Early this year Sarah Sze’s incredible Sleepers made its way to LA. I saw this one two years ago in Venice, in the haunted brick and humidity of Victoria Miro’s canalside storefront, where it was endlessly captivating. Each fragment of screen—delicate card with rough edges—is suspended on a matrix of filament, the projection landing precisely on the face of each one so that they can function variously as parts of a greater whole or individual images. From the Guardian:

Sleepers is based around video recordings that Sze made of her two daughters while they slept. In part the installation is about what it’s like to be a mother, of watching time slip away as one’s daughters speedrun the accelerated experience that is childhood, and trying to grab on to those fleeting moments of calm and closeness that are a part of raising children. “There’s a kind of real intimacy and tenderness when you see someone else asleep,” said Sze. “Their vulnerability and your own inability to engage in what they’re engaged with. That idea of being there and being completely in a world that you can’t enter.”

Field Trip: Manet and Morisot

On critic Jason Farago’s Instagram I saw this brief note about an exhibition at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco:

Four seasons by two hands. Manet’s Spring (from the Getty), Morisot’s Summer (Musée Fabre), Manet’s Autumn (from Nancy, unfinished), Morisot’s Winter (Dallas): this not-quite-a-quartet of Parisiennes is united for the first time in “Manet and Morisot,” a show about a brother- and sister-in-law who each taught the other how to live a modern life. I’ve got complaints at the margins; I could sound off on what’s missing. But at its heart this is a show about modeling and marriage, and what we learn from friends and family: about how art, in alienating times, affirms we are never alone.

Jason is one of our sharpest living writers on art. In an older piece from the New York Times he wrote about Morisot’s paintings of the seaside with a keen eye for detail. He starts with an analysis of this painting of Morisot’s husband, Manet’s brother, on their honeymoon. His approach is perceptive, sneaking in a lesson on the history of the seaside as a holiday destination, and his close reading of the brushwork around the garden, the curtain, the window frame is enlightening.

At the heart of the composition is the triangulation of painter, husband, society, world; we see the social graph of the relationships that constitute the artist’s life. As the foremost female voice of impressionism, it is interesting to follow shifts in Morisot’s subject matter over time. The structure of the family, of the maternal gaze, appears here in a very specific way. On the right, that’s her sister as a new mother; on the left, that’s her daughter in morning for Eugene. A greyhound rather than a whippet this time, or so we’re told, but who’s to say?

Emily Beeny, curator of the exhibition in San Francisco, walks us through her scholarship in this lecture. Jason’s colleague Karen Rosenberg has the review here. She concludes with a portrait of Morisot by Manet early on in their friendship:

The museum goes so far as to call the work “uncannily reminiscent of self-portraiture,” underscoring that the key dynamic in this show isn’t romance, or even friendship, but something perhaps rarer: recognition.

The exhibition does the curatorial work not only of putting two artists side-by-side and demonstrating influence or comparing styles, but further in evaluating the relationship between them in both directions. Beeny points out that in Morisot’s self-portrait Before the Mirror, she depicts a Manet portrait of her that he had gifted her some decade earlier. You can see it in the upper left, reflected above her head from behind her. It reminds me a little bit of Matisse’s portrait of Meerson, destroyed because its patron found the affair unsavory—and yet immortalized within the Red Studio.

Homework: Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs is on a book tour promoting his new book, Tom Sachs Guide, and on a podcast guest spot he did I was reminded of his infamous line:

Creativity is the enemy.

The idea is that artists are no different from everyone else, and no one gets to rely on inspiration, talent, or genius. Day in day out, you show up and do the work, creating the conditions for the art to emerge.

Book Report: Transformative Experience

In the New Yorker there’s a long profile of L.A. Paul, a philosopher who writes on decision-making. The upshot of it is this:

We all consist of multiple selves who cannot be counted on to agree with one another across time.

We know that we are very bad at predicting how much we will enjoy or appreciate something in the future. From the philosopher’s perspective, this throws our whole account of how we make decisions into doubt. Should we maximize for the pleasure or happiness that our present selves would appreciate? Or try to guess what our future selves might find more compelling? On some level, the mind of a future self is as unknowable as the mind of a stranger in the present.

I’m posting this here because of the real-life experience that brought Paul to these philosophical dilemmas:

The question of whether to have a child was, for Paul, a sort of riddle that illuminated the limits of rationality.

Letter from the Atlantic

Over the Chinese new year holiday Coco and I spent a couple of days in the Somerset countryside. For the second consecutive holiday I left my driver’s license on my desk; we are now on excellent terms with the taxi drivers of Sifnos and Bruton, for anyone who happens to be looking. It turned out to be not entirely impossible without a car. We spent one misty morning walking from the pub to the farm shop, then back to the pub for lunch only to arrive just before the delivery of our cache of cheese and cider.

Our ramble along the hedgerows was bracketed on both sides by the London imagination of landscape. I walked to the train station through the park, passing by the split golden Giuseppe Penone tree that stands outside the Serpentine. And, back in town, a Mayfair gallery walk offered up paintings by both Georg Wilson and Rachel Rose, both of whom are working with the history of landscape painting, particularly around the legacies of enclosure in the British countryside. Georg’s paintings are delightful romps through the bocage, with trees and shrubs taking on humanesque forms and little semi-human creatures peeking out here and there. I would imagine her somehow akin to Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in Hamnet, a forest witch familiar with the medicinal uses of all of the poisonous herbs at her disposal. This is somehow key to the way landscape is working in art right now: it contains a darkness that is both knowledge and threat. Rachel’s paintings take a step back, more about how we see the landscape as it is filtered through history, through time, and through technology. The two small pieces we saw in Pilar Corrias’s viewing room gave off optical distortions of paintings (also from what might be called the enclosure era), visually engrossing effects that merge the materiality of the painting into the slickness of the image. I am often averse to contemporary reworkings of the classics but this is the rare case where her reinterpretations of certain details offer something new that was only implicit in the original.

Speaking of reworkings, Ryoji Ikeda’s weekend in residence at the Barbican took the form not of his familiar electronic sound and black-and-white binary visuals but rather a series of new music compositions for strings, percussion, and choir—entirely acoustic. It was unexpected; I found myself particularly interested in the visual aspects of each piece. In each movement of one work, a pair of violins or violas moved towards and past one another along either side of a mirrored score laid out horizontally across the stage like a scroll paintings. In another, the nine bows of Ensemble Modern traced peaks and valleys, coming together in moments of visual unison.

I also loved the sprawling group exhibition across the new Sadie Coles space, a slew of brilliant painters somehow tied to or inspired by the Oscar Wilde novella Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime. It was the perfect skeleton for a Savile Row townhouse. If I had to pick a favorite it would probably be Laura Owens, with a kinetic cut-out canvas that continues to complete itself. But Celia Paul, Ambera Wellmann, Joseph Yeager, Maggi Hambling—the orbit around the galleries is like picking up new postcards dropped by friends off in distant places.

One surprise came in the form of the Beuys bathtub at Ropac. It is a shocking and unsettling sculpture. There is a suggestion that it could be plumbed into a home, that it is engineered to heat the water inside it and the air around it simultaneously. In maquette it is fastened to a wooly mammoth tooth. It is a thing pulled out of history that nevertheless sits so heavily on the fabric of space-time that it pulls us into a rupture, a chasm of memory and experience and memories never experienced.

The other bracket to my February came in the shape of the Beijing power couple Hu Xiaoyuan and Qiu Xiaofei. Xiaoyuan had an exhibition of new sculpture at Stuart Shave’s new St James space, which as our last stop in the neighborhood was somehow a synthesis of these drifting thoughts on the landscape and the townhouse. Best known for her works that trace the grain in graphite on silk stretched over wood, for the last few years she has been pushing further into found natural objects and the constellations that they can constitute, including in outstanding presentations at Tai Kwun and the Shanghai Biennial that I have written about previously. They are at their strongest when they come with an aggressive level of cohesion and insist on a degree of confusion between what is natural and what is intervention. In London they sat beautifully in nested spirals of gauzy textile.

Prior to the holiday I found myself in New York, where Qiu Xiaofei was opening his first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth. It was an intensely personal exhibition, working through his father’s death. His relationship with his parents has been a source of resonant and productive friction for Qiu: I think that his biggest breakthrough came when he moved from thinking about his experiences as representative of his generation—arguably the happiest generation, experiencing both the golden era of stable socialism in childhood and the boom years as a young artist—and started mining the traumas and dramas that might be unique to him. This group of paintings is achingly good, unveiling death as a specter tucked away just beneath the surface in the anxieties of the everyday, in layers from the mythological to the intimate. Another nested spiral. It is a simple geometry, this exhibition, using four perimeter walls and a single additional wall in the center, but it creates a complex experience of circumambulation, something of a temple effect that asks you to walk round and round as if you were reading murals.

There was a lot of religion in New York: at Amant, Lu Yang built an altar. Of her two video installations, I noticed that people spend huge amounts of time with the one that is driven by AI graphics. I wonder if it’s the irrational speed of transitions, if the viewing experience mimics the TikTok modality of dopamine delivery that we have come to expect from visual culture. Mimosa Echard, just across the street, constructed another kind of cavern of devotion. I think her rooms are like paintings, each wall work a single brushstroke that lends itself to a broader composition. At PS1, Ayoung Kim’s sequence of video installations from her “Delivery Dancer” series is almost the perfect complement to Lu Yang: parallel universes, intersecting timelines, doppelgangers, speed and seduction. A fundamentally unknowable self that is thrust back at us in dangerous ways at unsuspecting moments.

At MoMA, Wifredo Lam’s long overdue retrospective leaned heavily on the Santeria angle. In Asia we have been talking about him for ages as a key missing link in the history of the twentieth century, a vector of radical mobility (like Zhang Daqian, from China to Brazil) that proves the plasticity of the ideas and ideologies in which art variously swam and drowned throughout those years. We also speak often of the archipelagic thinking of the Caribbean, which has a particular application to the intellectual life of Taiwan, so I was thrilled to see Lam’s collaboration with Aime Cesaire on view. Downstairs, Arthur Jafa built a little apse chapel, the great success of which was his pairing of a David Hammons tarp painting with a Hélio Oiticica “Bólide,” two universes in miniature that require the mind to imagine traveling into and through them but reject the body at the narthex.

Many things are looking spiritual to me right now because my life has unexpectedly become a bit more religious. My daughter, who has been a committed communist for the past two years, has become curious about the Eastern Orthodox church, and last week asked me to chaperone her first liturgy. I was shocked by two elements: first, the self-inflicted discomfort of standing in a shadowy, smoky room for three hours, and, second, all of the touching and kissing of the floor, the icons, the bible, the crucifix, the chalice, the priest.

My religion, of course, remains art. Nicolas Party offered one vision of the sublime with his recreations in miniature of past paintings, which have been rightfully much celebrated. And while these are wonderful and stunning in their own right, and demand a fine level of attention wherever they are encountered, whether here in series or alone in an art fair booth, it’s really about the throughline to the show, the titular “Dead Fish”: three paintings proceeding from a Goya still life, all in different materials and dimensions (pastel on linen, 44.93 x 62.71 cm; oil on copper, 15.56 x 17.78 cm; soft pastel on wall, 439.42 x 523.24). Party transcends the conversation around painting with the action of painting.

The other paintings that caught me were on opposite ends of the spectrum and opposite ends of Manhattan: Joan Semmel at the Jewish Museum, and Jia Yifan at 56 Henry on the Lower East Side. With Yifan I have no idea what is happening or where it is going. Every canvas in the space operates in a different register. One of them, this long painting on the left wall, succeeds on a metaphysical level: it is an energy vortex, a black hole that persists in drawing more and more out of the painter, so much so that it swallows the room and suppresses everything around it. With Joan, on the other hand, it is very much about how sticking with a practice continues to open new possibilities over time. I particularly love the headless self-portraits, paintings of her own body composed from the perspective of her head. There is a relationship to social photography here, to how we imagine ourselves as seen by others, that only becomes visible with the advent of the cameraphone.

While I was on the UES I also stopped in at Sterling Ruby and Marguerite Humeau, who are both sculpting from nature to very different effects. Marguerite’s weird cave monoliths birth a new ecosystem through artificial means, while Sterling’s desiccated flowers of ash and steel mark an end to growth and freeze a moment in time.

Icon: Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie’s triumphant exhibition at the Royal Academy has opened. She rather famously took decades off from her practice to raise her children, a lacuna that contributes to the mythology of her success later in life. Last month she told the Guardian about what it meant for her to focus her attention alternately on painting and parenting:

If you are involved, emotionally and mentally, in painting, which obsesses you, your mind is elsewhere. I decided it was better to be around. People say, ‘Are you angry?’ I was never angry, because working with children is full of creativity.

Her son is now her archivist and you get the sense that her family is very supportive of her practice now, which is not always what we find in cases where the painting keeps an artist from the parenting.

Field Trip: Whitney Biennial

One of the highlights of this year’s untitled Whitney Biennial is a cluster of works that take on motherhood implicitly and explicitly. The unexpected pairing at the heart of it is that of Andrea Fraser and her mother, Carmen de Monteflores. Sarah Cascone in Artnet breaks down the relationship.

Andrea contributes these wax sculptures of babies, which allude to the work of the artist as a labor of love, a process of birthing and intimacy. They are described as sleeping and yet they are eerily still, too heavy, their limbs sagging into their plinths. They are described as toddlers and yet they are infantile. There are five of them, like Andrea and her siblings. They are made out of a kind of wax that never fully hardens, so they are technically always melting into the world around them. “There is no escaping the equation of artworks and children. They exist, psychologically, in a continuum of attention and care.”

The babies are complemented by a suite of slickly attractive Nour Mobarak wall works, one of which consists of a cast of her pregnant belly and the rest of which contain materials including blood, breast milk, and semen, as well as a recording of the flows and pulses of the body during pregnancy.

Carmen, for her part, is represented by a raucous painting of brightly colored entangled bodies that dates to the late 1960s. In a conversation between Carmen and Andrea included in the catalogue to the exhibition, she attributes the style to an excess of erotic energy that followed after being so focused on parenting.

Carmen studied art in Paris and New York, then married and, after spending four years as a full-time housewife on a ranch in Montana, kickstarted her creative work again: “I would put the three kids into this big car and drive around. The kids slept in the back, and I sketched landscapes.” She made 100 paintings in five years. “I did as much as I could, mostly during naps. I was very disciplined.” She started working with shaped canvases, beginning with a tightly framed portrait of her own mother and developing into this series of colorful nude bodies, a feminist take on the pop art of the era.

That’s from the entry on Carmen in the catalogue. In the entry on Andrea, Carmen asks the questions: “Maybe … I was too cut off from my being an artist to think I had influenced you.” “Mom, being in your studio is one of my earliest memories. You were working on your paintings, and I was there with my blocks, building things. After you stopped painting, you still offered art classes to neighborhood kids, and I participated in those. And your paintings were always there in the house. I grew up with them, along with your art books.”

Then Andrea gets into the psychodynamics of the family: “On some unconscious level, I believe that I destroyed your creativity … by being born.” And Carmen responds: “In this process that we’ve been going through for the past two years with my paintings, I’ve been feeling very cared for.”

Elsewhere in the exhibition we also get Mariah Garnett’s Songbook, a film that documents the process of connecting with a group of opera singers, experimental musicians, and theatrical artists to reanimate the diaries of Mariah’s great-great-aunt, a pianist and composer who moved to Egypt in the 1920s to write an opera. There is a lot happening here, but it’s another fascinating look at the dynamics of family ties and the creative urge.

Finally, probably the defining work of the Biennial will be Kelly Akashi’s hearth of glass, a recreation of the only part of her Altadena home that was left standing after the fires that decimated parts of LA last spring. It’s a simple and beautiful gesture to the power of home—and to its portability.

Link: What to Do with Little Children at Home

Emily Nell:

So, what should we do with young children at home? The answer is: What you should have been doing for yourself all along. Cultivate a stimulating and rich home life which will provide the warm background for your family’s continued life together. Bring your child along with you in both your duties and creative pursuits.

Sometimes taking the long way home means taking home along with you.

In New York earlier this month I had a phone call with Uncle Dragon, an avatar of the family-friendly AI known as SAGA developed by Ian Cheng’s Opponent Systems. I knew that Ian had been working on something around family and AI—I had assumed it was for children, and was surprised when he clarified that he started out developing it for kids before finding that it was actually the grandparents who spent the most time interacting with it. In my family we’ve had firsthand experience of children turning to chatbots to assuage their loneliness, so I can see how this could get interesting. Ian is particularly focused on how the dragon, who you chat with over Facetime, could become a repository for family lore, passing down networks and connections in a way that is palatable for everyone involved.

Ian is one of my favorite thinkers on parenting and technology in general. He’s done a lot of work with the idea of “worlding,” which is a big topic in digital art and gaming (as well as in marketing), but he’s also asking what it means to look at parenting as a form of world-making (“parenting is programming”). When intelligence is artificial and reality is virtual, growing up might mean passing through an increasingly consequential series of simulations. I love seeing creative people who treat the family environment as a laboratory for projects like this, and can’t wait to see where this project goes.

You can sign up to the waitlist for SAGA here.

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Field Trip: Lucian Freud

My first stop in London was the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which brought together too many of his drawings and not enough of his paintings, albeit with a quirky selection of works that made the exercise rather fun. One of the best paintings, for my money, was his portrait of David Hockney. David also did a commensurate portrait of Lucian, though that unfortunately wasn’t in the show. As two artists we’ve looked at quite a bit through the Nostos lens, this pairing would have been a fun one to revisit.

There was a whole wall of works that alluded to Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), the painting that we have looked at previously for its weird and exuberant depiction of Lucian’s highly unconventional family structure.

Here, it is nestled within a gallery dedicated to works inspired by the classics. By “it,” however, I don’t mean the actual painting—it was sadly absent. What we get instead is a series of preparatory compositional sketches, some of the most interesting drawings in the show. It looks to me that drawing was, for Freud, much more important as a way of thinking through space than as a tool for the close study of the sitter.

The NPG shared quite a bit of background on the project:

Lucian Freud said of Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau): “I took a while setting it up. It took quite a lot of staging. I’d been making drawings with the idea of doing a group painting, which I’d never done … It’s the nearest thing I have ever come to casting people rather than painting them, but they’re still portraits, really. They are also characters. A slight bit of role playing ... but I didn’t try to forget who they were. In the end they are just there.”

The artist gathered together people who were close to him to create the painting, which he regarded as ‘a family portrait of sorts’. Freud required the sitter to be present even when he was painting the background, aware of their impact on the space they occupied.

Sitting on the bed from left to right are Celia Paul, Bella Freud, Kai Boyt and his mother, Suzy Boyt with a girl called Star lying on the floor. The sitters only sat together as a group two or three times. They were also painted individually and sometimes with the person they sat next to. Celia Paul sometimes sat with Bella Freud and Suzy Boyt with her son Kai. Bella mostly sat for After Watteau alongside Celia and remembers the heat, which emanated from two bodies sitting so close together. Star, the little sister of the girlfriend of Freud’s son, Ali Boyt, was a stand-in for the original subject. Star was later described by Freud as “borrowed and bored.”

Poor Star. What I didn’t expect to capture my attention, however, was a wall of whippets. We learn that, in a certain scene at a certain moment in time, everyone had whippets. They are somehow the perfect dog for a draughtsman, all legs and angles. In some of Lucian’s compositions, a whippet curls up in the lap of or against the body of a man, tracing the architecture of affection.

Lucian sketched the head of one of his whippets, Pluto, for his daughter Bella’s brand. In one piece, she’s depicted wearing the Pluto jumper. There is also a Pluto shirt conveniently available in the adjoining gift shop, but it’s not the same graphic. Next month, Christies will sell Pluto’s Grave, a ridiculously sad painting.

The catalogue note for the piece reads like poetry:

Painted in 2003

Provenance:
The Artist.
Bella Freud, London.
The Artist.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2004.

Pluto’s Grave changed hands between father and daughter twice in the year after it was completed. For money, for love, or because it was just too sad to hang at home?

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Projections: Petite Maman

On my second-to-last flight over the weekend, from London to Hong Kong, I had a chance to catch up on a few movies I had been meaning to see. One of them, Petite Maman, was a perfect Nostos piece: a little girl of eight years old, accompanying her mother to clear out the old family home in the wake of her grandmother’s passing, runs into her doppelganger in the woods behind the house. This turns out to be her mother at the same age. They spend a couple days together, building a fort in the woods, eating their mother/grandmother’s mediocre cooking, playing board games, and acting in a play. Everyone—the girls, present-father, past-grandmother—seems to have a tacit understanding of what is happening. The girl and her mother-sister-friend are played by twins. (As opposed to the CGI of the twins in Sinners, which I also finally watched on this flight. Where there is a darkness to the doubling of Michael B. Jordan’s twins, and an inbuilt figure of two forking paths, in the cross-generational twinning of Petite Maman there is hardly a suggestion of the uncanny. Everything occurs as it must, the crossing between life and death a gentle brushing through time rather than a piercing of the veil.)

Petite Maman was Céline Sciamma’s follow up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, another contemporary classic and another meta-object about the relationship of art to life. In that period romance, a painter and her would-be patron, a young woman due to be married against her will, fall in love over the course of a contested portrait. Their affair persists through the formal wedding portrait, through another secret nude, through an additional portrait painted by a third party, and finally through a piece of music that follows them throughout their lives. Art is where love persists, even when life does not permit it.

I found both movies incredibly moving on their own distinct wavelengths. In both the present is remade through fragments of the past, and in both the motivations of the other must remain necessarily opaque. In Petite Maman there is a scene where the girl accuses her father of never telling her what it was really like when he was a child, of only sharing superficial details. It is difficult for us to remember, sometimes, what else there was beyond the details, because the fears and anxieties and pains of childhood can feel so small and remote from here. As often as we wonder at the joys of experiencing the world anew through our children’s eyes, how often do we wish we could meet them on their own level? As much as I hope my daughter can benefit from everything I’ve learned between then and now, do I ever wish that she could see what I was like when I was her age?

A couple weeks ago, waiting in line at a restaurant near my office in Shenzhen, my daughter and I had a big, emotional fight. She was asking for more pets (we already have two), thinking that they would keep her from being lonely at home. I tried to convince her that this was an illusion; that we can feel lonely even when we are with other people, and that she will need to learn to sit with that void and those unpleasant emotions rather than seeking to push them down with company, with distraction, or with material things. Through her tears she resisted, “I’m eleven! How am I supposed to have the emotional bandwidth for that?” There is a lot of childhood loneliness in Petite Maman, and I suspect that encountering a twin is the secret fantasy of many an only child. In a way I suppose it is incumbent upon us to become that twin and see the world through those eyes, if only for a moment—for the length of a movie, every now and again.

