Category: Reviews

Bury Your Gays: the latest tongue-in-cheek name for authors’ tendency to end queer relationships by killing somebody off, or having someone revert to heterosexuality, or introducing something that abruptly ends a queer storyline. The message: queer love is doomed, fated for tragedy. The trope has existed for decades, and although there are plenty of books and movies and television shows now that aren’t guilty of it, Bury Your Gays is by no means a thing of the past. In 2016, the death of The 100 character Lexa reintroduced Bury Your Gays to a whole new generation and reminded seasoned viewers—who could recall the infamous death of the character Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that the trope was alive and well. More recently, Killing Eve’s series finale reminded viewers yet again.  

Joanna Russ (1937–2011), who wrote genre-bending feminist fiction throughout the seventies and whose The Female Man (1975) catapulted her to fame at the height of the women’s movement, agonized over Bury Your Gays. In 1973, Russ was writing On Strike Against God (1980), an explicitly lesbian campus novel about feminist self-discovery and coming out. But her head was, in her words, “full of heterosexual channeling.” She felt constrained—enraged, often—by the limited possibilities for how to write queer life, but she struggled to imagine otherwise. “How can you write about what really hasn’t happened?” Russ appealed to her friend, the poet Marilyn Hacker, as she pondered the relationship between life and literature for people whose identities, desires, and ambitions were erased and denounced by mainstream culture. Everywhere Russ turned, women (and especially queer women) were doomed: “It was always (1) failure (2) the love affair which settles everything,” in life and literature alike. Russ’s was a quest to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct the elements of storytelling so that readers with deviant lives and desires might find themselves—their dreams and plights, lusts and fears—plausibly and artfully borne out in fiction, and it was a quest she undertook in dialogue with Hacker over the course of many years.

The letters published today on the Paris Review’s website offer a window into Russ and Hacker’s shared, decade-long attempt to wrest language—prose fiction in Russ’s case, poetry in Hacker’s—from the grips of patriarchal convention and to remake it in the service of underwritten lives. This window reveals Russ’s frustration at its most potent: On Strike Against God was her first foray as a seasoned author into a genre—realism, or literary fiction—she had enthusiastically abandoned years before. As an adolescent reader of “Great Literature” in the repressive fifties, Russ had become “convinced that [she] had no real experiences of life.” Great Literature—not to mention her educators, psychologists, and friends’ parents—told her that, despite the evidence of her eyes and ears, her inner life, and the experiences that shaped it, “weren’t real.” And so she turned to science fiction, which concerned itself with the creation and navigation of new worlds, within which gender roles could be either peripheral or malleable or both. She embraced speculative fiction as a “vehicle for social change,” a tool for escaping the “profound mental darkness” that engulfed her youth. On Strike Against God marks Russ’s return to the real world as a subject for fiction, and the real world’s bigotries were there to greet her upon arrival—in life, in fiction, and in her own head. 

Russ’s struggles upon returning to “realistic” fiction were not, of course, simple failures of imagination, just as Bury Your Gays isn’t simply a failure of individual creativity, nor is it (necessarily) evidence of an individual creator’s homophobic intent. “Authors do not make their plots up out of thin air,” Russ explains in “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write” (1972). They work with familiar, well-worn attitudes, beliefs, expectations, events, and character types—Russ calls them “plot-patterns”—that are already available to them, modeled for them by extant works of art. Like all “plot-patterns,” Bury Your Gays dramatizes what mainstream culture “would like to be true” and, indeed, what it took pains to enforce as true, especially in the early twentieth century. The Motion Picture Production Code—“the Hays Code”—instated by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1930 and enforced until 1968, threatened all depictions of “perverted” sex acts with censorship—unless, that is, these perverted acts, people, and relationships were shown to suffer consequences. This meant that, to depict gay life and love without fear of censorship, creators had to punish their characters with death, madness, or heterosexuality. The result? Hundreds of works of narrative art—lesbian pulps, gay films—with devastating endings. The message, for decades: homosexuals were bound for lives of loneliness. 

But of course, readers like Russ, coming of age in the fifties, sixties, and beyond, weren’t privy to the material bases of these devastating plots; the reality of the Hays Code lurked behind the scenes, regulating what it was possible to imagine, limiting queer viewers’ hopes and dreams for their lives. There were exceptions, of course. Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, published in 1952 and adapted into Carol in 2015, was a beacon in the dark. The novel doesn’t end in tragedy, so unusual for its time that it was rumored to be “the first gay book with a happy ending.” In her 1991 afterword to the novel, Highsmith recalls the gay novel conventions of the late forties and early fifties. “The homosexual novel then had to have a tragic ending,” she writes. 

One of the main characters, if not both, … had to see the error of his/her ways, the wretchedness ahead, had to conform in order to—what? Get the book published? … It was as if youth had to be warned against being attracted to the same sex, as youth now is warned against drugs. 

And so readers grew up, became writers, and recycled the trope, entrenching it, increasing its potency, even if they didn’t want to. A teenage Russ in the early fifties didn’t know anything about the Hays Code—she knew only that she couldn’t imagine a future for two women in love. When, in grade school, Russ wrote a story about two lesbians, she followed her imagination—but her imagination couldn’t conjure a happy future for her characters. In fact, it couldn’t conjure any future whatsoever. “I couldn’t imagine anything else for the two of them to do,” she explains, and so she ended the story with suicide. 

A seasoned writer by 1973, Russ had identified the problem—the seeming necessity of “failure”  or the heterosexual “love affair that settles everything”—but she struggled to solve it. Before she settled on On Strike Against God’s final, published ending, which she characterized as “an appeal to the future,” she cycled through frustrating alternatives, drawn ceaselessly back to the old, dire clichés. “The pressure of the endings I didn’t write—the suicide, the reconciliation, the forgetting of feminist issues—kept trying to push me off my seat as I wrote,” she confessed to Hacker. She wouldn’t kill off her lesbian protagonists like she did so many decades before—that much she knew—and she wouldn’t concede to heterosexuality, but what was there to do instead? “We interpret our own experience in terms of [literature’s] myths,” Russ wrote, reflecting on these difficulties. “Make something unspeakable and you make it unthinkable.” 

