead,
probably the longest piece in the book, that was what I
wrote first, and it came out of the desert.
I remember writing Desert for All of Music to Take
Place and it felt really good. I wrote it in New York,
but I would always go back to Needles in the summer,
and I was sort of going outward toward the desert in
order to write itI was thinking about Needles. Have
you ever been to Needles? Its right where you cross the
river from Arizona into California. Its the first town in
California on Route 66.
R D : I havent, but I always think of you when I drive by
the signs out there for Needles. I like how in Tell Me
Again [Immediate Editions, 1981] you write about your
dad answering the telephone at the auto supply store,
saying Needles Autohow this nonsense phrase was
one of your first poetic delights.
A N : Thats how culture views poetry, as inessential. But

poetry is inessential is only meant to be ironic. This
womans name is Ines Geronimo. Shes the last one
of her kind, shes the only one who doesnt surrender.
Geronimo wasnt the last one of his kind, but he was, in
the sense that he didnt surrender. Like me. But the name
makes her also be possibly Latina. Everyone in the book
has a slippery identity, and theres a lot of slippery racial
identity in the book, because thats what its like now.
R D : I thought about that reading Secret I D [The
Catenary Press, 2013]. When you wrote Mysteries of
Small Houses you were very interested in essential identity, what you called basic I, sort of going completely
against the grain of the fussing over first-person lyric in
the 90s. But the sense of identity in your work has since
become much more scrambled, or slippery, as you say.
A N : Well, outer identity is very slipperyno one can
keep hold of it right now. Inner identity, I think, is quite
graspable, but its indescribable because its a mystical entity. Its what the Hindus call self, when they talk
about whatever they call their mystical experienceI
cant remember right nowits an experience of self. Oh
yes, the self is the atman. It is said to be about the size
of your thumb, or you should concentrate on it with that
image in mindI think its in the chest.
R D : Right. Its a mystical experience, but not necessarily
an ecstatic one.
A N : Well, it can be, but its this other way of looking
at self. The word has mostly been used over the last
twenty, thirty years as a superficial thing, as the superficial cultural entity. So when people are always trying
to prove that there is no self, theyre trying to prove that
entity is superficialwell, it is, but thats not the self!
Thats just that self, this other self. The word can be
used in a lot of different ways.
I found the whole dialogue about self in the 90s to
be really boring. When people were talking about how
there was no self they didnt mean self, they wanted to
say soul, but they were too prissy to say it. You know,
you cant say soul, so you say self, but the minute
you say self youre in trouble, because self has a lot
of different meanings, and you get confused as to what
youre talking about. Then you just have this really stupid conversation going on.
RD:
An even uglier word is subjectivity!
Yeah! What the hell does that mean? What do any

of these words mean? Well, you have to sound smart,
and then you can get your degree, and then you can get
your job.
AN:
Needles Auto. My mother did it too. She worked

there for a long time after he died, and my brother did
too. They always said Needles Auto.
AN:
R D : The poet character in Negativitys Kiss is named

Ines for inessential. According to the dystopic logic
of the book, poetry is inessential. But in Dsamre [O
Books, 1995] you wrote Poetry is the species
100 FIRST PROOF
R D : In Alice Ordered Me to Be Made [The Yellow Press,

1976] theres a great proclamation: I hate saviors I love
heroes / the older artists of the / messy lives. Can you
say something about how the lives that poets lead now
are more boring than in the past?
THE WIND
It to take; or was it to be unpacked?
Packed it might signify death. The wind
Death the wind calculating your lesson
hast thou learned a thing? The name of
a thing. I am still defiant, of the presumption, as articulated. I passed him
in his velveteen jacket worn elbows. The
enculturated elbows of Death need patches.
Do you want my job? he said, for you are brave.
And you are the one different one... How do
you know? In your sleep I approach you
and you breathe on me, as if I were an object,
observable malice. I mean, he said, when you
die, thats when you can be me. Spy then thief
always the one left; but then theres more.
Im too wild, I say; Im an American. Maybe Im leavingfor where? bankrupt in
June, lost identity, lost shortcomings.
You have to really be broken in order

to be a poet. Its a very bad thing
to tell a young person, but its true.
Poetry comes out of all the places
where you break.
A N : Everybody wants me to say that! Its true, theyre
very boring, everyones lives. Everyones too much
inside of these institutions. They should get out of them,
and they should lead messy, sorrowful lives. And find
out what everybody really feels like, and find out how
to cope with everything. You have to really be broken in
order to be a poet. Its a very bad thing to tell a young
person, but its true. Poetry comes out of all the places
where you break.
R D : Fanny Howe has a small piece of writing about this,
how some poetry comes from devastating personal
experiences. She remarks that such poetry has given
rise to the myth of the poet and writer as victim, lonely
voice, fool and prophet. And she just writes, This myth
has some foundation.
A N : Theres a lot of truth to it. It isnt romantic to suffer,
but you wont know anything if you dont.
RD:
Were drugs ever an influence on your writing?
A N : I used to write quite a bit on small amounts of

speed, because it kept me going, actually. You know, I
was raising my children, making dinner, trying to hold
everything together on very small amounts of money.
There was speed around, it was just cheap pills. I took
cheap pills for a number of years, but I also did dangerous things. It says on the first page of In the Pines
[Penguin, 2007] that I got Hepatitis C from shooting
speed in 1970. Thats true. I did do that for about a year
and it was kind of horrible. Then I stopped and I forgot about it. It was something that seemed to go with
what it was like to be alive at the end of the 60s, during
the Vietnam War. Its part of how I think of that period.
Everything that was going on socially and politically was
very unpleasant, and I was doing something unpleasant
to get through it.
I tried a lot of different drugs, but I was never as interested in any of them as I was in poetry. I didnt need
anything in order to write, and the person that Im probably the most like in relation to drugs is Allen Ginsberg,
who tried everything but was never addicted to anything. Because he was always on some other mission,
you know? Although he talked about drugs all the time
and was always talking about legalizing pot and things
like that, he was on the mission of writing his poetry and
leading his life and being himself. Drugs fed into it, but
he wasnt very interested in them really.
R D : Did you find that taking speed, for instance, modulated your music?
102 FIRST PROOF
A N : It made my memory really good. They give it to

kids now and then theyre good students, right? If you
dont use it in large quantities its quite good for you,
actually. Joanne Kyger has a line about how often these
stimulants just graze the surface. I found that that was
truethat stimulants just graze the surface. When Ted
died I stopped taking it, I never took it again. Except once
with Doug. Doug decided when he was like sixty-two
that he needed to take speed in order to start a book. He
wrote the first chapter of Whisper Louise on speed. We
got some from someone and we were both just too old
to take it. It was horrifying! But I stopped using anything
after Ted died, except I was given tranquilizers. I didnt
drink for a number of years, and then I drank again, and
then I stopped drinking. I havent had anything to drink
for... twelve years? I sometimes get addicted to things in
very tiny quantities, the way women sometimes dolike
theyll take a quarter of something every day.
RD:
Its almost homeopathic.
A N : I do things like that. But mostly Im not interested.

On LSD you see certain things, but you only need to take
it a couple times to have the experience. On LSD I saw
that everything was in motion and that we have in our
perceptual equipment something that makes us keep
it still. Weve decided we dont want to see that its in
motion, but if you take LSD you see that its all moving.
And thats been very important to me to have actually
seen it with my own eyes. I can think about that forever
if I want to. But I would never take LSD again!
One time, Allen and I think it was Gregory [Corso]
and Harry Smith all took ecstasy together, when they
were in their sixties. Allens heart started going pittypat, pitty-pat, pitty-patit had speed in it and he didnt
know. You get too old for drugs, unless youre Herbert
Huncke.
R D : In an old interview by Judith Goldman in the Poetry
Project Newsletter, you said: I always want to write
poems that anyone can understand. Theres a line in
Secret I D that goes I write for those who dont read
my poems. My last question is, what is your sense of
audience currently, either living or dead?
A N : I like that line, I write for those who dont read my
poems. Thats my sense of what I do, that I write for
those who dont read my poems. Im trying to change
their lives, Im trying to change their minds, Im trying
to change them. Im trying to give them something that
they might not have, or speak for them even. Im writing
for them in that wayto and for. I think theyre with me.
Its a huge job to be a poet. Its the most essential thing
there is. In terms of essence, its very essential. Poetry
is the species. I would probably emphasize the is. All
of our perceptual equipment is geared toward seeing us
as forms, as compact forms operating on many levels
thats like a poem. Thats who we are, thats how we
see. Thats what there is, really: theres poetry. Prose
is very, very flat. But were not flat. Were dense and
layered.
Jimmie Durham
The Center of the World
(The Direction of my Thought)
Direct from my New Home in Eurasia
(Visit)
Here is a word you might like,
In French:
IN VI
BI LI
SI
TE
Invisibilit
Drawn by the stone called
Graphite across white paper
By your/my hand, it is a pretty word,
And looks like and sounds like visit.
It looks to be
(No words look not I look)
(See, if you receive these words
Through the front of your head;
That is visually, instead of laterally;
[And I want to be on your side]
You see the ncessit of a, _a comma_
To see: Words look not, I look)
It looks to be jumping quietly up,
And only half-way back down: invisibilit.
On arrival all my words were already
(All ready [read]) arranged carefully.
I knew what I intended to say.
I had rehearsed well and knew
Rules of poetics and discursive.
Still do; the longer I am away
The more memory can create.
(For example, when I hear your story
It sounds familiar, and the next day
I imagine I had happened in it.)
Surely you must know this rhyme
Is not mine - - - (either):
I might say, Now we see through a glass, darkly,
But at home I will see my own reflection.
You will know how long I had planned
To say it.
103 JIMMIE DURHAM
This happens often on television:

One guy holds a gun, and says, Give me
One good reason why I should not kill you!
I always cry, because of course he knows
I know no reason:
He just wants me to watch tomorrow.
In the Orient, I mean, in Portugal;
That is only to say, in the Far East
Of the Atlantic - - In the East Atlantic Ocean
Close to the end of the world
At one time, in Portugal;
Jos Saramago wrote, Do you say I am lying?
No, he answered, when precision limits us
We choose words which lie for us.
Where shall we go, to the netherworld,
Like Orpheus? (Give me one good reason
Why I should not kill you!) No, I mean
Like Gilgamesh; Orpheus is sentimental.
Dont look back! He says. Too silly
(And who was that guy in the labyrinth?
I am at a point where I cannot find
A reason for my words, nor the thread
Of the discourse of course)
Suppose I were to say, to write (And you
Know that I have been planning
To say that for several lonely nights)
That I write these strings of old words
In the Netherlands?
Wait. I am writing (saying words
Inside my head so that my hand
Across the page will draw toward
Some other person irrevocably lost
In the future) in the city of Middelburg,
Where the telescope was invented!
Middelburg, The Netherlands
October 1995
Apocalypsis,
or
The Dragon in Her Cave
Calypso is the leading technology platform for cross-asset trading,

Accounting, processing and enterprise risk management.
Key words:

Cross asset
Enterprise
Accounting
Trading
Technology
Risk
Management
Certainly

Verbosity
Necessarily hopeful verbosity.

Marco Koch, Luis Varela, Jae Geun Kim, Jung Dae Kim, Francisco HernndezNuo, Stephanie Simonds, Carlos Castorena, Claudia Vianna, Joel Elmquist, Yury
Morozov, Pasko Rakic, Ingo Bechmann, Michael Cowley, Klara Szigeti-Buck,
Marcelo Dietrich, Xiao-Bing Gao, Sabrina Diano & Tamas Horvath
Published an article in which they wrote that,
Hypothalamic pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons promote satiety.
Cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1R) is critical for the central regulation of food intake.
Here we test whether CB1R-controlled feeding in sated mice is paralleled by
Decreased activity of POMC neurons. We show that chemical promotion of CB1R
Activity increases feeding, and notably, CB1R activation also promotes neuronal
Activity of POMC cells. This paradoxical increase in POMC activity was crucial for
CB1R-induced feeding, because designer-receptors-exclusively-activated-byDesigner-drugs (DREADD)-mediated inhibition of POMC neurons diminishes,
Whereas DREADD-mediated activation of POMC neurons enhances CB1R-driven
Feeding. The POMC gene encodes both the anorexigenic peptide -melanocyteStimulating hormone, and the opioid peptide -endorphin. CB1R activation
Selectively increases -endorphin but not -melanocyte-stimulating hormone
Release in the hypothalamus, and systemic or hypothalamic administration of the
Opioid receptor antagonist naloxone blocks acute CB1R-induced feeding. These
Processes involve mitochondrial adaptations that, when blocked, abolish CB1RInduced cellular responses and feeding. Together, these results uncover a
Previously unsuspected role of POMC neurons in the promotion of feeding by
Cannabinoids.
104 FIRST PROOF
Key words:

Article
Satiety
Another guy wrote that,

Seasonal variation in box-office revenue is a statistical illusion:
If you release blockbusters in July and dogs in January,
Box-office is almost certainly a key word there.
It surely may not refer to an office of boxes.
My feelings are indescribable.
Many of my feelings are indescribable.
The physiotherapist asked me to describe my pain on a scale of one to ten,
And if it was sharp, dull or pulsing.
It seems there may be no way
Of moaning eloquently
Yet many man-made musical instruments
Are capable
In the right hands.
Almost everything in the world is light-years away
From us.
But heavy,
Weightlessly insupportably heavy are the years
Passed and many splinters stay too near.
Every grain of sand
Finds its way to our salad bowls.
Jimmie Durham has been an artist, essayist, and poet since the early 1960s. During
the 70s he was a leading political activist of
the American Indian Movement and founder
of the International Indian Treaty Council,
as well as its representative to the United
Nations. Recent solo exhibitions include
Venice: Objects, Work and Tourism at
the Fondazione Querini Stampalia Carlo
Scarpa Area in Venice, Here at the Center
at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin,
and a show at the Serpentine Gallery in
London. His books include Poems That
Do Not Go Together (Wiens Verlag and
Edition Hansjrg Mayer, 2012) and the
volume of collected essays Waiting To Be
Interrupted (Mousse Publishing, 2014).
105 JIMMIE DURHAM
Julie Carr
from What do
we want to know
and how far are
we willing to
go to get it?:
An epistolary
novella
Dear J.
Ive been meaning to write to you for
some time, though I am sure you are
surprised to hear from me. I think were
not much alike. At the time of our closest
connection, you were tall, narrow, and
quiet in a long coatvery elegant. I was
distraught but I doubt I looked it, practicing handstands on subway platforms. I
hung out with the one angled between us
and you did not, but actually, one could
say it was the other way aroundhe
went home with me and thought of you.
For this reason I couldnt speak to you
when we ran into each other at events, I
wouldnt look at you unless it was always,
and then I did, across rooms shut tight
against traffic moving models and billboards, freezing them in air. I thought
you beautiful in ways I could not be. I
also thought that you were cruel. But it
wasnt cruelty you carried but an irresistible sense of tragedy (it has to be mentioned). There was something about a
bridge: the two of you walking across it
in the wind. I think it was there, on that
bridge, that you revealed your motherless status
Dear J.
I write in the morning: a fly and a glare.
And I try to show you what is inside
myselfa freak, a foible, a mental illness
if you like.
In light like this, I should try better
to reveal my motives, but Im not sure I
know them to show them. Is it that you
should have been my daughter rather
than my rival? If we were hit by the same
strong wind, I should have been the
one to protect you? No tears. I admit
I hide out in the office, the x confessed
once the two of you were finally off in
the City of Magnificent Distances. How
and why did this communication occur?
I report this not in order to hurt you, but
to reveal to you what hides. I am trying
only to uncover whats been concealed for
so long, and if I happen to express contempt, even disgust, you will forgive me?
But J., everything you read is a reflectionand so you will need to forgive not
me, but yourself.
Today my ten-year-old daughter told
me, while doing some Lady Gaga moves
in the kitchen, that she had just two things
to look forward to: owning a credit card
and sitting in the front seat. She has other
106 FIRST PROOF
things to look forward to, worthy things,

as you and I know, or as I hope you know,
because I cannot tell, looking at your photos, what you know, which is why, maybe,
I am writing. Nothing, writes Flaubert
in the mind of Emma Bovary, was worth
the trouble of seeking it; everything was
a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom,
every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and
the sweetest kisses left upon your lips
only the unattainable desire for a greater
delight. Maybe I just want to prove to
you that she is wrong.
There is no harm in speaking of the
past, for the past does not exist, is nothing, less than the light that falls toward
my face. The future, however, is a red
fox, running right past me, headed for the
dark hole where it lives. Or else its like the
flush in Emma Bovarys cheeks: fleeting,
alluring, and unsure of its cause.
Dear J.
We looked at one another across a classroom. We were in a soft box. Were in one
now. Theres a lot that doesnt happen.
We arent in a field or a river. We arent
naked. We are not the children of communists. Nor are we loved by religious
grandmothers. Our light is ugly. We are
worried about words. We dont touch one
anothers wrists. J., I know nothing of the
party happening in your head, I can see
only your body, and that only in my mind.
I dont cause myself physical pain. This
is better theater, more believable, stronger. Theres water in the bottle and charge
in the machine. Ink on a piece of paper.
I have no requirement to speak of anything in particular. I ask you to look back
at me, and thats all. Someone else might
make a play about his father. Someone
else might sing born to be wild. I do
this; and if I happen to express adoration
for an absence, you will forgive me? You
will forgive yourself.
J.
Today I read about the inventor of chemical warfare. I read about chlorine gas,
mustard gas and the gas that damages,
not your body, but your brain. When you
are exposed to this gas you are stripped of
your will to participate in even the most
mundane tasks. You hear the groans
of others, but you cannot hear yourself groaning. You see that they are in
pain, but you cannot feel your own pain.

The colors of the world become all one
color. Thought dissolves into a fluid form
belonging to anyone.
J., its been a bad day full of semi-enclosed

spaces and too much parental guidance.
You do not have to like me, but think of
me as an eager affection fixed against reason, as something that resists.
The secrets under the hat are a kind of
fuel for me, driving this incessant interest
in letters. Every day resolves itself in language, like insects running across snow,
or like the premonitions of Philip Glass
heard through a pillow.
Words are talismans. Ive never been so
happy/frightened/sad.

Dear J.
I escape the pains of the present by reexamining the pains of the past. As I rode
the bus home from another Xs apartmentI was almost a childI didnt yet
drivemy body sometimes involuntarily
jumped, as if either sex or shame created
spasms in my nerves. This was not pleasant, but it wasnt unpleasant either. Like
lying, it created in me the feeling, false I
now know, that I was following my own
fate, a fate I couldnt control but which
would one day reveal its logic to me.
Did you have that sense too when you
turned as panoramic as an air raid and I
couldnt get out from under?
And were you to blame?
There are, in life, competing passions.
And perhaps we choose which ones to
live in, or perhaps we only narrate the
past.
Later I would try to imagine my own
bad behaviors as motivated by something
other than the desire for revenge, a sort of
freedom. But there was no other deeper
motive than this desire for freedom won
through cruelty. What had been done to
me, what had been done to my mother,
this I would now do to others. As if all
men were one man and all women me.
J., all the ways in which Ive hurt others
have made those others more beautiful
to me.
I know exactly how that sounds. But
this has been true for a dozen years, and
was true before then, though I didnt
know it, and might also be true for you.
J.:
For a while I found it only an amusement,
imagining your pristine home and history
books. Or picturing you with an infant on
some Italian island like H.D. Then something changed and that scarf you always
wore took root in my mind. I was afraid
that crying on the subway or puncturing
your body with needles, you had become
the performance artist I always wanted
to be, had settled down in Germany or
somewhere else where ugliness is a virtue. I imagined taking up smoking and
walking along the Muddy River with you
at dusk. I thought about sitting on the
hood of a car with you like its the seventies again, a cat in the cars shade sleeping
until the sun shifts. This isnt an erotic
narrative, but it is a passion. In the basement of a piano showroom you beat your
drums. I dont say much. I tie my shoe. I
am in your debt.
I have discovered this need to break
something, even if its only a houseflys
wing. Sex is too see-through to make me
real. Narrowing my eyes, tightening my
jawthis is my way of loving you and its
gone on for decades. Ive kept my pulse
pretty steady through all of it, except
when I think of you calling me by my full
name. Its like this:
1. I have become for you
2. If I claim never to have admired
you, I will lose the part of myself
that misses you
3. And so will miss that part of myself
Dear J.
I write again, after months of nothing,
on this the first day of a new year, with
a confession: I allowed my daughter and
her friends to watch Psycho at her slumber
party. I had no guilt, I wanted them, for
reasons I didnt at the time think about,
to see that mother in the basement: her
empty skull propped on her clothed and
rotting corpse.
This mistake, if it was a mistake, has
cost my daughter at least one friendthat
is, if the friends mother has anything to
do with it. I wanted to shout, not at that
mother, but at the world, maybe at you:
better that they see the rotting corpse
of the mother than the dozens of fleshy
girls parading themselves before panels of
judging sales associates and friends
in Say Yes to the Dresswhere they
submit, as I had, to the regime of selfimprovement with the goal of acquiring

the male, the children, who will then all
be submitted to similar rituals of dressing, redressing, presenting and representing themselves before ever widening
circles of judges for ever more violent
reconstructions.
That, J., is the true horror show. The

dead mother is only all of ours, the dead
mother we carry from room to room, we
dress her and speak to her, we shout at
and whisper to hershe must be dragged
from the basement into the light of day,
not so we can finally bury her, but so we
can finally admit our love for her, how we
care for her, how we speak in her voice,
how finally, we become her.
Julie Carrs most recent poetry book is Think

Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the
author of Rag, 100 Notes on Violence,
Sa r a h O f Fr ag ment s a nd L i ne s ,
Equivocal, and Mead: An Epithalamium.
She is the founder of Counterpath Press,
teaches at the University of Colorado at
Boulder, and lives in Denver. Objects from
a Borrowed Confession is forthcoming from
Ahsahta in 2016.
MFA
The
in CREATIVE WRITING
Fiction.
Poetry.
Creative Nonfiction.
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight. And let that page
come out of youThen, it will be
TRUE.
Langston Hughes from Theme for English B
True Writing.
hamline.edu/WriteTrue15
NEW FROM NEW DIRECTIONS
OREO
FRAN ROSS
Oreo has snap and whimsy to burn.

Its a nonstop outbound flight to a
certain kind of readerly bliss. Simply
flat-out fearless and funny and sexy
and sublimeits time is now.
Dwight Garner
The New York Times
Powered by Yiddish, neologisms,
ten-dollar words, and jive talk, Oreo,
Fran Rosss scabrous, shrewd satire of
race, religion, and sex, often threatens to jump out of the readers hands
with its irresistible logophilia.
Melissa Anderson, Bookforum
A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling,
and hilarious. Ross novel, with its
Joycean language games and keen
social critique, is as playful as it is
profound. Criminally overlooked. A
knockout.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
vancouverartbookfair.com
Presented by
Project Space
17
18 10 2015
12
06PM
BOOKS
MAGAZINES
ZINES
PRINT EPHEMERA
TALKS
PERFORMANCES
ARTIST PROJECTS
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street
GEIST
Fa c t + Fi c t i o n
COUNTERNARRATIVES
JOHN KEENE
Counternarratives is an extraordinary work of literature. John Keene

is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer.
Christine Smallwood, Harpers
Formally varied, mold-breaking, and
deeply political. Any search for innovation in this years U.S. fiction should
start here.
Christian Lorentzen
New York Magazine
North of America
se e i la k es, o r ey e s ?
Or, The Ambiguities
Karen Weiser
th i s is th e way we ey e s
cl ear the e n t ering
Distance Decay
Cathy Eisenhower
Richly conceived and brilliantly executed, the most original set of fictions
to be released so far this year.
Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire
Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history,
and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical. Vanity Fair
NEW DIRECTIONS NDBOOKS.COM
u g lyduc k lin g pr esse.o rg
A H S A H TA
GABRIEL GUDDING
L I T E R AT U R E F O R
NONHUMANS
These essay-poems argue that the

intersection of countless oppressions,
human and nonhuman, pivots on the
backs of farmed beings. Gudding
indicts the carnivores apocalyptic
appetite and nails his zopoetic theses
to the door of pastoral. Jonathan
Skinner
BRIAN TEARE
THE EMPTY FORM GOES
ALL THE WAY TO HEAVEN
Teare, struggling with illness,

searches for lost balance through an
intense engagement with the painting of Agnes Martin. These achingly
beautiful poems demonstrate the
ways that, as Dickinson puts it, After
great pain, a formal feeling comes.
Rae Armantrout
ANNE BOYER
GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN
Garments Against Women holds a

life story without a life, a lie spread
across low-rent apartment complexes,
dreamscapes, and information networks. These are the confessions of
Anne Boyer, a political thinker who
takes notes and invents movements,
social and prosodic. Ta gueule, Rousseau. Lisa Robertson
ahsahtapress.org / spdbooks.org 800-869-7553
Creative Writing at Hollins:

Write the next chapter of an epic.
Talented faculty. Visiting writers. Writer-in-Residence.
Graduate Assistantships, Teaching Fellowships,
and Scholarships.
Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
More than fifty years of achievement in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
Bachelor of Arts with concentration or minor in Creative Writing
Where students mature into authors.
www.hollins.edu/jacksoncenter
STONY BROOK
SOUTHAMPTON
MFA in Creative
Writing & Literature
NEW! MFA in Film
Come on in, the waters fine!
www.stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/index.html
631.632.5030 Carla.Caglioti@stonybrook.edu
Stony Brook University/SUNY is an affirmative action, equal opportunity educator and employer. This publication can be made available in alternative format upon request.
IN OCCASIONING THE OPEN LETTER PROJECT,

Claudia Rankine did the literary world, along with the world
at large, a great, necessary service, in providing a platform
for writers of all kinds to grapple with crucial questions
about race and whiteness in the 21st century; in putting
together this anthology, she and Beth Loffreda have
expanded and concretized the offering. Their graceful,
trenchant introduction should become required reading
across the land; that it is followed by dozens of acts of
genuine reckoning from all quarters makes the collection
momentous. That these acts are often as aggravating and
turbulent as they are edifying and inspiring should come as
no surprise: when it comes to the racial imaginary, our
editors remind us, Its messy, and its going to stay messy
(as if we needed reminding). But as Loffreda says, this
mess is a startone worthy of not only our gratitude, but
also our most profound engagement. MAGGIE NELSON
FALL / WINTER 2015
SUBSCRIBE TO FENCE
ONE YEAR (2 ISSUES): $22
TWO YEARS (4 ISSUES): $32
FENCE is a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, art, and
criticism that has a mission to redefine the terms of
accessibility by publishing challenging writing
distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather
than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. It is
FENCES mission to encourage writing that might
otherwise have difficulty being recognized because it
doesnt answer to either the mainstream or to
recognizable modes of experimentation. FENCE is
long-term committed to publishing from the outside
and the inside of established communities of writing,
seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and
bedevil other systems that bring new writing to light.
FENCEPORTAL.ORG
LETS LET THAT ARE

