Category: Reviews

I am prepared. I have had my will drawn and notarized. I’ve given away old books from my library that I will never read again. I’ve gotten rid of porno magazines and cock rings, things that would be difficult or compromising for my beloved to discard. Mother has all my baby pictures I stole. I have paid for my cremation. I carry a pocket full of change to give to panhandlers. My elementary catechism has returned; those who help the lowliest …

Marcus says he just doesn’t understand me sometimes, says he has dreams for us, a home we will build together, but it seems to him I’m giving parts of my life away. I sit quietly at the deli booth, staring at my unfinished sandwich. It is rare now for me to be hungry; the bones in my face have become more distinct. It is when I don’t respond that he gets annoyed, but I can’t help it. I don’t want to change his feelings or argue the probabilities. I don’t believe I have long; my blood has turned against me, there is no one here to heal me. The sunlight from the window pours heavily onto his face, rugged and aged. Myself, I have to stay away from the sun; my face discolors from all the medications I take.

Marcus has become quiet, maybe brooding. I hear a knock on the window next to me. It is a tall man, very dark and in a ragged black suit. He points with a dirty finger at the tray that holds my half-eaten sandwich, then brings his fingers to his mouth. I nod my head. Marcus hates when I do stuff like that, and he barks, “Why’d you do that? Why can’t you just save it for later?”

The man comes to our table, pulls the tray closer to him, unwraps the sandwich from the paper. Marcus leans back far away. The man is intimidating, his form towers over us. I want to tell him to take it away, but he just stands there and eats. Finally, Marcus says, “There’s an empty table over there!” The man gives thanks and then asks for the rest of my drink, which I refuse because I know it would piss Marcus off since he bought lunch. Marcus and I are silent for the rest of his lunch break.

It has become a ritual of sorts, to have lunch on Thursday with Marcus at his work. Sometimes I am too early, or I can see that he is busy with a client. The nursery is very dense and serene, and as he walks through it, he is in total command, like a god in his Eden. The customers are rapt at his every word on how to take care of the plant, what it is suited for, what it will look like in a year, two years. This is one of the reasons I love him, his ability to nurture. It is like he knows the secrets of life and wants to share them with me. I don’t want to be seen at his work.

This is a way I show him my love. My face looks too haggard. I have strange discolorations on my forehead and chest. I look as if I am going to die soon. I don’t want any rumors started about Marcus and me at his work. I don’t want him having to answer difficult questions about his friend. I can imagine his soiled hands clenching.

When I am early, or he’s busy, I go sit at this small Catholic church across the street. The parking lot is usually empty and there’s a porch by the rectory, which I go sit on. The Father has looked at me before through his window and knows that I am just there to wait.

Often when I am there, a large Mexican woman comes by. She carries paper bags from Pic ’n’ Save. Over the brims of the bags, plastic-and-silk flowers stick out. Some weeks they are all blue, others purple, still others pink and red. The woman has taken to nodding at me, “Como ’sta?”

One day, with a smile on my face, I said, “Merci.” She gave me a look and then I knew I’d made a mistake. “Bien, bien, señora!”

She laughed and said, “Ay.”

French has always come easier to me. I’m sure she thinks I’m some sort of pocho, like an Oreo, brown on the outside, white on the inside.

The large woman usually wears something that my grandmother would wear, a kind of flowery smock so she won’t get dirty. She decorates the statue of Mary that stands in the corner of the parking lot, under a large, sturdy eucalyptus tree. On holidays, she’s put out plastic jack-o’-lanterns, Styrofoam snowmen at Mary’s feet, and always lots and lots of fake flowers. Marcus has often told me that he’d give me some perennials, other flowering plants to give to the woman, but I think she wouldn’t want them. I think she loves the fake flowers’ everlasting quality. She does it as a devotion, and when she finishes, she prays, her knees on the cement, her head bowed down, hands pressed together. I’ve told Marcus it is like she has her own form of serenity, that she sees beauty over life, or that she sees her actions as more important than presenting living things.

The most notable thing about the Mary statue is that she has no hands.

Being at the rectory alone makes me think of death. Would I do it to myself if I got really ill? What if I start losing my mind? What if I start looking like more of a freak than I already do and people start staring? What if it becomes too painful for Marcus to be with me?

My upbringing haunts me, like a shadow of the tree. I was taught that I could never go to heaven if I killed myself, that even the most ill cannot do that, because life is a gift we must fully use or otherwise appear ungrateful. My archbishop taught me that. My parents had set up those meetings with Archbishop Mahoney because they didn’t know what to do with me, and they were afraid a doctor would lock me up in an institution. When I was twelve, I had already tried pills I got at school and from my father’s medicine cabinet. The paramedic who revived me cried openly, said he’d never seen a young boy try such a thing. Worse yet, my parents were horrified when they came out to the garage and saw lit stacks of newspaper, soaked with lighter fluid, surrounding me. Parts of my arms and legs were burned severely and today I carry those scars. No one ever understood why I would become so quiet, disappear into my parents’ closet for hours in the dark. Sometimes I would torture my pets, make the other children on our block cry. Still the only feeling I have now is guilt, and when I think of myself, I think I’ve wasted my life. All I remember fully though is a sound, the rush of air igniting.

I figure the hands of Mary must have broken off during an earthquake, or maybe due to vandals. There’s a bronze plaque that reads, “I have no hands but yours.”

The day I read that, the Mexican woman had come up behind me quietly and placed her hand on my shoulder. She started speaking Spanish much too quickly for me to understand. When she figured out I didn’t speak Spanish well enough, she switched over to a slow English. “My name es Yoli, Yolanda.”

It was my turn to say, “Como ’sta?”

There was a gentleness in her voice. “I see you here all the time?” I told her I was waiting for a friend. “Oh, you can help me though?” She pulled out a small hand rake and said, “Weeds.”

I got on my knees with a chuckle and started raking out the weeds that had grown in the flower bed. Eventually, my hands began to ache from the exertion. It was very quiet work.

She changed the vases and put blue flowers and then some calla lilies in the glass containers. I told her how Marcus worked at the nursery across the street and said that I could give her some flowers and other plants if she wanted. I told her maybe some small ivy around the edges would be nice. She smiled and said, “Gracias.”

I started to notice the meditative quality of working this soil, how there was something like a warm charge I received from the earth, that I became more spirit than being. And like the wind flittering through the eucalyptus tree, it felt like she was speaking to me telepathically.

“My son used to do this every Thursday, before I took over.” I stopped what I was doing. “He loved real plants, fussed over this small garden. The Father mentioned often how devoted Tulio was, how his love was an example to all of us. I was so proud of him.” On Yoli’s face, I saw a pride I wished my own parents could give me. “The women of the church would surround me and praise me for raising such a fine young man. But nobody saw how lonely he was. How he would drink in my kitchen till he passed out crying, ‘Mama, Mama.’ ”

I turned back to my work, flustered because I knew how he needed to create beauty in his life. “When the earthquake came,” she said, “and the hands of Mary broke, he wanted the church to have it fixed, but Father said, ‘No, it is more symbolic this way.’ Tulio could not understand; it was like the Mother of God was a real person to him and needed to be healed.”

I huffed, thinking of my own life. She turned her face away from me. “Everyone was surprised that day. I wasn’t. They came to my house, the Father, women of the church. I could tell they had been crying. They said, ‘Yoli, don’t cry but you have to see your son, you have to come with us.’ Tulio had said he was going to trim down the tree over Mary, that the boughs were too low, so off he’d gone with the ladder and some rope.”

The shade of the tree covered us both as she spoke. “Mary stands so far away from the street no one noticed Tulio stringing up the rope, pushing himself off the ladder. When I saw him, it seemed the air gently rocked him back and forth, his feet nearly touched the head of Mary. It was many days before I cried. Somehow, I knew it was all my fault.”

I wanted to ask her why, but I knew. Tulio saw no life ahead, and simply creating these altars was not enough. He was a man who wanted to heal and to be healed.

Marcus came at that moment, asked me to see a ficus tree he wanted to bring home. All I could say to Yoli was, “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Marcus was proud of the ficus he had picked for me; it looked sturdy, the roots unbound. Near the trees were shelves with pots and ceramic figures of cherubs and gargoyles. I noticed that a few of the cherubs’ arms were broken, parts of the wings missing. I could see myself grinding the arms down just to the hands and I started contemplating whether I should use glue or plaster, maybe cement.

I couldn’t tell if it was an act of creation or violence against the church. Maybe both. In my mind I saw what Tulio must have looked like. His smile must have been dazzling.