Straining for alternatives, Russ even tried murder on for size: she’d end On Strike Against God not with suicide but by having her protagonist kill “you,” the novel’s presumed-male reader, the object of Russ and her characters’ ire. Hacker, thankfully, objected to these earlier, unpublished endings. Murder, she pointed out—and killing men, especially—wasn’t an improvement on “failure” or the panacean love affair. In her letter to Russ, Hacker noted that these earlier endings capitulated to the same tropes Russ was trying to avoid. “Why are [the last pages] addressed to men[?]” Hacker asked. “I wanted this one to be for us, women.” “I can see,” she continued, “that the book must end on a note of challenge … but there is still the implication that The Man is still so important that even this book, even in defiance, in hatred, in challenge, is addressed to him, that the person you see reading it is not a woman or a girl thinking here is something at last, but a man being Affronted.” 

On Strike Against God was Russ’s attempt to speak the unspeakable and think the unthinkable, and she couldn’t do it alone. At Hacker’s urging, Russ decided instead on an ending that said, instead, “this is the beginning,” in which she addressed her readers directly, rallied and appealed to them, urged them to read, write, and live into reality that hopeful future that “really [hadn’t] happened” yet—urged them to do, in short, what Hacker and Russ were struggling to do themselves, in conversation with one another. If past and present models weren’t up to snuff—if neither “Great Literature” nor lesbian pulps were adequate for depicting, in fiction, queer life and desire—Russ would enlist her readers in “an appeal to the future,” positioning her novel as a jumping-off point for an as-of-yet unthought and unspoken world of possibility—as, in her words, “a kind of prayer.” Any meaningful, future-oriented appeal for change, in life or in literature, must involve other people, Russ concluded, and she told her readers so.  

Alec Pollak is a writer, academic, and organizer. She is the winner of the 2023 Hazel Rowley Prize and the 2018 Ursula Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship for her work on a biography of Joanna Russ. Her writing appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, and various academic publications. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of literatures in English at Cornell University. 

From the June 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Visitors to ‘the last decades’ come directly face to face with the master. A portrait drawing of Michelangelo by his acolyte and intimate friend Daniele da Volterra is the first work displayed. The drawing, made when Michelangelo was in his mid to late 70s, is a cartoon. It was pricked for transfer to paint the mural of the Assumption of the Virgin in the Della Rovere Chapel in the Roman church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti. In that picture, Michelangelo is at the (viewer’s) far right, among the apostles. His contemplative gaze is directed outwards. His right arm directs the beholder’s eyes towards the Virgin rising to heaven. The inclusion testifies to Michelangelo’s stature – ‘divine’ was an adjective used to describe him and his work – and the gesture to his devotional ardour. These and other aspects of his complex character are explored here through a compelling selection of his drawings and letters, poems in draft and polished form and prints and paintings after his designs, in an exhibition that charts the last third of his career.

Daniele was among those with Michelangelo when he died on 18 February 1564. He had written to the artist’s nephew and heir four days before, begging him to hasten from Florence to Rome. The letter, signed by Michelangelo with cramped and sloping hand, is among the last exhibits, a poignant testimony to Michelangelo’s failing, yet ever tenacious, grasp on life.

Thirty years earlier, on the eve of his departure from Florence to Rome, Michelangelo (then 59) wrote to one Febo di Poggio, a disaffected young man who was the object of his admiration to say that he was never to return. Not for the first time Michelangelo left Florence more or less in secret and anxious for his safety. In this case he was in a dangerously compromised position, having played an active part in directing the city’s fortification in the Florentine Republic’s last stand against the Medici in 1529–30. But he was too famous and too long linked to the family, through his formative years in the household of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the patronage of Lorenzo’s son Giovanni and nephew Giulio (later popes Leo X and Clement VII), to be harmed or dismissed. He was forgiven by the latter, who was soon to commission him to paint the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Only a handful of drawings survive from the planning of that monumental drama which took seven years to complete (1534–41). A significant number of them are in the first room of the exhibition. A sheet from the Casa Buonarroti, for example, shows him visualising a swirling distribution of figural groups that would cover the wall in poses of hope and despair responding to Christ’s commanding gesture, which typically is propelled by the fulcrum of his powerful and slightly turned torso. Typically as well, and as is demonstrated in the exhibition, Christ’s position evolved from previous thoughts. A sketch of Christ in a similar pose was developed from a tracing on the back of a lovingly finished drawing of the giant Tityus with a vulture poised to feed on his liver (see p. 105). The Tityus is one of the mythologies given by the enamoured artist to the young and beautiful Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Turned 90 degrees, the prone victim becomes the resurrected Saviour. This flip side transformation is an instance of Michelangelo’s imaginative process, along with his thrifty use of paper.

In the case of the Last Judgment drawing, light chalk marks suggest emerging forms, some resolved and shaped with darker outlines. Cross-hatching over the clouds of decision, or indecision, set the groups into relief. All of the figures in the compositional and the larger life studies are drawn nude, as was usual for Michelangelo. In the Last Judgment, however, they remain naked – a controversial choice that became a cause célèbre about artistic expression and religious decorum.

The dominance of black chalk as the medium for the Last Judgment studies is a striking feature of Michelangelo’s practice from the 1530s onwards. That his pen was to hand is demonstrated in the careful calligraphy of his letters and its use in architectural draughtsmanship, thoroughly represented in the exhibition. Perhaps he favoured black chalk for figure studies because it could be rubbed and also readily controlled to achieve different effects, from sharp lines to murky depths. Going from the polished, ivory-like surfaces evoked in the Christ on the Cross that Michelangelo presented to Vittoria Colonna for her spiritual meditations in around 1543 to the shadowy crucified Christs of his later contemplation of the Passion is proof of that versatility. Yet what explains the paucity of drawings for complex commissions? To what degree are the fragmentary (and often literally fragmented) remains of Michelangelo’s drawing practice simply the hardiest survivors of a long history? Or to what degree do they, at least in some part, represent the result of Michelangelo’s deliberate shaping of his reputation? As much as he suffered the indignity of growing old, Michelangelo was keenly aware that he was in a position to fashion his own legacy.

