Ink dot painting by Bei Dao, from the series “The Moment.” Photograph courtesy of Bei Dao.

Our new Fall issue includes an excerpt from Bei Dao’s book-length poem Sidetracks, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. In Sidetracks, Bei Dao reflects on his turn to making ink-dot paintings like the one here.

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

Four years after his stroke, Bei Dao’s Chinese language abilities had improved dramatically, and a new medical assessment showed a recovery of over 80 percent. He continued his painting practice, though, and started to write poetry again. In 2018, a year before he turned seventy, Bei Dao had his first-ever painting exhibition at the Galerie Paris Horizon, located just north of the Centre Pompidou. In the essay he wrote for the exhibition, he contrasts the oil-based pointillism of an artist like Seurat with the watery ink dots of the East, where the tones and textures of the so-called five shades of ink in traditional Chinese painting must be naturally integrated with the brush and the rice paper to form a single whole. And as the water evaporates, the ink colors change, creating unexpected effects. He has experimented with using the cold colors of Japanese green ink alongside the warm colors of brown ink, while using sumi ink to deepen the tones and textures through a rhythmic layering. Around the time he began his new painting practice, he made a pilgrimage from Hong Kong to many cities across the mainland to learn about traditional Chinese medicine. He has received treatment from eight different traditional Chinese medical doctors who are well trained in the dialectical principles of yin and yang and the five elements as originally presented in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, which was compiled over two thousand years ago.

The artist Xu Bing—he and his wife, the poet Zhai Yongming, were the first collectors of Bei Dao’s paintings—wrote an essay for Bei Dao’s Paris exhibition in which he links his work with that of the Chinese maximalist artists: a loose grouping defined in the early aughts to classify work that resonates with Western minimalism but that is also, as the art historian Gao Minglu has it, closely tied to “the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself.” Xu Bing suggests that a maximalist style of compressed intensity and repetition are generally found in three kinds of artists: the formally untrained, such as the Aboriginal artists of Papunya in Australia; the physically or mentally ill, such as Yayoi Kusama; and contemporary artists who “dress up like a god and play a ghost.” The painting by Bei Dao shown here is from an ongoing series titled Cike (The moment), which Xu Bing writes is a reflection of “a mixture of these three categories.”

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light; Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium.

Tove Jansson, Sommarön (Summer Island), n.d., pencil and gouache on paper, 24 x 15 cm. Photograph by Hannu Aaltonen.

Each summer, when they couldn’t stand the city anymore, when the heat was unbearable, and they had a brief reprieve, they drove for three days to the middle of the country to stay at a log cabin on a lake that her grandfather had built now a century ago and where she had spent summers during her childhood. Her father, her children’s grandfather, and his sister, her aunt, would drive up the eight hours from Chicago and spend a week with them so that they could be around her two small children.

The previous summer, in the week before her father and her aunt arrived, she was able to relax into the lassitude that overtook her from being there, and possibly as the result of the long series of days in the car, with two children to monitor and soothe and attempt to entertain. That summer, after having just finished a period of work, she spent most of the time on the bed in the newer room that the four of them stayed in. She would sit, on the old gray-green sheets, the dog curled up next to her, watching the two children and their father through the window, making notes in her notebook. She sat there amidst the green light of the lake and the surrounding green and sketched out the familiar geometry of the trees surrounding the lake, the fallen trunk the ducks often slept on. She attempted to sketch in pen the white pine tree directly outside her window, the surging upwards of the boughs, like a series of prickly mustaches.

The mother showed the drawings to her oldest in the morning, who became jealous of her notebooks scattered across the bed and demanded her own small notebook, which they later purchased in town, one for both of the small children. She wondered, then and now, if they would remember the sound of their mother’s pen, her illegible scratching that probably looked to them like the branches on a tree.

On their daily morning walk, they picked raspberries by the road, the littlest in wet overalls. Never in these woods growing up had she seen raspberries. She wondered whether it had something to do with the heat and heavy rains of the past years.

In the late afternoon, the sun was bright and hot. She sits with her notebooks and her copy of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book on the front porch. There were windows on all sides of the cabin. Through the window, she can see the girls and their father at the blue rope swing and hammock in the nested area of the woods near the water, where her oldest has made a fort of long branches. She hears the children lightly fighting, the father’s warning tones. She thinks about the grandmother in The Summer Book, charged with the granddaughter while the father is absent, alone with his work or grieving, or both. The mother is gone, but we don’t know anything about her. The father is allowed to not be present, to also be a ghost.

She wonders whether she is the older woman companion, or the absent father, in this narrative. The children are less on top of her here, they are more free. She couldn’t hear them now. Where were they? Suddenly, they emerge from the woods.

The lake is dark and moves silkily as the afternoon turns into evening. She charts the different patterns. At night the waterlilies recede. She just sits at the window and watches the lake and the trees. In the morning, the lake can be incredibly still, like a mirror. The lake looks dark green, reflecting the trees. Her oldest comes in and shows her a drawing of a bird in her new notebook, without the usual smiling face. She had paged through The Summer Book and seen the illustrations of creatures—mouthless yet expressive. The eldest and her father read the book together during the toddler’s naps.

That morning they had seen a blue heron near the red canoe. It looked like a naked alien, or a dinosaur. It surprised her to see it up close. It took a large shit and flapped slowly away by the time the girls could get to the bedroom window. She ran out with her daughters to look at its excrement, like speckled white paint across the grass. Will you write that in your notebook? her oldest asked her. The other day, she told her mother to write the textures of the lake. Like the brown muck, she said.

How silent everything was—it seems to just be them, like they were the last people on earth. Sunday and no weekenders, save the drunken boaters Friday night trying to see the supermoon. Almost no one on the sparkling lake. The retired town doctor and ER nurse that live across the way come near on kayaks. Sometimes they wave. The curiosity of the boaters that come nearby, like the dreaded pontoon boats. You can hear the voices before you see the people appear, coming closer sometimes to see who is there. She knew they were supposed to wave. They hated these boats, hated the interruptions.

Everything mostly silent except the birdsong The oldest sits at the rocking chair and deliberates on a large and speckled feather from a walk, poring over one of her grandfather’s bird books. Owl or woodpecker, she decides. They counted fourteen ducks on the lake that summer, learning how to fly. The mother sat on the bed looking out at the lake through the window and made spiral drawings of the ripples of the lake. How it can move rapidly.

On their last day by themselves, before their grandfather and great aunt arrive, they sunbathe nude on the dock, her and the two children, the pale moons of their little butts. She knows that all of this solitude will be gone in a few hours. Her peace punctured. The stomping around. The shuffling of slippers. The sighs. Having to remark on everything. But the children are so happy with them, pleased to have family.

There was so much of her oldest, who was then almost six, that reminded her of the child in The Summer Book—her curiosity and independence, but also how she clung to the two elders on the front porch, wanting them to play with her, wanting to chat at them. The aunt, who was actually her great-aunt, had brought a ball of yarn and needles to teach her how to knit, as she had done when she herself was a child. She wasn’t sure exactly what her oldest and her grandfather did or talked about during the hours of nap—she was relieved to have family watch her children.

Tove Jansson, Ensittaren (Recluse), 1935, pastel on paper, 66.5 x 49 cm.

They made sure the grandfather went for a walk down the road every day, sometimes holding the hands of one of his grandchildren, naming the wildflowers on the side of the road.

On the walk, they stopped to check out droppings and animal tracks. The large black mound with fur, acorns and berries in it was most likely Bear. They had witnessed while driving in one day from town two alien creatures running down the road, which they were convinced were wild turkeys. She drew the bird tracks later in her notebook. With the grandfather, they stopped at a burrow on the road and stared at the strange hole, trying to imagine the mysterious creature inside. A badger, the grandfather decides authoritatively. So many creatures that summer. The fox in the middle of the road they saw while driving. The mouse in a cup in the sink. The red ants in sand hills on the road and around the trash can.

On their walk, the grandfather looks with pleasure at the baby pines going up by the road. Red pines and jack pines, he pronounces out loud. He’s allowed a large part of the forest to be cut down by a logging company, which has also carted away the dead trees at no fee. Her father looks at trees the size of small humans and feels optimistic, but it is a source of tension with his youngest daughter, the now middle-aged mother, that continues into the next summer.