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Icon: Sayre Gomez

It’s really fun watching how artists of a certain generation see their practices twist and morph as they become parents (or choose not to become parents themselves but see children enter their lives otherwise). Sayre’s work is best known for a neo-photorealist pathos of the southern Californian urban landscape, the stuff of strip malls and telephone poles and road signs and graffiti, so I was struck by this incoherently adorable pair of sculptures. He explains to Artnews:

My son just turned six, and my daughter will be five in May. I made sculptures of both of them; they’re sit up in the rafters. They’re based on those Precious Moments collectible figurines that I feel like my grandma had when I was a kid. The Precious Moments brand is very openly Christian, which I don’t like, but I’ve also noticed that a lot of different subcultures have appropriated Precious Moments. They’re interesting as blank frames of reference in that way: they’re not recognizable like Disney characters or something, but they do have this familiarity… and some anonymity, too.

I called them Soldier 1 and Soldier 2 (both 2025) because I feel like they’re these figures who are just starting to get their awareness and become outfitted for the world in a way.

In the pre-show press material you get to see them up close, while, in the exhibition on view now at David Kordansky in LA, these two little Soldiers are seated next to each other on a rafter beneath the vaulted gray timber ceiling. Having children doesn’t just mean you suddenly have little people in your world to depict, though that’s certainly part of it. The bigger change is that they open up new points of view, particularly new angles of wonder; a little layer of the sublime that furtively rests over the dust of everything. Some of Sayre’s trademark paintings are trompe l’oeil doors and windows with stickers peeling off of them, so the patches on these garments seem like part and parcel of the practice.

Field: Trip: “Kids! Between Representation and Reality”

This is one of those exhibitions that contains so much of everything that it doesn’t end up as much of anything: children in art, from Titian to Richter. Children as theme is somewhat antithetical to the way I want to think of the relationship between art and family: inaccessible to children, barely interesting to parents, facile to the specialist. It’s hard to imagine what the impetus was for this project, other than a generically easy theme to bring together some loans:

Link: “Meet the Swiss Artist-Publisher Making Children’s Books with Artists like Rachel Harrison and Martin Parr” in Artnews

This is a great profile of Camillo Paravicini, whose Rookie Books imprint is making publications for children with artists like Michaela Eichwald and Monster Chetwynd. I’m obsessed.

I was impressed with the new Taichung Art Museum, including the architecture by SANAA, but also the way that the programming grows along the pathways of the building. The galleries are beautiful, of course, but the life of the building happens in between them. There is a fantastic little reading library in the connecting foyer-bridge area between two of the galleries. And there are delightful little hidden doors that lead out the back ends of several of the galleries, opening into glass stairwells up or down into the rear entrances of other galleries.

And, of special interest to us here, there are little activity areas for children scattered among the connecting bridges between galleries. These areas feel different from the galleries, more casual, more accepting of noise. It would be completely possible to make a quick pass through an exhibition space while children are occupied with one of these activities, or to break up the exhibition visit with stops at these stations.

On my second visit to the Taipei Biennial I brought my daughter with me to stop in at the Children’s Art Education Center in the basement of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, adjacent to Biennial projects by Ivana Basic and Musquiqui Chihying. The current project is “Whispers of Traces,” with work by Hsiao Yu-Chi, Liu Shu-Yu, and Delphine Pouille. The work is all quite strong, but they’ve separated the gallery into a distinct interactive zones and exhibition zones, which for me defeats the purpose of a space like this. You can feel the distinction in the space like an international border: everyone is clustered around the interactive installations, which are designed to a scale of cozy intimacy, and the “proper” works of art sit cold and lonely against higher, whiter walls. Where the differentiation among zones in the Taichung building creates a more inviting experience for families, her the latent lesson is that the art is better left undisturbed.

My winter reading project this year was finally finishing Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire, a super dense book about ethical philosophy in the Hellenistic era. I was first introduced to Nussbaum in college not as a classicist but as a theorist of civic life, and have only come around to her roots much more recently. Her understanding of Hellenistic ethics is about how philosophy emerges in the living of everyday life, and in particular through the mode of conversation and dialogue, and in creating an intellectual framework or understanding of the emotions or the passions. Hence, the therapy of desire:

Part of the sluggishness and carelessness of everyday life as it is normally lived is its failure to completely grasp its own experience and deeds, its failure to recognize and take stock of itself. The Stoic idea of learning is an idea of increasing vigilance and wakefulness, as the mind, increasingly rapid and alive, learns to repossess its own experiences from the fog of habit, convention, and forgetfulness.

It reminds me of something I read that Ian Cheng said in an interview: “The texture of life is a million little pinpricks of change.” Towards the end of the book, Nussbaum focuses on helping Stoicism find space for a more modern embrace of emotional life. As I would have imagined from her political work, she comes down on the side of love and the embrace of friendship, not as something to be feared but as a necessary condition for the life well lived:

Any person who loves is opening in the walls of self a hole through which the world may penetrate.

The most striking chapter, however, is not her conclusion but rather her close reading of Medea, in Euripides but particularly in Seneca, avatar of Stoicism. Together we are enthralled by the passions—pure sublimation—inspired by love, even love at its most jealous and possessive. As Jason says to Medea:

Go aloft through the deep spaces of heaven and bear witness that where you travel there are no gods.

I haven’t read any of the modern retellings of Medea, nor have I ever seen any of the stage adaptations, so I was thrilled to read that Natalie Hynes has just released her own version in No Friend to This House. I heard her speak about Medea on one of my favorite podcasts, The Ancients, just as I was finishing the Therapy of Desire, which has been out for 32 years and my copy of which I picked up in Shanghai years ago. It’s the kind of coincidence that means nothing and yet feels like everything when you’re traveling through the deep spaces of heaven where there are no gods.

While I’ve been reading this my daughter has been swapping back and forth between A Macrohistory of the Communist World and a selection of Russian existentialism. She’s looking forward to our move to Shenzhen, which we’re conceptualizing as a laboratory for actually existing fully automated luxury communism.

Later this week and over the weekend I’m planning on seeing a few exhibitions that I’ve very much been looking forward to, particularly Liang Yuanwei’s new solo exhibition and Yang Fudong’s UCCA show. Liang Yuanwei was one of the first artists I had the pleasured of working with fresh out of school when I was writing the press releases at Pi Li’s gallery. The exhibition “BLDG115 RM1904” consisted of around a dozen paintings from her “Piece of Life” series, each one an attentively worked textile pattern fading gently from top to bottom, one painting on each side of a handful of freestanding walls scattered around the cavernous space. Having the opportunity to sit with her and listen to the way she thought about her work and then try to translate it for the public was one of the formative moments of my early career, along with projects by Qiu Xiaofei and Yang Xinguang shortly before and after. I’ll write a bit about the Beijing exhibitions on Instagram.

I was in Shenzhen for Christmas this year, so I threw a Christmas dinner for friends and family back in Taipei on a random date in January between trips. There is no pleasure like the warmth of brilliant loving people around the table.

It’s a really interesting full-circle moment for me: our building was designed by Ole Scheeren, with whom I worked on a media culture organization in Shanghai in 2010. We were introduced by Phil Tinari, who was in the midst of founding LEAP, the magazine I ended up editing; Phil is now moving to Hong Kong to lead Tai Kwun. He takes that role over from Pi Li, my first mentor in the art world, who is also rumored to be heading to Shenzhen. The gravity to this corner of space-time is real.

We’ll be in those two boxes on the top of that building’s podium, for the most part. I think this will be an exciting development for the Nostos project as a whole. The Museum will incorporate a large art bookstore with a dedicated children’s reading room (art books for children only!) where we’ll host regular events on art for families, and we’re working on a series of play-friendly commissions indoors and out.

It means that this newsletter will shift gears. At some stage we’ll most likely look to incorporate the Lives of the Artists interviews into the Museum’s publishing program. I’ll still save this space to share links and thoughts on the intersection of art and life here every Wednesday, but I’ll also be reflecting more on how I’m balancing the creative practice of planning this museum with my family life, with my relationships with my daughter and parents and brother and partner and friends.

For me and for all of us, this move means major changes. After seven years in Taiwan, which I would call unreservedly the happiest of my life, we’ll be moving to Shenzhen soon. My daughter will be switching to a new school in the summer between sixth and seventh grades (sorry for that), and I’m spending long days in the office. There’s a lot to be discussed and sorted out in the process of giving shape to a new organization, and sometimes unexpected situations need to be handled during the times when I otherwise might have been cooking for family and friends, or walking the dog.

I’ve had the pleasure of working through a management course consisting of lectures by Richard Liu, the founder of our parent company, JD.com. Understanding different corporate cultures and management principles is one of my secret intellectual pleasures. The Netflix culture deck, the Amazon memo system. I learned so much from my time in Thomas Shao’s Modern Media Group office, and turn often to concepts that he first brought to my attention. It’s not so much about productivity or copying directly from a certain company or industry for me. I love what these things have to say about ideology and the principles that we live by. JD.com is a company with almost a million employees, so it’s a whole other level of thinking about management and leadership.

I could share any number of learnings I’ve picked up so far. I love the “sit, stand, walk” principle: respectively, that’s showing up and working alongside your team; representing the organization to external stakeholders; and going out into the field; all forms of respect towards colleagues, partners, and audience.

But the one that really surprised me was the insistence that family comes before work. This is not something you expect to hear in the Chinese tech industry, which is famous for its long workdays and long workweeks. In this culture, commitment to the family goes without saying; commitment to the job is a form of educational work, in showing your children the importance of dedication and responsibility.

The principle that my teams have always followed is to handle the thing that must be handled in the moment. Pick up your kid from school when she’s sick, and pick up the phone on your way to bed when you have an idea you need to get across to someone on the other side of the world. When you work across timezones with creative people, it’s hard to set firm boundaries via the time on the clock. Time management becomes an internal practice. We all have to protect our reservoirs of energy, to give when we are able and to recover and stimulate ourselves when we need it.

This is likely to become a recurring theme here as we get into the logistics of how to balance it all. How close to the Museum do we want to live while it’s still under construction? Should we choose a less rigorous school if it means I can walk my daughter to class every morning on my way to the office? How much tolerance for kids dropping by the office in the afternoon should we build into our team culture?

There was a beautiful profile of Joachim Trier in the New Yorker a couple weeks back, which describes his interest in creating a familial working environment and ties these efforts to early inspirations drawn from visiting movie sets where his father was working.

His new film, Sentimental Value, is one that I’ve been thinking about in terms of the intersection of art and family since the synopsis hit the festivals—it tells the story of two sisters whose estranged film director father tries to repair and then replace his family through film. There seems to be an upwelling here this season: think of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, also, on art as a product of the sublimation of domestic life. But I haven’t gotten to see either of these yet.

The one I have seen, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, lands in a more sentimental corner of this psychological territory, ending on George Clooney with a tear in his eye as a phantasmagoric highlight reel of his art and life comes to a close. “Can I go again?” he asks, “I’d like another one.” And that is of course the drive that motivates creative practice in general, and what separates the proper area of sublimation from the life in which it is lived out. Yes, George, you can have another take. We can shoot the scene again. But you’ll be a little older in the next one, maybe a little more practiced and a little bit more numb. You can go again in life, too, sometimes (all the way until the end, anyway), but the rule is that you have to start where you are. You’re tormented by the missing memories of kids who you didn’t spend enough time with, and so in this next take you’re going to have to play across them as adults instead of children. But that’s okay. It’s still another take. Let’s go again.

There is a collage-like texture to Jay Kelly that I enjoyed quite a bit, a pastiche of references to films, actors, moments in the culture. “What is the fatal charm of Italy? I believe it is a certain permission to be human” (That’s lifted from Erica Jong, whose daughter Molly Jong-Fast published a memoir last year about life with a famous mother and her eventual dementia diagnosis). It’s a wink at the love of cinema for its own sake, no matter how big or unwieldy it gets. As an aside, you get that in Zootopia 2, too, with its excellent Succession cosplay, a little Mos Eisley reference, and—did I hallucinate this?—a Stitch monologue a the end. (I haven’t had a lot of time for cinema outings without my daughter recently, as you might guess.)

With all of the talk about AI hallucinations in the discourse, I catch myself wondering if things I latch onto are hallucinations or real things out there, somewhere, in the slipstream. I think that, psychologically, we are highly suggestible by the terms of the discourse. The way that things are reported and talked about gives us an internal vocabulary for how we feel. It doesn’t mean I’m any more likely to hallucinate connections than I used to be, but because it’s on my mind the pattern emerges more clearly. I noticed this back when we first started talking about the infinite scroll, that we taught ourselves to think in terms of surfaces and depths again in a way that had gone out of fashion.

Attention seems to be the thing that can anchor us to ourselves and others now. Katrina Lainsbury offers a diagram of how attention or what we choose to notice leads into the internal architecture of taste:

INPUT → EXPOSURE
         |
         v
 ATTENTION (What we notice)
         |
         v
 SELECTION (What we save)
         |
         v
REVISITATION (What returns)
         |
         v
PATTERN RECOGNITION (Emerging themes)
         |
         v
     TASTE (Internal architecture)

Internet Researcher

Attention as Currency

Ugh… I’m exhaling as I begin this letter not because I’m unsure of what to say, but because there is too much to say. This is the part of the process most internet researchers rarely admit: the challenge isn’t generating ideas; it’s navigating the speed at which they arrive, and the inevitable tab-collecting that follows…

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4 months ago · 21 likes · 2 comments · Katrina Lainsbury

Recently I came across a really long Spotify playlist that purports to be based on James Baldwin’s record collection. It’s a lot of soul, gospel, R&B. Cozy music for winter working, not necessarily the sort that requires a lot of focused attention, but the kind that might bring a couple degrees of transcendence into a social living room.

I spent a lot of time when my daughter was away over the holiday thinking about an article by Eli Stark-Elster about the spaces children have to play today. The opening statistics are striking: more children my daughter’s age have interacted with a chatbot than have walked to a store alone. That’s crazy to me. That’s not how our family works: when the last block of feta disappears right before dinner, the offending snacker is walking to the store to get more feta. Given the way device culture in schools is evolving, I’ve decided that the best strategy is to integrate conversations about the digital spaces everyday in order to make them feel more real and consequential. Like Eli, I find myself hoping for better online spaces. No one expects absolute safety—there’s a risk in walking to the feta stand too, but that’s the friction that makes life worth living.

Unpublishable Papers

Where Do the Children Play?

I was interviewed about this piece on NPR Weekend Edition. Here’s a link to the interview…

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5 months ago · 109 likes · 25 comments · Eli Stark-Elster

I would love to see this become a dark forest situation pioneered by digital art. Where are the creative, child-friendly sandboxes online? Where’s the next level on top of Roblox?

Metalabel

What's a Dark Forest?

This season on New Creative Era, we’re diving into the world of Dark Forests. But what exactly is a Dark Forest? What’s the origin of the term, and what does it describe…

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5 months ago · 7 likes · Joshua Citarella and Yancey Strickler

There are some things shifting in the digital art space. Feral File has relaunched separate from Bitmark. Outland has relaunched separate from its original parent organization under longtime editor Brian Droitcour. Maybe there’s some space for new projects to emerge here. I hope the framework we’re building in Shenzhen can play a role in seeding some of these experiments, too.

Until then, take the long way home.

Melanie and Me Swimming (1978-9) is a masterpiece of twentieth century painting. Melanie is Michael Andrews’s daughter, an only child, and in the picture she is learning to swim in a dark rock pool while on holiday in Scotland. Part of the Tate collections, the painting is apparently one of the most popular postcard reproductions available in the gift shop. Speaking to The Standard in 2012, Melanie explains why:

“I think people wish they’d had a relationship like that with their father.”

She goes on to describe how her father’s practice intersected with her childhood:

“I don’t think Dad planned the picture. It just evolved out of the situation. When I started school, a few years before, he had started painting a series of fish, titled ‘School’ … I was about to leave primary school, was starting to wear school uniform, and the point about the fish was that they were wearing a kind of uniform; the picture is about my reaching another age. Everything about Dad’s paintings, whatever their subject matter, was to do with social situations and the way that people integrate and interact. That’s what makes them, like him, so enduring and so well-loved.”

I find this absolutely incredible, because while women artists have fought very hard for decades for the possibility of being taken seriously as artists regardless of whether or not motherhood becomes a part of their work, we very really encounter man artists who make fatherhood a core part of the content of his work. With Michael, maybe, we can see that there is a possibility for a loving family life to become constitutive of a practice that is generative, profound, and roundly respected. But it took both time and distance to get there.

The arc of Michael’s work is often understood in relatively simple terms: from the human landscape of early paintings of parties to the later humanist landscapes of Scotland and Australia, and from the groups of friends in those same party paintings to his later schools of fish. Each painting, taken on its own, is so mysterious and enigmatic, so impeccably composed, that it seems impossible to talk about them in broad strokes like this, as if this group of barracuda and that school of butterfly fish were separate projects entirely. And yet, at the same time, within each painting there are universes, spirals of nested configurations. Each painting stands alone, legible in its entirety, a complete key to and representation of a profound practice of looking and seeing. It says everything and lacks nothing, a perfectionist poetic economy of visual language that is crisp and disciplined, allusive and generous.

Some of Michael’s best known works tie into the same social graph that we have visited on several occasions. Colony Room I (1962) pictures Bacon and Freud.

A few years prior, in 1957, he painted a mural after Bonnard that sat over a banquette. When it was removed from the wall and restored, in 2008, it was framed to keep its trademark L-shape.

Michael himself is pictured in Celia Paul’s Colony of Ghosts, the darker figure on the far right blending into the shadowy corner of the table.

This is his position within this historical narrative: he is always the figure on the edge, painting the party if barely partaking, moving into the periphery, slowly traveling towards the space of the austere. He described his work:

“Identity and community—and identity in community; that’s my prevailing preoccupation.”

Melanie and Me Swimming was the first of a “Holiday” series, which went on to include a couple of incredible paintings of Michael and his companions on a deer hunt. While they share a landscape—the same Scottish estate—they are barely recognizable as the same series, and the deer pictures are more often lumped in with Michael’s landscapes of Scotland.

You can see something there, though, that engages with the swimming picture. Two figures alone in a natural landscape, a direct human bond that sits within the space of the sublime, engaged in activity face to face or shoulder to shoulder. Sport as an ethics of engagement with man and nature, maybe. Melanie and Me, as Melanie herself mentioned, also sits easily alongside the schools of fish. It is both-and, simultaneously within and without, a pool and a cosmos, a world unto itself that expands to swallow up darkness around it.

Also a note to say that I’ve shuttered the Nostos Instagram account. I don’t enjoy spending any more time on Instagram than I already do and have no interest in managing a second channel. You can still follow me on my personal account robinpeckham, where I very occasionally post excerpts from Nostos and announce new editions of the newsletter on Stories, but also mostly write about other art things that I’m seeing or working on.

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Link: Lola Clark on Ocula

As fate would have it, we have to start our catch-up week back with David Hockney again, because Ocula just ran this quirky photo shoot with the influencer Lola Clark, granddaughter of Ossie and Celia, who has herself now sat for David twice.

Field Trip: Linda Fregni Nagler at Galleria d’Arte Moderne Torino

Linda is the artist behind an incredible trove of “hidden mother” photographs, a genre of early portrait photography in which mothers would hide beneath sheets of cloth and other devices to keep their babies posed for the camera. She did a book of these images with MACK that is now more than ten years old. I’m hearing great things about the whole exhibition, which looks at her conceptual approach to the photographic archive.

Icon: Amanda Ross-Ho

Amanda’s instantly iconic Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025) is featured in the Hammer’s biennial exhibition “Made in LA,” which is on until March. She has recreated at larger than life size the door to her father’s nursing home room, then decorated them with the banal seasonal decorations endemic to institutional settings. Although there are four doors, suggesting a cycle of four seasons, the decorations are all out of order: a skeleton hangs over a sparkling Happy New Year banner, an Easter bunny sat to one side. I find this work dripping in the pathos of the passage of time on multiple scales.

Field Trip: “Designing Motherhood” at MAD New York

“Designing Motherhood” is one of the best exhibitions ever, full stop. It already has a beautiful book and now its tour has landed it in New York. Working across art, design, and advocacy, the curators have collected an extraordinary series of objects and concepts, a treasure trove of motherhood as generative drive and social product.

Link: The Inaugural Artists & Mothers Gala in Vogue

Artists & Mothers is an amazing American nonprofit that advocates for the inclusion of artist-mothers in the art world. They hosted their first-ever gala at the WSA a couple weeks ago, hosted during the family-friendly hours of 3-6 in the afternoon with children in attendance, and Vogue has the pictures.

More importantly, their 2026 grants are open for application until 2 January. The aim is “supporting artists who identify as mothers at an inflection point in their careers. Eligible to New York City-based artists with children under the age of three, awardees will receive a grant for $25,000 to be used for childcare expenses with the provider of their choice.” Amazing program, application online here.

Field Trip: “After School” at the Carnegie in Pittsburgh

The Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art convenes architects, artists, and educators to look at the built environment of public education, including a bit on playgrounds among other topics. I have never been to Pittsburgh and find a trip unlikely so I am looking forward to seeing the catalogue for this one.

Field Trip: Amalia Pica at Cample Line in Scotland

Amalia is an artist who draws on her experiences with children—her own and others—in a straightforward way without making this a thematic element of the way her practice is framed. As she frames it in this exhibition: “I am someone who works from the world. I don’t make worlds myself. I’m constantly looking around and finding or drawing on things.” Her “Keepsake” series of embroideries are based on the intuitive abstractions her son drew before he was able to think in terms of “pictures.” It reminds me of how Oscar Murillo uses kids’ scratches on school desks to tap into the global unconscious. Amalia has also included a pressed daisy chain of epic scale that really ties the room together. There is a great interview on Studio International.

Field Trip: Show & Tell at the Walker in Minneapolis

It’s another “Exhibition for Kids”! This one is genuinely for kids, not “curated as if,” which makes it a bit surprising that it’s a fall exhibition rather than a summer holiday show, though it’s on through spring so I guess they’ll get the winter holiday visitation. It’s largely a different set of artists than the one we’ve become accustomed to, with an American pop slant in Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, and Jeffrey Gibson. Halfway between an exhibition of contemporary art accessible to young audiences and an educational interpretive display about contemporary art, the exhibition design does a lot of the heavy lifting. I like the idea of a wall designed with apses and niches for encounters with works of art.

Link: The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside on Metalabel

Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective has been gradually advancing this theory that, with the internet either falling apart or being encrusted in a layer of slop, all of the interesting conversations are moving into walled gardens marked by internal trust and external exclusion. They’re developing a project called Dark Forest OS that will eventually be shared for external use. I wonder if there are interesting applications to creative parent groups.

Book Report: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in Vittles

Francesca Wade, author of the new Gertrude Stein biography, shares how the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Alice’s cooking in general fit alongside the creative practice that was Gertrude Stein’s home and studio.

On the subject of Vittles, I’m not sure I ever shared their wonderful six-part kids supplement on food and children.