The Punishment of Tityus (1532), Michelangelo. Royal Collection Trust, London. Photo: © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

The exhibition offers a rare occasion to see how Michelangelo’s artistic, emotional and devotional life evolved in times of religious crisis and reform. It demonstrates how he was able to give spiritual conviction pictorial and poetic form. It shows how he answered constant demands for works by his hand and for his expertise with a strategic deployment of his talents as draughtsman and designer, correspondent and poet. Drawings, paintings and prints reveal his increasingly systematic delegation of the planning and execution of projects, from the production and replication of relatively small-scale devotional pictures to reconceiving and supervising the construction of St Peter’s Basilica. His creative impulses endured even as he complained that he could no longer draw a straight line or that he was so old that writing was a chore (so he told his nephew in June 1562 in a letter thanking him for the 43 flasks of Trebbiano wine sent from Florence). Michelangelo’s genius served him well while he grudgingly adapted to the infirmities of age, proving the prophetic truth of his own verses: ‘No one has mastery / before reaching the end / of his art and his life.’

‘Michelangelo: the last decades’ is at the British Museum until 28 July.

From the June 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

As we were putting together this Summer issue of the Review, an editor in London sent me Saskia Vogel’s new translation of a 1989 book by Peter Cornell, a Swedish historian and art critic. The Ways of Paradise is presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript; the author, Cornell tells us in an introduction, was “a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden,” where for more than three decades he was “occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that—as he once disclosed in confidence—would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.” After his death, the manuscript was never found. “Which is to say,” Cornell writes, “all that remains of his great work is its critical apparatus.”

The footnotes that comprise The Ways of Paradise orbit certain preoccupations: the center of the world, labyrinths, flânerie, rock formations, Freudian repression, passwords, folds of fabric, aimlessness. As I followed the trails left behind by the mysterious man Cornell calls the author, I felt an emerging sense of relation between only tangentially related things. (I also felt a relief that the categories of “Fiction” and “Nonfiction” had already been banished from the Review’s table of contents in favor of the more-encompassing “Prose.”)

Taking note of connections, intended or not, is one of the pleasures of deep, patient reading—which is to say, one of the pleasures of reading for pleasure. And so I am always delighted when, despite our best efforts to avoid organizing an issue of the Review around a given idea or theme, a reader will point out that the most recent one was clearly all about this subject or was wrestling with that idea.

Which makes the kind of letter I am now writing—to announce our new Summer issue, out this week—a conundrum. I could flag its seasonal topicality (“That summer we had decided we were past caring,” Anne Serre writes in the issue’s first story. “It was just too tiring, rushing back and forth between mental institutions”). Or I could, like a savvy host at a drinks party, point out possible conversation starters: works in translation, maybe. Or romance novels (“I am a sucker for women carrying each other around,” Renee Gladman writes in “My Lesbian Novel”). Or the visionary (“It could be a dog crossing the street one morning with a string of wieners, which is something I’ve always wanted to see,” Mary Robison tells Rebecca Bengal in her Art of Fiction interview. “That’s my golden dream”).

But most of the time when we read, we are enjoying something we can’t necessarily name in advance. In Dreaming by the Book (1999), Elaine Scarry argues that when writers describe something, what they’re really doing is instructing the reader in how to make mental images—ones that appear “not just like a lazy daydream,” Scarry explains to Margaret Ross in her Art of Nonfiction interview, “but as an incredibly complex landscape of interactions.” There is no replacement for this powerful exercise, she says: “If you really want to take down someone’s, or a whole population’s, ability to think, you must do it by shutting down their practice of the fictional as well as their practice of the factual.”

Consider this issue of the Review, then, a chain of connections whose links are you, their reader. Soldiers, reportedly killed in combat, disembarking from a train in the eerie light of dawn, in a story by the late Argentine author Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, translated by Will Vanderhyden. Odysseus sitting on the rocks by the edge of the sea, grieving his homecoming, in Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Scarry recalling how, as a child on summer vacation, each day she would await her grandfather’s return from the anthracite mines where he worked. “I would trace his path in the dirt over and over,” she says. “I’d think, Now he’s coming out of the mines, now he’s approaching me, when I look up he’s going to be there. No, he’s not there. He’s coming out of the mines, he’s approaching me. No, he’s not there.”

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.

From the April 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

I f there is one mood that characterises a conversation with Kapwani Kiwanga, the Canadian artist who is representing her country at this year’s Venice Biennale, it is thoughtfulness. She speaks with a measured consideration that is all too rare in the conversation of artists. Each word is weighed, evaluated and considered before it is allowed to stand. Even then it might not be fully satisfactory to her. At one point during our conversation, I quote her own words from a previous interview back to her. She responds, ‘Maybe that’s what I said, those are probably my words, but I think my intention behind those words was…’ before recasting what she said with greater precision.

Kiwanga has built her career on the hard work of research: of exploring archives, asking questions and distrusting simplicity. Since the start of her career, she has eschewed conventional ways of telling stories as they fail to contain the complexities to which she aspires. As she says of her work, ‘Seventy per cent is research and 30 per cent is actually doing something with the research.’

She is perhaps best known for her work Flowers for Africa (2012–ongoing). This grew out of a research project in Dakar, when Kiwanga was thinking about the history of decolonisation in Africa, prompted by photos of the official ceremony marking Senegal’s separation from France. Working with florists, Kiwanga recreates the floral arrangements from the independence ceremonies of different African states and stages them in exhibition spaces. The flowers then do what flowers do: seduce, reassure, beautify, smell, rot, decay.

