Category: magazine

Everyone wants to get things done, but it can be hard to predict how long they’ll take. Mathematicians needed three centuries to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem—first proposed around 1637, the solution only came in 1994. Was that remarkably fast, or pathetically slow? What about rebuilding bridges and highways? Construction timelines often seem like testaments of wild optimism. Instagram tells me that in Austin, there’s a restaurant whose Michelin-starred chef spent two years “perfecting” his recipe for a double cheeseburger. I think the claim is meant to impress—here is a true craftsman—but it also made me wonder about the chef’s priorities. How could this task have taken more than a weekend?

To complicate matters, we Americans can’t make up our minds about whether it’s better to work a lot or a little. We flaunt long workweeks and disdain anyone working less than full-time. But we’re likewise seduced by get-rich-quick schemes and “labor-saving” gimmicks. The rich may work long hours, but much of their income is passive, the fruit of asset appreciation and other people’s labor. Students who use ChatGPT to write their term papers probably hope AI won’t take their jobs in ten years.

Amid this uncertainty, we turn to productivity gurus from Ben Franklin to Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek) who offer a clear, enticing path: follow this method, and you’ll accomplish more than your rivals with less effort. That’s also the promise of Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity, which is aimed at professionals, entrepreneurs, and freelancers—workers in a knowledge economy whose results are hard to quantify. Newport begins by noting that white-collar workplaces often value “pseudo-productivity,” appearing to be busy—sending emails, holding meetings, putting in pins and circling back—without measurable results. Newport’s book is a commercial success (it’s already visited the bestseller lists) but, as other reviewers have noted, an intellectual failure, offering little more than shallow repetitions of ideas from his previous books. There’s a deeper problem, too: Newport’s “me first” ethos suggests that, at a moment when more and more people prefer to work from home, we are no longer sure how to work together.

Newport himself seems to keep pretty busy. He is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University—a day job that’s normally considered full-time, if not all-consuming. In addition, he blogs, hosts a weekly podcast, writes for the New Yorker, and churns out books on how to work. Slow Productivity is his eighth, and his fifth since 2012. (He signed a deal for the first while still in college.) He is also a husband and father of three boys.

In light of this activity, Newport’s three recommended principles of slow productivity—“do fewer things,” “work at a natural pace,” and “obsess over quality”—might call for the caveat, “do as I say, not as I do.” To his credit, Newport doesn’t say outright that these principles worked for him and thus will for you. Still, he does borrow anecdotes from his own life, including how one of his key insights (about what productivity looks like on daily timescales versus longer ones) came while on vacation in Maine; he says he wrote an essay about it on the spot.

Newport’s principles make sense at first glance but fall apart on closer scrutiny. For instance, the second principle, “work at a natural pace,” means that we should “give our important efforts more breathing room, allowing them to take longer and unfold with intensity levels that vary over time.” Expressed this way, it sounds great. I’m not lazy or incompetent, I just work at different levels of intensity, thank you very much. But let’s think about this. Is a slow pace of work, or any pace for that matter, truly “natural”? Newport proposes hunter-gatherers as a model. The force of their labor fluctuates throughout the day; perhaps this is human nature, and we need to work more in tune with it.

But don’t people in agricultural societies—and technological ones—already do this? Haven’t we always? What about Pieter Bruegel’s or Vincent van Gogh’s harvesters napping in the sun? Isn’t your ESPN or eBay browser tab open for a similar reason? And besides, hunter-gatherer societies don’t produce enough food to support knowledge workers and our questionably useful labor. And as Newport admits, only agricultural societies have lengthy festivals and slow seasons. (Though I would add that even then, care work, traditionally done by women, continues apace.) Nature doesn’t know whether it’s Memorial Day weekend. Newport’s advice, then, is no match for the world we’ve constructed.

Slow Productivity is filled with stories of patient geniuses accomplishing great things without breaking a sweat: Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, John McPhee, Jewel. Someone Newport does not mention is Immanuel Kant, born precisely three hundred years ago this April. Already forty-six years old, Kant took a post at the University of Königsberg in 1770, and then produced nothing noteworthy for a decade. He was working on a tome, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), that would upend every philosophical assumption of its era. Following this breakthrough, Kant produced a cascade of important works on morality, aesthetic judgment, politics, and religion.