Vittles

The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook: An Audacious Literary Experiment

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Last week, we announced Issue 2 of our magazine – titled ‘Bad Food’ – which goes to print this week. We’re selling through the issue quickly, so if you wish to guarantee a copy, pre-order the magazine now. If you order before 1 December, you will receive it for a discounted price, with an extra discount for paid sub…

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5 months ago · 82 likes · 7 comments · Vittles

Projections: “Children’s Ways of Knowing” at the New School

Excellent screening program at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics that acknowledges how “children demonstrate forms of intelligence rooted in embodied experience and collaborative practice, ways of knowing that challenge what typically counts as intelligence.” Aside from Tiffany Sia’s A Child Already Knows, which wonders how aware a child might be of the political winds that buffet everyday life, it also included Aslı Baykal’s project on film photography workshops in conflict zones and Adelita Husni Bey’s Postcards from the Desert Island, a sympathetic retelling of Lord of the Flies, but radically aspirational.

Link: How overfunctioning keeps mothers trapped at home in Mad Woman

Amazing essay by the writer Amanda Montei on the relationship between motherhood and creative practice. “Within the institution of motherhood … sacrificial overfunctioning is praised as the minimum requirement for goodness.” And:

We tend to think women are only worthy of creativity, of that extreme act, and frankly of having public lives, when they have shown themselves to be very very good in other more traditionally feminine areas.

Mad Woman

How overfunctioning keeps mothers trapped at home

It’s been a while since I have written here about writing, but I am winding down a memoir class at Stanford, and coming up on the final pages of my messy first novel draft, so it feels like it’s time for a check-in. I have been thinking a lot about how to make space for a creative life, and have been feeling particularly good about how I have showed up, day after day, devoted to my current project, even when I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing, or why, or how…

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5 months ago · 56 likes · 10 comments · Amanda Montei

Projections: Artists in Residence at IFC

Amazing film written and directed by Katie Jacobs that just premiered at the DOC NYC film festival. Katie interviews Lois Dodd, Eleanor Magid, and Louise Kruger, who built a home together as single mothers and built incredible careers. She also interviews their children! It is super moving, a witness to the hope and perseverance that builds the kinds of creative lives that would seem doomed to impossibility from the outside. Best of all, before 30 November you can pay USD 15 to stream the film online as part of the festival.

Link: For the Children of Performa, the Sound of Art is a Buzz and a Growl in the New York Times

Lina Lapelyte, who wrote the incredible opera Sun & Sea, is participating in Performa this year with a piece of choreography that involves 230 third- and fourth-grade children. I haven’t seen much from the performance itself, but Will Henrich’s notes from his visit to the rehearsals is a great read:

“There are ways of creating a setup where nothing is a mistake,” Lapelyte explained. By building in improvisation and making the subversion of expectations the work’s very subject, Lapelyte ensures that she can declare whatever happens a success. Another key ingredient is to be very clear about the instructions you do give, Lapelyte said. At one point, reprimanding a group of boys who’d started chatting instead of practicing animal noises, Cooke told them sternly, “Growling or silence, please.”

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We’re adding that to our list of new mottos here at Nostos. Growling or silence, please!

But today I want to look at how one artist in particular handles the third degree of social portraiture: the double portrait, the picturing of a couple, the attempt to triangulate the zero-distance of the kiss from an external (if entangled) point and imagine how one lover sees another.

I am speaking of course of David Hockney, whose Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) was sold by Christie’s for USD 38m on Monday. This was the first in a series of double portraits that Hockney would execute over the course of a decade, and one of only two set in Los Angeles, despite the Californian breeze that we often assume to sense in so much of his work. Specifically, this one is set in the titular couple’s home on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica, where Don Bachardy continues to live today. He is now 91. Christopher Isherwood was 30 years his senior, and passed away in 1986. Their home, immortalized in the painting, is remembered as a meeting point for several generations of Californian intellectuals, from those who fled Europe alongside Chris in the late 1930s and early 1940s to the Hollywood milieu who would become the subjects of Don’s portraiture practice over the ensuing decades.

Don looks straight ahead. Chris crosses his legs, head turned to face Don. David has written that this is the pose they assumed whenever he asked them to relax. They seem so firmly anchored in their armchairs, in perfect parallel, a balanced universe of two. While they face different directions, their bodies are much more at ease with each other, much more evenly treated than most of the couples we will encounter.

Hockney was 30 when he painted this double portrait, and looks shockingly childlike in photographs from the 1960s. Don would have been just a couple years older, Chris—one of Hockney’s points of entry to the LA scene—three decades beyond that. When David arrived in LA for the first time Chris would have just published A Single Man, the best-known of his American novels, beloved for its picture of a quotidian picture of an intellectual romance. He was, of course, already known for Goodbye to Berlin, the source material for Cabaret and one of the defining novels of Weimar Germany. Don drew or painted a wide network of friends and sitters, and recently had a retrospective, “A Life in Portraits,” at the Huntington. It closed in August.

One of the most heartrending things I have seen is Don’s book Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood. It is utterly overwhelming. As Chris lay dying of cancer, Don captured him on a daily basis in black acrylics on large sheets of watercolor paper, ending the series only after he died. They had spent 33 years together, from Valentine’s Day of 1953 to January 4, 1986. They shared a life and a death, and the home they made continues to be Don’s. So what we see in David’s double portrait is a place, a time, a love, but also three creative practices balanced against one another, each relying on the other two in subtle ways.

Katherine Bucknell has edited a volume of correspondence between Chris and Don, published as The Animals. The title refers to their pet names for another: Chris was Dobbin, a “stubborn workhouse,” and Don was Kitty, a “playful feline.” Katherine has further adapted the letters for audio, in parallel with an audio adaptation of the play A Meeting by the River, which Chris and Don themselves adapted together from Chris’s last novel. I love this nested work of adaptation. It reveals how creative practices, when set alongside one another with an eye towards openness and connectivity, can make space for another as well as allow space for further hybrid forms.

David’s second double portrait was American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), also completed in 1968 and also set in LA, in the sculpture garden of the visibly modernist home of the titular couple. Fred and Marcia were incredibly important to the foundation of the LA art scene, hosting in their home a series of important lectures that introduced modern art to a circle of people who would become major collectors and patrons. After their divorce, in 1979, Marcia donated her half of their collection to the nascent MoCA and became a founding trustee. Her brother was Norton Simon, who built up the Hunt’s Foods empire and endowed an LA museum of his own. Fred, who made his money through car dealerships after working for Hunt’s, set up a foundation for part of his collection in his home in Holmby Hills (the neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Bel-Air), though I am unsure if the home that now houses the foundation is the same home where David painted him and Marcia.

Marcia appears as the matriarch, facing forward in a bright pink dress that pops off of the seafoam greens of the poolhouse. Her face is almost grotesque. Looking at David’s photographs and sketches you can see what he did: a shadow from her bangs falls across her right lip, and he has integrated this lighting effect directly into the flesh of her cheek. He has used one set of photographs for the overall composition, and another set of close-ups for the faces. Fred faces towards Marcia but seems not to see her, gazing off into the distance. He is stiffly suited. His fist is clenched.

It is often remarked that, in comparison with other couples in the series, the Weismans appear rather flat, or even that David seems to prefer the Henry Moore and the William Turnbull and the totem pole to Fred and Marcia themselves. Apparently Marcia originally asked David to paint Fred, but he turned down the commission and offered to paint them as a couple instead. He worked from photographs. The couple did not particularly like the outcome, and sold the painting. If Chris and Don is a portrait of a relationship, American Collectors is a portrait of a marriage. It is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Those two paintings were done before the summer of 1968, when David returned to Europe and spent the summer with his lover, Peter Schlesinger, who then began studying at Slade. (Don studied at Slade in 1961.) During their summer trip they visited Tony Richardson’s home near Saint-Tropez, and photographed the infamous swimming pool that will soon be making a star turn in our tour of the double portraits. But first we stop in on New York. In December, 1968, and into early 1969, David was working on Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott.

Actually, his first double portrait of Henry and Christopher was technically a lithograph he made in 1967. Scrawled in the corner: “Henry and Christopher in the Chateau Marmont Hotel, Hollywood.” Some of David’s sketches and prints are wonderfully weird. Henry and Christopher are connected at the mouth by an umbilical rainbow, a Frank Stella pasted into the space behind them.

Henry Geldzahler was one of the key curators of the era, first at the Met (where his “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970” would become a pivotal exhibition just a couple years later) and then later, after the painting, as the culture commissioner of New York City. There is a Warhol film of Geldzahler smoking a cigar over the course of more than an hour. Henry and David met through Andy. Like Chris (Isherwood), Henry left Europe for the States on the eve of World War II. Henry and Christopher is set in Henry’s apartment on seventh avenue.

Christopher Scott is described in most literature about the painting as a painter and model. Most of the scholarship on this painting focuses on David’s friendship with Henry. I don’t think that’s very fair, but I can’t find much about Christopher. He may still have his coat on, but this is still a double portrait. David apparently drew him at least one more time, but an image is not forthcoming. There is a Christopher Scott who helped found the Ridiculous Theater Company with Charles Ludlam in New York in 1967. The same? Ridiculous Theater Company was “campy and outrageous,” and its Scott had a background “in the fine arts,” and was an “advisor and consultant to art and cultural agencies such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Commission of Cultural Affairs.” That’s Henry’s CV. I say the very same Chris. I couldn’t tell you why he has been elided from the discourse, but he appears in the raincoat again in a studio photo almost ten years later.

Back to the painting. Henry sits directly in the middle of a voluptuous pink couch, one leg crossed, eyes looking straight out towards the viewer. Christopher has just entered the room from the right. As with Fred, he is depicted in profile looking towards his partner without seeing him. He has not yet taken off his raincoat. There is shadowy evidence of reworked paint around his face, as if he is new to the apartment, new to the scene, new to the painting, potentially on his way back out at any moment. The picture last sold at Christie’s for USD 49.5m.

In the fall of 1969 David was best man at the wedding of Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark in London, having spent the summer with much of the same cast of characters, including Henry and Peter, with another stop at the swimming pool of Le Nid du Duc as well as a visit to the town of Vichy. He spent much of 1970 working on Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, a double portrait based on photographs and sketches he made on their trip the year before. Around this time we begin to see evidence of David’s fascination with the optical device. The reflections in Henry’s glasses in Henry and Chris, which the painter compared to Van Eyck. In Le Parc it is a horticultural device: a formal garden planted so that two skew rows of trees create a forced perspective, giving an impression of depth that makes the lawn look larger than it actually is.

We see two figures from behind: Peter and Ossie, two halves of the two great double portraits to come. A third, empty chair has something of a conceptual remit. David describes its aim:

I wanted to set the three chairs up for the three of us … then I’d get up to paint the scene. That’s why the empty chair is there—the artist has had to get up to do the painting.

There is something in this logic that is highly description of the compositions of the double portraits overall. The artist has arrived in order to do the painting, but in arriving something in his sitters departs. That, perhaps, is the nature of portraiture.

Throughout 1970 and into the beginning of 1971, David was organizing his photographs and sketches to execute the next double portrait: Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. That would be Mr. Clark (Ossie), Mrs. Clark (Celia Birtwell), and a white cat (who turned out to be named Blanche; Percy was another cat, not pictured, but David preferred Percy in the title). At this time Ossie Clark was the absolute star of the London fashion world, and Celia Birtwell was the textile designer whose material he designed for. It is another example of the shared artistic impulse, here set off by the series of wry jokes that David inserted into the painting. Their creative practices went hand in hand throughout the 1960s and early 1970s until their divorce in 1974 due to violence, drugs, and infidelity. They had two sons together.

The painting is set in the bedroom of their flat at Notting Hill Gate. Ossie is seated, sprawled lazily across a Cesca chair, looking towards the viewer at an angle. His bare feet are buried in a thick sheepskin rug. There is a cigarette in his hand. The cat sits on his lap, facing towards the window behind. On the other side of the window, Celia stands erect on the same rug, hands on her hips. Behind her on a wall hangs an etching from David’s take on “A Rake’s Progress” (the piece titled Meeting the Good People, to be precise), a wedding present within a wedding present. Celia remained one of David’s most constant portrait sitters for years to come. Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy is today in the collection of the Tate.

David Hockney and Peter Schlesinger broke up in Cadaqués in October, 1971, and in the year following the completion of Mr. and Mrs. there were no double portraits. There were a couple individual portraits, but mostly there were still lifes and empty studio corners. Many, many unpeopled paintings, many lonely paintings, including perhaps my favorite Hockney, the red pool ring floating alone in the vacuum. David and Peter met in the summer of 1966 at UCLA (David teaching, Peter studying), their relationship spanning the incredible period of productivity that we have covered so far, including the sublime 1967 high notes of A Lawn Being Sprinkled, A Bigger Splash, and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool as well as the double portraits. There’s a great movie about these years. It’s also called A Bigger Splash.

The next double portrait, of course, was Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), completed in 1972, which the market holds to be the best of the bunch. It sold for USD 90m in 2018 and now belongs to the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen. David has said that he arrived at the composition by accident, when photographs of Peter and the pool ended up juxtaposed next to one another on his studio floor. In April of 1972 David flew back to France to see the pool at Le Nid du Duc again, photographed Peter some more, and then in May started the painting in earnest in London. It took a while, removing and replacing the background and ultimately repositioning the angle of the pool in relation to the picture plane. Although it’s the terrain of Saint-Tropez, one can’t help but see some of California in it. He is often quoted recounting all the sparkling blue pools he saw throughout the hills as he made his first approach into Los Angeles from the air.

In many ways it is an outlier among the double portraits. The light is totally different. The figures both face each another. But, weirdly, the one underwater isn’t anyone at all. That’s Peter standing at the edge of the pool on the right, fully dressed, looking towards someone underwater. But there’s no referent there. David has said the underwater figure represents some future lover (some have suggested, more specifically, Eric Boman). Peter posed for it in Kensington Gardens, so it was clearly an amicable breakup once they were out of the moment in Cadaqués.

Peter went on to develop a practice in photography and, later, ceramics, and built a home together with Eric, also a photographer, on Long Island. They met in early 1971 at Mr. Chow in London—by showing up early to a dinner party that David turned down—and spent 51 years together. A bit like Don Bachardy’s portraits, Peter’s photographs are the perfect social media record of an era that preceded the medium. The ceramics are cool too. By now it must be clear how much I dislike the imbalances that are often assigned to these paintings and the people in them. “Then-boyfriend,” “friend of the artist,” “muse.” I think they’re all very hurtful terms for people who clearly spent meaningful moments of time supporting one another, loving one another, amusing one another, and, yes, inspiring one another, too. To this day, Peter is remembered in a Portrait of an Artist, not a Portrait of a Muse or a Portrait of a Lover. It’s a portrait of two artists, really. Even three.

While Portrait of an Artist was completed in a haze of emotion, David was working on the next double portrait at the same time, George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, and found it equally frustrating. By 1973 he abandoned it and proceeded instead with Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky, which is perhaps even weirder than American Collectors. In the fall of that year he moved to Paris, and he became particularly interested in the architectural spaces he encountered there—see all of the balconies and windows he painted in those years, as if he took the center of Mr. and Mrs. and turned it into a whole genre investigation. In this case, Shirley and Gregory were American artists who moved to Paris in 1954, and David was struck by the arrangement of their tiny adjoining studio rooms: his, being on the inside, required him to walk through her space to exit. The window seat of studios. Again David focuses in on the little inequities of a relationship, and again it is reflected in the composition.

Both figures are seated, but they sit with a wall between them. Gregory sits on a bed with a drafting table in front of him, pen in hand, lit directly from above by a hanging lamp, facing outwards towards the viewer. On the other side of the wall, Shirley sits in a chair facing away from him, looking off to the right into the garden, her gaze echoed by a little Yorkie immediately in front of her. There is a painting, one of her own trademark mottled abstractions, on the wall directly behind. In order to show us this scene, composed as it is, David has replaced what should be a wall with a curtain, and then pushed the curtain all the way to the left, exposing a bare frame along the top and right edges of the rooms. Gregory is lit dramatically, while Shirley may as well be outdoors in California. They appear as if on a stage, actors in a play about to describe the portrait of their marriage. Shirley wears an incredible pair of heels, lacking only her oversized black sunglasses.

As a painter, Shirley had perhaps the bigger career—the light reached her sooner—but died young at the age of 55 in 1980, while Gregory survived until 2009. Her career tracked the transition from abstract expressionism to minimalism, as well as one from the school of New York to the school Paris (though Roberta Smith called her “not a very original artist”). He was a printmaker and typographer, and edited and published her journals after her death. Again, the shared creative practice, a product of two lives lived side by side, each one absorbing and reflecting aspects of the other.

David returned to George Lawson and Wayne Sleep in 1975 before abandoning it for good. Looking at the preparatory sketches and early photographs, he was clearly bothered by the handling of the large blank wall space, inserting and removing a pile of books and working over the surface repeatedly. During this phase his painting overall turns increasingly away from the naturalistic moment that encompassed the double portraits, and you can feel the energy for these kinds of large-scale social projects petering out. It looks like a dull painting at first, especially in comparison to the luminosity and theatrical eccentricity of the preceding pieces. But I think that blank space is a damn fine wall, dappled in a nasty London light.

George Lawson was an antiquarian book dealer and Wayne Sleep a star ballet dancer. It is set in George’s flat at Wigmore Place. This one only looks like an age-gap relationship—George was only six years older. He just dressed funny. But the composition remains unbalanced. George sits, of course, but here it is his gaze that avoids the viewer. Although positioned at center, he looks off to the left. Dressed formally in a suit, his right hand holds down a key on a clavichord. Wayne, by contrast, stands casually in the doorway, leaning against his elbow in tee shirt and bellbottoms, his eyes fixed on his older lover. In 2016, George described how he could still hear the G that he played during the sitting.

It was David who had introduced George and Wayne, giving him something of a special angle on the triangle of the picture, as with his role as best man to Ossie and Celia. George and Wayne dated in the early 1970s and maintained a lifelong friendship until George died a year ago. David donated the painting to the Tate in 2014, apparently finally deciding it was finished, and in 2015 George and Wayne did a goofy, charming photo shoot in front of the painting together, which makes me want to cry almost as badly as Don’s drawings of Chris on his death bed. I wish everyone in these portraits had the same chance. I will begrudge no one the opportunity to recreate Portrait of an Artist on the edge of a pool, and hope Celia gets to hold the cat next time.

There is copious scholarship on the double portraits as a body of work, and I can only summarize it in broad strokes here. As early as 1976 David himself agreed that in nearly all of them we find one figure rooted in space and another somehow passing through; we find them looking in different directions, creating a dynamic pattern of movement that passes from one figure to the other and then back to the viewer and the phantom of the artist. One compelling reading by Marco Livingstone sees in this dynamic a parallel with the Annunciation, which I find beautiful: the presence of the lover in one’s life as a kind of divine visitation. In their poses and architectural configurations, Marco reads “the sense of struggle between the impulse to connect with another human being and the need to remain separate.”

That would mark the end of the cycle of double portraits, more or less. Many of David’s circle continue to appear in his paintings, Henry and Celia most often, as well as others we have not yet had the opportunity to meet, like Gregory Evans.

But there is one final picture that both completes and breaks the series: My Parents. It occupies a special position because it is square, rejecting the logic of the room-like rectangular containers that have made space for all of these off-kilter bohemian relationships. And because David started the piece in 1975, including a self-portrait in a mirror positioned between his parents, then destroyed it and started fresh, leaving himself out for the final version in 1977. In the early stages he reflected:

It’s a very traditional thing to do, I know, painting one’s parents, but I think it could be a lot more than just that—their predicament, their lack of fulfillment, the desperate-not-knowing what they could have had out of life. And their relationship with me.

This painting, too, is in the Tate collections.

I will close with two pieces that do not belong to the double portraits as a series, but bookend this experience in time. The first is the only work by David to actually be titled Double Portrait. Dating to 2011, it is an iPad drawing of two pairs of scissors. Different colors, different sizes, still facing slightly away from one another.

The second is In the Dull Village and Two Boys Aged 23 or 24, which I believe to be the first double portraits that David executed. They belong to a series of drawings known as “Illustrations for Thirteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy,” though in fact the published edition consists of twelve etchings for fourteen poems, edited and translated by the poet Nikos Stangos.

It is quite something to realize that David Hockney, too, is a Cavafy fan, although he appreciates the homoeroticism where I savor the yearning for a lost home. Nevertheless, looking at his position on the outside looking into these couples—functional or dysfunctional, lasting or already falling apart, balanced or tortured—I believe that these things are not so far apart. One of the poems in the illustrated edition reads:

When he went out in the evening         (as it happened
he had to get something to eat)         to the coffee house where
they often went together         the squalid coffee house
where they often went together—          a knife in his heart.

There is a beautiful 1916 Klimt coming to market as part of the Leonard Lauder collection at Sotheby’s on 18 November, the portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a beshawled young woman poised like a mongoose on the plain. Like all Klimt portraits she is striking in costume and countenance as well as context. Reading into the backstory of the painting, we learn that it was commissioned by Elisabeth’s parents, Serena and August, “the artist’s most important patrons,” according to the catalogue note.

An earlier 1899 portrait of Serena herself is in the collection of the Met, a pretty picture that pales in comparison to the complex geometries of shawl, cape, and field, across which figures from Chinese design marshal themselves in salute. Photographs of Klimt’s studio from this era show the minimalism of Secession/Werkstätte furniture offset by the rich symbolism of Chinese court painting and folk art, an impressively cosmopolitan juxtaposition that makes its presence felt in this Jewish society portrait, too.

The story of Klimt’s relationship to the Lederers is significant. When his work on an official state commission attracted criticism, the family acquired the work from him directly and paid back his honorarium; a series of further acquisitions and commissions followed. Klimt died in 1918. During the Nazi takeover of Austria, Elisabeth was divorced, her father died, and her mother went into exile. Together, Elisabeth and Serena testified that Elisabeth was the biological daughter of Klimt, giving her a claim to Aryan blood. (By most but not all accounts this was not actually the case. The artist is understood to have had as many as sixteen illegitimate children, four of whom he recognized during his lifetime.)

One of the ongoing fixations of our research here is on the relationship between the artist and the sitter, and this may be one of my favorite stories yet. We have seen with Freud, Rodin, and many others how the aesthetic attraction between artist and sitter can become sexual and/or romantic, sometimes violently so. In other cases, certainly, the pairing of patron and artist has resulted in affairs of the heart. In this case, however, it is an intertwining of artistic lineage and family genealogy: Klimt did indeed give art lessons to both Serena and Elisabeth, and a part of Elisabeth’s case to the regime was her artistic talent. She reinvented herself as an artist, perhaps as part of the ruse and perhaps as a way to move through her divorce and the death of her son.

Oddly, the party functionary in charge of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, was a fan of modern art in spite of the official dictum of the regime, appropriating works from the Jewish families at his pleasure and celebrating Klimt with a 1943 exhibition at the Belvedere. As portraits of Jewish society, however, the Lederer portraits were excluded. John Geddes has a delightful take on this moment in history, tying together Klimt and Carl Moll, a Secessionist who became an ardent Nazi supporter, and his stepdaughter, the formidable Alma Mahler, who we will have to catch up with separately in another essay.

