Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato

Posted on 16 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 144

Feature · Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato
Words · Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato In Conversation mediated by Andrea Bratta

Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

Chance and love—two words that perfectly capture the encounter between photographers Donna Ferrato and Daniel Arnold. In the warmth of Donna’s NYC apartment, the two friends-photographers sit down for a candid conversation. Through the literal lens that unites them—a camera one—they reflect on their lives, the serendipity of their meeting on a summer morning walk, weaving through the intersections of love and lust, the compulsion to document, and the nature of seeing—and being seen.

Donna Ferrato Do you remember how we met? I saw the wildest couple walking down the street—the man seemed completely entranced by the woman, who had this almost ethereal glow, like a firefly in daylight, surrounded by a rainbow aura. I sat with my dear friend, Alex Paterson Jones, a brilliant designer. We were a little high, a little giddy, basking in the warm air. We spotted the man’s camera and I called out to them, Hey, photographer! Hey! I wanted to pull them in, drawn by the feeling that something was stirring, something electric. We needed them inside with us. So what did we say?

Daniel Arnold I looked up, slightly confused, and you told me to get up there! Kay and I had just been at the diner around the corner, and I was walking her to her studio a few blocks away in this totally ridiculous way, like a big cartoon strut, twisting together as I held her at the waist.

DF I can spot someone strange miles away. And, as expected..

DA We were deep in our own rhythm when we suddenly heard a woman call down to us—”Hey photographer!” We looked up, and she said, Get up here. We were feeling impulsive with nowhere particular to be, we just looked at each other and went, Okay, okay. And so, we headed upstairs.

DF You get into the building, you know it’s a little odd, you’re going up the stairs, it’s kind of dark, there’s the woman from the fire escape calling you in the hallway. Keep coming, Come on, come on in there, one more flight. And then they get into the house, the two of them. It’s like we started dancing around each other trying to figure out where we were.

DA The “what is this, who is that dance.”

DF You had a Leica, right? So I knew he was a photographer. I wanted you to know straight away that as soon as you stepped foot into my house, you could take pictures of anything you wanted, because I would have been taking your picture whenever I wanted. I guess that gave us a direction to follow in starting to understand each other, and that’s how it all sort of started, but still, you were very shy about it in the beginning.

DA I wouldn’t say shy, necessarily. Just.. It was all super impulsive—we walked in totally blind. I was just feeling it out, taking the temperature of the room. Not in a hesitant way, I was definitely up for it, but more like, Okay… what’s going on here? Where am I? Who is this person? Can I trust her?

At some point, I noticed more than one copy of a Donna Ferrato book lying around, and it clicked. Oh… wait. This is Donna Ferrato’s place. I knew your work—I was familiar with it—but I had no idea what you actually looked like. I mean, I live in New York, but that doesn’t mean I know everything. I just knew you were a big deal.

DF You didn’t know how friendly I was?

DA I just had to walk up the fire escape to find out! It’s not that I found you unfriendly, I just didn’t know anything about you, the human. And now we’re old friends.

DF We had a ton of pastries, plenty of good stuff to eat, and we just settled in. Then he told me his name, and weirdly enough, I remembered an assistant I had a couple of years back mentioning him—said they were friends. That caught my attention. At the time, I didn’t really know Daniel Arnold’s work. I had looked him up once and thought, hmm… interesting, but it was totally outside what I was following back then. Over the years, though, I kept seeing more of his stuff, and we ended up following each other on Instagram, sort of orbiting each other from a distance. But in that moment, when he said his name—when I realized who he was—it suddenly hit me. Oh. This is something special.

DA Perfect coincidence.

DF And your girlfriend, Kay, she is so whimsical. She doesn’t even realize she has so much strength, she’s like shards of glass, yet there’s something so powerful in her being. She has experienced so much in life: She’s young, but she’s also ancient, and suddenly she was there, showing me who she was. I was on my knees, I tell you. I was so humbled by her.

DA Oh, she knows. And yeah, you were clearly kind of intoxicated by the whole thing. It was great—just the energy of it, the time we spent together. I actually have pictures of you taking pictures of her. And the pictures of us—I don’t know if I ever showed you—but we had them up in the apartment for a while. I had to take them down because of some work we did, but for a time, they were hanging like a mobile from the light fixture. There was just something about them—the way you put it all together, the text on the back, the tape—it turned into this beautiful object. So we let it spin.

DF You gotta show that to me. This is what I like about you, Daniel—you’ve got this very cozy, straightforward vibe. Just a simple man, you know? No pretentious talk about photography, no blah, blah, blah—just the real thing. And I like your life, at least from what I’ve seen. Never been to your place, though. Maybe one day, who knows?

DA We met this spring, it was April, right?

DF Yes. Makes you think of how chance works. Speaking of working, I think we never speak about work, per se.

DA It’s interesting—leading up to this conversation for what, two months? I’ve been quietly, maybe a little neurotically, thinking about it—thinking about my work in relation to yours. I knew the magazine was interested in your Love & Lust series, and over the past month or two, we’ve talked a bit about intimacy—how it plays into both your work and mine. It’s been an interesting new angle, one I wouldn’t have necessarily applied to my own work if not for overthinking this conversation. It made me reflect on how love and lust show up in what I do—not just in the experience of intimacy but in the pursuit of it. And honestly, you could probably take that lens—Love, Lust, Intimacy—and use it to break down any two people, because really, what deeper common ground is there?

DF Than love? Let me tell you something: The majority of people don’t really carry the lust with whoever they love. It’s very rare.

DA Yeah, I had a long thought about this today on my way here. In my model of the world, which I am learning isn’t exactly like yours, lust is really just seeking love—whether it’s intentional or not. Lust is an avenue to love. And I think that, in a healthy, long-term way, love has to go looking for lust too. It’s like this snake consuming itself—lust leads to love, and then love needs to seek lust again. Because, you know, lust is of the body, and love, I think, ends up being more of the mind. It’s a choice, a sacrifice, an agreement. And I think part of maintaining that agreement, part of keeping it going, is that you have to go in pursuit of lust. That makes me think not only of my relationship but also of my work. It connects in a way I hadn’t fully considered before.

DF Without lust, there’s no human sexuality.

DA But I also think that lust is not just about sexuality.

DF To me, lust equates sexual life force. That’s why women’s empowerment and liberation is extremely important. Our lust and pleasure drives are ours to balance. There was a time when men could control women’s drive. No more... Women’s desires can’t be confined and of service to men anymore.

DA Wouldn’t you say that lust can also be expressed elsewhere? When I think about it in terms of work, I kind of see myself in it. Remember when we were talking about your dad and how he wanted—he wanted to take pictures so badly. At the end of the day, he’d stick his camera in the windows of strangers’ houses just to keep taking pictures. I totally get that, that first intense lust for taking pictures. It’s like, you need more, to have more, to capture more. And then, at some point, you move past that. Even though there’s still a muscle memory of it, you go from that intense lust—where you can’t go to bed because you need more pictures—to a place of long-term commitment, where you’ve got to search for that lust again, something that keeps you wanting to work, to keep putting your camera through the window. It’s interesting to think about how that evolution works. And funny, thinking about how the two—lust and love, work and life—fit together.

DF We dovetail together very well. And that all, I think, comes from our fathers. Both of our fathers were brilliant men who both suffered a lot. And we, the children, have suffered too.

DA Well, I’ve got to say, having been exposed to that in my life—in a sort of defanged, up-close, practical way—I also grew up in a world where experiencing the very high and the very low together just feels so natural to me.I think it’s kind of a more honest, more permissive relationship with the world. Yeah, of course I’m depressed sometimes; Of course, I’m having a month where I can barely drag myself out of bed. It’s part of it. And the highs can be just as extreme. You can go too far in either direction.

DF There’s a lot of conversation these days about how, especially the newer generation, seems to have less of a sex drive and a more complicated relationship with pleasure in all its forms. It’s not just about sex and desire, but also about how people relate to their extremes, whether that’s lust or pleasure. The suffering, you know, the human suffering, the cruelty, the barbarism, and the lack of empathy—it’s all killing our sex drive. Where’s the love? We don’t see it in front of us anywhere. It also ties into the relationship with one’s work and the enjoyment of it.

DA What does making work look like for you, nowadays, Donna? What do you shoot?

DF I channel, or rather shoot, my rage through other women’s bodies, women I meet and photograph. Even with Kay’s body that day, when she just took her skirt down in the middle of the house—it’s a place where women come to express what they’re going through, their fears, their rage, and they feel comfortable doing so. It’s been like that for 30 years. But when she did that, capturing that moment—that’s what my work is all about. Being with her in that moment and witnessing it. It was incredible.

DA Was she showing you the tattoo on her back?

DF Yes. It was the tattoo. Then she showed me what the hospitals had done during her surgeries. That was really powerful. But this is what I do all the time. I’m also working on stories about domestic violence. I mean, if I put the word out there, inviting women who’ve been through hell to come and stay with me, they come.

DA How does that part happen?

DF It’s a very private and delicate process. Sometimes they come stay with me for a week or two. I want women to come here and live with me. I feel a deep kinship and trust with these women, like we’re all part of the same story. If they bring their child, that’s fine. If they bring a kitten, that’s fine. It all just flows from one thing to another. I always tell them, “From now on, you photograph me too, because I’m going through hell, and I want the world to see it—just like I’ll be photographing you.” I know I can be intense. Did I scare you a little when we met the first time?

DA No, I wasn’t scared. Maybe cautious, but that’s just how I am, despite running up the stairs. I’m observant. But not scared.

DF Good, good. So you feel safe with me. You know, we’re alike—that’s what we realized today. That’s why we were also so late for the interview. Sorry guys.

DA We caught a spark of friendship from the jump, but we never managed to take the time to sit and swap lore. So we had to take a little extra time rolling out the good stories.

DF Family, craziness, and being honest about it is what brought us closer.

DA Gotta be honest! My idyllic Midwestern beginnings worked like a force field, something I carried with me that eventually had to be broken. I’ve never wanted blinders, but it takes a while to figure out which parts of your life are fantasy. I’ve always pursued reality, always been curious about chaos. And strangely, I think that raw, unfiltered living–though it might feel crazy–it ends up giving you a more grounded existence.

DF Does that have something to do with finding love in your life?

DA Yeah, definitely. That young, idealistic love-seeker in me had to be dismantled—not by me, though. I can’t take credit for that. I just threw myself hard against a lot of brick walls and learned the hard way that Disney life wasn’t available to me. At first, I had that naïve phase where I wanted to turn everyone into the love of my life, for the rest of my life—which, let’s be real, is a tough dream to bring to New York. Then, for seven, eight, maybe nine years, I swung completely in the other direction. I told myself, “No one can have me.” I poured everything into work, compulsively, obsessively. And it delivered. At some point, I realized I was experiencing the feeling of being in love—but alone. Not in love with myself, just in love. Chemically. I was consumed by work, by what I was putting in and getting back. It felt just like love.

DF Amazing. You know, in that way, we’re total opposites. When I came to New York, everything felt possible. I could find love easily and work like a beast at the same time—doing my own projects while hustling like a little street rat, picking up assignments with local downtown newspapers. It was all within reach. I was constantly throwing myself into relationships, wild love affairs, sneaking into the craziest clubs—Paddles, Chateau 19—dressing up, playing with men, making everything part of the experience. That’s how Love&Lust came together, all tangled together in the thrill of it. Photographing swingers, going to orgies, meeting Elizabeth and Bengt.

DA You’re the cautionary tale! I’m kidding, but there’s such a low hanging metaphor-microcosm here, with you swinging off the fire escape inviting me, a stranger, into your home, and me coming up and being cautious, and you wondering if maybe I’m afraid!

DF Here you were, with your girlfriend, and me begging you to take pictures.

DA Think about the way we work. It’s very telling. I have a much more cautious, guarded relationship with the world. You dive in deep, right up to someone’s belly button while they’re in the middle of having sex. Meanwhile, I’m slipping by unnoticed, catching a shot on the street without anyone even realizing I’m there. I’m gone before they can say hello. And I think both approaches have their own truth. They seem, to me, opposite expressions of the same itch—just different personalities finding their own way of coping, dealing with the world as a collectible surface. What I do on the street—while it’s what I’m publicly known for—has also been my education. I had this insatiable desire to document, to collect. Coming to this city with my little Milwaukee mentality, I felt like I needed to take everything home with me. That desire propelled me through an education I didn’t even realize was happening. At first, I didn’t know how to use the camera—I just pointed it at things I wanted. But as dissatisfaction with that grew, I learned. The camera became an extension of my body; I know it inside and out now. And along with that technical evolution, there’s always been the internal work—the work around my family, my home, my relationships. Even though that’s more private, I approach it with the same intensity. Just as you shot your domestic violence work, I document my own home in that same deep, personal way.

DF You see, that’s beautiful—truly beautiful.

DA It’s been a way to make sense of the early hiccups in a relationship, when you don’t fully know where the other person stands. My absent-minded, work-obsessed way of being could have easily felt like neglect, like not caring enough. But I had to point it out—look at how I live my life, look at the time, energy, and attention I pour into this. The three cameras on my desk next to the bed, the way I treat our existence as something worth keeping, collecting, studying. It’s not detachment—it’s devotion, just in my own language.

DF To be able to share a life with someone who understands and connects with this, it’s a beautiful thing.

DA When I think about it in relation to your work—the sex, the domestic violence, the big headline stories like Donna Ferrato—it’s obviously a different subject matter. I’m not documenting violence or abuse, but still, thinking about it alongside what you do gives me a new perspective on my own work. I’ve cultivated this relationship with my home where I can be completely in it, fully present and lovingly invested, yet still maintain an outsider’s perspective—feels meaningful. It allows me to step back and say, this matters, we need to keep this. I had such a juicy thought about this. When we were talking before the interview—yeah, the story of your dad. She told me about her father, this compulsive, insatiable photographer, always reaching for the camera, always capturing. Sticking the lens through a window at night, photographing everything, every moment.

DF You know, sharing these things with people—especially family—creates a bond like no other. I have a relationship with my ex-husband, Johnny. He’s been through everything with my parents, my brothers, and me. The street is just the surface. Home is where everything truly unfolds, where you see the raw, unfiltered truth. That’s where the real shit happens.

DA I don’t want to over-tell your story, but your dad experienced something profound—sitting in his home as an old man, watching his betrayed wife destroy all the work he had ever made. We call that a tragedy. A triumph for your mother, a tragedy for your father. But in that moment, I also thought—maybe it’s perfect. Because it clarifies the real core value of it all. You take away the work, and at first, it feels like erasure, like his life has been undone. But because he made that work. Because he cultivated that part of his mind and arranged his life around it. He lived in a way that can’t be erased. Those pictures existed because he saw, thought, and engaged with the world in a certain way. And that—his relationship with the world—means so much more than any legacy ever could, more than any proof ever could. It was his life. It was the world. Having all your work disappear, it’d be heartbreaking—but only for a moment. The life that created it, the experiences and state of mind behind it, can never be taken away.

DF Think of the Palisades—through the fires, through the loss. Everything is dust to dust. We’re not in control. Photographers, filmmakers, musicians—losing everything they’ve ever created. But they still have themselves.

DA It might be an insensitive time to think this, but there is a version of losing everything that might actually be a gift.

DF It’s about resistance. So many are just waiting to see what happens—but if you’ve been paying attention, you already know. We’re breathless, always bracing for the worst. Without collective action, we’ll all end up like Metropolis—faceless drones, marching back and forth, stripped of individuality. In fact, we may already be there. Resistance is all we have left. And somehow, we have to build it together.

DA Well yeah, you said something a little while ago—what can you do to be good? You be of service. You bother to see who’s around you and you do what you can to help. When we’re at risk of becoming drones, that’s a powerful guiding light, even without revolutionary upheaval. That’s one of the great things about New York, especially for photographers. You can’t help but tune into the idea that being of service is everything—it’s the way out of any darkness. Maybe that’s naive, maybe it’s not enough for what’s coming. But it feels like the right place to start, community. It connects you to your humanity in a sort of smelling salts way. Wakes you up.