The aunt never goes on the walks. She sits there with her large glass of milky coffee and straw and her knitting or her stories on her device. At a certain time she switches to decaf. She has always been an old woman, even when her nieces and nephew were very young, and she was only in her late twenties and thirties, and lived forever in that house in the other city with her other brother and her mother. Now, she takes her mother’s place, and sits at the sliding loveseat that used to be a swing, and watches. The women up at the cabin are supposed to be the ones watching through the windows, while the men and children have adventures in the immediate vicinity. When the lock breaks, the men focus on fixing the doorknob, and the mother is called into being a panopticon for the children. The plant position, to plant yourself in front of children. Like the woman is a tree. Although she was the one to also chase after them.

The next summer, they spent the first week with the grandfather and aunt, which took away the ease she usually felt upon reentering the lake and the woods, their little island. They were already on the rhythm of the others, and the silence was marred by constant voices. For most of the summer her father and aunt would be up there alone, sitting on the newly built front porch—newly built meaning much more than a decade ago—looking at the lake, remarking upon the birds that arrived at the bird feeders, such as the hummingbirds who came to drink the sugar water in the jewel-red feeders. They must name the blue jays, the grackles and the hummingbirds. Oh, look, a goldfinch. Two hummingbirds. They must be hungry.

They didn’t cringe at the increasingly occasional pontoon boats, instead waving at them. They didn’t mind intruders, which they saw as company. Very slow season on the lake, the aunt said.

At the beginning of the week a man came blazing up their road in a vehicle, from one of the more brutish clans that had hunting camps closest nearby, and offered to widen the road, which her father agreed to. As soon as she saw the older, athletic man out there talking to her father, she froze in the doorway and backed away. She was hoping to go out to check up on the children with their father at their swing. The grandfather was uncomfortable seeing the fort that the almost seven-year-old had built over consecutive summers, which he hadn’t noticed. He was worried it was a fire hazard. That was his new obsession—the dead wood, which is why he let the trees get cut down, why he let this man leave a mess of branches widening the road so that, he said, the firetrucks could get in if they needed to. There had been serious fires in this forest in the past, but the recent vigilance seemed to be a response to that summer’s fires in Canada, but not, for her father, mixed with anxiety about warming, which he professed to not believe in, or want to think about. She found herself wondering again whether her father was a good steward of the land.

They settled into a pattern of making meals for the older relatives, of encouraging the grandfather on a late afternoon walk, the children often whining that they wanted to play instead. The sight of their neon t-shirts against the sand road. Wearing the toddler on the mother’s back until she complained and wanted to run after her sister. There weren’t any berries at all on the side of the road this year, at least not yet.

There was an identical feeling to last summer. A palimpsest feeling, especially in the notebooks, the repetitions of the two summers. Only subtle changes. And that everyone was a year older.

She wonders often whether writing in the third person makes the “I” a fiction. Does it make her less real, she wonders?

Because they were up this summer earlier than usual, they kept picking ticks off themselves, which were crawling all over them, including the toddler’s tender arm.

The grandfather wanted them to take him on the boat to see the outlet which bisected his property. He had been fragile since falling the previous winter, outside of a restaurant, and didn’t want to get into the boat without help, which he did, slowly, hanging on to the dock and grunting. The little girls sat in the middle in life jackets. He wanted to see if the pines that were planted were still growing. They were not. Why did you let them cut the healthy ones down? the daughter said again, causing, as usual, prickliness. Well, the loggers weren’t going to just take the dead ones, he said. The water levels are high again, that was good, he said.

When the grandfather and great aunt left, one week later, the children were sad, but the mother was finally able to relax, to look onto the lake, still as glass, with the upside-down reflections of the empty cabins. Then the lake begins to ripple, the double world vanishes. The mother watched the oldest make crayon drawings, her back facing the lake. A house with a triangle roof, just like she was seeing now. Then a large tree. The self is wearing a triangle skirt. The self is as big as the tree. The summery light on the lake. Sweating. Saturated blue and green. Swaying of grasses, ripple of water.

One cooler morning she watches from the window the children with their father on the dock. Pleasure at the red overturned canoe, the red hummingbird feeder, even the red stripes of the flag her father buys every year to hang out there. The water bugs make ripples. The children are trying to catch fish with nets. The littlest captures a small fish. Her net gets caught on the splintered dock. The mother calls out, worried the little one is going to trip. It was like this for her mother, and her grandmother—the women sitting there watching. Her holler matching her grandmother’s. Eventually the toddler falls in the shallow end and emerges weeping, her yellow cotton sweater dripping. The mother runs to help as they pull off soaking wet pants, sweater, shoes, lay them out to dry.

It was perfect weather, after the storms when her father and aunt were here. Not hot. Cold at night, cool in morning. Earlier in the morning she watched two girls make their “pasta soup” in a metal bowl—ferns, weeds, pinecones, dirt, crumbled pieces of bark.

They can walk farther now that the grandfather is not with them. They take a morning walk to the other side of the lake, wearing long sleeves and pants to avoid insect bites, the mother wearing the toddler on her back, the oldest child managing the dog leash, moving to the side of a road when a truck or aging sports car came roaring around. They admired the elaborate signage of the houses more crowded together on the other side of the lake, the solar panels, the modern-looking cabins with Swedish and Finnish flags. Their family, even though they owned most of the lake for a century, did not get nice things. Her father and aunt used the same chipped ceramics that their mother had gotten free in a spaghetti catalogue. When they brought new beds, which they finally did after about forty years, they got the cheapest quilts.

Talking to each other, the parents remarked on this, on the specific sounds of the rustling birch trees, that there are so many less crickets on the sandy road.

When they return, the oldest begs for the mother to go swimming with her, but the youngest needs to be put down to nap. The mother watches the oldest sitting on the splintered, now sunken dock, the bench covered in lichen and bird shit. Her feet in the water, the spirals the water makes. She is waiting with the net, watching for the fish. It surprises the mother, how imaginative and solitary her oldest has become, their secret world here.

In the afternoon, after the toddler’s nap, they finally took out the canoe as a family. The oldest complaining she was not allowed to row, but the mother wanted to, like she had as a child. The children sat in the middle of the boat, in their life jackets, exclaiming over spiders and large ants on the floor. They traced the edges of the property, towards where she had remembered there was a beaver dam when she was a child. Apparently, there was a new dam, in the outlet, which they rowed towards to try to see. Another source of tension between the mother and her father, the grandfather. The father was letting one of the neighbors, who all hunted, try to shoot the beavers. The two adults remarked that in the past the outlet used to be dry, all muck. Now there were so many lily pads. And the ducks sheltered there. It comes as a shock, like a pain, seeing again the thinning trees. What must the other inhabitants of the lake think, she now wondered, to have their view so altered?

When they got back, almost as if to shake herself of this melancholy, she stripped down out of her overalls to her underwear, delighting and surprising the children milling about the shallow side of the water. Later, all three of them naked, as there was no one around, she watched the children climb the overturned boats on the shore, playing pirates. It was like they were the only people in the world. A joy watching them be free, like a relief.

Tove Jansson, Rökande Flicka (Smoking Girl), 1940, oil on canvas, 41 x 33.5 cm.

From the exhibition catalogue for Houses of Tove Jansson, on view at Espace Mont-Louis in Paris through October 29, 2023. 

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of The Light Room (Riverhead, 2023) and Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar, published next month from Columbia University Press.

Diana Markosian, The Arrival, from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

What follows is a series of rooms containing staged photographs, archival family images, and a few stray objects: a cherry-red rotary phone, a scalloped glass ashtray. (A photograph depicting these items, along with a small radio, is titled The Lifeline.) But the show’s centerpiece—the vehicle through which we watch the narrative unfold—is a short film dramatizing the journey Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, took from Moscow to America. Actors play the central roles. In one scene, Svetlana (played by Ana Imnadze) tries to buy bread at a crowded market; in another she has a violent argument with her estranged husband, Arsen. According to Jonathan Griffin’s 2020 profile of Markosian in the New York Times, her parents came to Moscow from Armenia to finish their Ph.D.’s and separated before Markosian was born. Arsen was an engineer, Svetlana an economist. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Arsen resorted to selling counterfeit Barbie dolls on the black market in order to survive.