One of Kant’s most enduring ideas is the categorical imperative, the notion that the implicit rules you follow in your conduct should only be ones that could serve as universal laws. Kant’s goal was to eliminate the free riders who undermine moral order. On his account, you shouldn’t lie to gain advantage, because if everyone did so, societal trust would break down to the point where deceit would no longer give you an edge. In fact, you couldn’t reliably get ahead at all amid the social chaos. The maxim “lie to get ahead” is self-defeating.

All this is true, but it hardly explains why the poet Heinrich Heine found Kant more ruthlessly revolutionary than Robespierre. Nor does it explain why Kant himself said only pedants care about that kind of skepticism. Ordinary people do not fret over the reality of tables or chairs or billiard balls. They do, however, wonder if ideas like freedom and justice are merely fantasies. Kant’s main goal was to show they are not.

The point is often missed, because Kant was as bad a writer as he was a great philosopher. By the time he finishes proving the existence of the objects of ordinary experience and is ready to show how they differ from ideas of reason, the semester is nearly over. Long-windedness is not, however, the only reason his work is often misinterpreted. Consider the effects of a bad review.

Had Kant died before his 57th birthday, he’d be remembered by a few scholars for some short, early texts. He withdrew from writing them in 1770 to conceive and compose his great “Critique of Pure Reason.” After what scholars call his “silent decade,” Kant pulled the text together in six months and finally published in 1781. For a year and a half, Kant waited for responses. When one finally appeared, it was a hatchet job accusing him of being a Berkeleyan solipsist: someone who denies the existence of ordinary objects.

Any author can imagine Kant’s dismay, and most likely his rage. In haste to refute the distortion of his life’s work, Kant wrote a second edition of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and more fatefully, the “Prolegomena.” Since the latter is much shorter than the main book, it’s read far more often, and this has skewed the interpretation of Kant’s work as a whole. If the major problem of philosophy were proving the world’s existence, then Kant surely solved it. (Richard Rorty argued that he did, and that philosophy has little more to offer.)

In fact Kant was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?

A stunning thought experiment answers that question in his next book, the “Critique of Practical Reason.” Kant asks us to imagine a man who says temptation overwhelms him whenever he passes “a certain house.” (The 18th century was discreet.) But if a gallows were constructed to insure the fellow would be hanged upon exiting the brothel, he’d discover he can resist temptation very well. All mortal temptations fade in the face of threats to life itself.

Jeffrey Gibson’s United States Pavilion opened at the Venice Biennale with a superabundance of color and signs of tradition that bring history into a vital present purview. The first Native American artist to represent the US with a solo show at the Biennale made 11 paintings, nine sculptures, eight flags, two murals, and one video installation for the Pavilion, which bears the title the space in which to place me.

Gibson—a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent—draws on his heritage but also remixes it in radical fashion in works that include pointed decorative elements (intricate beadwork, vintage pins, found objects like belt buckles and bags) and text drawn from what an exhibition pamphlet describes as sources ranging from Dakota proverbs and the songs of Nina Simone to excerpts from legislative documents. The effect of it all is celebratory and defiant, disquieting and full of righteous rage.

Below, some highlights from the space in which to place me.

Known for the origami-inspired technique she uses to transform paintings into wall sculptures, Los Angeles-based artist Susan Maddux’s creativity is incredible to experience. Each artwork, ranging in size from 12-inches all the way up to seven feet tall and protruding 2-6 inches from the wall, is constructed from separate acrylic on canvas paintings that are individually folded before being added to the larger piece. As Maddux explains it, the canvas is painted, folded, and unfolded many times as she experiments with proportion and patterning. The final forms, repeating mirrored images, bring to mind garments, perhaps a kimono or a cape, and acquire an anthropomorphic quality that transforms spaces.

Maddux is a 4th generation Hapa-Japanese woman, born and raised in Hawaii with a few stints living on the mainland growing up. Her work reflects her personal experiences, recalling the land’s lush landscape and brilliant colors with each piece of canvas. The work also connects Maddux to generations of women who came before her through the rituals of smoothing, folding, shaking out cloth, repetition, accumulation, veneration, and reflection.

After receiving a fine art degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, Maddux’s career began as a surface designer in New York. The profession, and what she learned through it gave her a different perspective on painting. But every time she would consider taking it on full-time, someone would say it was impossible to support herself that way and it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be done. So, she protected her artistic talents and kept them for herself.

In 2012, Maddux made the move to Los Angeles and began exploring how to plug away at her paintings as material, developing the folding collage technique in the process. In 2019, after some life struggles, she went professional as an artist.