I picked up the broken arm and asked Marcus if I could possibly have this and another hand. Marcus shrugged his shoulders, questioned me, Do I want the tree or what? I kissed him lightly on the mouth, surrounded by the lushness of the nursery. He looked embarrassed in his paradise.

Gil Cuadros (1962–1996) was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987 and channeled his experiences into the acclaimed collection City of God, published by City Lights in 1994. “Hands” is excerpted from My Body Is Paper: Stories and Poems, a previously unpublished body of work forthcoming from City Lights in June.

Although many cultural spaces across the arts have been aware of the needs of neurodivergent people for some time and have worked hard to improve accessibility, World Autism Acceptance Week is as good a time as any to remind people that the vast majority of cultural venues were not designed with neurodivergent people in mind.

Part of my work focuses on helping cinemas such as the BFI and the Barbican develop their programme of ‘relaxed’ screenings, which give autistic people a comfortable environment in which to watch films. These also help to avoid incidents of people getting expelled from cinemas, as happened in 2018 when an autistic woman was ejected from the BFI for laughing during a screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Changes typically include reducing the volume of the film, keeping the lights on to allow audience members to move around freely and providing quiet spaces for people to retire to. Classical music venues such as the Royal Opera House have also introduced relaxed screenings – to varying degrees of success. Family performances are often grouped with autism-friendly events, which can be distressing for neurodivergent adults. Then there is the issue of reducing volume, which often proves complicated in practice when it comes to live music.

But what about in museums and galleries? Video art installations in galleries strike me as ideal screening spaces for neurodivergent audiences, with ease of access in and out of the room, various seating and standing positions (often including benches and beanbags), low-level lighting and reduced sound. In 2023, Tate Britain hosted an exhibition of installations by Isaac Julien that included a central portal space, with screens informing visitors about each film on display and the time remaining on each screening. It seemed to me the perfect cinema, much like the pre-multiplex picturehouses of Britain where one could purchase a ticket and come and go as desired. Exhibitions in which different sound effects clash can be distressing for neurodivergent people; here, the rooms were clearly separated from each other, preventing sound from bleeding from one chamber into the next.

The Lady of the Lake (Lessons of the Hour) (2019), Isaac Julien. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro; © Isaac Julien

It’s a problem that the V&A avoided in its recent ‘DIVA’ exhibition, which offered visitors individual headphones with sensors that triggered different music clips to play as they moved through the displays. Offering visitors the opportunity to block out those around them can be a useful way of managing sensory overwhelm. The show also managed its lighting levels much better than, for example, the often garishly bright lights and white walls of the Tate Modern, which can be distressing for neurodivergent visitors.

Preparation is also important: some museums and galleries provide a pre-visit walkthrough notifying visitors of what to expect as they move through the venue, especially as to where quiet spaces are available. This was particularly noticeable at two recent exhibitions involving performance art: the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2023 and ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’, currently at the Tate Modern, where screams, banging nails and naked humans seem to be waiting around every corner. It is important to make resources available to those who need them, while still maintaining the element of surprise for those who do not wish to have things ‘spoiled’ for them. It may be beneficial to have designated, reduced-capacity hours for neurodivergent visitors, especially where exhibitions are multi-sensory or immersive and therefore more likely to be triggering. The travelling exhibition ‘Dreamachine’ (2022), which used light and music to induce subconscious mental imagery, issued medical warnings and gave visitors information about how to get out of the space if it became too intense. By contrast, at the VR experience ‘Tonight with the Impressionists’ I visited at the Musée d’Orsay last weekend, it was much more difficult to make my access needs known and there were no warnings about the potentially distressing aspects of the Virtual Reality experience.

Four Crosses: The Evil (positive) (2019), Marina Abramovic. Courtesy the Marina Abramovic Archives; © the artist

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to neurodiverse access. Some people may find loud noises or bright lights particularly distressing; some may be comfortable with certain modes of immersion but not others. Different shows demand different approaches. In large gallery spaces it is much more difficult to accommodate individual access requirements than in more intimate artistic spaces. But as the way we display and engage with art is being constantly reevaluated, neurodiversity often goes under the radar. The needs of autistic people should be considered when thinking about how we engage with art.

Lillian Crawford writes about neurodiversity in culture and curates relaxed events for neurodivergent audiences at venues including the BFI and the Barbican.

The Queens Museum will always have its building and its memories—the New York City pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, with the marvelous scale model of the city inside. Yet it would be only a pale reminder of past glories without art.

On a cold winter’s day in midweek, the fair’s Unisphere right out front had no one to appreciate it, and water did not run in the pool beneath. The tennis center from the U.S. Open stood towering and empty just a glance away, and the walk to the subway through Flushing Meadow Park felt lonely and bleak. Grand Central Parkway running past the museum’s entrance seemed to cut it off once and for all from the Latin American neighbors that it so often celebrates in its art, but bundle up. With four shows through April 7, the museum welcomes emerging artists all the same and to keep things light—and I work this together with a recent report on the clamor and cacophony of “Open Call 2023” at the Shed as a longer review and my latest upload.

Besides, there are worse things than art, especially in a museum, and these four seemed determined to stay optimistic. That is not exactly a compliment, but it beats the winter blues. The curved wall facing the exhibition space always has its charms. Who would not want a new mural on that scale every few months? Still, most often, one can easily ignore it on the way to the model city, with its spare curves in black and white. Not this time.

Caroline Kent announces her modesty along with her ambitions in its title, A short play about watching shadows move across the room. Still, those shadows are colorful, and they almost dance. They are also in high relief, carrying them into the space of the museum, and Kent claims to draw on floor plans for the site as well. I could not see a design, but its lightness against a black background does come as a relief. It also segues easily into more art that takes off from the wall.

sonia louise davis is anything but confrontational, much like her title, to reverberate tenderly. And she means “reverberate” seriously. She considers her free-form sculpture musical instruments, her “soundings.” The rest leaves the center of the room empty, as sound must, while engaging sight and touch. It includes slim curved neon lights in primary colors and paintings of densely packed black and colored threads. They seem less the fashionable painting in fabric than abstract art in the process of taking shape.

What could be more welcoming and, to me, less welcome than dog imagery? Drawings by Emilie L. Gossiaux depict several dogs dancing amid flowers, but she has a decent excuse. This is, after all, a museum in a park, and the dogs are her guide dog, London. Wall pieces run to trees in epoxy and paint, with leaves but no branches, while versions of London on its hind legs circle a maypole littered with artificial flowers. The fifteen-foot pole, she explains, takes off from her cane as vision impaired at three times its size. Put that down to round-off error rather than an eight-foot-tall artist—and to the pleasure of the dance.

A bartender is in the business of welcoming, but Aki Sasamoto (who has appeared both in “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1 and a Whitney Biennial), has a more urgent purpose, too, in Point Reflection. On video, paring and assembling her ingredients, she could be tending bar or delivering a science lecture, and the soundtrack tells of tornados. Her title sounds serious, too—a reference to point symmetry, or elements at opposite ends of a line drawn through a point. In practice, though, she is symmetry breaking, with snail shells scuttling across tables and whisky tumblers blown about fishbowls, both thanks to air. Large metal pipes, roughly the height of adults and children, could stand for museum infrastructure or museum visitors. Think of all four exhibitions as less the confluence of meteorology and choreography than relief from the cold winter air.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

In May of 2005, discontent with my job as a photo editor at a women’s magazine, I accepted an offer from a friend who did Bruce Weber’s casting to interview for a photo assistant position with him. At the time, Weber was doing the photography for Abercrombie & Fitch, working in tandem with the CEO, Mike Jeffries, to resurrect the brand. The photographs, in tonally rich black-and-white or vivid color, showed cheerful, cartoonishly chiseled, (mostly) white people frolicking, washing dogs, and generally playing grab-ass. They hearkened back to the scrubbed cleanliness of the fifties (with a sprinkle of Leni Riefenstahl); everybody looked like they had gotten a haircut the morning of the shoot. My friend described the photo assistants as a group of young men who traveled the world with Weber, making big money. On breaks, they’d show off for the models by playing shirtless football on the beach or jumping off cliffs into narrow pools of water. This seemed better than sitting at my desk arranging catering or reassuring Missy Elliott’s team that the mansion where we were going to photograph her did in fact have air-conditioning.