Many of these social structures were treated in the 1917 Neue Galerie exhibition “Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900-1918.” That show brought together both Elisabeth and Serena with the two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, some of Klimt’s most celebrated. When I started reading into the stories about Klimt’s relationships with his other sitters, I quickly landed on Emilie Flöge, with whom he kept up a correspondence and companionship for 27 years. She was the younger sister of his brother Ernst’s wife, and they became something of a blended family after Ernst died unexpectedly.

Klimt and Emilie were partners in public life (on the Viennese ball circuit) and in their creative practices: Emilie became the creative director of her family’s couture operation, and dressed many of the women of Klimt’s portraits, while many of the patterns that would become his signature come from her work. He sometimes designed the dresses she would create for his sitters. The creative dialogue between paint and textile is evident in just about every mature Klimt painting. I imagine that Charlie Porter’s Bring No Clothes would find a beautiful sequel in this epoch of Vienna.

Klimt was not much of a writer, but he wrote some 400 letters and notes to Emilie, which constitute the bulk of the visibility we have into his thinking about his own life. There is nothing whatsoever about the romantic side of their relationship, if there was one at all. Irina Olikh called it an “unsolved formula of love.”

He gave financial support to some of his paramours, at least those who were professional models rather than those who were his patrons, and wrote perfunctory notes inquiring after the health of his children during their younger years, but appears to have lost interest as they matured.

But speaking of children. The Neue Galerie exhibition also included the Portrait of Mäda Primavesi (1912), which I will end on. Mäda was nine or ten years old when she sat for the portrait, the daughter of another important patron couple (in fact, the core patrons of the Werkstätte) and she’s the most badass sitter of the bunch. Her portrait was sold by the family early on in the upheavals of occupation. She settled in Canada, where she founded a children’s hospital, and sold Klimt’s portrait of her mother, believed to be lost until it came to auction, when she prepared to put her estate in order in 1987. The New York Times tracked her down, then the last surviving of the women of Vienna’s golden age, and she recalled the parties in which Klimt wore Emilie’s flowing robes. She said that Klimt was “awfully kind” when she became impatient over the course of the “200 sketches” he made in preparation for the portrait. He left her an inscription in an autograph book: “The day is like night unless I see you. I am happier if I dream about you.”

That’s much more than any of his biological children ever got, at least in writing. Better a muse than progeny—some of the artist fathers seem to have done their best parenting posthumously.

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Book Report: Things Become Other Things

Before Substack exploded and became what it is now, it was Craig Mod’s newsletter practice that opened my eyes to the email format as a serious literary endeavor, not just a way to market what one might be doing elsewhere but rather a way to sit with readers where they are, in the domestic space of the inbox, and have conversations of some profundity and utility. He is one of the sharpest thinkers I have had the pleasure to read, knowledgeable on everything he touches, both because he is patient and caring enough to put in the research on whatever field he writes about and because he is daring and vulnerable enough to position himself in those spaces, willingly learning in equal parts from his body, his mind, and their shared experiences of the greater world beyond. Subscribe to his newsletters.

Craig’s main methodology is walking. He has group walking projects, which necessarily involve much more conversation and social interaction, both within and external to the group, and he has solo walking projects, mostly in Japan, often over the same routes. He does scary things like talking to strangers just for the sake of the conversation, often asking to photograph them. His walking memoir, Things Become Other Things, is a record of one such solo walk along the pilgrim trails of Japan’s Kii Peninsula. In it, he makes cultural observations about the sense of abundance and security he has found in the Japanese social fabric, in stark contrast to the hollowed-out post-industrial towns of his youth. Near the closing pages of the book, he writes about the children he encountered on the Kii Peninsula:

Even here, even on this peninsula where youth is vanishing, on weekday afternoons, toward the end of a long day of walking, the elementary-school kids are let out and roam about. Village or town or city, makes no difference, elementary-school kids walk as elementary-school kids walk. They have nowhere to be and nowhere they want to be but in the walk. Supple bodies bending and twisting as they shuffle forward, jumping, crouching low, pushing one another over, bouncing back up. They walk, and don’t even know it as walking. In this way, they are ideal walkers, and have found the true walk. Their walk is a walk of peace, of a collective social decision to allow it to happen. Eyes are on them. Eyes peering out from behind hedges and eyes beside pushed-back curtains. Eyes attached to adults who care, who have the yoyū [abundance] to care, who watch at a distance. Their freeness of walk is a product of a cascade of this support. The kids don’t know this but they feel it, show it in every little yelp. They bump into one another and speed up and slow down. They run alongside rivers with their umbrellas held behind, like miniature fighter jets landing on aircraft carriers surrounded by dandelions.

It’s a beautiful piece of writing and a beautiful sentiment. Craig writes a lot about his own family background and I, as a nosy reader, follow a lot of his interviews and other appearances as well. In a couple podcasts earlier this year he told the story of how he recently tracked down his birth mother, and certain aspects of his personality and way of being in the world clicked into place. He talks about his adoptive mother, too, about how she saved up money for college tuition before she knew how badly someone like him would need to get out of their environment. To think that this is what we are, formed in some directions before we are born by things we cannot know and cannot explain, and then molded in other ways by the very tangible, circumstantial boundaries that we push up against on a daily basis.

Living with awareness might be little more than accepting that, just as we are shaped by these sets of things, we are responsible for the accidental, incidental, and intentional shaping that we give to things in turn. This isn’t exactly what Craig means by “things become other things,” but it also isn’t alien to his project. He dedicates the book to a child who is his daughter in mind if not in law:

Her life force cracked open my heart in a way that allowed me to go back to him, to revisit what we had and didn’t have as kids.

One of the greatest gifts we get from our children, wrapped as it is in Pandora’s Box, is the opportunity to ride the elevator of experience back to our own childhoods, to relive, rethink, and relearn the lessons we missed the first time around.

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Project: Cindy Chao

Last weekend my friend Yuting and I put together a creative workshop for children in the context of an exhibition by CINDY CHAO, the extremely high-end art jeweler whose pieces are de rigeur in collecting circles across Taiwan and China. This season, Cindy invited the artist Yu Wen-Fu to work with her on the space, and he used his signature bamboo material to create a series of rectangular volumes and cylindrical hubs in which to display Cindy’s jewelry. One of Cindy’s ongoing concerns is the feather, and in her newest body of work she has worked wonders with titanium settings to create feathers and leaves that are truly sculptural objects in the round.

For our workshop, Yu proposed combining feathers and bamboo: the kids were invited to cut duck feathers to create little winter dioramas. It was a lot of work and all of the parents had to pitch in on the feather-snipping assembly line, but the results speak for themselves. Bringing the kids around the exhibition space made for a strikingly different atmosphere, and I dare say asked all of us to look at the work with fresh eyes. The best part for me was watching how each kid took their project in a different direction: my daughter, ever the contrarian, perched her figurines on the tops of her trees and face-down in the snow. Our neighbor, the daughter of a boutique owner and a theater producer, researched what everyone else was doing before going her own way and sending her figurines along a path into the forest.

My photographs of Cindy’s jewelry are too amateurish to do it any justice by reproducing here, but you can take a look on my Instagram.

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Links: Rachel Cusk and Catherine Lacey

Two beautiful recent short stories from the trenches of autofiction, two of my favorite writers thinking about what it means to inhabit a life from the perspective of another:

“Project,” in the New Yorker

Rachel Cusk: “It might be said that creative people were people whose childhoods hadn’t ended. There was no particular basis for thinking this, other than the fact that most children created things and most adults didn’t. In a way it was terrible, the idea that childhood might not end.”

“Coconut Flan,” in the New Yorker

Catherine Lacey: “She tried to imagine the sound of someone putting her lost keys, their found keys, into the lock and turning the knob and entering her home. She thought so much about this possibility, with such focus, that she was quite sure she knew exactly how it would feel, finally, for some other character to enter her life, ready to repossess it as their own.”

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I’ll be back next week with a piece on David Hockney’s double portraits that I’ve had a great time researching and working on. Until then, enjoy the long road home, and stay in touch.

I’ve lifted that title from Louise Bourgeois writing on Freud:

There’s a surprising amount of stuffed animal art on exhibit at the moment. Stuffed animals are such charged objects, sitting close to us in moments of weakness and vulnerability, speaking to parts of ourselves that we don’t typically take outside the house. When artists do so, we are offered an illuminating window into the making of childhood: how artists deal with their children on a logistical level, how the labor conditions of making art sit with the labor conditions of raising children, and how art gets made at all on a psychological level.

When I was a kid I was supposed to be careful with stuffed animals because of my asthma. Weirdly, I don’t remember my favorite stuffed animal—I remember there was one, and I can picture its role in my life in parallel with my brother’s favorite, which I recall as clear as day (peanut butter bear). I need to ask him to jog my memory about mine. I remember buying a stuffed squirrel on skis at the hospital gift shop for my new baby brother when he was born. My daughter has had many favorites: a succession of baby seals, one giant oversized pink thing that she referred to as her big sister, and more recently one of those custom facsimiles of our dog, Brownie. She particularly likes them in series: identical Jellycat bunny patterns in different colors, and Labubus that sometimes make it into bed with her. Repetition is a balm on the soul, as we shall see in the work of several artists I want to talk about today.

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Field Trip: Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet

Ghislaine Leung’s exhibition at Cabinet in Vauxhall was advertised very minimally. The first email contained this close-up photograph of a rainbow gradient stuffed cat. The second email, conveying the timing of the opening, included just the following text:

It is the holidays. I am working. I ask my daughter to play with her bear for a minute. She’s making a dress out of kitchen roll and hairbands. I put my work away. I start back to work. I am not paid for either work. There will be no fee for this show. No guarantee it will sell. If it sells I will be paid, if it doesn’t I will not. Perhaps other things will happen. Perhaps they won’t. So. We all work. Some are paid. Some are not. It’s just how it is I am told. It is the risk you take. I know this. We all know this. Everyone knows. So. Here. I will take my risk. I will work my hours. I will know my burn time. I will let go so I can hold on. I will stop so I can continue. I will let what is already done, and being done, be enough. I do not know if it will be enough. I am frightened. I am in love. I have nothing and everything left to give.

Cabinet is one of those galleries who tends towards the minimal, with one of those wonky websites that feels like it was put together by hand in HTML when the gallery was founded in the 1990s. It’s elegant, in a way. It speaks for itself. Ghislaine is also an artist who prefers that the work speaks for itself, in that the work typically consists of itself speaking, a speech-act that is also an art-work. For the past decade her practice has involved composing conceptual scores that are executed by the space or institution.

By way of illustration, this exhibition shares a title with another solo that ran at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein over the summer: “Reproductions.” That solo contained two scores and five editions. The score of Budgets reads: “The exhibition budget is displayed.” The score of Maintenance reads: “The exhibition space is left as it is.” Ghislaine authors the scores, and institutional curators interpret and perform them. In the case of the latter score, for instance, the curators decided to leave in place some of the residue of the preceding exhibition, and not to clean the exhibition during the course of “Reproductions.” Other curators might interpret this score differently. The five other works, each titled n.b.k. Edition, consists of decommissioned infrastructural objects like lighting fixtures that Ghislaine moved from storage into the exhibition space, turning them into editioned art objects that can be sold for fundraising purposes. What you see, in the exhibition, is this: piles of lights on the floor and a spreadsheet printed on the wall. Thus spake Ghislaine.

Her text introducing the Berlin exhibition runs in parallel to the London text: “It is spring. The blossom is on the trees. My daughter dances in the kitchen …” She has turned the cumulative actions of being an artist, the actions of being a person who is working as an artist, into the practice of an artist, into the art. Is there less invention in this autofiction? Or does the invention, the creative act, simply occur at an earlier moment in the cognitive process.

Several artists are working in this area, with legacies of dematerialized conceptual art and institutional critique wedded to our post-identitarian political moment. Aside from Ghislaine, the most prominent among them might be Cameron Rowland, who is currently in the news because a flag from Martinique that is a manifestation of his work has been removed from the facade of the Palais de Tokyo. Collectively, these artists are interested in labor and in the material structure of how art is circulated, seen, and understood.

As we see in Ghislaine’s introductions to her two “Reproductions” exhibitions, motherhood is an important part of how she considers her labor—as an artist, as a mother, and as a member of society. Just one part, of course. In a wall painting titled Jobs that was also repeated on the exhibition poster for “Commitments,” her solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel last year, her many commitments are listed in full. Mother comes last. I suspect their order to be chronological, but as this is not specified in the score I remain unsure. Mothering, perhaps, is the last thing one ever does. “Commitments” also included a pair of Albers-esque geometric wall paintings. The score to Care reads:

A wall is equivalent to all the days in a year. The 2016 child care hours the artist would need to cover working full time are shown as a banana rectangle. The 1140 free childcare hours supported by the UK government are shown inset as a cobalt square.

Aesthetically, this approach is necessarily dry. It is the visual language of the spreadsheet. The practice actually incorporated toys for a number of years before the artist became a mother. The work itself was the grid, the score, the raison d’etre. The toys were a weird visual remnant of the point being made. But there is a hidden poetry here as well. Ghislaine’s book Bosses begins in address to her daughter:

I’m tired of hiding everything about it all. Hiding becomes intolerable at some point. My desire to mask my situation is a disadvantage to the understanding of the work. Love is an action, it is learnt, and must be maintained. You are my heart in the world, you told me. I did not know how to love, or I had forgotten. Freedom is often conflated with autonomy, but dependence is perhaps less the incarcerator than the liberator. I am free with support, not without. I am big and you are small, you say. But I am as dependent as you are and this is not an issue because care exists socially, is required and reciprocated a thousand times over in a moment. That I fail to acknowledge this is the price I pay when I misattribute agency to individual life, as identity in a monological sense, in my vivid financialised disincorporated life. Because love is not romance but trust. And trust is not an attribute of the adult.

Perhaps it is only my personal bias, but the emotional power of this framing hits me harder than the spreadsheet aesthetics, and returns me to the exhibition budgets in a new frame of mind. There are stakes to what we do. I’ll close on what is probably Ghislaine’s most iconic score, titled Four Years in Ten Years in Twenty Years, which reads in full:

A three-tier anniversary cake to mark four years of being a mother, ten years of being an artist, and twenty years with her partner.

Field Trip: Precious Okoyomon at Mendes Wood DM

I want to pick up on the last line of the first paragraph of Ghislaine’s book, when she says that “trust is not an attribute of the adult,” and read it again in the context of Precious Okoyomon’s solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM in Paris, “It’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world.” It is exciting to pair these two artists together in commercial gallery solo exhibitions because they are so committed to the practice of art outside of the commercial gallery sector. The mind struggles to imagine what kind of objects might potentially even be for sale.

And yet, there is one distinct difference: you will find no photographs of Ghislaine’s exhibition on Instagram. As of this writing, literally not a single image. Cabinet is not on Instagram. Ghislaine is not on Instagram. Her face is not on the internet. I waded deep into the Vauxhall geotags. Nothing. Precious’s exhibition, on the other hand, you will have seen everywhere, even if you didn’t know it was her work. It’s instantly iconic, and almost assured to show up in the next round of QAnon cultural crusades alongside Demna, Borremans, and Matthew Barney.

These are the creepiest of stuffed animals: slick, oversized teddy bears with flames in their eyes, wearing translucent frilly couture panties, pinning each other down amorously or violently—or totally innocently. Precious’s show is about the Venn diagram of innocence and knowingness, described as “oneiric inner worlds where the childlike and the erotic become paths to understanding how fragility can be a radical condition of care and transformation.” The labor of being a childhood, juxtaposed beneath the labor of mothering.

This takes me back to the Lauren Oyler piece on vulnerability that we read last week, and Lauren’s preference for the recognition of weakness in place of the performance of vulnerability, and for un-gendering the whole thing, seeing systemic problems as systemic rather than as part of a gendered identity.

Precious has been working with things that look like kids’ toys for a while. She sees the bears as a reservoir of the “innocence, violence, submission, play” that is the stuff of childhood. They often appear in horticultural configurations, like Beloved, the animatronic bear in the same couture lingerie breathing and blinking, passed out at the heart of a garden of poisonous plants. Smaller toys started appearing more recently. Mendes Wood had a group of them at Basel last week, captioned as “artist-made children’s toys with taxidermied bird wings, rope, motors.” They are equally adorable and horrifying.

Ghislaine and Precious show us two sides to childhood, two sides to the practices of love that protect and deform us as we try to grow into the world alongside the flawed and broken people around us who can only try their best. One analytical, one evocative, both reaching towards the sublime of human experience in touching on the grittier corners of the ways we love. Love is work. Work not as in labor, not as in effort; work as in art work.

Also like Ghislaine, Precious has a publishing practice. Her poetry collection But Did You Die? has become one of my very favorites. She speaks of the bears:

Invocation of the Bears
They plotted in play
In love to dream
to love in a way that was freedom
Outside of the apocalyptic visions of utopia
Open something in the wound
DREAMS RUINED THE DESIRE ECONOMY

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Links: Sally Mann and Cosima von Bonin

“Sally Mann,” on Great Women Artists, plus

“Demystifying the Life of an Artist, the Sally Mann Way,” in the New York Times

Katy Hessel interviews Sally Mann, who has recently published a second memoir titled Art Work: On the Creative Life. Sally is a particularly productive speaker on the topic for how closely she has drawn from her family life and domestic life in her practice as a photographer. Her photographs of her children in everyday life have been a flashpoint of the culture wars across several decades now, first in the 1990s when she first published Immediate Family and now, again this year, when police in Fort Worth, Texas, confiscated the same photographs from an exhibition at that city’s Modern Art Museum. Some 15 years ago, she shot another body of work on the body of her husband, Larry, who had then recently been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. She has continued to shoot him as his condition deteriorates, with new images coming in her next Gagosian exhibition in 2027.

“Cosima von Bonin’s Works Are Dumb. That’s the Point,” in ArtReview

JJ Charlesworth writes about yet another exhibition toying with stuffed animals this season, in this case Cosima von Bonin in her first London solo exhibition at Raven Row. His opening line says it all: “Plushes, plushies everywhere.” Von Bonin’s soft toys, often on plinths on the corners of art fairs booths, are one body of work that has consistently evaded me, in the sense that I’ve never quite been able to figure out how to place them. In a sense it feels of a piece with the Kippenberger scene, and in another sense it seems to be taking the piss. Either way I appreciate them as the manifestations of flaccidity that they are.

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Icon is a regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.

That’s Biala in a letter to ARTnews, expressing her frustration at being contextualized as someone’s wife or brother: “I have never been given a review in your journal unaccompanied by one dear husband or another, and now the secret is out. I have a brother too!” With apologies, she will have to remain frustrated today as we look at the social graph of her artistic lineage, because that’s what we do here, but rest assured—we are looking at her paintings on their merits alone.

Biala’s work caught my eye in a couple previews of the fall season. Berry Campbell dedicated their Frieze Masters stand to her work, and indeed it was the work itself that grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go; I knew nothing about her story until I went digging. The first story is always visual: starting with her earlier work of the 1930s one finds genre pieces (street scenes, interiors, still lifes, group portraits) teetering on the edge of dissolution, chunks of paint pushing in and out of their compositions, until the 1950s when they let go and relax into the wind of gestural abstraction, and then finally in the 1960s and 1970s land anew in lighter, more suggestive places. There is no dull phase across her oeuvre.

As of yesterday, Galerie Pauline Pavec has opened a solo exhibition of Biala’s work in Paris, giving her an epic Channel Slam. If you’re in town for Basel I hope you can make it over to see these paintings in person. The exhibition will be on view through 20 December.

Biala was born in Poland in 1903 and immigrated to New York with her family at the age of 10. She brought her brother along with her to art classes—and he became the abstract expressionist painter Jack Tworkov. She changed her name to Biala to avoid confusion. In 1930 she traveled to Paris and promptly met the English writer Ford Madox Ford, some 30 years her senior, and entered into a love affair that would last until her partner’s death in 1939. How I love a cross-disciplinary creative power couple. Together they spent that decade in the company of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Picasso, Brancusi, her idol Matisse.

To frame her legacy this way: to speak of her conjugal and fraternal yokes, to put the biography directly beside the pictures, to wonder about her as a person. Does it devalue her contribution as an artist? Artists are so often suspicious of biography, particularly when they come from (or initiate) illustrious lineages like this one. Everything, after all, is already in the work. And this is the fun of it. We can look at Biala’s early paintings of Provence, which she developed out of illustrations that she made for Ford’s travel memoir Provence and then exhibited in a gallery solo exhibition back in New York. Knowing that she and Ford shared a hardscrabble, romantic existence gardening, drawing, painting, writing, and loving in a house outside Toulon is not to try to reflect the stolen valor of one’s career on the other but rather to admire with some degree of wonder how they were able to put it all together.

Provence will be reissued by NYRB Classics in June of next year, just in time for a pilgrimage to the Villa Paul in Toulon. Max Saunders has done the heroic work of tracking down the location of the house based on views of the area from Biala’s paintings, and his adventure in doing so is well worth a read. It is also from Max’s account that I have borrowed these two paintings of the terrace of the house in Provence, one by Biala, one by Stella Bowen, Ford’s paramour throughout the 1920s; apparently Stella and Julie, her daughter with Ford, stayed in the house in the winters once Ford and Biala had returned to Paris. Stella, too, provided her services in illustrating Ford’s books during their time together. Later she would return to Australia and become known as a war artist.

War painting is not something that particularly interests me, and I would surely have passed over Stella’s paintings entirely had I not noticed this little bit of connection. In this bit of biographical sorcery, it is not her connection to a famous man that lifts her up but rather the improbable inversion of loose and louche paintings of the Provence coast into propagandistic portraits of bomber crews. What a life.

In 1939, Ford died and the war came to France. Biala made a daring rescue of his papers from Provence before returning to New York, where she circulated among the New York School, a vortex with her brother at the center. In the summer of 1942 she married Alain Brustlein, a painter and prolific illustrator of New Yorker covers. It was Biala who introduced Willem de Kooning to her dealer, and she and Alain nursed him in ill health, and celebrated his wedding to Elaine. They returned to Paris after the war in 1947, and split the rest of their lives between France and the east coast—the city, as well as Provincetown and rural New Jersey. Back in Paris, Biala’s shift towards abstraction sat alongside Joan Mitchell for those middle decades. There is one knot of a painting from 1959 in the Pavec exhibition that is just stunning. You can and should look closely at these beautiful pictures here.

For me it is the tabletop still life that offers the ultimate line through Biala’s life: dark and heavy or nearly floating, ordered and rectilinear or chaotic and naturalistic, sparse and scattered or dense with symbolism, captured from directly above or from a skewed low angle. We see in these pictures the shape that Biala gave to her life, how she picked up and turned around in her hands the substance of it all.