Diana Markosian, Lifeline from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

Interspersed with these scenes from daily life are clips of Svetlana in a darkened room watching a daytime drama called Santa Barbara. The show aired in Moscow from 1992 to 1999 and starred Robin Wright, A Martinez, and Dane Witherspoon, among others. It was the first American television series to air on Russian television. Millions of Russians tuned in, caught up in the fantasy world of the forever-feuding Capwell and Lockridge families. The private yachts and palm-lined streets, elegant dinner parties in mansions overlooking the Pacific—here, then, was the American Dream.

Svetlana gets caught up in that dream. She registers, in secret, as a mail-order bride and becomes engaged to a man named Eli, who lives—where else?—in Santa Barbara. In the middle of the night, Svetlana wakes her children Diana and David, ages seven and eleven, and tells them to pack. They leave the next morning without saying goodbye to their father, who has remained present in their lives despite the separation. The children will lose touch with him for the next fifteen years. 

Eli, played by actor Gene Jones, is waiting for the family at the airport in California. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he turns out to be a very old man, nothing like the photograph of the middle-aged man he’d sent. “When you came and saw him, what did you think?” the actress playing Svetlana asks the real Svetlana, who is middle aged now. The two women sit across from one another at a small dining table: the younger “Svetlana” in costume, the real Svetlana wearing a sleek black dress and pumps. 

Eli is a kind man. He and Svetlana make a noble attempt to love each other. One moving scene depicts the two of them in bed with a book open between them, Eli helping Svetlana practice English.

“I have confidence,” Eli says, enunciating the words.

“I have confidence,” Svetlana repeats.

“I am confident,” Eli says. 

“I am confident,” she repeats.

“But I was unhappy for a long time,” Svetlana says to her daughter in a recorded telephone interview, clips of which play in voice-over throughout the film. 

“Do you think he felt it?” Markosian asks.

“Of course he did,” Svetlana says.

Diana Markosian, The Pink Robe, from Santa Barbara, 2019. Courtesy of Rose Gallery.

***

Markosian’s film, scored by the composer Nils Frahm, is twelve minutes long. I watched it five times. Markosian collaborated with Lynda Myles, one of the scriptwriters on the original Santa Barbara, to write her own screenplay. I expected the film to feel like an episode of the soap opera. But it resists melodrama and heightened emotionalism. Eli is portrayed neither as villain—preying on a younger woman with no means—nor as victim of a femme fatale. Svetlana, too, refuses the victim role. In one of the voice-overs, Markosian says, “I’m trying to understand you, Mom.” “You need to love me,” the real Svetlana replies. “You don’t have to understand. I don’t need understanding.”

When I got home from Stockholm I pulled out the videos I’d recorded in 1992, my own chronicle of that world: interviews with my students, walks through the streets (everything in some stage of demolition, it seemed), standing in line for morozhenoe, ice cream. A weekend trip to Irina’s dacha in the countryside, where I drank a delicious Egyptian flower water and was sick for a week. A trip to Sergiyev Posad to see the Orthodox churches. (“You must not call it Zagorsk,” our guide said, referencing the town’s Soviet-era name. “Never again Zagorsk.”) Dinner with Vladimir and his wife, Olga, and their son, Paul. Vladimir was a professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute. We corresponded for several months after I left. Here’s an excerpt, dated December 12, 1992:

Now the economic situation in Russia is very hard. In this year the prices have grown more than 100 times and our salary have grown only 20 times. We see that in future will not be better than now and we think about the future work in the foreign countries in the field of my profession. Now Russia does not need the persons of my profession. Therefore I am obliged to change the field of the work, to do the commercial work, or to look for the work in my field of work in the foreign countries. 

Such hard-won democracy, overcoming czars and dictators to finally—finally—begin the long road toward a stable democracy. And now, just across the Baltic, a madman was attempting to turn back the clock: the day I saw the Markosian exhibit in Stockholm, Vladimir Putin launched an attack on the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, injuring twenty people, five of them children. 

***

Markosian auditioned sixty men for the role of Eli. Each actor was asked to draft a mock letter to Svetlana, attempting to convince her to come to Santa Barbara, as the real Eli had done. The actors then read their letters on camera. Some of these letters are displayed alongside photographs of the various actors, with clips of their audition reels playing on a loop.

I am an attractive man—not extremely handsome—but I think attractive enough to please you.

I am a good Christian. I love God and his rules.

Svetlana Dearest, Thank you for the lovely letters and the photos. You are always in my thoughts, and I can’t wait to see you in person. We have written each other for a long time now, and I feel that each letter draws us closer together. If you will take the last—and biggest—step to me, I promise you won’t regret it.

Watching the actors audition for the role of Eli—one more distillation of the distance between fantasy and reality—I thought about my own summer in Moscow. How we pretended to teach English when in fact we were trying to make converts; how we playacted poverty while our students and their families suffered. I thought of the distance between the glitzed-up, televised version of the American Dream Svetlana put her hopes in, versus her experiences in America, but also the way these intersected. After all, Markosian went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia. “It was a small little world and I changed that for you,” Svetlana says to Markosian in voice-over.

“Do you feel like our story is like a soap opera, Mom?” Markosian asks.

Svetlana is silent for a moment.

“It’s life,” she says, finally. 

Jamie Quatro is the author of Fire Sermon and I Want to Show You More. Grove Press will publish her novel Two-Step Devil in summer 2024 and her story collection Next Time I’ll Be Louder in 2025.

Ghost Ranch, 2019. Fuji Instax photographs taken by Josephine Halvorson in and around Georgia O’Keeffe’s houses, New Mexico, 2019–2020.

There’s a certain weather-beaten tree stump at Ghost Ranch—the U-shaped, adobelike home once occupied by the famed American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe—where Josephine Halvorson, the first artist-in-residence at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, often took breaks from her own work. It offered her a clear view of Cerro Pedernal, the narrow New Mexican mesa that appears in many of O’Keeffe’s desert paintings, and where the artist’s ashes are scattered. From here Halvorson could observe weather patterns forming around the mesa’s caprock, circling the top and then sweeping theatrically down its cliff face, racing across the plain toward her.

Halvorson makes paintings on-site, in proximity to the objects she hopes to commemorate, and the museum offered her access to a rich archive of letters, clothing, books, as well as O’Keeffe’s two homes, Ghost Ranch and nearby Abiquiú. Halvorson spent two months there: one in the summer of 2019 and another a year later, during the pandemic. 

“It was through the sense of quiet and closeness that I connected with her things,” Halvorson recalls. “The museum registrar would open a cabinet or put the group of keys out on the table for me. No one who visited me was permitted to come into the house, so it was really just me there alone, working every day from dawn till dusk.” In Abiquiú, Halvorson made intimate acrylic gouache paintings of the tree stump, a curious grouping of tagged keys, and the interior of a kitchen cupboard stacked with O’Keeffe’s dishes. Wishing to manifest a sense of place, she used the same close crops to capture a National Forest sign complete with target practice holes, as well as an abandoned pile of kindling that she conceived as a memorial to her father, whose loss she was grieving—he had passed from coronavirus that year. Her still lifes are all framed by wide, chalky-colored “surrounds” that draw on the dusty hues of the area. Halvorson regards these as visual “buffer zones” between the object in situ and the white gallery wall. Each has a surface made rough by small rocks, which Halvorson collected on the property and then ground up to be preserved in paint as a geological account of the place and time. “The rocks represent a much deeper past than what I’m able to paint in real time,” she explains. The result is a series of paintings, eleven in all, that read like tightly framed long-exposure snapshots. The greatest challenge, Halvorson said, was “to make art that isn’t about O’Keeffe, but is instead in relation to her.”

Painting O’Keeffe’s Stump, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

Painting O’Keeffe’s Rocks, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

Painting O’Keeffe’s Dishes, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

Painting O’Keeffe’s Keys, Ghost Ranch, 2019.

Painting National Forest Boundary Sign, near Abiquiú, New Mexico, 2020.

Painting Sacred Site, near Abiquiú, New Mexico, 2020.

Contemporary Voices: Josephine Halvorson opens to the public on October 1 and runs through March 28, 2022.

Charlotte Strick is a principal at the award-winning, multidisciplinary, Brooklyn-based design firm, Strick&Williams. Her writings on art and design have appeared in The Atlantic, HuffPost, and The Paris Review, where she was the magazine’s art editor and designer from 2010–2021.

David Hockney, Grand Canyon II, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 96″.

David Hockney’s latest painterly passion, the results of which are currently on display at the Pace Gallery in New York City, consists of an elaboration of his ongoing fascination with reverse perspective, this time by way of notched hexagonal canvases, such as the one above. As I discussed in my catalogue essay for the show, this current round in his interest was in part spurred by his encounters with the thinking of an early-twentieth-century Russian Orthodox monk, but for my own part, I couldn’t help but be reminded of  the work of Trevor and Ryan Oakes, young identical twin artists whose ideas I’ve been following for several years (as has David, after I introduced them to him).

Unlike the sorts of identical twins who develop secret languages from infancy, Trevor and Ryan (born in 1982), out of West Virginia and before that Colorado, had been carrying on a conversation, virtually since toddlerhood, on the nature of bifocal vision—what it is like, that is, to see with two eyes. (Around age ten, their parents once told me, they could be found sitting on stumps out in the woods, twenty feet apart, trying to work out what the depth perception might be of a dragon with eyes that far apart.) Notwithstanding their tender years, they’d been thinking about this stuff a long time—almost as far back as David when he started making his Polaroid collages. And as it happens, the ideas that seem most pertinent to Hockney’s current concerns are the twins’ theories on depth perception, which they developed when studying together at Cooper Union as they developed a system for making camera-obscura-exact drawings deploying no other equipment than their own two eyes (a facility that obviously came to fascinate Hockney).

For at one point they began noticing the way that our noses are continually present in our fields of vision, though not (as one might expect) in the center of that field but rather to the two sides. Try a few experiments and see for yourself. Extend your right arm at shoulder height straight out to your side with the thumb of your right hand pointing upward; now, with your head facing forward (perpendicular to your arm) and your right eye closed, gaze past your nose with your left eye as you slowly slide your extended right arm forward until you can make out the thumb emerging from beyond the interference posed by your nose. That point will likely be further along than you were expecting. Try the same thing with your right eye and your left arm. The point is that it is only in the relatively narrow area between the two emerging thumbs that you can be said to have actual bifocal stereoscopic depth perception. The twins actually drew out the results of the experiment, plotting all the points where their thumbs emerged.

Ryan’s depth of field, charted.

Note how even though one’s overall field of vision is much wider (and perfectly stitched and modulated laterally from one side to the next), one’s nose (to both sides) and eyebrows above frame a shield-like area, which is the only field where Ryan, in this instance, can be said to experience the world with real depth perception. (The twins would presently surmise that this is indeed why shields came to be shaped like shields—only partially, that is, because swordsmen needed to protect their cores, but more so because that specific shape over time proved the lightest and most economic, one that also assured that one’s own offensive lunges would occur outside the field of one’s opponent’s depth perception. Around the same time, Oliver Sacks, apprised of this effect, noted that there was a considerable literature to the effect that lepers who have lost their noses have heightened depth perception, and that furthermore that may explain why one sees so many flat-nosed boxers—not because their noses have gotten bashed in across their careers but rather because in the same way that abnormal height privileges basketball players, flat noses, and hence wider fields of depth perception, probably privilege people who make their living at fist-to-fist combat.)

The point here, though, is that one is always aware of one’s nose to either side—even if only subliminally, as a kind of unconscious barometric pressure—because the brain is constantly occluding the nose to each side and filling in the scene with information it is getting from the other eye. You don’t believe it?  Okay, try this: Close your right eye, and with your left look to your far right. There’s your nose, correct? Now do the opposite. Same thing. Now, though, with both eyes open, look to your left and right, and you won’t see any nose, even though you know your eyes are seeing it. (Your brain is seamlessly stitching the full view together out of information coming from both eyes, even though it’s only the central shield-like area that is actually experiencing depth perception.)

And the fascinating thing here is that as the years passed, the twins began noticing curious sorts of trianglelike shapes emerging to either side (but especially on the side of the dominant eye) in the lower left and/or right quadrants of the canvases of painters all across history. With Rembrandt, for instance, or Cézanne:

Paul Cézanne, View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph, 1887, oil, 2′ 2″ x 2′ 8″.

Or Morris Louis and Roy Lichtenstein:

Morris Louis, Delta Theta, 1961.

Roy Lichtenstein, Little Aloha, 1962.

Or perhaps, most fascinatingly, with Matisse, in whose famous Goldfish painting one makes out not only the specific shape of his slightly bulbous nose but also the shape of his distinctive round glasses (and even the shape of the eye itself, projected onto the cylindrical aquarium’s aqueous bottom):

Matisse, The Goldfish, 1912.

For that matter, Hockney himself was displaying such tendencies long before he met the twins or began any of these notched experiments.

David Hockney, Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica, 1990.

To be clear, the twins are not arguing that these effects result from conscious choices on the parts of the artists in question—merely that artists who are by definition surveyors of the visual field might be more sensitive to the barometric pressures evinced by their (otherwise unnoticed) noses, and that that sensitivity could be expected to register in their renderings of the world.

Similarly, I’ve begun to wonder lately whether one reason Hockney’s notched hexagons feel so somehow right, or at any rate seem to evoke the phenomenological feel of one’s actual depth of field, is that they are in fact mimicking the way we actually see, as revealed to us (and perhaps subliminally to Hockney himself through his conversations with Trevor and Ryan Oakes about the camera-obscura method they in part generated from the insight) by the Oakes twins.

For more on the Oakes twins, see Lawrence Weschler’s piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review and his collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative. 

Lawrence Weschler, late of The New Yorker and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, is the author of more than twenty books on myriad subjects. He is currently completing work on a biographical memoir of the years, during the early eighties, when he was serving as a beanpole Sancho to Oliver Sacks’s capacious Quixote, due out in 2019.

Excerpted and adapted with permission from David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]; introduction by Lawrence Weschler, Pace Gallery, 2018.

David Hockney, A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017.

David Hockney’s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, “Far from cutting corners, I was adding them.” In Lawrence Weschler’s catalogue essay, Hockney suggests what he means by reverse perspective by way of an allusion to an experience he once had coursing through the arrow-straight eighteen-kilometer St. Gotthard Pass road tunnel, the tiny pinpoint of light ahead epitomizing “the hell of one-point perspective.” “I suddenly realized,” Hockney tells Weschler, “how that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel everything suddenly reversed with the world opening out in every direction … and I realized how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to capture.” 

In one of Hockney’s first experiments in his recent series, he took Fra Angelico’s San Marco fresco The Annunciation (a masterpiece of one-point perspective)—a poster of which used to grace the upper corridor of his elementary school—and turned it inside out, offering a sense of what it might have looked like in reverse perspective.

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1450.

David Hockney, Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico, 2017.

Weschler’s catalogue essay, from which we will be publishing two adapted excerpts this week and next, goes into further detail on the taproots and implications of Hockney’s current reverse-perspective passion. The first, below, involves an improbable recent mentor. —Nadja Spiegelman 

During this period, Hockney came under the spell of a new intellectual mentor. He’d always been a ferocious autodidact, and in the past, entire bodies of work had come into being in tandem with his discoveries of one fresh contemporary influence or another: the physicist David Bohm and his implicate order, the historian George Rowley and his ideas on moving focus in Chinese art, the art and science historian Martin Kemp and the optical physicist Charles Falco and their notions on mirrors and lenses as possible contributors to the rise of one-point perspective (and the optical look it began enforcing) as far back as the start of the Renaissance. Approaching eighty years of age, Hockney was as susceptible to such sudden passions as ever—only the inspiration this time around proved perhaps his most surprising yet: a Russian Orthodox monk and his writings from almost a full century earlier.

Early on in the creation of these new notched paintings, David had been rhapsodizing on the virtues of reverse perspective, and one evening, one of his friends and assistants, Jean Pierre Goncalves de Lima (universally referred to around the studio as JP), decided to burrow into the World Wide Web in search of further clarification on what this boss of his kept yammering on about. He quickly came upon a long essay from 1920, offered forth in its entirety, indeed entitled “Reverse Perspective” and credited to one Father Pavel Florensky of Moscow, Russia. JP printed out a copy of the eighty-page monograph and left it on David’s studio chair for David to discover in the morning, which indeed he did, becoming progressively more engrossed (“positively thrilled” being the way he described his reaction later that very day when he called me up, along with many other friends no doubt, positively ordering us all to download the text and get back to him with our reactions).

Pavel Florensky.

And the text was indeed something—as was its author. Florensky, born in 1882 in Azerbaijan the scion of secular Westernizing parents (his father a Russian railway engineer, his mother the cultured product of ancient Armenian nobility), proved a mathematical prodigy from his earliest years and went on to do pathbreaking work in non-Euclidean mathematics while also pouring himself into wider scientific studies more generally. But apparently, after a visit to Tolstoy in 1899, Florensky fell into a growing spiritual crisis in which he came to doubt the primacy of the scientific positivism that had guided his studies thus far. Following graduation from Moscow State University in 1904, he declined the offer of a teaching position in mathematics, instead repairing to the nearby holy city of Sergiev Posad (site of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church), where his theological studies culminated in his being ordained as a priest in 1911 (though he married and would have five children). Although he wrote widely on philosophy and theology (his essays on the idea of the Divine Sophia would later become central to the concerns of feminist theologians), he nevertheless continued his equally far-flung scientific investigations, all the while trying to meld the two vocations. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even though the Communists shut down many of his most beloved Orthodox institutions, he threw himself into technical work, particularly on behalf of the electrification of rural Soviets, under the sponsorship of Trotsky himself (notwithstanding his insistence on wearing clerical robes all the while). By 1932, however, Trotsky was gone, and Stalin, finding the charismatic and querulous cleric an increasing nuisance, had him exiled to Siberia, where he launched into investigations on the nature and properties of permafrost, further path-breaking research that has become increasingly relevant in recent years with the rise of global warming. Meanwhile, in 1937, at the height of his Red Terror, Stalin had Florensky brought back to St. Petersburg and, following a brief trial, summarily executed—that being the very year, as it happens, of the birth of David Hockney in Bradford, England.

Pavel Florensky shortly after his arrest by the GPU, 1933.

The point is that on top of all of that, Florensky was also a hugely influential art critic and aesthetic theorist, one of the leading lights of Russia’s Silver Age and well known to the likes of Malevich and Kandinsky (and such writers as Andrei Bely and Sergei Bulgakov). His reverse perspective essay, in particular, dates from a moment in 1920 when Bolsheviks were busily imputing the value of the medieval Orthodox icons they were tearing off the walls of museums and monasteries, dismissing them as hopelessly primitive for their allegedly clumsy handling of modeling and perspective (the way, for instance, a nose might be seen to be going one direction while the lips went another and the eyes a third—not in any way, at any rate, as in real life). But Florensky fired back, marshaling tremendous erudition to argue that if, as far back as Babylonian and Egyptian times, artists and craftsmen continually made similar errors, it was not because they didn’t know about rigorous one-point perspective (they would have had to call on such knowledge to be able to build pyramids and the like) but because they sensed there was something wrong with its practice when it actually came to the depiction of real life in all its timely and timeless vivacity—and they chose not to use it. Florensky showed how conventionally one-point perspectival tricks first began being deployed on theater sets in ancient Greece and Rome with the express intent of deceiving audiences, such illusionistic effects being likewise prized on the walls of decadent villas, say, in Pompeii, even though they really only registered as accurate from one specific location, completely falling apart from any other point of viewing. Over and over again, Florensky marshaled arguments that Hockney himself would start deploying more than sixty years later as he launched into his photo collages around 1982 (one hundred years almost to the day after the good monk’s birth, though Hockney obviously hadn’t known this at the time). For example, Florensky pointed out how young children, when asked to draw their house, will naturally include the front, the back, the tree and the doghouse in the backyard, and so forth (all of that correctly, since all of those details form part of the house they live in), and they have to be rigorously trained instead to draw in a “correct” manner, which is to say as if arbitrarily standing stock-still with only one eye open, and then only to accept that way as accurate. For that matter, Florensky, like Hockney after him, pointed out that we ourselves never see in rigorously abstracted perspective (the way a camera does) because, for starters, we look out at the world from two eyes simultaneously, and for that matter our eyes and bodies are always in motion as we construct our actual sense of the world across time from all those multiple vantages.

You can see what thrilled Hockney. At one point, for example, Florensky writes how “it was not in pure art that perspective arose, it came out of applied art sphere”—theater design in antiquity, and subsequently alongside the rise of positivist science on the far side of the medieval era—“which enlisted painting in its service and subordinated it to its own purposes.”

[However,] the task of painting is not to duplicate reality, but to give the most profound penetration … of its meaning. And the penetration of this meaning, of this stuff of reality, its architectonics, is offered to the artist’s contemplative eye in living contact with reality, by growing accustomed to and empathizing with reality, whereas theater decoration wants as much as possible to replace reality with its outward appearance.

(One of the problems with conventional photography, Hockney often says, is the way it can capture only surfaces.)

For that matter, you could see what thrilled me, for in the sentences that follow, Florensky insists that “stage design is a deception, albeit a seductive one, while pure painting is, or at least wants to be true to life”—his italics, though as it happens, those last three words track exactly with the title I gave my own 2008 collection of twenty-five years of conversations with Hockney, starting with those photo collages in 1982—“not a substitute for life but the symbolic signifier of its deepest reality.”

It’s of course interesting how Florensky locates the original sin of perspective in antique theatrical design whereas contemporary opera staging proved one of the places where Hockney himself chose to elaborate his critique of one-point perspective, but that was only because Hockney was consciously trying to wrestle radically free from what Florensky saw as the very foundations of a prior perspective-infused tradition.

Florensky meanwhile has a slightly different take from David’s on the waning of the reverse (or multiple or moving) perspective traditions that had, as far as he was concerned, haloed the art of the Middle Ages both in the West and in Russia. Although Florensky saw the growing Renaissance focus on humans in their secular individuality opposed to their sacred community as one of the wellsprings renewing the antique theatrical bias toward a one-point perspective that by definition required a solitary individual’s solitary gaze (out of one eye)—and of the positivist science such a revolution in turn helped occasion—he declined to point to a particular moment when the world views suddenly flipped (as Hockney was to do with The Great Wall, which formed the heart of his research program leading up to the book Secret Knowledge, in which he argued that something revolutionary must have occurred between 1425 and 1435, a point at which artists from Bruges to Florence, from Van Eyck to Brunelleschi, must have suddenly started using optical aids and it was “as if from one decade to the next, European art put on its glasses”). Florensky argued for a more gradual transition, pointing out that as late as Leonardo (The Last Supper, c. 1497) and Raphael (The School of Athens, c. 1511), masters were deploying multiple perspectives to heighten spiritual interpretations of their material.

Notwithstanding the reading of which, I was thoroughly startled a few weeks later in Madrid when, visiting the Prado, I came upon another Fra Angelico Annunciation (c. 1430), similarly squeezed into a tapering one-point perspective:

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1426.

Underneath it, there was a predella consisting of five scenes, all of them (but especially the second and the fourth) laid out in pure Hockneyesque notched reverse perspective:

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1426 (detail from the predella).

So go figure.

“Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]” will be on view at the Pace Gallery from April 5 to May 12.

Lawrence Weschler, late of The New Yorker and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, is the author of more than twenty books on myriad subjects. He is currently completing work on a biographical memoir of the years, during the early eighties, when he was serving as a beanpole Sancho to Oliver Sacks’s capacious Quixote, due out in 2019.

Excerpted with permission from David Hockney: Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]; introduction by Lawrence Weschler, Pace Gallery, 2018.

Left: Unica Zürn, Untitled, 1965. Right: Unica Zürn. © Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin.

In 1970, after over a decade of intermittent hospitalization for mental illness, Unica Zürn committed suicide by jumping out the window of the apartment of her longtime companion, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. Zürn is best known as the author of anagrammatic poetry and the semi-biographical novellas Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, but she was also a visual artist. She had a preternatural skill for creating phantasmagorical worlds. Her pen-and-ink drawings were exhibited at galleries throughout Paris and Berlin, and she participated in the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition. Her artistic practice, often eclipsed by that of her husband, confounds her literary legacy.

Untitled, 1959.

Zürn was born in 1916 and raised in the Grünewald suburb of Berlin. Her father—a writer, editor, and cavalry officer whom she adored—was frequently absent, and she detested her mother and older brother. In Dark Spring, she alludes to suffering verbal and emotional abuse from her mother and being raped by her brother. When she finished school, she began working for Germany’s national film company, Universum Film AG. She claimed to know nothing about the violence being committed by the Nazi’s until 1942, when she heard an underground radio broadcast describing the conditions of the concentration camps. That same year, at the age of twenty-six, she married Erich Laupenmühlen, a much older wealthy man who worked for Leitz Cameras, manufacturer of the Leica camera. Seven years later, they divorced, and because she had no money to pay for a lawyer or to provide for her children, she lost custody. In 1953, while working as a freelance writer for West Berlin newspapers, she attended an exhibition of Bellmer’s work at Galerie Springer. Shortly after, she abandoned her freelance writing in Berlin (her final radio play aired in 1954) and moved with Bellmer to Paris. There they lived a largely reclusive life in various hotels. She became pregnant multiple times, but never again gave birth. Zürn endured many back-alley abortions during her second marriage.

Zürn with Hans Bellmer in their apartment.

With Bellmer as her entrée, Zürn met Paris’s leading Surrealists. She began experimenting with anagrammatic poetry and “automatic drawing,” in which the artist’s hand moves freely across the page in an attempt to express the unconscious. In 1954, she produced Hextentexte (Witches’ Writings), an illustrated manuscript consisting of five drawings and corresponding anagrams. Zürn had a sophisticated conception of the relationship between words and images. One drawing, accompanying a text titled “Wir leben den Tod” (“We Love Death”), portrays a sprightly creature with an alligator-like beak, marching in profile, its body covered in highly detailed patterns. Another drawing depicts a flying creature with multiple wings and thin, scaly arms—it looks like the animal kingdom’s equivalent to an antiquated airplane. The anagrams—filled with motifs of death, love, and sorrow—invest the images with a sense of melancholy. At the same time, the chimerical creatures—rendered in black India ink—invest the writing with an ineffable joy.

In Oracles and Spectacles, an unpublished book of drawings and anagrams from the 1960s, Zürn’s filigree lines form interconnected faces, dizzying swirls of human and cephalopod-like bodies that billow through the picture plane like clouds of smoke. She employs the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing, but her gossamer line work and fantastical flourishes evoke decorative motifs of Art Nouveau and grotesqueries.

Untitled, 1961.

In her personal life, Zürn located her sense of identity in her relationships with others, particularly men. She embraced Bellmer’s dominance: the original manuscript of her novel The Man of Jasmine attributes authorship to “the wife of Hans Bellmer.” She fell passionately enamored of the Surrealist writer Henri Michaux, whom she saw as the embodiment of the original “man of Jasmine,” a recurring figure from her childhood dreams whom she describes as her “image of love.” According to the art historian and literary critic Mary Ann Caws, Zürn once said, “I always need a companion to tell me what to do … They just have to say, Now you do this, now you do that.”

In The Man of Jasmine, she describes an anonymous “someone” traveling through the body of the narrator, modeled in her image, and turning it into his home. This sense of housing an other echoes her feeling of being divided between two roles—that of the artist and that of the passive muse. The Trumpets of Jericho, her most sophisticated and novelistic anagrammatic work, begins with an unwanted pregnancy and a rejected baby. Here, repulsion simmers beneath the surface of creation. The child, the product of one of seven possible lovers, is deformed and monstrous, a “hideous creature.” Yet his birth gives rise to a dreamlike fantasy recounted through fluid prose poetry.

The Trumpets of Jericho.

Zürn’s artistic practice was inextricable from her bouts of mental illness. She produced the majority of her art during the years she spent in mental institutions. Her work reflects the sense of being observed by both staff and fellow patients in the institution. Zürn’s drawings are populated with eyes and faces that overlap and emerge from one another, sometimes in claustrophobic masses and other times as what appear to be different facets of the same person.

Untitled, 1961.

Although Zürn is being looked at, she is also watching attentively, and her creations—multiheaded hydras, apparitions with wandering eyes, all-seeing phoenixes—suggest preternatural perception. “As a child,” she writes in The Trumpets of Jericho, “I was given to reconnoitering, recognizing. Now I have been led for years by gloom into the blackness. Do you know it? Pairs of eyes dead full of time look earnestly across the border between being and nothingness.” While Unica Zürn’s literature portrays a life of illness and loss, her drawings attest to—and, with their multiple eyes, see—a realm in which wonderment triumphs. 

Natalie Haddad received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of California, San Diego, in 2016. She is currently a freelance art writer and coeditor of Hyperallergic Weekend.

Hans Haacke, News, 1969. Installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

On the top floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a printer is printing the news.

As the printer groans and stutters, long loops of paper gather on the gallery floor. It prints slowly, pausing every few minutes, as the paper grows into an endless ribbon over the course of a day. From a distance, it looks like a recycling heap. Close up, it looks like a Tara Donovan sculpture or the graceful curls of intricate origami.

There are RSS feeds coming in from all over the world, in English: Reuters, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, Haaretz, Der Spiegel, Fox News, the Times of India, others.

You’re invited to pick it up and read it. “Legendary Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker, 84, reveals he survived bite from poisonous spider.” “Anthea Hamilton review—gourds move in mysterious ways at Tate Britain.” “Detroit-area girl, 3, wounded after AK-47 accidentally fires.” “Lindsay Lohan named the new face of Lawyer.com.”

This is the German artist Hans Haacke’s News, part of SFMOMA’s broadly conceived new show “Nothing Stable Under Heaven” (open until September 16), which deals with tech, surveillance, resistance, and instability of all kinds.

“It’s Twitter!” a visitor joked on a recent afternoon, dropping the article he was reading back into the paper pile and walking away. 

*

The first incarnation of News was born in 1969, out of Haacke’s desire, he said, to break down “the barriers between what is presumed to be this secluded and holy sphere that we call art, from the rest of the world, which is dirty politics.”

A few days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Haacke, then in his early thirties and living in New York, gave a scheduled talk about his work. “I had to say, well, these works and what I’m involved in unfortunately does not take into account what happened the other day,” he said in a video interview with SFMOMA. “That was a shocking realization.”

In 1969, he took a telex machine and put it in Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf as part of an exhibition called “Prospect 69.” It was continuously receiving wires from the German press agency DPA. The next month, he showed it at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, where it spit out English wires from UPI. In 1970, at the Jewish Museum, he set up five different Telex machines, which simultaneously spit out the news.

The Vietnam War was escalating. So were the protests. Nixon was president. The news of the day—today’s history—flowed into the gallery. This was far faster than most Americans got news, which was then delivered at predictable hours on the radio, on broadcast TV, or on their doorsteps.

Haacke’s News preceded the cool of protest art. “In the early 1970s, the art world was not dominated by the avant garde scandal aesthetic which was redesigned in the 1980s with the provocative stunts deployed by artists like Jeff Koons,” Walter Grasskamp and Molly Nesbit write in their book on Haacke’s work.

Haacke was one of the members of the Art Workers Coalition in 1969, which organized to bring protest into cultural institutions. At MoMA in New York, he exhibited MoMA Poll, asking visitors to cast ballots on the question, Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November? The Rockefellers were some of MoMA’s biggest donors. Haacke’s work was not shown there again for decades, Grasskamp and Nesbit note.

After Haacke took aim at the exploitations of the real-estate industry, his first major international solo show at the Guggenheim was canceled six weeks before it was supposed to open. Haacke’s work was not bought or shown in U.S. museums for twelve years.

News was less shocking, maybe, but it was the most literal realization of his desire to break down the boundaries of the gallery space.

But now, forty-nine years after it was first shown, those boundaries seem essentially broken. For instance, almost all of us carry the news in our pockets. As we try to step away for a few hours to look at art, New York Times news alerts buzz in our pockets.

*

News is a repeated interruption, a moral necessity, an unhealthy addiction, a requirement for a free society, a hard thing to live with. It is also the mundane fabric of our days. News is the traffic on Highway 101. News is the president’s personality. News is that a journalist was killed in South Sudan, and it is also that there is civil war there. News is the weather tomorrow, yesterday, today.