DF Build relationships. In the subways, they say, Don’t be someone else’s subway story. But the truth is, I am the story. I’ve been creating and telling these stories for a long time—through my own lens, my own voice. My father used to say, If it wasn’t for you, Donna, men would still be getting away with beating their wives. You showed the world how ugly it is. You made men feel guilty—at least for a while. Who knows? Do you think New York still has its own creative language?

DA New York is a place where, no matter when you show up, you always feel like you just missed it. There’s so much I missed, that I’ve come to fetishize. But the creative language of the city—it transcends generations. I think New York does something to people. Whether it’s meaningful—-or getting better or worse, I’m not sure—but it taps into something deep.There’s an undeniable thread through hundreds of years—people who come here and fall into the same obsessive relationship with the city, trying to articulate their own special connection. When I found out Leaves of Grass was about walking around Manhattan, looking at the people, I went nuts. It’s so far back, it’s not even photography. It just feels like such profound time travel to find it all alive in myself. New York still has that essence. Being in this place, in the mess of people making their mythology—it’s like a constant. It hits people in a way that’s traceable through time, and it doesn’t change that much. You really feel impermanence pressed on your throat here. Every store, every restaurant is built on the ghost of 500 others, and you look away for a month and there’s an entirely new city. Everything is so fleeting. It makes you want to catch every face, every train, to hold onto the moment. It intensifies the instinct to value the passing moment because everything moves so fast, and you’re confronted constantly with your impermanence and your insignificance. My story is as good as anybody else’s, because I can see we’re all going to end up erased. So whatever, might as well enjoy the ride.

DF I think that’s what it is about New York—it’s always had this sense embedded in it, even before this feeling became so widespread.

DA Yeah. It’s a very New York thing that has infected the world. We shouldn’t be surprised –we’ve been trying to infect them forever.

In order of appearance

Donna Ferrato, Daniel Arnold & Kay Kasparhauser, 2024
Donna Ferrato, Swingers So, CA 1999
Donna Ferrato, Studio 54, 1980
Donna Ferrato, Studio 54 Poppers, 1980
Daniel Arnold
Daniel Arnold
Donna Ferrato, Kay Kasparhauser, 2024
Donna Ferrato, Kay Kasparhauser 2024
Donna Ferrato, Dad Open Heart Surgery. 2008

Merlin Carpenter

Posted on 15 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 154

Feature · Merlin Carpenter
Words · Lila Torquéo

Can the Inside go beyond the Outside?

Merlin Carpenter wields negativity as a weapon, dismantling art’s illusions with irony and self-negation—his shows postponed, relocated, or delegated. Grounded in Marxist materialism, he exposes art’s inescapable entanglement with capitalism, stripping critique of its false autonomy. Rejecting comfort, he embraces failure and refusal as radical acts. Through writing, he probes spaces beyond market logic, seeking new critical frontiers.

“Not just our labor, not just our leisure—something else is being commodified here: our sociability, our common and ordinary life together, what you might even call our communism. Sure, it’s not a utopian version of communism. It is a very banal and everyday one, it’s our love of sharing our thoughts and feelings with each other and having connections to other people. But still, most people seem rather alarmed that their desire to share and be with each other, to reach out to friends, to pass on cat pictures, even their desire to have ferocious arguments with strangers, is making someone else very, very rich.” McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, 2019.

Merlin Carpenter explores forms of negativity through an iconoclastic, disillusioned, and irony-tinged approach. His exhibitions stand as negations of themselves – they are postponed, relocated, multiplied, or even delegated. From his artistic practice to his theoretical writings, steeped in Marxist and materialist philosophy, he lays bare the links between the economy of artistic production and capitalist ideology. Art, especially painting, finds itself confronted by its own contradictions: despite its pretensions to critique, it remains tethered to its market essence and the dominant financial system. Operating within both commercial and alternative spaces, Carpenter scrutinizes the speculative commodification of art and the flows of information and economic value that govern its circulation. While contemporary anxiety is often soothed with antidepressants and comforting illusions, Carpenter deliberately chooses the path of solitary failure and refusal, a radical gesture aimed perhaps at fostering conditions of lucid discouragement, or even a shared revolt. It is in writing, however, that he has found a privileged space to explore areas free from value, beyond the reach of capitalist logics, and open to new critical possibilities.

The heat of capital

In 2021, Carpenter presents his exhibition Steam Engine, curated by Tobias Kaspar, at Longtang, a Zurich-based venue. Entering the space, one encounters a room thick with steam and metallic sound textures, paired with panoramic paintings of locomotive wheels. Bold, rough black strokes define the structure of these machines – icons of the industrial revolution and metaphors for Fordist capitalism. These crude lines overlay colorful checkered patterns of plastic tablecloths mounted on frames. The speed suggested by the steam engine wheels is slowed by the heaviness of these strokes, yet the symbol of progress is definitively undermined by the ironic contrast with the retrograde connotations of the “Wachstücher” patterned tablecloths. This vernacular motif, emblematic of Italian trattorias and traditional German breweries, was notably used by his fellow Cosima von Bonin, who also contributed to the hedonistic mythos of the Cologne art scene of the 1980s and ’90s. These tablecloth patterns evoke scenes of rural life and a nostalgic yearning for a still and conservative past. The track Stress II by London-based producer Acolytes intensifies the sense of disjointed time, with its stretched and jagged frequencies endlessly looping in distorted echoes, repeating in a relentless cycle.

In a separate room away from the fog, two posters hang. One advertises Carpenter’s 2020 Paris exhibition Circuits at Palette Terre, featuring the Art Deco-styled tagline: “La vision obscurcie est la vision dégagée” (“Obscured vision is clear vision”). The second is titled The Far Right in the Art World as of April 2019, a diagram originally published in the Art of Darkness issue of Arts of the Working Class. These words, which conclude the exhibition at Longtang and which the artist will expand upon in a text published afterward, provide insight into the tenuous links between the ideological drifts of public opinion and the art world, as well as the hierarchies of perception associated with it. The steam both obstructs our vision and creates an effect of revelation, forcing viewers to move closer to the paintings to see how they engage with modernist, technocratic, and conservative traditions, all at once obsolete and enduring. The brash sounds gradually fade and decay, dissolving into a spectrum of broken, ever-regenerating frequencies. No revolution seems possible in this claustrophobic loop.

The drawings and paintings in Carpenter’s Circuits series, shown in 2020 at dépendance in Brussels and Palette Terre in Paris, depict broken electrical circuits. Their black lines on white background schematize the abstract chains of the global financial system, as if flattening them were the only way to represent it. After generating these circuit images in large quantities, Carpenter transforms them into something else: the cogwheels of steam engines, which give a new, thermodynamic shape to the energy of value. Though corrupted from the beginning, the system emerges stronger from its own damage, its ideology thriving on sabotage: the more it destroys, the more it progresses. Carpenter’s chaotic fusion of locomotives, smoke, and sound becomes an allegory for a disintegrating system in full delirium, that, though on the brink of a breakdown, continues to insist it still has energy to burn. We are faced with a megalomaniacal spectacle seemingly beyond redemption, compelled to consume even its own means of survival – right down to the very wood of the old locomotive’s wagons – in order to keep moving forward. There is almost a metallic aftertaste that recalls the misogynistic rhetoric of futurism, with its glorification of progress and war, famously described by Marinetti as “the only hygiene of the world”. The movement of the locomotive wheels is nothing but an illusion, a mirage conjured by smoke. But it doesn’t matter – White, dominant-class fascism spreads like a virulent cancer.

The fog’s obscuring effects and the hypnotic reverberations could lead to a physical experience of desubjectivation. It could echo Georges Bataille’s headless man and his meditation practice, which for him was a painful trial seeking to dissolve its mind. His retreat from both the social world and his individuality became a way to resist the war machine of negativity that defined World War II. This mental withdrawal resonates in a way with the trance state Carpenter values for its revolutionary potential. In his book The Outside Can’t Go Outside, he positions trance outside the realm of value. He frames it as a metaphor for what exists beyond capitalist realism, yet in a state that can only subsist virtually. Brian Massumi explains that capitalism is a vast exterior that captures interiorities. Carpenter, for his part, describes it as “a line of control within”. Since capitalism is boundless, can our actions occur outside of it? Pushing the question further: can the inside go beyond the outside? To capitalist, monetized surplus-value, Massumi opposes a non-capitalist, purely qualitative form of “surplus-value of life”. This makes us want to believe that in Carpenter’s exhibitions, or perhaps even more so in his writings and his concern for trance, there lie remnants of bare activity stemming from this great exterior. One can imagine a micro-activity stirring on an imperceptible scale within the steam. By changing the air’s density, the steam alters sound perception, heightening reverberations or dampening high frequencies. The particles suspended in the air may be to the waves what Carpenter’s texts are to his readers: micro-movements carrying transformation, traces of emerging ferment, of passionate activity. However, Carpenter insists that if such movements exist, they do so solely in their virtuality, with no direct relation to assimilated forms of opposition to capital such as alternative value systems, forms of care, or non-capitalist enclaves.

There was no official statement at the exhibition, only the steam, which could be read as a press release, and the announcement of a forthcoming text, written by the artist months later. A deliberate choice, meant to leave the field open. This retroactivity is common for Carpenter, allowing him to incorporate political episodes but also to self-revise, in what he calls an “endless theoretical discussion”. According to McKenzie Wark, the hacker class is made up of those who define themselves in opposition to their detractors, much as Marx and Hegel by embracing communism. Wark urges us to invent new term combinations that break free from our capitalist paradigm, to forge fresh conceptual matrices that can reprogram our perceptions. Carpenter’s approach seems close to this, using language to better shape a self-generating and experimental theory.

The “value” of refusal

One should expect Carpenter to take a disconcerting approach with commercial galleries, urging them to make efforts that acknowledge the political stakes in which they are entangled. His 2018 exhibition De Streepschilderijen at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles, offers a case in point. Carpenter required the gallery to rent an exhibition space far from the US, in Amsterdam, while keeping the Los Angeles gallery open as a salon for discussions and self-promotion. Between two screens, a television displayed footage of the Amsterdam exhibition, which Carpenter filled with paintings. Large canvases repeating a single motif – black and white lines stripes crowded the outdated rose-pink walls, making the entrance almost impassable. This is how he staged a blatant parody of the uniformity of classic – institutional formalism. By deterritorializing his works, Carpenter positions himself not only against the rise of the far-right but also against the incestuous ties between white imperialism and the art world. However, in promoting himself, he paradoxically cancels his own boycott while simultaneously reaffirming it. This act of sabotage transforms into an absurd performance. A strategy of failure, as seen in his boycott against the rise of the far-right with Not Doing a Show in FPÖ Austria at Nousmoules in Vienna (2018) – once again nullifying his refusal by allowing the exhibition to proceed after all.

For his 2020 exhibition Paint-It-Yourself at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, Carpenter seemingly delegated the creation of the work to the audience, not preventing them from paint the white canvases displayed in the gallery. Ironically, the audience finds itself both exploited and complicit, working without remuneration, while Carpenter and the gallery reap the financial benefits, even though no money has been made yet. The work, which outwardly appears to offer free participation, is ultimately commodified. In doing so, Carpenter brings the dynamics of appropriation and free labor into the physical space, echoing their global normalization on social media. As he stated in his letter to the gallery, “Instead of using right-wing material as a left-wing joke, I would make the simplistic left gesture as a formal joke in relation to a more rigorous hypothesis.”Carpenter’s absolute rejection of any compromise lends him a heroic air, which simultaneously flips into cynical anti-heroism, as a risky way of life that embraces failure to avoid any form of reification. He seeks to expose the mechanisms of an ideological machine that, far from being subverted, is reinforced in the very negation of its own discourse. His attitude can in some ways align with that of Bonny Poon when she staged what she called the ‘nightmare of the gallerist’ in her exhibition Off The Wall at City Galerie Wien in 2022. There, Bonny Poon parodied the hierarchies that structure the transactional relationships of the art market, reducing the exhibition to a raw confrontation of messy obstacles, walls where she tag titles – Artist/Dealer/User/Lover/Pet – and a painting titled Anatomy of a Deal. Over the past few years, a growing interest in the conditions of production has been shaping the young art scene. We think of Eva Barto’s exhibitions, in which she created ‘communication vessels’ between public and private institutions, highlighting economic negotiations. This awareness and positioning is further marked by the rise of militant collectives such as Wages For Wages Against (founded in Switzerland), Art en grève and La Buse (in France) founded by Eva Barto, all with the urgent goal of regulating artistic labor. A massive work in progress.

Designers

Merlin Carpenter, Steam Engine, 2021
Merlin Carpenter, Paint-It-Yourself, 2020
Merlin Carpenter, Circuits, 2020
Merlin Carpenter, De Streepschilderijen, 2018
Merlin Carpenter, Steam Engine, 2021

Banks Violette

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 130

Feature · Banks Violette
Words · Daria Miricola

A Kind Of Martyrdom

Banks Violette’s world is one of collapse—landscapes eroding, subcultures dissolving, symbols drained of irony and filled with raw sincerity. Raised in Ithaca, a town haunted by its name, his work blurs devotion and destruction: suicide sites turned icons, death metal aesthetics treated with the reverence of illuminated manuscripts, American hardcore and true crime folded into the language of high art.

Daria Miricola Today, I’d like to discuss the very beginnings of your practice and some of your early shows and inspirations. But to kick off, I would like to talk a bit about your hometown Ithaca, I guess its name is inspired by the Greek Ithaca, the motherland of Odysseus.

Banks Violette Ithaca is on the southern end of one of the Finger Lakes, a glacial valley that is a sort of dead center in New York State. There are these big gorges, these big ravines that have been essentially hacked in the earth. The bedrock is made out of shale and slate, almost like compressed mud. So the landscape looks sort of rotting out, and it’s decaying. The best word to describe it is entropic. Coming to its name, there are a lot of towns in New York State that are named after Greco-Roman, classical cities. There’s a Rome, there’s a Syracuse, and there’s Ithaca. I’m sure that a lot of people who live in this area have no fucking clue that there’s a connection to something beyond, and it’s a sign of how bad American education is. Despite this, we also have a huge Ivy League university.

DM Recently, I was intrigued by a story about a scientist from Cornell University, the Ivy League university you just mentioned. His name was G. S. Moler, and apparently, he did one of the earliest movie experiments to date, featuring a moving skeleton. This immediately reminded me of the presence of skeletons, and skeleton-like shapes within your work. But I should add that my curiosity about Ithaca was also fostered by an incredibly fascinating early painting series you did, titled Ithaca Suicide Drawings (2004).

BV When I was growing up there were a lot of people committing suicide in this town. So those drawings represent suicide spots that are really fundamental features of the landscape here, like the holes in the ground and ravines, that became sites for recurring suicides. There is an inescapably aesthetic component to sites that become associated with suicide, you know?

DM There is a profound connection between the aesthetic dimension of a place and suicide. And this, let’s say, aesthetic of suicide, can equally characterize natural and urban landscapes.

BV Well, this is an oddball piece of trivia but, apparently, the railings on the side of the Golden Gate Bridge are lower than you would find in any other bridge because the engineer who designed it was a little bit shorter than average. He scaled parts of the Golden Gate Bridge to his height, which allows it to be a little bit more accessible for somebody who wants to commit suicide.

DM So coming back to Ithaca and to your formation years. I found out that your grandmother was an illustrator, so I wonder if her work has somehow influenced your imagination and sensibility while growing up.

BV She was extraordinary. I only had the opportunity to meet her a couple of times but for sure her influence was seminal. She raised my mom as a single mother living in North Carolina. She worked as an illustrator and she made it a functional occupation at a time and in a place where it wasn’t a really practical thing. She was one of the first sort of King Features Syndicate-published cartoon artists who are in all the Sunday papers in the US and she also illustrated books like Wizard of Oz and things like that. But she also, with my grandfather, wrote a couple of children’s books for my mom that they never published. These illustrations really are the sweetest thing possible and they stem from a tragic history that I don’t have access to—these are the only records of that—but they are just utterly sweet and lovely. So, yeah, that’s pretty significant.

DM This reminds me of something pretty recurring in your practice—the idea of recasting, especially through charming and attractive plastic qualities, something that actually has to do with the realm of the horrific, or the evil. And since the very beginning, this modus operandi has been considered a very precise iconography that owns a lot of specific music subcultures.

