March 30, 2017 At Work Making Theater: An Interview with Elizabeth LeCompte By Hilton Als Photo: Zbigniew Bzymek I met with the director Elizabeth LeCompte over a number of months in her loft, two blocks from the Performing Garage, where her actors and technical team, the Wooster Group, rehearse on an almost daily basis when they’re in town. Liz, as everyone calls her, lives in a dimly lit space, eclectically furnished. The front part of the loft—you step directly into it, off the lift—contains a bed and screen for guests; several paintings Liz made early in her career are stacked on the floor. Liz’s own bedroom is in the back, off a tidy screened-off bathroom. The main feature in the space is the kitchen; it runs the width of the loft, and even though Liz doesn’t really cook much and eats relatively little—for our meetings I’d bring some Italian takeout, easy to heat up; one saw a number of frozen pizzas in the fridge—it is a homey area, with a wide countertop and high chairs and a television nearby: the director is an avid baseball fan. The Wooster Group’s latest production, The Town Hall Affair, is at REDCAT in Los Angeles through April 1, then at Z Space in San Francisco from April 6 to April 16. Read More
March 28, 2017 At Work Dream a Little Dream of Me: An Interview with Pénélope Bagieu By Meg Lemke All images from California Dreamin’ by Pénélope Baigu. “I could live at MoPOP,” the French cartoonist Pénélope Bagieu tells me. She has just returned from Seattle, where she debuted her new biography, California Dreamin’, at the Emerald City Comicon. While there, she took in the Museum of Pop Culture: “My fascination is triggered by all the relationship drama, the rock ’n’ roll anecdotes where everyone takes the stage angry, fighting behind the curtains.” As a child, in Paris, she and her sister drew comics about Freddie Mercury, her “childhood icon,” hand-making dozens of booklets about the members of Queen living in a fantasy communal house. Mike Dawson got to Mercury first—his graphic memoir, Freddie and Me, was published in 2008—but there’s something of a recent trend of French comic books about dead American musicians, with Nicolas Otero’s broody vision of Cobain, Mezzo and J. M. Dupont’s woodcut rendering of Robert Johnson, Philippe Chanoinat and Fabrice Le Henanff’s ode to Elvis, and now Bagieu’s energetic portrait of Cass Elliot. In California Dreamin’, Cass is imagined in her formative years, as Ellen Cohen, before she became Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas (who really did live in a communal house and were consumed by intergroup romance and betrayal). The book closes before the birth of the daughter or her untimely death. I offer Bagieu my notion of Cass as yet another “tragic figure” of rock fame, but she dismisses it. Her Cass is unapologetic; the book is bursting with her talent, ambition, and drive—and her unrequited loves, which help propel the plot. The book is also very much a celebration of Cass’s beauty and her music, which often intertwine visually by way of Bagieu’s curlicue lines and handwritten text, as when the familiar lyrics “Allll the leaves are brown … ” swirl together with cigarette smoke. Bagieu’s drawings are superlative: soft pencil lines that convey detail without constraining her figures and that animate the characters’ exuberant facial expressions. She is popular in France for her comics series “Les Culottées” in the newspaper Le Monde, charming portraits of women throughout history—Mae Jemison, Peggy Guggenheim, Hedy Lamarr, to name a few—whose accomplishments have been obscured. Cass Elliot’s story, Bagieu declares, likewise “needed to be told.” Read More
March 1, 2017 At Work Quantum Wall: An Interview with Jack Whitten By Yevgeniya Traps Jack Whitten. Photo: John Berens. Jack Whitten’s art—canvasses built up with what he calls “tesserae” of acrylic paint, at once minimalist and ornate—is an excellent analog for his manner. He speaks in units: measured, often deliberately repeated phrases that build to constellations, opaque and revealing, abstract and grounded. With influences and interests ranging from astrophysics to sports—missing matter and Muhammad Ali are equally compelling as eponymous subjects of recent paintings—Whitten is a gregarious conversationalist. At seventy-seven, he’s sprightly and regal, full of wonder and enthusiasm. In a conversation that touched on octopuses (“they are so good to eat!”) and on “modern technological society,” he displayed the restless curiosity and joie de vivre that have made his work—painting, drawing, and sculpture, the latter now showing in New York for the first time—such a marvel. Born in Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten came to New York City in 1962. “I was one of the first artists in Tribeca,” he said, though, after forty years in the neighborhood, he’s decamped to the quiets of Woodside, Queens. He studied at Cooper Union and metabolized downtown and uptown currents to create a distinct vision that speaks to art history even as he transcends it. Early in February, Whitten walked me around his first show at Hauser & Wirth’s space on West Twenty-second Street. “The space was just made for these paintings,” he observed with obvious pleasure. He spoke of the lasting legacy of his time as a pre-med student at Tuskegee Institute, the importance of materials, and the joys of spending the summer “sculpture season” on Crete. Read More
December 12, 2016 At Work Becoming Invisible: An Interview with Mary Ruefle By Caitlin Youngquist Mary Ruefle in 2011. (photo © Matt Valentine.) When I spoke with Mary Ruefle on the phone recently, she’d just moved into a new house and had spent the morning putting screws into the back of a mirror. “I had my toolbox out and one of the screws was deficient,” she told me, “so I had to find another and it was just endless … You need two people for this sort of thing, but I did it myself.” It’s a statement akin to many in her new collection, My Private Property, a mélange of essays, stories, and prose poems, in which small objects often become vehicles for profound reflection. Ruefle, best known for her poetry, begins much of her work this way—she muses on ordinary things like keys or clouds, yellow scarves or golf pencils, until those descriptions unfurl and beget larger, existential meditations on sadness and boredom, on language and lullabies and autonomy in old age. Our conversation was like that, too, always unraveling toward some arresting observation. To work with Ruefle is to enjoy the pleasures of another age; she rarely uses a computer. I mailed her the transcript of our interview, and she returned it with scrawls of red ink and typewriter marks. The last page had been touched by a lit cigarette, leaving a small orbicular burn in the right margin with a stale, nimbus-like ring around it—punctuating, with great finality, the end of our conversation. INTERVIEWER In your poem “A Half-Sketched Head,” you wrote, “If we were thermometers, no one would want to be thirty; everyone would want to be seventy-eight.” My Private Property returns to this theme of getting older and embracing old age. Take “Pause,” your essay on menopause. You write about a feeling most women experience as they age, the feeling of becoming invisible, of becoming more and more like a ghost because we’re no longer noticed in the same way we once were. But you settle on this, that “being invisible is the biggest secret on earth, the most wondrous gift that anyone could ever have given you.” What do you mean? RUEFLE Well, thematically, aging and death become one in the same for writers, and very often you lose young readership because you’re no longer interested in the things young people are interested in. The time for exuberance, energy, endless curiosity, endless activity within a body of work, that drops away and everything becomes bittersweet. But this becoming invisible—all women talk about it. There’s a period of transition that’s so disorienting that you’re confused and horrified by it, you can’t get a grip on it, but it does pass. You endure it, and you are patient, and it falls away. And then you come into a new kind of autonomy that you simply didn’t have when you were young. You didn’t have it when your parents were alive, you didn’t have it back when you were once a woman to be seen. It’s total autonomy and freedom, and you become a much stronger person. You’re not answerable to anyone anymore. For me, it was a journey of shedding the sense of needing to please someone—parents, children, partners. Men don’t become invisible in the same way. There’s a difference in power between men and women, and I know I’m using an archaic formula but I do belong to another century. For the longest time, male power was posited in the accumulation of wealth or experience, and experience was something every man could have. And a woman’s power was always posited on physical attractiveness, the ability to have children. So as a man ages, he gains power, and as a woman ages, she loses it, or feels as though she does. If you go back to this paradox, which I understand people may find antiquated, you find there are still shards and shreds of it everywhere. Read More
November 14, 2016 At Work The Invisibility Cloak: An Interview with Ge Fei By The Paris Review From the cover of The Invisibility Cloak. Ge Fei is one of China’s foremost experimental writers. He started his career in the eighties with “vanguard fiction”—self-reflexive works focusing on history, historical narrative, memory, and myth. Now, for the first time, one of his novels is available in English: 2012’s The Invisibility Cloak, translated by Canaan Morse. It’s the first in our monthly book club with New York Review Books. Set in cutthroat, consumer-driven Beijing, the novel follows Mr. Cui, a down-at-heel Everyman who lives with his sister in an apartment where the wind is always blowing through a crack in the wall. Cui designs and installs custom stereos for hyperrich audiophiles and intellectuals, for whom he has an unreserved contempt. Then he reels in a promising but shady client who demands the best sound system in the world: an assignment that takes Cui to an unexpectedly dark place. The Invisibility Cloak is a comic tour de force; Kirkus Reviews wrote that it “packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader’s spirits like few recent English-language books.” Last month, Ge Fei visited New York, where he appeared in conversation at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He was joined by Morse, his translator; and two moderators, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam. The exchange below is a condensed, edited version of their discussion, including some questions from the audience that day. INTERVIEWER How did you come up with the idea for the book? FEI What constitutes Chinese reality, particularly from the eighties onward, is always changing. With The Invisibility Cloak, I thought back to 1980, when I was an undergraduate in Shanghai and I felt that life for Chinese people was extremely spiritually rich. People didn’t care about material possessions so much, they didn’t care about clothes, what shoes you wore, what kind of watch you wore, they didn’t care if you knew rich people. In fact, wealth was held in contempt. Every weekend my friends would go to classical-music concerts—Bach, Beethoven, Haydn. Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time. The writing and structure of this book have a deep connection to a question that’s chased me all my life. When everything is moving in one direction—toward money, advancement, and feeling insecure about it—are there people out there who intentionally go the other way? I discovered that in one of my circles of friends in Beijing, these hi-fi enthusiasts, there were a number of such people. It reminded me of a metaphor from a Japanese author I like. He talks about crickets living in a closed box, no sunlight, no windows. You have these singing insects in there, they lay their eggs, they hatch, they grow, they sing, they die. Are there people who are willing to make themselves invisible and keep away from the “sunlight” of contemporary society? The author also mentions seeds—when flowers turn to seed, some will float in the wind and fall into fertile soil, while others will fall into dark corners or on top of trees. I was interested to find that there are people in China who’ve resisted modernity, who have held onto their own value systems. The character I chose as an entry point for The Invisibility Cloak is modeled on one of the great eccentrics I know in Beijing, one of my hi-fi enthusiast friends. Read More
November 8, 2016 At Work Before Pictures: An Interview with Douglas Crimp By Sarah Cowan Douglas Crimp at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, c. 1970. Photographer unknown. In September, the art historian Douglas Crimp was speaking about his new book, Before Pictures, at the Whitney Museum when the slide projection was turned off and the screen rose, revealing the sunlight bobbing on the Hudson River and a view of Pier 52. It was there that, forty years prior, Gordon Matta-Clark had carved his monumental and illicit work Day’s End in an abandoned warehouse and Crimp had gone cruising for sex. The piers were known to be dangerous, Crimp writes, but at the time he had no fear of them, except the anxiety that their lure was distracting him from his work. Now the seventy-two-year-old was backlit against a thoroughfare of joggers and Citi Bike riders along Eleventh Avenue. The “vast and hauntingly beautiful” structures he describes had long ago been flattened into a parking lot for the Department of Sanitation. Read More