There are many kinds of compressions that happen in the news, but one of the strangest is this pairing of different kinds of information. In a newspaper, they run alongside each other. Any front page might feature the distilled news of a murder next to the account of a parade. Online, they are not even separated by column space. They interrupt each other, inseparable, unintentionally intertwined.

I am a reporter, and I spend a large portion of my day passively on Twitter, the ultimate compressor. In its accumulation of the news, there is a flattening. Scales and geographies are crushed into single lines. Commentary is added. “lol dying,” someone writes with a laugh-crying emoji next to a celebrity interview. Elsewhere, an unidentified person is shot and killed, and no one knows why, not even the reporter, who dutifully records the time and place of death. Elsewhere, the ice caps melt and melt and melt.

*

One afternoon, I watched News for two hours straight. I also watched people watching it, sitting to read it, circling around it, or snapping iPhone pictures of it while barely stopping to look.

I wanted to know: What is the point of News in 2018? It isn’t radical in the way that it was in 1969. One has to walk only a few feet away from it in the gallery, into Arthur Jafa’s astounding video installation, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, to see something more provocative. He stitches together footage of the civil rights movement, boxing matches, shaky cell-phone videos of police shootings, and people dancing. Watch Jafa for thirty seconds and it is clear that News is not the most lively, challenging, or powerful way to relate to the dirty politics of our day.

Perhaps, too, the gallery has become a place to escape the bombardment of breaking news, as much as we can. (While I was there: “NYTIMES: President Trump’s national security adviser is out. H. R. McMaster will be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former U.S. ambassador.”)

When the visitor observed that News was like Twitter, I thought, immediately: He’s right. A physical Twitter printing itself into the gallery.

And yet what was once a radically fast way of getting the news seems slow today. At the end of the first hour, I was restless, frustrated by the printer’s pauses. The first time I had visited the exhibit, the pile of paper was much higher. I wanted to see the loops of newsprint grow faster, evidence of events across the world happening and accumulating.

“I read this one earlier,” a teenage girl said, reading the sports headline out loud. Someone pointed to the date on one of the articles: March 21, yesterday’s news.

The printer churned and wheezed. People often congregated around the printer with a kind of delight. Wow, it’s printing the news! How charming.

There were people—a middle-school-age boy in an Oakland A’s sweatshirt—who sat cross-legged on the floor and finished entire articles. He picked them up and put them down with intense focus. A girl in overalls stood and did the same.

But mostly, people seemed charmed by the analogueness of the piece. “Wow, it’s a real article about Bethlehem,” a teen exclaimed, astounded that such a thing could be connected to reality.

News, in 2018, feels like a reminder of when the news was an object. It looks, in its moments of stillness, like the sculpture it is.

Sophie Haigney is a writer and journalist based in San Francisco.

Zoe Leonard, TV Wheelbarrow, 2001, dye transfer print, 20 in. × 16 in. Collection of the New York Public Library; Funds from the Estate of Leroy A. Moses, 2005.

Never have I wanted to touch a photograph as badly as I wanted to touch Zoe Leonard’s Red Wall 2001/2003 (Leonard typically includes two dates with each photograph, the first signaling when the photo was taken, the second when it was printed). It’s an image of such saturated—such tactile—redness that it was, for a beat, difficult to accept that it was only a representation of a wall, flat and smooth and framed. Red Wall is a minimalist monochrome wet dream that inspires a maximalist yearning—an outsized, outrageous need.

Zoe Leonard, “I want a president,” 1992.

Leonard is a photographer and a sculptor. She is also an activist, and her work with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) serves as a model for conscientious, personally risky political involvement. Her samizdat poem “I want a president,” originally written to celebrate Eileen Myles’s 1992 “openly female” (in the poet’s words) run for the presidency, was originally meant to run in a small journal that shut down right before publication. In 2006, it was printed as an insert postcard in the journal LTTR, and in 2016, it appeared on a billboard at the foot of the High Line. “I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president,” the poem begins. It ends, “I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.”

As the scholar Ann Cvetkovich has written, Leonard is an archivist of feeling. What might otherwise remain inchoate—rage, mourning, loneliness, alienation—coalesces in her photographs and in her installations of collected ephemera. Leonard’s work is an invitation to interrogate how our depressions, despairs, and desires can be harnessed as political perspectives. Our emotional responses, according to Leonard, are a form of political positioning. The resulting pieces caress the eye and prod at the conscience. They are demanding, but also witty and companionable, and together they articulate how one might take action in a society that incentivizes passive complicity.

Zoe Leonard, Red Wall, dye transfer print, 29 11/16 in. × 20 7/16 in., 2001/2003. Collection of the artist; courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York. 

“Zoe Leonard: Survey,” the title of her current midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, suggests the importance of looking from many angles. As the wall text at the exhibition’s entrance has it, “to survey is … to look out a place or site and gauge it from multiple viewpoints in an effort to understand and describe it.” One of Leonard’s newest sculptures, How to Take Good Pictures (2018), comprises over a thousand copies of the eponymous Kodak manual, stacked in columns of varying heights. Evoking a cityscape or a bar graph, and set against the grand expanse of the Whitney’s westward-facing floor-to-ceiling fifth-floor gallery windows—all sea, sky, and skyscraper on a clear pre-spring day—the work instructs us in the ways of image making. How to Take Good Pictures is breathtaking and a little funny, but it’s also mournful and elegiac. Outside the picture windows we can see large scale excavations, which will make the way, eventually, for new buildings. In her Analogue series, a collection of pastel snapshots document the vanishing landscape of mom-and-pop shops and expand to reflect on the global rag trade. The results are a form of poetry, the sort of thing that cannot be summarized. They are miniature vitrines, diamond sharp.

Leonard’s photographs include the telltale black lines of analogue photo development, which indicate the edge of the exposed film. These lines point to the camera as a framing device, acting upon its subject rather than passively capturing it. In a 1997 interview with Anna Blume, Leonard expressed surprise that people think a photograph captures a real moment: “It’s not reality; it’s a subjective view. It’s a picture. I go out and I see things my way and take my photograph among all the millions of photographs that can be taken.” Leaving “the mistakes”—the dust, the borders, the holes—is a way of signaling to the viewer that the image is a product of labor, and that it was made by a person whose truth “is no more true than anyone else’s.”

Zoe Leonard, New York Harbor I, two gelatin silver prints, 21 in. × 17 1/8 in. each, 2016. Collection of the artist; courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York

Yet there is something special about Leonard’s truth. In his catalog essay, Bennett Simpson, who is one of the curators of the show, describes Leonard’s aesthetic as one of “subjective authenticity, sentiment, and sincerity.” Her sentiment without sentimentality spans her photography and her sculpture and ties her artistic practice to her work as an activist with ACT UP. As Leonard recounts in a 2010 oral history of the organization, she participated in “die-ins” and set up needle exchanges, which were illegal at the time. The needle-exchange initiative was two-part: ACT UP enabled access to needles, and then, when activists were arrested and subsequently arraigned, they worked to set precedent for legalizing the exchanges. In the oral history, Leonard speaks of her mother, who had been involved in the anti-Nazi resistance in Poland, noting that “it was translated to me really early that you stand up for what’s right and do what you believe in at whatever the cost might be. That’s just what you do.” (“Survey” includes several images, rephotographed in the artist’s studio, of Leonard’s mother and grandmother arriving in New York Harbor.)

The AIDS crisis inspired one of Leonard’s most iconic works, Strange Fruit. The sculpture was made between 1992 and 1997, at the height of the crisis. It was inspired by the death of the artist David Wojnarowicz, a close friend of Leonard’s and the person to whom Strange Fruit is dedicated. Leonard attended her first ACT UP meeting on the day she found out Wojnarowicz was diagnosed. An update of the vanitas paintings of the old masters, Strange Fruit is a floor display of emptied fruit peels—orange, banana, grapefruit, lemon, and avocado—held together with thread, buttons, and zippers. Decayed and dried, Strange Fruit is part still life, part graveyard, part participatory artwork. It addresses the viewer as someone with a conscience, who can act against the tyrannies of silent, lethally complacent governments, but also as someone with a body that must eventually succumb to the realities of mortality.