BV While growing up, my friends and I were in bands and were heavily tattooed at a time when it was not a normal thing, so the subcultures I was associated with at that time— American hardcore, punk rock, metal, and much more—still inform the image selection I use. You were mentioning an oddball figure from Cornell University who had this history of doing animations. There was another academic, Harold Craft, who published this little sort of sine wave in his PhD thesis in 1970. This image was then used by Peter Saville for the cover of the Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. So the intent behind using that particular iconography is from that kind of background, that kind of personal history, that relationship to both subcultures and seemingly marginal activities. As a 51-year-old man, it still informs everything I do and the way I look at the world.

DM This perpetual lingering of your personal background within your work draws me to a recent conversation you had with curator Neville Wakefield. In it, you mentioned that there was a particular moment, between the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium, where there was a certain fixation within the art scene with the notions of purity versus the one of impurity.

BV So for me, a more accurate way of describing a pure vs. impure kind of relationship to something would be sincere vs. insincere. After the Pictures Generation and the 80s criticality with their ironic relationship to mass culture, many artists started ironically referencing popular culture, pulling it into a different context, with this kind of critical distance. For me, there’s something very off-putting and alienating about that. So formatively, on one hand, you have Richard Prince and his use of American outlaw biker culture imagery, and, on the other hand, you have Stephen Parrino’s use of American outlaw biker imagery, which is informed by a sincere, loving relationship to that. It’s a hugely important distinction. And as well, I had a sincere relationship to the history that I reference. I was interested in appropriating my own history and pulling it into a different context sincerely, without treating it ironically, without that critical distance. I still am very interested in sincerity.

DM And sincerity, I suppose, can be expressed in many ways, I’m thinking for instance to your most ambitious, labor-intensive installations, like the church’s skeleton you presented at the Whitney Biennial in 2004—you always have fabricated everything on your own and this studio practice is a crucial component to understand your poetic. There is something inherently ritual within this approach because, in a certain perspective, which is opposite to the one of pop art, of the picture generation, and of appropriation art that you just mentioned, you are setting zero distance between you and your work, so a viewer can really feel that there is this sense of devotion, almost a sodality between you and your own work.

BV You know, when you’re talking about minimalism or pop art, or any dominant post-war contemporary art-making strains, they all revolve around a couple of polls like seriality, repetition, and mechanical production. The church specifically, has a lot to do with that. What happens if you take a form and you repeat it again and again and again? It collapses. So that was in a literal sense like taking the conventional skeleton of post-war art making—in a broad sense—and just allowing it to do exactly that. Repeat itself again and again. But it was more than an art conversation, it also had a resonance to real-world things like the human devotional relationship to music and culture, and how it can blur the line between something that is a fact and a fiction, to the point where, by repeating a gesture, humans can enact something potentially horrific, and they can dissolve and disappear within this kind of fiction.

DM These perpetual rebounds between cultural production and murders or suicide were also treated very in-depth through a few collective art shows at the beginning of the 2000s. I’m thinking in particular of an exhibition you curated in 2001 titled “Dear Dead Person,” whose title referenced a book by Benjamin Weissman. The whole show seemed to provide an archetypical reading, or psychogeography of American violent crimes, from teen sex addicts to religious fanatics, to create the portrayal of a collective, national psychosis. I think my generation could relate so much to an exhibition like this because we are also quite deeply interested in such themes: We watch Netflix series about Jeffrey Dahmer in bed to go to sleep and listen to Sword and Scale in the morning while we do our skincare routine. I guess my question would then be—if violent crimes can act as a mirror of the generations that commit them, which are the ones that you think better define your own?

BV I remember there was this huge hysteria and paranoia about heavy metal music, punk rock, gangsta rap, or whatever. There were Senate hearings about “how this was going to destroy our children.” This happened for the preceding generation as well. Every generation experiences this, because the culture that they produce is antagonistic by necessity. So when I was growing up, there were members of heavy metal band who dragged a female classmate into a eucalyptus grove in Arroyo Grande and they stabbed her to death, or this kid who committed suicide, theoretically, because of Judas Priest subliminal suicide messages, that’s a famous example.. Clearly heavy metal seemed like the bane of your children.. It’s a tale as old as time. In the 19th fucking century Goethe wrote an epistolary novel called “The Sorrows of Young Werther” which was held up as responsible for creating a series of copycat suicides, because people found it such an influential text that I think it was eventually banned. So just the same way, when I was a kid, if you listened to Judas Priest you were going to commit suicide and in the 19th century you would have committed suicide if you read Goethe. There’s always that kind of threat implied by one generation’s cultural output.

DM And speaking about the opposite movement, namely when there’s something so shocking and disturbing about certain crimes that they enter the cultural realm and gain cult status, it was always in that year that artists’ work started encapsulating a certain morbid or violent imagery and language, for example with the artist using pictures and details of crime scenes, reporting sentences from murder news, or even adopting a drawing style that evoked the ones of the vignettes used to chronicle trials or to identify serial killers. One of the artists you included in “Dear Dead Person” is called Marlene McCarty, I’m not sure whether she’s still active today or not however, she did an amazing drawing series with a strong forensic inspiration, depicting very attractive young girls with huge wounds on their bodies. The drawings were accompanied by a cold, objective description of how they were murdered.

BV She’s still around, as far as I know. But the fact that we’re not talking a lot about Marlene McCarty today is a crime in proof that the art world is a fucking terrible place because she did an amazing rock-solid corpus of work. It is way ahead of its time. I’m happy that you looked into her work and you liked it because she’s amazing.

DM Likewise. And you know, it is always worthy researching into this milieu of very underground group shows happening across the 90s and the 2000s in the US, because it allows younger generations to discover so many, almost forgotten, incredible artists, that in those years were exhibiting next to the more successful ones that later became highly recognized—names in the art world are written in pencil. However, the other two very peculiar shows you took part in that I wanted to ask you about are Transnational Monster League (2001) and another one curated by Bob Nickas that was dedicated to the Melvins and their cult fandom among artists.

BV “Transnational Monster League” was cast around two centerpieces, two artworks I really wanted to show together. One was a Stephen Parrino painting that was just fucking mind-boggling, incredibly beautiful. And another one was a video by an artist, operating at that time under the name Matthew Greene, where he dressed up as a witch in a Los Angeles garage. He had crappy makeup on that was falling off, and was playing a guitar just slowly over and over and over. It was an amazing video.

DM And Stephen Parrino was featured too in the other show I mentioned about the Melvins. This show captured my attention for the same reason why I was curious about those art practices borrowing from murderous or deadly languages and aesthetics. It is something that your generation has kind of initiated and mine has continued. I’m referring to the idea of creating fine art pieces that employ the very visual codes and poetics of fan art, a peculiar aesthetic realm that nuances a sense of romantic sublime, a religious devotion, and the cheesiest consumer culture. And this artist-fan attitude is, like you said before, a warmer approach radically opposed to more detached, critical attitudes towards pop or celebrity culture. A fan is forever. And so this Melvins show was really about artists-fans of the band paying homage to its iconic visual legacy, picking fav albums, and producing a lot of graphic art. Your generation was also pioneering this kind of interest in graphic design as a fine art medium to express higher conceptual values. A narration that in those same years was becoming central for the development of the history of streetwear: Legendary, at times controversial brands like Fuct sedimented precisely in that period.

BV It’s funny that you mentioned Erik Brunetti as I just did a radio session thing for Fuct. Anyway, absolutely. We mentioned Steven Parrino, Marlene McCarty, my musical influences and heroes..the way I relate with these artists and their work is less close to that of a “proper” art viewer than it is to how a fan relates to who he admires. I understand art in that way—it is part of the music I listen to, of what I wear in the morning, and of what’s on my body and all that kind of stuff. Going back to something I was trying to articulate a little bit earlier, I think this is exactly that sort of difference between the sincere and the insincere. You can tell when somebody doesn’t have a relationship to the culture that they’re referencing when they’re doing it just as an ironic kind of quotation of something that doesn’t have anything to do with their life. I think that there’s a hugely important distinction between an ironic quotation and a sincere reflection on something, which is, as you said, something very religious. You know, one of the reasons why all the things I reference have kind of a true crime dimension is because pretty much every religion revolves around martyrdoms to a certain point. You know what I mean? The true crime resonance within my work is because there’s an almost inevitable level of devotion within it, a kind of martyrdom.

DM Yes! And you also extended this analysis to movies and cinema in certain cases. A very cool case study is this pretty crazy show called “Screams” 2004 where you participated. Every artist was picking a movie to base their work on. And then all the artists and their works were assigned to a writer. The title you chose was Martin (1977), a horror movie about this 70s narco-vampire creature.

BV Martin is a George Romero movie, one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s about this kid in Pittsburgh. For the entire movie, you cannot tell whether he’s really a vampire or he’s just a sick kid who totally believes he’s a vampire, just because everybody else kind of believes he’s a vampire. The whole thing’s super weird, it revolves around a central question: what happens if you lose yourself in fictions and narratives you have built yourself? And it’s both a great and a fucking clumsy and bad movie because a lot of the footage was lost for it. But when you watch it, you’re aware throughout that if somebody found the missing five minutes, this would be the greatest movie ever made, super good.

DM Even in Romero’s most legendary movie, The Night of the Living Dead (1968) the horror genre becomes a container for a crazy fine, exquisitely allegoric cultural critique. Because there was this idea of the zombie’s figure being used to address the human condition under capitalism. Some scenes were even set in a mall in Pennsylvania. And so there is this kind of never-ending circle where real horrors inspire songs, movies, and novels, which in turn are mimicked to the point that they inspire real crimes because people lose themself in the fiction.

BV And also, you know, there’s something really interesting that brings me back to your very first question. George Romero is from Pittsburgh, and both of those movies are set in Pittsburgh. He uses the backdrop of his personal history for his work, especially for “Night of the Living Dead.” You know this is a movie that was played in cheap theaters. It was a schlocky horror film, and, at the same time, it’s one of the only movies from that era that talked about how fucked up American domestic politics was. You know the actor who played Ben, the black character, who’s the central figure in the movie and ends up dying in the end. And so wow, this movie was really actually talking about civil rights and how fucked up America actually is on a fundamental level, and he was employing a vehicle that allows that conversation to reach not just a rarefied audience, but a bunch of kids you know, stumbling in for, like a midnight matinee to get scared and accidentally receive an incredibly progressive political message.

DM There is something sublime within this subliminal level of communicating.

BV There’s something kind of fascinating about the correspondence between sublime and subliminal. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the music and culture that I was involved with as a teenager, was looked at as a threat, like it had subliminal messaging. All these things were coded to communicate something vile, evil, and anti-statist, which is interesting, and sublime by itself. It is similar to the Burkean concept of terror because the sublime is awe and majesty, it is terrifying. You know, romanticism seems like such a benign term when you use it, except when you start thinking that Caspar David Friedrich was talking about this sort of spiritual connection with his landscape and, oh shit. That’s pretty close to blood and soil ideology ideas where, like, there is an ugliness to get skipped over somehow in our conversation about these things, I’m interested in the conversation with the ugliness included. I’m not interested in a casual subcultural or aesthetic definition for a moment in time but in the fully expansive notion of romantic or sublime. I’m absolutely interested in that.

Credits

Talent · Banks Violette
Photography · Jeton Bakalli
Styling · Jungle Lin

Full Look CELINE
Shirt ZEGNA, Trousers ACNE STUDIOS
Full Look CELINE

Romeo Castellucci

Posted on 14 de March de 202517 de March de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Romeo Castellucci
Words · Annalise Kamegawa

A Fight Against Reality Itself

In conversation with NR, director and stage designer Romeo Castellucci speaks about one of his first performances, Cenno. A mysterious work staged only once in a flat in Rome in the early ’80s, it has since been difficult to trace in any concrete way. When asked about it, Castellucci remarks, “In Italian, the word cenno means a little gesture—it’s the minimal gesture. And probably, Cenno was literally a minimal gesture.”

This early experiment foreshadowed a career of theatrical productions that are less about performance in the traditional sense. Instead of a reenactment of narrative he offers something closer to a whisper, a procession of movements, or a thread of energy extracted from some of the most iconic operas and didactic tales.

Some, like The Rite of Spring, are so complex that they challenge visual perception. Others, like Ma and La Passione, are more restrained, presenting not not much more than bodies on a stage. Yet what unites all these works is a distillation of reality itself. In capturing the narrative within form, Castellucci creates what he calls “a space in which the image calls the name of each spectator.” In this way, theatre for him is neither literature nor mere performance—it is a battlefield of aesthetics, a confrontation with reality itself.

What led you to study painting in Bologna? What were some values or ideas you formed during this period of study, and how did this go on to influence your later career in theater?

At the time, Bologna was the intellectual center of Italy—the most avant-garde city in terms of art and philosophy. It was a city on fire, as it was the most politically engaged, involving itself in these extreme fights. I was barely 18 years old when I arrived there.

Art history became my spinal structure, my intellectual foundation. The Renaissance and the study of Italian art history were disciplines that carried a kind of radicality. Instead of turning to political activism, I engaged in an artistic fight—a fight against reality itself. At every level, the experience of art is a battle and a combat with the very principles of reality. Studying the history of art, painting, and sculpture was the main food of my soul.

I never studied theater, but within the Accademia di Belle Arti, I began to develop an idea of theater from my engagement with performance art. There is a difference between theater and the performing arts. The first is the conception of time and space. Theater embraced an idea of fiction and falsehood—the fake as a discipline. In the end, I found theater much stronger than the performing arts. It’s a much more radical conception of life for me.

Then I started to study Greek tragedy. It was a kind of matrix, a philosophy, for me. Greek tragedy is not only an aesthetic—it’s not just archaeological stuff—it is really living in my flesh and in our society.

Your work pulls from some of the world’s most foundational myths and tragedies. On that note, how did you build your literary foundation?

My study was independent. I was alone at school, and it was very personal. But then I was lucky to meet an instructor, Giorgio Cortenova, who taught the history of contemporary art. that orientate my thinking on the language of the “form”. But for the rest, I was completely alone at school, without friends or companions. However, outside of school, I had a small group of friends, and together we created our first theatrical experience. Previously, I had worked on many installations—paintings, sculptures, and performances. But somehow, without any deliberate decision or choice, theater became my primary activity.

I never chose theater—it happened by chance. In fact, I originally studied visual arts. Despite this, I still feel that, in a way, I am working in visual art.

Theater, for me, can sometimes be a very boring job. As a spectator, when I was young, it was always terrible and so strange. I’m in the middle of it now, in the blind spot, so I cannot judge my work. But very often, theater is just boring. That’s not a snobbish statement—I’m just being honest, as a spectator.

I’m curious, then, where you found the potential in theater if your experiences were always met with boredom?

Not always, but frequently, I was met with boredom. Because normally, theater—both then and even now—is seen as a second branch of literature, a way to illustrate it. But theater has nothing to do with literature. Theater is the art of the flesh.

During my studies, I came across Antonin Artaud. He was a French philosopher and radical thinker. He wrote and worked in the first half of the 20th century and died in 1948. That encounter changed my life.

And music changed my life as well. When I was an adolescent, I heard The Rite of Spring performed live. It was a shock—something really violent. At that age, we need violence, and I found that violence in a form. That, for me, was a revelation.

I discovered that aesthetics could be a battlefield. You can fight through aesthetics, and that was far more interesting than the so-called political fight.

How did your first performance, Cenno (1980), come to be? I had quite a hard time finding any information about it, but I think that’s the nature of it.

It’s very mysterious because it was done one time, in one flat, for one spectator. And then it stopped.

Nevertheless, it’s the foundation of my work. This spectator was—he’s now passed—the Italian critic Giuseppe Bartolucci. Afterwards, he became our friend. It was so important to do Cenno only for him, that one time, in that flat in Rome.

It was very important because the work was terrible, but the discussion was very rich. I remember the discussion better than the show.

Could you share a bit about what the performance was about and the discussion afterward?

I have almost forgotten. It was some mysterious images with strange characters, almost without words. I don’t remember. It’s a bit confusing, even in my mind. In fact, it was something between performance and theater, but it’s difficult to try to describe to you what it was.

I can say something else about Cenno: in Italian, the word cenno means a little gesture—it’s the minimal gesture. And probably, Cenno was literally a minimal gesture.