“Painting had always been how I came back to myself, what helped me remember who I was, and how I got grounded,” Maddux says. “I had the opportunity to do a large installation at the LA Design Festival in 2019, and I took that chance and gave it my all. I did 12 pieces, and things started really taking off. My work was discovered by the design community, and I’ve been able to work within both art and design since then, which has been fantastic.”

Maddux took a minute to recall traveling to visit her grandparents for the first time in San Antonio, Texas, when she was 10 years old. Never having gone anywhere before, their 15-foot carved antique wooden front door from Italy made an impression, as did the rest of the house. “It was built in a Mediterranean style with open walkways and bougainvillea surrounding a tiled pool that sparkled in the sunshine,” she recalls. “The house was filled with art they had collected all over the world. It was a total revelation for me to see that you could intentionally create an environment of beauty and harmony like that.”

If you’d like to catch Maddux’s work in person, her next solo show, Wet Drapery, opens April 13th at the Not There Gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles. But today she’s joining us for Friday Five!

Painting by Utagawa Kunisada

1. Yokai

My fascination with the spirit world and depictions of yokai, Japanese ghosts and demons, began when I was very young. Growing up in Hawaii, I was always aware of the supernatural world, and hearing ghost stories from my Japanese relatives fueled my imagination. Paintings of yokai and the grotesque seem to open up space for the imagination to run wild and delightful depictions of demons that run from terrifying to absurd are absolutely captivating.

Art by Giovanni Garcia-Fenech

2. My Art Collection

I started my art collection by trading art with friends when I was in school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I’ve known so many incredible artists over the years, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to collect their work. I like to buy something every year as a gift to myself. I have a couple of large paintings and photographs, and many smaller pieces. I love to be surrounded by pieces that remind me of inspiring and talented friends and how art shapes the world we inhabit and makes life so much more interesting.

Photo: Susan Maddux

3. Vases

When I travel, I love to buy ceramics. Something made by hand, with materials from a particular area is such a great way to connect with and remember the creative energy of a place. Some of my favorite vases are made by friends as well, we’re lucky to have such a rich ceramic tradition here in Los Angeles. When I was little, a family friend gave me a collection of tiny vases because I loved small things. Putting a single flower in a little vase brings me right back to that fascination. I’m always foraging on my walks in the hills, so I’ve collected quite a few large heavy ceramic vases that can hold the eucalyptus branches, overgrown mustard stalks, seed pods, and palm fronds I find while I’m out.

Photo: Susan Maddux

4. Symmetry

I became very aware of the relationship between elements when I started exploring print and pattern design. Symmetry is a very important organizing principle that creates an expectation that is really interesting to play with. In my work, I refer to symmetry as it is found in nature – an imperfect mirror image. That little bit of difference creates tension and curiosity and offers an invitation to look closer. We intuitively sense something humanizing about imperfect symmetry. It wasn’t made by a machine, but rather speaks of the beauty of a flower or a face we love in its unique construction.

Photo: Susan Maddux

5. Vintage Textiles

I grew up thrifting in Hawaii. We would find a lot of 60s and 70s pieces and I had an incredible collection of psychedelic shifts and house dresses – the kind with the zipper up the front that grandma used to wear – that I wore to high school. This did not make me very popular, but I did become interested in textiles and patterning. I always shop by both feel and look, and I loved going through the racks looking for treasure: vintage aloha wear patterns, prints on silk, or barkcloth. I’ve always collected vintage, and over time I’ve used many pieces from my collection in my own work, as inspiration for patterns in paintings and even as subject matter.

Work by Susan Maddux:

Blue Cocoon Photo: Susan Maddux

The most recent development in my work has been incorporating painted portals or frames that are specific to each piece and painted directly on the wall.

Queen Photo: Neil Bachand

Coquina Photo: Susan Maddux

Azure Aura Photo: Susan Maddux

Flame of my heart Photo: Susan Maddux

Scarlet Botanica Photo: Susan Maddux

Totem Photo: Susan Maddux

Kelly Beall is Director of Branded Content at Design Milk. The Pittsburgh-based writer and designer has had a deep love of art and design for as long as she can remember, from Fashion Plates to MoMA and far beyond. When not searching out the visual arts, she's likely sharing her favorite finds with others. Kelly can also be found tracking down new music, teaching herself to play the ukulele, or on the couch with her three pets – Bebe, Rainey, and Remy. Find her @designcrush on social.