The day of my interview, I put on a gray sweater, a striped oxford, and A.P.C. New Standards. I wanted to look tidy, but not too uptight. As requested by the first assistant, I brought a CD of my pictures to demonstrate my photography skills. The office was open plan, with a large round table in the middle and twenty or so people milling about. Weber, a bandanna-ed Santa Claus type, shuffled around chatting with his employees, trailed by a pack of identical golden retrievers. I sat down with Weber’s first assistant, whom I’ll call Sean. Sean told me he had been photographed by Bruce (we kept talking about “Bruce” as if he were imaginary, even though he was standing a few feet away) when he was a NCAA wrestler. He had close-cropped blond hair, and the lingering musculature of a former athlete (I later came across Weber’s pictures of him and his teammates in the locker room, showering cheerfully). The job, as Sean described it, was to hand Weber an unceasing flow of Pentax 6×7 medium-format cameras that had been preloaded with film, focused and set to the proper exposure so he could photograph continuously without technical fuss.

We clicked through the CD of my photographs and he complimented my use of color. While we talked, I looked around the office at the other assistants, a variety pack of hunks. Among them were an Ashton Kutcher type, a Patrick Bateman type, and the all-American boy interviewing me. Wrapping up the interview, he told me that they needed to take a Polaroid because Bruce “needed to be able to put a face to the name.” I stood up and posed for the Polaroid, made with a vintage land camera. I knew this moment was to be my undoing. I am under six feet and, according to my sister’s 23andMe, our family is 99.3 percent Ashkenazi Jew. This type seemed absent from the roster. I suspected I was not there to fill that void. We shook hands, and I got in the elevator and left.  After a few calls over the next few weeks, things tapered off and I never heard from them again. Sometimes I wonder if they saved those Polaroids, and if it would be possible for me to get mine back.

Shortly after my interview, an Abercrombie flagship store opened on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street. Aside from the overpowering stench of their cologne Fierce (an “irresistible blend of marine breeze, sandalwood, musk and wood notes”) and the moody lighting, both A&F retail signatures, the Fifth Avenue store was notable for its centerpiece, a mural called The Locker Room. This was painted by the artist Mark Beard, under one of his many aliases, Bruce Sargeant. (The name Bruce is inexplicably historically associated with being gay; for example, when the Incredible Hulk comics were adapted for television, Bruce Banner’s name was considered too fey, and changed to David.) The mural depicts an early-twentieth-century gym class in a style that evokes Thomas Eakins: young men in baggy loincloths or singlets, doing calisthenics and climbing ropes. Like Weber’s flawless crew of assistants, the romantically rendered athletes were perfect manifestations of the hairless-and-wholesome masculinity defined by his work for A&F. Homoerotic, suggestive, but never explicit. You could be spotting your pal as he climbed a rope or playfully pulling your buddy’s underwear down all in good fun! The photos from the store’s opening show the live version: groups of unnamed shirtless guys carrying around the (blond, rosy-cheeked) model Heather Lang, chastely kissing her on the cheek.

These festive days are now over. In July of 2023, Abercrombie closed its Fifth Avenue flagship and converted the Hollister (a sister brand) down the block to replace it. The CEO, Fran Horowitz, said of the consolidation: “It’s 180 degrees from the cavernous, dark club feeling of the past … This is the antithesis of that.” In the decades between my ill-fated interview and the store’s closing, Abercrombie saw a slew of sexual abuse scandals involving Weber and Jeffries. Weber was accused of molesting male models while photographing them (sticking his fingers in their mouths, et cetera) and settled their lawsuits for a undisclosed amounts. The allegations against Jeffries (and his romantic partner) involve a middleman named James Jacobson, recognizable by the snakeskin patch he wears over his nose, possibly due to a botched plastic surgery. Jacobson was said to have recruited hundreds of young men for Jeffries and coerced them into sexual favors by tantalizing them with the possibility of modeling careers. Very Epstein-like indeed, and coincidentally (or not?) Epstein was the money manager for Les Wexner, the man who not only brought Jeffries on to A&F but once owned Victoria’s Secret as well. Wexner (along with Dov Charney) was the architect of the New American Horniness that sprung up in the aughts and supposedly died with #MeToo, Hikikomori Zoomers, and the pandemic.

On a recent trip to Midtown with some time to kill, I found myself looking for the A&F store to revisit Sargeant’s mural. This was when I realized the store had moved, and that the mural had been uninstalled in 2018. (It was reconstructed in Beard’s studio, before being cut up into smaller paintings and shown at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.) The new A&F store has an open plan, ficuses, and bright overhead lights. The only art is bland travel photography. I wandered around, taking inventory of a tepid mix of preppy basics, Nirvana kids’ T-shirts for the children of Gen Xers, and a conspicuous lack of A&F logos. The strategy is working: the company’s stock went up 300 percent in 2023, their scandalous past is long gone. And Bruce? He seems to be doing fine. In a recent Instagram post, he shared a photograph of seven golden retrievers, including a new puppy, who, after much debate, was christened Spirit Bear.

A&F Hong Kong store opening, 2012. 製作, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Asha Schechter is an artist and writer living in New York City. 

Far from immune to the charms of the Hollywood blockbuster, Rakewell feels his ears prick up when news of James Cameron is mentioned. After all, the director of the highest-grossing films of the 1990s, the 2000s and – so far – the 2020s is not simply a box-office juggernaut: he is also a draughtsman and painter. Cameronheads know that when Rose in Titanic demands of her new paramour, ‘I want you to draw me like one of your French girls,’ she was half-addressing the director: Cameron executed the (rather creditable) charcoal sketch himself.

So imagine Rakewell’s disappointment at the latest Cameron-related development, involving the Canadian film-maker’s plan to sell four new pieces of photographic art which, in limited editions of varying dimensions and in unlimited posters, he hopes will fetch a total of $10 million. There’s no doubt the fundraising is for a good cause: all net proceeds will go to The Nature Conservancy, a global charity that aims to ‘conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends’. As anyone who has seen Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) can attest, this is a cause close to Cameron’s heart.

What has left Rakewell scratching his head is how abysmal the art is. The photographs, taken by the underwater photographer Christy Lee Rogers and co-commissioned by Cameron and Disney, are part of a series titled ‘Muses of Avatar’. They feature a combination of Kate Winslet, Sigourney Weaver and/or Zoe Saldaña – the female leads of The Way of Water – swathed in rather unnerving digital taffeta and suspended in a languorous aquamarine dream state with sapphic overtones. With Winslet, Weaver and Saldaña rendered practically unrecognisable by whatever digital trickery has been wrought on the photographs, it looks like nothing so much as AI art, as if Midjourney had been fed the prompt ‘Create an aquatic pre-Raphaelite purgatory but make it Quality Street’. Perhaps these photos are a balm to Cameron – many of his films have required extensive underwater shooting – but personally Rakewell is relieved that the heroines from Cameron’s oceanic extravaganzas The Abyss (1989) and Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) were spared from this project. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Tricia O’Neil surely have better things to do.

The Cinémathèque française evidently thinks enough of Cameron’s artistry to be devoting a nine-month exhibition to the art designs he made for his films. But one need look no further than Titanic itself to notice the director’s shaky artistic bona fides. A minute before Rose’s request to be drawn, Jack’s eye is drawn to one of Monet’s Water Lilies – artistic licence on Cameron’s part, as no Monet is known to have been aboard the White Star Liner. ‘Look at his use of colour here. Isn’t he great?’ says Jack, waving his hand over the canvas. One would hope that a talented artist might have something a little more precise to say. More egregious is a shot of Rose holding Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which most certainly is not at the bottom of the Atlantic – it is ensconced at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Rakewell had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that a director who has dominated the box office with his every release for decades would have the commercial nous to realise that if you want numerous buyers to pay $35,000 for a nearly two-metre-tall photograph, it would help if the artwork in question were appealing. Still, one hopes for the sake of The Nature Conservancy, which aims to conserve more than 10 per cent of the world’s oceans by 2030, that the sale is a success.

Is blackness invisible? Maybe literally so, and maybe so for African Americans everywhere who ask to become fully visible to white eyes.

The twenty-eight artists in “Going Dark” demand to be seen—not as targets for the police, but as individuals with human needs. They demand to be seen as artists, too, shaping what it means to be an individual. Much the same demand underlies the electrifying opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as well, and several here take its title for theirs. Still, the show’s title continues, this is “The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” and every one of them contributes to the darkness. Just how they seek invisibility is more than half the point. That alone keeps the show compelling the full length of the ramp, at the Guggenheim through April 7.

Not all its voices are black. Farah Al Qasimi, say, is from Abu Dhabi, but for her, too, It’s Not Easy Being Seen. The curators, Ashley James with Faith Hunter, do not make plain just when race informs their choices. They seek only invisibility—as sought, imposed, a form of inquiry, or a matter of perception. Each has its own tier of the ramp, although the art keeps pointing to all four. Still, this could be the perfect survey of currents in African American art. It leaves out most fashionable figure painting and myth making, but such is the price of going dark.