The performance was done with the founding members of the theater company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. In the text The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (2007), regarding the development of Tragedia Endogonidia, I felt such a cohesion of voice in the company. What were those early years with the company like?

We shared different aspects of the language of theater. Claudia [Castellucci] was engaged in the writing of texts, so at that time, she was basically a dramaturge. Chiara [Guidi] was more focused on how to pronounce the word. I did all the rest—the set, direction, and so on.

I have to mention Scott Gibbons, my musical collaborator. I still work with him, and it’s a strong relationship. He’s very similar to me, like a brother. When we work together, we don’t need to speak or explain things.

You had been practicing from the 1980s until the early 2000s with Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Where did the energy come from?

This is a fair question because, without fire, you cannot create work. I refuse the idea of profession—when you are a professional, you can do the “right” thing, but that is not art. It’s decoration.

I try to surprise myself all the time. I believe deeply in the principle of contradiction. I want to work against myself. Every time I create something, it is both the first time and the last time. Therefore, it has to be a surprise. The stage is the most bizarre and strange place in the world. If you are not able to feel the strangeness of this place… it’s strange.

For me, you have to reinvent everything every time—not only concerning issues like material, topic, gesture, and aesthetics, but even the necessity itself. You have to ask yourself, What is the urgency? What is the necessity? What is the danger? I have to feel a danger because it’s a dangerous place. This is just my opinion, but if you are confident in your way of doing things, it doesn’t work.

[Regarding Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio,] we now work separately. Just after Tragedia Endogonidia, we split our beds. We still share the space “Teatro Comandini” in Cesena, but everyone has pursued their own personal work.

Moving into your more recent work, La Passione (2016): it seems like the performers, apart from the musicians, are not exactly actors. Who are they? Technicians?

There are no actors at all. They are technicians and real people who come from the city.

La Passione, which is Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, is a portrait of a city. It was first in Hamburg, then in Lisbon, and now it will be in Florence. The people on stage are real people—citizens of the city—each bringing their own experience.

In a way, it was not created to portray the passion of Saint Matthew or the gospel itself. Instead, it was the gospel as seen through a real person. The passion belonged to a real person, creating a kind of mirrored effect. So La Passione is not just the passion of Christ—it is also a reflection of the passion that exists in everybody in real life. The fact of having a body is a passion. That’s the main idea.

Your works do not simply remake a text but rather use it as a framework for theatrical exploration. What’s fascinating is how this approach allows for a transformation beyond strict interpretation.

When I’m facing a production—maybe something from tradition, La Passione, Hamlet, or so on—I don’t ask myself, “What does Hamlet mean for us?” Instead, I take the reverse perspective: “What do I mean for Hamlet?” Meaning myself, my place as a person, and my place as a spectator.

When I work, I always take the place of the spectator because a director is a spectator too. It changes the perspective—you are surprised every time. You don’t know what is going to happen.

But the most important thing is a question—a question that the spectator can interpret however they want. It’s just as important not to provide answers.

The question of the audience is always very important because it presents a reversed perspective of theater. What I do on stage is not an object or illustration; it is an experience that completely belongs to the spectator.

It’s such a vulnerable position to be in as well, to know that your work is going to be held by all of these people.

Because I want the spectator—the audience—to have to finish my work. There is space for any kind of interpretation, even spaces that engage the imagination of the spectator. My work on stage is never complete. I always leave open doors. There is also a lack of narration and logic—a kind of hole in the representation.

There is a space in which the image call the name of each spectator.

What do you say to audiences who come to you later asking for answers?

I ask the spectator what they think. To tell you the truth, that is more important. Of course, I have a dramaturgy—I have ideas, a concept, a vision of the form, and so on. But it’s much more interesting to ask a spectator what it means for them. There are many, many different interpretations, even completely opposite ones.

That is good news. You can feel whatever you want because your body is diving into an experience. It’s a good reflection of society when there isn’t a singularity of thought.

Sometimes it’s not easy because the spectator to have to make a decision. The spectator then takes on a kind of responsibility when viewing. There has to be a choice, a strong one.

Now, in a way, we are spectators 24 hours a day. Without any choice, without any question, we just eat pictures. But at the theater or in an art gallery, you have to make a choice. That makes the difference.

With such a long career, I’m sure you’ve been presented with many new technologies. In the Die Zauberflöte (2018) grotto, the set was created with parametric design and CNC. This display is particularly breathtaking in scale and detail. What are your considerations when presented with a new technology?

I use every kind of technique, every kind of technology that exists. I am not superstitious about technology—I just use what I need in the moment. Very often, technology can turn out to be a kind of trivial gadget or something simply demonstrative.

I worked with the architect Michael Hansmeyer. We had a very good exchange while working on the Grotto. It was large-scale. It wasn’t just an aesthetic choice—everything was based on symmetry, like a mirror (symmetry is a key theme for Mozart).

I did The Rite of Spring with 48 sophisticated programmed machines that performed a dance with bones dust in the air: it was bone ash from cows is used in agriculture as a fertilizer. Instead of dancers, I created a precise choreography with machines suspended from the ceiling. They were able to spread dust into the air. They created something like spirals, jets, explosions, falls, forming shapes and dancing to Stravinsky’s music.

That performance involved only machines. There were no people on stage. It was very complicated—we spent a month and a half just programming it to be in sync. That project was the biggest technological push I’ve made. But when I work with machines I deal with the ghosts they represent.

There is a very different emotional impact when you see machines versus a human body.

A machine is frightening because it does one thing with absolute precision—it has a function. There is no space for humanity and no space for doubt. And that is what makes it so unsettling.

The opposite of that is the presence of an animal. I often work with animals—not to command them to do something precise, but because they enter the stage as animals. They are pure beings. They represent chaos. It’s another kind of inhumanity, the opposite of a machine.

An actor is, at the same time, both an animal and a machine.

Your performance Μa (2023) unfolds within the Eleusis archaeological site, a space imbued with the weight of the Eleusinian Mysteries. We discussed earlier how mythology can serve as a framework for building another narrative. In that vein, how do you approach and manage a site so charged with history, mythology, and cultural memory?

It sometimes happens that I get to work in very special places. For example, here at the archaeological site in Eleusis, where the cults of the Mother took place. I’ve also done work in Geneva’s Saint-Pierre Cathedral or the Palais des Papes in Avignon, among many others. In every special place, we must consider the place itself as a character, not just a venue.

You have to work with the phantoms that are present. It’s better to engage with the memory of the space—to become close to it and work with it. Otherwise, you are dead, because the place is much stronger than you. So, we have to deal with their memory, as characters endowed with spirit.

The venues can speak and listen. In the end, the main creative choices will come from the spaces themselves. You just have to listen carefully to the ghosts of the space.

A bit of a silly question, but do you have any interaction with pop culture?

Sure. From a certain point of view, it’s inevitable. We exist in this world. I am not a hermit—I go to the supermarket, I use the internet, I listen to the radio, and I like some of it.

I have no prejudice. If something is good, it’s good. I like Schubert, but I also enjoy pop songs when they have a strange form that can catch my attention.

In order of appearance

Romeo Castellucci, Cain, overo Il Primo Omicidio. Composer: Alessandro Scarlatti. Premiere: 2019. Photography: Luca Del Pia.
Romeo Castellucci, Hey Girl!. Premiere: 2006. Festival: Festival d’Avignon 2007. Photography: Steirischerherbst/Manninger.
Romeo Castellucci, Hey Girl!. Premiere: 2006. Festival: Festival d’Avignon 2007. Photography: Steirischerherbst/Manninger.
Romeo Castellucci, Genesi. From the Museum of Sleep. Premiere: 1999. Photography: Luca Del Pia.
Romeo Castellucci, Genesi. From the Museum of Sleep. Premiere: 1999. Photography: Luca Del Pia.
Romeo Castellucci, Salzburger Festspiele 2024 / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni. Premiere: July 28, 2024. Photography: Monika Rittershaus.
Romeo Castellucci, Mystery 11. Eleusis 2023. Photography: John Kouskoutis.
Romeo Castellucci, Mystery 11. Eleusis 2023. Photography: John Kouskoutis.
Romeo Castellucci, Don Giovanni. Photography: Monika Rittershaus.
Romeo Castellucci, Parsifal. Opera House: De Munt / La Monnaie. Premiere: 2011. Photography: Bernd Uhlig.
Romeo Castellucci, Parsifal. Opera House: De Munt / La Monnaie. Premiere: 2011. Photography: Bernd Uhlig.
Romeo Castellucci, Die Zauberflöte. Opera House: De Munt / La Monnaie. Premiere: September 18, 2018. Photography: Bernd Uhlig.

Corbin Shaw

Posted on 9 de November de 202410 de November de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Corbin Shaw
Words · Andrea Bratta

Eurotrash

A national identity? in this economy? On the eve of his first large scale exhibition at Spazio Maiocchi in collaboration with Slam Jam, NR spoke with British artist Corbin Shaw (b. 1998) of new and old monuments, and taking, conceptually, the piss, diving deep in the global-local dichotomy and the meaning of nostalgia and complexity in the economy of a gen Z artist seeking sustainable form of expression. A conversation on Shaw’s practice framed through his new body of work developed exclusively for Eurotrash, an exploration of identity and contemporary stigmas, with the occasional detour on Mod’s “live clean in difficult circumstances” motto and a touch of Baudrillard mixed with Simon Reynolds subcultural commentary —best served cold at an airport.

You mentioned that you’ve never worked in a place quite like this. How does it feel?

It’s surreal, honestly. I’ve never really been in a position like this before, where I feel trusted to take on something so significant. But yeah, I’m excited about it. It’s this strange experience to go from just sitting, sketching ideas, to suddenly seeing them materialize. To see my name on the window outside—it feels almost unbelievable when I think back to just four years at university, working alone as an artist. Things have evolved so quickly, from working in my bedroom, to having a studio, to shows, and now to something this large. It’s kind of a dream.

Is this your first exhibition of this size?

Yes, it is.The groundwork for this show started with another project back in April, which marked a big step in my practice. People from London started noticing it and sharing it. But yes, this is the largest thing I’ve done. It’s crazy. One minute you are a student at university, the next one you’re here. I’m really curious about how an Italian audience would react to my work. In Britain, there’s a certain cultural understanding, a legacy, around the themes I explore, but I wonder how that translates here. I’m also constantly trying to explore my identity as British, yet not cling to it too nostalgically. The works reflect modern Britain, not an idealized past, so I’m interested to hear how Italian viewers might respond to this contemporary vision. Growing up, I was surrounded by the clash between old and new. It’s like this constant layering of history. In London, for example, you see these guys on bikes, fully armored up, like modern-day knights riding electric-powered bikes instead of horses. It’s this strange mix of the past and the present, like jousting in the streets, but with a tech twist. Living in a city like London, it feels like you’re always immersed in it. You walk down a street and see a plaque that says, “This person lived here” or “Karl Marx wrote here,” and you’re reminded of the history all around you. It’s mental, really. You’re not just walking through space, you’re walking through time, learning about it, experiencing it, and being a part of it all. There’s this sense of living within layers of history. I’m fascinated by that.

How do these themes of history and identity find their way into your work?

When I moved to London, a lot of my work was focused on my hometown and the city I grew up in. I lived in a way that made it feel like my life had ended—everything was about the past, about my childhood. I was mourning that phase a bit, while also trying to move on. I was growing into adulthood and starting to consider myself a distinct person in the world, trying to figure out my place as an artist. But eventually, I realized I wasn’t paying attention to what was around me, to the contemporary culture. When I left university, I was really eager to learn more. At school, I was always more academic. I knew I was creative, but I never felt great in the academic setting. When I studied in London, I often felt like I was falling behind. So, when I graduated, I was determined to learn about the deeper things that fascinated me. I was drawn to places in London—whether they were galleries, museums, or institutions—that had a rich cultural history. Being in a city that has so many cultural sources, shaped by its colonial past, was a privilege. It’s similar to when I was in Athens and visited the Parthenon. That experience was huge for me. Of course, half of it is in the British Museum, and I was just so fascinated by that.

So, you’ve shifted from nostalgia to something more current, right?

Yes, absolutely. I grew up in a post-industrial suburb, a place surrounded by new developments and shopping centers, where my comfort was in these plastic, suburban spaces. Now, whenever I go back, I notice even more the rapid transformation—everything seems modeled after American culture. But I’m drawn to these “modern monuments,” and I’m trying to express that they are as valuable to me as a historic landmark might be. For example, the urinal in the square references Trafalgar Square fountain, but also the one outside Buckingham Palace and the one at Fauci Square. Each of these has become a space where, every time a football match is on, the fans gather. In football, especially, the celebration gets a bit wild—men often celebrate the game by being naked in the fountain. There’s something about that, almost biblical in a way, that makes me think about how people overlook the significance of these rituals in modern contexts. It’s like history repeating itself over and over again, in a different form. I’ve become increasingly interested in architecture, particularly in the last year or two, and how the materials used in buildings influence our perception of them. What does concrete say in comparison to limestone? What’s the history of limestone? How does the color of concrete, or something like plastic, influence our understanding of a place? In the UK, a lot of new buildings, even in the city, are made to look old. It’s as if there’s a desire to preserve history, but in a way that feels almost like a post-postmodern approach. We’ve had modernism, then postmodernism, and now this hybrid where every detail is meticulously recreated. I think in Britain, there’s a struggle with identity, especially with the impact of globalization and capitalism.

It’s funny you mention that, because one of the things I jotted down in my notes was exactly this apparent clash between the rampaging globalization happening right now and the closing of borders, which is especially evident on the political level—like with Brexit and, just a couple of days ago, Trump being reelected. It’s a bit unsettling, to say the least. But then, on the cultural and arts level, we see this amazing (though not always in a positive sense) amalgamation of everything. It’s as if everything is starting to feel the same. You can see it and feel it in cities, in the way things are constructed, but also in food, in people’s behavior, and in how they react to art. I think this ties into what you mentioned earlier about being curious to see how people will react and interact with your work here. What do you think about this? Do you consciously think about it when you’re working, or is it something that’s so ingrained in people of our age and generation that we just absorb this contradiction and live with it?

I think, for me, I realized that nostalgia had crept into my work so much that it started to feel like I was looking backward, not appreciating what was around me. I grew up in a suburban area in Sheffield, in the north of England, in a post-industrial village where much of the industry had been lost. I lived on a new-build estate, and my comfort was found in shopping centers, retail parks—new spaces that, in a way, reflected America. Every time I go home now, I notice how rapidly it’s all changing. Everyone drives around with huge Stanley Cups, buys doughnuts, grabs coffee, and goes to the movies—it’s surreal. But is that a bad thing? Can you actually love these things? I think you can, and that’s what I’m trying to explore with my work. I’m trying to find a balance, a kind of level ground, where something like a McDonald’s toy holds as much emotional significance for me as a historic monument or flag. I feel emotionally attached to it, so why not value it as a cultural object? In England, the class system is so deeply embedded that what’s considered valuable or not is tied to hierarchy. It’s a classic thing that runs through everything. But there’s something sad about it in Britain—especially in fashion—where working-class culture gets fetishized. It’s appropriated by middle- and upper-class people, and then, all of a sudden, it’s seen as valuable when before, it wasn’t.I’m really interested in that tension between the high and the low. Words like “kitsch” are so loaded.. It’s aggressive, almost. I try to work around this question: What does it mean to take objects that are deemed “unimportant” or “alien” and reframe them as valuable in a gallery setting? For example, in my work, I’ve taken an inflatable plastic sword, something that would usually deflate or fade, and I’ve cast it in stone. I like the idea of freezing time—preserving something that would typically be temporary, turning it into something that lasts, just like plastic itself does.

That’s fascinating—taking something “disposable” and making it timeless. It makes me think of monuments. Historically, they were grand symbols of a culture’s values, but today’s equivalents are different, like you said. They might be something as mundane as an iPhone or a McDonald’s toy.

Yes, exactly. It’s about finding meaning in the “everyday monuments” of my time, which might be shop signs or commercial objects. I love Baudrillard’s idea that everything in our society has become a simulation—meaning is fluid, almost arbitrary, yet we find ourselves living in this “nightmare” where we can’t help but participate.

This reminds me of a larger conversation about culture in an era of globalization. Everything is blending, borders are dissolving, yet there’s a resurgence of nationalism. Do you find this paradox influencing your work?