NOT YET : INFERNO
Ed Pavlic
NATIONAL POETRY SERIES
Selected By John Keene
SEPT. 2015
978-1934200964 / $15.95
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A
CONVEX MIRROR 2
Paul Legault
OCT. 2015
978-1934200933 / $15.95
BITTER GREEN
Martin Corless-Smith
NOV. 2015
978-1934200988 / $15.95
SOLAR
Kevin Holden
FENCE MODERN POETS SERIES
Selected by Katy Lederer
NOV. 2015
978-1934200971 / $15.95
JOURNAL OF UGLY SITES

AND OTHER JOURNALS
Stacy Symaszek
OTTOLINE PRIZE
Selected by Brenda Hillman
NOV. 2015
978-1934200995 / $15.95
HOLLYWOOD FOREVER
Harmony Holiday
DEC. 2015
978-0986437304 / $15.95
THE PASSERBY
2015, cast
polyurethane,
pigment, and tape,
Images courtesy of
the artist and Foxy
Production.
Ester Partegs
by Eduardo
Abaroa
113 ARTISTS ON ARTISTS ESTER PARTEGS
left: THE PASSERBY

2015, cast polyurethane, pigment, and
tape, dimensions
variable.
opposite: UNTITLED
(CONTAINERS
AND LABELS)
2015, cast polyurethane, metal and
acrylic on paper,
114 BOMB 133
Mold-making and photography have an ambiguous relationship to whatever they reproduce. They can deliver
the most faithful rendition of a given model, but it is
precisely this similarity that makes them extraordinary,
unreal. Both reproduction techniques depend on an
accurate register of a given reality; they are relatively
artless if compared with life drawing or sculpting, which
require motor coordination and a specific power of
imagination. There is little room for interpretation when
making a mold. Yet these relatively automatic processes
rarely fail to seducedeath masks and photographic
portraits can be more fascinating than a living face.
The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows
over it, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ester Partegs
turns us into victims of a comparable mirage. The
delicate transparent screens that she has presented in
her fourth show at Foxy Production, The Passerby, are
not a departure from her previous experiments with
photographic murals, which reproduce street alleys and
graffiti. While the materials are completely different, the
same concerns are present. Productive tensions arise
between context and object, outside and inside, the
ordinary and rarefied. The urban milieu is subtly present
in hanging transparent pieces inspired by the multicolored stands of street vendors in Mexico City.
Emerson and Georges Perec, with almost a century
between them, shared an intention: to recover a primordial amazement that has been lost by habit. Emerson
tried to reenact the glory of a godly existence through
the contemplation of Nature. Perecs approach seems
less grandiose, and still his contemplation of the street
has an ascetic flavor. They both mention technology and
115 ARTISTS ON ARTISTS ESTER PARTEGS
artifice as a way to activate the intensity of the moment

of discovery. A state of peace is necessary to open the
observers perception.
The streets of Mexico City can be overwhelming.
A sensitive explorer of the outdoor markets will feel
lost in irregular corridors constructed with pink, blue,
or red squares of plastic tarp. The dazzling profusion
of the most diverse and seemingly useless products
and pirated versions of Hollywood movies makes one
wonder who will ever buy such an impossible amount
of stuff. This is why learning that Partegss installation
riffs off of the market stalls' provisional structures is
so appealing. Partegss pieces are molded by pouring
slightly tinted resin onto actual squares of canvas, so
that the creases are registered as the material hardens,
to form what looks like the surface of the Earth seen
from an airplane or the waves of a colorless ocean.
Transparency produces a spectral, luminous quality. The
result is a faint memory of that commodity chaos. The
recollection of an everyday event is transformed, generating a completely different experience.
These screens are not servile representations, but a
reflection on the act of reproduction. Perception squints
as it perceives itself.
Eduardo Abaroa is an artist and writer working in
the fields of sculpture, installation, and live action.
His recent exhibitions include Total Destruction
of the Museum of Anthropology at kurimanzutto,
Mexico City, and Photosynthesis in Flora, Colombia.
Michael Childress
116 BOMB 133
by Susan Jennings
117
ARTISTS ON ARTISTS MICHAEL CHILDRESS
Michael Childress
studio, 2015.
Courtesy of the
artist.
VISIT TO CHILDRESSS STUDIO

IN EASTHAMPTON, MASS.
It starts, of course, with water. A bath

for the newborn, a baptism for the
blank canvas.
Add phthalo blue, the solar color. Retinal
cones fire in a way that no other color
can coax. Light.
As babies age they develop the ability to
see color. So do cultures over time. At
first there is only black, white, and red.
The history of literature of each culture
slowly adds colors. Without words, say
without the word blue (or phthalo), it
does not exist. Blue is always last.
Form
Affect
Words give birth. Word is form. Word
is matter. Word is an event. Everything
begins with word.
Humanity.
I wonder what our todays blue is, the
thing that is everywhere that we have
not yet recognized and named?
Art. A painting.
Phthalo. A color discovered in the
atomic age, now essential to functioning
of solar panels.
Invention. Destruction. Invention.
Failed gestures are the train tracks for
the eventual breakthrough. Artists seek
blind spots, the color blue, by laying the
tracks of the failed gesture so that the
breakthrough moment is birthed. To not
be willing to create failure is to not be
seeking to succeed.
Agnes Martin alone in the desert
reached her own zero. She felt without
zero there could be no truth.
Everything.
Topology. Sperm. Mbius strip egg.
Looping and
Energy
Quiet. Minimal.
Mass times a really big number.
The speed of light squared.
Isnt that another way of saying E=M
going extremely fast? Mass (going fast)
and energy are the same thing.
Quantum mechanics tells us that there

are no edges. We name the edge. We
call you you and me me and it it. But
electrons and particles fly between the
edges. I share mine with you and we
share ours with chair, floor, wall, tree,
light.
Light.
Lene Hau, a physicist at Harvard, slowed
down light. C isnt so constant, after all.
E=M times a really big (variable?)
number.
Can quantum mechanics and Newtonian
physics be resolved by light being
variable?
Time.
There is no time. Time is a construct.
A name. A word.
There is now. And now. And now.
And memory.
And nothing.
Abstracta
Concreta
Between and within the quarks and the
leptons there is more and more nothing.
It is all all all all . . .
Nothing. Birth.
It starts, of course, with nothing.

Nothing can begin without nothing.
And then there is all possibility.
118 BOMB 133
Donald Judds plywood boxes are not

minimal. They are everything. Frozen
time. Psychedelic. Memory. Energy.
Rhythm of growth.
Trees. Chlorophyll.
Field
Array
Quiet. Nothing.
An empty room. A canvas. A void.
Nothing.
A scar is just a memory of an event.

There is no good reason for cells to continue to form around that event.
Yet they do.
Birth of a child. Birth of a painting. Some

forgotten.
Destruction. Memory.
Heliotropism, Gravity. Photosynthesis.

Form.
Fibonacci is magic nature. Form
responding to and created in gravity,
matters bending and warping of the
emptiness between matter and matter.
The growth of trees and their lightseeking leaves. A thumbprint. A nautilus
shell. A hurricane. A galaxy. The great
whirl of all existence.
Exquisite. And as Richard Feynman said
Nature, (or art) as She is absurd.
Susan Jennings is a visual artist
and musician/performer. She often
collaborates with Slink Moss on their
multimedia project called Black Lake.
Jennings lives in the Berkshires of
Massachusetts.
Cameron Rowland
by Ian Edward Wallace
Of the various collected objects in Cameron Rowlands
studioa fluorescent orange work coat, a bundle of
street-sweeper bristles, several pot-medal badgesthe
most abundant are books. Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardts Empire features alongside works by political
scientists Cedric Robinson and Naomi Murakawa, and
Cornel Wests writings on genealogical materialism. The
influence of the latter, which critiques the biases and
blind spots of indexical history, is particularly evident
in Rowlands work, which, because it testifies to social
injustices that are usually hidden by capitals opaque
machinations, he describes as a kind of documentary.
But Rowlands documentary is not a process of image
production. Instead of mimetically representing or
claiming to expose social realitiesstrategies that have
been complicated by the well-rehearsed debates over
an images ability to truly reveal realityRowland
selects objects that speak for themselves as components of broader social infrastructures. His work
simultaneously suggests two apparent impossibilities:
an implicitly imageless documentary practice, and the
potential for art to engage in meaningful critique within
the very structures that seem to most aggressively foreclose on that possibility.
Many of the objects that Rowland uses come from
online government auctions and scrap yards, from
decommissioned municipal buildings and manufacturers of commercial security apparatuses. Theyre often
implicated in the processes of daily life, and yet appear
unfamiliar. Few would recognize, for example, the
aluminum rings that are used to raise manhole covers
to meet the level of newly repaved roads. But these
ringswhich will feature in some capacity in Rowlands
upcoming solo exhibition at Artists Spaceare indispensible fixtures of urban infrastructure, literally
facilitating the circulation of capital. Theyre also one
of the major products manufactured via inmate labor
in the New York State prison industry. Rowland uses
this kind of informationlisting it on checklists and in
image captions alongside a works title and dateto tint
the apparent banality of the presentation of the objects
themselves, and to trouble the detached mode of looking characteristic of art viewership.
Beyond indexing processes or exchanges that
belong to the past, Rowlands works are explicitly
future-oriented. Some are accompanied by a contractual agreement for a collector to rent the work for a
fixed period of time, but not to buy it. The document is
based on a model used by Rent-A-Center, and Rowland
considers it a work in its own right. It mimics the function of the standard museum or gallery loan agreement
while bypassing the institution entirely, reorienting
119 ARTISTS ON ARTISTS CAMERON ROWL AND
49 -51 CHAMBERS
STREET BASEMENT, NEW YORK,
NY 10007, 2014,
wooden table top,
base, hardware,
31 42 42 inches.
Images courtesy of
the artist and ESSEX
STREET, New York.
Public Surplus is
a private auction
system that sells
government
property to private
buyers. This circular
wooden table was
bought at auction
from Public Surplus.

It was used in the
building at 4951
Chambers Street in
New York City, when
it was owned by
the Mayors Office
of New York. The
City purchased the
building in 1965.
The building was
sold in 2013 and
is now privately
owned. Everything
unclaimed in the
building was sold
in 2014 via Public
Surplus.
an exploitative financial model aimed primarily at

low-income consumers to emphasize the privileged
entitlement to property that characterizes exchanges
in high-end markets. (Some collectors have gamely
responded with their own counterproposals in contractual legalese, but Rowland has stuck by his terms.)
In recent writing by photography theorists Ariella
Azoulay and John Roberts, among others, documentary
photographys efficacy has been described as a kind of
annunciation: a declarative power that circulates within
a greater social and political infrastructure, commanding a response. Experimenting with the ways that an
object might address not only its beholder but also the
financial networks it circulates within, Rowland finds
the same political dynamism in material things. Without
claiming to eschew the market, or simply ignoring it
altogether, as many artists do, he pushes art to initiate
rather than simply comment ona progressive politics.
He suggests one method whereby art, the luxury commodity par excellence, might meaningfully begin to
critique endemic inequality and economic obfuscation
without pointing the way to its own demise.
Ian Edward Wallace is a writer and critic based
in New York. He is a doctoral student in Art History
at the CUNY Graduate Center.
ZERO TOLER ANCE,

2015, 5 gallon bucket,
squeegee, washer
fluid, water,
19 12 12 inches.
As minute a
problem as that
might seem in the
overall scope of a city
with 2,000 murders,
squeegees are of
great significance,
said Mr. Bratton
because like fare
evasion and like
disorder on the
subways, it's that
type of activity that
is generating fear.
Steven Lee Myers,
Squeegees Rank
High on Next Police
Commissioners
Priority List, New
York Times, December
4, 1993.
120 BOMB 133
49, 40, 6, 2014,

catalytic converter,
7 15 5 inches.
Catalytic converters
are one of the most
valuable scrapped
car parts. They
contain various
combinations of
Rhodium, Platinum,
and Palladium that
filter exhaust. Each

model converter
has a different
value. This Volvo
catalytic converter
has been quoted at
a $40 value by the
author of the Book
of Numbers and at a
$6 value at a scrap
yard. It was bought
for $49.
PASS-THRU, 2014,
acrylic, hardware,
24-hour rotator disc,
23 x 20 x 21 inches.
Rental.
In some places,
businesses use a
pass-thru, to pass
cash or goods back
and forth; this could
CONSTITUENT,
2014, outlet,
dimensions variable,
edition of 3.
Outlets allow the
flow of current
through cable. When
electrical cable is
sold as scrap, the
outlet is often still
connected, but
be at a bank or a
liquor store. The
highest standard
of pass-thrus use
bulletproof glass,
although this
material is far too
expensive to be
used as a protective
measure by those
businesses where
it might be most
effective. Therein
plastic is used
in place of bullet
proof glass. They
are either made by
a manufacturer or
by the shop owner.
This pass-thru was
made by Rowland.
LOOT, 2014
Cut copper tube,
cardboard box,
crate, 11 18 13
inches. Rental.
flows are valved by

private corporations.
When abandoned
buildings are broken
into and stripped
of their copper
piping, it is sold to
scrap yards, where
it is cut down. This
cut copper was
bought from a scrap
yard. Copper has a
function, its base
material has an
inherent value.
cannot be used and

has no value. An
electrician cuts the
power supply to
one outlet, removes
the faceplate
and reveals the
copper core of two
electrical wires.
At some point
basic utilities like
electricity and
water were services
controlled by the
state, because
they relied so
heavily on public
infrastructure. More
and more these
121 ARTISTS ON ARTISTS CAMERON ROWL AND
Deana Lawson
Deana Lawson,
HELLSHIRE BE ACH
TOWEL WITH FLIES,
Portmore, Jamaica,
2013, pigment print,
35 44 5 8 inches.
Images courtesy of
the artist and Rhona
Hoffman Gallery,
Chicago.
122 BOMB 133
Henry Taylor,
WHERE THOUGHTS
PROVOKE, GET TING
DEEP IN SHALLOW
WATER, 2015, acrylic
on canvas, 36 36
inches. Courtesy of
the artist and Blum
& Poe, Los Angeles/
New York/Tokyo.
and Henry Taylor
123 ART DEANA L AWSON AND HENRY TAYLOR
Henry Taylor,
HAITIAN CEMETERY,
2014, acrylic on
canvas, 124 106
inches. Courtesy of
the artist and Mesler/
Feuer, New York.
124 BOMB 133
Henry Taylor and I were introduced by our mutual friend

and collector, AC Hudgins, at a MoMA PS1 function in
2012. When we met I was about to depart on my first
trip to Haiti to do my photographic work. The following
year I asked Henry to accompany me to Port-au-Prince.
That trip was a key moment in our friendship as well
as in our artistic practicesthe influence of Haiti can
be seen in both of our work. It also gave us insight into
each others process and the methods that arent necessarily visible in the final paintings or photographs.