The fascination is unending. Did you ever read the Little Bear picture books? Little Bear’s Christmas? Somewhat improbably, these are yet another of Biala’s contributions to the culture. And the rest of Biala’s clan: her niece, the painter Hermine Ford, and Hermine’s husband, the painter Robert Moskowitz. So many corners of this story remain to be covered: the give-and-take between painting and illustration in Biala and Alain’s shared upstairs studios in Paris (8, rue du Général Bertrand for those piecing together the pilgrimage), Tworkov’s defection from abstract expressionism towards geometric abstraction and his own notes published as Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov. In addition to the galleries I have mentioned here, much of these notes are drawn from research gathered by the brilliant painter and scholar Mira Schor and Jason Andrew, who works on the Biala estate.

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Book Report: No Judgment

Book Report is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.

How much should we be aware of the artist’s biography as we try to understand the work? When is it a distraction, and when is it actively harmful? These are questions we are constantly returning to as we figure out how to look at the interface between art and life. The critic and novelist Lauren Oyler talks quite a bit about the relationship between these two sides of her practice in her essay collection No Judgment, particularly in what she describes as “my autofiction essay,” “I Am the One Who Is Sitting Here, for Hours and Hours and Hours.” Early in the piece she gives us what will have to pass for a definition.

What It Isn’t: A piece of fiction that merely draws on an author’s life. A selfie. Social media. Reality television. Fiction about cars. I’m not saying that autofiction isn’t like any of these things; in fact, autofiction is like all of them. However, two things may share similarities without completely transforming into one another. This is an important lesson for romantic relationships as well as for literary criticism.

Visual art is interesting to put alongside conversations like these. I tend to think of the blurring between autofiction and memoir and fiction as something akin to the near-constant vacillation between figurative paintings and abstraction that happens in art—which is to say, some things become more or less popular in reaction to what people are currently finding more or less popular, but no one can really stake the battle lines anywhere meaningful. Also, where a novel requires some degree of plot, which can be systematically compared to the arc of the author’s life if the reader is so inclined, a painting is simply a moment in time, a condensation of many different experiences that may or may not occur to the artist in a first-person kind of way. We assume that many of Biala’s still life configurations were housed at 8, rue du Général Bertrand, but we wouldn’t fault her for borrowing a memory of a tea set from the Villa Paul. Does this make painting inherently less honest than writing, or rather, both more and less honest, because it is held to a completely different standard? It certainly makes it more interesting to play the game of drawing biographical conclusions from painterly hints.

Lauren continues

Autofiction is a form more than a genre. … Autofiction is sometimes called a genre because it is first and foremost fiction—that’s its structure—and because autofictional novels could be said to follow certain conventions, such as the inclusion of references to the writer’s career, critical digressions about external works of art the author-narrator encounters, and a moodily naturalistic style. But I’m arguing it’s better to call it a form. In nonfiction, ‘what really happened’ is the form; in fiction, the form is possibility, again broadly construed—what might happen, what might have happened, what might happen if. This possibility may or may not involve an authorial avatar. In autofiction, the form is the author himself.

You have to live a life, in other words.

Autofiction tends to dispense with Barthes’s old-fashioned reality effects: the detailed description of a sitting room—say, for the purpose of accumulating evidence of realism—is seen, in the context of the otherwise verifiable autofictional narrator’s voice, as pointless.

This is fascinating because it is exactly the opposite of what happens in first-person painting. In a Biala still life, the “detailed description” is not there to “accumulate evidence of realism,” but rather because it is the substance of the life that the painter is living. Not proof of life presented for witness, but life itself that is executed in its very production. The tabletop still lifes, the tree outside the terrasse in Provence, the cluster of cornflower blue brushstrokes. No degree of abstraction or obfuscation speaks any less clearly about the liveness of the moment.

... as a critic and reader I know that people who have read both Fake Accounts and this essay—any of my essays—will necessarily, consciously or not, be reading them in some way ‘together’: that the essay will shed light on the novel and vice versa.

This is how we read art and life: together, side by side, intertwined, inextricable. Because art, like it or not, is necessarily the product of a life, a series of lives that intersect and create the conditions for art to emerge at a particular point. And life, of course, is something that happens to us while we are trying to write autofiction.

As a form, autofiction is about self-awareness; it represents self-awareness formally.

Lauren goes on to discuss the ethics of including material related to other people in autofiction, and the pressure to put everything interesting that happens in one’s life into one’s art, concluding that everything is fair game, the label of fiction is not particularly important, and the central mandate is simply to be interesting. We write because “we take what’s there and imagine something new or simply different.” In another essay she analyzes vulnerability and the gender dynamics of how we relate to truth, trauma, and disclosure in literature, which is another conversation waiting to happen, but I want to end here on the idea of self-awareness and connect it back to the idea of “painting beside itself,” the social diagram of the artist’s relationships that we often see in practices of portraiture and still life—the genres of immediacy before immediacy.

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Field Trip: Caroline Walker at the Hepworth Wakefield

Field Trip is a regular column reporting on exhibitions and institutions.

Although this is already getting quite long, I wanted to close with a brief nod towards Caroline Walker’s brilliant exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield closing this weekend. Caroline is a painter who we will no doubt revisit often here because she is such a tireless advocate for women’s experience and women’s labor in contemporary art, advocacy that is evident in both subject matter and practice. She paints women. They are often alone or with a child. They seem to appear between private and public space. They are sometimes people very close to her and sometimes people laboring in situations that seem almost anonymous. They provide a diagram not only of her own situatedness in the relationships that define her life, but also the situatedness of society at large, a mapping of what womanhood means across architectural spaces, employment arrangements, and family configurations.

In Lauren Oyler’s critique of “being vulnerable” and “relatability,” there is the corollary effect of “feeling seen” (or the sarcastic “feeling attacked”), one of the primary pathways through which the reader-viewer is able to situate herself in relation to the work of art. Caroline’s paintings seem more like vehicles for feeling seen than windows into a specific embodied consciousness. This is her reality effect.

Caroline’s exhibition is called “Mothering,” and the paintings in this exhibition are largely of herself, her children, her life. (Though not all: the series “Birth Reflections” was painted during a residency in the maternity ward of a London hospital.) The Hepworth Wakefield published a print of a scene from her daughter’s nursery school. A viewer might still feel seen, but in this new exhibition we additionally gain more visibility into her life. As she told the Guardian:

A lot of the time, I’ve been looking in on a subject as an outsider. I was paying for another woman to look after my child, so that I could make my work, which in this case was portraying that woman looking after my child. There was a complicated relationship of financial exchange going on that made me think about how we value different forms of labour.

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Links: Transit Books, Kids Curating, Essential Childrens Books

Transit Children’s Editions Book Club

One of the best independent publishers out there, particularly for literature in translation, has launched an imprint for children’s books, which now has a book club (though book club here unfortunately means pay in advance to have newly published books delivered to you, not sit with a group of like-minded individuals in a pro-social environment to discuss art and ideas). Their picture books look delightful.

“One Way to Shake Up Museum Curation? Hand the Keys to the Kids,” in the New York Times

Ray Mark Rinaldi looks at a bunch of American museums with educational programs that allow community members, including children and teens, to participate in the curatorial process, hopping from the Orange County Museum of Art to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. I think these can be great projects, but also have a sneaking suspicion that, like German museums pushing exhibitions for children, involving children has a way of sidestepping the sticky political realities that are making life for non-profits so difficult right now.

“65 Essential Children’s Books” in the Atlantic

I have done pretty well on this list, except for everything published after my daughter came of independent reading age. I feel a bit betrayed that there is no Dahlov Ipcar included. One day I’ll write about all the outstanding Maine literature for children and why I think our home state has become such a beacon of wholesome childhood.

Until next week, hope your road home is a long one.

Editor’s Note is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.

Lots of new readers have joined us over the last two weeks via the interview with James Jean—welcome and thank you James for sharing! Glad to connect with so many people who find his work and life as interesting as I do. I thought I’d take a moment to introduce who I am and what Nostos is all about.

My name is Robin and I am a divorced father to an 11-year-old daughter attending middle school in Taipei, where we live with a Formosan mountain dog named Brownie and a ragdoll cat named Karma. We moved here six years ago so I could take a job as director of Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas, an art fair that attracted galleries from all over the world until earlier this year, when I resigned and the fair went on hiatus. My daughter was born in Beijing, and during our time there and later in Shanghai I was the editor-in-chief of LEAP, then the main bilingual art magazine in China. Her mother is the director of a museum in Jakarta, so since she was born I have thought a lot about what it means to grow up in a creative family: how we communicate our work with our children, how we encourage their creativity, and how we balance the logistics of careers that tend to have very fuzzy boundaries.

I have been working on this in fragments for around 10 years, and started Nostos early this year to dissect my experience as a single parent working in contemporary art, a field where artists and curators are encouraged more often than not to pretend that children and family do not exist. I looked around at many of my friends with children and saw the brilliant ways in which they approach this balancing act, and wanted to make public some of the conversations that might otherwise remain private. When my daughter was little, I indulged quite a bit of male privilege: when I showed up to professional settings as a dad with a kid in tow I was met with a degree of welcome and positivity that moms were not. This plays no small role in the co-parenting arrangement that we have chosen.

At the same time, we are living in a golden age of early years art education and accessibility to contemporary art and culture for children, especially in places like London, where multiple interactive experiences are available at low or no cost on any given weekend. Even here in Taiwan, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum has a basement exhibition space dedicated to rotating exhibitions for children, and the Taoyuan Children’s Art Center has a full building of its own.

So, Nostos exists to explore the relationship between art and life. The heart of the project is the column “Lives of the Artists,” in which once a month or so I interview an artist (or other creative parent—in the pipeline we have designers, chefs, architects, and others) and dig into how their personal lives and creative practices bleed into one another. Other regular columns include some of the ones you’ll find below today: “Icon,” which focuses on the private life of an art historical figure; “Book Report,” in which I read books touching on the creative life; “Projections,” about movies; and “Links” to other corners of the internet. Not featured this week are “Field Trip,” in which we visit exhibitions; “Learnings,” in which I reflect on and collate things artists tell me in conversation; “Homework,” in which these artists give my daughter and I creative assignments that you can follow along; and “Essays,” a more occasional series of longer writing that ties together some of the looser threads of the rest of it.

In addition to this weekly Substack, you can find us on Instagram (Nostos and Robin). Beyond the editorial content, other projects I’m working on include artist-design playgrounds and play structures to be installed at museums, and pop-up events for creative families. If you’re interested in what we’re doing, please subscribe and share to others who might want to join too, and if you have any ideas or would like to collaborate, drop me a line by replying to this email or leaving a comment.

Icon: Édouard Vuillard

Icon is a regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.

Last week, without really planning to, I had a date at a touring exhibition of the Met’s Robert Lehman collection at the Palace Museum in Taipei. It was so packed and the exhibition flow was so awkward that it was difficult to see anything at all but, fortunately, people tended to cluster around the larger, more colorful paintings, leaving occasional gaps around some of the smaller drawings and works on paper—one of the strengths of the Lehman collection. One of the few I was able to get a picture of was this delightful Vuillard drawing of his mother.

Les Nabis are feeling really hot right now. By whatever logic of rediscovery and reemergence our compulsions follow, I have been spending a lot of time looking at Bonnard, Vuillard, and Vallotton this year, particularly the interiors. I suppose it’s because of the thread that I followed earlier this year from Alice Neel back in time to Suzanne Valadon and her luscious upholstery, and from there into the other domestic painters of her era, learning from more gifted scholars and viewers of art how to read the social and political clues of interior arrangements.

Maurice Denis speaks for Les Nabis:

Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

Camille Mauclair says of the Intimists:

A revelation of the soul through the things painted, the magnetic suggestion of what lies behind them through the description of the outer appearance, the intimate meaning of the spectacles of life.

That the little Vuillard I snapped depicts his mother is natural: she appears in more than 500 paintings over the course of 40 years. He painted from a bedroom studio, and they lived together until she died. An unattributed text on the Moma website describes her as “the gravitational principle that prevents a collapse.”

There seems to be some really exciting research done on the gendered domestic lives of Les Nabis. In a previous issue we touched on Bonnard’s muse, his partner Marthe, who appears in endless configurations—often in the bath—throughout his oeuvre. With Vuillard the muse is the mother. I am desperately taken with how these different kinds of loving relationships might differently structure an artistic practice: what different modes of obsession, of attention, of tenderness, of care. While Vuillard never married, he had a 40-year affair with Lucy Hessel, the wife of his friend and dealer Jos.

Francesca Berry curated an exhibition for the Barber Institute of Fine Art titled “Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard,” from which much of this biographical sketch is drawn, and has recently published a monograph titled Édouard Vuillard and the Nabis: Art and the Politics of Domesticity. I would love to read this for inclusion here but will have to wait until the paperback is out next summer rather than spend the USD 84 for the PDF e-book version that is currently available.

For a talk in Oregon, Francesca described the life they shared:

In these rooms Vuillard and Madame Vuillard operated mutually supportive, parallel working practices: Vuillard put his mother and her small sewing business ‘in the picture’, while she posed for his pencil and camera or printed his photographs.

I am fascinated by the family business angle to this, and love how these economic activities seemingly marginal to the practice of art actually end up being precisely what the art has been made up of all along.

Reviewing Francesca’s exhibition, Laura Cumming triangulates a complex relationship between the matriarch, her browbeaten daughter Marie, and Édouard the observer:

She is posing, but also pausing for a moment from her labours, her wistful face downturned. Madame is just through the door. Will Marie even be allowed to drink that coffee?

Marie married Édouard’s colleague and friend Ker-Xavier Roussel, and her children—Édouard’s niece and nephew—became some of his favorite subjects. They all lived together in an apparently claustrophobic series of apartments.

Francesca describes the structure of one complex composition featuring them all:

Madame Vuillard intently reading a large book … a contrast to the rising figure of her granddaughter Annette (b.1898), and the silhouette of her grandson Jacques (b.1901) hovering, perhaps melancholically, at the window. Félix Vallotton’s framed portrait of Vuillard, depicted at the compositional apex of the painting, enhances its tripartite intergenerational composition.

The painting is shaped by the practice is shaped by the life.

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Book Report: Lili is Crying

Book Report is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.

Speaking of codependent relationships between matriarchs and browbeaten daughters in early twentieth-century France, I recently read Lili is Crying, a short and lyrical novel written in experimental prose by Hélène Bessette first published in 1953 and recently translated for Fitzcarraldo by Kate Briggs. That name might seem familiar: Kate is the author of The Long Form. Her novel is all about fragmentation, particularly the kind that comes with having a newborn baby around. The brain is functioning differently, and it’s impossible to get anything done in long blocks of deep focus. You skim across the surface of the hour for days and nights on end, coming up for air whenever it is possible.

Lili is Crying asks what it would look like for a relationship as intimate as all that, a relationship between mother and daughter, to persist past the age of 20, 30, 40. There is an excellent introduction by Eimear McBride that helps translate some of what’s happening in the novel, because the language is hardly transparent, jumping between points of view, between dialogue and explication, but mostly between points in time, occasionally throwing out numbers to suggest that Lili is at this moment this age or that without any real sense of internal coherence. We know that we are in a small town in rural France, that Lili is the daughter of Charlotte, better known as “the mother,” that she has run away from home several times but has always ended up back with the mother, who runs a boarding house.

In one memorable episode, Lili says “I refuse to leave with the man I do love. Instead, I leave with the man I don’t love.” Perhaps she loves a bureaucrat in her 20s, elopes with a foreigner she doesn’t love in her 30s, and has an awkward affair with her younger cousin, the local shepherd, in her 40s. To spite her mother, to please her mother, to leave her mother, to come back to her mother. The mother, we suspect, is not only a person, even a particularly dominant one, even the sort of parent who can only create a sense of themselves in the choices of their children, but also an internalized way of being: the mother burden.

One of my favorite scenes involves a dinner at which the mother has made up her mind to host Lili and the husband she doesn’t love, only to be so offended by him that she offends him in turn and he resolves never to return. Over the course of the meal, his inner monologue turns toward his own mother, and to the meaning of a mother:

Children have to get on with their lives. Mothers stand at the threshold of the home, to watch their children leave. It’s destiny. Even so, children never forget their mothers (and mothers never forget their children).

But family meals can turn

on a screw

on a nail

on a word.

That reminded me of the saying, familiar to parents of teenagers, that the job of a child growing up is to kill their parents, and the job of the parent is to survive that metaphorical murder.

One line is repeated several times in several contexts, seemingly emerging from several of the men in Lili’s life:

Eimear’s introduction sets up the stakes of the book for Hélène as a writer: she was hailed as a rising literary star before it was ever published, but somehow her published acclaim never lived up to the promise. When she set to writing full time she was divorced with full custody of one of two children, who later became a literary collaborator of a sort. Kate Briggs writes that together they authored a manifesto for her work. I am ever besotted by a family manifesto. She was also known to incorporate character sketches from her social circle into the writing, beginning in Australia where she began her first novel before returning to Paris.

There is an excerpt from the novel here, which gives an excellent sense of the texture of the language. In my mind I picture Marie tending to her children and Madame Vuillard reading this very book at the table:

The novel is taking its leave

gently

like a fire going out

like a fire going out

like a fire going out.

Like a meandering stream losing its way.

Like a trickle of water parting.

Like a wind abating.

Like a sun dying.

Read my piece on Kate Briggs’s The Long Form here:

Projections: One Battle After Another

Projections is a regular column on films that touch on living in a creative family.

On another date last week—a week of spectacular dates—I spent most of the day at the cinema for One Battle after Another, which felt to me like one of the most complete and resolved movies—a real and proper movie—that I have seen in a long time, perhaps since Everything Everywhere All at Once, which has been on the top of my mind since it started streaming on Netflix and since I was looking at James Jean’s film poster last week. Both epics about ordinary family people thrown in to situations and networks far beyond their depth.

There has been a lot of great writing on the mind-bending car chase, the politics of fascism and anti-fascism, the sticky racial dynamics, and the absurdly good casting, but I haven’t read a whole lot about the family angle of the movie, which I actually found really engrossing. But here at Nostos we write about creative families, so why should this resonate? We watched Black Bag over the summer and encountered a very similar scenario.

What does it say about us that espionage and terrorism seem to make the strongest cinematic metaphors for the creative family?

Quite frankly, I think it says that we are equally unwilling or unable to separate our work lives and our home lives.

And also that the commitment to art can be as totalizing and all-engrossing as the commitment to a militant faction or a spiritual cult. And that the aesthetic impulse, the desire that motivates the urge to create and to love, is the same thing that lies beneath it all. It’s one of the first things we hear from Leo/ Pat/ Bob in the getaway car: “What the fuck do you think I’m doing here?”

Imagine yourself as Willa/ Chase Infiniti. You’re a teenager in a small but diverse town. You’re the mature only child of a single father who spends most of the time stoned and has a ton of weird rules, one of which is no phone, but you get a secret one anyway. Your dad has told you, at some point, that your mother was a political martyr, and has given you a weird device you’re supposed to carry at all times and a series of passcodes. It all sounds deliriously insane, but you have digested it and made peace with it, probably just to keep things cordial at home.

Then, one day, it all suddenly appears to be real: the device works, someone else knows the passcodes, you’re in mortal danger, and you’re absorbed into a broader underground network of people who would seemingly do anything to keep you safe. You have an extended family, kith and kin, the discovery of which both justifies and normalizes what you’ve been suspicious about in your father’s paranoid delusions.

I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for what it’s like growing up as the only child of a single parent in general, particularly if your single dad is an artist. It’s a significant variation on the traditional trope of the orphan or adoptee who discovers special powers that give them a sense of belonging within a wider web of outcasts, mutants, wizards, or heroes.

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Links: Children’s Cinema, Lock-Through Power, and Cognitive Load

The Children’s Cinema at Light Industry

Light Industry, one of the coolest art cinemas, runs an ongoing series called The Children’s Cinema, which looks for ways to introduce kids to experimental film. Their next event is coming up on 25 October and has something of a Halloween theme. The way they’ve programmed it is nothing short of brilliant:

“This program is co-curated by a kid! R. Emmet Sweeney asked his nine-year-old daughter Alice to select some of her favorite YouTube memes, the ones she endlessly quotes with her friends at school. They naturally broke down into three themes: Cats, Pop Music, and Horror. Rob then paired them with a selection of silent films and experimental works to prove that so-called ‘brainrot’ has roots in early and experimental cinema, what former Light Industry guest Tom Gunning called ‘the cinema of attractions.’ So you’ll see one of the first close-ups (1903’s The Sick Kitten) alongside an earworm meme of a headbobbing kitty (2024’s Chipi chipi chapa chapa cat), a mind-melting KPop Demon Hunters remix leading into abstract animation set to an Oscar Peterson beat (Begone Dull Care, 1949), and the unspeakable abyssal terror of dead-eyed CGI gummy bears (Ich Bin Dein Gummibar, 2017) followed by silent ghostly experiments from Segundo de Chomón and Buster Keaton…and more! Happy Halloween!

“Lock-In and Lock-Through Power,” on Dare to Lead

Brené Brown’s podcast ran an excerpt from her book Strong Ground. Since everyone is talking about locking in this week I thought it would be a good moment for this one: the theory is that we need time, space, and bandwidth to shift from one mode to another, so we need to set and communicate “locking-through” rituals to transition from office mode to home mode. The lock-through is a metaphor drawn from inland navigation where ships, boats, and barges use lock systems to move up and down waterways at different altitudes—a maritime metaphor is always a winner with me. I feel like the lock-through can be particularly complicated when you’re moving from the studio, partially because we often invite friends and family into the working space and partially because hanging out time often leads to some of the best spontaneous ideas that need to be captured immediately. What kinds of rituals do you use to negotiate between home mode and studio mode?

These other links are Substacks which load a little weird as links, so dropped in with a bit less commentary.

“Move over emotional labor: it’s cognitive load time,” in Evil Witches

On the “mental workload of family life,” which is a very real thing

“The Coolest Interiors on TV are on a Kids’ Show,” in Schmatta

On the architectural set design of Shape Island, and the sophistication that kids’ visual palettes are open to when they’re given a chance to step outside the noise

“Our favorite children’s illustrator,” in Love, Sylvie

On mid-century author, illustrator, and dancer Remy Charlip

This week, in the second part of the conversation, we get deeper into the nitty gritty of how he sees his life as an artist and his life as a father. James shares some tips he’s learned in being present in his son’s life, and we discuss what we as parents are looking out for in the world today in terms of educating and nurturing our children.

Alongside this part of the conversation, I’ve inserted a series of images of the movie posters that James has done. I really appreciate how James has embraced the crossover side of his practice as a draftsman and painter, and not only for the audiences that these posters are able to reach beyond the gallery and the museum. It’s no coincidence that he’s done the artwork for some of the very best films of the past decade. I think his posters elevate the movies themselves in a really interesting way, inserting the visual storytelling of auteur filmmaking—one of the most important image cultures we have today—into the eternal spirals of timeless myth and imagination.