Absolutely, it’s like we’re witnessing the collapse of any singular cultural identity. I think that’s what I’m questioning: What is British culture now? Is it the historic landmarks, or is it the commercial plasticity of modern life? As artists, we’re kind of forced to reckon with this fragmentation. It’s exhausting because things change so quickly, yet there’s a deep sense of nostalgia for what’s been lost, even if we didn’t live through it

This is a discussion I’ve been having with a lot of the people I work with. I think this is the most contemporary predicament we’re facing right now. Is a predominant culture even possible anymore? And if so, what would that mean today? In a way, this relates to the fact that there are no longer clear borders, but politically, the new right is trying to reintroduce them. I think it comes from a shared fear—the fear of dispersion, of complete fragmentation—and we all internalize it and express it differently. You as an artist might channel it in your work, while I try to write about it. But at its core, it’s the same fear: the fear of not being able to keep up, or even worse, not knowing what we’re trying to keep up with.

I think it’s strange. I feel like capitalism has hijacked creativity in a way that distorts what I believe creativity was originally meant to do. For me, art and artistry were about connecting with others—expressing myself through writing or physical objects is just a way of trying to relate to someone, or to describe a feeling, a setting, or anything happening in our lives. But now, everything is moving at such a fast pace that so much gets lost. We don’t spend enough time with what’s being presented to us. You could even say that about this exhibition—it’s only up for a few days, maybe four or five. In my head, it seems crazy. I can’t believe how much time and effort go into something so grand that ends so quickly. We live in an era of the “moment.” Everyone wants to be at the event when it’s happening, to get that photo and say, “I was there.” And it’s exhausting. Honestly, it makes me want to lock myself away in a house by the seaside, be completely alone, because I think that’s important for an artist. But at the same time, I want to be immersed in the culture, react to it, experience it all. It’s such a tough balance. You can’t do everything, right? It’s hard. I think this is the experience we’re all living now, especially as creatives trying to make work—it’s incredibly complicated. I don’t think anyone before us could have really understood it.

The levels of complexity are definitely different now. It’s also about the continuous pace of change and the sheer amount of information we now have access to.

I don’t work in one specific way, and I actually find it almost backwards when I think about artists who limit themselves to one medium. I don’t know if that sounds like a bad thing, but I can’t see myself creating work in just one form. We have access to so many tools and opportunities—why couldn’t I be a weaver, an embroiderer, a sculptor, a video artist, a performer, all of it? I think a lot of young creatives in London feel the need to work in just one way because they believe that’s how they’ll sell. But I don’t feel that pressure. I love being an artist because I approach my work as a question or an exploration, and I’m always trying to find the right medium to best fit the concept or the idea.

The word “brief” itself says a lot about how we’ve become accustomed to balancing the art world with the commercial side. I think the most effective way to work within this framework is to make those two coexist. With younger artists, like those of our generation, there’s a growing awareness of how capitalism, or whatever system is in place, has infiltrated art—something that was once meant to be its antithesis. More and more, artists are internalizing that contradiction and starting to work with it, exploring how to express themselves within that tension.

At the end of the day, people need to make money to pay bills, rent, all of that. But I think the bigger issue is that it’s stifling creativity. So many interesting ideas are out there, but they’re just not being funded. Big companies, or filmmakers and funding bodies, would rather back the same formulas over and over again. They’d rather fund another blockbuster movie than take a risk on something new and experimental. There’s this fear, and I think fear is what’s strangling a lot of creativity right now.

Do you think new pockets of resistance are emerging in response to this?

Absolutely, there are always new pockets of resistance. I don’t think that creativity is dead or that interesting things aren’t happening—I know people who are doing amazing work. But I do feel like there’s a big difference between now and, say, the 90s. Back then, people just went for it. We did what we wanted, how we wanted, without worrying about how long we could keep it up. It was more spontaneous. Now, when I talk to people from that time, it feels like it’s not like that anymore. Everything has become more commercialized, and the spirit of creative freedom feels restricted.

Do you ever get frustrated by that?

Sometimes, yeah. I know it sounds a bit like a tantrum, but I think it’s justified. I just wish past generations understood that things aren’t the same anymore. I know they faced their own challenges, but it’s different now. It’s harder, really hard. But at the same time, great things are still happening. People are resilient, and there’s still faith in the creative process. I just wish more opportunities were available to more people.

It’s a big issue—sustainability in culture and expression. How do you see that changing? What do you think about new models for supporting culture and creativity?

Yeah, that’s a huge topic. It’s not just about environmental sustainability but also about creating a sustainable model for culture and artistic expression. We need new ways of supporting the creative community, and I think institutions need to start thinking outside the traditional structures. There are places like Sponsor Mayock, which operate at these intersections between art, commerce, and culture. They take money from one pocket and use it to support new platforms and give people a space to be heard. That’s what more people should be doing—providing space, providing opportunities.

Speaking of space, I’m really intrigued by the sound section of your show. Could you tell me more about that?

Sure! James Massiah is a poet, rapper, and musician. I first came across his work through the Baby Father album, which captured such a specific, vivid snapshot of life in London at that time. After hearing that, I dug deeper into his spoken word, and I ended up spending some time with him—though not personally, I followed his events in London and watched a lot of his talks and podcasts. I’ve always been drawn to artists, especially men, who manage to balance hyper-masculinity with vulnerability. They express themselves in ways that feel so raw and authentic, especially considering the environments they come from. When I heard James’s words, it really painted a picture of the London experience—of love, loss, and everything in between. I thought it would be interesting to showcase two different perspectives on life there, especially with the contrast between my background as a white northerner and his as a Black man from London. There’s an intriguing interplay in how our experiences overlap, and I think that contrast makes for a compelling conversation about identity and experience. I just really admire his work, and I felt it would be an interesting addition to the show.

Circling back to the questions about a different audience, would you think say an italian audience might get the same contrast? Or perhaps not? Are you also interested in the possibility that this contrast might fly over their head?

Well, I chose to make work referencing an airport, which is such a sterile, liminal space—almost without any fixed identity. It’s hard to pin down to any one country. But, of course, there are elements in airports, like signs or symbols, that make it clear you’re in a specific place. I like that idea—there are subtle elements of me in there, but mostly, the space is so clean, almost like a white cube, that the addition of James’s words would really paint a different picture. His words would recontextualize everything in a new way, almost creating a suspension of the usual narrative. His work could shift the whole atmosphere in the space.

Exactly, it would create a new kind of suspension in the moment. Maybe his words, when played, would generate something different, a kind of re-contextualization happening in real time.

Yeah, definitely. And reconnecting to what you said about being so obsessed with the moment—being at an opening, being in that experience—it makes me think about how we engage with shows. There’s this element of site specificity that’s inherent in the medium itself, and how we experience things in museums. You go for the experience of the opening, and that specific moment—something that can only happen there, and then.

Right, it’s almost like the temporality of the show itself, being here for just a few days, really makes you reflect on how events like this are tied to a specific site and time. It’s a fleeting experience.

Yes, exactly. That temporality is key to the experience—it adds another layer of meaning. I think there’s something really interesting in that. i like the idea of doing something as grand as this outside of London. A lot of the time, I look at New York and think, everything’s happening there, and I wish I were there. I think the same probably happens in London—people look at the city and say, great things are happening here. But for me, I like the idea of moving my work outside of London, even outside the UK altogether. There’s something intriguing about stepping away from those established centers of culture. I’m just curious about how people react to it. I want to know how people from outside view it. Like, if an Italian were to look at a British person, how do they see that? It’s interesting how we boil down cultures into symbols—through history, football teams, political leaders, and so on. You know, Italians have their own stereotypes, and so do the British. It’s fascinating how these perceptions play out across different cultures.

Well, Britain has had a rich subcultural history, especially in London. My father, for example, was a modernist—he collected things related to that movement. He would always tell me that being a mod is more about an attitude than an aesthetic. He was big into Northern Soul and the Manchester club scene, so I grew up with that influence.

That’s really similar to me, actually. My father also had that mod influence, with skinhead culture and fashion. Britain was really defined by things like mod culture, skinhead culture, and even ska, fashion-wise, but also as a reflection of the working-class attitude—living clean under difficult circumstances. It was a real expression of resilience.

Yeah, exactly. That’s why Simon Reynolds’ essay on Mods really resonates with me. His exploration of how kids would save up for certain clothes, dress up—they were making a statement. It’s essentially where streetwear culture was born, just from a conceptual standpoint. This idea of attaching pride to what you wear, even when it means making sacrifices elsewhere—like, do you eat or do you dress? And they chose to dress. It was that important.

Exactly. It’s fascinating how that culture was built on wanting to be part of high culture, but doing it on a shoestring budget. Look at the mods in post-war Britain—they were watching the Italians, drinking cappuccinos, riding Vespas, listening to jazz from America and France. All of that was aspirational for the working class in Britain. They wanted to be part of that “cool” European vibe but in their own, more affordable way. They were looking at European and American culture and trying to recreate it with what they had, making it their own. What’s overlooked in the UK now, I think, is how deeply that ethos still lives on, in some form. That’s the beauty of culture, isn’t it? Things don’t belong to anyone, really. When something becomes a pure symbol—like the Vespa—it doesn’t matter where it came from anymore. It’s a symbol that represents something else entirely. It becomes something significant in its own right, without needing its original signifier. That’s where it gets interesting. Yes, there’s a lot of confusion, a lot of loss of meaning, but there’s also a lot of freedom in that.

That’s why you’re wearing a MoMA hoodie, right?

Absolutely. Even though me wearing a MoMa hoodie comes from a completely different place, if you’d like, culturally.

It says a lot about the state of things today. I think it’s time to rethink what culture even means now. I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between art, aesthetics, and politics, and whether there’s still a meaningful connection between them. Can art even be political today? That’s a tough question, one that’s kind of provocative. But, when you look around—especially with figures like Donald Trump or Berlusconi—it’s hard to make sense of it all. When politics feels so absurd, everything kind of seems to make sense at the same time.

It’s true. We live in a time where deep fakes and AI are making it harder to tell what’s true and what isn’t. It’s all very confusing. But somehow, we just carry on, don’t we?

Yeah, it’s a strange existence. And it reminds me of the Form Follows Fiction show at Castello di Rivoli in the early 2000s. 20+ years later, it feels like life is more and more similar to being in a movie sometimes—like when you look around, you feel like you’re playing a part. And that, oddly, becomes your reality.

Exactly. And we were kind of getting into this when talking about my show, but we got sidetracked a bit. The fountain concept in my work, though—it’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. I’ve always wanted to use a fountain because it’s such a sharp reference to art history, but I also wanted to play with that in a more subversive way. In a city like Milan, you have these beautiful, crafted fountains, right? But in places like Soho in London, you get these grotesque, plastic public urinals where people piss. I thought it would be interesting to transform something so raw, so hyper-masculine, into something beautiful and reflective—turn it into an art object. And I wanted to play with the idea of it “pissing backwards,” which felt pretty nice.

Is the fountain, conceptually, “taking the piss?”

Yes, exactly. But it’s more than that. There’s something about the space a fountain occupies in a city. At night, when you walk by one of those public urinals, it’s like the atmosphere shifts. Soho transforms from a daytime café and bar culture into a nighttime, more aggressive drinking culture. And as a woman, you’d probably feel some fear walking through that, right? But what I wanted to do was take this hyper-masculine, charged object—this four-way urinal—and turn it into a soft, inviting space. Something where people could reflect, sit, maybe throw a coin in, and make a wish.

That’s an interesting inversion of the object’s usual use.

Yeah, it’s about giving a sense of serenity back to a place that is typically more charged. In a way, it’s a nice contrast—a beautiful, calm fountain where you can wish for a better, more peaceful world. Even in all the bleakness, that’s the kind of hopeful gesture I want to end with. But then there’s also the billboard. The picture on it is from when I was driving down to Dover. Dover’s this big, white, chalky cliff area in the UK, and it’s where ferries to France or the Netherlands depart. What’s interesting about Dover is that when you’re there, your phone network changes to a French one. It’s like being so close to another country, but still so far. I’ve been working a lot with chalk recently, so I’ve been carving and playing with the white cliffs of Dover in my work. I took this picture driving down there, and it’s the first thing you’d see when you arrive by ferry into Britain. But it’s not exactly exciting—it’s actually quite bleak and boring. It’s real. And when you arrive, you see these road signs in different languages, like French and Spanish or maybe French and German, telling you what side of the road to drive on. It kind of looks like I’m driving on the wrong side, which I thought was interesting. I liked the idea that it could be a foreigner just arriving, confused about which side to drive on. It’s a simple but effective picture, and the font used on the signs also has a certain feel to it. It reminds me of a type used in Britain by organizations like the National Trust, which is responsible for preserving natural landmarks like the white cliffs of Dover. The National Trust protects these places from being built on or altered, allowing people to walk through and enjoy them as they are. In a way, it felt like an advertisement for Britain, especially with how some ads in Britain today try to promote domestic travel. They encourage people to leave London for the countryside, like Suffolk or the seaside, to escape the nine-to-five grind. It feels almost a bit surreal, but it’s true—people in London rarely leave London. There’s a disconnect between London and the rest of the country, just like the difference between cities here in Italy, like Milan and Naples or Rome.

Yeah, Milan is its own world, separate from the rest of Italy. It’s the same with London and the rest of Britain.

Exactly. There’s a huge divide between the North and the South of Britain, just like there is between the North and South of Italy. It’s a different reality in each region, and it’s something that’s really apparent when you travel outside the big cultural capitals. There’s this weird thing about regional pride, too. I was thinking about this when I was in New York this past August, working on ideas for this show. I came across a story about graffiti artists replacing white flags with star-spangled banners on the Brooklyn Bridge, and it got me thinking about the symbolism of white flags and surrender.

That’s really interesting. It’s almost like a stripping away of national identity.

Exactly. I thought about how, if the far right got their way in post-Brexit Britain and created a “white utopia,” they might try to erase all color—like bleaching everything white, almost as if to cleanse it. That’s what I liked about the idea of the white flag—it symbolizes surrender, but in a very daunting way. It felt like a metaphor for what was happening in Britain, especially with the way they want to hold onto the past, with all the imperial history and the constant pomp and circumstance. The actions don’t match the rhetoric.

Right, it’s like they want to hold onto this image of Britain that doesn’t exist anymore.

Yes, and the way things are now—the ceremonies, the national symbols like the poppy—have become detached from their original meanings. For example, the red poppy was meant to symbolize ceasefire and remembrance for fallen soldiers, but now it’s become more of a detached ritual. Last year, on Remembrance Day in London, people marched for the fallen in World War I and II, but there was also a Palestinian freedom march happening at the same time. There was conflict between the two groups, but both were essentially marching for the same thing—a desire for peace. Yet, it became this battle over meaning, and that’s where language, history, and symbolism get distorted.

So, the idea of the white flag in your work reflects that loss of meaning and identity?

Exactly. The flag, in its pure white simplicity, is a surrender—there’s a kind of haunting finality to it. But it’s also about the bleaching of something—removing all the color to create this sterile, empty ideal. It’s also about the way Britain tries to elevate itself by clinging to the past while ignoring the realities of the present. This all ties back to that idea of “peace, prosperity, and friendship” that was stamped on the commemorative coin made when Britain left the EU. It’s a joke because the reality is so far from that ideal.

It’s interesting how these symbols that once meant something have now become empty gestures.

Yes, and it’s like the ceremonies and parades continue as if nothing has changed. The poppy, for example, has become detached from its original meaning, much like the national identity itself. It’s a cycle of forgetting what something truly stood for and replacing it with a hollow version. We only start to realize the consequences of this once it escalates into something even larger, like a global conflict. History tends to repeat itself, but people often don’t recognize the patterns until it’s too late.

Credits

Photography · Andrea Nicotra
All images courtesy of the artist and Spazio Maiocchi

Entrance Gallery

Posted on 3 de November de 20246 de December de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Louis Shannon
Words · Andrea Bratta

NR and The Salon by NADA and the Community are excited to introduce a media partnership for the novel invitational fair’s first edition.