Dutch traders had visited the area of North America that is now New York in the early 17th century, but it was not until 1624 that colonists arrived for permanent settlement. By 1660, the colony of New Amsterdam had reached what would be its peak before the 1664 English takeover. A detailed map known as the Castello Plan—on view until 14 July at the New York-Historical Society—shows the wall at the edge of the clusters of homes that would later give Manhattan’s Wall Street its name, as well as the path of today’s Broadway curving up from the imposing Fort Amsterdam. However, 400 years later, beyond these traces in the streets there is rare physical evidence of the Dutch colonial era.

What remains is easy to overlook, surrounded by the centuries of development that followed, but frequently speaks to the foundational divisions within the future New York City. Enslaved people were brought to the colony as early as 1626 by the Dutch West India Company, while violent attacks by Dutch colonists on the Indigenous population forcibly removed them from their land.

“In preserving Dutch historic sites, I think it’s important that we’re not just telling the story of the Dutch who came here and built these houses,” says Meredith Sorin Horsford, the executive director of the Historic House Trust of New York City (HHT). “It’s really important for us to tell a more complete and robust story of history and think about other groups who were a part of that period of time.”

HHT has a partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to advocate for and support the preservation of member sites that are publicly owned and located on park land. HHT’s online Dutch Heritage Trail, launched in 2021, includes 11 locations that range from the Alice Austen House on Staten Island—expanded from a 1690 one-room Dutch farmhouse—to later structures like the Dutch colonial-style Dyckman Farmhouse in Manhattan, which was built in 1784. Although they can stand out as curious relics (the white-clapboard Dyckman Farmhouse looms over Broadway from its elevated perch nestled between apartment buildings), Horsford emphasises that they are not like objects behind glass.

“These places don’t exist as static historic structures that just sit there and continue to grow older,” she says. “They are dynamic, integrated pieces of their community.”

Horsford was previously the executive director of the Dyckman Farmhouse, where she launched an initiative to research free and enslaved Black people who lived and worked at the site, with artists humanising their stories—such as Reggie Black projecting the words “Slaves Lived Here” on the house. All historic houses must grapple with this balance of offering a look into the past while conveying the fuller story of their histories, often with limited staff and space.

Located between the Brooklyn neighbourhoods of East Flatbush and Canarsie, the Wyckoff House has approached this challenge by shifting the focus from the house itself to its community. Built in 1652, it is the oldest house in the city, dating to when this area was farmed by Dutch colonists—it is currently wedged between a car wash and a McDonald’s. The steep slope of its roof faces the now-obsolete Canarsie Lane, which was once a Lenape hunting path. As Melissa Branfman, the executive director of the Wyckoff House, observes: “This land has had many lives, and to interpret it only from the life of the Dutch family that lived in the house is very limiting.”

The Wyckoff House does not have interpretive panels or roped-off exhibition spaces; visitors are immersed in rooms where plants from its garden are dried for tea, much like they were in the 17th century. Its outdoor space has allowed the house to be decentred in its stewardship, with the land it sits on hosting festivals celebrating the Caribbean culture of its Brooklyn community, and its farm growing crops such as pigeon peas that are common in Caribbean food but can be hard to find in the borough.

“That kind of interpretation can make parallels between liberation and colonial culture that were happening both in the Americas, like in New
Netherland, as well as other countries, where some of the Caribbean was under Dutch rule,” Branfman says.

A more inclusive history

The Lefferts Historic House, located at the edge of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, is likewise being re-examined for how it can present a more inclusive history. It dates to 1783 and includes wood salvaged from a 17th-century house, reflecting the Dutch influence that endured under English rule, with its Dutch colonial frame house including a broad porch lined with columns facing the busy traffic of Flatbush Avenue. A new initiative from Prospect Park Alliance is elevating the past four centuries of resilience of the Lenape and people of African descent, while a $2.5m architectural restoration is protecting the site for the years ahead.

“Maintaining a nearly quarter-century-old house takes an enormous amount of money, time and work, much of it unseen by the public,” says Dylan Yeats, a project manager for the house. “So in addition to developing interpretations with our ReImagine Lefferts initiative, Prospect Park Alliance has been investing in the structure itself.”

The Lefferts Historic House closed in 2019 for the overhaul and will be reopening this summer. When it debuted as a museum in the 20th century—after being relocated to the park in 1917 to protect it from development—it concentrated on the Lefferts family. The house will welcome visitors later this year with a textile installation on its façade by the artist Adama Delphine Fawundu that honours the 25 identified people who were enslaved by the family between 1783 and 1827.