Installation view of Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992–97. Orange, banana, grapefruit, lemon, and avocado peels with thread, zippers, buttons, sinew, needles, plastic, wire, stickers, fabric, and trim wax, dimensions variable. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; purchased with funds

In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing writes that loss is a cousin of loneliness. Thinking of Strange Fruit, Laing suggests that “phsical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture.” Strange Fruit¸with its titular reference to queer sexuality, as well as its invocation of Billie Holiday’s 1939 antiracist protest song by the same name, is a work of personal politics. One imagines Leonard painstakingly sewing a banana peel, but then one also pictures her attaching buttons: there is sadness here, to be sure—the fruitless attempt to avoid decay—but also something defiantly hopeful, a full-throated peal of laughter in the face of the plague. Strange Fruit speaks to fragility, to impermanence, but also to agency, and to the refusal to do nothing even when it seems there is nothing to be done.

My first significant encounter with Leonard’s work was during the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the last to be held in the museum’s former location on Seventy-Fifth Street. For that show, Leonard transformed one of the fourth-floor windows into a projector, a form of camera obscura. Madison Avenue was projected topsy-turvy on the museum wall. It was immediately recognizable and completely strange, a world turned upside down but still alive.

Yevgeniya Traps lives in Brooklyn. She works at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU.

A concept drawing by Kay Nielsen for The Little Mermaid.

The mermaid in the illustration was lithe, mysterious, sylphlike. She perched on a rock, inscrutable. For years, I’d been bombarded with the images, books, merchandise, and endless one-offs of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Disney’s Ariel was redheaded, cheerful, an open book—voluptuous in that squeaky-clean cartoon way. She was certainly not the mermaid Hans Christian Andersen envisioned when he wrote his tragic tale. But here was a sad water sprite who was the perfect embodiment of the ambiguous virtues of folklore. I’d stumbled across her online, in a series of concept drawings for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. They had been drawn in the fifties and shelved for thirty years.

A concept drawing by Kay Nielsen for The Little Mermaid.

Who was this illustrator, Kay Nielsen? What happened to his version of the mermaid?

I grew up during a losing streak for Disney. They were putting out live-action films, and while their classic fairy tales were still beloved, they were scarce. As a child, I was more familiar with the source material: I had devoured the Grimms, the Andersens, the Perraults with gusto. I have noticed that younger generations tend to be shocked to learn the original plot of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (spoiler: she kills herself), hence the scores of articles revealing the real stories behind Disney fairy tales. Disney made his versions cannon; the originals were reduced to curiosities.

A concept drawing by Kay Nielsen for The Little Mermaid.

Perrault and the Grimm brothers collected the folk stories peasant women had told their daughters since prehistory. They repackaged them for the landed (and literate) gentry. Dark tales told as warnings gained some lightness and lost a bit of savagery in these retellings. But they still retained the elements that Bruno Bettelheim approved of when he wrote his classic, The Uses of Enchantment, where he posited that children resolve their fears by imagining themselves up against fairy-tale monsters. When Hans Christian Andersen, George MacDonald, and other writers set to work in the mid-nineteenth century, they braided their modern, national stories with the wild strands still at work within fairy tales. There were plenty of writers who used fairy tales to preach moral values. But there were others, such as Andersen and the Grimms, who saw themselves as recorders rather than interpreters. Andersen had spent his childhood tagging along with his grandmother as she tended gardens at the town insane asylum, listening to the surreal tales the women there spun.

Kay Nielsen, Rapunzel, 1925

Enter Kay Nielsen. Nielsen was born in the late 1800s in Copenhagen, and so straddled the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. During the the Golden Age of Illustration, Nielsen and other artists, such as Arthur Rackham and Gustave Doré, found themselves illustrating expensive, exquisite gift books of fairy-tale stories. Nielsen took a Nordic coolness and married it with a love of strong line work and fantasy, creating strangely graceful creatures and spirits. According to the Nielsen scholar Noel Daniel, Nielsen loved the theater and the ballet, and was particularly taken with the fantastic costume and art designs of the Ballet Russes when he was an art student in Paris.

As Kendra Daniel points out in her introduction to the gorgeous East of the Sun and West of the Moon, reissued from Taschen, Nielsen chose to illustrate stories with a strong thread of irrationality: “they take their power from the snowdrifts of Scandinavia.” Cold, unpredictable, and indifferent to human need, these frozen landscapes heighten the danger of the fairy world inherent in the fantasy.

Though the books they illustrated were expensive, these artists were paid so little that they were forced to show their artwork at galleries to make money. On the side, in the twenties and thirties, Nielsen began designing sets and costumes for the theater. In 1924, his art was featured in the new edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. His fellow Dane wrote stories at once modern and ancient, sensual and cold—dualities always at work in Nielsen’s illustrations.

By 1936, expensive gift books were no longer sought-after. With his theater background to recommend him, Nielsen moved to Hollywood to work on Max Reinhardt’s Everyman, staged at the Hollywood Bowl. Elsewhere in Hollywood, Walt Disney was leading groundbreaking animation in films like Snow White. Disney distilled the cheerfully Puritanical values proscribed by the censorious Hays Code into fairy tales for a new generation. As Jack Zipes writes in his essay “Breaking the Disney Spell,” “animators sought to impress audiences with their abilities to use pictures in such a way that they would forget the earlier fairy tales and remember the images that they, the new artists, were creating for them.” Walt Disney was less concerned with children’s souls than he was with their parents’ wallets, and he built his empire around the bet that happily ever after sells better when untroubled by nuance.

Kay Nielsen’s illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, 1924.

These tales had been the one place that women, however flawed, were allowed to take up space. Disney’s versions still featured heroines, but the action in the stories fell to the princes, dwarves, and, of course, villains. (In the newest version of Beauty and the Beast, the beast and Gaston take a central role, while Belle’s sisters are done away with entirely.) The politics of colonialism and racism pervaded films like The Jungle Book and Song of the South. But the biggest coup d’état of all in the Disney film was the total dissolution of the dark. Nuance was lost to the bright glare of intentional innocence. As Zipes writes, “The diversion of the Disney fairy tale is geared toward non-reflective viewing. Everything is on the surface, one-dimensional … It is adorable, easy, and comforting in its simplicity … Disney wants the world cleaned up.”

Artwork by Kay Nielsen for Fantasia.

Kay Nielsen strode into this Disney-studio atmosphere in 1940 ready to embrace the uncanny, the odd, and the unnerving. According to Noel Daniel, a sort of internationalism followed in the wake of Romanticism, bringing a more cosmopolitan version of folk and fairy tales with it, and “took a seat at the same table of widespread interest in vernacular culture.” Nielsen, like many of his fellow artists, illustrated folk works for multiple nations and cultures, his source material as diverse as his artistic influences—a mix of Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Japanese woodcuts and watercolors. Before following his star to the animation studios, he had lived in Paris, London, and Copenhagen. But he arrived in Hollywood too late. Nielsen was hired to work on Fantasia, and he designed one of the most original sequences in all of Disney’s films, the “Night on Bald Mountain” piece. After that, he began work on conceptual art for an upcoming film version of “The Little Mermaid.” But by the end of World War II, a soft nationalism had firmly settled into the works of American animation, and in particular the work of Walt Disney. Nielsen’s multicultural, mythical designs for the film were too dark, too morally ambiguous. The artist’s slow, painstaking style was at odds with the assembly-line speed of Disney Studios, and even when other artists were brought in to take his concepts and develop them into animations, he was worn down by the pace of the work. Nielsen and Disney parted ways, and his concept drawings were shelved. He was brought back briefly to work on Sleeping Beauty—in my opinion, the most visually striking of all the Disney films, with a strong Gothic look inspired by the period—but was let go again in the fifties.

From East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

The kind of design Nielsen specialized in—decadent, beautiful, and opulent—was no longer in vogue. He did very little profitable work in the few years before his death, in 1957. He worked on a few murals for churches and local schools, and then, to try and make ends meet, became a chicken farmer. He and his wife relied on their friends for support, and without their help, they almost certainly would have been homeless. Nielsen died in poverty and obscurity. The age of Disney was on the rise, and the age of illustration was over. Nielsen’s art would have to wait fifty years to see new printing and popularity, and, by then, like Andersen’s mermaid, he was just foam on the waves of a long-ago world.

Amber Sparks is a novelist and essayist. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Burnaway, Fanzine, and other publications. Her most recent book is The Unfinished World and Other Stories