Spanning three floors of 30 bis Rue de Paradis in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, a historic location that once housed the Baccarat crystal factory, The Salon is designed as an alternative cultural experience during Paris Art Week, showcasing a dynamic selection from over 50 galleries, art spaces, and non-profit organizations spanning 18 countries and 24 cities, including Basel, Cologne, Dubai, Glasgow, Oslo, Guayaquil, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Warsaw.

NR’s comprehensive media coverage will highlight The Salon’s unique model and amplify the fair’s vision for a cultural experience that challenges standardised models, emphasizing the importance of supporting new voices and underrepresented creators in the art world, while bringing together new, and established, voices in contemporary culture.

As part of our coverage, we spoke with Louis Shannon, founder of Entrance Gallery, one of the most interesting Lower East Side spaces in NYC.

Let’s start by taking a little step back. This is not the first time you work with The Community, right?

We had a show in The Community’s space in Pantin last November, titled LA RENTRÉE. It was the first of The Community’s invitationalformat, which I guess they also expanded, in a way, with The Salon. It was a beautiful, very spontaneous show –the reasoning behind it was bringing everything that fitted into a single suitcase. [laughs]

This time, with more preparation, we brought a fuller range of works reflecting our gallery’s vision in a more organic, and complete, manner. The selection gives an overview of what we’re aiming to accomplish in New York—primarily supporting artists ready for their debut solo exhibitions. I love working with emerging artists, and here at The Salon, we’re showcasing artists who’ve never shown before. For instance, Ethan Means, a remarkable oil painter from Flatbush, Brooklyn, is showing his work for the first time here, at The Salon, and it has been an exciting experience to see the public’s response.

Alongside him, we have pieces from more established artists in our program, like Hannah Lee, whose work references Caillebotte, whose work is currently being exhibited at the Museeè D’orsay. Having these artists side by side captures the essence of our program, emphasizing new voices and ongoing dialogues.

How’s working with artists who are just starting out?

It definitely adds a layer of curiosity and collaboration, allowing us to nurture meaningful relationships from the outset. This approach aligns with the salon’s ethos and its conversational format, fostering open interactions, much like NADA’s broader mission to connect communities in art.

As we’ve already said, this isn’t my first collaboration with The Community—I’ve known them for a long time—and it’s always been about intellectual curiosity, introducing fresh voices and keeping things innovative.

Was supporting emerging art always part of your mission from the start? Since you began collecting, has that focus always been there, or do you feel it developed over time as you gained experience?

It is a mission, 100%. Since opening our gallery in 2017, our goal has been to elevate emerging art. It started as a DIY space, driven by an underground spirit, and that ethos remains central to everything we do. For instance, Pat McCarthy is one of the artists I brought to the salon; his background in zine culture and punk aesthetics reflects our gallery’s roots in alternative art scenes, and his work blends high and low art in a way that resonates with our values.

I see each show as a collaborative journey that connects me with the artist on a deeper level. The Salon has been especially rewarding because it feels less like a conventional fair and more like a community of art lovers sharing ideas and engaging in meaningful conversations.

And those conversations become part of the story. Just like the way you work with artists, that same deep involvement in their practice. The way you described Pat’s work really shows the thoughtful, long-term relationships you seem to cultivate with artists. Is it challenging sometimes to keep that up?

Honestly, it’s good. It’s my everyday, my whole life—I live and breathe it, so I don’t think about anything else. For me, it’s all about the relationship, and when your work becomes your life, that’s when it’s truly rewarding. That personal, enduring connection with the artists and their work is central.

Speaking of connections, have you had a chance to attend any talks or activations here?

Not yet, but I’m excited to see Nick Sethi and pick up one of his books. He’s a friend and a talented artist, also involved with The Community for years.

Is there a particular medium you’re interested in curating right now? Or that perhaps you wanted to specifically focus on for a fair setting?

Not really. For me, it’s more about the artist’s intention. I enjoy working with artists at various stages of their practice, especially when they’re deeply engaged and obsessed with their chosen material. If they’re passionate about oil painting on panel, that’s fantastic. If they’re drawn to English porcelain ceramics or performance, I’ll support that too—as long as it’s an authentic pursuit. It’s not about creating what sells; it’s about creating because they have an undeniable drive to express through their art. Also, The Salon’s format is less costly than larger fairs, allowing us to take more creative risks.

How’s your feedback on The Salon experience so far? How would you describe it?

I think that there’s a more relaxed environment that lets visitors, including collectors, approach the works with an open mind, which fosters a greater receptivity to new perspectives. It’s refreshing compared to the high-stakes, high-commercial settings of other fairs. Plus, it’s nice to see students and young creatives engaging with the art, it’s different.

What are the next steps for you after The Salon?

Right now, we’re in the midst of our season, with several shows lined up through the end of the year, including a fair in Miami. I’m also working on a sculpture garden in Red Hook in collaboration with the gallery, an exciting new project focused on expanding our sculptural offerings.

Credits

Entrance Gallery booth at The Salon by NADA & The Community, Paris, 2024. Photography by Gabriele Abbruzzese.
Ethan Means, Fashion parents, 2024. Oil on wood panel. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Ethan Means, Doing some rooftop reading, 2024. Oil on wood panel. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Lizzy Gabay, Building at Night II, 2024. Oil on linen. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Lizzy Gabay, The Water Statues, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photography by Stephen Faught.

Discover more on entrance.nyc

The Salon by NADA & The Community opens on Thursday, October 17. Please use the link here to RSVP. and confirm your visit

Opening Hours
Thursday, October 17, 6pm-8pm
Friday, October 18, 11am-8pm
Saturday, October 19, 11am-8pm
Sunday, October 20, 11am-6pm

Address
30 bis Rue du Paradis
75010 Paris

Foreign & Domestic Gallery

Posted on 3 de November de 202419 de December de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Alex Meurice
Words · Andrea Bratta

NR and The Salon by NADA and the Community are excited to introduce a media partnership for the novel invitational fair’s first edition.

Hey Alex! How’s it going?

Last day vibes, you know? I guess we are all more relaxed, and tired. [laughs] But I am definitely happy.

Should we start this with a little introduction about your work?

Sure. The story actually traces back to 2018. I first used the project name “Foreign & Domestic” when I participated in The Salon de Normandy’s first edition, back in 2019. The name originated from an exhibition I held in London in 2018, titled “European Foreign and Domestic,” which was inspired by a road sign advertising mechanic services in Los Angeles. You see signs like “Foreign and Domestic” throughout the U.S., often referring to parts from both Europe and America. But the phrase sparked a question for me: What’s truly foreign nowadays? So, everything kind of revolved around this theme and wordplay.

I held the show in a big abandoned hotel in London, and one of the artists showing was actually The Community. There’s an exact replica of an English town in China, It’s called Thames Town. This town, a near-exact recreation, even down to its decor, served as a fascinating setting for their work. Replicating European architecture like this isn’t allowed in China anymore, as recent policies under Xi Jinping restrict European-style designs. But back then, they were able to create almost identical replicas.

The Community contributed with a video filmed in Thames Town. They sent two of their members to stay in an Airbnb that looked like a stage set for an English home, complete with decor that imitated traditional British interiors. The effect was surreal—like a TV set with three walls, furnished to mimic a scene straight out of the UK. That’s what they brought to my space, capturing this unique blend of cultural imitation.

How did, from there, Foreign & Domestic become what it is today?

In 2020, I moved to New York. I kept the original name, dropped European –The shadow of the old continent. One of the first artists I showed in NYC was Michael Iveson, a British artist whose work I had shown extensively in London. He created a significant installation there, featuring double-wrapped sculptures and smaller prints. It felt right to bring Michael back into focus, and his work is also here at The Salon. Now, five years on, in 2024, things have evolved. I’ve been running a more established gallery program since December 2022, with Michael set to have his next show in November. My presentation at the Salon this year is straightforward, showcasing snapshots of recent gallery highlights: the previous show with Joseph Brock, the upcoming one with Michael Iveson, and the show I did with Greg last year, which I also curated for another exhibition.

You were there for the first Salon de Normandy, The Community’s project that served as the baseline for where we are right now. How would you say the project evolved?

It’s definitely more professional now, but the spirit remains the same. NADA and The Community might operate slightly differently, but they share the same mission. There’s a special energy of support and innovation. They even had artists giving away work for free—a beautiful gesture. I’m referring to Nick Sethi’s performance. I think they managed to elevate and translate to a bigger framework what the original Salon was. A very diverse mix of people visited the fair, and the presence of music and art roaming through the halls adds a unique touch.

Would you say your role as an exhibitor, or perhaps how audiences interact with your work, has shifted over these years?

Yes, in some ways. It’s a more diverse audience now, and it’s exciting to see people interact differently with the pieces. I’m showing at NADA Miami next, where I’ll explore this further.

What drew you to participate in fairs? Is it just about exposure, or something deeper?

Mostly, it’s about connecting with new audiences who resonate with the gallery’s programming. Fairs like NADA’s or The Salon attract a unique crowd, and the community among exhibitors is strong—each gallery has its own story and perspective, which keeps the experience rich and varied. Which I think it’s what made this experience very interesting. Each exhibitor had its own very individual aesthetic, program, history, but we managed to create a communal experience. A certain kinship I’d say. Neighboring galleries often collaborate, and friendships emerge organically. These “invisible lines” form between spaces, making the event feel truly communal.

How would you describe your curatorial approach?

I’m interested in the personal connection and experimenting alongside the artists. The results come naturally through these collaborations. Some artists I work with are known for using found or recycled materials—like magazines, old t-shirts, or even candles—giving their work a raw, sustainable quality.

The relational side seems essential in the way you work, beyond just what ends up on the walls.

Absolutely. A gallery is like an iceberg—the art on display is just the visible tip of a much larger social and creative context. I still very much believe in the idea of social scenes, and I mean that in a more meaningful way, not just you know, going to openings and the social side of being in the art world, and I see that a lot in the interactions we managed to build here during these four days.

Credits

Minotaurs, 2024, group exhibition curated by Harris Rosenblum. Installation view. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Nicholas William Johnson, Apparatus (Henbane viewed in a convex obsidian mirror), 2022. Photography by Damian Griffiths
Michael Iveson, Boots, 2024. Photography by Stephen James

Discover more on foreignndomestic.io

The Salon by NADA & The Community opens on Thursday, October 17. Please use the link here to RSVP. and confirm your visit

Opening Hours
Thursday, October 17, 6pm-8pm
Friday, October 18, 11am-8pm
Saturday, October 19, 11am-8pm
Sunday, October 20, 11am-6pm

Address
30 bis Rue du Paradis
75010 Paris

Meriem Bennani

Posted on 3 de November de 20244 de November de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · For My Best Family, Meriem Bennani at Fondazione Prada
Words · Annalise Kamegawa

For My Best Family

Meriem Bennani is really funny. But don’t forget that it’s often said that the best humor comes from a place of truth.

On talking about the process behind For Aicha, the film commissioned by Fondazione Prada for the event, Bennani (Rabat, Morocco, 1988) remarks, “I don’t know if everyone has this experience, but because I’m going back home [to Morocco to film], it feels like I’m a child again in my old room. I’m back to being a virgin, you know? But at the same time, I know I’m an adult. I make art. I can have these kinds of interactions. I think that makes my relationship to home more complex and dynamic and fun and helps it all come together.”

From 31 October 2024 to 24 February 2025, Fondazione Prada Milano hosts Meriem Bennani’s solo exhibition, For My Best Family. In this two-part show, Bennani and her collaborators bring to life cigarette-smoking jackals, rubber flip-flops, and a poignant nostalgia for home. The exhibition features the film For Aicha alongside the sprawling sound installation Sole Crushing, immersing viewers in Bennani’s playful yet evocative vision of family and belonging.

To see For Aicha, one must walk through the cacophonous installation, Sole Crushing, composed by Morocco-based music producer Cheb Runner (Reda Senhaji). The slap-slap of the flip flops, speaking to each other from polyphonic groups, traps the viewer in a lively conversation. The shoes are adorned with an eclectic collection of accoutrements: metal rings, a rainbow of plastic cord, and wooden nubs are the secret instruments in this orchestra. It’s like walking into a room with aunts fighting over a recipe, siblings squealing over a video game, or parents dancing to an old favorite song of theirs – there is an odd, yet familiar, feeling of absurdity that most only find in the comfort of their own homes.

It’s this rubber, soul-filled arrangement, that got the docents dancing and even the most stoney-faced journalists chuckling. Chanclas, pantofole, slippers, and off-brand Havaianas reminiscent of summers past respond to the puff of pneumatic tubes to welcome all to Bennani’s solo exhibition.

Ascending into the upper level of the Podium space, visitors find a miniature version of Fondazione Prada’s, Cinema Godard. A portion of the theater’s chartreuse velvet chairs are waiting for audience members, ready to hold on to them as they sit for the 73 minute, animated work, For Aicha. Alongside co-directors Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki were Net artist John Micheal Boling and actor, filmmaker, and teaching artist Jason Coombs. From the labor of these four creatives, a micro production studio came together in New York for this project.

Created over the course of two years, the team produced work that sits familiarly in Bennani’s oeuvre anthropomorphic characters. Barki, who some might recognize as the other mind (and lizard) behind Bennani’s 2020 series, 2 Lizards, has a background in documentary filmmaking that contributes to the texture of the film. In this blend of cinematic styles — documentary, traditional filmmaking, animation — a layered, experimental work emerges.

For Aicha follows the journey of Bouchra, a 35-year-old jackal filmmaker living in New York creating an auto-biographical film about coming out to her mother. She (referring to both Bouchra and Bennani in this case) explore themes of queerness, coming out, and the profound effects of living between worlds—worlds shaped both by cinematic fiction and by borders such as those between the US and Morocco.

The film is filled with clever details that reflect the team’s shared experiences and the joys of working in animation. In creating the film, Coombs references a quote from Peter Chung: “I often remind myself that animation is the creation of the illusion of spontaneity. Because nothing is in fact less spontaneous than the process of animating.”

Nonetheless, For Aicha immerses the viewer in its narrative through a series of playful visual moments that are characteristic of Bennani’s style. A truck door printed with the image of toothpaste container folds open like a squeezed tube; a POV sequence of a descent down a glowing, singing elevator shaft; a series of high-contrast, fast-paced radio station introductions that harken back to talk-radio shows of the 2000s.

Even thinking of Bouchra’s presence, the tiniest of details were considered to construct her aura. Orian reminisces, “it was the folly artist’s idea to make the character of Bouchra very squeaky. She’s just wearing this leather jacket, but even that can create this presence for the character. When she sits down, she moves a tiny bit, and it squeaks.”

Integrated into the film are real conversation between Bennani and her mother, spoken in smooth, familiar, and affectionate French. This dialogue exemplifies how the film draws on documentary filmmaking techniques, not simply to replicate reality, but to use the very fabric of real life to evoke emotion. By framing these intimate moments in her animal kingdom, Bennani prompts the audience to reevaluate their everyday connections to home.

For long-time followers of Bennani’s work, her mother pops up in another Prada-related creation. Among a display of flying animated papers, her mom popped up as the star of the SS22 Miu Miu runway video.

In discussing mothers, homes, and family, the team behind For Aicha reflects on how this work has affected their notion of what home is.

Born in Isreal, Barki remarks, “in the past year, I’ve seen where I come from going down the drain, committing insane war crimes and genocide. Because of this—even unrelated to the film—my perception of home was shifting while making it.”

Barki later goes on to say on how the split of narratives in the film mimics the “split” sensation of diaspora. “In regard to living in a different country: at first, I expected that I’ll move to the new place [the US], and slowly, I will feel more like I belong in that new place, which I do. I realized that as more time goes by, I feel like I belong less in where I come from, but there’s never a full transfer. It’s just kind of like two vessels that becomes split, and this split is what makes you whole.”

Coombs follows up by adding, “one of the things that really drew me to this project was the beautifully complex, nuanced, philosophy and politics of both Meriem and Orian… It was really beautiful to be brought into this world, to be brought into their homes and their families, and see things that are so outside of my world. It’s been transformative for me. It’s hard to put into words exactly how home and family have changed, but they’ve definitely been very much affected by these two women.”

In discussing My Best Family, the team effused a sense of admiration for each other and their contributions. Bennani’s extensive collaborations on this project for Fondazione Prada embody the values at the heart of her exhibition—a sense of community and connection. In bringing together so many creatives, pulling in the voice of her mom and family, selecting a music producer from her own country, Bennani created a family within the exhibition space.