Ive sat for portraits for Henry in various locations, including the Hudginss homes in Harlem and Sag
Harbor, Henrys studio in Los Angeles, and my apartment
D E A N A L AW S O N :
So how's everything
going?
H E N RY TAY L O R : Everything is cool; it's
summertime. I'm trying to get ready for
London. Oscar Murillo invited me; he
said, "Come on out and kick it in London
for a month and then why don't you do a
show here?"
DL:
You and Oscar were at Artpace

together last spring, right? How did the
residency go?
HT:
I mean, Texas is not California, and

San Antonio is not Los Angeles. But it
was a great experience. It was three of
us at the residencyAutumn Knight, a
performance artist from Houston, Oscar
Murillo, and myself. It was interesting
to watch Oscars process, because even
though he did a lot of labor, it came out
minimal, just like a diamond. You kill a
whole elephant for this little bit of ivory
to put on a key chain or something. You
know what Im saying? He painted the
whole space blue, and then whitefirst
I thought he had fucked up, but actually
that was his intention. He was uncomfortable with it, but I said, "Brother, I
got it!" Sometimes we give so much
and then it feels like we've been shortchanged. But I told him, That was so
rich and good. It was like magic.
DL:
HT:
in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Henry no longer needs to ask me

to sit for him; I now ask him to paint (document) me,
because, as a photographer, it is fascinating to experience up-close an artists process that is quite different
than mine.

Our dialogues have been mutually inspiring and
have informed my focus and my photographs in subtle
ways. What comes out of Henrys mouth in conversation
is completely unpredictable, and it is our meandering
exchanges that keep the friendship alive and fresh. The
text below is an excerpt from a recent phone conversation we had between New York and LA.

Deana Lawson
what I was going to do. It seemed like

a good place to experiment. I thought
about video and I started going to my
grandparents' property, knowing my
grandfather was shot and killed there,
although that was not in the forefront
of my mind. I would take pictures, and
there were these horses just running
wild; it was so beautiful. I thought about
what my dad had told me about the trail
where my grandfather picked him and
his mom up in a wagon. When I looked
at that trail I thought, That's it, here's my
story! But it was so not like my work,
maybe more like Hockneys. I started
painting the horses but wanted to do
something minimal.
When I think of your paintings,
minimalism doesn't necessarily come
to mind.
sometimes. They might think I'm

short-changing them, but I'm not. I'm
just learning to be more efficient, when
I can be.
DL:
Lets think of the commonalities in

your work as a painter and my work as
a photographer, or photo-based artist.
We're both dealing with portraiture and,
oftentimes, we're representing subjects
who are strangers.
HT:
Yeah. I find it fascinating how in

your work you're going from point A to
point B but a lot happens in between.
When you went to Haiti or to the Congo,
you had drawings and I was like, Whoa,
that's like film!
DL:
HT:
Because I was thinking about video,

the paintings started to come out like
storyboards. The first time, I did Beam
Me Up, Scotty, it was just a rough rendering of a guy being hung. But, I didn't
want it to be so blatant. It was like, those
birds that just dive in the water, pelicans and shit. It was like, Beam Me Up,
Scotty! Everyone knows their history
we just want people to do right. Yet
we still got the Confederate flag being
waved. A lot of things aren't done right;
some people can't make that change.
DL:
When I'm traveling to other countries, I often don't have a lot of time.
At the most I might stay for a month,
but thats still not much time to make
work, which is why its important for
me to have at least two clear ideas of
an image before I arrive. My friend and
colleague Aaron Gilbert often sketches
scenes that I describe to him. I then use
these drawings as a basis for the photographs.
When we traveled to Haiti together, I
showed you the sketch for As Above, So
Below, the sister with the cut-off pig's
head. What did you think when you saw
the drawing?
Do you have family in Texas?
My grandparents were from Naples,

in the eastern part of Texas. We go back
generations. My parents have acres of
land out there that has been unattended
since the migration. A lot of people from
that part of Texas moved to LA. I had
only been there a few times. Going to a
residency in San Antonio, I had no idea
The minimal work gets held back

perhaps because people tend to think
they want more. Its like with a plate
of foodsometimes you just get this
starchy-ass shit but then you go to some
healthy French restaurant, and it's like,
Damn, for a $300 plate, look what I got!
I could have went to Dominos!

So you've got to wean people
HT:
Hey, it was wild! Are you kidding

me? You're like the bansheesI gotta
go get a fuckin' carcass and cut that
muthafucka open! Here in the States,
we would just get a plastic doll instead.
You took it to another level! I thought,
Deana, I'm with it. I can't think of nothing better to do than follow you. I was
like Jimi Hendrix's roadie; I loved it.
DL:
(laughter) During that Haiti trip, we

really got to know each other not only as
artists and makers, but also personally.
HT:
I was like tripping going to a Voodoo

church, damn! And that girl was crazier
than shit, she just grabbed the pig by
the ears like it was nothing.
DL:
I hadn't met the woman who was

going to pose for the image, so I was
nervous to see whom they had chosen
for me. This was actually the first time
the model wasnt chosen by me, but
by the community who helped me to
restage this image. When we got there,
she was really afraid, she thought that
I was going to do dark magic with the
photos. I remember you guys started
drinking some rum; that and your
presence helped her to relax. When I
showed her my book of photographs
and explained the context she understood. I tend to work alone because
I feel like it's bad luck to have people
around besides the subject and me.
But having you present in this situation
made a big difference. You helped make
that experience and the photograph
even more powerful.
other types of powders) during Voodoo

ceremonies represent a particular Loa.
Formally, the designs are like cosmograms, they are balanced but not exactly
symmetrical. These drawings, in combination with drum, dance, song, and
other mysterious elements, become an
entry point to the spirit world.
Not to generalize, but what I also
noticed amidst destruction is that
Haitians are very clean and tidy. Often
I saw women sweeping the ground.
While in the countryside of Saut dEau,
I remember a young woman swept the
ground for about an hour before any
sacred materials or drawings were laid
on the earth. Sweeping was a constant
motif that reappeared throughout my
travels. In the Democratic Republic of
Congo, people would be up at 4 AM
before sunrise, sweeping their outside
spaces. Seeing this made me think of my
Bed-Stuy neighborhood where people
sweep their brownstone stoops.
It was interesting how our processes
converged in Haiti with Juriana, who
was in Mother Tongue. I photographed
her in our room and you painted her. I
was curious to see what you would create from the same being.
H T : The whole setup in the Voodoo temple was like being in an African village. I
felt some real good love right there. And
then the drumming with them dudesit
was such a good energy that it was okay
to talk about all the negative shit. We
tend to forget that they had a catastrophic earthquake happenI mean,
people talked about it. That one girl had
lost her momma, sisters, and brothers.
Being in Haiti, I think I developed a better
understanding of [Gordon] Matta-ClarkI
ain't sayin' that's a good waybut I
started to notice the destruction.
HT:
DL:
DL:
Matta-Clarkon my first trip to

Haiti, I was walking along a sidewalk,
and without warning there was a massive hole in the pavement, at least four
feet wide. There were no orange cones
to warn you, it was like a pit, so deep it
probably led straight to hell. Had I not
been paying attention, my story couldve
ended right there.
But then, too, whats so bizarre
about Haiti are the contradictions, the
contrasts. . . . There is destruction but
also heightened organization and systems. For example, the Veves that are
drawn on the ground with cornmeal (or
126 BOMB 133
We go to a ball game and we're all

gonna take a picture of the court, you
know what I'm saying?
You went to the Congo after that and
then you took a road trip to Detroit and
then you went to Ethiopia. Maybe we
should go to Egypt together? I mean,
what would you do there? Seeing you
work in Haiti, I was really blown away
by how much you had to set up and
prepare. That was new to me. I look at
the photos differently now. I have a few
friends that are photographers but they
don't do drawings to prepare.
The drawings I use might be inspired
by something that I saw. For example,
when I went to Haiti by myself, I witnessed a sacrifice of a pig, and a woman
placed the pigs head on top of her own
head and walked around. Her posture
and her gaze were so serious. Typically,
when you're mounted by the spirit, your
eyes become wide, and her eyes were
very wide. But because it was my first
ceremony, I really didn't feel comfortable going close, so I only got a faraway
shot. When I came back and I looked at
the picture, I knew that I needed to get
the shot up close, and that I wanted to
restage the image. There was something

about that woman and that pig's head
it just kept replaying in my mind over
and over again. So then I knew I had to
revisit Haiti to recapture it. One could
say that I could've staged and made the
photograph here in New York, I didn't
have to go to Haiti to make that picture
per se. But there's something about the
journey, like you described earliera lot
of labor for a small diamond.
HT:
Making that extra journey resonates

in the work; one can feel it. Hey Deana,
why don't you come to London? You
could stay with me. I could stay with
you. Hey! We could stay together. Al
Green baby, let's stay to-gether!
DL:
(laughter) But some of the photos

that I took, for example the woman that
posed in the hotel, I had no idea I was
going to make those photographs when
I got to Haiti. So I like to work spontaneously as well. You don't seem to pose
your subjects as much. You have done
several portraits of mehold on one
second, my baby's cryin'.
HT:
Right on.
DL:
Getting to watch you work as your

muse, I feel like you tend to let the subjects do what they want. With the latest
portrait you painted of me in the yellow
dress, I chose the pose and decided
to include my vintage Crown Graphic
camera. The way I sat was a pose quite
difficult to hold for a long time.
While I tell my subjects precisely
what to do, you seem very laid back in
terms of how the person positions her or
himself for you.
HT:
That's true, 'cause first of all, I'm

grateful. A painting can take much
longer than a photograph. It's a commitment on both ends. And I'm doing
something that I love. I'm appreciative.
Afterwards, I'm able to be more intuitive
or play with it if I want to create some
story. But sometimes it's just the painting experience alone that I relish. When
I was in San Antonio painting these
horses I was having such a kick out of
it. What a fuckin' honor to paint their
portraits! Sometimes you just love doing
opposite:
Deana Lawson,
AS ABOVE,
SO BELOW,
Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, 2013, pigment
print, approx.
45 35 inches.
I try to find absolute freedom in painting. I want to be taken over!

Henry Taylor
128 BOMB 133
right:
Henry Taylor,
MAN ON
HORSEBACK IN
NAPLES, TX,
2015, acrylic on
canvas, 58 69
inches. Courtesy
of the artist and
Mesler/Feuer, New
York.
opposite:
Henry Taylor,
THE DARKER
THE BERRY, THE
SWEETER THE
JUICE, 2015,
acrylic on canvas,
78 63 inches.
Courtesy of the
artist and Blum &
Poe, Los Angeles/
New York/Tokyo.
something. It's like playing in somebody's band.

DL:
How do you find your sitters?
HT:
Sometimes I'll take somebody off

the street, and sometimes I do seek out
people. I think that's a commonality with
our work. The way we gather people, its
interesting in its own way. Sometimes I'll
pick up a guy at McDonald's who's panhandling, Won't you just come over to
my house for a sec? I want to paint you.
It's almost like a prostitute! (laughter)
Painting that person I feel like I'm getting
off. Metaphorically speaking. And then
I zip it up.
then I played something and it popped.

Even you walking around, you can be
rhythmic. Youre settin' up and you're
about your business and there's just
a certain rhythm youre in. You start
to be the director, you're a fuckin'
Cecil B. DeMille. Okay, Gloria, cmon
downstairs!
Im not bipolar but I'm on this high
you know how you can just be positive,
how you just let something take over.
It's like, Oh, I'm relishing this, I got this
beautiful baby, I'm lovin' this. You just
gotta relish life, like my parents said,
"You have up days and down days." So
there are all these different rhythms.
DL:
DL:
One thing I love about your path is

that you were a psychiatric technician
before you were painting.
HT:
H T : A lot of work was inspired by experiences I had at Camarillo State Mental

Hospital, as a technician. I went to
CalArts and worked at the state hospital
at the same time. For at least two years,
I'd commute from Valencia. I worked the
second shift, four to midnight.
When I look at your paintings, I'll

think of jazz, but then when I go to your
studio you're listening to Lil Wayne or
Kendrick Lamar. How does music influence your process or your work?
I listen to Drake, to Kendrick, to
Wiz [Khalifa], I listen to Bob Dylan. And
every once in a while I'm like, Man, let
me play some Miles. You have to find
a rhythm that you know is true. I just
did this portrait of this Israeli guy, and
DL:
Our conversation is all over the
place! (laughter)
HT:
Check it, it's like stream of consciousness, baby! It's like in jazzthey
talk about the whole thing. I'm listening
to Fela, and I'm watching all these biographies, and theyre talking how certain
people can just come in on a certain
key. How do they do that? Were all over
the place, hell yeah, like we should, you
know. We gotta be lost before we can
be found. You know what I'm sayin'?
Theres some cohesiveness there.
DL:
What I admire about you is that your

wheels, as an artist, are turning nonstop. You're always sketching, whether
you're drawing on a napkin or in your
notebookit's pretty awesome to see an
artist making something 24/7. Whereas I
feel like I have spurts, I'll think of an idea
and take a picture for maybe a month.
It might take me a long time to make a
photo shoot happen.
HT:
Your process is not as obvious and

is maybe more abstract. A sketchpad is
just obvious. Also, I might be superficial
in what I do on my travels. Like when
I go to San Antonio, I might wander
130 BOMB 133
opposite: Deana
Lawson, DANTO
SACRIFICE, Port-auPrince, Haiti 2012,
pigment print,
43 54 inches.
below: Deana
Lawson, HOTEL
OLOFFSON
STOR AGE ROOM,
Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, 2013, pigment
print, 43 54 inches.
There are things that you couldnt set up, or couldn't even imagine,
they are just presented to you in the world.
Deana Lawson
around the gift shops. It's apparent that
it's a gun-totin' state, so maybe for me
it's just that. Sometimes I put things
away too quickly. But you want everything to be sincere. Going to the Congo
or Ethiopia, damn, what would I have
made had I gone there? You're gathering
things, you're documenting, you're being
voracious. You made some work already
surrounding it. When I just wanna go
back to my sketchbook, you must wanna
go back over and relook at things.
Definitely. Whats strange is that
recently, during my pregnancy, I had
vivid and piercing flashbacks of my
travels. Visions would come back to me
at the most unexpected moments during
my day. Like while cleaning my toilet
bowl in Brooklyn, suddenly I saw the big
flying cockroach in my mosquito net in
Congo; or when boiling rice I remembered Nellies vomit on the kitchen
floor at Mama Gomas house, as she was
going through a bout of malaria. Maybe
the hormones from my pregnancy
brought the images to my mind. I think
ideas for my photos work in this same
way. Sometimes they simmer under
the surface for a long time before being
born. Often, Ill have a sketch
with me for years before it becomes
a photograph.
off to help in the kitchen. When she

got up, I saw the imprint that she had
left in the towel. I saw flies swarming
around the towel, like they were eating her sweat. So I took a quick photo.
That is one example of how I work
spontaneously.
HT:
The imprint, maybe that has to be

scrutinized a little more. It came like an
abstract piece to me. I'm saying that
because most of your work has figures
in it.
DL:
HT:
I love the image of the guy with the

bananas on his head in the Congo.
That one is titled Walking Home

on Some Road. This one wasn't staged
at all. There are things that you couldnt
set up, or couldn't even imagine, they
are just presented to you in the world.
I love when those moments happen.
For instance, the Hellshire Beach Towel
with Flies I shot in Jamaica. Hellshire
Beach is a local beach without many
tourists, so there are mostly Jamaicans,
and they make really good fish on this
beach. My friend and I were having
beers and ordering fish at one of the
beach shacks, and I saw this woman
lying on a mat watching TV. I asked if I
could photograph her, and she said yes.
So I took a few pictures, and then she
languidly roused herself and just walked
DL:
132 BOMB 133
DL:
One of my teachers at RISD told me

a long time ago, "You don't have to get
everything into one picture." Sometimes
I have to remind myself of that. The
Hellshire Beach Towel takes that
moment to be abstract, but still talks
about the body in an interesting way.
That sounds almost like an heirloom,

if you know what I mean. My mom used
to kiss the envelopes so they had her
lipstick on it. I saved them. There are
just certain things that resonate with
you, but will often and inevitably resonate with other people. And, Deana,
sometimes I think of myself as an
abstract painter, although nobody would
ever say that. When I saw your photograph with the towel, I was like, Yeah,
I like that. What's there is whats in
between. It's a lot like poetry; sophisticated poetry sometimes alludes more
than its explicit.
Or in painting, theres the negative space, the time in between things.
With that towel, you know, something
has roamed that muthafucka. There's
a landscape and there's nothing there,
but you can imagine it. I look at the flies
and tell myself, They eatin' something.
There must be something there, I just
don't see it! You know, we're breathing
something but we don't see it.
you talking about the Oloffson Storage

Room photo that I did in the hotel we
stayed in? I'd like to hear how you would
describe what happened.
HT:
Well, I mean, we didn't have the

key to the room, it wasn't our assigned
room but it was like being graffiti artists
or anybody else who takes chances.
I remember once seeing a Colonel
Sanders cutout in a Kentucky Fried
Chicken and I just walked in and took
the six-foot display. I don't think of
myself as a thief, but there are times
when I'm goin' to break in and enter,
like you did. We ain't stealin' nothin'!
We're making something beautiful. It's
kinda like the ends justify the means.
It's almost like a very communal sort of
thing. I used to say, Why I gotta fuckin'
buy a lawn mower when you got one?
Lemme' use yours!
HT:
DL:
Exactly. Sometimes its the one

thing that catches your eye at the
periphery. I just happened to walk by
that storage room and I saw the mattresses in there and the extra sculpture
of Dessalines head. It was dusty and
full of different furniture pieces from the
hotel. The scene was like a collage that
to me was the essence of Haiti. Then, on
the day of the shoot, the housekeeper
was in cahoots with us. He just loved
you, you guys would smoke cigarettes,
and you would give him drinks
HT:
I gave him sunglasses and baseball

caps and shit. All it is, Deana, we just
gotta break bread with people. I think
that's a large part of it, not coming in all
arrogant and condescending.
Its the instrumental track on the

album.
Word-up, when I go to a place as a

photographer, Im not using a fixer or
someone hired to arrange things for me.
Its the subjects family, or a friend of a
friend of a friend, who are working with
me to bring the things to life. It has to be
organic and personal.
HT:
HT:
DL:
I was trippin' on your photo of the

woman in Haiti. You did some gangsta'
moves!
D L : (laughter) What do you mean? Are
DL:
Haiti was a trip, thats all I can say.

But it was so fuckin beautiful at the
same time. I wanna say thisyou just
on, Deana. When youre able to make
moves like in Haiti, its like youre the

best halfback in football. You jukin
away and gettin the touchdown. I was
an athlete back in the day, and I ran for
sports a lot. You figure out where the
hole is and you cut that way. Thats all
youre doin, just cuttin. Between point
A and point B shit can still go down,
so you gotta stay on your guard. The
defender may be miles away, but you
might run into some stray muthafuckas
on the way to the touchdown. So
you gotta be on. I'm always on, and
I think that's why Im sometimes so
depleted, 'cause that battery is always
plugged in.
DL:
Making artwork is about being a

different kind of alert. I think whats
similar about our work is that our subjects seem familiar, even though they
might be strangers. Many of the people
you've painted I know, but even those
I dont know, I feel like I've knownor
I've known that energy from around
the neighborhood. For example, with
the image of Scotty, I'm like, Wow this
brother looks so familiar. I think it's the
energy you paint your subjects with. I
get similar comments about my work.
When I showed my photographs to the
people in the Congo they thought they
knew the people I photographed in New
Orleans or in Haiti. And that's what I
wantI want people to feel they are
interconnected.
HT:
I hear what you sayin. When I

was in Cuba, the lady who I stayed with
felt like she was my momma. I mean,
they don't even speak my language!
But I didn't even wanna leave the house
some days, 'cause it felt so much like
home.
DL:
When I got to the Congo, I had to

give a talk and explain what I was there
for, what I was doing as a photographer.
I was talking to a community of farmers in the country, in a village, and one
of the questions was why didn't I speak
French. But then one of the sisters said,
"She has hair like us." And even though
I'm from America, I think that was the
moment when there was definitely that
connection. In my photographs, regardless of where they're taken, whether it's
Haiti, Alabama, Brooklyn, the Congo,
Ethiopia, I want people to come across
like an expanded family.
H T : No matter where you come from,
as long as you're a black man, you're

African. I just thought about those
lyrics by Peter Tosh. And even when
we cross the racial shitand I'm not
assuming you just mean black people
you find this commonality with, or
this sense of being familiar with them.
Sometimes, being in Chinatown, I look
at the Chinese, and I think, They are my
brothers.
DL:
How do you think about color in

your paintings?
in control. I may be thinking about

weight and how something recedes or
comes forward and of course I know
what cobalt blue does as opposed to
other types of blue. So I make those
kinds of decisions, but for the most part,
I try to find absolute freedom in painting. I want to be taken over! I'm making
too many decisions in real life already,
paying rent, doing this and that. When
Im painting, I want to be free. Ohio
Players baby, you know?
DL:
HT:
When I'm painting from life the

colors seem more alive and apparent,
because it's realI mean, whatever real
is. If I were to do something from a photograph, then I only try to depict what's
there and that seems more limited. I
could work from a photograph for hours
and hours, but I can work from life in
minutes. A human being is never in
black and white, even if I'm colorblind.
Right now I'm looking out my window
and I see shades of green, and then
something may be reflecting onto that
green from somebody's apartment. So
you get blue in there. (in a high-pitched
voice) "Why you got blue in the muthafucka?" I say, Shit man, there was a
blue light over there. But you just don't
see the blue light.
Brown skin tones are important to

me. I often think of Carrie Mae Weemss
titles in the Colored People series, in
which she names the nuances of black
and brown bodies and undertones,
titles like Blue Black Boy, Golden Yella
Girl, and Magenta Colored Girl. I try to
glorify brown skin within the print and
bend toward specificity of skin tones. I
also tend to get caught up over what I
perceive to be real color as you mentioned, and memory color. Was that pink
towel a red pink or a magenta pink? Was
Nikkis shiny black weave a cool black
or warm black? And then regardless of
what it actually was, what does it need
to be for the sake of the print? I can nitpick over colors in a print for hours and
days. James Welling told me recently
that my prints looked wet. I took that
as a compliment; it meant to me that
the print itself was alive and present. I
thought of my prints sweating, like skin.
I admire the freedom you feel while

painting. At the beginning of Nina
Simones documentary, shes asked
what freedom means to her and one of
her responses is, Ive had a couple of
moments on stage where I really felt
free. And thats something else. Thats
really something else! Ill tell you what
freedom means to me: No fear. I mean
really, no fear I would be lying if I
said I felt free while photographing. The
photographic act is workits gidgets
and gadgets and lights and tripods and
shit. But the journey is liberating, and
even when I do have fear in my heart, I
feel free. During my flight to the Congo,
there was a moment when I looked out
the airplane window into dark night and
I thought to myself, I cant believe Im
flying to the Congo alone. I must be
crazy.
DL:
HT:
With color, I tend to go for what

I feelthat's when the subconscious
comes into play, when you're not really
HT:
I swear to God, some questions

are just hard to answer. I think in my
compositions, I can be intuitive and at
the same time start putting in dragons,
like Goya did, or Max Beckmann. You
start to tell a story that might be about
Herculesmyths! You start grabbing
things because you want it to feel a
certain way.
DL:
Its interesting that you mention

myths. A constant puzzle for me as a
photographer is how to depict the visible and how it connects to the unseen.
HT:
Sometimes things can be really

dark, like when I was painting these
horses in black I know it had to do
with death. So sometimes I mute the
palette, but I'm not opposed to yellow
sneaking in there. A little baby may
walk into your studio and accidentally
bump into something, and next thing
you know, your painting is gonna
change.
Katherine Hubbard
Notes from Utah. Notes on gray. is a
performance-lecture that explores the
relationship between the human eye, the
camera, and cognitive perception. The work
considers topics such as landscape photography, the subjectivity of vision, trauma, and
grayscale as a value system. The lecture is
timed with the setting sun. The performance
stage is established by determining the
furthest points north, south, east, and west
within a space. The camera is then positioned
facing the center of the room from each
of these four points and the cameras field
of vision is marked on the floor from each
position, creating a four point star. Chairs
are positioned facing into the center of the
room within the four triangulated sightlines.
Photographs are made throughout the lecture
from the north, south, east, and west.
This text should be read in

conjunction with the sunset so
gauge your start time and pace
accordingly. There should be no
controllable light source on
while reading.
Facing the setting sun, position
your body towards the west.
The first two paragraphs should
be read aloud.
graygraygraygray
graygraygraygray
graygraygraygray
The cut of the g in contrast with
the roll of the y. The form of the
mouth ends in the same shape
with which it started. A slight
cast down at the edges of the
lips. With a lower case g
the tops of the g. r. a. and y.

sit in pillow-topped alignment
making a series of soft arcs held
at either end by the tail of the g
and y sweeping left. You could
sit on the word, it would hold
you. You could lay under the
word, lounging between its tails.
Removing the g leaves us with
ray. A beam of light. Emanations
from the sun or any other source
of light. A narrow cast. Ray, a
gleam or slight manifestation
as in a ray of hope. A line of
sight. Grade. Gradation. Ascent
by degree, steps toward gradual
change. Gray, remove the r
and you have gay. The word
sits completely inside the
mouth. The y looses its ending
and the g opens the mouth
exposing the hinged mechanism
of the jaw.
Stop reading aloud.

Western definitions of
gray define it as a color
between white and black; an
intermediary color defined by
what it is not. An achromatic
color meaning it is a color
without color. A neutral
hue. Things that are gray are
most often perceived as old,
conforming, boring, uniformed
and without adornment. It is
a sad melancholic range. It is
dull and dismal. Gray day. Gray
sky. It is a range that exists as
a lack. It is temperate and cool.
Lacking color. Lacking heat.
Lacking commitment. Gray area
is defined as a nonconforming
space in between. The space
that resists categorization and
the assignment of rules.
Gray makes black objects

appear lighter than they
actually are. Gray makes
white objects appear darker
than they actually are, drawing
the tone of the object closer
to itself. Gray shamelessly
shifts human perception.
A gift. Twilight. Tweenlight.
A holding together. A juncture
between times. Twi meaning
half-light. Sun sinking below
the horizon. Line that marks
a separation between earth
and sky. Horizon/tal. Horizontal
from Latin horizontem meaning
flat, relating to the horizon
(horizon being circular). Sky
line arcing. Bounded line
touching itself.
There is no availability of
light when the sun hits 18
degrees below the horizon,
meaning the range once
marked as a transition is over.
Sun down. Sprinting west.
Outrunning the sink of the
sun. Taking the visible
horizon with you. Dropping
to a crouched position your
geometry pushing night back
by degrees. Lying down
parallel to the horizon/tal.
Arced.
E. y. e. I transition to night
vision.
Performance documentation
for N O T E S FRO M U TA H.
N O T E S O N G R AY taken from
the west, no. 1 of 4, Company
Gallery, 2014, silver gelatin
134 BOMB 133
Raising your eyes from the

page, look forward and maintain
a steady head position with fixed
focus for approximately
3 seconds.
Rotate your body clockwise to
face north.
Wet almond loosely sitting

in its socket. Moisten and
vision. Moisten, vision and
moisten again. Involuntary
gesture, even blinking can
feel heavy. Haze. Eyes reacting
to light, a sensing organ.
Human vision as we understand
it resides between the eye and
brain. A negotiation. Vision
meaning color registration.
Vision meaning depth
perception. The pupil like
a drawstring cinching and
loosening its grip as it registers
light. Pupil from pupilla, Latin
meaning little girl-doll. Pupil
named as such for the tiny
image of self seen reflected
in the eye of another. High
noon sun F90. Under a tree,
shaded in the afternoon
F16. Sun sinking F5.6. Sudden
darkness aperture wide open.
Sun has set. The eyes reliance
on photoreceptor cones
transitions to a reliance on
rods. Two shapes providing
two sensitivities. Working
seamlessly toward continuity.
Rods allow us to see as
available light decreases,
rods provide black and white
vision. Desaturation and the
graying of things with nightfall
are a part of human sense
perception.
Retina. from Latin re te,
meaning net. A net is for
catching. Catching implies
keeping. But anything thats
not the catch runs through.
The liquid runs through. Retina,
a light sensitive layer of tissue
lining the inner surface of
the eye. During embryonic
development the retina and
optic nerve develop as growths
from the brain, the retina is part
of the central nervous system.
The optics of the human eye
create an image of the world
upside down on the retina. The
optics of the camera lens create
an image of the world upside
down on the film plane. The
camera opens its eye to cast
this image upon light sensitive
negative film. The latent image
is held in stillness or blur with
the duration of time. Moisten
and vision, moisten and vision
again. The image on the retina
means nothing. Unprocessed
registration of light and dark,
an exuberant patterning of
the cones and rods. The brain

works in tandem with the retina
to form a representation of
the external environment. This
forming of representation is a
constant reliance on what is
already known by the brain.
A filling in a cramming in of
understanding. Understanding
in this case is an assimilatory
practice. That looks like. I
recognize. I know. I think.
An involuntary response to
draw familiarity in. Anxiety
of the fractured parts
organizing, categorizing into
a sensical waltz. Seeing the
fractured parts again is a slow
unlearning.
Humans have binocular vision.
Bini for double and oculus
meaning eye. Humans have
two eyes. Humans have frontal
vision. Humans have a maximum
horizontal field of view of
approximately 190 degrees
with two eyes, approximately
120 degrees of which can
be seen by both eyes. The
uniocular field of vision, seen by
only one eye, is approximately
40 degrees total. The fovea
centralis is a small portion of
the retina with acute visual
focus. This allows for enhanced
focus in two degrees of the
human range of vision. To make
an accurate comprehension
of the visual world the brain
must shift the eye so that the
image of the point of interest
falls on the fovea. The brain

has to make many assumptions
to compensate for the rather
faulted and narrow visual
capacity of the human eye. This
is called unconscious inference
and requires a great deal of
preexisting information and
prior experiences of the world.
Peripheral vision is that which
occurs outside of the center
of gaze.
Looking forward find a point

in the distance to maintain
your focus and locate your far
peripheral vision, using both
your arms stretched outwards
to either side. You should just
barely perceive your hands.
This constitutes the outermost
range of visibility. Without
shifting your focus hold this
position for 10 seconds.
Now bring both your arms in
approximately forty-five degrees
to locate your mid-peripheral
vision and without shifting your
point of focus hold this position
for 10 seconds.
Slowly bring your arms together
perpendicular to the body to
locate your near-peripheral
vision. This is just outside of your
central gaze. Without shifting
your focus hold this position
for 10 seconds.
Slowly bring your hands closer
the north, no. 2 of 4, Company
together. As your hands cross

your central gaze you will see
two of each hand. All four of
your hands now hold the
delicate and narrow field of
focus available to the human
binocular vision system.
You may put your arms down.
I. Ego. Self. I being marked
by its capitalization while it,
they, he, she, me and we all
remain lower case. Point of
view. Vision prevailing as the
primary sense by which humans
establish here-ness. Now-ness.
Thing-ness.
Because we are generally taught
to rely on vision as the primary
sense organ with which to
orient self.
Because we read photographs
with the same tools for
perception with which we read
the external world.
Because the photograph is
presumed to exist as simulacra
of the world.
Because we do not see the
same things.
And we keep making the
medium. We desire what the
medium allows us so we make
more of it, more medium. We
are the holders of the medium.
Camera strapped to chest.
Inert and bobbing while we

walk. Oversized appendage.
Or maybe that image is out of
date.
What does it mean to look

back? The physicality of the
gesture implies turning or
torquing the body so the eyes
face what was once behind you.
To look back means a pause in
place in order to turn around.
However, the gesture negates
itself at first consideration
because in looking back or
behind what was once behind
you is now ahead the moment
the body is turned. By these
terms the attempt to look back
becomes a dizzying turning.
The retina is both brain tissue

and optical receptor.
Light comes from above.
The ground is below.
Objects farther away will

appear smaller in correlation
with their distance.
Objects closer will block the

visibility of that which is further
away.
A needle turned perpendicular

to your chest and held at the
precise angle of alignment
will appear only as a point.
Vanishing point.
Five points of curvilinear

perspective aligning north,
east, south, west and center.
Photographed from the

vanishing point. This lessening
place of low light and low
visibility. This actively
diminishing point establishing
the perspective of all the lines
around it. Relinquishing power.
I see we arcingly from the

vanishing perspective.
Raise your eyes from the page

and looking forward maintain
a steady head position with
fixed focus for approximately 15
seconds.

face east.
135 BOMB SPECIFIC K ATHERINE HUBBARD
Utah is a fissure of the senses.

A kind of vast vast. You see
a space, you see space. You
see atmosphere lingering
in the canyons. You see the
atmosphere bringing its blue.
You see land before you most of
the time. In the car land moves
at two paces. To either side
is fast. It looks blurred. Hair
whipping. Hat brim caught and
thrown back. Mineral deposits
registering as streaks of color.
Red rust, brown, gray, and
shapes like lumps repeatedly
overlapping, licking the hinds
of the previous lump. Shapes
stay for some time and then
are gone. It shifts and a new
register of blur is upon you. You
see age in these rocks. Rocks so
old they are tired of being rocks,
transitioning to dust. Rocks
that are ancient molds of oyster
shells from the time when this
used to be an ocean. Your life
recorded in milli. Or not at all.
This kind of rock does not need
you. Does not like you. Burns
you with lessons of your own
humanity. Your own fragility,
your own liquidity. Stupidity.
Deserts do not bend they take,
they absorb. The average adult
body is 65 percent water. You
are only 35 percent everything
else. The water is what leaves
you first. Porous skin burning.
Drying. Drying and losing.
Letting down, breaking down
so that the liquid seeps out. You
are part empty when you are
there. Needs are simple because
they are non-negotiable.
The other view is through the

front window. The roads are
smooth and the view pans
with the head. Framed by the
windshield. A rounded frame.
To the front is slow. Its the pace
of a stroll. A stroll at an almost
legal 95 miles per hour. Its this
view that suspends gravity
within the car. This view rolls.
Your tiny lake body sloshing
side to side like carrying a halffull fish tank. Pebbles stirred
at the bottom, kicked up and
sinking slowly back down with
the sediment. When the car
stops you do not. You carry that
vibration on atrophied legs into
the gas station, snaking through
aisles, into the bathroom. Still
vibrating while you piss. While
you wipe. Having a seat is
familiar.
Land. Ground. Soil. Definite
portion of the Earths surface.
A material substance. Scape
shortened from escape, closely
related to excappare, literally
meaning get out of ones cape,
leave a pursuer with just ones
cape, Scape. The suffix of
landscape. A thing so distant
walking toward registers as
standing still with cape in hand.
Slippery naked idea slinking into
dusk.
136 BOMB 133

the east, no. 3 of 4, Company
Landshape. Landescape.
Landscape. A term for the
human capacity for perspective.
Emotional landscape, landscape
as a pictorial equation for
comprehension and the
symbolizing of abstract and
sometimes distant ideas.
The comprehensive range
of something. Landscape,
a euphemism for I have
absolutely no idea what Im
trying to hold here. But this
perspective is so great we
should all share it. We should all
look at this view from this place.
It is spectacular and youre not
alone when you stand here.
Emotional land shape.
Political land shape.
Social land shape.
The roads that are paved run
deep gauges into the earth.
Roads made somewhat to fit
within the divots and turns,
through preexisting canyons
and washes. Naturalized into
the topography. Roads made
with black repaired tops that
glimmer in the heat and melt
in the distance. A radiant heat
so severe air conditioning
overwhelms your car. Roads
like any intrusion in the desert
create their own ecology.

Headlights from your S.U.V.
attracting bugs the size of
small mammals in the flood
of light. Drawing a sweep of
birds, one after the other risking
impact with the car to feed
on the insects. Driving at a
slowed pace, the pop of gravel
and small stones flicking the
underside of the car is soothed
by the rushed swooping
impression of birds coming
from the right and then from the
left. Looking beyond the sweep
and shadow cast through the
headlights in the near distance
you can see the birds lined up
along the roadside. Waiting.
Timing. Bridging neurological
pathways for this practiced
and learned dance with the
headlights.
Raising your eyes from the page,

look forward and maintain a
steady head position with fixed
focus for approximately 30
seconds.
face south.
137 BOMB SPECIFIC K ATHERINE HUBBARD
My amygdala felt Gunmetal

gray long before the rest of the
brain. It started with a weight
in the body. Lead wrecking ball
lodged in the chest threatening
to break the ribs and flesh,
its weight so frontal. There is
an immediate knowing in the
My amygdala felt Gunmetal

gray first. Before the fractured
image had to line up at the
floodgate of the brain with all
the rest. Gunmetal impatiently
waiting for the receptionist to
come back from a smoke break.
Nicotine breath taking down
descriptions at the head of the
line. Okay, next was the curt
dismissive reply. The fractured
image, irritated at the excessive
wait and seeing the tremendous
pile-up of descriptors still to
be processed, sits back down.
Waiting as image. Messy and
whole, each time returning to
the line and being refused the
passage of integration with
previous experience.
Gray Wolf. Shadow gray.

Distinct gray. Ash, soot,
graphite, lead gray mirage.
November rain. November skies.
Shadows and smoke. Horizon
gray. Pigeons and whales.
Gunmetal gray. Each being a
stand-in for a tone without
particularity.
I am naming titles of gray for

you now.
We remind ourselves often

that the object of affection has
nothing to do with desirous
sentiment. We invented the
medium. Our disappointment
cant be with the image. The
responsibility is ours to hold.
The eyes are in our own heads
after all.
Desire and fear share the

same neurological pathway
in the brain. Desire always
haunted by its inversion. The
desire for something in relation
to the fear of living without it.
Yearning in a standstill with
itself. Satiated only when the
desired thing is attained. When
wanting turns into having,
desire is nullified. Desire turns
into relationship.
This happens when you look

at something without prior
knowledge that you will
look at something. Looking
happening in time and in line
with experiencing. The body
sees first.
body that something large and

external is dying. Something
much bigger than you. The
knowing takes physical form.
Increased heart rate. Activated
sweat glands in the palms and
feet. Ache across the chest. It is
all this physicality that triggers
an emotional response. Sadness
knows its place in accordance
with the body.
the south, no. 2 of 4, Company
Tunnel vision is the loss of

peripheral vision while retaining
central vision. We panic at the
thought of losing the periphery.
We cling to the wide field of
vision, broad though unseeable.
Peripheral sight locked in a wet
saliva-mouthed embrace with
Our body feels suspended.

Legless. Existing in a collective
state of trauma. Trauma is
imaged all around us. It hides
in the folding back of bed
sheets, corner tucks, along
the meridians that run the
lengths of the shins, in chests
that tighten slowly over years.
Trauma, meaning wound in
Greek, resists recognition
or consideration so it hides
easily. We open doorways and
lubricated slides for it to slosh
around, we offer pockets of
self up thinking we can manage
without that bit. Existing in
the world is a negotiation with
trauma and images of that world
act to confirm and revisit the
poked skin, numb and tingling.
Suspended in the immobilityresponse. Playing dead. Hoping
the image wont detect my faint
breath and pulse. Coming out
of this response is violent. The
limbs must revolt. The muscles
must quiver and you cannot fear
the movement. Please do not
fear the irrational body. Heat in
the body and increased heart
rate. Sweat. Race sweet heart
race through it.
Turning inward the lights
organ refers to the lungs of
sheep, pigs, and other animals
considered to be for human
consumption. The lungs are
called "lights" referring to the
weight of them. Lights filled
with air pillowed for expansion
and deflation. A butchers term
for the organ that floats in a
pot of water. Light as air, as
a measurement system. The
photograph is a record of the
distance of visible light. Light
as the sensation of perceiving
brightness. Light in humans
is reserved for the mind, the
thinking part, the bodyless part
but what goes in as air returns
as breath.
survival for as long as the eyes

have faced forward.
Place your index fingers firmly

into your ear canals. Raising your
eyes from the page look forward
and maintain a steady head
position with fixed focus for
approximately 60 seconds.
Annie Baker by Elianna Kan

Christopher
Abbott as Elias
Schreiber-Hoffman
and Hong Chau as
Jenny Chung in
J O H N, written by
Annie Baker and
directed by Sam
Gold. Signature
Theatre, 2015.
Photo by Matthew
Murphy.
B O M Bs theater
interviews are
sponsored by The
Select Equity Group
Foundation.
138 BOMB 133
Circle Mirror TransformationAnnie Bakers second play, which, together with her play The Aliens,
won the 2010 Obie Awardbegins with fifteen seconds of silence. The slowed-down, natural pacing of
Bakers plays, perhaps initially uncomfortable for the
viewer, ultimately makes for a visceral and immediate
experience.

What drew me to Bakers work from the beginning
was its lack of pretense. Her Vermont characters
drawn from her childhood environment in Amherst,
Mass.reminded me of people from my hometown
in rural New Hampshire. I admired how truthfully she
captured these characters without making caricatures
E L I A N N A K A N : One thing I love about
your plays is that the characters feel so
familiarthey talk the way that people
I know talk. It's people from small towns
who are hanging out in the back of coffee shops, working at movie theaters,
or taking community theater classes.
What makes you draw on them as your
characters?
ANNIE BAKER:
Theres very little

conscious strategy behind the subject
matter for my plays. There's a lot of
strategizing in the actual researching
and writing of a play. But, in terms
of what it's about, and who the main
characters are, and what the setting is,
it really is something that just comes
to me. It's not like I'm saying, "I could
write a play about this, or I could write
a play about that. Which is the better play?" I can only hold one play in
my mind at a time. Unlike some other
playwrights, the characters in my plays
are not based upon people I've met.
They really do feel like products of my
imagination, or different pieces of my
consciousness in dialogue with each
other. But that said, I don't think it's a
coincidence that I grew up in a small
town in New England and Ive written a number of plays that take place
there. This latest play takes place in
Pennsylvania, in Gettysburg. But the
couple in it is from New York, and that's
totally new for meI've lived here for
fifteen years, and it's very slowly starting to creep in.
EK:
To become your world.
AB:
Yeah. Although I'm not really interested in writing one of those Upper
West Side playsnot that I've ever lived
on the Upper West Side. I don't think
of them. I see the same honesty and precision pervading her dialogue and story development. Baker is not
afraid of speech that sounds awkward, if its authentic, and her plotlines dont always get tied up in neat
little bows. She resists being confined to any particular
style or subject matter and her latest play, John, is testament to that, as it teeters between naturalism and
surrealism.

Annie and I met to talk about her work, and ideas
about theater in general, at a diner down the street from
the Signature Theater, where John had just opened for
previews the night before.
Elianna Kan
we need more plays about artists in

New York City. Although who knows.
Now that I've said that I feel like I should
write one to punish myself.
EK:
I remember reading an interview

in which you describe how your plays
come out of whatever your obsession is
at that moment. If you had to articulate
what obsession this new play John was
born out of
A B : There was some point in my life

when I said, "I'll never write a relationship drama, a two-hander because I
often hate those, it's such a trope, and
I often watch the play thinking, Why do
I care? But then, as I investigated my
own resistance to that, I thought, Oh,
I should make myself write a play about
a couple, precisely because for some
reason I find it threatening. So I became
interested in having a relationship
drama, but within a totally different play,
like they're stuck in their own relationship two-hander within a larger play.
I also really wanted to write a play for
this actor, Georgia Engel, who plays the
proprietor of the bed and breakfast. She
was in my production of Uncle Vanya, I
just fell in love with her. Thats, actually,
what most leads me to my characters
these days: an actor I really want to write
a part for. Like, I wanted to write a play
for Matt Maher, and that was one of the
first impulses for The Flick.
EK:
What is it exactly that makes you

want to create work for a particular
actor?
A B : Well, to use Matt and Georgia as

examples, they're both people who are
effortlessly funny. They never have to
push for laughsjust them at their most
deadpan is incredibly hilarious because

they both have a genius sense of comic
timing. They also always sound like
a real person talking. It never sounds
stilted or written when they say words
out loud. They're also people who don't
remind me of anyone else I've ever met.
They're the kindest people I know. And
they understand my writing. That, I've
learned, is so important. I think my work
is very easy for some actors to understand, and very hard for others.
Im curious what else inspired John,
because its very different from your
previous work, more free-wheeling,
maybe.
EK:
With John, I was interested in a play

where multiple older people are watching people fifty years younger than them
struggle in a way that's very specific to
ones twenties and early thirties. I had
also started to investigate the numinous
in my work, and became interested in
discussions of the holy and the occult.
Do you know Bruno Schulz's short
stories?
AB:
EK:
Yes, sure. Theyre so full of life. He

writes shtetl life in a way that makes
his characters both ordinary and
extraordinary.
A B : I was also reading E.T.A. Hoffmann,

and watching that great PowellPressburger movie version of the opera
Tales of Hoffmann. And then I came
across this amazing essay that Rainer
Maria Rilke has on dolls. I became
really interested in the spiritual life of
the inanimate object. I mean, I was
very interested in that as a child but
then I started trying to figure out what
that interest really signified about my
psychology. And somehow it all

started coming together into a play.
I also wanted to investigate women's
relationships to dolls from their childhood, what those dolls embodied and
expressed. The Rilke essay comes the
closest to articulating what I experienced as a kid, but there was still
something else I wanted to talk about.
There's something very specific about
the women I talked to, me and most of
my friends, and the relationships we had
with our dolls when we were younger.
We had this obsessive guilt surrounding
them. That guilt is what I hadn't heard
anyone talk about and it became really
interesting to me as a metaphor. And
then there are twelve other things I was
interested in researching that worked
their way into the play.
A B : You know, because theater is

mostly not part of the larger cultural
conversation, theater people then tend
to overcompensate. When we apply for
grants, we try to make theater sound
really amazing in relation to other art
forms. But ultimately that's fruitless. . . .
It would be like saying that painting is
better than the movies. But, okay. What
resonates about it for me? Everything
I'm about to say might be obvious, but I
do think there's something special about
the thing happening in front of you.
Movies are an opportunity to travel back
in time, which is exciting, but theater
is an opportunity to experience time at
the same rate as the actors in the story
you're watching. That's just a really
weird, crazy thing to experience.
Or an audience member starts having a coughing fit or a seizure.
A B : Yeah, and you can't hear the most

important line in the play. Or, conversely,
sometimes the actors perform the play
in a way that's much better than you
ever imagined it. So, the emotional roller
coaster of it, it kills me. And then I'm
like, Well, I must be doing it because it's
also attractive to me, and compelling
MAN INTERJEC TS:
Excuse me. The Flick
blew me away!
A B : Oh, thank you, that's so embarrassing that you heard me, like, holding court.
M A N : I mean it. I love your work, Im a
major fan. The Flick was astounding.
EK:
EK:
I find that you create these tight

spaces where people are forced into
some kind of empathy, or intimacy, for
and with people they might not have
otherwise cared about. In The Flick,
the central conflict revolves around the
question of loyalty and betrayal among
relative strangers. In Circle Mirror
Transformation, a group of people who
randomly find themselves in an acting
class together quickly end up becoming
very vulnerable with one another. Same
with The Aliens.
A B : I think that's probably true of this

play, too. Although, it hadn't really
occurred to me until you said it.
EK:
When did you first start paying

attention to the way people speak?
It's like putting a microscope on the

present.
EK:
A B : Yeah, and Im especially interested

in the restrictions of theater. In dealing
with a single space. Of course, a play
can take place in multiple locations.
Some of my favorite plays do. But, so
far, I'm really interested in trapping
everybody in one space. When people
have asked to make movie adaptations
of my plays, I draw the line. Once I was
like, Well, if you wanted to do one long
shot, with no close-ups, then you can
do it. And they were like, You can't have
a movie that's one long shot. But, now
that we're talking about it, I actually am
really interested in making a film that's
one long shot for two hours, with no
close-ups or change in location.
EK:
I have a big question with theater

in general, and especially with young
playwrights who could have chosen
screenwriting or novel writing: What is
it about theater that still resonates with
you? Does it let you articulate or represent something in a way that's perhaps
more honest or more true to life than
other artistic mediums?
140 BOMB 133
M A N : The old one, at Playwrights. Im

so sorry to interrupt but, holy mother of
God! Thank you.
A B : Thank you! Nice meeting you.
(pause)
EK:
Lets talk about speech patterns

in your plays, or more specifically, tell
me about how you became fixated on
the importance of silences between
speeches. We always talk so much
about dialogue in plays.
AB:
I know!
EK:
EK:
A B : I have been amused and moved

by the grammar and music of the way
people speak since I can remember.
When I was seventeen I started secretly
recording people and then transcribing
everything, twenty pages of a so-called
banal conversation, and then marveling
at how beautiful it was when you just
write down exactly what people say.
A B : Oh, thank you! Did you see the old

version, or the newer version?
It has to be the way it really would

be if these people were in this room
right now.
A B : Well, actually, no, I'm not interested

in trying to represent the world as it is
in this play John, especially, I'm making
no attempt to adhere to reality at all.
For me, letting the space lead the story,
rather than the story lead the space, is
really interesting. In terms of why I'm
drawn to theater, there's also something masochistic about it, because I
am a perfectionist, and I do have such
specific ideas about how things should
be. Theater constantly teaches you that
perfection is impossible. It always goes
a different way than you plan; theres
always a night where something goes
insanely wrong.
I remember, what was it, maybe

it was Krapp's Last Tape . . . there was
some Beckett play I was seeing at BAM,
that has a full minute of silence at the
beginning. And, you could feel how
uncomfortable everyone was. That was
one of the most powerful moments that
I've had in a theater in a long time. How
did you tap into the fact that silence
could be such a crux of what makes live
performance have a certain magic?
A B : You articulate a thought that I didn't

have when I started making the work.
I guess I contemplated using a lot of
silence in Circle Mirror Transformation.
But I wasn't conscious of experimenting with that, or trying to show people
anything. I just knew how the play
sounded in my head. Then, when we
rehearsed it, I would really insist on
I have been amused and moved by the grammar and music of the way
people speak since I can remember.
longer pauses. But it wasn't because
I had some sort of aesthetic project
involving silence. It was more like trying
to replicate a musical score in my head.
And I do think there's a lot of silence in
real life. But Im not attempting to hold a
mirror up to reality, it was just what was
working for me musically. Circle Mirror
Transformation was just me being like,
Okay, what if I just write, not worrying about marketability or wondering
if people will like this or pay attention
to it? What if I write something that I,
alone in a theater, would enjoy watching? That really helped me. And then I
guess that ended up involving a lot of
silence. I still didn't think it was such a
big deal, that it was a distinctive quality
of my writing. And then it started getting written about as a thing I do, which
was mystifying to me. But it was one of
those things where you realize something about your work because people
are telling it to you.
But in the stage directions to The
Aliens, you specify the silences need to
be at least five seconds long.
EK:
A B : Well, that's the only play I've ever

done that with, because that play really
was about the relationship between
these two men who don't have jobs
and spend all day hanging out together.
And, for me, that playmore than any
of my playsentailed a lot of stillness,
and revolved around the music of these
people talking, and singing. So, yeah,
it was ultra-specific in my head. But,
again, not as some kind of
EK:
project, or premeditated artist's

statement.
A B : Yeah, but actually thats what

these dudes in my head are doing,
these characters: they're hanging out
in silence together. The first preview of
John was last night, and I really never
think my plays are particularly silent,
quiet, or slow. I mean, we're still working on the pacethis is a very early
preview. I'm always surprised by what
happens when you get an audience:
how much people laugh, and how many
people get freaked out. I never think I'm
writing something divisive or challenging. It's a really sad statement about

how conservative theater is today that
I'm considered a challenging or divisive
artist. That's hilarious. Because I think
I'm pretty accessible! There's a story
with characters that you can follow.
And there are touching moments at the
end, you know? I don't feel like I'm a
member of the avant-garde. What I can
say is that I'm trying to make something
unusual and surprising and not bound
to convention. But not something anticonventional either.
EK:
The first thing critics seem to mention when talking about your work is
how people walked out when The Flick
first opened at Playwrights Horizons.
Like it was the biggest scandal.
A B : That just means that the theater

world is really lame. Its so conservative, its crazy. And maybe that's another
thing that makes me interested in the
medium. It's not hard to challenge people in the theater, to do something that
makes people feel a little uncomfortable,
or think a little differently. Because what
we're used to seeing is so predictable.
EK:
And you're just being true to what

sounds authentic, or
A B : interesting to me, to what would

entertain me. I do have a slightly different metabolism. I really like long books
with a lot of description. What I find
entertaining might be different. But Im
always surprised by the reactions to my
plays. Last night was our first preview.
My friend came, and he said that there
was a couple outside the theater in a
horrible fight afterwards, because the
man loved it and the woman hated it.
EK:
Can you remember the turning point

when you started making work that you
would enjoy seeing, regardless of what
other people might think? What caused
the shift?
A B : It was actually a shift in my thinking, what you just described. When

you're in your twenties and broke, you
just want to make it, you want to be
recognized, you want to get ahead, and

so you write trying to make something
that you think people will like. And then
it just wasn't working for me anymore.
I was writing the worst stuff. And I had
coffee with my grad school mentor,
Mac Wellman, and I told him I felt like
a fraud and that I didn't want to write
stupid uptown comedies but I didn't
feel like I fit into a more expressionistic
mode either, and he said to me: Well, if
you were just writing to amuse yourself,
writing entirely for fun without worrying about whether anyone would like it,
what would you write? I said: I'd write
a play that was just my mom and her
hippie friends sitting around and talking
about spirituality for two hours. And
he said: Do that! That sounds great!
I was truly taken aback like, Wait, I can
do that?
EK:
Is your creative process any different when adapting someone elses

work, as in the case of Uncle Vanya?
Did adapting Chekhov involve any
reassessment of your relationship to
theater?
A B : Uncle Vanya is another example of

wanting to make a project for an actor.
The director Sam Gold and I really
wanted Reed Birney to play Vanya. I
think one of my secret weapons as a
playwright is that I'm good at casting.
Whenever I thought about Vanya, I'd
have casting fantasies. I'd think, Oh,
Maria Dizzia should play Yelena. I just
had a lot of ideas about it, and I also
found myself dissatisfied with all of the
translations and adaptations of Chekhov
I read, with Paul Schmidt being the
exception. And then it was commissioned by Soho Rep. So me doing the
adaptation was an opportunity to write
something for these actors. There was
also the pure pleasure of investigating the play. I studied Russian in high
school, and it was a way to revisit the
language and to go to Russia. I worked
with a literal translator, but I also did a
pass with my Russian dictionary, which
was so fun. I don't have fun writing my
other plays. Its usually a very painful,
horrifying process.
Louisa Krause and

Matthew Maher in
T H E FLI C K , written
by Annie Baker and
directed by Sam
Gold. Barrow Street
Theater, 2013. Photo
by Joan Marcus.
EK:
That's why I translatebecause

I can respond as a reader. Translating is
freeing in a different way than writing.
A B : You can play around, the material is already good so you just have to
work on doing justice to it. I found it so
pleasurable. I would really like to adapt
Chekhovs Ivanov, and I would like to
spend five years on it.
EK:
Why do you love Chekhov so much?
A B : Oh, I probably don't have

anything original to say about him.
I love that his plots and characters are
full of contradictions. I love that his
plays are ultimately about inner conflict,
not outer conflict. They're plays about
people in dialogue with themselves.
Almost all the outer conflict between
people is actually about competing
narratives.
EK:
Absolutely. And he shows how

vulnerable that makes people and how
silly much of our conversations end
up being, how we can never say what
we actually mean. It's the most honest
theater, and yet it's the easiest to fuck
up by making it overly sentimental or
slapstick. Chekhov productions often
end up exemplifying theaters worst
tendencies toward being staid, artificial,
or over-the-top.
142 BOMB 133
A B : In contemporary American theater,

especially in the world of nonprofits and
older subscriber audiences, there's all
this stress about making things clearer
for the audience. If you have this plot
thread, you have to tie it up later. One
thing I learned poking around inside
Vanya is how many things in that play
are inconsistent; they don't actually
match up time-wise. There's just some
basic stuff, like, Wait, they've only been
together this long, how is it possible
that he's that oldit doesn't add up. It's
a very strange play that takes its pretty
time in some sections and then speeds
through others. It was a lesson in letting
the play be its own weird animal.
one speech, I think it's one of Astrov's

speeches, that's one long run-on sentence in the original Russian, it's just so
many ellipses. Translated, its always
rendered in perfect full sentencesI
don't know why you would do that. So,
I really got excited by the idea of being
super loyal to the original text. Initially I
thought, Maybe I'll do some crazy version of Uncle Vanya, where they're not
talking about getting their horses ready,
they're getting their car. But once I
looked at the original text, I thought, No,
this is totally strange and perfect and
the problem is people just cleaning it
up too much. We have to do the weird,
specific, original, dirty Uncle Vanya.
EK:
EK:
And it can still speak to you and

move you, whether or not it's totally
logically consistent.
A B : He somehow manages to be timeless and simultaneously very much of

his time. I had the most fun with the
character Waffles, who has all these references to nineteenth-century Russian
painters and writers. He name-drops a
lot, and translators always take that out,
they try to make it more general. I was
like, No, that's great, we don't know
what he's talking about. The specificity of it is so awesome. Also, a lot of
Chekhovs grammar is smoothed over by
other translators and adaptors. There's
And there are things about it that are

timeless. Is it The Cherry Orchard where
Varya is in love with Lopakhin? There's
that goodbye scene where she's hoping
that he's finally going to propose to her
before he leaves, and instead they talk
about the weather.
AB:
EK:
Yeah.
There are times when the characters in your plays are not talking about
anything; they're projecting onto something else. And that's so true to who we
are, we just dance around the things we
want to say.
Maria Dizzia,
Michael Shannon,
and audience in
Chekhovs U N C LE
VA N YA , adapted
and directed by
Annie Baker, Soho
Rep, 2012. Photo by
Julieta Cervantes.
A B : Yes, I love the layers and layers

of metaphor that you can hit when
you investigate the way people express
themselves. Going back to Chekhov,
I have a fantasy of doing a movie out
of The Steppe. It's my crazy project.
Because, speaking of silence, so much
of that novella is just a little boy watching stuff go by in the countryside. I
remember this whole section where
they stop at an inn, in what would now
be Ukraine. There are these Jewish
innkeepers, and they're kind of crazy,
and Chekhov is playing with Jewish stereotypes in this really interesting way.
Anyway, I was obsessed with that whole
section, because people in my family
were Jewish innkeepers in that part of
the country around that time.
So I have this whole fantasy about
making a really long, really slowmoving movie out of The Steppe.
EK:
Do you write for the screen?
A B : I do write for the screen. I primarily

got into it to get health insurance and
money. Now I only want to write movie
scripts if I can make the movies myself.
I was really bad at being a writer for
hire. It wasn't a good career for me.
Right now I'm working on a movie that
I'm attached to direct.
EK:
Is it strange for you that The Flick
is also playing right now, at the same

time as John?
A B : Super weird! I write a new play
every three years, so I'm usually in
rehearsal only every three years. I'm still
going to John every night. After a play
opens, you stop going, and you just get
these performance reports every night.
It'll be crazy when The Flick is playing
downtown, and John is playing uptown.
Ill be out to dinner, or in bed at night,
and be like, Oh my God, two plays are
happening right now, and hundreds of
people are watching it! It's simultaneously my worst nightmare and a crazy
fantasy.
EK:
Do you still feel very involved with

The Flick, or does it have a life of its own
now?
A B : I was very involved in the second

incarnation, but we launched it very
quickly. It's the same group of actors,
and they're super smart, and they didn't
require a lot.
EK:
Their chemistry is unbelievable.
A B : They're amazing with each other.

We had to re-tech it for a new space,
basically, and re-choreograph their
trash cleanup. But because Sam and
I have been working on John, now
it's just happening downtown. So it has

a life of its own. Every night it's different. The audience changes it, sometimes
an actor skips a really important line,
sometimes someone cries when they're
not supposed to cry, sometimes they
don't cry when they're supposed to. It's
a different story every night, and that's
so infuriating and also really beautiful.
EK:
So, you truly are a masochist to

be a perfectionist and get involved in
a medium where you don't have much
control.
A B : There's a whole thing in theater

where when the press comes you say,
It's frozen, the show's frozen now.
And it's not
EK:
ever. But in the process of staging

a production, even if its only fleeting, when do you know that the play
works? What does that feel like?
A B : Nope. I never feel that way. I'm

way too self-critical. To me it always
feels like it's falling apart. I'm never
like, Eureka! It works! But there are
moments that thrill me. When I'm
like, Oh, that little moment just then,
that little moment between those two
people, was magical. And that's a real
adrenaline rush.
Subscribe and Save 40%

bombmagazine.org /subscribe
144 BOMB 133
BOMB
CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARTISTS, WRITERS, MUSICIANS , PERFORMERS, DIRECTORSSINCE 1981
Start your free trial today. No credit card required.

WEBSITES DOMAINS COMMERCE + MORE
U S E T H E O F F E R C O D E B O M B M A G T O S AV E 1 0 % .
NUMBER 133 / FALL 2015
Build a beautiful website with Squarespace.
Conversations between Artists, Writers, Musicians, Performers, Directorssince 1981
BOMB
Number 133 / Fall 2015

Bomb Magazine 133

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Bomb Magazine 133

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

BOMB

CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN ARTISTS, WRITERS, MUSICIANS , PERFORMERS, DIRECTORSSINCE 1981

Start your free trial today. No credit card required.

NUMBER 133 / FALL 2015

Build a beautiful website with Squarespace.

Conversations between Artists, Writers, Musicians, Performers, Directorssince 1981

Number 133 / Fall 2015

BOMB 133 / FALL 2015

on the cover: Henry

 he Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life

22 Samuel Becketts Happy Days

Actor, Playwright, Failure, Father, FagConrad

Fran Rosss Oreo

This issue is supported in part by public funds from

Gianni de Falco (editorial)

WEB EDITOR AND ONLINE

MANAGING DIRECTOR, MARKETING

FALL EXHIBITIONS 2015

PAULA COOPER GALLERY

THE XEROX BOOK

Matthew Deleget is a Brooklyn-based

Lee Jaffe is an artist and musician. He

Robert Dewhurst, a poet and scholar,

Elianna Kan is a freelance writer and

Tonya Foster is the author of A Swarm

Katherine Hubbard is an interdisciplinary

John Keenes latest book, Counternarratives (New Directions), was released in

Deana Lawson is a photo-based

Aily Nash is a Brooklyn-based curator

Jay Sanders is Curator and Curator of

Henry Taylor is a Los Angeles-based

Valentine is pleased to inaugurate the new

Teal Daylight, 68 63 inches, acrylic on canvas, 2010.

THANK YOU TO ALL 2015 BOMB PATRONS JOIN, DONATE, SUPPORT

Skinscreen: Art and Poetry

not uncoincidentally, most artseeks to do. So that

DIS, THE ISL AND

Abbass Chamber 664 Kubrick, Chamber 665

expandedliquididea of poetry. In her foreword

show, its left to the poets to do most of the emoting

No one knows this secret half-covering my face.

The night makes the bruised woman, freely twirling

Pierre Huyghes Rite Passage

Still from UNTITLED

The glass used for the Rite Passage aquarium

a published conversation with Sheena Wagstaff (the

The Racial Imaginary: Writers

as well as with Farid Matuks trenchant inquiry: What

John Lucas, TONY

slowly into the ground over two acts while prattling

Matt Freedman and Tim

increasingly blackened with charcoal. At one point you

The Continuing Line,

Front Gallery: Helen O Leary

This Mortal Coil,

Front Gallery: Elisabeth Condon

Sean Kennedy, successpool

Devin Powers: Train Drawings

Roland Flexner and Japanese

Alicia Gibson, Mandy Lyn

Volume 2: Black & White,

LIFE ON MARS GALLERY

RACHEL UFFNER GALLERY

here can be read as physical manifestation, but also

he Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life

22 Samuel Becketts Happy Days

The night makes the bruised woman, freely twirling

DADDY & BILLY: THE PICNIC Billy: Daddy! Im