“It can be very easy to forget the past in a city like New York that is constantly remaking itself,” Yeats says. “Historic houses and other markers of the past offer visitors and even passers-by an occasion to remember. Many Brooklynites don’t know the colonial history of the land they live on or what those who came before them did on the land.”

Surviving the odds of New York’s continuous development, these houses convey part of the story of how the largest city in the US grew from a small colony at the tip of Manhattan. Their preservation also recalls how practices like slavery, associated more often with the American South, were foundational to the city.

“It’s an exciting time to be interpreting history and talking about history, because I’ve definitely seen a shift in the field, which is less about telling a singular narrative,” Branfman says. “We’re starting to realise that the facts that we know are often not all the facts. And if you look through the same materials with different eyes, you might find different things.”

For a generation of New York gallery-goers (not to mention fairgoers internationally), Gavin Brown’s gallery—branded Gavin Brown’s Enterprise—was a vital ingredient in the soup. He showed essential artists ranging from Joan Jonas and Alex Katz to Arthur Jafa and Rirkrit Tiravanija. (In the latter case, the soup was literal, as the artist handed it out to visitors in a key example of what would come to be called relational aesthetics.) 

I’ll never forget when Urs Fischer dug an eight-feet-deep hole in the gallery that extended some 38 feet across. When he lost a space on 15th Street in 2015, he memorably revived a presentation of a Jannis Kounellis piece in which a squad of horses were parked in the gallery, munching hay and snorting. When he premiered Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, the Message Is Death just days after the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, it became a place for the art community to mourn.

The gallery operated for some 26 years across locations on Broome Street in SoHo, 15th Street in the Meatpacking District (where a neighboring bar, Passerby, featured a light-up floor by Piotr Uklański and was a key art-world watering hole), to the West Village, and finally to Harlem. He ultimately joined Barbara Gladstone’s globe-spanning gallery as a partner in 2020.

Now, the records behind many of those unforgettable exhibitions have found a new home, as Brown is donating the gallery’s archives to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, a short trip north of where the gallery once stood. 

“Gavin Brown’s Enterprise was as much a social space as an influential pillar of the commercial gallery world, and it remains a key touchstone for independent representation within the arts community,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS Bard. “The archives preserve and make public a dynamic history of a space known for challenging convention and for dynamic exhibition-making.”

The center serves students in the graduate program, who are an influential bunch; the program has sent many notable graduates into the gallery and museum world, such as Carla Acevedo-Yates, Cecilia Allemani, Anne Ellegood, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Ruba Katrib, Denise Markonish, and Tobias Ostrander.

We spoke to the dealer about feeling sentimental, how the gallery will live on, and what future scholars might find in those boxes.

How did you come to settle on Bard, when your records could have gone to, say, the Archives of American Art or a university that would have been happy to have them?

I’m totally ignorant about these things. Tom asked, and no one else did. CCS does an amazing job. I like the idea of it being a resource for young minds that are thinking about art. It gives the gallery and its history some longevity. It’s carried on in the nervous system of these kids. And I think there’s something powerful about what they do. They’re the new Peace Corps, spreading the word of art around the world. Politics has now become so vacant and empty that no one wants to go into politics, so maybe even if not as a career, they want to go into art as a way to understand the world and our life. 

Does it feel strange to donate the archives while you’re still living, breathing, and doing business, when it’s such a retrospective gesture?

No, I feel much lighter because of it, to be honest with you. I’ve moved on from that chapter, from that volume. 

On the other hand, I also feel a mania or collective pathology of trying to stop time and contain everything is… I don’t know… not that I have trouble looking back. I can find myself feeling very nostalgic and sentimental. I have a tendency to revisit locations. I drive past the Greenwich Street location or cycle past the 15th Street location. But all that other stuff about how people look at it in terms of academics or being part of history, that’s for other people to think about. My memory’s so bad, I’ve forgotten so much anyway.

But I don’t want to be blasé about it. I’m extremely proud, and it feels good that it’s with a friend and I hope it’s useful. 

Have you taken a close look over the archives in preparation for this move? If so, was there anything surprising in there?

No, all the boxes were in storage and I gave them the key and they went and got it. After everything went digital, we changed our server at some point and lost a whole lot of stuff. So, the post-digital years are perhaps a bit thin but that’s just my own anxiety. What’s in there? It goes from the minutiae to financial records—which is frightening in itself. I guess it’s just the stream-of-consciousness diary of an institution. Well, not that the gallery became an institution. A thing. 

Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.