If you enjoy conversations like these, please subscribe to Nostos! And if you can afford it, I would be very grateful if you would consider upgrading to a paid subscription. These subscriptions allow me to give the Lives of the Artists interviews and the other writing I’m doing here the time and attention they deserve.

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Tell me more about the home and studio space.

James Jean: The place we moved into used to be an art gallery. It was part of a three-house compound. There was a tiny house in the middle with a pool, and another regular house, and then the third house which was a gallery for the previous owners. The gallery building was designed by Frank Gehry in 1976. It was his first residential commission. A developer bought the property and split it up into three separate lots. They’d already done a few renovations, and the gallery house was in pretty bad shape, and then they decided to sell. I saw the listing when it had been on the market for a long time, almost a year. It was a hard sell probably because there were no windows. It’s a big white box with no light. It definitely needed a full renovation. When I saw it, I felt it was perfect for us, especially being in a historic Japanese neighborhood. Two blocks away from our house there are numerous Asian restaurants and a Japanese supermarket, all super walkable and tailored for the Japanese community. So I just thought it was perfect. And I had friends in the neighborhood too.

It took a year and a half to renovate. The bedrooms are upstairs, and then the main floor was my studio. It’s got 12-foot ceilings and it’s basically a large white box with a large pivoting wall, so it can transform if needed. The configuration of the house and the office shifted over time as the family evolved. We stayed in a bedroom downstairs for a while, because it was easier to watch the baby on one floor. Then as he got older we transitioned upstairs, and the initial bedroom turned into my office, and then my painting area. Now I’ve moved the studio out of the house. I moved down the street into another house, which is a block away. The new place is just fully for my own work. It’s not as large or as interesting as the house we live in, but it’s very quiet, and I’m more in control of the environment. This house is much more organized. The house with the family is chaotic with the dog and the cooking and the homework and the toys and everything that goes on, and it got to be a little too much. I needed my own space, and luckily this place was available just a few houses down the street.

What are the rules? Is your son allowed into the studio?

There’s no rules. He comes by sometimes to play ping pong, and sometimes when he has playdates, I’ll bring them here to hang out. But he’s mostly at the other house. He’s got a lot of room to roam and play. In the Gehry house he’s able to ride around on a scooter because the floor is poured concrete. That floor is probably the best part of the house. Did you see the video I posted today? I’m having him finally contribute to the family business by helping to sell prints. The video is about him being the “Bibliophile,” a character in the print that I’m currently selling. It’s based on him since he’s constantly reading. Not the best material, unfortunately. But even when he’s walking out the door, walking up and down the stairs, his face is constantly buried in a book. I have to tell him to stop when he’s supposed to get ready for bed. Still, it’s better than an iPad, which is destroying our kids’ minds, especially with Roblox and all the micro-transactions and gambling mechanics that they implement in every game. Every single kid is playing Roblox, and that’s going to be the cause of a lot of problems in the future. Already people are betting on anything and everything with Polymarket, the online prediction markets, and all the sports betting that’s legalized now. Roblox is grooming these kids to become gambling addicts. So, we’re trying to navigate these new hazards. And now there’s AI. Even if it’s not in the home, it’s at school. They’re using Google Slides or Canva with AI built in. It permeates everything.

As an artist and as a parent, what do you think is important in the way that we educate kids now?

I think having them try as many things as possible is the best way to help them find that spark of interest, inspiration or motivation. We’ve tried piano lessons, jiu-jitsu, soccer, all these different sports. With karate he has finally developed the motivation to keep that going. Other sports didn’t go well. Having good instructors is key. We went to this famous jiu-jitsu gym near us, and the instructors were not good with kids, really mean and not compassionate. He would get anxious before each lesson and throw up in the locker room. With karate he’s been able to feel encouraged by leveling up, earning the belts, doing well in competitions. Also, his mom is very dedicated to bringing him to the lessons. It’s Kyokushin karate, so he’s able to do that in Japan over the summer too.

To bring it back to my parents, they didn’t show me anything. Everything I learned about culture and the world, I learned on my own. My parents were so focused on working and surviving and supporting the family. Our conversations were always very surface level. That’s something I was always a bit sad about. I would have breakfast with my parents, but there’d be no conversation at all. I’d read the newspaper, and my dad would read the Chinese paper, and it was very silent. Now, my son asks a lot of questions, and I try to answer them to the best of my ability. When he was younger, he would ask me questions like, Why was I born? Or, why am I afraid to die? Difficult existential questions. Now the questions have evolved into, What is a floppy disk? How does it work? What was Netflix like? How was it different from Blockbuster? How is a DVD different from a CD? How do you use a VCR? Is the Neo Geo better than Turbografx-16? I’m looking forward to introducing him to movies, movies that were influential in my childhood. I was just telling him about Akira Kurosawa and Seven Samurai and how that inspired Star Wars, and High and Low and how that inspired a lot of the crime dramas we see now.

He’s really into manga and anime right now. He’s really impressed with Mob Psycho 100, which is the same creator as One-Punch Man, which is about that existential idea of, what do you do if you’re the most powerful being in the universe and you can defeat any adversary with a punch? My son was also impressed that the creator couldn’t really draw and uploaded his stories on the web on his own. The web comic gained traction because he just wouldn’t stop uploading, and eventually he got to work with a really famous, amazing artist to bring his stories to life.

The only thing we’re very strict about is language. Again, that relates to my childhood, where I lost the ability to speak Chinese. I want to make sure he’s at least able to read and write Japanese. So, he only speaks to his mother in Japanese and goes to tutoring twice a week and Japanese school on Saturdays, plus two months of public school in Tokyo. Thankfully, his language skills are pretty decent. With everything else, I’m at the mercy of the culture that the kids are immersed in now. We’ve gone through mewing and skibidi toilet and rizz, and I fear what comes next.

The work of sorting through all of the crap that’s out there and finding something interesting and then taking it to the next level—that’s what we do, that’s what everyone’s supposed to do. But I don’t know how people are going to hone their taste or their eye in this generation.

It’s difficult because there’s no consensus reality. We were all viewing the same media as children, and you could navigate to the alternative or fringe parts of the spectrum if you wanted. Now the algorithms tailor everything to your own particular interests, and a lot of it is very pernicious brain rot. With editors and gatekeepers the brain rot was kept at bay. You had to actively seek out the interesting and weird stuff, like public access television. Now it’s everywhere and all the kids are addicted to it. Culture and technology and society are evolving at such a fast rate that it’s becoming impossible to establish a contemporary canon of quality. In the school parent group chat there are warnings about AI chat bots talking your kids into committing suicide. On Netflix, the number one documentary right now is Unknown Number. It’s a true story about this high school girl who was getting thousands of harassing and sexual texts, telling her to kill herself. No one could figure out where it was coming from, the police were involved and eventually the FBI, and then the FBI found out that all these texts were coming from her own mother.

The root of the problem is the phones. We’re going to avoid that as long as we can. A lot of the kids chat via FaceTime or messenger on their iPads even if they don’t have phones. There is a class group chat, but my son is not in it. There are a couple other kids whose parents don’t let them on the group chat. But in the parent chat there have been some complaints about the boys saying inappropriate stuff about the girls. I’m so relieved that my son is not involved. I feel like my son isn’t quite ready yet to deal with this type of social dynamic, to have his inappropriate jokes consecrated in a text chain.

Recently, my son became friends with another kid whose dad has shown his 10 year old son all the Terminator movies, all the Alien movies, all these classic R-rated films. The kid likes Kendrick Lamar. When you see them together, they’re just kids, but then all of a sudden you’ll hear the kid say a line from a Kendrick song, and I don’t know if my son’s ready for that. I do want to introduce him to more mature material soon, and that’s something I’m trying to figure out now. Early or late, it’s always going to be traumatic in some way. It cracks something open.

Does your son appreciate your work?

He doesn’t have much interest in it. He doesn’t draw or paint at all. He does have a sense of what I do. As far as art goes, he’s mainly fixated on manga and anime. I’m trying to get him to appreciate the artwork more, because he’s more interested in the story. He flips through the pages and reads way too fast. I think he’s starting to understand the different storytelling techniques that the artists will use, noticing those details and appreciating them. It’s hard to know what’s happening in his head, it’s all developing so quickly.

I want to go back to your work. I think your work treats childhood and intergenerational family relationships in a really interesting way. Is this idea of family or kinship important to how you think of your practice?

I think it’s more of an incidental effect of the work I like to make, which is generally narrative in nature. There was a marked change when my son was born and we moved back to LA. My world changed and the studio was filled with children’s books and colorful plastic toys and I was stepping over things all the time. In 2018, when he was three, I did a show at Kaikai Kiki with a lot of bright colors and imagery that was inspired by an Italian children’s book illustrator, Antonio Rubino, who did these really vibrant images of flower people in dazzling combinations of shapes and colors. That early period of being a father was a big shift for me, retreating back to innocence. In my 20s and early 30s, things got really dark. A lot of messed-up stuff happened in my life, and the work was really dark and violent. But when I got into a new relationship and my son was born, everything reset. I was being pulled in different directions, which made me focus during the time I had to devote to painting.

That initial body of work created a whole new way of working with my assistants, too, because I was able to formalize a way of making these paintings. That’s partially down to the influence of Takashi Murakami. I started to create digital color studies and color swatches that we would match by hand, and it led to a set process for making the paintings. It’s a process that I’m now trying to break out of. It’s been almost ten years now, so it’s time for a change. Now I’m trying to figure out a way to return to what I was doing in my early 20s, when I was more innocent and not as much in my head about a lot of things. Returning to that initial purity of creativity is more naive, in a way. I was doing a lot of work in my sketchbooks that had a very sincere energy, and that still resonates with a lot of people. I want to get back to that feeling of not knowing what I’m doing.

It’s been 25 years now, and I’ve made so much stuff that sometimes the process becomes too predictable. Say I’m making a sketch for a movie poster. Even though I don’t know exactly how it will go, I’m always trying to find those moments of unexpected spontaneity, a moment of inspiration where you’re struck by something that’s beyond comprehension. You don’t know where it came from, but it’s this moment in the piece that makes you feel like you’re not in control, like you’re a vessel for the divine.

I want to carve out space for those magical moments of divine intervention. But I don’t know if that’s possible as I get older. A lot of the great artists, or mathematicians, have their great insights when they’re in their early 20s, and if they haven’t by the time they’re 30, then basically they’re done.

Mature style and late style for artists are really important. There are some who crystallize and end up at a point of clarity,, but then there are also those who find a new sense of freedom. Once they’ve defined their thing, then they can break out of that. It’s always beautiful to be able to follow that in an artist’s career. As someone looking at art, you want to be surprised. You don’t want to know in advance what’s coming next. The danger is when the practice becomes too planned out. Like what you were saying about trying to plan out the future for your kids—the more you try to control the outcome, the more you invite unexpected challenges.

Sure, in that sense, I don’t want to do everything now. I want to have space left in my timeline to look forward to, that point where everything crystallizes and becomes something new. Maybe in my 50s or 60s, I’ll feel more free, but that’s not to say I’m not enjoying what I’m doing now. But currently the structure is more contained in that masochistic way. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully unchain myself again.

My parents had a very prescribed way in which they thought I would grow up: piano lessons, straight A’s, frugal, very typical Asian-American experience. I still have trauma from not being able to wear nice clothes. I would draw “AIR” underneath the Nike swoosh with a sharpie because it was cooler to have the sole with the plastic bubble inside. Now, shoe companies send me stuff. It’s a totally different experience now for my son, though I don’t know if we’ve set him on the optimal path. He goes to a progressive independent school here in LA. When he goes to school in Japan, the teachers say he’s a normal student. At school in LA there’s a lot of issues, emails and meetings with counselors, and so on. It’s interesting, having him grow up between those two different cultures and seeing how he adjusts to them. He gets to have me as this very Americanized father, and his mother who is very Japanese—she even wakes up at 5am to make him fancy bento boxes.

Bento boxes and school therapy. It’s the best of both worlds.

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Thanks for following. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation as much as I have. I’ll be back next week with some books I’ve read and exhibitions I’ve seen recently, as well as a few takeaways from this interview and some notes for upcoming conversations. Hope your road home is a long one.

Read the first half of this conversation with James here:

In our conversation, James is candid about the sacrifices he makes to balance raising his son, advance his career, and push forward the work itself. As we will see, it can be tricky, and while the focus of mind and time that comes with being responsible for a young child can enhance productivity in one sense, it can also take away from work in other ways.

James has a new painting on the stand of BAIK ART at Art Jakarta, which opens this week. Don’t miss it if you’re in town for the fair. I’ve chosen to lead this issue with an image of that new painting, which is related to a myth about the invention of silk, and have selected a group of other paintings from the archive to accompany it. Next week, with Part II of our conversation, I’ll share James’s latest movie poster, as well as some older posters and drawings.

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What was your childhood like? What was your relationship with your parents like, and what was your first exposure to art and culture? I’m curious about the first moment you felt like this was something you might pursue.

James Jean: I moved to New Jersey from Taiwan when I was three. My dad got a job working at Formosa Plastics, which is a pretty well known Taiwanese company making industrial plastics. The opportunity to move to the US was very prestigious back then, though the US has lost its luster these days. My mom taught high school English, and my dad still speaks with a very heavy Taiwanese accent. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, riding my bike around the neighborhood—it was a very 80s, Stranger Things kind of upbringing. Both my parents worked and they wouldn’t get home until five or six, so I spent a lot of time off on my own and would have to get the rice cooker going every day for dinner. My dad also delivered newspapers, the Star Ledger, as a side hustle, and I joined him as well. When I was 13 years old, that’s when I first discovered comic books. All throughout my childhood I loved drawing, and I got a lot of praise for my drawing skills, but I never took it too seriously. I always loved to doodle. There was no outlet for it other than copying newspaper advertisements or photos of Batman and pictures I found interesting. My parents weren’t artistic at all, and I knew nothing about art history or the art world.

In middle school I got this issue of Wolverine from a classmate, I believe it was number 37, and my mind was completely blown, because that was the first concrete outlet I could see for drawing. I fell in love with comics and became obsessed, and helped my dad deliver newspapers early in the morning to earn money to go to the comic book store every Wednesday. That’s what we did throughout middle school and high school. My parents were happy I finally found a hobby or something I was passionate about, but they definitely did not see art as a viable career path. I was a pretty good student. I was in marching band, jazz band, pit orchestra, and even made it to All-State band every year. I took a lot of AP classes, but when it came time to apply to colleges, for whatever reason, I only focused on the School of Visual Arts and also the University of Arts in Philadelphia. Those were the only two schools in the area that had a cartooning program. I only had the equivalent of one semester of high school art, and then maybe another semester of portfolio prep, so my actual portfolio was very undeveloped when compared to kids who went to art high schools. Admission standards were low, and when I applied, the admissions office was pretty shocked that I was even considering art school, because they told me no one had ever applied with these test scores, since I got a 1540 on my SATs and had like a 4.3 GPA.

My parents were very disappointed. I remember my mom even cried when I told her. She was very worried. She’s sweet and sensitive, and my dad is more disciplined and entrepreneurial. He gave me The Art of the Deal when I was in high school, but I never read it. He was always ambitious. I feel like I inherited both sides, the more empathic and the more entrepreneurial. It’s a fortuitous combination. When I started art school I wanted to prove to them that I could be self-sufficient. I lived very cheaply. I got scholarships. I also worked a variety of different jobs to get myself through art school. My third year of art school coincided with the internet bubble in New York. I had a job at a children’s educational website on Wall Street. This was when everyone was making websites out of Flash and all these startups were having crazy parties and spending money like crazy. It was very extravagant and insane. And then the bubble burst in 2001, and the World Trade Center collapsed down the street from where I worked. I graduated with very few prospects. I sent my portfolio to various book publishers and got rejected. Almost as a last resort, a friend recommended me to an art director at DC Comics. I dropped off my portfolio, but what impressed him was my sketchbooks. That led to a seven-year gig doing covers for Vertigo comics.

Proving myself to be self-sufficient was at the forefront of my mind. By the time I was 25 or 26 I started doing pretty well as a commercial artist, as an illustrator, and then my parents could start bragging to their friends. And then I did a big collaboration with Prada in 2007, which was finally a name that the general public could recognize and appreciate, and I took time off from doing commercial work to focus on my own painting.

The one thing I always had trouble reconciling was always feeling disconnected from my ethnic background. Growing up, my parents would always speak to us in Mandarin, but then they would speak to each other in Taiwanese to have “adult” conversations. Because they had their conversations in Taiwanese, I was unable to absorb adult communication. Even now, my partner barely speaks English, and I’m isolated in my own world, and don’t share a language with her family. I’m recreating those walls that existed when I was a child, but somehow I’m okay with not being able to communicate fluently.

I remember being really struck the first time you told me about how much you enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by family and having those connections without being able to actually communicate. In a way that’s a function of art. You can sublimate all of that feeling into a visual output. Artists often aren’t the best verbal communicators.

It’s a way to relinquish responsibility. My childhood was pretty lonely, so in a sense, I’m recreating that trauma. Artists like to be on the margins of society. I still feel like an outsider, even though my practice bleeds into the mainstream with commercial collaborations and social media. Despite my perceived success, I still feel like an outsider because I haven’t been able to enter the art world as thoroughly as some of the people I came up with. I see them navigating the art world in a much more agile way. I don’t know if I’m self-sabotaging, but it’s difficult for me to leave the family for work. I see other artists constantly traveling all over the world, away from their families and children, because they’re so singularly focused on their art. I can’t do that because I enjoy being close to family, or feel duty-bound to be around and making sure everything is taken care of.

Is it more enjoying it, or is it more duty and responsibility?

Maybe I’m a bit of a masochist. There’s definitely suffering there. It feels normal for me. I’d feel guilty if I were self-indulgent enough to travel for weeks away from the family. During Covid I remember seeing an artist do 30 days of quarantine in China because he had a museum show, with a new quarantine in each city. That’s impressive to go to those lengths. I admire the focus. I guess I feel inadequate in that way. Then you see someone like Virgil Abloh. He had a family, but he was so focused on his work, even to the detriment of his health. He didn’t take care of himself the way he should have, and passed away much too young. I’m not willing to go to those lengths. Yet. When my son is 18 or 19, on his own, maybe that’s when I’ll be able to go full tilt.

But there’s a distinction between being committed to your work as a practice and being committed to the promotion of your work, being out and doing the road show all the time. I get the feeling that you’re extremely committed to your work in a studio sense. Maybe, in a way, being around the family and having that home environment keeps you locked in and gives you a really stable way of working in the studio. What’s your studio setup? How far is the studio from home and how do you do it?

I think you’re right. Being close to the family does create a structure that I’m forced to adhere to. I used to work from home. My son was born in Japan, and then we moved to LA in 2015 and renovated the house and the studio. The studio has shifted formation a few times. At that time I had two assistants, and they worked with me for a long time. It was very structured. Eventually when my son was old enough for daycare there would be a certain amount of time available for me to work. Now that he’s in elementary school I’m able to drop him off and pick him up every day, so that sets the schedule. My assistants come in at 10, and they work until 6pm. These days I play table tennis from about 5:30 to 6:30 to get a bit of exercise. It’s become a de facto middle-aged men’s group that’s formed around this ping pong table.

There’s another middle-aged men’s group I’m in, which is the directors group. I go to Guillermo del Toro’s house on Sundays and we paint plastic resin model kits. Jon Favreau will be there, because he’s also in the neighborhood. And then there’ll be guest directors who come by, like JJ Abrams or Jason Reitman. Steven Spielberg’s been a couple of times, although I never met him. He took my spot! As you get older it’s important to have these third spaces. It’s our way of inoculating ourselves from the male loneliness pandemic.

My son does karate four or five times a week, plus Japanese school on Saturdays and tutoring. It’s all within walking distance. His elementary school is a five minute drive away. Everything is pretty tight and efficient, so I’m able to get a lot done within a certain amount of time. No wasted moments. When I was younger I was mostly by myself. I’d be in the studio staring at the canvas for hours and pacing around, wasting time. Some could argue that that’s important, to let things develop in your subconscious. But when I look back at that work, it’s not very focused. Now that I’m forced to work in this more compressed way it actually produces stronger work, and I’m more productive as well.

Over the summers we take our son to Japan to go to public school in Tokyo. In the US, I deal with all the school stuff, all the communications with teachers and counselors, all the stuff that’s usually handled by mothers. Then, in Japan, my partner takes care of all the educational and medical stuff. We split duties that way, hers for two months, mine most of the year. Her English isn’t completely fluent, so she doesn’t feel confident in catching all the nuances in the social situations at school, which can sometimes be delicate and difficult.

Obviously you’re very involved as a father. Is that something that was really important to you from the outset, that you wanted to structure your family life that way? Or has it evolved over time in response to how things have gone?

It evolved over time. Honestly, I didn’t give it much thought when she got pregnant. I face things as they come. But subconsciously I knew I’d be very involved as a father. Obviously there are a lot of unknowns, but if you try to predict the future, you end up causing a lot more suffering than is warranted. You want to make the best possible choices for your family. You want to optimize everything as much as possible. But it’s impossible to know what’s best. Choosing the right school, the right area, the right environment. When you have a baby, you want to protect them from all the evils of the world, but eventually you have to live in this poisoned world. You see your kids playing on Astroturf in the park. You know Astroturf is bad and full of toxins. But then you see how much fun that they’re having. You can’t prevent all the ills of the world from contaminating your pure, innocent child. They’ll be corrupted anyways. You can only ever do your best.

Check back next week when we get into the vulnerable heart of how home and studio life sit together, plus James Jean’s thoughts on the state of childhood today and what parents need to be paying more attention to. We talk through how artists’ styles change as their ways of working change at different stages of their lives, and look at the idea of breaking through a creative plateau.

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Icon is a regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.

“There seems to be the universal knowledge that between the moments of absolute tension and expenditure of energy, there must also be the moments of relaxation.”

Few artists have become as central to conversations about art and parenthood as Loie Hollowell. Many of the others who occupy a similar position focus on the labor of parenting (like Caroline Walker). Loie, to my mind, comes in with a really unique contribution in the form of the body of the mother—the true heir to Judy Chicago and Georgia O’Keeffe. She started connected her practice to her first pregnancy in 2018. Of course, her work has always been about the body, her body, the experience of being a body; pregnancy and childbirth, it seems, opened up a line of inquiry that connected pleasure to pain, darkness and light, openness and closure.

I really admire Loie’s willingness to take the sex and sexiness of motherhood right alongside the blood and guts:

It’s important to have many, many, many different perspectives on the birthing body, the fantasy of the birthing body, the actual birthing body, what it feels like to really be inside of it. We need all these perspectives to add on to the history. For me, I feel like my contribution can be one of lived experience and abstraction.

What I most appreciate about how she’s integrated all of this into her practice as an artist, though, is that it doesn’t take the form of a moral imperative, but rather a natural outgrowth. The contours of her practice, the relationship between the body of the artist in the studio and the semi-abstracted geometric forms that result from it, is elastic enough and yet profound enough that it is able to digest all of this and spit it back out in its own mature language.