Before leaving the interview, Barki says, “I’ll say one more thing! Today [30 October 2024] is going to be a very special event because our families came from all over to watch the opening of the film and be part of it. Also, about 30 of our friends from New York are here. In a real sense, that is just so fucking special!”

In a final remark Boling adds about Fondazione Prada, “yeah, so home’s gonna be here today.”

Meriem Bennani (Rabat, Morocco, 1988) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, Art Dubai, Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Public Art Fund, CLEARING Gallery, and The Kitchen. Her animated series, 2 Lizards, in collaboration with Orian Barki, was premiered on Instagram in spring 2020 and was described by The New York Times as “hypnotic . . . deploying a blend of documentary structure and animation surrealism . . . both poignantly grounded in actual events and also soothingly fantastical.”

Orian Barki (Tel Aviv, Israel, 1985) is a filmmaker based in New York. Barki both shoots and edits many of her raw character-driven documentaries. Her work 2 Lizards, co- directed with Meriem Bennani, was acquired by MoMA and the Whitney Museum for their permanent collections. Barki’s work has been featured on ESPN, PBS, Fader, Vogue, Nowness, Le Cinéma Club, Dazed Magazine, and more.

Cheb Runner (Reda Senhaji) is a music producer based in Morocco. Inspired by various musical cultures, his sound is innovative and blends North African and European influences.

John Michael Boling is a Net artist, former Associate Director of Rhizome, co-founder of the Internet surfing club NASTY NETS and co-founder of Are.na, a platform for creative research.

Jason Coombs is an actor, filmmaker, and teaching artist from New York. He has produced several short films that have screened at festivals around the world.

All images courtesy of the artists and Fondazione Prada.

Meriem Bennani portrait shot by Valentina Sommariva
Meriem Bennani. Research for Sole Crushing, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Meriem Bennani. Research for Sole Crushing, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs. Stills from For Aicha, 2024. Courtesy of the artists
Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs. Stills from For Aicha, 2024. Courtesy of the artists

Discover more on fondazioneprada.org

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family
October 31 – February 24

Address
Fondazione Prada
Largo Isarco 2
20139 Milan

Simone Bodmer-Turner – Emma Scully

Posted on 9 de August de 20249 de August de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully
Words · Simone Lorusso

The Fusion of Art and Design: A Discussion with Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully

Renowned American artist and designer Simone Bodmer-Turner, known primarily for her work in ceramics, has embarked on an innovative exploration into new mediums, showcasing collectible design objects crafted from bronze, wood, lacquer, and silk at the Emma Scully Gallery in New York. In a captivating discussion, Bodmer-Turner and Gallerist Emma Scully delve into the intricate interplay between design and art, reflecting on the evolving landscape of creativity. At the heart of their conversation lies the focal point of their recent collaboration—the exhibition “A Year Without a Kiln.” running until June 22, 2024.

Simone, Emma thanks for joining us. Simone, you recently moved from New York City to rural Massachusetts. What motivated this change, and how has it impacted your life and work?

SBT: Before I was able to do my work full time, I spent a period of time working at a food/farming-centred start up, then working in restaurants and farming to support my studio practice. Being close to food, growing it myself, and being very intertwined with nature has been something I’ve been trying to re-incorporate into my life, but I had to be patient through the initial years of solidifying my work becoming my business in New York before I could do that. It’s been freeing to be able to expand into the spaciousness of the countryside.

Your solo exhibition at Emma Scully Gallery, “A Year Without a Kiln,” features pieces created during this transitional period. Can you tell us more about this project and what inspired it?

SBT: The work in the show was created both in a moment of transition, but also in a moment when I didn’t yet have a studio or access to my usual materials and tools I had used to make my work up until this point. I had had the privilege of collaborative work before, but finding myself in this place with the invitation of a solo show, made collaboration key to the conceptualisation of the work. It was an opportunity to design in materials that I was not personally a master in – wood, bronze, iron, lacquer – but that resonated with me for their rootedness in traditional craftsmanship and the unadulterated materials of the natural world.

Emma Scully described this exhibition as a tactile encapsulation of your work and perspective. What do you hope viewers take away from “A Year Without a Kiln”?

SBT: I hope that viewers and clients begin to understand what work I do as diversely as I dream it up in my imagination – covering all manner of materials and ways of working. I want viewers to recognise my language of form and see it transposed onto unexpected and sometimes more traditional shapes. I want to remove preconceptions and categorisations – both in my work and in all these overlapping worlds of art/design/craft – of “high” vs “low”, “functional” vs “sculptural”, “craft” vs “art”. I want the work to serve as a small part of a movement towards a different way of designing and fabricating, with craftsmanship and human relationships at the center. Collectively we need to recover from the hangover we have from the 70s when the idea of craft erroneously came to equate to craftsy, rather than multi-generational, learned craftsmanship – an error that has birthed multiple generations who turn a blind eye, often unknowingly, to how the things we bring into our homes are made and by whom.

Where do you see your practice going from here?

SBT: I’ve dabbled in many materials and ways of working over the last few years, and plan to spend the next bit solidifying and clarifying the arms of the studio and our offerings. We’ll be growing our site-specific interior installations, continuing to partner with craftspeople to develop furniture and sculpture in other materials, and building out our new ceramic studio in the countryside to have a ceramic offering again.

What challenges have you faced in transitioning from ceramics to working with materials like wood, bronze, and lacquer?

SBT: Every material is so different. Wood requires precision whereas clay does not. It’s challenging to make progress with bronze in the summer when it’s too hot to have the furnace going. Bronze also brings weight into the equation as a potential issue, though luckily it has much more capacity to bear weight that clay does and there’s the ability to create finer, thinner areas within a piece, unlike clay. True urushi lacquer takes an immense amount of time (4 months per piece) and the right moisture conditions to cure, unlike any material I’ve encountered before.

Speaking of the Tadpole Bowl, its polished bronze silhouette reflects the titular creature. Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind this piece?

SBT: I had to come up with a name that quickly reframed for the viewer what they initially thought, might just possibly be a sperm. It was early springtime when I finished the model, and all the tadpoles were out in the ponds, and hence…

Calder and Giacometti are muses for you. How do their influences manifest in your new work?

SBT: Calder was the first creator of objects that I understood, as a child, to be “an artist”. My parents really loved the whimsy, balance, and lightness of his work and took me to his exhibitions when they came to town. A lot of the playfulness, interactivity, and tension I bring into my work stems from a lifetime looking at his. Diego Giacometti was a later discovery, only finding out about him from underneath the shadow of his brother when my work was moving more distinctly into the design realm. His adornment and twists on traditional structures of lighting, chairs and tables, has been influential in this most recent body of work.

Now, I’d like to shift our focus to Emma Scully Gallery, where your latest work is being showcased. Hi Emma, how did you approach curating this exhibition, and what was your vision for presenting Simone’s work?

ES: A solo show is a wonderful opportunity to show the world of the designer. Simone took the lead on the exhibition design of her show and thoughtfully created a space where her work could be presented in the context of her larger design ethos.

How do you choose the artists and designers you collaborate with for your gallery? And how do you envision the future of galleries in promoting hybrid forms of design and art?

ES: First and foremost, my responsibility to my clients is to show them the best of contemporary collectible design. Beyond this, a lot has to align to show an artist or designer at the gallery. It has to be the right time in someone’s career to be supporting their work, and we have to want to embark on this intensive journey of working together! One of the things I am most proud of in my work at the gallery is supporting the fabrication of work. What this means looks different for each artist and designer I work with. But I hope it is something other galleries continue to do – and find ways of supporting the work and the artists we work with beyond sales.

Emma, what advice would you give to emerging artists looking to find their unique voice?

ES: Experiment, work and look at a lot!

Credits

Photography · William Jess Laird
All images courtesy of Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully Gallery

Parker Ito

Posted on 22 de July de 202431 de July de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Parker Ito
Words · Andrea Bratta

Expected Value and the Sublime:
A conversation with Parker Ito

Art and poker. If life’s a gamble, then the two must have more in common than it might appear at first glance; American artist Parker Ito is pretty sure of it. On one of the busy days leading to his show at Climate Control in San Francisco, NR conversed with him on the similarities between the career of a poker player and that of an artist, the notion of value, and markets vs communities to retrace his past production as an artist, and figure out his next moves. Expect also: A detour on sartorial matters and style, a crazy night out in San Francisco leading to a disappointing encounter with the giants of Impressionist painting, and an exploration of the Sublime, but make it Las Vegas Sphere.

Hi Parker! How’s it going?

Good, you? I’m running on a few hours of sleep because of poker, but other than that I’m great.

I’m great! You preceded me mentioning poker, that’s what I wanted to use as a conversation starter! How are you managing that with art and everything else?

Well, I’m getting ready for a bunch of shows and new projects. The building where my studio is stays only open ‘till midnight, and that creates some unfavorable timetables for me to work. I used to have a lot of assistants, so I had to be up when they were working. But now it’s just me, and I’m naturally more active at night. So right now my sleep schedule is really bad. I’m going to bed at, I would say, between 6am and 10am, some nights.

Really?

Yeah, you know..Poker just goes on all night.

Working in your studio, and playing poker, which, by the sound of it, it’s starting to become something that you are doing quite professionally. Seems like a packed schedule.

I don’t feel like I’m good enough to say that I’m a professional poker player. Had I been speaking to a real pro, I would feel embarrassed to call myself that. Poker is just something I’m super obsessed with right now, and I’ve had some success doing it; I want to be good at it, I love it. But art, of course, is always going to be my number one thing. I tend to work in my studio usually in bursts of intense periods –I don’t really make work outside of a planned exhibition, I’m not someone who just goes to their studio every day. So sometimes I won’t be there for like a month or something, and then, when I have a show, I’ll be there like every day. Lately, I’ve been there all the time because the building my studio is in closes at midnight. I’ve been basically spending the night there, something I had never done before until last year’s New York show.

The Lubov one with Jon Rafman?

Yeah. That show with Jon, even though it was a two person show, it’s probably the hardest I ever worked on a show. That was the first time I’d ever had to do any kind of overnight session in my studio —It’s really weird to say something like this because I’ve been working for over a decade now as a professional artist. But I just realized how much I like overnights. Lately I’ve been going to my studio, I get there between 2 to 5pm, and work all night, sleep a little bit, and then wake up and work all the next day. I’ve been doing these like 30 plus hour-days in my studio, sometimes it’s super productive, I get really high on Adderall and get so much done, other times I just play poker the whole time. Poker can definitely be distracting, but I’m good with deadlines, and I’m good at multitasking.

What parallels are you finding between poker and art, as practices, if any. For example, the Lubov show was titled “Poets, Gambler, and Fools,” so now I’m wondering if your experience as a poker player might have informed the show’s narrative in some capacity.

I thought of Jon as the poet, me as the gambler, and then we’re both sort of fools. I guess It could be that there’s a lot of gambling in art, a lot of parallels to the nature of poker. And I think the careers of artists are similar to those of professional poker players, something I explored in a text that I wrote in 2021, which talks about this idea of Expected Value. Expected Value is a concept that’s been around for a long time, it’s not a poker-specific notion, but it’s used in poker to think about decision making. And it’s not necessarily about making the right decision at the right moment, but understanding that if certain decisions are made, again, and again, and again, they will yield a +EV outcome. EV has to do with the nature of variance in poker, which makes it a really interesting game. Chess, for example, is a game of complete information, while poker is one of incomplete information –in chess, a really high level chess player would never lose to an inferior one; In poker, even the best poker player in the world could lose a hand to an amateur, because of variance, and unknown factors. I think there’s a parallel in art there, even though poker is a game that clearly has winners and losers, unlike art –Like I said in this text I wrote: “As an artist, you never really win, you just kind of hope to get to your next show.”

Also, the idea of who’s a better artist than who, is something very subjective. In poker, I think the results can tell who’s the better poker player in the long-run, but if you broke down individual hands, they might tell a different story, because of luck and other factors: It’s not always the best poker player that’s winning. I think there’s another parallel there to the way that artists are sometimes received. Poker is also very psychologically challenging in its swings. When you’re running good, you feel that everything comes naturally to you, but then you start running bad, and you feel like it’s the end of the world. As someone who’s had an art career and experienced the swings, I’d like to think I’m prepared for the ups and downs in poker a bit more.

Earlier you mentioned that you’re experiencing some novelty, working without assistants, doing overnights and extra studio sessions. What do you think is changing or has changed in your practice throughout the years, especially maybe in correlation with the movement that you’ve been associated with at the beginning of it, Post-Internet Art, which you recently felt the need to reconsider thematically for Poets, Gamblers, and Fools.

I view “Post-Internet” as a term with multiple meanings. In the art world, it’s often seen as a market term. To be honest, I wasn’t actually even in a lot of those post-Internet curated shows -maybe I was in only one of those?- As an aesthetic, I don’t see my work as closely related to what’s typically associated with it, even though my work happens to be the current main image on the post-internet Wikipedia page. In terms of Post-Internet as a scene -which I usually just refer to as “net art” I was definitely a part of that. It initially felt like that scene existed outside of the art world but was eventually consumed by it. And it really had felt at times, at least for me, once Post Internet became part of the mainstream artworld there hasn’t really been another unified art movement. Maybe some market movements, defined by shared formal qualities, but there hasn’t really been a group of artists working as a real community with shared interests, like what happened with Post Internet. Recently, I’ve been exploring the contemporary NFT scene. I never got into NFTs because I felt so turned off by the art world’s smash and grab motivated by profit, and I just didn’t want to do an NFT and turn it into that kind of thing, I wanted to do something that felt like it was specific to the medium, because it is an interesting technology. Also, a lot of the NFT aesthetic was really corny. Recently, I’ve just been looking at this new NFT stuff through Twitter, or X whatever you wanna call it, and the aesthetic I’m seeing is really different from what it was a couple years ago, and there’s also just a whole scene of people communicating with each other – they all work under pseudonyms and it feels exciting! It feels like when I was discovering the net-art stuff when I was in college, and I realized there’s this whole scene of people talking to each other on the internet, who have the same shared interest and communicate with one another to insure the evolution of this thing they care about. This new NFT somehow feels like a continuation of the net art scene I was a part of, in terms of just like other areas for artists to communicate and share, and that’s really cool.

One could say that NFT art was almost doomed from the beginning, it really had an incredibly accelerated, almost meteoric rise, then that bubble quickly burst. Conversely, It almost seems that when market expectations were lifted from the NFT world, a scene proliferated and the medium felt fertile again. I’d be very curious to know a bit about that project you mentioned that never was. Are you going to experiment with the medium further in the future?

I’m actually working on a new project right now, coincidentally, all of this stuff kind of just came together. Someone had asked me to do an NFT project, and I agreed to do it –that was at the end of last year. I spent a lot of time on Twitter and went down this wormhole of new NFT stuff; that was just kind of an accident, because I previously decided to just do the NFT project and not care about what was happening in the NFT space, but then I found myself in the midst of it all and had all these realizations. There are a lot of aesthetic similarities between these new NFTs and the kinds of photoshopped collaged paintings I was making in 2015. A lot of these NFT projects are made with generative programs and therefore can be easily made into large quantities. Sometimes a drop can be 10,000 images. I made this print for a show in 2013 –I can’t even remember what the print says– but it’s something along the lines of “when Picasso died, he had made 250,000 pieces,” whatever the number, it was an approximation of the amount of work Picasso had made over his entire lifetime, and I claimed that I could make that many JPEGs in five minutes. When I made that print NFTs were yet to exist, but now the premise of being able to make 250,000 images in 5 minutes is an actual reality. This new project I’m going back to an image I used for the first paintings that people recognized as my work- The Parked Domain Girl series which was these paintings based on a widely circulated stock photo that was everywhere on the Internet from 2006-2012. Primarily this image was used as a placeholder image on websites that were “parked”. I’m trying to create a high volume of NFTs constructed around that Parked Domain Girl image, loosely in the framework of a PFP project. This collection of NFTs will be presented in a website format that mimics the layout of the Parked Domain website template, which has a text component that will be constantly changing every time you visit the page, and then the image area of the template will have a newly generated NFT every time you reload the page as well. You can mint any of the images as well as pay an additional fee to have an oil painting made of any of the images at various different sizes. The paintings will be produced in a Chinese painting factory just like the original Parked Domain Girl paintings.