To be sure, black Americans are seen more than enough, as stereotypes and objects of fear. Blackness itself can become visible, as a barrier or as an invitation to find comfort in the dark. Stacy Lynn Waddell and Tariku Shiferaw take that as their subject in the galleries, and so do the artists here. Invisible Man for Kerry James Marshall reduces to white teeth and white eyes—somewhere between a stage villain and a minstrel show. Faith Ringgold leans for hers on the flat, mute colors of African masks. The Invisible Man series for Ming Smith leaves its actors out on the streets, metal gates down for the night and covered with graffiti.

Still, Marshall is never less than amused, and Ringgold’s faces acquire warmth and individuality as both men and women. Smith’s photos build a larger portrait of Harlem, from children at play to adults finding sacred ground, but still at risk and alone. Sandra Mujinga’s Spectral Keepers are at once larger than life and forever hidden. Nine feet tall, they tower over the viewer in loose green pants and green hoods. They might almost be emitting a green light from within. And they are not the show’s last hoodies.

Kevin Beasley dips his sweats in resin as sculpture, while photos by John Edmonds lend his accents of sharp color, and David Hammons takes an entire bay for a single hood. With her hoods, prints by Carrie Mae Weems, are just Repeating the Obvious. Hiding behind clothes may take other forms as well, in Camouflage Waves for Mujinga and camouflage colors for Joiri Minaya. Doris Salcedo needs only needles and thread, while Rebecca Belmore needs only hair. Belmore’s shrouded figure kneels, in prayer or despair. It has straight black hair, not dreadlocks, but then the hair is synthetic.

Of course, the easiest way to hide behind a photograph or video is in the processing. A blue light hides Chris Ofili, leaving only swirls like loose curtains. Glenn Ligon prints each of his fifty self-portraits in a different off-kilter color. Yet Smith blurs her central figures with nothing more than her command of lighting, while prints by Stephanie Syjuco take on the rhythms of her shutter release. Sondra Perry speeds things up instead. A dancer’s uncanny blur contrasts with the stasis of an unfinished Sheetrock wall.

At the same time, they gain in presence. That, after all, is the show’s central demand. There is no escaping faces emerging from the darkness in close-up from Lorna Simpson, Ellen Gallagher, and Titus Kaphar. There is no escaping, too, the materials—Kaphar’s asphalt paper, Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s leather (as in kinky sex), WangShui’s oil on aluminum, or Tomashi Jackson’s marble dust on PVC, even when their images fade to black. Photos may also show only backs, paired with the sitter’s front for Lyle Ashton Harris. Your phone and the FBI may not ditch face recognition anytime soon, but these backs are personal and real.

Charles White enters as a kind of father figure, although his hard-edged portraits in a sea of swirls look decidedly old-fashioned. History itself takes a back seat, apart from dark landscapes by Dawoud Bey, including the site of John Brown’s tannery. One bit of history, though, could sum up the vital paradox of the show’s demands. The 1995 Million Man March cried out for dignity, even as an individual had to surrender to a million. Ligon depicts it in a diptych that leaves the other half black, and Hank Willis Thomas calls for One Million Second Chances in images of the nation’s flag and Capitol with all else fading into white. When Sable Elyse Smith counts the days and nights for prisoners, she could be counting out America for all.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

The one time I met Lauren Oyler in person was in New York in the spring of 2018. I had been closely following her work as a critic and admired her intelligence and fearlessness. That exuberant night, she sat mostly quietly, with a look of anger, through a long evening at a bar, which ended late, outside a pizza restaurant, over greasy slices. She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, who was the reason I was there. The next day, I learned that after they had gone home, she had dumped him. All of this made a deep impression on me. Not pretending to be having a good time. Some sort of power she embodied, just sitting there stonily. I have a terrible memory, but I remember that night—and her at the center of it—so vividly.

That spring, it seemed like everyone was talking about her hyperarticulate critiques of Roxane Gay, Greta Gerwig, and Zadie Smith. She was unafraid to use the full force of her critical eye to scrutinize even those artists who were mostly widely praised. Several weeks after we met, she wrote a defense of my novel Motherhood in The Baffler, responding to various prominent American female critics who had negatively reviewed the book. I wrote to thank her, and in the years since, we developed a correspondence and a friendship.

Three years ago, she published her first novel, Fake Accounts, about a young woman who flees to Berlin and interrogates her relationships and herself, while a Greek chorus of ex-boyfriends occasionally chimes in with corrections to her self-mythology.Her new book of essays, No Judgment, contains six pieces, all written specifically for the book. She thinks about the history of criticism in the form of star ratings on Goodreads; about gossip and anxiety. I was struck by the pleasure vibrating from these essays; the evident joy she takes, and freedom she feels, in writing and thinking in the essay form. I was eager to ask her certain questions outside the structure of our friendship. She is a critic I admire, with strengths that feel different from my own; in other words, someone to learn from.

INTERVIEWER

I want to begin by asking you generally about the pleasures of writing—when did you discover them?

LAUREN OYLER

The first things I remember writing were journals and daily writing assignments in school, and then there were the private blogs I kept as a teenager. I think I wrote those online just because I preferred to write on the computer as soon as that was available. I was always a good typist and it was the dawn of the social internet, but I kept the blogs locked, or whatever we used to say, so the point was just that I wanted to be able to write fast and emotionally while talking to people on AIM at the same time. I don’t know if I found the pleasures of writing uncomplicated, even at the time—writing was a compensation prize for the various anxieties and miseries I experienced, and I kind of still feel that way. I wanted to be a painter, which I am not naturally talented at, but I always had a natural talent for writing and a unique relationship to language, and for some reason I kept developing it. You’re not supposed to say this—you’re supposed to say, “I am so lucky to have a career, I am no better than anyone else.” I know many very naturally talented people who aren’t ambitious, and I admire and sometimes envy them, but I have been very ambitious since I was fourteen years old. I don’t know why.

INTERVIEWER

How would you describe what these pleasures are for you, and how have you cultivated them since you first discovered writing, if that is the right word, cultivated?

OYLER

The pleasures are in problem-solving—particularly in criticism, where the problem is often how to avoid saying all the things you absolutely do not mean and instead to express something that you don’t necessarily know how to articulate at the outset of a piece—and then in making something new, despite the odds. I find formal experimentation almost euphoric when it works out, and of course there’s always the pleasure in finding the right word, and the satisfaction of composing something beautiful and/or interesting, whether it’s a sentence or a paragraph or a transition. But overall the pleasure is often about relief—wanting to write about a particular idea or work and then finally doing it, or wanting to explain something or understand something, and then finally getting there, more or less, through writing.

If cultivate is the right word, it would mean that I wrote all the time, in increasingly professionalized settings, so that having to earn money became less of a problem, and I studied others who do or have done it, even if all of this has often been painful or difficult, and even if at times I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it. I’ve also always pushed myself to do things that are uncomfortable for me as a writer, things that I might dread but that I know are good for me. I cannot remember the last time I didn’t cry while writing a magazine piece, for example, but I do them anyway. Almost every boyfriend I’ve ever had has earnestly told me many times that I need to stop doing magazine pieces because they upset me so much, and that I don’t even make that much money from them and I should focus on fiction because that’s what I love to write, and I really appreciate this, but I will not stop writing magazine pieces until I die, or until the industry itself does. I don’t know why. I love magazines. Career-wise, I’ve also learned how to conduct myself with editors. Until recently, when I’ve become more comfortable pushing back, I would take edits on magazine pieces that I profoundly disagreed with—this is usually the source of the upset—and this has meant I’ve always gotten more work, more opportunities to “cultivate” my writing. And until recently, I had to do many different kinds of writing and editing—I copyedited so much—to earn money, which helped me develop my strange relationship to language even more, the high-low, ironic-sincere register that many people are wrong to hate.

INTERVIEWER

Please say more. Why do they hate it and why are they wrong to?

OYLER

I think a lot of people want to be able to easily classify you. So if I’m using the word prelapsarian and the phrase “that sucks” in the same paragraph, or whatever—and saying “or whatever,” in order to create the effect of conversational speech—they don’t know where to place me. Or they say I’m strategically developing a persona, because they think no one could possibly be like this, because they know only one kind of person and they think everyone is exactly like them. Does it matter who I am? I’d argue that, unfortunately, today, yes, it often does.

Of course, there’s a tradition of blending slang with high-flown language in American writing in particular, and I go on and on about David Foster Wallace, but people didn’t like it when he did it either. I’m coming at it from a different angle—I grew up working-class, speaking a fairly specific regional American English, and while my family are very smart, they aren’t “intellectuals”—and I also work with argot from the teen’s and women’s magazines and internet writing that I grew up reading. I think some people don’t realize that I’m doing this on purpose; when I’m writing book criticism, I try to treat everything in a text as intentional, or under the author’s control, even if an effect is obviously the result of laziness, like “or whatever,” and I do wish more critics would do that. You can still write a pan that way—actually, pans that treat an author as fundamentally responsible for her work are the only ones that really stick. I love language and I want to use as much of it as possible, and I refuse to deny that one side or the other of it—as in “high-low”—exists. This is why I love novels like Mating and why I love Nabokov, because they show you so many new ways to use language. I would like my writing to do that for people, if they are willing to see it.

INTERVIEWER

One of the things that most excited me about your book was the clear pleasure you get from thinking in the form of an essay. Many people write essays because that’s the form they’re paid to think in—they’ve been commissioned to write something—but it struck me that the essay might be your ideal form. What is it about the essay form that you like so much, or that makes it so particularly useful for you?

OYLER

As I say in the book, my favorite form, to read and to write, is the novel. But I think that’s why I have more fun writing essays—there’s much less pressure, and I don’t expect so much from them. I don’t have an idea in my mind of how an essay should look or feel, what kind of texture it should have, whereas many of us have strong ideas about what a novel is and should be. You could say I don’t care as much about essays, which is not to say I don’t want them to be “good,” or rigorous, but I don’t care about cleaning up the edges so much, and that means my thinking can be more flexible in that form. There’s something about the novel that is always straining for timelessness, but essays can be more spontaneous and contemporary.

INTERVIEWER

Are there essayists you read when you were growing up who inspired your own work? Or critics in the contemporary world whose work you regularly seek out?

OYLER

I get a lot of permission, as they might say in therapy, from rereading my favorite essayists. I reread in an almost desperate way while writing essays—like, please, please, Ellen Willis, help me—and something that always strikes me when doing this kind of intensive purposeful rereading is how messy the great works of the past are. Elizabeth Hardwick—you know, she often doesn’t totally make sense, and it doesn’t really matter. David Foster Wallace—very repetitive, very tedious, often wrong. Who cares? I want an amazing paragraph, I want a sudden moment of clarity, I want an unusual transition or connection. It’s the trade-off you make for thinking that feels alive, and it’s one I’m happy to make.

You and I have talked about the frustrations of writing for magazines. For a piece of criticism, many magazines want you to have a thesis statement in neon lights, and that is something I’ve been trying to actively avoid doing. I think it’s just really unrealistic—both in terms of the craft of writing and in terms of how unwieldy the world actually is—and often not very fun to read. A good essay will have many arguments in it. The arguments in the essays I write accrue—they’re almost narrative, in that you start in one place and end up somewhere else. With a thesis statement, you have nowhere to go, or you start at the end and go in a circle.

INTERVIEWER

One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way?

OYLER

Let’s first please allow that I am thirty-three years old, so I’ve had only about a decade of reading that actually counts. It’s probably true that I read the way a “digital native” reads, which is to say broadly and not as deeply, because of the way our technologies of reading work. But I don’t know if you’re right that many of my references come from, like, bopping around Wikipedia at 2 A.M., which is not something I do. I do not memorize things, no, but I think it’s important to have a penumbra of references that you can use to make interesting moves, particularly in essays. I think it might seem that my references come from googling in part because I’ll often narrativize a somewhat base style of research—I’ll say things like “I was googling around and found this New York Times article about whatever”—in order to represent what life is like now, where you google around. But actually in many cases it may be that I encountered a text many years ago, remembered it vaguely, and then reproduced it with easily fact-checked internet research when it became useful to me. But why is that bad? The Google Book is not any different from the actual book.

And the internet is very useful for starting research—you look up some broad topic, find sources linked at the end of the Wikipedia article, go to those sources, find sources from those sources, and so on. I don’t see anything wrong with the first part as long as you do the second part rigorously. The internet is a tool and it’s with us forever, so we might as well harness its power for good when we can.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder, since not all writers read reviews of their work, what do you hope to learn by reading reviews of your own work?

OYLER

If I will be able to sell my next book, ha ha. I don’t think reviews actually contain this information, but these are what the stakes are for me. I also hope to learn what I hope to learn by reading reviews of anyone’s work, which is, What are the values of the moment? For better or worse, I’m attracted to what “people are talking about,” to the issues of the day, and if I often disagree with what “people” are saying, that’s fine, because I get a lot of ideas that way. The essays on autofiction and vulnerability in the collection are the result of having read both a lot of book reviews and a lot of reviews of my own work.

INTERVIEWER

I once wrote a negative review of a book in my early twenties, and for years I felt terrible about it. I decided that, from then on, I’d only write about books I liked or loved. I think this means I’m not actually a critic—I don’t have the stomach for it. I have recently been enjoying Merve Emre’s podcast, The Critic and Her Publics, in which she conducts interviews with critics before an audience of students and has the critic make a judgment of something on the spot. I thought her interview with Andrea Long Chu was especially compelling—Long Chu talked about how her harsher book reviews come out of “disappointment.” In looking back at some of the reviews that made your name, would you say that the motivating spirit was disappointment or something else?

OYLER

I agree with her that there is definitely an engine of disappointment in my earlier negative pieces. For me it might be a class thing. I taught myself to like what I like, it didn’t come naturally to me, so when I encountered writers who gesture toward the “literary” while also pandering to their idea of “the masses”—“the masses” that I am from—it would make me really mad. Most of the negative reviews I wrote were also assigned to me, so they also probably involved resentment that I was being asked to spend my time this way. I could have been stockpiling references!

INTERVIEWER

I am impressed by your ability to actually criticize, in depth and in public, people who are alive today. Can you explain what qualities you possess that allow you to do this?

OYLER

Confidence, certainly, but I don’t know where that comes from, and I don’t like to use the word that often because it implies little connection to the convictions that might produce the confidence. I’m confident in my criticism because I am pretty certain of both my interpretations and my stylistic choices by the time I write. A sense of agency? A democratic sensibility, or maybe just a sense of proportion? I don’t think many of the people who call themselves writers actually care about literary form or style or ideas expressed in writing. They care about being called writers. So my attitude about this is, fine, if you want to be a writer, I will treat you like one—I will assess your writing on the level of form and style and idea. I’m as qualified to do this as anyone else, and anyone else is welcome to do it to me. If you’re a serious writer, you should be able to withstand criticism and determine which criticism is legitimate and which criticism is made in bad faith, even if it stings.

INTERVIEWER

I have been teaching this year, and one thing I am noticing is that young people who want to be writers are drawn to writing in genres that my peers, when we were their age, were less likely to have dreamed of writing in—science fiction, romance, fantasy. We all wanted to produce Literature, classics, like the greats—a category my students perhaps rightly deny, or that to them is merely another genre. One of the students theorized that this was because of the weakening power of the gatekeepers, and another said it was because people have shorter attention spans, so a writer who wants to win an audience should put their ideas into a genre that seems easy and that people already love. Do you have any thoughts about this?

OYLER

I think gatekeepers still have power, but they don’t necessarily have as much money as they used to—or at least they say they don’t. They don’t dictate what sells. They chase what sells. So maybe you could say they have less power, inasmuch as there is now a populist swell of data that guides their decisions. And I think that for many people of the younger generations, making money signifies worth in a way that it didn’t for Gen X. Also, for younger generations, popularity signifies money, which signifies worth. This isn’t only because they’re or we’re shallow—it’s because of the deteriorating conditions of life in the U.S. and the UK, where it costs a lot of money to live barely comfortably. People want to have a nice life.

All that said, it may be that it’s also harder to hide from what’s popular now. There is also a widespread conflation of identity, and class, with what one likes, so you’re not supposed to be a snob about culture—you can’t flat-out reject Beyoncé or Marvel movies, or say you only read the greats—because that would mean you’re rich and out of touch, a coastal elite. It must be, too, that these kids like what writing sci-fi and fantasy would have to say about them, but I do not know what desirable qualities writing sci-fi and fantasy would represent …

INTERVIEWER

If you have a biggest fear for the culture—I don’t mean environmental catastrophe, I mean the world of our minds all together—what is it?

OYLER

I don’t know if it’s a biggest fear, but I think everything is really boring right now. I find it hard to muster the energy to write about contemporary culture anymore. There is also a lot of droning competence—work that is pretty good but that lacks a sense of purpose or strangeness, or any reason to actually look at it. Nor does any of this work seem to represent some horrible trend or tendency that it’s nevertheless fruitful to discuss, as bad writers of the very recent past did. Everyone seems to be going through the motions.

INTERVIEWER

I sometimes feel and can’t believe that I have such a good life, and I wonder, do you feel you have a good life?

OYLER

This is a good question. I’m very proud of my life, which is wonderful and which I fear losing or damaging. I’m very, very proud of my relationships and the way I travel. I’m proud of the taste I’ve developed, not just in books but in art and film and music, and that I have found people both in my life and through my work to share it with. I love my writing, which has gotten easier for me in the past couple of years and accomplishes what I want it to accomplish.

I just read your interview with Phyllis Rose in Granta, and you asked her a similar kind of question—whether her great second marriage was “luck.” It makes sense to me that you’d ask these kinds of questions—so much of your career has been about asking what a life should look like. On a political level, everyone deserves a good life that they must work really hard to lose or truly damage. I feel that I have worked, sometimes hard, to get and maintain what good things I have, given the advantages and disadvantages of the circumstances I was born and bred into, and I believe it is my responsibility to make the best and most of my life, precisely because there are billions of people in the world who also deserve to have the things I have. In general, one person’s sacrifice of moderate goodness—or, worse, any self-aggrandizing performance of guilt—does not make the lives of suffering people any better. That said, I’m against the rich, who should have to sacrifice much more, and I’m for radical political statements involving self-sacrifice or self-harm.

But I’m more interested in this question as it relates to the social world. When I say I’m very, very proud of my relationships, I mean that I try to be a loyal and transparent friend, I pay close attention to people and remember what they tell me, I am open and intimate while trying not to burden people with my problems, I apologize when I do something wrong—only when I’m actually sorry, though—and I am pretty much always fun and interesting to be around, possibly to my detriment. If I were a manipulative asshole, I would say I deserved to lose those friends. Like I said, I have a sense of agency.

INTERVIEWER

Finally, what is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

OYLER

Mint chocolate chip.

INTERVIEWER

Me too!

OYLER

If they don’t have it, I get whatever has the most ingredients. I’m a maximalist.

Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including Pure Colour, Motherhood, How Should a Person Be?, and, most recently, Alphabetical Diaries. She is the former interviews editor of The Believer, and has interviewed such writers and artists as Elena Ferrante, Joan Didion, Agnès Varda, and Dave Hickey.

The painter and printmaker Tammy Nguyen takes an unabashedly intellectual approach to her work. Drawing on Dante’s Divine Comedy and incorporating references to 20th-century South East Asian politics, as well as throwing in the occasional Tyrannosaurus rex for good measure, she realises her premeditated designs on canvas with painstaking precision, though she leaves her work open to more instinctive flourishes too – splashes of red, say, that resemble marbles, moons or eyes. An assistant professor of art at Wesleyan University, specialising in printmaking and book art, Nguyen developed an expertise in illustrated manuscripts early in her career – an interest that has found expression in her mixed-media sculptures. She also publishes artist books through her imprint Passenger Pigeon Press. Her exhibition ‘A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio’ is at Lehmann Maupin, London, until 20 April. It is the second in a series of three Dante-inspired exhibitions by Nguyen; the final show in the series, ‘A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso’, will open at Lehmann Maupin, New York, next year.

Where is your studio?

In a little town called Easton, Connecticut. I have a three-acre property there – a little brown house where my family lives and, about 200 steps away, a really nice red barn that is my studio. My husband and I moved there three years ago – I was a new mom, I’d just been appointed as an assistant professor and there was the pandemic, so there were a lot of life changes going on.

What’s the atmosphere like in your studio?

It’s beautiful. There’s so much nature where I live. In Connecticut you have four real seasons. In the autumn, the leaves are oozing with red and orange; in summer, it’s extraordinary – lush and humid; in the spring, the blossoms are just bursting; and when we get a good winter, everything’s just covered in the most beautiful untouched snow. And I see all that through the windows of my barn.

It’s a space that’s always welcome to people. My three-year-old comes running in from the house all the time, and she’s just a delight. She tramples all over the place.

Spears Pointed (2023), Tammy Nguyen. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London; © the artist

What do you tend to listen to in the studio?

I get a lot of cool ideas from the New Books Network. It’s a series of podcasts comprising interviews with academics about their books, which cover all sorts of areas – military history, critical studies, the environment. My favourites are the new books on religion.

As for music, my assistant Holly just showed me this new app called Radiooooo. You pick a country and a decade, and it plays the radio of that time period. It’s amazing. The music that was playing in the last few days of preparing this Lehmann Maupin exhibition was from Antigua in 1970. I had really wanted to visit the country but that’s not going to happen anymore – at least, not for a while.

Classical music has also been a big thing. I’m preparing to get deep into my next exhibition after this show. It has a lot to do with music, so I’ve just been going through different composers: Rachmaninov, Bach’s ‘Inventions’, a couple of Beethoven concertos that I’ve been curious about. As I’m in London for this show, I went to see the opera The Flying Dutchman the other night – I like Wagner a lot, I think he’s a very clear, crisp composer.

And, of course, there is the indulgence of pop music.

How does music inform your work?

I have a desire to create a show about contradiction. I’m planning an exhibition with haikus at its heart: haikus follow a five-seven-five syllable structure, which gives you 17 syllables, and I want those to be transformed into 16 notes of music. So with two bars of music in 4/4, a question arises: how do you hide the extra note? How that will take shape visually may be the crux of my upcoming exhibition at the Sarasota Museum of Art in Florida.

Long Live and Prosper (2023), Tammy Nguyen. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London; © the artist

What do you like most – and least – about your studio?

There’s no bathroom. We have to get some plumbing out there. That’s the only thing I dislike about my studio, which means that it will become perfect.

How large is your studio team?

Holly is my main gal right now – she’s my one permanent team member, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be expanding soon. Then there’s a lot of other people who come and go, who are all former students from my printmaking classes.

For this Lehmann Maupin exhibition, there was an amazing group of people who did a lot of the hand-set type. They helped with all the ‘sous-cheffing’ – the cutting of the paper, the rolling up of the ink, the stretching of the paper. There’s a lot of that kind of work to be done for one of these shows.

Do you have a studio routine?

I wake up at 5.30am, make myself a coffee and start writing. There are a lot of ideas that I want to express in writing, and it’s also the time I’ll write the introductory essays for the artist books I publish through my imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press. Two hours later, I’ll do a lot of my emailing, which is pretty quick, and then I make a to-do list.

I also make a list of ‘moves’ I’m going to make in my paintings. Because they’re all made on paper using water-based materials, much like in the traditions of East Asian painting, there are no take-backs. So say it’s foliage day: I would have done a lot of observational drawings of the plants already. I’ll think, ‘today we’ll do mid-tones of small leaves’, and I’ll write that down as a move. Then I might write ‘blue stem’. I’m not loyal to this list, but I think it through almost like how I imagine an athlete might think about the plays they’re going to make.

Once that’s done, I pack my daughter’s lunch, go for a run, and when I come back I dress her and drive her to school. By the time I get back, it’s 9.30am; Holly comes at 10am. If we have a lot of catching up to do, we’ll just go over deadlines and things that need to get done.

Then I paint until 6pm, head back to the brown house and make dinner.

Mine, Purgatory (2023–24; detail), Tammy Nguyen. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London; © the artist

What are the most unusual objects in your studio?

For this show, there are a lot of dead moths in my studio. I’ve got three species: a Malaysian one, an Indian one and a Chinese one. I was able to get both the male and the female of the Chinese species; the male is blue and the female is pink, which is funny. I was drawing them for a long time. They were from previous projects. I was thinking of how to collapse the micro and the macro, and grasshoppers informed the recurring theme of little helicopters in my work. I also have a box of random insects.

The other cool thing I have in my studio is fern fossils. I found a guy in Pennsylvania who sells these awesome fossilised ferns, and I was drawing those from observation too.

I try to surround myself with materials. I think that observational drawing is part of every studio’s healthy diet. I try to embed that into the practice as much as I can, but I should do more.

What is the most well-thumbed book in your studio?

Probably Dante’s Purgatorio. I use the Stanley Lombardo translation (from 2016). I find him to be very lyrical, and it helps when someone’s lyrical when translating old texts, because, my god, it’s so hard!

Three Crown of Thorns (2023), Tammy Nguyen. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London; © the artist

Who is the most interesting visitor you’ve ever had?

Shortly after my show at the Berlin Biennale in 2022, a priest named Buddy Gharring reached out to me. He’s from Twin Falls, Idaho, which conceptually is even further away from me than London. He wanted to use my work as a backdrop for his sermon. I couldn’t believe it – as an artist, you always have this dream about reaching people but, more often than not, your work is mostly being viewed by people in the art world. But there was this Christian magazine that wrote about my work, and Buddy saw an image of my art and messaged me on Instagram.

I was delighted. I understand the ways in which religion, and certainly Christianity, can be criticised – I went to Catholic school; there are a million things to complain about. My family’s not Catholic and neither am I, but there’s a contradiction for people of Vietnamese heritage in having a faith that was brought to you through a colonial campaign that caused a lot of pain and erasure, but at the same time has given you a community and offered you salvation. It’s a very important part of one’s life if one has that faith, and I love religion for that – it offers so much for people and is so important to folks who need that in their lives.

‘A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio’ is at Lehmann Maupin, London, until 20 April.

Has Marta Minujín gone soft? Don’t count on it, not for an artist who brings a creature to New York so large and colorful that the half-costumed, half-naked regulars in Times Square cannot begin to compete, not even for your selfies. There is no getting around it, although you can comfortably settle in below and look around. You never know what you will see.

Entering her eighties, Minujín is still raising her voice—about book burnings, dictatorship, sexual norms, and such lesser details as the pandemic. She means her retrospective at the Jewish Museum as at once a battle cry and a celebration, much like its title, “Arte! Arte! Arte!” It ranges from painting and sculpture in bronze to torn mattresses, installation, and video. Still, it opens, like her approach to Times Square, with soft sculpture and what I took for a smile. You can see it through glass doors well before you enter. It may be whimsical or unnerving, but it is still an invitation, through March 31—and I bring this together with earlier reports on artists who instead present obstacles to admission as a longer review and my latest upload.

Born to Russian Jews in Buenos Aires, Minujín had a conventional arts education and started her career conventionally enough, but then late modern convention called for destroying painting as we know it and casting aside its materials. She got to work with Albert Greco, one of the country’s leading artists, and adopted his thick surface, dark palette, and sobriety, but in lacquer, pigment, and glue. Soon, though, she lightens up, in busy abstraction with bright colors and a touch of Surrealism. Let the party begin. This was the 1960s, when mayhem and a party had to include free love. She made her first soft sculpture in 1963 from, sure enough, a mattress.

Her sculpture in Times Square, for the full show’s first week or so, is a return to her roots—or maybe rootlessness. She has lived in Central Park as well as Argentina and Washington, D.C. Her New Museum installation took a full floor for its many passages, enough to disorient anyone. Her retrospective, her first in New York, has an immersive room as well. If Yayoi Kusama can have people lining up around the block for her vacuous “infinity rooms,” surely Minujín deserves the same. To my mind a soul mate, Pipilotti Rist, had two Chelsea galleries during the run, Hauser & Wirth through January 13 and Luhring Augustine through February 3, to pour her body out.

Soft sculpture returns to Minujín’s roots in other ways as well. It connects to everything that she has done, however hard and firm. First, it supplies the motifs and materials. Its broad stripes blend, well, seamlessly into the show’s second series, for all-over painting in collage. There she cuts the strips from mattresses, without a hint of folk art or quilting. As one title has it, it is her Soliloquy of Mixed Emotions.

Second, it relates art to the body, hers or yours. She returned to painting in 1975 for Frozen Sex. A self-portrait is almost Cubism, but in shades of pink. Third, it verges on performance, like her stay in the park, and hers began with “happenings” (or, as she sometimes had it, “kidnappenings”), in conjunction with Alan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg, who shared her interest in collaboration and dance. Of course, she kept her sense of humor and, like the soft sculpture, invited one in. Opening events for Frozen Sex, at what is today the Americas Society, included a strip tease.

Last, it is political. Minujín could have better timing, but she moved back home in 1975, just in time for a military coup, and she responded with “Toppled Monuments.” Franz Kafka’s America greets immigrants with only a sword in place of the torch in the Statue of Liberty. Her Liberty is merely lying down, perhaps for a well-earned rest. Where there is destruction, there must also be building, and she created an entire Parthenon of Books— in Buenos Aires and again in Germany, on the site of Nazi book burnings. In photos from 1985, she and Andy Warhol trade ears of corn in payment for the Latin American debt.

Not that all is despair. She also built a Tower of Babel of books, and she likes the babble. She calls a strip collage Endemic, War, and 1000 Other Things. She could be barely able to grasp the horrors, but she is still joking. She is also communicating. You could step right into her old-fashioned phone booth, or Minuphone, back in 1969 and place a call. It turned out psychedelic sounds and colors, but you could still come with her afterward to Soft Gallery for a drink.

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While reading Maradona’s autobiography this past winter, I found that every few pages I would whisper or write in the margins, “I love you, Maradona.” Sadness crept up on me as I turned to the last chapter, and it intensified to heartbreak when I read its first lines: “They say I can’t keep quiet, that I talk about everything, and it’s true. They say I fell out with the Pope. It’s true.” I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope. 

I started reading El Diego: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Footballer, ghostwritten by Marcela Mora y Araujo, on the basis of a recommendation by an editor I have liked working with. He said reading it was the most fun he’d had with a book. I came to El Diego with basically no knowledge of Maradona or even of soccer. I would have said I hated soccer actually. I hate the buzzing noise the crowds make on the TV. But from the very first page I found Maradona’s voice so addictive and original that reading El Diego felt like falling in love. 

Maradona’s skirmish with the Pope goes the way of much else in the book. Because of his extraordinary talents and global fame, Maradona is invited to the Vatican with his family. The Pope gives each of them a rosary to say, and he tells Maradona that he has been given a special one. Maradona checks with his mother and discovers that they have the same rosary. He goes back to confront the Pope and is outraged when the Pope pats him on the back and carries on walking. 

“Total lack of respect!” Maradona fumes. “It’s why I’ve got angry with so many people: because they are two-faced, because they say one thing here and then another thing there, because they’d stab you in the back, because they lie. If I were to talk about all the people I’ve fallen out with over the years, I’d need one of those encyclopedias, there would be volumes.” 

Whether it be FIFA, money-hungry managers, angry fans, the Mafia, drug tests, or the tabloids, Maradona never takes anything lying down. He stews and stews, and this fuels him to play better and better soccer. There is an Argentinean word Maradona uses for this: bronca. Mora y Araujo explains, in an introduction in which she lovingly details the difficulties of putting Maradona’s unique voice down on the page, that this basically means “fury, hatred, resentment, bitter discontent.” But the difficulty of choosing a translation left her to simply leave bronca, and many of Maradona’s other favorite catchphrases, as they were. The result is a narrative voice which is totally distinct, and an overall energy out of sync with the pristine, restrained public image most celebrities seek to cultivate, especially in the social media age. 

Maradona first learned to play soccer on the streets of Villa Fiorito, the extremely poor city on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where he was born. He played all day in the blazing heat and then when the sun went down too. Early on in the book he says: “When I hear someone going on about how in such and such a stadium there’s no light, I think: I played in the dark, you son of a bitch!”

I still don’t know enough about soccer to verify my impression that he is one of the greatest soccer players ever. But Wikipedia asserts this too. El Diego tells the story of his extraordinary rise through the world of small, local kids’ clubs to a glittering career which involved World Cups (one of which he captained Argentina for), a transformative stint for the Italian team Napoli, setting the world record for transfer fees twice, scoring a famous handball goal against England, and lots of other things I don’t really understand properly but felt enormously gripped by.   

It’s an incredible life story, shadowed by, as well as his constant fights, a cocaine habit and a string of extramarital dalliances. But mostly I was gripped by the way he tells it. At one point, when FIFA bans him from a match, he says: “My legs had been cut off, my soul had been destroyed.”

I started El Diego in the airport, on my way back to Belfast for Christmas. A young man on my flight pointed at my book and asked me what I was reading. (I discovered over the next few weeks that reading the book in public places was a magnet for men.) I showed him the cover.  

He said: Oh yeah I thought it said Maradona. You like football? 

I said: Oh no I don’t know anything about football. 

He said: Why are you reading it then? 

At the time I told him it was because I wanted to read something different from what I usually read. If he’d asked me the same thing when I finished it, I would have said it’s not really about football. It’s about being in love. It’s about the little guy against the big guy, I would have declared. And believing in something. And respect. It’s about having a sense of who you are.

If the young man had not politely excused himself by this point, I would have told him I sent photographs of many pages of the book to everyone I know who has a slightly bad personality. Grotty, unwholesome types who have dysfunctional relationships with substances. People who have problems with authority and are incapable of being obsequious and are always getting into trouble. People who take things too personally. Which is to say, I sent pages to all the people I love the most in the world, saying: You need to read this. 

I can’t really talk about El Diego without sounding like a fanatic. I think this can be true of any book or piece of art which we find resonates particularly with us. Enthusiasm can come off as a little crazed. Here especially, I think, because I am surprised at how much it did resonate, given that soccer is a world I previously felt I couldn’t relate to much at all.  

Now that I have discovered Maradona as a thirty-year-old, decades after the rest of the world, I notice he pops up in places where I’d never noticed him before. In the Italian café I eat in around once a week I noticed a Maradona shirt behind the counter. 

That’s Maradona, I said to the owner. He looked at me like I’d just asked him if he had heard of pasta. 

Yes, he said slowly. He was the best. I nodded and sat down to eat. Soccer, I noticed, was on TV in the background, as it probably had been on all of my visits. 

Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast. She has written essays and criticism for the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the Guardian and others. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. Her first novel, Lazy City, was published in 2023.

Sometimes an origin story is just too perfect. In the case of Richard Serra, who died on 26 March at the age of 85, it was a recollection of being taken as a four-year-old by his father to the shipyard in which he worked as a pipe fitter for the launch of a huge tanker. Everything, Serra said on many occasions, was contained in that memory. The way in which this huge mass of material suddenly became buoyant, matter became light and solid steel became a container for a vast quantity of air, fascinated him and haunted him.

Serra grew up in San Francisco, the son of a Russian-Jewish mother from Odessa and a Spanish father from Mallorca. His early memories were of the wartime economy of a city geared up for production and he would later work as a labourer in steel mills to pick up pocket money while taking up drawing, apparently in an effort to gain attention and affection from his mother. He always revelled in the contrasts between blue collar and high culture. Serra initially went to study literature, first at UC Berkeley, then at UC Santa Barbara where he took courses with Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and supported his studies with more shifts at steel foundries. After graduating he switched to art school, a portfolio of drawings got him a scholarship to the Yale School of Art and Architecture where his teachers would include Philip Guston and his classmates Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Nancy Graves, whom he would later marry. He graduated in 1964.

It was a trip to Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship in the mid 1960s that proved formative. Serra wanted to be painter, at first inspired by Cézanne, but often told a story about how after seeing Velázquez’s Las Meninas he realised that the bar had been set too high. The work of Borromini in Rome however – notably the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane – introduced him to the spatial power of the ellipse, something that would stay with him through to his creation of powerful steel torqued pieces later in his career.

However Serra didn’t find his metier easily. He worked in mediums as varied as taxidermy, ink, rubber, neon and molten lead. His first show in Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966 featured caged animals, both stuffed and alive. Returning to New York, he settled into the nascent downtown art scene which included musical minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich. He also founded a removals company, employing artists as day labourers as a way to help sustain them.

In 1968 his work Splashing made a, well, splash, at Leo Castelli’s Gallery as the artist threw molten lead at a bare brick wall. He began working with steel in various forms, leaning pieces against walls and against each other and then moved to more singular, solid volumes. Around 1970 he became more interested in his surroundings. Having helped his friend Robert Smithson with Spiral Jetty, he began working on site-specific projects based around topography and land.  He and Graves divorced in 1970 and he embarked on a long relationship with Joan Jonas.

His career as a major art world figure only really took off with controversy. His monumental work Tilted Arc was sited at Federal Plaza in New York, a block or so away from his TriBeCa stomping ground in 1981. A huge, 120ft-long, 12 ft-high wall of subtly curving, slightly leaning Corten steel, it became a lightning conductor for public animosity to modern art, condemned as an obstacle in the path of busy New Yorkers. When moves were made to take it down artists including Claes Oldenburg and Keith Haring came to its defence, but in 1989 the city succumbed and Tilted Arc was never seen in public again (as Serra instructed). It still resides in a Brooklyn storage facility, albeit cut down to three sections. Serra was crushed but, ironically, the exposure also made him a mainstream figure and the sculpture introduced the world to his mature style. Fulcrum (1987), installed as part of the Broadgate Development near Liverpool Street Station, a piece consisting of five planes of steel leaning on each other, has enjoyed a happy fate, remaining a striking and popular piece of public sculpture at the scale of architecture.

Arguably his best work was made for the Guggenheim Bilbao (between 1994–2005) in which Serra’s shifting curves, cones, labyrinths and coils sit inside Frank Gehry’s modern-baroque building. Rather than clashing, the two accommodate each other perfectly. After working with rolled steel in the mills, Serra had a different understanding of the material to other artists, seeing it not as a medium but as a thing in itself. He understood the lengths he would be able to work with, the mass, the height and the sheer presence of the steel. Although often described as a minimalist, Serra was working in a very different way from, say, Donald Judd, with his perfect metal boxes. He appreciated the steel for its own qualities: how it might stand outside a foundry waiting to be used, a pure product of industry and a container of potential. He used its gravity and mass to make it stand up unsupported. There were no unseen tricks or hidden rods. These were forms that were just there.

The way in which his sculpture torques, twists and leans allow the works to change according to the body’s position within or beside them. It is always changing, but you are in control of how those changes work. Up close it might be oppressive or claustrophobic, from further away powerful and almost magnetic. The thickness of the steel is critical. You should feel its mass, perhaps even a frisson of danger if you think too deeply about the sheer weight of these leaning forms. Although he claimed to be uninterested in surface, the rusted texture of the Corten made you want to run a finger along it. His real material he said, however, was not steel but space.

His work can be found in the collections of almost every major museum of modern art and he had two retrospectives at MoMA. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 2001, Serra said, ‘I was in analysis and I told my analyst I wanted to be the best sculptor in the world and he said, “Richard, calm down.”’ He needn’t have worried.

Raymond Saunders casts a long shadow. He cannot help it, not in a two-gallery show where the shadows will not stop coming, all but decimating the walls. Its layers keep coming, too, in oil, graphite, enamel, oil pastel, and plenty of pasted paper.

Unlike Anthony Dominguez, he is anything but an outsider, except perhaps to New York. Yet he, too, found his art waiting for him on the street. For him, that meant not its hidden corners and subterranean passages, but on boarded-up buildings and in the air. And I bring this together my report on Dominguez as a longer review and my latest upload.

For Saunders the details accumulate, in years of found objects, frail scraps, and paint—to the point that one can neither put a name on the shadows nor dismiss them. They may lurk in the background, as shadows in the shadows, or seemingly leap right off the canvas, aiming for you. Should you start in Tribeca, a shadowy figure does both just as you come in, at Andrew Kreps through March 30. You may find yourself poring over the clues, there and at David Zwirner in Chelsea through April 6, to see where they lead. If you never do find out, try not to blame yourself. That first shadow is watching.

Black may be his favorite color, but it is not his only color. That figure’s bright yellow face and shock of hair would be hard to overlook even if the rest of his body were not hunched within a loose black coat. But then the yellow continues unbroken behind him—and the blackness returns behind that. Saunders loves reversing expectations, including the expectation that the ground must be white. He must like, too, undermining the distinction between painted image and ground. Works hang on the wall and serve as walls themselves.

Black may function as a ground for fields of color, like that yellow or a tart reddish pink. It may serve, too, as a playground for his impulses, in chalk scrawl. Numbers in that shadowy first painting run horizontally, as if to count the seconds, while a tribute to Charlie Parker reads Bird above a poignantly small photo. Approaching ninety, Saunders is old enough to remember when chalkboards, meaning blackboards, were black. Above all, a painted surface may serve for whatever he cares to find, whether advertisements or warnings. He calls the show “Post No Bills,” after a 1968 painting and the image it contains, but then he has no qualms about breaking the rules, including his own.

The show has more room to run through his violations in Chelsea. His methods suggest graffiti, but he is defacing only himself. It returns him to the streets, and his quotations are decidedly urban. Like black, they also allude to his status as an African American. While the LA artist has had little exposure in New York, he is at home enough to borrow a delightfully nasty front page from the city’s once-stellar alternatively weekly, The Village Voice. You may have forgotten whatever scandal, but he has not.

The references can be inscrutable, especially compared to the text art and political art of his time. You may dismiss his collage on one visit as a waste of good waste, see it on another as dazzling. (I did the first on catching him in LA art at MoMA PS1 in 2013, and look now.) Still, he will always have a firm reference point in the shadows and himself. An artist’s palette is just an illusion, but brushes are real enough, as if painting themselves. They are also black.

His favorite or not, “Black Is a Color,” as his 1967 manifesto has it. I can only wish that a formalist like Ad Reinhardt had adopted it as a motto, but Reinhardt died two years before. Like a Minimalist himself, Saunders works with monochrome and the space as well. He covers some walls in his tar-like black. He cloaks others in a caked white that is already coming off the wall. Naturally the cracks are black.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.