Loie’s first solo exhibition was just 10 years ago; her first solo exhibition with Pace Gallery happened to be the first show of her pregnancy paintings, in 2019. Now, a decade into her career, we can see something of its arc, from the embodied spirituality and sensuality of the earliest paintings through to the poignant cycle of works from pregnancy to childbirth to nursing.

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Field Trip: Non-Gestational Co-Nursing

Field Trip is a regular column reporting on exhibitions and institutions.

Ei Arakawa-Nash inaugurates the new Berlin space of Max Mayer with the solo exhibition “Non-Gestational Co-Nursing,” centered on a film of the same title that depicts the artist and his partner nursing their babies with a “prosthetic chest-feeding device” created by Taikan Hoshino and Osamu Takahashi.

In some ways the exhibition is an extended genealogy of the artist, connecting their professional practice with their more personal family tree as a parent and partner. Ei studied with Jutta Koether, who herself cites Jürgen Klauke as one of her core influences. Ei’s partner, Forrest Nash, is the founder of the website Contemporary Art Daily, an archive of installation shots of exhibitions at galleries and museums. Their children are named Soh and Yunta; Yunta is named after Jutta, triangulating the strands of genealogical influence present in the artist’s life. Jürgen’s work used photography, video, and live performance to trouble the presentation of gender and sexuality, a lineage into which Ei can now insert their everyday practices of parenting in this film and in a series of LED works that pay homage to Jürgen.

Ei describes this stage of his practice:

I am planning to make art with my children until they are around 3 years old. It’s weird to structure such a thing, but that is the age when most adults' earliest recalled memories are formed. I would like my performance to attempt to capture some aspect of the twins’ unrecorded early years.

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Book Report: Mobius Book

Book Report is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.

Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is one of the novels that has had the greatest influence on my thinking in the past few years. An enigmatic artist, X, has died; our narrator, her lover, sets to unearthing the details of her life, only to discover that the authentic core of the person she loved was invention itself. The story takes place in an alternate present, one in which the American south has seceded (again) and become a fascist theocracy. Catherine mixes in real people like Arthur Jafa, the kinds of artists someone like X would have known in New York, and historical events, so the line between this alternate history and how events have played out in our world beyond the book is always slightly blurry. Biography also borrows postmodernist winks at the archive as a source of data, with metafictional photographs and excerpted interviews and a handful of footnotes. It was pure mind-expanding pleasure to read, and played a part in how I conceived the Nostos project in a couple ways. Biography, clearly, is important to this idea of the artist’s life, and the idea of biography as fiction perhaps even more so. Plus, of course, I love the creative pairing, the idea of art coming into existence through the friction between two people’s distinct practices, their love for each other the catalyst to something new. Two summers ago, I wrote:

On the beach I was reading Biography of X, an amazing experiment in alternate realities that attempts to learn as much as is possible to know about the other from the zero-distance of the Kiss, and to define the self through its relationships. How can we know an artist? What in a life prepares us to understand its work? We have moved a long way from the orthodox New Criticism dissociation of art and life, even after the identitarian interventions. Frances Lindemann wrote in The Drift recently about auto-criticism and the biographical fallacy, and probably worries a bit about over-identification as a risk to the critic. You cannot see the other at all when you are really focused on looking for reflections of the self. In the right place at the right time with the right people, however, I think we’re able to look with true empathy—looking for the other in the self, perhaps. Is that what auto-criticism might be for? That’s where we’re able to see how life enables the work, and how the work enriches life.

Catherine’s latest, The Möbius Book, seems to have been written as if in direct response to these questions. Its format is perhaps even more playful than Biography. You start reading the book and then, a little more or a little less than halfway in, you bump into a page of acknowledgments. The following pages are upside-down. You have to flip it over and start reading again from the opposite direction. This is a break-up book, of which I am something of a morbid connoisseur (Light Years: undefeated; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept: literally ended up in the ER the night I finished it; The Children’s Bach: doesn’t count because everyone moves back in). I almost called it a break-up novel, but that wouldn’t be quite right. One of the two halves, the slightly longer one, is memoir, told from the perspective of Catherine Lacey in the wake of her break-up with Jesse Ball, who she refers to throughout as The Reason, introduced on the first page as “The Reason I’d turned from inhabitant to visitor” in her own home. (She is referring to moving into a guest room after being broken up with over email, but in a more general sense this displacement is a symptom of all endings, the unwilling relinquishing of a shared understanding of a life, a future, a world.) The other half, the slightly shorter one, is novella, a story about two friends processing a break-up that has destabilized their friend group. (One of them was caught cheating on the third friend by the fourth, who is also the brother of the third.) The novella, presumably, is the fiction that resulted from the period delineated by the fact of the memoir, though of course the whole point of putting it all together is that the fact flows into the fiction and the fiction might be fact. As Catherine puts it in the memoir:

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.

The two halves are linked by a page of acknowledgments, a page of credits, and a page of works consulted, linking the work within the work to the work beyond the work, emphasizing the milieu of connection that creates art and providing a shared buffer zone of social reality between these two pieces of fiction. One-and-a-half pieces of fiction. The other links between the two are repeated images: naked swimmers at a rough beach, variously dying and surviving. Another image, an action that occurs in the first couple pages of the memoir and the last page of the novella: a tool is placed beside a teacup. In the memoir it is a hammer and a Japanese teacup so precious it must be destroyed in order to repair the relationship around it. In the novella it is a crowbar and a beautiful gray teacup. In both cases the action is one of place-setting, a composition of mise-en-scene that is charged with meaning. A corner of the world, laid out in preparation for the work to be done. Catherine has a strong sense of this domestic setting, of how home is something that is both material and not:

Hope is visible in the objects in our homes. Identities and plans rest dormant in a stack of books. The kitchen pantry reassures us of our future nourishment. A toolbox is the confidence that we can fix what will break. Little notes to self. Little notes of self. The secret language of things we use to fold life into time, time into life.

The home and the studio, understood side by side:

The Red Studio was an idealized place for Matisse—a room displaying years of work, an arc of one man’s visual language. I love paintings of paintings, Avery said, and the moment she named this category, I loved it, too. Books about books. Films about films. Often I find myself writing about an apparent subject that is concealing an almost opposite object. To write about hatred is to see love, vividly.

In her works consulted, Catherine Lacey notes a number of other writers who I have been working through. She quotes from Gillian Rose, who I would like to return to in more depth, as well as Thomas Merton. There is a constellation there of love as a spiritual practice, something that she believes in with perfect clarity, “faith in another person … faith in something we could not prove.”

Catherine is also on Substack where she is amazing read:

Untitled Thought Project

144-word essays, book stuff, writing stuff, etc.

By Catherine Lacey

Links: Nina Simone, Feminist Duration, Kids with Phones, Carework, and Placemat Poetry

Nina Simone Childhood Home

Adam Pendleton has brought together Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher, and Julie Mehretu to preserve Nina Simone’s childhood home in North Carolina as a house museum, possibly with an artist residency component. I love the house museum format and appreciate this action as artists supporting artists in a political sense: preserving a personal site as a window into the woman behind the work.

Feminist Duration Reading Group

This is a reading group for “under-represented feminist texts, movements and struggles from outside the Anglo-American canon.” I stumbled on the website while I was looking for a Carla Lonzi text that Catherine Lacey mentions at the end of her memoir. They meet monthly in London, but the resources they have assembled in readings and notes available on the website are amazingly deep and incredibly useful.

“My Fellow Parents Have Betrayed Me,” in The Cut

Through the end of year six/ fifth grade my daughter was in the dream situation of going to a school where all devices, smart watches included, were banned from campus entirely—not in bags, not on buses. It was amazing because it left no decisions to individual families. If one kid gets a watch or phone, their friends don’t even see it unless they’re together on the weekends. Now that we have moved up to the middle school campus, the divisions have begun. Some kids are getting flip phones, some already have iPhones, some have their own landlines. Most of them use their school computers to email each other, treating Gmail threads like group chats.

“Too Few People Are Doing the Carework, and Too Many People Are Doing Bullshit Jobs,” in The Auntie Bulletin and The Matriarchy Report

The Auntie Bulletin

Too Few People Are Doing The Carework, and Too Many People Are Doing Bullshit Jobs

Aunties, there aren’t enough people doing the carework. There are not enough childcare providers, not enough teachers, not enough therapists, not enough home health aides and nurses and doctors, not enough social workers — the list goes on and on. In pretty much any caring profession these days, there’s a worker shortage. And in the home — in the domain…

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7 months ago · 42 likes · 10 comments · Lisa Sibbett and Allison Lichter

This one is 100% great. Do you like this video format on Substack? Would you like it if I started doing some of the Lives of the Artists conversations over video in addition the edited transcripts I archive here?

“Four Ways of Setting the Table,” in The Common

I really enjoyed this poem by Clara Chiu and thought that this line, in particular, would be an appropriate way to end this week’s letter. As we have moved from breastfeeding to the domestic tableau, all of these ways of nourishing: “A placemat, you see, is a thing of decorum … I have laid out a corner of the world for you.” Click through here to read the whole poem:

CommonPlace

Four Ways of Setting the Table

By CLARA CHIU…

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8 months ago · 4 likes · The Common

Thank you for reading. Until next week—take the long way home. Please share with any friends you think might be interested.

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Editor’s Note is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.

Looking at Bruce Nauman last week I was thinking a lot about the space of the studio as a site of experimentation, a lab for testing out ideas both material and conceptual that is understood to be accepting of failure and forgiving of wasted time. Coincidentally a couple days later, Jeff Waldman wrote about his approach to experimentation: noncommittal, low-pressure, small-scale data collection about what works and what doesn’t. He suggests starting as soon as possible, and as cheaply as possible. And his biggest takeaway is something that I’ve said again and again about the biggest decisions we face: “The only way to learn if a thing is the right fit is to probably just do it.” Bruce Nauman’s early approach to wasting time in the studio—measuring out the space-time of being in a particular place—was a low-cost series of experiments that opened a door into what would become one of the most consequential artistic practices of the later twentieth century. A lot can come of a little experiment.

One of the things that we as non-artists need to learn from artists is how to structure the way we are in the world as a practice. Many artists do this intuitively, and bristle at the idea that there are principles in how they approach their next step. Others are clear and explicit. Sister Corita Kent listed rules for art: Consider everything an experiment. Nothing is a mistake. The only rule is work. I think there’s a great value in seeing the next thing we do as connected to the last thing we did, and pushing forward each next step as an evolution of our present moment. And of course, part of the freedom to this discipline is being okay with ripping up whatever we’re working on and turning to something else instead. Within a practice, any given experiment might result in a meaningful next step, but it also might push us closer to a meaningful dead end.

A lot of the artists I’ve spoken to for Lives of the Artists invite their children into the studio and let them have at it with whatever materials happen to be on hand, be that paints or scraps or a video camera. Part of what makes the experiment work is that there is no expectation of an outcome. There will be nothing to hang up on the fridge afterwards, nothing to hand in to a teacher. Instead you get mess: mess on paper, mess on the floor, mess on hands. When non-artists expose their kids to art education, they tend to want to see something come out of it, and they tend to want to like what comes out of it. When artists let their kids into the studio, nearly everything ends up in the trash. There’s no judgment. When there’s commentary, it tends to be in the process of the experiment, not on the result. What comes out of these kinds of experiments in the studio is something the kid carries forward with them—they’ve taken an invisible step that can inform how they approach the world around them. They can choose to take another step, and another.

My daughter spent her weekend experimenting with a hot glue gun on the floor of her bedroom. While she was busy with that I visited two exhibitions, one of the late Li Yuan-Chia at Winsing Art Place, and another by Felix Treadwell at Dopeness.

Li Yuan-Chia was a colleague of Hsiao Chin, both pioneers of abstraction who came of age in Taiwan and then founded the cosmopolitan Punto group in Italy. He moved to the UK in the 1960s and fell in with the Signals group, eventually settling in Cumbria and opening the LYC Museum. This museum was partially a place for Li to exhibit the work of friends and peers and partially a community art space, welcoming contributions from neighbors and, importantly, children from the area. In this sense it preceded the participatory public art galleries that we see today. The exhibition in Taipei is strong, including work from my favorite series—wooden blocks attached by magnet to metal surfaces that can be reconfigured at will. Li was all about the spirit of the experiment.

Felix Treadwell is an emerging English artist who has a studio in Taipei where he paints a series of iconic characters that expand with psychic interiority: there are dinosaurs (many dinosaurs in this newest exhibition), an androgynized fashionable version of himself, and occasionally something like the xenomorph from Alien. For me Felix’s work is a reminder that what makes us who we are more than anything else is the terrain of the childhood we come from. In his new work I see him moving more into painting per se, letting the material guide the composition instead of working to an image. There are some clever color fields and blending practices on view, and it is evident that the studio remains a site of experimentation for him, too.

Read Jeff Waldman’s piece on experimentation here:

Elevated Spaces

Experimentation

I had a follow-up thought to my most recent post... Last week I said…

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7 months ago · 23 likes · 10 comments · Jeff Waldman

Icon: Do Ho Suh

Icon is a regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.

We bring our memories with us when we move and my memories inhabit the architectural pieces that I create, which are physical, but also psychological and metaphorical. What I bring is a skin, the thin skin of the bigger physical thing.

Do Ho Suh’s exhibition “Walk the House” is on at the Tate Modern for another month, closing on 26 October. I write a lot about concepts of home here, so it should be clear why Do Ho Suh has become such a touchstone for me. His most iconic work involves recreating spaces in which he has lived in fabric with traditional sewing techniques, so that they are sculptural and soft and monumental and translucent and present all at once. One of the centerpieces of this exhibition is Nest/s (2024), which sews together various liminal apartments and studios in which he has resided over the course of his life, each one its own striking color. What results is a monument to the places he has been and the versions of himself that he was when he lived in them, and a tunnel that allows us to walk through the space-time of his life as a young man, an artist, a father.

Do Ho’s first engagement with home was with his childhood ur-home, which he rubbed, inverted, and reconstructed for Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013-2022). You can feel the tenderness with which he approached this dwelling as an object, every detail of every corner preserved in its own slowly sagging mirror dimensions. Since then he has become interested in concepts of home more generally, often working with communities and documenting the architecture—as it is lived as well as how it is designed—in social housing and other sites of psychological significance.

Today I shared this quote because I wanted to point out this gentle pair of Time Pockets (2021). Do Ho sees architecture and clothing as intimately related, skins or envelopes that come between the body and the world and mediate states of thinking and feeling as much as they modulate our physical perceptions. I want to share his explanation of the project in full:

My wife and I decided early on that we would try and keep hold of as many of the little objects used by our children when they were young that we could. Our daughters were constantly growing out of their clothes and toys, and making the decision of what to keep and what to throw always felt impossible. We couldn’t come up with a system and decided to keep everything until our kids could decide for themselves. This is a huge privilege and a storage problem, but I’m so glad we did it!

I think the objects we touch the most accumulate our energies – which is partly where the idea of the fabric specimen (doorknobs, switches, sockets etc.) comes from. Because I always think about the interplay of clothing and architecture – the question of what is the space that houses us – we decided to try using clothing as a vessel for memories of the children’s early years. We made two smocks and asked the girls to pick the objects that were most meaningful and held the most memories for them. They were then placed in the pockets, like a three-dimensional photo album, only so much more tactile and physical than a photo album. The choosing process was the best part really!

Do Ho Suh also has a touring project for children called Artland, which has been through the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Kids and other visitors get air-drying foam clay with which they can sculpt flora and fauna to add to big jungly environments. The results are cute and I’m sure it’s a fun way to get kids doing something hands-on in the museum, but if I’m being honest I’d rather just be one of Do Ho’s daughters sewing my most treasured possessions into the pockets of a phantom dress.

Until soon, enjoy the long way home.

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Field Trip: For Children in Munich

Field Trip is a regular column reporting on exhibitions and institutions.

I’ve written about the wave of exhibitions looking at design for children, art for children, and playgrounds by artists that we’ve seen over the past couple years. At the Haus der Kunst in Munich, “For Children. Art stories since 1968” is one of the largest and most comprehensive of these surveys, bringing together installations intended for young audiences as well as a certain level of historical and conceptual discourse around what these choices mean for the artist and for the museums.

There are two things I really like about this show. One is it speaks to a broader age range than most. When we imagine “art for children,” too often we immediately jump to older toddlers and lower primary years kids—the age set who can spend the afternoon doodling on the walls and floors, as they are indeed invited to do in Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Mega Please Draw Freely (2025), which occupies the central hall at the entrance to the exhibition. The Haus der Kunst also invites the participation of older youth and younger adults. They are given opportunities to participate in the work itself, like with Koo Jeong A’s HAUS DER MAGNET (2025), an indoor-outdoor skate park, and crucially, in the making of the exhibition, via a youth council that came together in advance of this show. As the proud father of a tween student council representative, I can confirm that there is nothing more important than making kids this age feel included in the machineries and bureaucracies that shape their lives.

The second thing about this show for me is it doesn’t shy away from the more discursive side of contemporary art—for every LEGO play tray and costume dress-up station there is a video installation or audio work. It’s able to accomplish this by stating clearly up front that “The exhibition is not a playground.” I like the effort to normalize exhibition-going as a practice for children, young people, and families: here is a hammock, check the sign, looks like it’s okay to lie down here, here is a guitar on the carpet, check the sign, not supposed to touch this one. As a result we find complex and layered relationships between reality and performance, from environments that welcome interaction to videos and documentation of moments from which we are excluded.

The title of the exhibition seems obvious and declarative: art for children. But it is an allusion to a Bruce Nauman installation that one encounters in the exhibition, a work in which we hear the artist repeat the phrase “for children” on a loop, which was itself titled after the Bela Bartok piano pieces For Children, originally intended to teach piano to young people. Bruce’s work was originally a part of “For Children/ For Beginners,” the latter half of which was a large-scale projection of “all the combinations of the thumb and fingers,” mirroring the poses of schoolyard hand games with the fingering positions of the piano.

This continues with work that I do not believe was made for children, but engages with the concept of childhood discursively, and in doing so makes itself legible to younger audiences. Antoine Catala’s Jardin synthétique à l’isolement (2014) is like this, using pictograms that were originally developed to communicate with non-verbal children. Harun Farocki’s Bedtime Stories films (1973-7) use his daughters as actors to explore the potential of the imagination of the child. In Lake Valley (2016) Rachel Rose draws on antique children’s picture books and classic animation. The result is stunning; I think Rachel is one of our top contemporary poets of both childhood and parenthood.

Another category of work draws on forms that will look fun and playful for children, often inviting interaction that feeds back into future iterations of the projects. Many of these were developed through the education departments or child-friendly commissions of other institutions. Basim Magdy’s How I Learned to Laugh at Failure (2018) is a set of altered ping pong, pinball, and pool tables with custom rules developed by children playing the game over time. Olafur Eliasson’s LEGO-based Cubic Structural Evolution Project (2004) we have looked at previously. Yto Barrada also used building blocks in Lyautey Unit Blocks (Play) (2010), with an optional dose of historical-political content. Rivane Neuenschwander’s The Name of Fear (2015-25) begins in workshops with children who share their deepest fears and then design capes to defend against them; Rivane and her collaborators then produce the capes as beautiful fashion objects that can be worn during certain designated times. The catalogue of the exhibition uses this image on the cover. Very much looking forward to reading this one.

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Editor’s Note: Art and Play, Art as Play

Editor’s Note is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.

What I love about the projects in exhibitions like “For Children” is that while they are often interactive, participatory, and even fun, they are not always didactic. Children’s museums, whether they are the more traditional sort focused on science, technology, and society or the newer sort with educational projects by contemporary artists, almost always have a theme or a point to convey. Contemporary art as we think of it doesn’t have to be “about” anything at all—when we end up reflecting, it’s because we’ve gotten there through play.

Bruce Nauman is particularly important here. In many contexts art is told that it must be about something, that it must have a point. Bruce, with all the white male privilege of the late 1960s, asserted the moral right of the artist for art to be about nothing at all. The body in the studio: bouncing in a corner or walking around a square.

My proposal is this: What if we had an institution that showed projects like the ones in “For Children” consistently, all the time, as the heart of a program? What if they weren’t packaged as being explicitly “For Children,” but rather presented without comment to an audience that was presumed to include children as well as adults? What if there was art that you could touch and become a part of, but it wasn’t drowning in didactics?

I am so bored of thinking about art in the same binary categories: art that’s meant to appreciate in value for the market versus art that’s meant to signal the virtues of its community. The most exciting artists working now for me keep themselves far, far away from these orthodoxies. They believe in beauty and purpose all at once. Art is meant to play.

Play is one way that artists can create a space of freedom for themselves. Some playful art invites us to play along with it. This is the art that I find myself wanting to spend my time with right now. A little bit dangerous, a little bit pointless, and always very much open to the outside.

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Learnings: Petra Cortright

Learnings is a regular column that digests some of the lessons from the Lives of the Artists.

Since my conversation with Petra I’ve been thinking about how different we all are as people, as parents, and as children, and how our preferences and inclinations define what we think of as good art, good parenting, and ultimately a good life. Petra and her husband Marc have completely different approaches to making art: he needs to bounce ideas around, take feedback, and work through it in relationship, while she wants to put her headphones on, close the door, and make her work completely on her own. Yet, somehow, their partnership works, and their expectations of each other are understood and respected. Petra also spoke about her approach to travel and self-promotion, on how she doesn’t like to bring the kids along to things. I decided early on that I was going to bring my daughter to everything that would have her, and institutions were actually remarkable accepting of that, often offering plane tickets and sometimes childcare to make the trips work. I’m glad that my daughter got the early exposure to art and culture and different parts of the world, but now as a middle schooler she’s completely lost interest and doesn’t even want to think about all the art fairs and biennials she’s seen, so maybe there’s something to the waiting strategy that Petra has opted for. Jin Meyerson also preferred a bit more distance between his second daughter and the studio life. Clearly there isn’t a right or wrong approach here. So many things work, and so many things also cause their own problems. One thing that I really loved about Petra’s approach was her inclusion of her own mother in their family dynamic. I think everyone who has access to help from grandparents has a great leg up. The conversation with Petra is here:

I wrote this week’s newsletter listening to Tito Puente, whose son sells a line of hot sauces along with El Rey del Timbal merch. I’m very excited that Lives of the Artists will be back towards the end of the month with a new interview with James Jean, the LA-based painter and father who is known far beyond the art world for the posters he’s drawn for many of your favorite movies. James has a new print that’s available today for 24 hours only that happens to be based on his son’s reading habits. Buy an edition here. Until next week, take the long way home.

Editor’s Note is a regular column introducing topics, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.