Kiwanga has said in a previous interview that she was ‘somewhat uncomfortable about reproducing pictures of politicians – exclusively men – in situations of power’. She also noted a further discomfort: because these photographs date from the 1960s, ‘they can feel quite nostalgic’. But to her, the flowers captured in the photos ‘had been witness to history’.

Of course, most of the photographs are black and white so the colours of the flowers might not be known. There is room for interpretation which might, itself, be a comment on history and power. For all the weighty concerns Kiwanga is placing on delicate flowers, there is something supremely elegant about such a work that enters into conversations about what she calls the ‘asymmetry of power’ through such simple material. She has described this work as ‘connecting history to nature and the nonhuman, putting political and social struggles in relation to the cycles of nature’.

If this sounds like an arid way of producing art, the opposite is true. Apart from anything, research is a great pleasure to Kiwanga. ‘I’m just enthusiastic about almost everything,’ she says. Born in Canada in 1978 to a family with roots in Tanzania, she studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, before moving to Paris in 2005 to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts. (Still based in Paris, when we speak, she is in Rome for a residency at the Villa Medici, part of the Académie de France.)

Kiwanga is open to the possibility of discovering dead ends: ‘I don’t think I have a cost analysis kind of approach to things – it doesn’t have to necessarily be efficient, or productive.’ This patience for just following the research where it will go seems to be partly sustained by the fact that it plays such an important role in her work. She is, however, alive to the fact that there is an effort to it: ‘I enjoy it no matter how tedious it can be, at times,’ she says.

Kiwanga’s ambitions extend to the range and scope of what she exhibits, too. In the middle of the pandemic, in October 2020, she opened ‘Plot’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Social distancing put paid to some of the more elaborate elements of the exhibition – ‘there’s a lot of things that were planned around that, including performance and processions and all the rest, that we could not do,’ she says – but the physical objects were striking enough. Vast sheets of translucent fabric separated the huge rooms into defined spaces containing inflatable sculptures that encased plants and objects. Redefining the space was part of the point of the work. ‘It could have been viewed as an image on its own, how that space was transformed,’ she says.

Nowhere is space more important than in the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. Each national pavilion comes with its own architectural expression of nationhood, its own challenges and difficulties and its own history of responses to those challenges. When asked why she said yes to the commission from the National Gallery of Canada, Kiwanga replies quickly, with a laugh, ‘I didn’t think you could say no.’ This is not her first appearance at a Venice Biennale, since her work Terrarium – which developed some of the themes in ‘Plot’ – was part of the central exhibition at the Arsenale in 2022. But being part of a group show like that is a different proposition from representing your country in your own pavilion.

Despite my proddings that there is some wider geopolitical significance to the Giardini, where national styles proudly jostle up against one another – Lutyens’ tea house for the UK next to Ernst Haiger’s strident pavilion for Germany, for example – Kiwanga seems reluctant to read politics into the venue. ‘It does have that bit of microcosm,’ she says, ‘but at the same time it was built in a time and it exists in a time. I think it adjusts to something much more porous and I think that’s the reality of our kind of world and how we think about it now.’ Instead, ‘it’s quite pragmatic for me. It’s a space that doesn’t need to be given more importance than any other space.’

Installation view of Terrarium (2022) by Kapwani Kiwanga at the Arsenale during the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano; © the artist

We are not able to discuss exactly what will appear in her exhibition ‘Trinket’ at Venice, such are the pressures of matching up our schedules, but Kiwanga is happy to hint that the choice of material will be an important part of it. In 2015, Kiwanga put on her first solo show in the UK, ‘Kinjiketile Suite’ at the South London Gallery. Sisal, a cash crop imported from Central America and grown in Tanzania by German colonialists, loomed large in the exhibition. Uncovering such histories is characteristic of Kiwanga’s approach to materials: Terrarium, for instance, explored the politics of sand as a by-product of oil refining and a symbol of an increasingly arid planet.

But Kiwanga is not an artist to try something and move on. Sisal makes continued appearances in her work, most notably in her sculpture Maya-Bantu (2019), recently shown in the exhibition ‘Off Grid’ at the New Museum, New York. Great screens of sisal interrupted the rooms of the gallery; an exploration of light, following research into police use of floodlights for surveillance. Venice is ripe for material metaphors, but predicting the interests of an artist who is exploring histories of toxicity during her Rome residency is a fool’s game.

Despite the combination of thorough research and profound readings of apparently simple objects, there is something bracingly practical about Kiwanga. One quirk of her history is that before her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts she relocated to Edinburgh for three years to make television. This doesn’t seem the most natural stopping point for a French-Canadian artist with aspirations to create intellectual art.

‘It’s not a good narrative,’ she says, by way of explanation, ‘it was a really pragmatic thing.’ At the time it was easy to get a visa and to find work. ‘I didn’t say Edinburgh’s where I wanted to go necessarily, but I knew I wanted to come to Europe for film-making. European cinema appealed to me more than North American cinema at that time.’ She worked as a freelancer ‘because those were some of the opportunities just to propose ideas and projects.’

It sounds almost Arcadian in its innocence and is hard to imagine some 20 years on. ‘There were these nurturing moments, these funds where you’d be paired with someone else and you would make your first little thing. And then from there, it just kept on going for a couple of years.’ This was the beginning of Kiwanga working with visual and moving images, though it was less rarefied than it might sound. ‘I was working in the social sector, doing things with youth and – how does one say – less serviced areas, so I was able to have a pretty rounded experience of, at least, that aspect of Scottish society.’

Maya-Bantu (2019), Kapwani Kiwanga. Photo: Dario Lasagni; courtesy the New Museum, the artist and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London/Galerie Poggi, Paris/Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin; © Kapwani Kiwanga/ADAGP Paris, 2023

Ultimately, Kiwanga was looking for a mode of storytelling that found a more complicated and richer way of understanding things than the narrative of film and TV at that time. Though there was also the problem of who got the final cut. In one interview, she said, ‘After a few television commissions that dealt with the African diaspora, I realised I had an unsolvable problem – I didn’t get a say in the final edit and the overall message slightly changed.’

Influence and control seem to chime quite naturally with an interest in power dynamics. For an artist who is intent on uncovering the way power has worked, finding a space to say exactly what you want becomes imperative. Oddly, for an artist whose ideas are so thoroughly worked through, Kiwanga doesn’t seem to have a particular design to where her work will take her – though of course she has preoccupations. ‘It’s really just by being in a world’ that she begins a project. ‘That could be by being in a world by physically waiting for the bus, or in a park, or having conversations with people, or reading other people’s thoughts through books or whatever that might be.’

The physical aspect is something that keeps cropping up in our conversation. For all the thinking involved, Kiwanga keeps referring to the bodily experience of an artwork. Approaching Terrarium it was impossible, in the vast height of the Arsenale, not to feel the room change; not to approach the work with trepidation, slipping into the space defined by the translucent, orange fabric. But it was also exciting to enter a new world and see what was hidden behind the curtains. It was a physical as much as an intellectual response.

It becomes clear in our conversation that this is the complexity that Kiwanga is looking for. Film and television didn’t fulfil her vision because ‘there was something else that was missing in terms of the body,’ she says. ‘I think the complexity I was speaking of was really to have something that [the] body feels.’ Her academic readings are part of the work, of course, but they need to lead beyond that for a fully artistic rendering.

At one point in our conversation, while we are talking about the bodily experience of art, Kiwanga refers to people as ‘archives of experience’. It’s a beautiful image, affording each individual a dignity and richness that might easily be overlooked. I cannot help but wonder if part of Kiwanga’s excitement at going through archives is the opportunity it provides to meet new people and understand them in new ways, even if they are no longer alive. If that’s the case, then the melting pot of Venice, a city that can’t shake off its history no matter how contemporary the art it displays, seems like a particularly apt location for her next work.

‘Trinket’ is at the Canadian Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, from 20 April–24 November.

From the April 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Anyone can lay a funerary GIF at one of the 238 million virtual tombstones at findagrave.com. A rose JPEG accompanied by the words “im sorry the world did not treat you well” is laid on Kafka’s grave page amidst various uploaded photos of tombstones; “Your statue was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol today,” reads a post for Willa Cather. Someone leaves an update on Federico Fellini’s page that tonight they “will watch La Strada in your memory.” Many of these messages seem to have come after a pilgrimage to a physical site. They read like confirmations of an encounter: as though their writers, unsatisfied with what they’d found in the material realm, had taken to virtual channels to yoke a final closeness with the dead.

The playwright and actor William Gillette’s online grave is littered with notes from recent visitors to his house museum, updating him on his property: “Interesting man, a shame he did not have children to enjoy the castle and train ride,” or “when i vist [sic] i always notice something … deer in your yard, the fawn was nursing from its mother.” Another: “Went to your home today… You would be proud that it is in impeccable order.”

Gillette Castle lies up a coily road in East Haddam, Connecticut. I visit on the first hot day of May. An elaborate stone pathway leads me from the parking lot to a gray, cobbly estate that overlooks the Connecticut River. A rabbit passes the entrance sign and disappears into the forest.

I live nearby, and have developed a chronic wandering habit in my final semester at divinity school. The more direct and pursuant my inquiries of God have become, the greater my conflictual desire to roam has grown. Perhaps my proclivity to wander is a symptom of my frustration with the jigsaw splodge of academia, or of my desire for a single, quiet path of pilgrimage. It has become increasingly apparent to me that one of the key tenets of the spiritual life was imitation: of Christ, of the saints. And so, rather serendipitously, I show up to this castle made by a man whose life was defined so completely by imitation.

William Gillette looked exactly like Sherlock Holmes—a tall man with a smoking pipe and cape—or, rather, Sherlock, as we imagine him, looks like William Gillette. “The careers of the master detective, Sherlock Holmes, and the master actor-playwright, William Gillette, are inextricably combined,” writes Ruth Berman in A Case of Double Identity. Gillette is best known for adapting Sir Conan Doyle’s stories to the stage, then later playing and perfecting the part of Holmes in more than a thousand performances. “Elementary, my dear Watson” was adapted from a line of Gillette’s. The deerstalker hat was his invention. Gillette’s embodied adaptation was so successful that playbill images of Gillette became source images for subsequent book editions of Sherlock Holmes. Certain covers bear Gillette’s exact likeness. Gillette became Sherlock; Sherlock became Gillette.

Before the two became one, Gillette was a moderately popular playwright and actor from Hartford, Connecticut. An inventor as well, Gillette created a machine that perfectly emulated the sound of a horse’s hooves “approaching, departing, or passing at a gallop, trot, or any other desired gait,” as a way to heighten the realism of the stage. Much of his acclaim was thanks to two Civil War plays, Held By the Enemy (1886) and Secret Service (1895), written after his beloved wife, the actress Helen Nichols, passed away from a burst appendix at twenty-eight. Gillette withdrew to the woods. He never remarried, and spent six years away from public life.

Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes was dead. Sir Conan Doyle had killed him off in “The Final Problem,” when he falls into a gorge in Switzerland. Doyle himself wished to resurrect Holmes for the stage, but neither he nor other playwrights were able to get it right. It was Doyle’s agent who eventually recommended Gillette for the project. When the two men met in 1899, Gillette showed up dressed as his interpretation of Holmes and examined Doyle with a magnifying glass.

***

At the castle, which is open to the public for tours and surrounded by hiking trails, my tour group consists of eight children and three mothers, who at first regard me with enthusiasm, joking that I’ve joined a group of monsters. “Oh please, you go,” one mother insists, so I spill ahead, peering at the corners of the wooden staircase. The tour guide notes that Gillette owned fifteen cats. The children gasp. I inspect a Japanese tea set.

“Gillette was very concerned with what other people thought of him,” says the tour guide, pointing to a window that is actually a mirror, an apparatus that allowed for Gillette to see how his guests would act when he left the room. When peering into its reflection from the second-floor master bedroom, I can see what is happening downstairs at the bar—a boy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt stares into his phone while his date, dressed in velour, takes selfies. Stalin, too, had an intricate surveillance system in his home, in order to know who to kill, and though Gillette’s motives were less ideological,  this self-surveilling house appears as an uncanny reflection of a person fully curled in upon themselves. Like a dog resembles its owner, a house can begin to mirror the neuroses of its inhabitants. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes declared in the story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”

I pass what looks like a wooden dagger hanging from the ceiling, which I later learn is a fire-extinguishing device. In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay on “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,” he stresses that Doyle never follows the dictum of Chekhov’s gun. Instead, “The gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.” The same logic applies to Gillette’s castle. Some of what you see becomes something else. Dead-end staircases, trick furniture, and intricate lock systems abound. Near the main entrance is a secret door that leads from his office so he could “escape unwanted guests.” The castle is thoroughly adorned with furniture pieces with double meanings, trick latches, reflections and deflections. Gillette even refused the word castle and often referred to it as “the pile of rocks.”

Gillette rarely did interviews, didn’t keep a journal, and kept most of his life secret—a pattern of behavior especially fitting for a man whose craft involved the grafting of much of his self into another man’s fiction. Walking through the great hall of the castle, made from white oak, I begin to feel that I am inhabiting an intercessory space between the man and his character; a place where a problem, puzzle, or personality was in the process of being worked out. Perhaps all houses serve this secondary function, an exercise in holding together what is meaningful; like Gillette, we sometimes prefer to obscure this process even to ourselves, in labyrinthine corridors and secret passageways.

The children at the end of the tour complain that they want to eat hot dogs, and I’m confronted with an unexpected emptiness. Perhaps I’d come to the castle expecting to glean something of Gillette, but I find him impossible to extract from the character who eclipsed him. Perhaps I’d secretly hoped for evidence that Gillette had returned to himself again, in the privacy of his own home. And maybe he had—after all, a man is not his materials. I think of the anonymous people who wander their digital way to findagrave.com in order to update Gillette on his estate. When they do so, do they imagine him as a man who spent his life on the stage, practicing his lines? Or do they imagine a detective in his silk robe and violin?

Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera and Imaginary Museums. 

Franklin, Apple TV’s latest moodily lit historical biopic, begins with our hero, the most versatile American ever to have lived, landing on the coast of Brittany in December 1776. As he steps out of the rowing boat that has brought them ashore, his companion asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ Nothing, Franklin says. He’s ‘merely thinking’. About what? ‘Roast pheasant, potatoes in butter, candied carrots chased by a respectable Madeira. And our mission, of course.’

Michael Douglas plays Benjamin Franklin with gusto. His performance may be quieter than the one he gave as Liberace in the Soderbergh film, but not by much. In the series, and in this period of history, the founding father is on a mission to form an alliance with France for the cause of the American Revolution. A sclerotic monarchical regime can’t be expected to get excited about liberty and equality, but perhaps it can be persuaded to biff its old enemy, Britain, on the nose.

To remind us that Franklin is a man of appetites as well as of ideals, another early scene has him fart himself awake at a dinner table. ‘It’s remarkable how one’s outlook is improved by the passing of wind,’ he says. In real life, Franklin’s personal unpretentiousness was a trait he turned to good use while trying to gain the ear of the powerful in France. His plain brown suit, unwigged hair and fur cap all marked him out as a new kind of person, a citizen of a state that did not yet exist.

Benjamin Franklin (1778), Joseph-Siffred Duplessis. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It seems fitting that the painter who did more to fix Franklin’s image in the public imagination than any other was also a flexible figure, who managed to negotiate the upheavals of the French Revolution. Joseph-Siffred Duplessis’s portraits of Louis XVI and Gluck are surprisingly candid depictions of their subjects. The king in his coronation robes looks like a dilettante who has been rootling around a dressing-up box; the composer seems to be hunting a melody down in the act of composition. Duplessis painted Benjamin Franklin more than once. In 1779 his portrait of Franklin was much praised when it exhibited in the Salon that year. But it’s the portrait of c. 1785 that forms the basis for Franklin’s depiction on the hundred-dollar bill. In the former, the statesman wears a reddish-brown suit and a fur collar and his hair loose. In the latter his grey hair is greyer and his outfit even simpler: a grey coat and a white collar. In 1785, Franklin left France having achieved everything he had set out to achieve. The sitter for Duplessis’s second portrait has accomplished his mission and had his fill of roast pheasant and potatoes along the way.

Benjamin Franklin (c. 1785), Joseph-Siffred Duplessis. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The Review was thrilled this year to honor Tobias Wolff with the Hadada Award, our annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. At this year’s Spring Revel on April 2, Wolff spoke to a gathering of writers, artists, and friends. We are pleased to publish his remarks here.

When Lady Astor was breathing her last, a large group of family and friends gathered around the bed to see her off. Just before she departed this life, she snapped awake and looked around and said, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?”

Well, don’t tell me.

The scene here bears some resemblances to hers. I look out and see my dear wife, Catherine, and my oldest and best friends, and others who’ve come into our life in later years, even as I still vividly recall the laughing, never-to-be-forgotten faces of two beloved friends who left our company too soon, George Crile and Edward McIlvain. I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here.

The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.

Case in point:

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher became exasperated with my mulish refusal to learn cursive. I liked to print my words, so that they looked like the ones in the books I read. Finally, Mrs. Post sent me home with a note to my mother, telling her that I would not be allowed to return to school until I learned to write in cursive. My mother did not need this complication. She was raising me alone, in a small apartment above a garage, working on her feet all day at a Dairy Queen. By the time she got home and finished making dinner she was ready to put those aching feet up and lean back with a book. Now she had to spend her evenings teaching me how to … well, write.

This is how she did it: she started with the “quick brown fox,” and when that became unbearably tedious she chose passages from the books I’d borrowed from the library: Lassie Come-Home; Old Yeller; Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild; Lad: A Dog, or another volume of Albert Payson Terhune’s many-volumed testaments to his love of collies. You see a pattern here. I wanted a dog. So: passage chosen, my mother adjusted the pencil just so in my fingers, then put her hand on mine and guided hand and pencil over the page, copying the chosen passage in her beautiful script that I could never duplicate, though damned if I didn’t finally learn to stitch letters together, and make recognizable if unlovely words and sentences, until I was allowed back into the classroom. And to this day, when I write in longhand, I sometimes stop and remember those nights, and the feeling of my mother’s hand on mine. 

Some years later I received a scholarship—preposterously undeserved, but that’s another story—to a rigorous boarding school in Pennsylvania. I spent the summer before school began with my brother Geoffrey. We had not seen each other in six years. He had just graduated summa cum laude in English from Princeton, and was shocked to discover that I couldn’t write an essay, not really. I’d been skating by in a rural high school in Washington State, the classrooms full, the teachers overwhelmed. Late as the day was, my brother took my education in hand. He assigned books for me to read, and essays to write on those books while he was at work, and then he went over my essays when he got home. He was both demanding and kind, his red pencil unsparing but also, often enough, encouraging. So did this young man with plans of his own give his summer nights to his little brother, hoping to get him launched with some hope of success. In this way his hand joined my mother’s hand on mine, helping me make words, helping me make a life.

I could go on. Each of us here tonight has known something like what I describe. We are all the beneficiaries of others’ gifts of knowledge and talent, patience and time. And those gifts never stop coming, not as long as we can read a book—for a book is made of just those gifts.

As I said, we’re never alone.

Ibrahim Mahama is best known for exploring the politics of labour through monumental installations and wall-based works. His art has made extensive use of old jute sacks (the kind used to carry cocoa or coal), but for his latest public commission, Mahama has collaborated with hundreds of craftspeople to weave and sew 2,000 square metres of fresh cloth embroidered with more than 130 second-hand batakaris (Ghanaian tunics traditionally worn by men). The result: a vivid purple-pink covering that swaddles the brutalist concrete facade of the Lakeside Terrace at the Barbican Centre in London. Weighing 20 tonnes and installed using a complex system of levers, Purple Hibiscus (2023–24) is at the Barbican from 10 April–18 August as part of the exhibition ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’, which is on show until 26 May.

Where is your studio?

It’s in Tamale in northern Ghana, where I was born. When I was living in Accra during my MFA, I had various ‘studios’ – I was working in market spaces, on the railway or under bridges – because I like the idea of producing art in the public domain. I’m interested in the idea of decommodifying the arts.

When I finished art school, I decided to go back to Tamale to build a studio. I thought I could somehow use it to influence a new generation of artists and thinkers. In 2014 I bought some land on which to build my studio, Red Clay, in a farming community outside the city.

For me, a studio isn’t just a place where an artist produces objects. Red Clay also holds the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA). It has a 900-square-metre hall used for retrospectives, we exhibit archives and other materials in another hall, and the main studio is used for showing parts of the permanent collection.

The Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana, at its opening in March 2019. Photo courtesy White Cube

There’s also Parliament of Ghosts (2019), a work I made in Manchester (at the Whitworth) that I rebuilt here as an extension of the studio. We use it for talks and all kinds of public programmes and experiments.

We also have a library, a 15-room residency space for artists and writers, which I’ve been building for a while now, and two cinema halls, which I’m now using as studios to produce tattoo-based works on leather for a show at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh. Then there’s a 2,000-square-metre space that’s supposed to be for archaeological exhibitions but currently shows large commissions I’ve made for museums.

This year we’re beginning work on a new building: a 10-storey-high art school with studio spaces. We also have farms, our own mosque, our own police station. You get an idea of the vastness of SCCA – it’s like a town. The aim is to build an environment that is centred purely around creativity.

For me, the idea of the studio in the 21st century goes back to a pedagogical question about the distribution of art. Even if I’m just sketching in the studio, I’ll invite school kids who will watch me draw before we do a drawing session together. I have to use residual capital from the art world to build alternative systems, but it’s important to me that the work addresses local concerns before being distributed globally.

Installation view of Transfer(s) (2023) by Ibrahim Mahama at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Photo: © Friso Gentsch/Lucie Marsmann/Angela von Brill; © the artist

How would you describe its atmosphere?

It’s very friendly and open-minded. Every day when I wake up there are maybe five buses with 400 school kids who are already there. And then I go down, open the studios up and show them work that I’ve done or exhibitions by other artists.

I started out with this idea of transforming art from a commodity into a gift. Everyone here, even the security men and caretakers, is invested in the work. There are older kids in the community who come around the exhibitions so much that they can now give other kids tours.

What are the challenges of working in this way?

Sometimes I think I’m still trying to understand what I’m doing. There’s also the problem of co-ordination: sometimes when I’m travelling I’ll get a request for something, and I’ll say yes, but then maybe the memo doesn’t get across to the studio. When you’re working with large communities, there are always conflicts that are bound to happen. Also, capital: there’s a lot going on and it puts pressure on me to find creative ways of working to earn money to sustain it.

All this work is a proposal I’m making: to inspire other artists to think differently about what their practices could be. It’s certainly not for me and it’s not even for our generation, but for a generation ahead.

Installation view of A Friend (2019) by Ibrahim Mahama at Caselli Daziari di Porta Venezia, Milan. Photo: Marco De Scalzi; courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi; © the artist

How did you create your Barbican commission, Purple Hibiscus?

It started off as a joke. When I was asked to do it, I said, ‘Oh, normally I make work that has very dull, subdued colours. Wouldn’t it be interesting to make something very bright and pink to counter the grey English weather?’ I sketched an idea, then worked with my uncle to help find and coordinate with weavers across Tamale. They wove about 2,000 square metres of fabric in three months. Everything that you see in the Barbican was done by hand.

Given the scale of the work, I thought the local sports stadium would make a good studio – I was interested in the architecture as seen against the production of the work. It was difficult, though, because there are always football matches on. We also had to move with the sun, as the shadow of the superstructure shifted across the day.

I’m currently editing a film that shows the work being made from scratch, including the fabric being woven and drone footage of the sewing. For me, the labour factor of this work is very important. The installation is the residue of the performative work of stitching and so on.

Purple Hibiscus (2023–24) being sewn at Aliu Mahama sports stadium in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy the artist/Red Clay, Tamale/Barbican Centre, London/White Cube

Do you ever play music – or listen to anything – while you work?

The studio is still under construction, so sometimes there’s the noise of earth-moving equipment, say. You also hear bird sounds and the bats that live in people’s roofs – they’ve moved into the gaps in our walls. In the evening, they fly out in a big swarm. I do play music once in a while, but mostly I just like to have peace and quiet in order to think.

What’s the most unusual object in your studio?

I would have said the trains and aeroplanes, but they don’t really surprise me anymore. I’ve bought trains that were built in the colonial era – the British built a railway in Ghana between 1893 and the 1920s. A lot of the labour came from the north of the country, but when it was finished, none of the wealth came there. A lot of these train lines have been scrapped – they cut the trains into pieces and sell them or melt them down. I built a railway line at the studio and put the trains there; we do performances where we pull them. We also use them as classroom spaces. I’m interested in the layers of history within these objects, which are some of the most fascinating (and also the biggest) things I’ve collected. When I leave them outside, they age like fine wine.

Lots of the materials I collect (for my work) were originally used for the transportation of commodities and have since been discarded. I focus on their history, on the void that’s within them. I use the void as a way of giving birth to new life.

I’ve also been collecting the interiors of old factories built in the post-independence era; some were never used and were just abandoned. I buy interiors of those I know are going to be destroyed, and work with a team of welders and so on to remove the objects. The idea is to rebuild the factories, eventually.

I collect quite a lot of strange things. When I’m taking people around and talking to them about political intentions and so on, they pretend to understand. But in most cases, you hear them say afterwards, ‘This guy is crazy.’

Purple Hibiscus (2023–24) being crafted at Aliu Mahama sports stadium in Tamale, Ghana. Courtesy the artist/Red Clay, Tamale/Barbican Centre, London/White Cube

What’s your most well-thumbed book?

Marx’s Das Kapital is an important one – also Walter Benjamin’s text ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) and The Making of the Indebted Man (2012) by Maurizio Lazzarato.

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

A tuk-tuk driver who brought tourists to my studio then had a personal tour. He was very excited about what he saw. He never knew that art like this existed. He went home, closed work for that day (as precarious as his situation was), then brought all his kids over to spend the afternoon here. There were 15 kids in the tuk-tuk! He had to put wood on the sides to prevent them falling out.

If we cannot make work that can be somehow transformative for people like him, what’s the point of art? When you go to an opening at the Tate or any big museum in a cosmopolitan city, there’s normally the same type of people there all the time. If you can shift something and change how people respond to or use art, that’s a gift.

As told to Isabella Smith.

Installation view of Purple Hibiscus (2023–24) by Ibrahim Mahama at the Barbican. Photo: © Pete Cadman and Barbican Centre; courtesy the artist/Red Clay, Tamale/Barbican Centre, London/White Cube

Purple Hibiscus (2024) is at the Barbican, London, until 18 August.

Official notice: you can become an outsider artist without ever venturing outside. Plenty of artists have, but not Anthony Dominguez on the cold streets of New York. Only now is he receiving a less chilly reception not so very far from where he once lived, at Andrew Edlin through April 6.

Outsider artists have often been insiders in everything but their art. Many have worked diligently within a community, like the Gee’s Bend quilters, and folk art in portraits has become an emblem of early American art. Yet a step outside the art world was never enough for Dominguez. He took to the streets for over twenty years until his death in 2014, and his art does nothing to disguise the costs. For him, even a cat begs to cat-sit for pay. Baby, it’s cold outside.

Some outsider artists have been trapped inside with their madness, in an institution or in their head. And there is no getting away from the madness of his decision. Others artists have grown up in an artistic family, in his case with a commercial artist for a father, or dropped out after a few courses in art and headed for New York. Not everyone, though, abandoned an East Village apartment at the very depth of East Village malaise and the very peak of East Village art. Dominguez had to be ingenious just to survive, making art from whatever scraps he could find. Not surprisingly, he never made it to his mid-fifties.

Not that he cared all that much about the label outsider art, and he had one dealer and then another. Without them, his work could not have survived, although both galleries passed away as quickly as he. Yet he valued nothing so much as freedom, and nothing less than homelessness would do. One can see it in the show’s very first work, where Lady Liberty in jail comforts a fellow prisoner. “What are you in for?” “Breathing.”

It is the closest Dominguez comes to hectoring. Uncle Sam and a cop with a dollar sign for a head parade right by, while others behind bars are either catching what sleep they can or dropping like flies. Once back on the street, though, his bitterness melts away. A comfortable jogger is just part of the pageantry, along with a man rich enough to toss a bill into one trash can, waste paper into another. In time, he found religion, but giant insects appear more often than a savior. Text within paintings accepts everything he saw, like one that gives the show its title, “Kindness Cruelty Continuum.”

The gallery pairs it with a second show for writing found on the subways, in fake ads, doctored posters, and handwritten rants. Are they witty, tedious, or hateful? All of the above, and Kenneth Goldsmith, who collected them along with Harley Spiller, gives them a name from his poetry, “Are You Free on Saturday from 4–7 PM?” The words look suspiciously like an invitation to his opening, with tabs at bottom for your RSVP. Like Dominguez, Goldsmith would welcome anyone who can make it before 7. I just hate to think whether they would shut up.

Those scraps of raw prose underscore the sophistication of white on black for Dominguez. He brings totemic patterns to large works, in his paint’s chalk-like line on black, and a delicate texture to decals pricked with bleach. He also brings color and the look of traditional samplers to songs after teaching himself to write music. Even the street scenes stop short of cartoons, although one might as well call them a graphic novel. Yet he would still rather be alone. As one lyric begins, “Company loves misery.”

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