It all feels very much in line with some of the themes you’ve always dealt with throughout your career: The circulation of images, their production and reproduction. And maybe this has always been something present in your work, an almost fixation with certain themes and even symbols or tropes, the way of utilizing determined symbols, like in Clear Sushi, or even the Parked Domain Girl, the repetition of an image or visual patterns or through and through. What is it that draws you to certain things rather than others, in your work? What drives you?

I really love being in my studio and I really love making things and that’s had a lot of different manifestations. When I was working with a big team of people that was a very different process. Now that it’s just me, it’s something new again, but at the end of the day, I think I’m just thinking about and making art. These things I make are just something that I feel should be in the world. If I made something it’s because I wanted to see that thing exist, and most of the things I make are somehow about me, they’re just about my life. Sometimes I have these discussions with my artist friends, and they’re like “I want to release this project, but I could never do it under my name because it’s not my aesthetic or conceptually irrelevant. ”I’ve always been driven more by making things rather than trying to adhere to ideas about what my art should be or shouldn’t be. I never wanted to have a thesis to my art per se, but of course, because all these things are made by me, the same shit shows up all the time – there’s reoccurring themes and characters, mostly having to do with the fact that when I think about making things, there’s always a million different ways it could be done; So I always I try and do as many of those things as possible. I think the NFT format is a great way to explore this because it’s so easy to make multiple iterations of something at the push of a button.

It seems like you used to be, or wanted to be, more personally distant from your art than today. Now, at least during this conversation, you feel very present in it, even just in the way you speak of it –I’ve read that you never really liked too much to talk about your art, and for a time you even stopped doing interviews, while now you are even writing, maybe not about your art or practice per se, but about things that are still very much a part of what you do and the way you create. What changed?

My relationship with the art world has changed a lot, many times in the course of my career. Nonetheless, I don’t know if my relationship to art ever changed. It may have outwardly seemed so, maybe things I said in interviews may have indicated that it was different, but I think it’s always been the same for me. I didn’t get into art to be smart or intellectual, so for a long time I think I intentionally just acted like a dumbass; I just probably didn’t care at the time if I or my work was perceived as having any kind of depth. But time went on, and I got annexed to Zombie Formalism, a market movement, and for two years everyone that was looking at my work only talked about prices and nothing else.That frustrated me a lot, I was making all this stuff, and there were all these ideas embedded in it, but none of that has was being communicated because of the shadow of market speculation. And I mean, for me, art is about a lot of things, but one crucial thing in art is communication. And so I went the opposite route, stopped doing any interviews, I stopped having my photo taken for a long time, stopped having press releases, stopped having openings for certain shows, stopped exhibiting with my CV, which is still not publicly available. During the Zombie Formalist era there was too much stuff around the work being discussed, and I only really wanted people just to look and focus on the art solely, so I tried to remove an extraneous material. But it turns out when you remove a lot of that material it doesn’t mean people are actually going to look any harder, they are probably going to pay less attention to it because people are lazy and there is just too much art being made these days. So it got to a point where I realized there were so many ideas in the work that audiences were likely missing in this total absence of language. So I turned to writing, something I honestly never liked doing, but wanted to try it. These texts that I’ve written the last couple years are part of a book that I want to eventually publish about my art.

I’ve really only written two, one in 2020 and one in 2022 –I had so much to say, the second one is like 60 pages or something like that. Now I’m working on a new one that’ll probably come out in the falI- I want to look at the sublime through the lens of Thomas Kinkade, AI, and the Las Vegas Sphere. I’m really obsessed with the Sphere right now. I’ve also always wanted to write something on the subject of style, both personal and in its relation to art practices, maybe I’ll tie that into some of the discussions around Zombie Formalism.. Sorry but I digress a bit, I actually forgot what your original question was.

I forgot too, but I like where we are going with this so let’s keep it freestyle. Your interest towards a theory of style is not something entirely novel, in one of the texts you wrote I found quite a bit of fashion references, especially to particular archival items, you seem quite fond of maybe not fashion per se, but for sure clothing and its importance. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

I really like clothes! I traded a painting with my tailor a couple years ago, so I have this huge credit with him –I make clothes with him and get stuff altered. I’ve actually made a couple of custom things for myself. I don’t know, it’s just very similar to how I used to make things in my studio. My tailor essentially operates like one of my assistants, and I kind of just bring him something, an idea, or a source material, and we modify it and adapt and play with it –It’s creative and fun, something that is outside my job but still related to aesthetics. I guess there are some parallels between how I’m thinking about style in art and personal style, specifically related to my personal experience. What I mean by that is, when I was associated with Zombie Formalism, it actually had very little relationship to the current work I was making at the time, it was all this work that was probably a year or two years older that was really present in the auctions etc. The main stuff showing up at auctions were these reflector paintings that I made on a Scotchlite material in 2012-2013, and those were going bonkers in 2014. In 2014 I was making what you could technically consider figurative paintings, these super dense Photoshop collages that I was turning into paintings, which is what I’ve returned to now. So I always felt there was this disconnect between the way my work was being thought of and what I was actually doing. I don’t know if this is clear in my work, but I’ve never really wanted to have a recognizable style as an artist. And I would say there are some parallels in my personal style to this concept because I never wanted to dress in a way that would be, how do i say it?

Expected maybe?

Not necessarily expected. I just never wanted to be dressing so that I could be lumped into the Zombie Formalism equivalent of fashion, but it’s really fucking hard because brands have these associations, I think the associations are stronger in fashion than in the the formal qualities of a painting. It’s kind of dumb, you know?

On one hand, It’s really fucking stupid to even care about this stuff. But then on the other hand, it says a lot about where culture is. One of the things that I often think about is that when I was growing up you couldn’t really wear a band shirt without actually listening to the band and being a fan of them, so there used to be really defined subcultures that were communicated through clothing, and we just don’t have that anymore. And I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing, but when Vetements is making a Marilyn Manson tee that anyone can buy, it’s a very different thing than being a middle schooler who gets made fun of for wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt. So the way that people dress now I think is not a reflection of their interests at all –It’s something that I find quite fascinating. But I guess there still are aesthetic groupings of stylings that people are a part of. For example, there’s certain brands that maybe I think something they are doing is interesting, but I would just never wear the clothes because I find the people who wear those clothing annoying, and I don’t want to be associated with them, and it’s really really stupid but I can’t help it.

It’s how human beings work. I think it’s a very, very basic yet important emotion: The unwillingness to be associated with something or someone we don’t fully embrace. Or maybe, more precisely, an antinomic feeling towards certain aesthetics, or certain things, elements in our style, or other people’s. It’s the Hipster Fashion Circle. But let’s back up a bit to another feeling, that of the sublime. You mentioned that it would be the overarching theme of the latest text you are working on. I want to know more!

There’s a lot of stuff happening in this text. One funny anecdote in there is about me during my college years going to see an Impressionist show at the de Young Museum that had traveled from the d’Orsay. I’d never been to Europe, never been to France, never seen any impressionist painting. My aunt loves impressionist painting so she really was pressuring me about going to check that. It was one of those things where you had to buy special tickets and they were all sold out by the time I actually tried to go see it. One night, I was out partying in San Francisco, and got really, really fucked up. I woke up the next day, and I had tickets to the exhibition in my pocket. I was like “What the fuck? Where did these come from?” I was so confused; Turns out, that during our night out one of my friends had found a leather jacket on the street with tickets to the impressionist show in its pockets, which is insane. And so I ended up going, and I think I just went by myself. It was a really disappointing experience.

How so?

All of those paintings need to be protected, because of conservation issues. The lighting was really low, they were under glass, so there’s this weird thing that you’re looking through to look at them. At the time, I was on my computer a lot you know, and I was a part of the net scene, so everything was being mediated by a screen to me. Looking at those paintings on the screen, I just thought they were so much more interesting on the screen than when I saw them in person. I was actually let down. So that’s the story kinda opening the text and then leading into a digression of what it means to have a more visceral reaction to jpegs than actual paintings. I spent a lot of time in Las Vegas, and I had been visiting the Sphere regularly. That thing is fucking insane, arguably the best artwork created in the last 20 years. It’s sublime. I believe there will soon be one in every city, altering the urban landscape significantly. Despite not having been inside it yet, I’m constantly amazed by its impact. Moving on to Thomas Kinkade- I’ve always been a big fan of his. Whether it can be considered sublime is a big question of mine –some Europeans I’ve spoken to aren’t familiar with Kinkade, but in America, he’s a household name, despite not being embraced by the mainstream art world. There’s something intriguing about his popularity. This led me to contemplate AI and its potential poetic and visceral capabilities compared to human-made art. Some argue that AI will never match human creativity. Whatever, that’s sort of boring conversation but I think it’s a good way to think about what sublime actually means in this current moment. When considering how image-generating programs function with prompts, it parallels the process I used with my studio assistants in 2014-2015 –”paint this hand, but painted in the style of Philip Guston.” The best prompts are crafted by individuals with extensive references. All of this feels interconnected- Impressionism, the Sphere, Kinkade, AI – especially concerning style and how it’s conveyed.

There’s a connection with AI that harkens back to the importance of language and its utilization in prompts, which are inherently linguistic. I’ve been thinking a lot of the resurgence of writing as a crucial skill due to its role in guiding both people and AI. It’s similar to communicating with others to convey a desired outcome effectively. It’s paradoxical in a sense, considering our image-centric focus until now, even considering what was the rise of social media. But with evolving technologies, there’s a shift towards language and its incorporation of imagery and concepts, making for new intriguing possibilities; Perhaps we’re on the cusp of another significant shift, or maybe not. Regarding what you just said about the sublime, I’ve recently visited Venice during the Biennale’s opening weekend and visited the Guggenheim Collection. While traditional works by European masters are considered sublime, growing up with instant access to art through the web and installation views, I struggled to connect with that supposed sublime I had to feel. It makes me consider how our perception of it is evolving, especially with monumental new artworks like the sphere. All these topics are maybe what we should be thinking more about, especially in terms of asking ourselves where is art ahead, and what’s the value of it now? As for AI, the debate often revolves around its potential to either end or augment human existence.

My friend once told me about a German philosopher who postulated that something is sublime when it has the potential to kill you, or something like that – He was commenting on the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. I guess the threat of AI destroying society is what makes it sublime, perhaps? For me AI is just like any other tool that an artist has access to, though its implications are a lot more; There’s a lot more going on with AI, and I hope it just means that we can all quit our jobs, eventually, and everyone can just be an artist or whatever.

That for sure would be the good ending.

We’re at a point where I don’t really think art history exists anymore in the way that it used to. I think art is moving closer towards entertainment, something I honestly don’t have a problem with. This is a really obvious example, but think of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms – I had recently heard about a museum de-acquisitioning a Rothko to buy a Kusama Infinity Room. And I think that makes a pretty big statement of what museums’ agendas are. But at the same time, I have never been to a museum like the Broad. I think those are pretty annoying in some regards. The Broad is not even really a museum, it is one man’s private collection turned into a vanity project, it doesn’t represent societal interests as whole- not that any museum really does this, at least in America anyways where there is so much reliance on private funding to run museums. But on the other hand, the Broad has been really good at bringing non-art people into art –The Broad is like the number one selfie Museum, it’s very good at getting people excited about going to the Museum and taking photos of themselves in front of art. And I think it’s important that non-art people are brought into these spaces. I think it’s a positive that art can function as entertainment and have a more mass appeal. I’m not really sure how AI is going to impact that. But if you think about Web 2.0, and all the tools, and things that people all of a sudden had access to so that they could just make cool shit at home –that had a huge impact on visual culture, and I’m sure this trend it’s just going to be so much more extreme and exponentially growing in the next decade. Everything is so weird! The art world has gotten a lot bigger, but its impact on culture has shrunk, maybe. I mean, I still think it’s definitely, in the long game, super influential, but just in terms of visual culture there’s so many other things that it’s competing with now.

I think all these things are connected in a way. Had we been speaking 30 years ago, maybe we would be lamenting that not many people are going to museums, discussing an ideal state of things where everybody should be in museums, have access to culture, and be able to be present in the cultural movement that art produces. But art nowadays, I think, is carving its own territory in a fundamentally new world, and it moves towards entertainment and towards being more mediatic than ever. The question is how do we find the balance between surfing art’s unprecedented mediatic pull and mass appeal, without diluting too much its cultural impact, significance, and role. And what is that role, anyway, today? Because maybe I am thinking of a role that it used to have, and it simply does not possess anymore. And a similar discourse could be applied to cultural operators, curators, artists, and so on and so forth, especially in a future where everyone has potentially access to all the tools to be one. And don’t get me wrong, all of this is an amazing thing, an incredible possibility. But it’s something that can be exploited too, and it has already been, to a certain extent. I don’t know about you, but I’m actually quite hopeful for the future, even though the world from a societal and cultural standpoint might seem a little bit..bleak. I think we are right at the precipice of either a great leap into the future, or, if things don’t work out, something that’s more similar to a good old Orwellian dystopia. What’s your take on the future of culture? Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

I think I’m just an artist that will just continue making stuff no matter what, I’m much more driven by the desire to make things than anything else; If art didn’t exist, I would just find another outlet or something.

There’s this quote on your website: “The Power of Art.” What is that, for you?

I don’t know if I could articulate that, I think it’s something that I just feel. I do believe that there are people in the art world who believe in the power of art, while others may prioritize different powers like money, fame, or prestige. But the power of art, well, the best way I could sum it up is like the first time I saw Jeff Koons in person. Art is this weird, nonsensical place where we create things without utilitarian value, and because of that, it can really be anything. It’s a way to think about the world, a language of its own. Koons, controversial as he may be, has produced some mind-blowing work, like his polychrome sculptures. Seeing those, it dawned on me, when I visited the Louvre and saw medieval polychrome sculpture, it was like, “holy shit.” Koons is tapping into that, but in his own way, like with a woman holding a pink panther stuffed animal or something, you know what I mean? There’s something about art that’s uniquely experiential. While other things, like the Sphere, may serve specific functions, art is different. Even these JPEGs from old books of medieval sculpture that I’ve been using in my work lately, they evoke a particular feeling. I’m not sure if it’s an unconscious formal thing that works by association or something else entirely. I mean this is what I want to try and get to the bottom of in this text I’m writing. How does genre and style affect our relationship with art, because I think that has always been something that I have really tried to tap into in my work. I have always been, seeing images and then being like “why do I have a visceral, compelling reaction to this image versus this other image?” and then trying to apply those things as filters to my own work. The power of art..I still really believe in the power of art, and I think that means a lot of different things, things I am not sure I know how to articulate, really.

Maybe some things are better left untold, un-articulated.

That’s the other thing about art: It doesn’t need to rely on language to communicate effectively. And that’s a big part of its value, impact, and appeal sometimes.

Yeah, because you can develop your relationship with the artwork into something uniquely personal -Wow that was a very romantic on the verge of cheesy thing when said out loud- I guess the less you know, the less language you have pre-absorbed about a work, or an artist, the more you feel like you can develop a spontaneous connection to it without over-intellectualization. So maybe what we are really saying is that the power of art is something that resists articulation. And it’s just there. And maybe that’s what Sublime is: the impossibility of mediation.

Credits

All images courtesy of the artist

Category: Art

Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato

Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

Merlin Carpenter

Can the Inside go beyond the Outside?

Banks Violette

A Kind Of Martyrdom

Romeo Castellucci

A Fight Against Reality Itself

Corbin Shaw

Eurotrash

Entrance Gallery

Foreign & Domestic Gallery

Meriem Bennani

For My Best Family

Simone Bodmer-Turner – Emma Scully

The Fusion of Art and Design: A Discussion with Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully

Parker Ito

Expected Value and the Sublime:
A conversation with Parker Ito

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Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

Can the Inside go beyond the Outside?

A Kind Of Martyrdom

A Fight Against Reality Itself

Eurotrash

For My Best Family

The Fusion of Art and Design: A Discussion with Simone Bodmer-Turner and Emma Scully

Expected Value and the Sublime: A conversation with Parker Ito

Entradas recientes

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Archivos

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Expected Value and the Sublime:
A conversation with Parker Ito