Logically: a conch fritter is the opposite of a bee sting. I came to this impossible conclusion spending time with my family on the road this summer. When your summers consist of tumbling around the undergrowth, eating sun-warmed berries straight from the bush, bee stings are a fact of life. This August I was in Maine during that magical week of the summer when blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries are all ripe at the same time. I collected them hand over hand so enthusiastically that I found myself competing with bees loosely swarming the bushes, at times accidentally knocking them out of my way. No stings. It must be 25 years or more since the last time I was stung by a bee. When you spend your winters messing about on the decks of boats and up and down the docks of marinas in Florida and the Bahamas, conch fritters are equally a fact of life. Sometimes a little too spicy, always a little too hot, but invariably on the menu. It will have been 25 years or more since my last conch fritter. As a child, bee stings are something you hope to avoid, but nevertheless accept as the cost of doing the sweet, sweet business of berry picking, tree climbing, and general woodsy mayhem. Conch fritters are something you assume will proceed apace indefinitely into the future, an uninterrupted stream of spongy, chewy goodness that will pop up on every menu from here to eternity.

Needless to say I haven’t lived on a boat in a while, and I don’t dine on as many docks as I’d like to. When I got back to Taipei a giant blue mud dauber had taken up residence in the kitchen, but after a couple days we were able to work her out the door without a sting. Here I am, more or less an adult: minimal bee stings, minimal conch fritters. Ample berries, to be fair.

We are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. We think we know, but we are almost always wrong. My philosophy of life has become a lot more about acceptance than planning, almost to the point of chaos. Being in a committed, loving partnership with the right person brings color to the corners of our lives in unexpected ways, and yet planning for what the right kind of person means and attempting to seek them out almost always backfires. Finding a sense of purpose in the work that structures our days creates a scaffold of meaning that gives weight to everything we do, but it’s not the kind of purpose that can be written out in a mission statement. So many of our choices, especially the ones that feel like the big ones, don’t actually matter—at least not in the life-defining ways we expect them to. The things that do reliably make us happy tend to be the places where we can pursue the inner work within and between the milestones: coming to terms with ourselves, building a sense of home, cultivating connection, picking berries, caring for others, diving for conch.

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Icon: Marlene Dumas

Icon is a regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.

This painting is titled The Painter, and is based on a photograph of Marlene Dumas’s daughter coming in from finger painting in the garden. The painting is two meters tall and one meter wide. Hung even slightly off the ground, the figure dwarfs the viewer. There is something unsettling about the body of a baby in the proportions of an adult—think of Charles Ray’s Family Romance, coincidentally executed around the same time as The Painter.

Marlene introduces The Painter:

Historically it was always the male artist who was the painter and his model the female. Here we have a female child (the source my daughter) taking the main role. She painted herself. The model becomes the artist.

She painted herself. Marlene Dumas is one of the greatest painters of our age. She is the greatest living painter of motherhood. She is also the greatest living painter of pornography [compositions from pornographic source images]. The fact that she is such a titan of her medium means that she is automatically “the greatest living painter of ______,” where the blank represents whatever she might choose to paint. And yet I can’t help but think that the slipperiness of her bodies, the tactility of their surfaces, comes from a place of profound awareness of the ties between all of these things, the paint and the skin and the self and the other and pleasure and pain and the future and desire and death, that part of her greatness actually comes from her willingness to dig into the creative properties of the body.

Marlene became a mother for the first time at the age of 36 in 1989 and was struck by the body horror and responsibility of the new baby. As she said in the audio guide to her MoMA exhibition:

People said that my babies looked quite horrific and alien, but actually all I did was something that is often done in art, you know, changing the scale of smaller things into very big things.

In the mid-1990s Marlene created a series of paintings on paper in collaboration with her daughter, Helena, who then would have been around five or seven years old. She has said:

Helena decorated, improved and worked on my black and white drawings with colour when she was six years old. She found them a bit too boring. I was her underground. Unlike Arnulf Rainer working on photographs, she worked ‘against’ me rather. I allowed her to play with my drawings so I could do other work. This wasn’t set up as an art project in the first place. She ‘re-casted’ my models into her own stories. One was kidnapped, she said, and walked into a horse.

On view at the Museum of Cycladic Art this summer are paintings of Helena as a toddler as well as Helena as a grown woman with her own daughter, Eden.

Sexuality, pregnancy, childhood, and death are some of the parallel lines that track through Marlene’s work over the past half century. It might be this disconcerting suite of four paintings that captures the darkly existential joy of what she brings to painting better than any other. Here stands Helena again, maybe three years old, mischievous and defiant and innocent and knowing, flanked by three skeletons with their own dolls and children. The painter’s child is the only memento mori she needs.

Book Report: Three Summers

Book Report is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.

With apologies to those who have to share the beach, deck, or cabin with me, my embarrassing travel habit is reading the book about the place. A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, which is set in the affluent outskirts of Athens in the 1930s. Liberaki tells the story of three sisters over three summers: one who marries and has a baby, one who rejects men for the company of horses and an aunt, and one who finds herself deciding between pursuing the love of an astronomer and writing a novel about seeing the world. In her translator’s note, Karen van Dyck speaks to the autobiographical aspects of this triangle, and how the third sister (the protagonist and narrator of the novel, of course) represents a synthesis between the positions of the first two sisters, who respectively represent the domestic family life and the creative life of the artist. In real life, Liberaki only had one sister.

The concluding chapters of the book are rife with fun meta-fictional reflections on the nature of storytelling and the blurry area where life runs into narrative. It all ends a bit too abruptly for me, but the material that leads up to the revelation that the sister will indeed sublimate her yearning for love into literature is beautiful:

Of course all voyages are really one—the voyage. And in this way Andreas, by leaving some days from his life in Barcelona, some in Le Havre, some in Athens, carves a single, unique line. That’s the line I want to find and express, the line that represents the essence of his life and that perhaps even he doesn’t know about. I want to be like the artist who, in a moment of inspiration, captures a resemblance, expressing the whole person, the person at all times in one painting. I once saw a painting like that. It was of a woman. But you could also say it was about submission. Submission was characteristic of that woman, but in her life it wasn’t obvious, it didn't reveal itself all at once, instead it spread itself among her various gestures, each one quite distinct from the next. It wasn’t condensed the way it was in the portrait, which managed to combine a submissive look from one day with the submissive movement of a hand from another day, and so on.

That leading line might even need to enter the poetic pantheon of my sign-offs:

Projections: Materialists and Black Bag

Projections is a regular column on films that touch on living in a creative family.

I’ve been a big fan of Celine Song since Past Lives, which I watched in bed as a little wallowing treat on my birthday two years ago, so I was pretty heavily invested in the discourse around Materialists leading up to its release. I read a handful of reviews before I was able to see it, and somehow from the reviews I was led to believe that cynicism won out and the film came down on the side of money over all. This is not the case; Celine is a romantic in spite of everything. Which is important for our purposes because, in Materialists, this involves the protagonist choosing the struggling artist over the financier in spite of everything, choosing the compulsions of love over playing the game. Celine’s real-life partner is the writer Justin Kuritzkes; like the couple in Past Lives, they met on an artists’ residency.

If pushed I would say that I find this situation more interesting, the nitty gritty of how creative people choose to make a life together, how they choose to channel all of that energy—all of that storytelling. In a way these movies are the answer. The other one I enjoyed recently was Black Bag, in which Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play married spies who have to decide how much they can trust each other: how much to share and how much to keep in the black bag. This is a beautiful artistic romance. They may be spies instead of actors and directors, but the creative intellectual energy they bring to their work is so much about invention and devotion. In both Materialists and Black Bag, love wins. Art wins. I heard someone say recently that the way to balance ambition and contentment is by linking them through a practice of devotion These movies get that.

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Links: Children’s Museum Exhibitions, Cooking for Gertrude Stein, Psychoanalyzing Romance, La Gonette, and Gwen John

“Not Just for Kids,” in Monocle

Kimberly Bradley asks if child-focused exhibitions might actually be the future of museums. She looks at exhibitions like “For Children,” “Radical Playgrounds,” and “The Enchanted Castle,” as well as the Young V&A, suggesting that they create inclusive forms of public space and reach out to the audiences and decision-makers of the future. I agree with all of these points and am glad to see this trend being picked up in the media. Personally I feel that positioning public art in this way also sidesteps the painful binary of the commercial and the academic, which has become ossified and almost unworkable. More on this soon!

“The Joy of Cooking (for Gertrude Stein),” in The New Yorker

Anna Russell attends a London dinner party thrown by Francesca Wade, author of the new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. She alludes to the labor of love that was the life built between Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, those two icons of twentieth-century arts and letters: Toklas silent in the kitchen, Stein entertaining the milieu. I look forward to reading this one and writing a longer piece on their writing and cooking.

Romance, by Parapraxis x Psychosocial Foundation

Parapraxis and the Psychosocial Foundation are running a seminar on romance from a psychoanalytic perspective with a great syllabus and list of speakers. Starts 7 September. I would sign up but it’s an awkward time slot in Asia, late Sunday nights into early Monday mornings. I really enjoy the way they introduce the question: “What is bad can feel good, and what is good can seem beyond one’s capacity to reach or realize. On the other hand, desire will not reliably bend to will or fiat. Given all this, can we engage in romance strategically? Or is the power of romance precisely that it undoes all strategy? Can we form attachments that do not provide momentary pleasure at the cost of planetary pain?”

“A Little Piece of Heaven,” in La Briffe

Ruth Reichl writes one of my favorite newsletters on Substack, in one amazing column revisiting the “Old Menus” she has archived from various stages of her career in eating and writing. I was really excited to read about her week at La Gonette, a retreat in the French countryside for creative people led by novelists Michael Cunningham and Alice Nelson. In Ruth’s description:

As far as I can tell novelist Alice Nelson and her husband, psychiatrist Danny Shub, thought about the world they wanted their infant son to grow up in. Then they set out to create it. They bought La Gonette, a 17^th century chateau in the Luberon that belonged to King Charles’ favorite designer Robert Kime. Then they filled it with beautiful objects, mountains of books and an ever-changing cast of creative people. At La Gonette there is always someone in the kitchen conjuring up fragrant food, always someone on the terrace deep in conversation, always someone heading off to collect yet an even more interesting person from the station.

La Briffe

A Little Piece of Heaven

“But what did you do while you were away?” my family asked…

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10 months ago · 252 likes · 41 comments · Ruth Reichl

“The Remarkable Lives of Gwen and Augustus John,” in The Guardian

Jonathan Jones reviews Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, a new dual biography of Gwen John and her brother Augustus by Judith Mackrell. We have spent quite a bit of time with Gwen John via the books by Celia Paul and Rebecca Birrell; I know little about Augustus, who was the more celebrated in their time. Jones asks about what it means to succeed or fail under these circumstances, when the shifting grounds of aesthetic experience might completely invert over the course of a century. He frames Gwen’s creative ideal beautifully: “to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude.”

Until next week—hope your road is a long one.

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When you look at your work over the last few years, can you look at something and tell that it’s something you made when you were pregnant, or when you weren’t sleeping well? Does it translate through like that?

It was really apparent with Otto, the before and after is such a hard, hard line, but with Jack, I was already in the mindset. I made a lot of work, and I was happy with it. When Otto was born I remember feeling so intensely that I was trying to make some new stuff from scratch, from a blank canvas rather than taking apart an older file, and I just couldn’t do it, and it was so scary and frustrating. Now I have insane thoughts, like maybe I could have a third just because. It’s just brain damage.

I’m obsessed with Jack. With Otto, I hadn’t been around babies. I had never changed a diaper before. I guess some people have more exposure to them. I didn’t have any friends who had them. It was a massive lifestyle change, obviously, and now I’ve become a baby person. With Otto, it was about a year later that I really felt happy with the work again, which is a long time. I started to take a little bit of pressure off myself and not necessarily try to make something new, but rework old files instead, which is a guiding, helpful thing for me. I am incapable of making the same thing over and over. I try to, but I can’t. There’s always progression in some way. There’s also little tricks to getting started. When I would work with the webcam videos, I would always tell myself, “Okay, this is just a test, just have fun.” This is not a piece of art with a capital A. It gets you into a better mindset, more carefree with nothing on the line. That’s always the best point to enter into the work. I slowly built my confidence up in that way. And then a year later I could make something completely new. But the second time around there hasn’t been that gap.

You mentioned that, at home, you have systems set up so you can parent and make art at the same time. What does that look like? What’s the system for you?

When there’s a baby in the mix, there’s a nursery, and that is two rooms away from my studio room, so if the baby is sleeping, I still be playing music in my studio and the sound is not a problem. Or I can have a meeting or move freely. It’s my own space, too, there’s no toys. It’s just a small home office. Otto, the five year old, his bedroom is in the room next to the home office studio, but he’s at school and doesn’t nap during the day so that room is empty. I don’t really work at night because I’m tired, but there is a door between the rooms so on the rare occasion that I want to work at night I could go in there and work.

Here, in Santa Barbara, the computers are right next to the bed, so I can’t work at night with Otto sleeping right next to me. Sometimes I have processes going at night, rendering a video or downloading or uploading files, because I have to send a lot of files to the printers for making the physical pieces. The paintings are bigger than they used to be. Each file can be, like, three gigs, so if you’re sending 20 or 30 paintings for a printing run, the uploading takes some time, and I used to do all that at night. And now the internet is very slow here, and I can’t do night things, because we wouldn’t be able to sleep with the screen on.

Then Marc has his separate studio. My mom moved in with us last year when Jack was born. She’s with him right now. That’s him screaming in the background, if you can hear. She helps me so much. We had a nanny when Otto was little, but it got really expensive when he was at preschool. Navigating school and childcare is really hard, and so much money, so we basically solved it by having my mom help. I love the idea of their grandmother being so close. Living with your parents, three generations in one household, it’s not for everyone, but for us right now this is the best way for our family to function.

You’re back in Santa Barbara. You were in San Barbara when you were a kid. What was life like there as a kid? Did you have any early exposure to art?

Both my parents were artists. My dad was the head of the art department at the University here, and my mom was his student. That’s how they met. There’s a 14 year age gap, which the younger generations look down on now, the power imbalance. Everyone in our family is an artist. Honestly, it’s too much. My sister, my husband, my mom, every single person. It sucks. We’re praying for a doctor or a lawyer. How do you even cultivate a doctor and a lawyer from this situation? Even the music that I listen to with Otto, I’m like, “Oh my God, what are you even exposing him to?” Maybe he’ll push back against it, rebel against us or something.

Santa Barbara is a ridiculously nice place for kids. It’s so small, it’s so easy, the weather is really nice. There’s a lot of resources for the size of the town. The summer camps are so much better than LA. It’s a very coddled, bubbly bubble place. We live five minutes from the beach. Otto walks to school. It’s a very sweet little elementary school. I pick him up and take him to the beach and sit there for two hours while he plays. You don’t have all the driving of LA, which I try to avoid. We’re on the outskirts, in the historical suburbs. And when it’s not on fire, it’s a very nice place to be. People always worry about their kids growing up in LA or New York City, that they’ll grow up too fast. Bunch of softies coming out of Santa Barbara, for sure. No edge here. I don’t know how I got my edge. I got it because I was on the internet when I was little. That’s how I got my edge.

A lot of artists form their community through art school but then also through sharing studio space and things like that. But with the digital art community, you’re connected to people who are in different parts of the world. How is that social dimension transformed? Are there internet artist parent groups?

We keep in touch for sure. All the women artists I know who have kids, you sort of keep tabs on that. It’s a lot of Close Friends stuff on Instagram. You’ll see someone have a show, but then you’ll see on Close Friends that the kid is sick. Nothing official, there’s no actual group, because it’s also so incredibly specific to people’s careers and their setup, and what country they live in. For people in Europe the school thing isn’t as intense as the United States. There’s a little bit more of a safety net. Education is more accessible. They’re not paying private school tuition in Berlin, but they’re still learning about gnomes and baking the bread and feeding the chickens.

When I talk to other artists about it the thing that comes up the most is travel. The longest I’ve ever been gone was when I did a residency in Saudi Arabia three years ago, and that was a big, big thing for me to do. I had never been to the Middle East before. I ended up loving it and having the best time. Now I’m an ambassador for Saudi. I’m obsessed with it. Before I went it took some talking and planning with Marc. I had this window to go because we were planning on having another baby, so if I hadn’t gone then I wouldn’t have been able to go. You can’t really travel when you’re pregnant in the same way. There’s so many limitations. I was talking to another artist at the time who was considering it, but she was going to have to bring her son along. He was in that really hard early toddler time, crawling and baby walking, putting everything in the mouth. It’s not like the residency is child-proofed. The only way I could go was for my mom to stay at our house and help Marc.

California is so far away from everything. Everything is a 12-hour flight. Wow, 12 hours with no one bothering me for anything, this is such luxury. But then you get there and you’re already missing your children, and you think you’ll sleep so well alone, but then you don’t. It’s so weird not having kids and people around. Then God forbid something happens while you’re not there and you feel guilty for not being there. But with our work there’s such a demand for travel. Some artists are on planes all the time. There’s so many fairs, biennials, museums. I have to say no to a lot of travel, but it’s a really hard thing to balance, because when you say no and you’re not there, that’s felt, and it affects your career when you don’t show up. When you show up you talk to collectors and people and it’s nice to be connected and be a part of things. That’s a constant thing to negotiate, how much do I need to be out there to keep things going and not be away from my family all the time.

I also just don’t like traveling. I’m such an artist. I’m such a homebody, I truly love being at home and having my time on the computer to make work. That’s my happiest thing. The thing I’m always forcing myself to do is the more outward-facing stuff, going to openings. Some people are very social. I’m an internet artist. I prefer to be on the computer. I prefer to be social on the computer. I talk to artists all day on the computer. Then I wonder, do we even have to live in LA, or in a major city? Could we get away with moving to Montana? We have a place in Montana that we got four years ago with crypto and NFT money. I thought it was very poetic to convert crypto into land and water. This was a year after Covid, and there’s always so much climate anxiety in California, and it’s really oppressive. It’s five acres, which is a lot for many parts of the world, but not for Montana, but it has a well and water rights. It’s a little bit of a Doomer sort of thing. And also for children—at least we have water rights for the boys.

It’s not like LA is the center of the art world or anything, but it is a major city with a lot of museums. A lot of people come through. But then two hours north in Santa Barbara, there’s nothing going on here. You really are removed, so I’ve had to go down to LA for the fairs and other things. I’ve spent some years in the past not doing enough things, saying no to too many things.

Hi bugs. You can come in and tell me, just push the door. Let me help you. Hi, come here. What’s up? Do you want to say hi to Robin? And then I will help you. You can watch that, but not in here. Is that en Espanol? Que bueno. Hey, vamanos, you’re gonna take it downstairs into the other room. Okay? Careful going down the stairs, please.

As artists, the work is always there. With a lot of opportunities, if you don’t take a show, they’re going to give the show to someone else. You don’t necessarily get that show back. Now I don’t want to say no to anything anymore. I’m going to get it done one way or another. This year I’ve been working brutally hard. This is the amazing thing about having children, that it puts a drive into you that is unspeakably strong. Your reasons for doing things and for life are very different. It’s a primal human thing that you can’t even describe. There’s these forces at play that are bigger than you, and it makes you capable of doing things that you couldn’t have done before. It’s extremely positive, actually, but very intense and very aggressive.

A bad day with the kids can be worse than a regular bad day, and then when everything’s going well you feel like things have always been easy. You don’t remember how intense it can get.

What are the shows you have coming up this fall?

I have a show at my gallery that I work with in LA, 1301PE, in September, and then I have a show in London at a new space called Interval by David Gryn, who used to run Daata. He’s opening this super interesting live-work house gallery space, very cool project he’s doing with his son, Jacob Gryn. Very family. I love that model, sort of an older idea of a gallery as a shop or an inn. And then in November, another show in London with Almine Rech. I’ve just started working with them and I’ve never met her in person, we’ve just spoken on the phone. It’s another kind of thing that I’m adding. I already work with seven galleries, and that would be the eighth.

My setup, my model is a bit different. I still work with the art dealer Stefan Simchowitz. I’ve worked with him for 12 years now. He’s chilled out in so many respects. He still funds the production of everything and then consigns work to the galleries. The easiest way to describe it is as a wholesale thing where he buys a batch of digital work, produces it physically, pays for the production and shipping, and then consigns to the galleries depending on their situation, and they work out their deal. But I’m always paid up front, which is a great system for me.

I try to be as transparent about it as possible, because people are so opaque about the ways in which they’re even able to be an artist. I also sell NFTs, maybe twice a week. I haven’t been doing them recently. I need to make more. Instead of putting all the eggs in one basket and trying to get to some mega blue chip gallery, I prefer to work with as many people as possible. There’s no reason why I should ever have to say no to having a show. Basically, I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s a 7-11. If someone wants to try to sell art, it’s not a problem. I don’t believe in these older models of exclusivity. I think they’re failing.

It ties into the whole children thing. Jon Rafman was super hesitant about doing NFTs, and I told him it’s just grocery money. He thought that was an interesting way to think about it. Grocery money for your family, or a down payment on a cabin in Montana if things come into alignment in the right way. You just have to play around with things and not overthink them. I don’t know how else to do it. Saying yes, forcing myself to show up and try different things.

I want to ask about Marc and your relationship and how you balance everything. It’s two studio practices and sharing a family. Are you very intentional about the way that you make physical space for each other’s work, but also mental space?

It’s very difficult for me. We have really different personalities. Marc wants to bounce a lot of ideas around, and I want to be left alone. I don’t want to talk to anyone about anything ever, in terms of art. I just want to be in a room with a computer by myself. I’m always such a bitch to him, “I can’t talk about this right now. I don’t want to.” We literally barter. I’ll ask him to do something around the house and he’ll say, “You owe me one art question.” It’s crazy. I’m sure other people have a better way of dealing with it. I always encourage him to talk to anyone else that’s not me. Two artists is a lot, and it’s more than two artists in our family. You have to put on your own mask before helping someone else. You have to balance not being drained by giving too much of yourself to someone else. How much energy can I give to my children so that I still have enough in me to make my own work? How much energy can I give to Marc?

What do you do to replenish your energy?

Being by myself. It’s a classic introvert-extrovert thing. And exercise. I do believe that you have to expend energy to get back energy. Sitting around only begets tiredness. I was thriving during Covid when there was no demand for us to go out into the world. Having a routine was great. We would have a babysitter over for Otto and do personal training sessions outside in the backyard. But then as an artist I also naturally want to break out of routines. I have this contrarian bug worm in my brain that wants to do things differently or feel more alive or something. Routines are very good for children too. It makes them feel safe. Jack is still a baby so he’s still napping, and I know that I can make work during that time. I thought that I was going to be one of those whimsical California baby-wearing moms, but it was really getting on a schedule and a routine that made me feel like I could do it. There are people who travel with kids all the time. I can’t do that. I’ve never brought Otto along on my travel. I don’t know how people do it. I prefer for him to stay home and have a familiar setting and a routine, and for Marc and I to switch off and take turns. There will be a time and a place for traveling later down the road.

For Part I of my conversation with Petra, click here: