This was published in GARAGE in 2018 and, funnily enough, is once again receiving “a limited theatrical release this August courtesy of GKIDS.” (Metrograph ought to specify whether they’re screening it on the 31st in its original Japanese or as an English dub, though. Along with correcting the inaccurate date of ‘2019’ they’ve assigned to it.)

Seeing all these movies I wrote about a decade ago makes me feel like I’m settling into my elder statesman era as a critic, finding satisfactions as they come, including reconfirmations that my instincts are pretty much always correct. This was written at high-speed during my brief tenure working in New York media—Artforum was never really media, nor ever meant to function like a press outlet per se, so I ended up writing in a different modality for some of 2018—and it’s more so a long description mirroring the romp-quality of the film. My short review below:

To what lengths would you go to get the classmate you have a crush on to notice you? Does colluding with a Japanese school festival organizer who fronts an NSA-style operations center that collects data on a student body sound like it would be in your wheelhouse? If so, do I have the anime for you: The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. Directed by Masaaki Yuasa and released in Japan last year to great acclaim, the film received its US premiere over the weekend at the Japan Society in New York and will see a limited theatrical release this August courtesy of GKIDS.

The titular girl is only called otome (a word that means something like “maiden”) or referred to as “The Girl with Black Hair” by her senpai (an upperclassmen, or anyone in a more senior role whatever the context), who carries a huge, burning torch for her but doesn’t have the, um, courage to do much besides engineer coincidental meetings and encounters with the object of his secret affections. She, on the other hand, is a bottomless pit for booze, but in an adorable kind of way where one night out on the town in Kyoto drinking turns into a psychedelic journey to find a mythic alcohol accompanied by encounters with a deadbeat dad who collects old, traditional erotica; an underwear thief who considers it a matter of principle to sport the same pair of unmentionables until he finds the woman he loves; and other assuredly fine people.

The girl, who in the end really just wants to find a copy of a fairytale book she had as a toddler, even has a run-in with “The God of the Old Book Market” at a gathering of used book sellers. The god puts in an appearance to make sure that the vendors aren’t ripping customers off, and to explain a novel connection between authors Yukio Mishima and Jules Verne!

The director Masaaki Yuasa—whose popular series Devilman Crybaby is currently streaming on Netflix—isn’t known for films that make much sense. He’s moreso an auteur of the manic; he choreographs sequences that slide in and out of visual dazzle or cheerful nonsense, like a Lewis Carroll for the what’s-the-WiFi-password set. Our first red flag comes when the girl gets low with a delightfully outré dance, and when the rest of the cast follows suit rather than ostracizing her for her outlandish style, we know we’re in a world that cares little for the conventions of dull reality. By the time we’re introduced to the aforementioned school festival organizer, always a reliably egomaniacal figure in anime, we have been groomed to accept that yes, this is the man who has the necessary élan to help senpai get the attention of his beloved girl. The underwear thief sullies the heroine’s hapless upperclassman time and time again throughout the film—and the used book god even tries to frame him for child molestation—but he knows he must bear all this and stay the course to find that freaking picture book if he ever wants to have lovey-dovey school days before the crushing advent of professional life. Life is short, smooch on lovebirds.

The Night is Short, Walk On Girl premiered in the US as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Film Festival, which ran through July 29, 2018. The film then played at Metrograph in New York through August 30 in Japanese with English subtitles.

Another entry in my miniseries of republished reviews of films that have recently reentered New York theaters. This one is on Der Fan, a delightfully gruesome parable of fandom gone wrong—or perhaps one that simply follows fantasy and lack to their natural conclusions with true gusto. You decide.

I originally saw the film paired with Emmanuelle Bercot’s complementary Backstage (2005) in a double feature at Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg in late 2017. Der Fan begins its new run at Metrograph on Friday, August 28, 2026.

Originally published in 2018 in Artforum as “Dear You: Paige K. Bradley on Backstage (2005) and Der Fan (1982).”

HOW LUXURIOUS TO BE ALONE in a theater for a double-bill screening of two love-rhymes-with-hideous-car-wreck films at Spectacle Theater. French director and actor Emmanuelle Bercot’s Backstage (2005) and German director and writer Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982) suggest that fandom, like a diamond, is forever. In each, the center of gravity is a younger girl pining for an older pop star, seeing her idol as the physical embodiment of the love that she longs for—at least as a one-way ticket out of banality.

Horror makes a major of the minor, an opera out of suggestion, and treats fantasy as if crime were the inevitable result of dreams coming true. Backstage’s teen Lucie (a twentysomething Isild Le Besco) first encounters her stage god Lauren Waks (Emmanuelle Seigner) after her mother arranges a visit from a television crew. They invade the unsuspecting fan’s home and surprise her, SWAT-like. Sometimes seduction looks like terrorism: Lucie is distraught by the appearance of Lauren; tears flow and she flees from the singer after being gently prompted to give the cameras a better show. She retreats to her bedroom—where there is, what else, a wall-spanning poster of the glowing creature just outside her door—and the crew decides to cut their losses and pack up. Lauren takes pity on the young fan, a note is slipped under the bedroom door to the star, and Lucie slumps on the floor, defeated.

Lucie runs out on her berating mother, then departs for Paris to meet Lauren once more. She prods the idol’s vulnerability for pills and human connection outside of her menagerie of paid subordinates. The fan has listened so well—she knows the star better than the star can know herself. A smoking-hot ex-boyfriend of Lauren’s, named Daniel (Samuel Benchetrit), eventually precipitates the end of their solidarity.

There are three reasons that girls want to use your cock: roll out the dough; walk among the stars; get bored, distracted.

Lucie seduces Daniel to ingratiate herself in Lauren’s future, by carrying to term the star’s hopes for a love child—a collab between her and Daniel—that ended in abortion the first go-around with D. Lucie “comes out” to Daniel—not as gay or straight, but as a fan. That is her true orientation, the ledge from which she casts her line. While watching Backstage, it never once occurred to me that what I was seeing was a queer love story, or an examination of attraction between women. What was being played out was calculated confidence stroking the trembling dissonance of youth. Worship is the original kink, and it’s totally timeless.

Todd Haynes once said his luminous 2015 film Carol articulated what it is to be “young and in the dark and falling in love with someone.” Backstage is the anti-Carol, which is to say, this is about what it is to be young, desperate, harshly lit, and destroying yourself for someone who is simply not available. Surrounded by noise, how can you love someone who makes you forget yourself? Then you remember, that’s what you wanted from love in the first place.

While Backstage is extraordinary and breathless, the deadpan Der Fan thrives on the soupy atmosphere of fantasy gunking up the view of a world outside obsession’s narrow frame. A love supreme moves through the titular fan, Simone (a seventeen-year-old Désirée Nosbusch), living in West Germany in the 1980s. She adores R—a stone-faced idol played by a new-wave singer in his thirties named Bodo Staiger. On her bedroom wall is a poster of him abutting crowds of what appear to be Sieg Heiling masses. Sylvia Plath was right: “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute.” And most entertainers operate, to some degree, in the power structure of fascism: Try to tell me you don’t think of the Third Reich every time a full arena screams someone’s name. Or, isn’t there someone out there you’d rather be stomped on by, instead of all the hugs in the world from basic b’s?

R doesn’t reply to her incessant fan letters, failing to cement their bond. Our Lady of Correspondence interprets this lack as the postal service’s conspiracy against her, and she gives the Marvelettes a run for their money by skipping pleading altogether and simply bullying Mr. Postman. So Simone hitchhikes to Munich to track him down. She finds him swishing around a television station in a black SS officer–like getup, with jodhpurs whose volume suggests he might be overcompensating. He seemingly takes a liking to his nearly silent admirer; they go back to his friend’s place and he lays into her. When the deed is done, his strategic warmth evaporates into chilled disdain. Shocked by his attempt to exit the house, her life, the universe she has built with him at the center, she whacks the back of his skull with a foyer trophy. Unspeakable moves, which include an electric carving knife and a pot on the stove, follow. To be blunt, she gets her fill and ends up back at mum and dad’s, secretly pregnant. Talk about anchor babies! The R she loved didn’t exist, so she destroyed what was left. Songs aren’t contracts between a singer and individual listeners, but the real fan makes a dotted line and signs anyway.

Lauren’s last song in Backstage is performed at a concert Lucie watches on TV, back at her mother’s house in the French suburbs along with her newborn baby by Lauren via Daniel. It goes: “Lucie is drunk on tears / All she knows about me by heart / Lucie doesn’t break and Lucie weeps.” Another loser anthem.

Backstage and Der Fan screened on December 2, 6, 13, and 16, 2017, at Spectacle in Brooklyn.

After noticing that a number of films I wrote about while editing Artforum’s Film column are back in theaters, I thought I’d serially share some of them here. Cheers to 2017!

Your Name is currently screening in the U.S. and Canada. See listings here.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING MORE POPULAR.

Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (2016) is the highest-grossing anime film, ever. Bulldozing through Hayao Miyazaki’s previous box-office record for Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), it’s a perfect introduction for the anime newbie, cannily weaving together so many of the genre’s tropes—an apocalyptic event with a high school innocently built into the middle of its path, teenagers who are the only ones willing to accept that everything can be swept away in an instant, a love that defies the rules of time and space, and, of course, a few shots up skirts.

Shinkai’s first effort was a five-minute short in 1999, She and Her Cat, which looked at how a feline might see its life with its human owner. But he really made his name with Hoshi no Koe (Voices of a Distant Star, 2002), which follows a young girl—don’t they always?—fighting a war in outer space as she desperately tries to maintain a texting-based relationship with her earthbound boyfriend. Hoshi no Koe was remarkable not only for its ability to take you from zero to tears in twenty-five minutes, but also for the fact that Shinkai made it entirely by himself: He even voiced the main male character in the film’s first version; his girlfriend at the time played the lovelorn military contractor. For all its subcultural appeal overseas, anime is not, for the most part, a niche or DIY affair, and Shinkai emerged as a curious auteur.

But people—as in the masses—love what Makoto Shinkai does, so no lightless infamy for him. His films display an endearing desire to dazzle. No child is left behind. His tales begin personal and insular but strive to cast the widest emotional net.

So here we have Mitsuha and Taki. One lives in a rural Japanese town called Itomori, the other in Tokyo, but both dream of a comet—and each other. You don’t need to know someone to dream about them, and they each see “nothing less than a beautiful view.”

They both wake up and are confused by their bodies. Their friends and family say that they were acting strangely the other day, while in the background TVs provide a cheerfully narrated commentary on the comet, dubbed Tiamat, due to soon make impact. Mitsuha and Taki don’t understand the queries about their inconsistent behavior, and both start displaying curiously cross-gender affectations. On the first day after we see Taki wake up, he appears horrified by his junk and sits properly, feet folded under him, with his friends. Instead of saying ore for “I”—the more masculine form—he says watashi, or worse, watakushi. He may as well have applied glitter to his cheekbones and pulled out a feather quill. Meanwhile, Mitsuha scandalizes her little sister by fondling her own chest in amazement and intimidates her classmates by thrusting her leg onto a desk. This send-up of gender roles is charming, to be sure, but what’s beautiful is how un-unique the film’s attitude is—anime often plays fast and loose with transgender imagery and sexual identities, so much so that that any American “coming-out” episode seems laughably lagging.

The reason for our heroine and hero’s schizophrenic, slapstick personality crises is soon revealed: They are switching bodies every other day, a discovery they address efficiently by leaving accounts of what each did with the other’s life on a diary app on the other’s phone. Mitsuha sets Taki up with his longtime work crush—which he would never have had the guts to go for himself—and Taki helps Mitsuha carry her grandmother, the only surviving proprietor of their family’s Shinto shrine, up steep roads into a clearing that locals believe is a portal to the underworld. There they deliver a jug of sake, made by Mitsuha chewing rice and then spitting it out and letting it ferment, as a tribute. On the way, the old woman describes the Shinto concept of musubi—the power of creation, or the ability to become—and its knotting as time itself. These are spoken of as myths, but by the film’s end they become the very warp and weft of reality.

Mitsuha’s story is fated to end on the night of an autumn festival at her family’s shrine, as the comet splits in two, with a piece landing right on her world. But this is no action movie—there are no mushroom clouds or people tearfully searching for each other in the wreckage. We see the light fall in her eye, then an unnerving clang, and she stops appearing in, and as, Taki’s life. He tries to show his friends her diary entries on his phone, emojis and all, to prove she exists, but they delete themselves before his eyes.

He draws detailed sketches of her town from memory, from when he inhabited her body, and, using them as a guide, he sets off to find her. Recognizing the places in his pictures, a man tells him that Mitsuha’s town was destroyed by the comet three years ago, with few survivors. Taki finds the cave, and there drinks her homemade sake—when two become one. Over and over Mitsuha and Taki find, document, and try to hold on to each other, but they don’t always know it. They can’t remember their names, they keep asking each other, “Who are you?” Their world comes alive when they know but falls apart as the memory slips away into something impossible.

Taki stands on a precipice and remembers her name, and then forgets it. Each is helplessly moved about by fate, time, death, or musubi. They quickly try to write each other’s names on their hands before they forget again, but Mitsuha disappears before she can get through more than a single line on his palm, and the music cuts.

Taki wanders around Tokyo eight years after the comet fell, doubting: “I’m not sure if I’m searching for a person or a place.” All he knows is something is missing. The title of the film in Japanese, Kimi no Na wa, is more a question than a declarative statement. It’s a phrase that trails off, a request: It can’t finish itself on its own. It wonders where, and what, might be its answer.

Your Name is now playing in select theaters nationwide.

Speaking of Miku-maxxing, here’s a timely meditation I wrote nearly a decade ago on the prescient project that is Hatsune Miku. In another coincidence, the last time I was at the Javits Center, I was showing the Gramercy International Prize–winning booth at The Armory Show; this week, it’s a gathering of the weebs at AnimeNYC, Zohran Mamdani-approved. A retrospective look allows us to see how far we’ve come—or perhaps how little has changed. Catch up on my coverage of AnimeNYC’s inaugural edition in 2017, written for Artforum when I was their resident anime expert. (So far as I know, that gaping hole I left there remains unfilled.)

“THERE WERE SIGNS.” A small Totoro charm hanging off a mini Fjallraven just so, spotted on the Q train; the Shoto Aizawa from My Hero Academia button on a backpack moving along Thirty-Fourth Street. Clearly something was afoot.

’Twas an anime convention, dear reader, the inaugural edition of a gathering of weebs in New York: AnimeNYC. Held for three days last weekend at Hillary Clinton’s Waterloo (though most around these parts just call it the Javits Center), it marked a terrific opportunity for Midtown councilman Ben Kallos (D) to hail the money and tax dollars that this fan base would bring to the city. It was also the first anime convention I’d attended since I was thirteen. Time to reexamine my foundational narrative at the intersection of high and low.

“Anime is trash and so am I.” Now that we got that out of the way, here are some con thoughts. Anime, even if you haven’t heard of it or seen any of it, has at this point probably its greatest global visibility ever. In the past decade, we’ve gone from faceless usernames on the internet swapping DIY-subtitled .avi files and fan-translated scans of manga pages to an impressive—if not always consistent or comprehensive—array of legal, US-based streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, Crunchyroll) vying for the loyalty of the English-speaking audience dedicated to this . . . I hesitate to say genre—how about behemoth? Or, a cultural expression that has for some time now not even been made exclusively by Japanese people or for Japanese audiences. The demand for content is high, live-action adaptations are picking up speed but not necessarily enthusiasm, the wages for animators are generally acknowledged to be minuscule, and some people are perhaps dying of overwork.

But I do go on. What did the weekend have to offer? An alley for artists, the immersive runway that is cosplay, an exhibitor hall of well over a hundred booths featuring Blu-rays, books, nail art, massages, snapback hats, plushies, sailor-style school uniforms, exclusive Sailor Moon merchandise (got one), the New York Public Library, kigurumi suits, T-Mobile, and porn—something for everyone in the fam.

And the panels! Anime cons have come a long way from handing the keys to nondescript meeting rooms over to future election influencers so they could have free rein to troll each other IRL. Here were convocations of major companies in the field, such as Sunrise—purveyors of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, which has been running since the 1970s and is now an enterprise unto itself—VIZ Media, Kodansha Comics, and the title sponsor of the event, Crunchyroll (full disclosure, I’m a subscriber, as if you couldn’t guess).

Unlike the panel discussions endemic to contemporary art, these affairs are pretty upfront about the fact that they’re there to sell you something: Primarily, release dates for boxed sets were announced. The smell of pretzels and the distinctive sweet scent of NYC roasted nut carts came in from the street, there were gender-inclusive restrooms, and the diversity of the crowding swells was not in itself remarkable considering the demographics of this town, but after spending some time in the ranks of the culture industry it does slow your roll a bit when you realize that across all these rows of folding chairs at the J-pop concert in a cavernous hall, in Midtown, on a Friday night, is a more diverse set of engaged cultural consumers than you might have seen in the past six years together in one place in this borough. Headlining the show were Yoko Ishida, Chihiro Yonekura, and TRUE—veritable celebrities in Japan, brought here to sing what were mostly anime theme songs both recent and vintage. The audience had prepared: Neon glow sticks were held aloft, like a wave of dutiful air traffic controllers bringing bombastic tunes (including this banger from Gundam Wing) in for a smooth landing.

Animator LeSean Thomas hails from the Bronx and is the first American to become a full-time in-house animator at a South Korean animation studio––the places that are actually making many of the parts move for both American and Japanese animation. In an inspiring talk on Saturday afternoon, Thomas quickly dispensed with the speechifying and hustled straight to the Q&A, so that the many people gathered could step up to a mic to ask him about the industry and the future of animation itself, and to seek advice regarding the barriers that kids of color face in achieving their dreams. He invoked the notion of “transgenre” to describe how stories and animation are now made and distributed, and how this is engendered by the turn to subscriptions rather than advertising-based models to generate profit. Realness was served, and the people were schooled. Didn’t hurt that his first sign-language interpreter was a silver fox either.

Hatsune Miku. Have you heard? It’s her tenth anniversary this year. How are you celebrating? Note, it’s not her birthday, and she’s not married, because she’s not a person but a simulation, a voice bank that Saki Fujita lends her talents to and which goes on tour with a live band sequestered at the sides of the stage, the better to spotlight the forever-blue, forever-star, eternally young and fake Miku. Forget the waffling and proselytizing about VR, here’s Panel Room 3 last Saturday, where a video of her April 10, 2016, live concert at Zepp Tokyo was screened to citizens and aliens of Earth in folding chairs for what felt like both a revival and an annihilation. Revived was my faith, by the fans rushing from their seats and breaking out the glow sticks to mimic the very same hailing gestures of the Tokyo crowd occupying approximately half the screen; annihilated was any remaining shreds of loyalty to the artifice of authenticity. Mic check: This is what democracy looks like. Not unlike the atomic bomb, a digital pop idol is a weapon so effective it is quite beyond humanity. It is better than us—superior to women and too good for men, even the ones left helplessly screaming “MIKUUU!!!” at the end of her live show. A superior technology if ever there was one. Pop stardom is, frankly, inhumane and should undoubtedly be automated and outsourced to the machines.

This is the way forward; we need to detach the image of Woman from women. We can shove an image into performance and track her every move, weigh her every word, and measure her volumes, but we simply can’t do this to humans anymore. The anime girls have come for our jobs, and we must let them have at it, they are so strong. Let human performativity go back to its village-storyteller function. It is imperative that we leave Britney alone, and every other Britney to come. In a detour via a detour, “[Miku] disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.” Hatsune Miku is the future, the one true way, and I’m ready to glow up. Are you?

~~

P.S. Here is what I’d recommend:

Revolutionary Girl Utena

Evangelion

My Hero Academia

March Comes in Like a Lion

Jin-Roh

Fruits Basket

Haibane Renmei

Serial Experiments Lain

Mob Psycho 100

Yuri!!! On ICE

You’re welcome!*

Last year, before subsequent events diverted attention elsewhere, the cohort of the Whitney Independent Study Program presented an exhibition titled “Prototype.” For the occasion, I created an installation that also supplied the show’s title and organizing theme. Ordinarily that might be a curator’s role, but circumstances do occasionally create further opportunities for an artist to make their mark.

Conceived as a prototype for a future, more ambitiously scaled woven and sculptural installation, the work begins with the phrase “it’s apples and oranges” and treats objects as words in a spatial statement. Combining handmade and mass-produced elements—including the character L from Death Note, Prussian blue, cast plastic fruit, Apple products, and my 2023 book Drive It All Over Me—it explores conflict, allegory, and linguistic play through a constellation of signs whose relationships remain suggestive rather than fixed. I approach making artworks syntactically, treating them as material information that remains contingent and subject to change. This has a relationship to language’s sculptural qualities, after Robert Smithson. At a time when complexity is increasingly compressed into simplified formats, making rich concepts and histories lossy and lame, let’s say I am interested in approaching installation like “long-form content.” Installed in dialogue with the paintings mounted above it, the Prussian blue rug assumed the form of an “L” extending from wall to floor, turning the exhibition architecture itself into a compositional device. Meanwhile, my L figurine was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, perhaps an allusion to another L from the news of late. Last name…Mangione.

A publication accompanied the exhibition, and my fellow participant Daniel Melo Morales contributed an interview about the work and the broader concerns that run through my practice. I’m pleased to republish that conversation here.

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DMM: Having read about your work as well as the book you wrote, Drive It All Over Me, I wanted to know more about how you think about your process when making works?

PKB: There’s a micro- and a macrocosm, I’d say. I’m always thinking through both. With this painting that I’m working on right now, I’m thinking about its form and composition: the micro. Then there’s the macro: which I’m not always thinking about consciously. With the most recent body of work that I finished, the macro idea was about creating an analog culture of the digital, or using hand-made things to address a digital condition of images, artworks, and the circulation of ideas. Among other things, I was thinking about Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas around meaning (in an artwork, image, or text) via circulation. It’s about how it appears, where it goes, or what it relates to, interacts with ...

People often ask, “How does your writing and your art relate to each other?” There’s a lot of text on my work, some of it from already published writing—my own or others’—and there are ideas that are being generated from looking at other people’s work, but those ideas are also mine, too. There’s a reason why I was drawn to write about the subjects that I have published on—it has a relationship to what I’m thinking through and working on as an artist. And my work has a relationship to semiotics given the way I deal with images as texts. This comes from a particular kind of art history at this point, but I would say it’s not standard practice. My affiliation with those kinds of ideas is probably the most old fashioned thing about what I do. Maybe because I worked at Artforum and read October articles seriously—that was my youth, believe it or not. I thought that history was important to developing one’s thinking, building your work, building a practice, but joke’s on me since it’s abundantly clear we’re in an art world now where that’s totally not the case whatsoever! [LAUGHS]

That stuff is opt-in. In fact, it may well be a hindrance to your work for it to be too informed because that density slows people down often dampening a viewer’s receptivity to what you’re doing. But at the same time, I’m also deliberately using things that relate to a fast, easily comprehensible way of reading images, like memes. Last fall, I showed gestural paintings with Impact font text on the top and bottom of the wall they were on in order to play with this convention. I was actually gesturing at social behavior outside the paintings though. Thinking about how people scan images for memetic potential, or would be at whichever art fair looking to make digital content from art. This has a predatory dimension, but that’s how images are treated. The most interesting or important images now are ones that different people can have different relationships with, and can use further. I was playing into this by reformulating found images as paintings. I had a more or less personal relationship to all of those images, too, but I don’t consider that the most important aspect of what I do. I also had a variety of textured surface qualities going on throughout that body of work, but wanted to put them into a situation where they would be flattened into a JPEG photograph. Compressed, lossy—it’s what the people want, ostensibly.

DMM: In looking at images of your exhibitions and installations, in addition to understanding more about your ideas through our conversation today, you have a compelling way of synthesizing your practice. I’ve seen images and descriptions of candy, balloons, and paintings, among many other things. How do you decide what different elements will be included when constructing an exhibition?

PKB: For an individual work, part of that is having folders of images and sourced material ready. Similar to the way an essay might have a folder on your laptop with citations, references, or drafts—my art works the same way. Every work comes with an archive; every work has endnotes or footnotes. I titled a series of paintings in Of Course, You Realize, This Means War, my 2023 solo show In New York, to reflect that. It’s the same approach as when I was writing my book about Jay [Chung] and Q [Takeki Maeda]’s work. “Show your work,” right?

A painting, or installation, evolves out of sources that I return to repeatedly. For instance, there’s a photograph of the shadow of my hand holding an origami crane and a lighter. I shot it at the installation of a solo project in 2022 and used the picture as the main reference image for the largest painting I exhibited two years later at The Armory Show. The repetition in my work is deliberate because I’m aware my practice is dense and so I want to extend a helping hand! I was always admonished when I was younger to “consider the viewer” and I’d like to think I’m doing so, perhaps facetiously, without abandoning my firm belief that that’s a square-the-circle sort of demand placed on artists.

Then there’s the how of the installation, aka how things are put together spatially. That’s where a different logic comes in. When you’re bringing seemingly disparate things together, whether images or texts, they’re being isolated from their origins and instead brought together for new meanings. This is part of what interests me about the allegory and Craig Owens. I see my work as having that kind of allegorical structure, it does relate to the proliferation that the allegory is attempting to compress, as it were. So for me there is a through line from Owens’ 1980s perception and theory of art—what we read in the Whitney program—to contemporary digital compression. That’s just one point of connection.

As to how material comes together in my work, as in, “how or why are they like this?” Or “why are there those balloons?” and “why are these paintings installed in this way?” I could tell you that the balloons were a clock, they deflated over the course of the show and therefore registered time’s passage. But we rarely think about or behold a clock, per se. A system of measurement itself is not an object of contemplation. Likewise, there is a structure in the work, but, like infrastructure, it’s not really meant to be consciously thought about by the “users” of the work. It might seem arbitrary—like how the paintings in the show were paced apart with a specific number of inches on the red-orange painted walls. That was simply a conceptual rule for me. The entire show was plotted out to have very specific distances between things, and to be syntactical. There were paintings that were shown at the gold standard of museum-wall hanging height (MoMA’s standard). But you only make people aware that there’s a rule when you break it. So I thought you have to show the rule and the broken rule at the same time, in the same space.

Other drawings or photographs (perhaps “minor” types of work in the traditional museological hierarchy) were hung at a lower level, which I called “dog’s-eye level.” But who is that really for? It’s an open question in the experience of the work, but I have certain convictions about why I’m putting that in there in the first place. I’m interested in problems—some are given to me and some I create for myself. I use both, regardless. Even that phrase “the viewer” is a huge problem, but it’s wielded In this bog standard way. “The viewer” implies a system of logic, a clear dynamic between producer and receiver, but systems aren’t necessarily reasonable, and that is what interests me. This binary of giving and receiving, a clear feedback loop, is itself a totally outdated mode of transmission for culture.

Then there’s this idea of the “personal reason,” a reason which would not seem rational but it’s a common phrase, e.g. “at this time for personal reasons I will be ...,” etc. I’m drawn to observable, or at least colloquial, understandings or modes like that. The “personal reason” can be invoked as a way to avoid saying something, too. I used it in a resignation letter once! I thought it spoke volumes! [LAUGHS]

So then, what is important is that there needs to be a feeling of logic. The viewer needs to have an impression of logic that—regardless of whatever sort of perceived chaos is happening in the images, in the materials, or in the references—gives an order to things. It’s an affect. My work is very ordered, and that’s very important because I feel you can’t engage with things that are negated from the start. In other words, it’s not so interesting to say “fuck you” right away! You have to lure people in first with something that might appeal to them, like with a color they might think feels nice, or balloons, the novelty value—“this is memorable,” or with the Impact font—“this looks like something I recognize.” A viewer might eventually realize, “Wait, this isn’t helping me actually. There’s something else going on here and this novelty is not helping me understand that!” And it won’t. Or, it’s not designed to. They’re going to need to engage deeper if they want to get anywhere. That’s how I design the work. It’s devised for a kind of effect yet not an alienating one.

I think gimmicks are fine to use. I’m also influenced by writers and theorists like Sianne Ngai. She wrote the books Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. She’s a Marxist so she’s writing about things through the lens of labor, what labor the gimmick does, what cute does, and what a cute object’s work does. The specialization is minor feelings or the anti-sublime. She writes about how the affection inspired by cute objects actually conceal latent feelings of aggression towards it. Using things that are cute, but it’s a cover (in the disguising sense of the word) is also part of my work. I’m gift wrapping over something that is aggressive on my part, but that doesn’t come from nowhere—it is a reciprocal stance. I’m meeting the aggression that has both implicitly and explicitly been expressed and enabled towards me. I’m dealing with that dynamic of projection and association by giving you something cute, yet I know you’re actually going to hate this thing on some level. It’s actually a demanding thing that’s not emotionally warm or automatically available. It’s a real effect with personal dimensions. I was talking to Olivia Kan-Sperling recently, who’s a writer and an editor at The Paris Review, and she said something along the lines of, “You look cute, but you’re not cute.” She said it in a very blunt and direct way, but there was no aggression in it. I took it as a total compliment!

DMM: Was she referring to you as a person, not your artwork itself?

PKB: Yeah, she was saying that about me as a person. It was something like, “You look cute. But then you start talking and you’re not.” I love that, because it is true. It is a perceptual disjunction. But most people I find can’t get past that disjunction. Instead, they’re stuck at that moment when they realise, consciously or not, that I don’t activate or fulfill the implied promise of my appearance. It’s difficult then for them to take advantage of that. They actually can’t carry out an unconscious or semiconscious operation of polite, even friendly-seeming aggression—it’s not going to work! This results in frustration, but I doubt many would articulate that because this is all very psychological—it’s projection. I’m interested in embedding that kind of dynamic into the works I make, because I find it so persistent and relevant. For my installation in the ISP show, among other things, I have this “ark size” plush lamb. I showed Gregg Bordowitz this at the beginning of the first term. The object was marketed as “ark size” like Noah’s Ark! Seven inches. I thought that was a very interesting distinction! And the size just worked relative to the overall scale of the installation I wanted to place it in anyway. It’s a cute thing, but it also has other cultural connotations, like the black sheep of the family! [LAUGHS]

So that’s an obvious and idiomatic meaning to just place within a larger installation. This object is just one hook, or lure, for people to get into it and focus for more than five seconds. That reminds me about how I liked Gregg’s writing on Hanne Darboven’s work as a “field of lures or hooks”. The ISP Studio exhibition is going to be called “Prototype,” a word that I was using to help me think about my piece. It’s a version of a work that I’d like to make with a different production value at a later date. The basic element is a Prussian Blue rug. That color is a recurring motif in my work for various reasons, but not necessarily personal ones. The meeting rooms of the Shakers (a sectarian Christian group that mostly flourished In the nineteenth century) were Prussian Blue.

On my rug there will be objects laid out in a mutable arrangement. Three iPhones will be included, for instance. I’ve previously made a painting shaped like an iPhone and shown a video on an iPhone amongst a lineup of paintings. Their appearance in this new work is a way to continue the facetiousness about art turning into circulating content. Artists are expected to send work into competitive arenas of platform physics, where the artwork succeeds or competes in an economy of images that has nothing to do with art as I, and many others, have been trained to historically situate it. It has nothing to do with the art history that I care about. That’s the disjunction I experience, ·then, of being compelled to work across these different registers. You know the saying “you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth”? I’m doing that—talking to a history of ideas with Robert Smithson, Owens, Darboven, and so on, but also that endless scroll of the phone. This is absurd so I feel I have to seriously work with it. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth connotes insincerity, hypocrisy, and deception. I like that. It’s on the spectrum with dog whistling, which is often associated with political speech. This is a very measured and calculated way of speaking, or expressing. And that influences how I structure work.

DMM: Are you concerned about the negative connotations of the expression “to talk out of both sides of your mouth?”

PKB: I am concerned with what reads as a sincere versus an insincere approach. A cute or similarly appealing object is associated with sincerity. It’s a kind of betrayal if a cute thing is not sincere. This is what interests me. I could cross-reference this with how animals are cute or charming to humans up until the moment they assert agency and don’t play along or lash out.

DMM: How does meaning within your practice change over time through the repetition of motifs, materials, or concepts?

PKB: It has a narrative function because something continually appears. It implies that whatever the thing is has an important role in the story of what your work is telling. It doesn’t have to be a story per se, but just by reappearing it becomes narrative. It may not necessarily have been important when I used it the first time, but, like in a conspiracy theory, it starts to take on significance regardless of intent. I’m prompting people to read into something. Someone should ask me why I keep referencing snakes or shed skins in my work! I’m foot-tapping-on-the-floor waiting! I’ve set the work up for such a question to be asked. So there’s the approach of putting something in the work, and there’s the approach of taking an object and writing about it. One’s creative, another’s critical, but both strategies are being utilized. In my last body of work, I had this pair of Nike Air Huarache shoes. They aren’t important, personally, but they were included in an essay I wrote for Jeppe Ugelvig’s Viscose Journal in the summer of 2021. It’s a trend report that collapses into a conspiracy theory, which then collapses into a personal essay. Think of it as if you had a house that was structurally unsound, then first the attic collapses, and then the second floor goes, and then it’s all down. I wrote about this object and then a couple of years later I will show you the object. That’s about the internal coherence of my practice rather than being about me thinking someone is going to see that in my installation and think, “Ah, yes, that Viscose essay.” I don’t think that’s going to happen. That’s not how discourse functions anymore. But in the long arc, as I build out my work, I’d love to believe those things matter. That’s my good faith.

On August 1, 2019, in response to a query about what “no clipping through the backrooms” means, a user dubbed “Dragonvarine” on the STEAM app community forum replies, “It means you lost. You descended into madness.”

In April 2023, I wrote a rangy essay on a particular shade of Pantone yellow, dogs and the dog days of summer, A.I., premium mediocrity, gaming, the ‘no clipping’ game glitch, the ignoble end of the U.S. War in Afghanistan, poetry, narcotic technology, the September 2021 cover of Vogue, Dennis Cooper’s 2005 novel God Jr., sculpture as IRL rendering, the iPhone as an apparatus, and the internet myth of the ‘backroom.’ As with many societal issues plaguing us today, the backroom can be dated to a 4chan post.

Commissioned by Swiss Institute in New York for a catalogue somewhat belatedly accompanying a summer 2021 solo exhibition by artist Jan Vorisek—the book actually came out last fall!—I worked on this furiously over the course of a few late nights while simultaneously preparing to install a solo exhibition of my own. To wit—I was on fire.

Sadly, a major portion of the essay was axed from the first run of the book due to a printing/layout error. My friends at the institution were appropriately horrified and they made a sweet goodwill gesture of messengered merch, donuts, and assorted exquisite pastries. See, like God, I too forgive the penitent.

With the release this weekend of newly crowned cinema auteur Kane Parsons’s A24 joint Backrooms, along with a recent essay by Prof. on the genealogy of the ‘backroom’ and ‘no clipping’ for her Substack The Unseen Internet (and the MIT Press Reader), I thought now the perfect time to circle back and re-release this essay of mine.

ENDLESS SUMMER

For 2021, the Pantone Color Institute chose two shades for its annual “Color of the Year.” One was a saturated yellow, a choice that was couched in the following rhetoric:

As people look for ways to fortify them-selves with energy, clarity, and hope to overcome the continuing uncertainty, spirited and emboldening shades satisfy our quest for vitality. PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating is a bright and cheerful yel-low sparkling with vivacity, a warming yellow shade imbued with solar power.

In Jan Vorisek’s exhibition No Sun, staged in New York over the course of the summer of that year, a curtained swathe of yellow—not yellowed with age, just freshly acrid—was an eye-searing feature of his video installation Dog Cloud (2021). Or, at least, that’s how I remembered it. The fact of the matter is, the PVC curtain that impressed itself upon me was downstairs in the show and the video was upstairs in another room on a monitor surrounded by a ring of heavy, black curtains with a plastic midsection I’d characterize as a color on the verge of becoming. It makes the word orange wither on the tongue. The tension of its indeterminacy, the threat of oscillation, turns the shade into a shadow, like a threat in a horror film. And yet, oddly enough, that aspect originally didn’t seem as impactful in comparison to the show’s overriding take on a primary color. It was gold, the way a trophy in a video game might be, and yellow like the color of piss. I mean this as a specific compliment. One odd connotation of “yellow” is cowardice or gutlessness, a projection still apparently lingering in the lexicon of Oxford Languages, which strikes me as slanderous to the tint of yolks, a generative substance, or the cast of lemonade—the stuff one traditionally makes out of sour offerings.

A placeholder in my mind for this show was yellow because the windows had a filtering film covering them on that second floor, too. There was no natural light, no sun, then, allowed. It was sparse, and on reflection, even lonely. Only staging and media—like a setup for some kind of game that was already over. An untitled sculpture in the show, made of epoxy-coated Styrofoam chiseled and painted into a form that looked like a prop from a post-apocalyptic film set or first-person shooter mise-en-scène—imagine a piece of the labyrinthine walls of the original Doom (1993) transposed from rudimentary 3D graphics into high resolution for reality—seemed to confirm the hunch. In retrospect, I start to get the joke. It’s not fun, but it is funny. Now, more than ever, we need gallows humor just to cover the blues.

August, when I saw Vorisek’s show, is the most heated, sluggish time of the whole year. It was on August 17, 2017, that the writer and consultant Venkatesh Rao set forth the term “premium mediocre” as a term to describe “millennials”—particularly the bicoastal, gentrifying variety—in an article he published on his blog, Ribbonfarm.1 Rao considers August the premium mediocre month, similar to how a pundit once declared in Slate, a month before 9/11, “[August] has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.”2

The dialogue throughout Vorisek’s video (whose doggy aspect, for the record, involves a shot of a German Shepherd briefly bounding through a field) is of a similar tone and cadence as the script etched into a number of metal tags he made for the show. Two of them were safety-pin-piercing the aforementioned drapes, right near where one would push the fabric aside to enter the room, and another was given to me by the artist that summer. On one side of the metal is a protruding pattern of raised dots modeled after the grill on an intercom speaker, and on the other is an oblique poem:

The Radiant Pressure That Shimmer 

        Gasping Apart 

                        The Agonal Frazzled Memory 

                Encounter A Brittle Fantasy

As if in a parody of emphasis, those odd lines have a chiseled, vermilion underline on the medallion—a design motif that conveys a vaguely official or authorial seal, regardless of the actual information being conveyed. Here are the first lines of dialogue in the video, delivered by two people in what appears to be a control or command room, where little seems to be being actively managed:

“When did you get back from the desert?”

“Well, I got drunk last night. Everybody knows, I think.”

They are actors, ostensibly, but I have no idea who this “I” or “you” is, and, frankly, I think they’re evading a “when” question with a “what” answer. “Who” is very much in doubt, of course, and the video doesn’t chase after clarification thereafter. The untrue, or at least unstable, seems more realistic. I mean this as a compliment—identity verification is inescapable in a contemporary, digitally linked society and I like to still imagine the possibility of a person who just doesn’t care if you understand them or not. A little illegibility is welcome these days, especially in a city where, as the palpably beleaguered collective editors of n+1 bemoaned in their Winter 2023 issue: “For thousands of years, this was the principle of illumination that triumphed over all others. Louis XIV’s Versailles and Louis the Tavern Owner’s tavern had this in com-mon: the recognition that some details are worth keeping hidden. But now blinding illumination is the default condition of every apartment, office, pharmacy, laundromat, print shop, sandwich shop, train station, airport, grocery store, UPS Store, tattoo parlor, bank, and this vape shop we’ve just walked into.”3 Artificial light, of course, no sun—that natural heat just gets worse every year. I want to believe the illegible will inherit the earth, but there may not be much of it left by the time the VIPs of visibility are done with it.

The lines from the metal tags seem to be a version, or perhaps a rewrite, of a similar text that served as the title for a sculpture—The Radiant Pressure That Shimmer Retention Gasping Apart the Agonal Frazzled Memory Fading from Interior Energy—which the artist made in 2020 of a resin-cast hand encaged by a metal exoskeleton, or elaborate jewelry accessory, depending on one’s tastes. It was included in a solo exhibition that same year—Song for Dead Time at Zurich’s Galerie Bernhard—and the adornment, or a close version of it, has also been shown by itself as a discrete sculpture (Hallucination, Memory, and the Terminal Oracle, [2021]) and appears again in the video Dog Cloud as worn on a real human hand belonging to somebody reading aloud a text wherein a series of assertions start to sound like some tautological mission statement. “Sound becomes noise / noise becomes music / when entertainment becomes pain / pain becomes entertainment.” Echoes of the words start to press upon subsequent ones, turning the speech into a whirlpool and draining itself with the final ambiguity: “Where ambient becomes ambition.” That’s the end, period.

But it’s not the whole story. That final phrase itself was a continuation. An installation from 2020 shown at the Kunstmuseum Bonn was titled The Ambiguity Between Ambition and Ambient. A literary reading is a form ostensibly for the expression of an author, as in poet, or character, as in an actor portraying such. They are assumed to be explicable or to have some underlying psychological motivation or profile, but the subjectivity of Vorisek’s characters in this video as they’re written, or as they read, is no more revealed than is the personality of an automated voice as omniscient narrator from a prior scene, wherein rapidly blinking purple spirals accompany a stream of words and clauses imparted too quickly to comprehend. The human rejoinder then, like feedback, seems like another distortion. A repetition becomes an endemic quality of a human mimicking the machine. Is this how one exhibits a desire to transcribe, to annotate, or to be overwritten? Is this modeled by the artist in forms sincere or facetious? Why not both?

In the artist’s book Image Distortion Continuum, which Vorisek produced for his exhibition Collapse Poem at the Kunsthaus Glarus in 2020, he opens the first section, “An Incomplete Guide to Chaotic Writing,” with the following: “Feedback and Distortion—two inextricably connected phenomena— weave information in on themselves and extend back into the body that they originate from, so it appears they overwrite precisely that body they once stood beside.” And that is precisely what I initially suspect when I see somebody reciting words well: they are being overtaken, as many of us are in the more banal yet technologically cutting-edge way by the once-exciting promise of instant digital communication. One can say anything, but what if we’re just being read down by the machine and then saying what we already know it wants to hear, to project, to amplify? We don’t really need to say anything anymore—the machines will learn from and talk to each other, and we won’t have to understand a thing! No questions—just clear answers, right or wrong. This, I’m told, is an exciting new proposition for culture and society. Incredible. I don’t mean that as a compliment. I’d rather have something so subtle that no machine, much less many people, could even receive the signal.

Jan Vorisek’s sculptures and installations are rangy, consisting of found materials and objects he makes, or ones he alters, assembled into tableaux that tap out messages, perhaps for the ears of a dog to hear. Once I realized that there seems to be no center to any of it—you can declare fealty to the parts, but there’s nowhere to land, really— I became more sensate to it. It’s a piecemeal attachment style convincingly arranged as a broad collation—or coalition—of forms or references, all containing kernels of information that one can free associate from or with. This is one of the few ways I have left to describe any sense of reality. It is certainly my own devotion strategy, to constellate shards and shrapnel of the assault of content that experience has become in a digitally interpolated, interrupted, and discontinuous life. The personal is (still) political, after all. There’s a certain instability to Vorisek’s work that I identify with, especially the repetition, reiterations, and versions of forms, which in his case seem to be spiky lumps, pedestals in curious proportion to their proffered objects, humbly functional furniture as ambiguous detritus, metal attachments and spiraled coffee tables, or even bricks that look like cinderblocks. There’s a “poor image” quality, after Hito Steyerl, to these actual edifices.4 The blocks memorably appeared in Memory Hotel (2020), installed in a room where the light was filtered by gels in scarlet and sunrise red. More Doom, or is it just doom? The real things in his world are visible in ours, too, but given the way he presents physical matter and ambient light as either isolated fragments or an art-directed encounter, they look rendered. As if waiting to be dragged and dropped into the right production, or making you feel like you somehow stepped onto one in medias res. It jars—something’s missing, something’s off, the transition is sudden. From that, the work derives power.

Writing in the summer 2013 issue of Artforum, art historian and critic Michael Sanchez surveyed some effects of digital circulation and aggregation websites like Contemporary Art Daily on the aesthetics of contemporary art.5 After 2011, when he claims mass critical usage of the iPhone was reached, the traditional premise of the art center— whether that be cities as incubators of artistic scenes or institutions as functionaries for artistic legitimations—was dislodged, the visual proof of which was in part the prevalence of galleries adopting overhead fluorescent light fixtures in order for their shows to resemble the ones CAD seemed to favor. (As Sanchez argued). Art would now inevitably be made to appear and be seen primarily on a smooth screen, probably an Apple product. The transition was sudden, and its flattening effects still percolate. If you, the artist, weren’t already seen before this point, then you had next to no choice in the matter of getting viewed. Decentralization is hawked as an ideal for tech and finance, but contemporary art was the lab animal for it this past decade and change. The phone is an apparatus, after Giorgio Agamben, which turns the art object and the subject of the artist into nonsubjects captured on slides like cells for study of their replication and reproduction. Smart. I see years of Jan Vorisek’s art, which he has been exhibiting since 2011, as flat planes on an Apple-manufactured screen and believe its depth and dimensionality anyway. Similar to the 3D of a render, where verisimilitude models a live experience, reality turns into an extension of the virtual. This is the major business of our time, and an artist’s work is charged with making a story out of the reality.

His looks not just coded for some subcultural signification, but coded, like something you’d expect to find in a room you hadn’t walked into but rather had pushed the “B” button on a controller to drop into. This is akin to falling out of reality and into a backroom—a fictional concept that has taken on a real life of its own as many notions that started as jokes on a 4chan forum have. The backroom is a liminal space, a seemingly endless series of rooms, hallways, and doors—generally lit by overhead fluorescent lighting for harsh, yellow, labyrinthine spaces—that feels familiar regardless of one’s ability to pinpoint where or what exactly this is. This place, if we can call it that, is strongly associated with the suspicion or fear that there is someone or something somewhere in it even if they never appear. Such an affective dynamic is referenced as a pervasively unsettling quality in Vorisek’s work, like a noise, and the volume on the uncanny manifestations of it can be modulated to the point of making it subtle and totally missable, or sharply alarming. It becomes clanging in Devotion Strategy (2020) from Collapse Poem, where an inflatable black polyester maze occupied a room of the institution.

One could go inside—there were some stools, a metal and glass table and lamp draped in black mesh, along with a single-channel video displaying another series of spaces, including a subway car and other hallways resembling the architecture of bunkers in some villain’s lair. This is a room with not so much a view, but windows onto further rooms, and where have I seen that spiral metal coil on a glass table before, anyway? It was similar to, if not the same as, an earlier sculpture—Crime Design (2018), the low-slung, chrome rings of which may well be a bootleg of or riff on Eileen Gray’s Adjustable Table E1027. In a story, motifs reappear for a reason. Reoccurrence establishes a sense of time. Foreshadowing, perhaps, portentous, yes, but then again, one could say this was also just a room filled with air. And the backroom isn’t real. But stories, like faith, can make one act and feel like anything is possible. This is both dangerous and the only way some can live.

Jan Vorisek and I are about the same age and prob-ably both remember when video game graphics were clusters of sharp-edged polygons lit to look believable. But it wasn’t real and it didn’t quite look the part. But there was something more interesting than credibility going on: by rotating one’s perspective in the game there might be a sudden and accidental glimpse underneath a 3D structure or object, revealing it to be an empty contour of the shape or character. This was one of my favorite moments in gameplay—when it became obvious that it was a construction, that there were gaps and holes and the illusion wasn’t all that fluid. The code didn’t have to be cracked, it visibly already had cracks, and one could take a good, long look. I did not know there was a term for this until recently: “No clipping.” Generally speaking it’s a tool for programmers that allows them to see a level from a different perspective. The command can be entered into the debugging consoles of PC games to turn off collision detection so that a player might pass through solid objects in the rendered environment. Newer games are gorgeous; they look flawless and impenetrable, even better than real. I can’t get interested. And I have noticed that it’s considered a beautiful experience to be absolutely immersed in a fastidiously engineered world where the user has no agency and cannot break or build anything beyond the rules of the game. Mission accomplished . . . ?

Vorisek doesn’t seem to be trying to convince me of anything, but rather quietly and doggedly advances a subtle agenda of bait and switch. It gives a setup that is meant to be seen through and deliberated upon, not embraced. I trust this process over art that claims clarity and directness because this mode places its faith in me as a viewer to determine the findings of the experiment on my own. This is rare, and beautiful. With an oddly playful lack of sentimentality, his practice tempers the illusions it sets up by insisting on the overall picture’s artificiality. He exports a piece to one show that he first imported into another; when he renames a piece, like a file, with minor changes or adjustments, it undermines easy identification as well as our inclination to assume discrete works are, like solid identities, unquestionable and unassailable. What we take for granted about objects in space becomes imperiled. Bodies notably seem included but mostly in the form of Vorisek walking through or standing still in his rooms, generating noise, distortions, feedback that forecloses the figure or subject of the artist as locus of meaning. I start to wonder, if I held out my hand and touched the work, would it really be solid? Thoughts like “Is this real?” give way to “Am I?”

On August 1, 2005, American author Dennis Cooper’s novel God Jr. was published by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. The New York Times, in a review published on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, declared it “the literary equivalent of machinima (films made from video-game images).”6 I think of the book as illuminating yellow, which is odd in retrospect, since the cover design features none. The spine and back cover do, though. It seems I’ve remembered this work not as a flat cover, or straight text, but as an object spatially and as spread open but also turned over, as if for no one but a person who was going to be thinking about it even without the words in front of their face. Imagine having no proof of being overtaken, nothing to recite back with total recall, only sixteen years of living in your head with a story that never fully reveals itself no matter how many times you go through the lines— the facts of the matter—again.

The main character of God Jr. is a father, Jim, whose teenage son, Tommy, is dead from a car crash that also partially disabled the driver, Jim. He’s pretending about the latter bit. It seems he thinks it helps him appear less monstrous to others if they think at least he suffered, too. Before the accident, he was a real estate agent who covered parts of the Hollywood Hills and did well. The post-9/11 falter of the market provides him with a window of opportunity to raze a lot adjacent to his house and try building a monument to his son based on one of the kid’s drawings. A neighbor dubs the incomplete project “folk art run amok.” Problems quickly arise—the drawing hastily consulted as master blueprint is a mess, poorly rendered with no actual interior indicated, ergo the father’s monumental reconstruction has none either. It’s hollow, with red and yellow scales screwed on as a skin. And then the drawing turns out not to have even been made by Tommy but the kid’s girlfriend. Jim was finally trying to get close to the boy, and now here’s another distancing effect. This is a comedy of errors played in the key of unresolvable tragedy. The quest for clarity and control is, clearly, a failure, and the book isn’t even a third of the way over yet. It gets better, or worse, depending on your sense of humor: the father turns to playing the video game that the son played, in which the original structure he has ruinously imitated actually exists—to whatever extent one might possibly deploy the terms “original” and “exists” in such a context—to find the inside world of the monument.

In short, he no clips into a backroom, a purgatory where he declines to participate in his game-overed life and extinct marriage and instead devotes himself to getting high and having existential exchanges with oddly sentient characters. Clipped, steeled sentences narrate his unhinging as a Socratic dialogue between humanity and its works—the virtual creations speak to him beyond his comprehension, or so he imagines. Sounds familiar. He lost everything after something of apparently little value to him in life was lost, killed off. He’s not blameless. The story is unclear if his descent is for the purpose of an ascent, or not. Redemption is in the eye of the beholder, the reader, or user, of this book. I’m using it right now. It’s no coincidence that in the parlance of technology and drugs, all participants are “users.”

On August 1, 2019, in response to a query about what “no clipping through the backrooms” means, a user dubbed “Dragonvarine” on the STEAM app community forum replies, “It means you lost. You descended into madness.”7

Jan Vorisek has another sculpture, titled The Incomplete Interior (2022)—it’s a plywood plinth incorporating Perspex, Styrofoam, resin, PVA, paint, latex, paper, and cardboard. The installation photo of it makes it seem tall but proportionately it’s about the scale of a smaller human. And its ruggedly metallic appearance is a ruse—these are lightweight materials playing a role, and its central tower is a model for nothing on a foundation of poly-styrene manufactured by Dow Chemical. I don’t need to explicate what they’ve done, it’s common knowledge, and this substance of theirs fills land with trash we will never escape. If Vorisek’s model was built, the resulting place or locale would be as brilliantly, tragically unhelpful as Jim’s useless yet inescapable edifice.

During the last month of No Sun, the United States made its dramatic exit from Afghanistan. The work wasn’t done, the game in the desert wasn’t over, but then again it never would be, so better to cut losses and quit while behind. Some might say, “You lost.”

Walking around New York you might see many spaces where a commercial business has vacated, leaving the place in limbo, unused, or banished from use. Such locations have been allowed to lapse into nowhere. You could say these are not real places, in a sense. But there it is—I can point to it and anyone can peek into their windows and see nothing for themselves; it’s not my hallucination. The Modell’s on Atlantic Avenue, Rite Aid on Grand Street, CVS at Union Square, the Duane Reade at Broadway and Lafayette—to name a few liminal spaces. New York has some of the most valuable real estate in the world, and yet these locations are accurate images of it, too. Is this a joke, or is it for real? Why not both? To quote Venkatesh Rao: “At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.”8 We’re running out of real room to live because of stories that became systems about the way things work that some-one( s) somewhere(s) once made up. Realistically, I might instead say the answer to such issues is “beyond my purview,” or, I could recite poetry:

The Radiant Pressure That Shimmer 

        Gasping Apart 

                        The Agonal Frazzled Memory 

                Encounter A Brittle Fantasy

Try introducing that aloud into the discourse—as in a national conversation, or, just between you and me and the world—then perhaps a clear and illuminating reply would be:

“That means you lost. You descended into madness.”

Who, me?

Right at the end of the run of No Sun, the September 2021 issue of Vogue was published. On its cover, in the background of a gaggle of models—headlined “in real life”—there was a man facing away from the camera and looking at his desktop monitor, on which there was a brilliant rising sun.

Now it’s spring. A new billboard has gone up on Canal Street: Apple has another iPhone to offer us. Oblong, canary-colored, and illuminated by stagy lights above, the phone is held forth and slightly tipped forward, like a monstrosity about to squash us with its cool smoothness. It is looking down on us and occupying the lion’s share of the foreground. This is the new principle of illumination that triumphs over all others. “Hello Yellow” the board says—and it’s giving more dread. I was nudged into the desert of the real by simulations of a life. I believed a premium-mediocre fiction, and now, in a sense, I’m trapped in an empty room. I’ll keep believing, I will just walk in these halls—do I have a choice, really? The city recedes further. I rarely see the sun and now it’s almost summer, again. It’s nothing personal.

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Afterword, May 31, 2026:

I had a few further thoughts vis-à-vis Shira Chess’s aforementioned essay as well.

As Chess notes, the backroom “touches on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia. But above all, ‘Backrooms’ captures a feeling — and one that I would argue has become a defining condition of life under Corporate America: dread.” The precise naming of this structure of feeling, after Raymond Williams, seems useful.

She has a specific and intriguing thesis about the backroom as an articulation of what she calls “Institutional Gothic.” I didn’t quite register the ‘backroom’ as gothic in the literary sense she invokes though, with qualities of “duplicitous, monstrous antagonists, terrified heroines, fragmented narratives, and the supernatural.” The readers themselves projected all that into the backrooms—going on a simple, crummy digital file—using their own imagination (our minds being the true loci of horror). Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for one, is a gothic novel because of what she wrote into her book. At the time, people were horrified that anyone could imagine what she came up with. Her story was considered astonishingly nasty and the characters remain so to this day. (She also didn’t care much for grammar.) Now, the would-be reader simply hallucinates or dissociates it all on their own. This is authorship.

I think the backroom concept has moved in that gothic direction though, given the tone previewed in trailers for Backrooms.

When I first learned about the backrooms what I found compelling was its lack of such structuring devices or narrative qualities like gothic, romantic, conceptual, etc. And its lack, the blankness, even meaninglessness, was its pure, untapped potential as material. This interests me because it’s a quality common to a range of cultural phenomenon or physical experiences, from the original QAnon ‘drops’—contemporaneous with the backroom’s…discovery?—to sounds in your apartment building at night that can’t quite be placed or traced as an effect of a particular cause. I’ve written previously about conspiracy as folklore—see my feature in Spike #62, ca. Winter 2020—and this premise that feeling or affect could be attached to something so seemingly simple, even banal or cruddy reminds me of something Mike Kelley said in a 1992 interview. “If I could make something that moving, that could have you frightened for the rest of your life, and all it was was a piece of clay that falls off a piece of cardboard . . . That so much emotion could be invested in this piece of shit—that’s amazing.”

And one final note:

“Cyberspace is dreamscape, a place for exploration and reverie. […]The theft of the capacity for reverie by the social industry, the way it has used gaming-industry techniques to lead us into a guided trance, down pathways lit up with virtual rewards, is therefore no trivial matter.” 

Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020)

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My name is Paige K. Bradley. I work across sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, embroidery, and writing. I think of these less as fixed categories than as methodologies. There’s a cliche in art discourse about ‘blurring the boundaries between x and y’, but I don’t see these as having boundaries. That’s what it means to be multidisciplinary—using the same critical or creative faculties to arrange a room or lay down colors on a panel or one sentence after another. I’m frequently asked to explain the connection between my work as an artist and my output as a writer, and for a long time I was flummoxed that anyone would ask, given the history of artists writing the statements of their avant-garde movements—Cubism, Courbet’s Realist manifesto, Fluxus, Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”—or the many published collections of individual artists’ writings. For me, writing and art making have a natural continuity. I understand visual form through a semiotic framework. Artworks relate like verbs and nouns; there’s also mischief in the prepositions and syntax of forms.

My practice grew from a lifelong engagement with reading, editing, and close looking, and that shaped how I think about how meaning is constructed. That focus has stayed with me even as my work has become more material and spatial. The installations I do are composed relationally: objects operate like clauses, meanings shift through scale and proximity, and resolution is often withheld. I often return to something I once heard Dorothea Rockburne say: “Art is a language—don’t make it do.” And I see everything I make on a continuum, oscillating between Douglas Huebler’s statement about refusing to add more objects to the world and Hannah Wilke’s insistence on making an object rather than being one.

Conveniently, your professor actually wrote about Huebler in 2006 for Artforum, a magazine where I was an editor from 2014 to 2018. He addressed the very Huebler line I mentioned, ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.’ And then he wrote about the declaration as follows: “It implies a cessation of production [...] It hints at a certain ecology as well. [...] Why bother? [...] Just two years after renouncing object making for good, Huebler seemed to double back, emphatically proclaiming his intention ‘to photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive.’ [...] What links [these seemingly irreconcilable statements] is the quandary of an individuated subject confronting ‘the world’ as an indifferent, globalized system.”

I see my work as having a similar vibe.

Some biographical background: I’m from Los Angeles and exhibitions like Kara Walker at the Hammer Museum and the feminist art survey “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at MoCA were formative for me. I also read catalogues and monographs— Phaidon single-artist books, the Vitamin D catalogue. Then I learned of this place called the California Institute of the Arts, probably from reading about Mike Kelley’s work. I enrolled in 2007, then went to RISD in 2008 to study printmaking. I found a folder of images I put together for a class presentation I did while at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin for a semester in 2010, and a few of them still seem relevant as touchstones for how I’d go on to develop my work. Looking back I seemed drawn to both a very particular handmade quality, and an ambitious scale of installation. But the tones of, intentions behind, and attitudes embedded in all of these works are totally different.

Christian Boltanski—allegories for the Holocaust. Kiki Smith’s informed yet untrained drawings of folkloric material, and her work in printmaking. The seemingly humorless complexity of Matthew Barney unsettled me—it seemed wildly pretentious, but I liked the idea of getting away with it. That question—who gets to “get away with it”—stayed with me.

A word here about another important influence: I distinctly remember one particular text—an interview between Mike Kelley and Isabelle Graw from his 1999 Phaidon book, where he noted: “I had to say how my work operated in relation to various discourses, because no-one else would have done so. I’ve said this many times before: if you don’t write your own history, someone else will, and this ‘history’ will suit their purposes.” Other touchstones: Mira Schor’s feminist art criticism and David Wojnarowicz’s writing before I was aware he was an artist too. It was a revelation to see the real painting from the cover of Close to the Knives in his Whitney retrospective a few years ago—to me it had always been a book. Chris Kraus’s collection of writings on art in her book Video Green for me predated actually reading I Love Dick, so I’ve always thought of her writing as essentially art criticism. Even the fact that I learned about Julie Becker’s practice from that book, and had a vivid sense of what it was like or about before seeing any images of it, much less the actual works installed, is important to my practice.

Though I developed specific interest in materials and methods—painting, drawing, intaglio printmaking—I’m agnostic about medium per se. That’s why installation ultimately is what makes sense to me as an artist—using particular tactics in service of that operation. I think underneath everything I was drawn to, there was a deeply personal desire to see space rendered intentionally, for an effect, even if that effect was debatable, ambiguous, or variable. To say, in form, here’s something, you can look, but you have to keep your distance. This is my room. There’s a power to that, a demand for respect. And I’m fascinated by the range of feelings we attach to objects—from worshipful to contemptuous.

The fact that I studied printmaking is still relevant, too, for its iterative logic of repetition and difference and the kind of painting I’ve been doing lately aligns.

Moving up to my work in recent years, here’s a solo show from 2022, held at the gallery Lubov in Chinatown. When I was making these works throughout 2021, I was thinking about grief and grievance—the latter a state of being aggrieved, and how that affect is expressed through personal or political speech. Grievance politics was a term being bandied about at the time. I was also interested in using impersonal signifiers or motifs to articulate something personal. And I was keen on this announcement by Pantone of their colors of the year for 2021—an illuminating yellow, as they called it, and a stone grey hue, like pencil lead.

Altogether these works were titled “laugh(RIOT)”—with a strike through the word “laugh”. The large collaged vinyl piece (seen below) was a reworking and continuation of a printed adhesive decal I made for an installation on the windows of the artist duo Shanzhai Lyric’s short-lived community and art center Canal Street Research Association on Canal Street in January 2021. At the center of that piece is a photograph showing a view of the World Trade Center. I was interested in the collapse of time and space into one obscured image, like a foggy, ahistorical view of history, but appended by boldly declarative speech. That feels very American to me.

The swimming frog was used because it’s typically seen for sale on Canal Street. The tupperware it’s swimming in has intaglio lettering, drypoint specifically, of a text from a found 4chan post.

I also painted a flock of clear acrylic eagles on the windows at Canal Street Research Association. It was the First Republic Bank logo, but also in a sense a citation, even tag, of Marcel Broodthaers, e.g. his Museum of Eagles project. I would use this same logo for a contribution to the Canal Street Research Association reinstallation in Greater New York (2021–2022) at MoMA PS1 later that year, as well as an installation element in a solo show in 2023.

In the aftermath of January 6, I noticed memes riffing on the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag. Another circulating during Covid was “YOU’RE FINALLY AWAKE!”. I wanted to collapse these—political crisis and joke— onto the same level. I liked the incidental collusion of this notion of an “awakening” with the “illumination” of the yellow Pantone color and the flag —that just by riffing on similarities you could imply connection. This is also a formal quality of conspiracy narrative.

What interests me about conspiracy theory is form, not content. Conspiracy theory has no content. It abuses the cognitive function of pattern recognition in an attempt to make sense of an ungraspable, lossy, and impoverished yet overwhelmingly fast pace of information. My works create a similar encounter where the viewer or reader is also prompted to synthesize disparities. The process of interpreting the clues I lay out exists in parallel to the contemporary imperative to connect dots and map or even force meaning onto a given territory.

Here are a few articles I’ve written that address conspiracy theory, namely QAnon, which was a 4chan joke that scaled into something like a mass multiplayer online game for the right-wing and/or mentally ill. From Spike Magazine and Artforum, both 2020, and both published prior to January 6, after which many more Americans became familiar with QAnon. I have written and published quite a bit for the past thirteen years, with much of it of appearing in Artforum from 2013 until 2023. These are just two examples of my writing as critical underpinning for the work I exhibit.

A postcard I made for the Lubov show. It’s one of those memes I saw circulating, but in the form of a long-winded, alternative way to say, essentially, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

I was also inspired by corkboards. Boards, as in BBS boards, were functionally the early internet. Cork became a recurring material in my practice.

The large collaged vinyl piece was the first work where I used dried cherry blossoms on the surfaces of drawings or paintings. I’ve been collecting and preserving them with a salt and plum vinegar process every spring since 2020 and they’re also a consistent material for me. They have an association with east Asian or Japanese culture specifically—I remember them as a common motif in a lot of the anime I watched when I was younger—but cherry blossoms are also an attraction near where I live.

This body of work is also where I introduced origami cranes into my practice. These were singed with a lighter. I took a photo of my hand holding one and used that silhouette of the cast shadow as a template for later work I’ll show you. I liked that the shadow puppet, as it were, resembled a cute sort of plane bumping into two towers, knocking one over.

I wrote the text accompanying the show as well, as I have for all of my solo presentations to date. I consider the writing part of the exhibition, and the texts are more or less serviceable as press releases, but I rarely read press releases for any shows I’ve critically written on. It’s not a form I respect, moreso one I like to think of interesting ways to disrespect.

At the same time as that solo show I was in a group exhibition across town in Tribeca at Theta gallery. Titled “You’re Finally Awake!”, the show was based on the themes of that aforementioned work, but the gallery couldn’t accommodate the scale of all three yellow drawings and collages together, so I exhibited the following two works instead. A graphite drawing of the German shepherd from Jack Goldstein’s 1975 film Shane, framed in a zinc leafed wood that looked like it was coated in powdered graphite, and installed at what I call “dog’s eye level”. I titled the drawing Jack. The painting in this show interlaced three primary sources in both image and citation. One is a still of anime character Asuka Langley in The End of Evangelion (1997), caught mid–free fall after emerging from a stupor to launch into an aristeia, the Greek epic poetry convention of a hero’s moment of peak prowess in battle. (She is about thirteen years old in her story.) Another source is a 2017 Politico article tracing the history of Sugar Daddy candy-bar inventor Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, and the revival of its right-wing ideals after the 2016 U.S. election—his portrait and the Politico logo appear in the work. The third is the title of a 1969 Ladies’ Home Journal essay, “We Need Decembers,” by the artist Corita Kent, published shortly after her left-wing political sympathies and artistic concerns led to her departure from the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisterhood in Los Angeles. (I’ve written about Corita Kent’s work a couple of times.)

My practice is concerned with translating citation, like all these I’ve just mentioned, into visual form. The artist becomes a host for networks of reference.

I iterated on the drawing as part of a much larger installation at The Broodthaers Society of America in Harlem later in 2022, and the painting became the primary source for a solo show I made in 2023, titled OF COURSE, YOU REALIZE, THIS MEANS WAR. A reworked version, along with further iterations, was featured in that exhibition, which was on view in May–June of 2023.

Before I get further into that show, I want to show you a reading I gave as part of the Segue Reading Series at Artists Space in February 2023, which shares a title with that exhibition as well as a playlist broadcast on Montez Press Radio. Segue been held live at Artists Space on Cortlandt Alley since 2021, and I was a co-presenter on my night with Dodie Bellamy. I pin up a drawing behind me before I read—a hieroglyph of Anubis on a tomb, which means “he who is over the secrets”—and the whole monologue is rather anti-poetic in a way. It’s bookended by a reference to another performance that took place at Artists Space in 1986 when it was on West Broadway.

The piece comprises a text I edited—partly original, largely assembled from sources listed elsewhere in a chronological bibliography. Passages that cannot be traced mark my own voice, as it were. The reading is bookended by field recordings from Kassel, the site of Documenta, and the café of the Whitney Museum. I’ve emebbeded below the latter audio separately—it was muddled by Youtube’s detection of the Taylor Swift song playing in the cafe. The video runs for about 30 minutes.

I was especially pleased that Charles Bernstein, who started the reading series in 1978, seemed to dig it.

This exhibition opened three months after that reading. While the street-facing windows of the space were also a component of the presentation—a repeat pattern of the aforementioned eagle logo in transparent acrylic was painted directly across the glass, as in Greater New York—this view conveys the overall layout. The exhibition functioned as both a display of discrete artworks—hand-made and readymade—as well as a plotted installation. With all walls painted the Pantone color of the year for 2012, the show hung at two levels: one where paintings and drawings appeared at the height considered to be the U.S. museum professional standard, the other plotted along a line that more closely corresponded to the average height of a dog or a young child. The works included a suite of seven paintings and a video shown on an iPhone as the first piece in that former lineup. Other gestures in the show included drawings made directly on the walls, usually in graphite, of numbers. The significance of those numbers was not supposed to be legible. This kind of gesture is something closer to a picture of reality: ‘we live in mystery.’

Organized after the manner of a complete sentence, the show ended with a black ovular period painted directly on the wall with sign painter’s enamel paint. Like, ‘that’s all folks.’ Sometimes my gestures are fairly on the nose. A clock held on the wall by brackets was set to the year 2012—the year in which Documenta 13 took place, more on that later—as well as to Pacific Standard Time, the time zone in which I resided for the first half of my life.

The Anubis drawing from the Artists Space reading was in the show as well. And I made a number of sculptures out of two by fours—one staged to look like a kind of cartoonishly oversized, used match. It has a photograph of a stage of the cherry blossom preservation process affixed to it.

A different German shepherd. This one leaving, rather than barking at us. Silver leafed frame this time, not zinc, but this drawing’s also graphite. The sentence captioning it appeared below the drawing directly on a wall in a different solo exhibition the year prior.

This work is especially important to me. It’s titled Chair Does Not Care :D feat. “Drive It All Over Me,” riffing on the title of a Bruce Nauman installation at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care from 1984—a picture of some graffiti’d bricks from that piece was drawn onto the wall in my show. Chair Does Not Care is an aggressively cute showcase for my longest piece of writing to date.

I’m compressing years of backstory here, so will put it like this: The book addresses broad themes of subtextual narrative, authorship, and identity in text-based visual artworks while touching upon allegory, elaborately subtle jokes, and writing as a sculptural material. I was originally commissioned to write an Artforum review of the installation Bad Driver by the artists Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, exhibited at Maxwell Graham’s gallery in January 2021. Bad Driver consisted of one long book with multiple chapters laid out across the surfaces of 40/4 Rowland desk-chairs, the same model you see here in my piece. That review was suppressed when a former colleague prioritized his personal discomfort with my interpretation of the artists’ work. My text was then recirculated to Chung and Maeda, who affirmed my interpretation and commissioned an expanded essay, which grew to a 20,000- word volume that included the late artist Jack Goldstein’s Selected Writings (1993–2000) and poet and attorney Vanessa Place’s Gone with the Wind (ca. 2009–15). We published the book you see here, Drive It All Over Me, in summer 2023. My writing on Jay and Q eventually did get into Artforum—obliquely—via Josh Kline’s 2023 “Best of the Year” list, which coincided with the institutional fallout surrounding editor-in-chief David Velasco’s firing.

The coup de grace to the whole affair is that, in November 2024, the FRAC Lorraine published a version of Bad Driver by Jay and Q that comprises both the original text of their 2021 work as well as the entire text of my book. Now my writing is a part of both their artwork and mine. Ta-dah!

Back to the exhibition: The balloons were there to deflate over the course of the show, which some people seemed to have a hard time believing or accepting as an artistic intention. (Remember the great Chinese spy balloon incident of 2023?)

I thought the deflation a piquant parallel to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank during the same season as this show, since the ripple effects included the failure of First Republic Bank.

Both the chair work and the larger painting of Asuka from Evangelion in the 2023 solo show then went to Somerset House in London for the first iteration of the traveling survey exhibition “CUTE” in January 2024. Here’s how they looked there.

Other artists represented in the show included Cosima von Bonin, Julien Ceccaldi, Maggie Lee, CFGNY, Bunny Rogers, Mark Leckey, a lot of shojo manga of the kind I loved when I was younger—still do—and the Djungelskog bear from Ikea. All sponsored by Sanrio. Sianne Ngai’s 2012 book “Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting” from Harvard University Press sold in the gift shop. I went on the Josh Citarella podcast and talked about it a bit if you’d like to listen to that sometime.

In spring of 2024 my proposal for the upcoming Armory Show fair won the Gramercy International Prize, consisting mostly of paintings but like my previous solo show also conceived as an installation. All walls were to be painted the Pantone color of the year for 2024, Peach Fuzz, but it became one wall of the booth due to budget constraints. (Gotta love supporting “union labor” while the artists work for speculative, prospective pay). The text on the wall is also the title of the work as a whole, which I posed as one potential answer to the question “what is a meme?”

To put it briefly, I was thinking about the show or individual work as a board of images, and memes as sites where visual and linguistic meaning collapse into one another, sometimes aligning, sometimes not.

Across layered surfaces—combining painting, collage, embroidery, and found materials—the works embed images ranging from personal to art historical to literary, treating images as text.

Like Jasper Johns, I’m also interested in the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and something Johns said in a 1965 interview with Walter Hopps has always resonated with me: “My only idea is that one ought to be able to use anything that one can see and any quality one can perceive. It’s difficult for me to just do that because, I don’t know, because I formed habits which only let in certain things or sometimes because the qualities simply are not visible, until a certain time. Suddenly you see something you have not seen. I don’t know for what reason, it’s clearly not something you’ve invented.”

Wittgenstein came into this body of work via a recurring visual clue of Prussian blue—an allusion to his postulation that the word for the color is its original, or perhaps the idea of Prussian blue itself is the original, and an actual sample of the hue is the copy. You’re recreating the idea of Prussian blue every time you make it, find it, use it. The cranes and the liquid in which the reference material for some of the paintings are immersed are Prussian blue. I also like what Wittgenstein said about how ‘we find certain things about seeing puzzling because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.’

Altogether I saw these works as puzzle pieces toward an analog reconstruction of digital circulation, where fragments of culture are recomposed into an associative, conspiratorial, field of meaning. Contestable. Strangely enough, and you may not believe me, but the readymade base, the training toilet sculpture, was not intended as a Duchamp reference. Different Armory Show! It was a thing I found and thought would work to encase the reference objects I recreated as paintings, installed on the side walls of the booth. One reworks a fawning missive from an insolvent bank, the same one that had the eagle logo, and my old business card. In this scenario the paintings were laying claim to the status of originals, with their reference materials—originally mass produced copies, actually—getting flushed.

The whole installation was also facetious about the impoverished, JPEG experience of art that is an art fair, where no matter what your work is it’s just a competitor in an economy of attention and the main goal is to stand out, or be a ‘wow moment’ as I heard one art advisor put it.

There were moments of sincerity embedded therein though, too. This is a recreation of a Shaker gift drawing. I care about the idealism of the Shakers quite a bit. But I was bringing that in vis-a-vis a merchandised object of something from Shaker material culture, a keychain charm version of the drawing, and I thought that by remaking it, it would become mysterious again. My painting is an object moved through a few kinds of transformation, and it satisfies me because I don’t know what it is by the time I’m done with it. It’s familiar, and strange at the same time. I think generating a level of ambivalence about what something is, represents, or should be valued as, is a mark of success for an artwork.

Here’s the silhouette of my handing hold the crane aloft, in the center there, between arches taken from the Flatbush Avenue Apple store. There’s a lot of repetition in my work—partly it’s that iterative, serial, printing methodology again.

Below is the installation I made for the Whitney Independent Study Program show last year. I worked in cast plastic sculpture and made apples and oranges after the idiomatic phrase “it’s apples and oranges,” meaning ‘it doesn’t matter,’ or ‘these things don’t relate’ to scatter amongst readymade objects and my cherry blossoms.

Most of my bodies of work are keyed to a word or phrase, often idiomatic.

This installation included the two Pantone Peach Fuzz color painted panels I made for the Armory Show booth. I thought of these paintings as pieces of wall, and they helped turn this installation overall into an L-shape, like an L bracket against a wall, in a kind of visual homophony with the figurine of “L”, a character from the anime and manga Death Note. I got a prison jumpsuit for him, so he’d also be an allusion to another guy whose name starts with L and has a high profile federal and state murder trial forthcoming in New York. Last name Mangione.

Each object was like a word in a spatial statement, similar to the syntactical quality of the 2023 solo, and corresponding to Robert Smithson’s practice of text as sculptural matter. That was a Craig Owens idea in his October journal essays on allegory, and I saw this work as allegorical on his terms.

Last summer I made an embroidered jacket—it adopts its shape from the silhouette of military-style garments designed by Seth Price for Documenta 13 and integrates digitally printed and hand-embroidered text drawn from found sources and my own published critical writing, including those aforementioned articles for Artforum and Spike, offering a very literal answer to question oft posed to me: what is the relationship between my art and my writing?

Its worked surface situates embroidery as inscription and record, referencing the Agnes Richter jacket from the Prinzhorn Collection of outsider art. The piece also functioned performatively through a live reading from its text at the artist-run space EARTH in New York in September 2025. Seth did a concept store of some of his clothes there, and at my night as part of the week’s program I had a slideshow behind me and an iteration of the rug work I showed you at my feet. I read excerpts from the garment as part of an expanded version of an essay I wrote and published in the second issue of Jeppe Ulgevig’s fashion journal VISCOSE. It was titled “You Can(not) Re Dress.” I see the garment as part of further work to come, and here’s the reading from September. It runs for a bit over 20 minutes. When it’s done, I’ll wrap up with a few last remarks.

EARTH Reading, September 21, 2025.

A couple terms that I think about in relation to my work: One that I see as useful for structuring an understanding of what I’m doing is “transformational fandom,” which comes from Dreamwidth—an iteration of LiveJournal built in 2008. It was coined by a pseudonymous fan fiction writer trying to explain the origin of an ongoing conflict between copyright holders and the amateurs who were appropriating from their work to make new stories. The ambivalence of fanfic interests me—the works produced in response to an (ostensible) original are not necessarily respectful, and it is difficult to interpret them at face value. Too, such material is a priori subjugated; it is already less than. This is a less than ideal circumstance for an artwork, which supposedly sets its sights on creating a new authority, a unique and signature power attributable to the individual artist. But what if a work was more about creating a gravitational pull between entities—from artist to artist, or work to work, between the past and the present, the dead and the living? And what if this intertextual tension were staged as wry comedy? If fandom could be an inside joke that never ends, then maybe transcendence is still possible from this low level.

Another useful term is “character goods,” which simply refers to merchandise deriving from a media property, any kind of object featuring the likeness of or emulating parts of a particular character. I’ve repeated a particular film still of the aforementioned Asuka in a number of works because it’s a moment of her joy right before she’s torn apart. Art is like this to me—a free-fall, aided by gravity, before consequence. But such a character is also useful as a short-hand, vernacular, and expressive vector in online registers of communication, including memes. It functions in a way that replaces speech and communicates to a global, globalized audience. I supported this argument with my own reporting on the topic for the new title for international journalism, Now Voyager, this year.

My imagery is often drawn from the ranks of the “cute,” “zany,” or “interesting”—per Sianne Ngai—in order to articulate a repressed malevolence latent in the cultural embrace of such typically gendered material. Anime characters as personal avatars, flower petals, candle ash, school chairs, and embroidery collide with Pantone colors, designations of scale like A4, memetic catchphrases, poetry, and uncanny graphic design. In this clash I’m being honest to what I see as the nature of subjectivity—a broken story and troubled processes of interpretation, projection, and revelation. As Walter Benjamin once said, “The writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging.”

Following on the heels of my recent report from Lucca Comics & Games—published in the inaugural issue of Now Voyager, a new magazine for international reporting started by Hélène Garneau Werner and Nicolas Niarchos—today’s results are in for the Christie’s auction “Anime Starts Here: Japanese Subculture Reimagined.” It raked in over a million dollars and included the sort of things I clearly should have bought more of at anime conventions long past.

Posters for Akira and My Neighbor Totoro, an animation cel from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)—Hayao Miyazaki’s film presaging the founding of Studio Ghibli—and an original illustrated page from one of the earliest shoujo manga, Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, a work that influenced the later creation of series like Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles, and Be-Papas’s Revolutionary Girl Utena. Though the latter lot failed to sell—they don’t know!—a drawing on animation cel paper of the main cast of characters from Sailor Moon by Ikuko Ito—who served as animation director on early episodes and as main character designer for two latter, better seasons of the anime—flew past its estimate of $5,000–7,000 to sell for $88,900.

From the Lot Essay for the Sailor Moon drawing (a sentence I never thought I would type):

Fab.

For context: a print from the great woodblock master Katsushika Hokusai, the infamous Kinoe no Komatsu (Pining for Love), featuring an octopus making love to a woman, and which perhaps can be blamed for the existence of hentai generally, sold for $35,560.

I don’t value art by price point—I just think the discrepancy is hilarious, and telling. What bidder came through for the Ito era of Sailor Moon? Do they collect in depth? Perhaps we should be friends.

I wrote in my feature for Now Voyager about how anime and manga have become a global lingua franca, a visual language which supersedes oral language, and may well be replacing the trajectory of Western art history as the contemporary vocabulary par excellence.

A high-profile sale like this one adds support to what I’ve observed over the past decade. The cultural advantage, as per usual, is 4chan’s (with you, sir!). I bought my Rurouni Kenshin OVA cel from eBay years back—perhaps in the future an auction house of Christie’s caliber will be the go-to for such material. I’m ready to be courted as a selling client.

A few of my other personal highlights from the sale:

The color story of this monster was gorgeous.

I can’t believe no one wanted this! Maybe it was in bad condition? The stupid mushroom trend has been so strong for a while now…perhaps we reached peak mushroom in 2024 though. I would love to be a steward in this world for a carved basket of fungi from the Taisho-Showa period.

What’s really funny is this sold for much more than a period set of armor in the same sale. Obviously there’s always more context to any object, but the contrast of values struck me. There’s also very little info out there about this artist…maybe Wolf and Armor is like the final evolution of Labubu.

;___;

Good morrow, cousins! This is a space for writing I stand behind. I’ll publish essays—some new, some recently published elsewhere, and occasionally older pieces that still hold. The date matters less than whether they feel alive or relevant after thirteen years of regular bylines.

The throughline of my writing has been a voice that treats criticism and art practice as inseparable. This is not a new idea—it’s actually a historically rooted one! John Miller’s another artist in this vein and, appropriately enough, I’ll be presenting a lecture on my work in April to his class at Barnard.

I’ll be writing about subjects I’m an authority on and have expertise in, or a sincere curiosity about. I won’t be spouting off about the viral topic du jour if it doesn’t align with me. I also want to be able to loosen up and write a couple hundred words or so about beauty, makeup, color, design, literature, poetry, and the like when I feel like it. I’ve written about anime a number of times before too—I’d like to do more of that. Think more early weblogging, less LinkedIn. I’ve always written for myself anyway.

What you will not find here:

• Party reporting (I wrote Artforum Diaries when it was part of my job, and that time is past)

• “Dimes Square” commentary (a structure of feeling, perhaps, but not one I identify with)

• Jeremiads about the state of ~criticism~ (other writers’ or institutions’ failings are none of my business)

• Unexpurgated personal diary entries (I have a fountain pen and I’m not afraid to use it)

• Casual speculation on topics that are life and death issues to the real people concerned

• Grandstanding

• Analysis of prestige television shows (who has the time? Not me!)

• the MFA degree

Ciao for now.

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When Josh Kline and I first spoke about the pressures shaping American art—real estate, debt, the narrowing of possibility—the argument felt structural but still anecdotal: something we could see unfolding all around us, without yet knowing what to do about it. It was clear he was angling toward a more rigorous account, one that could articulate the scale of the problem. His new essay, honed over two years, makes that thesis unavoidable: “New York City itself now constitutes a core problem in American art.”

A turning point came with Christopher Wool’s summer 2024 show in the Financial District, a luxury reenactment of the very conditions it seemed to mourn—a kind of LARP of the artist-run spaces it invoked. Domenick Ammirati and I urged him to see it. Afterward, Kline went home, finished his outline, and wrote for four hours.

What follows are brief excerpts. The full essay appears in the Winter 2026 issue of October.

The first step towards a cure is admitting you have a problem. Contemporary art in twenty-first-century America is sick with problems. These are not problems raised by artworks as subjects of concern, but structural malignancies in the United States that are present in art’s curation, its institutions, and its patronage; in the commercial entities that sell it and the schools that produce the people who participate in its world. The result is a tidal wave of art whose primary function as decorative speculative financial instruments eclipses any possibility of inquiry, experimentation, or real meaning. These problems share a root cause: New York City real estate and its currently impossible prices and rents, which smother art in a choking, conservative atmosphere. American art is suffering a polycrisis that combines a lack of belief in and support for its artists born after 1975, the structural de-centering of artists in the art industry, and the subsequent stagnation and possible breakdown of formal innovation in art. In other words, meaningful art, relevant for society and our time, may not be sustainable under the current conditions here.

[…]

The artist Georgia Sagri once likened an artist’s lot to that of a sixteen-year-old American girl in the 1950s who had to be asked to attend the school dance by a boy. The rule is that we have to hang around until a curator or gallery employee notices us and says something along the lines of “What are you working on?” or “I’ve been thinking about you” or “I want to visit your studio.” These words magically unseal the artist’s ability to promote their work. This places enormous pressure on young artists to be present in New York to entertain these career bouncers, blowing conceptual balloon animals at the bar or acting as a nightlife safari guide for aging curators, etc.

[…]

New York City itself now constitutes a core problem in American art. The answers for younger artists are likely not in New York and not in the American art industry, for which the art of the present and the art of the future are not as important as the art of the past.

For all these reasons, New York no longer deserves the ambitions and ideas of the country’s young artists. They should stop fighting to give them away to an industry and to a city that no longer care about art except as a means to make some quick money or generate some fleeting attention before moving on.

Originally published in 2023, this essay on the 1970s L.A. musician Judee Sill is a companion piece to my recent post on Jack Goldstein. I originally wrote it three years ago with the intention of following it with a piece on Jack Goldstein. I knew a biography of the latter was coming and bided my time.

In some respects, they have a lot in common: both are treated as deep-cut figures, inextricable from their time and place yet continually cycled through rediscovery. Each made rigorous, exacting—at times astonishing—work, and each may have sabotaged themselves in the name of it. Both strained toward transcendence; both disappeared.

They’ve stayed with me for most of my life because their work does not settle, comfort, or confirm—it unsettles me. Both were drawn to heroin; at times, I can feel the pull of that same oblivion in their work.

I’m less interested in the cultural operation of recuperating overlooked figures than in lingering with the condition of their work now: art that persists—underneath what we’re doing, or ambient to it—but without a stable place to land.

A major difference, unsurprisingly, is gender. Jack Goldstein was afforded a far greater tolerance for ego in the pursuit of his art. With Judee Sill, even praise carries the residue of patronization—condescension, diminishment, a fixation on her person as much as her work, or instead of. I hear it, and I recognize it in the way I’m seen, too. Accomplishment and talent register as surprise, even shock.

No matter how poorly Goldstein behaved, his art remains primary. Sill, by contrast, is continually routed through affect—how she seemed, how she appeared to others. If she had been nicer, it’s implied, things might have turned out differently. Goldstein, meanwhile, was granted a much longer lease on monstrousness before others, perhaps, turned on him. When he had another chance—a last one—he didn’t want to be pet. He bit.

Sill went into her room and drew the curtains. I’ve seen the apartment on Zillow.

They motivate me, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. There are moments I wouldn’t explain, and don’t need to. A tightening in the chest, a pressure that grips the heart, when I set my jaw and move toward the work. Sometimes I think that feeling has a name. Sometimes I call it Judee.

And when I see a German shepherd, I keep my distance.

Below follows the beginning of the piece from October 26, 2023. You can read the full version at The New York Review of Books.

It seems to be impossible to tell a story about Judee Sill without resorting to overused tropes and cliche. The Los Angeles musician and composer completed two exquisite albums in the early 1970s in what she called her “country-cult-baroque” style, filled with “licks of Pentecostal fury,” but her critics, documentarians, and fans alike often reduce her to the sensational or scandalous: a 1963 arrest at age eighteen for armed robberies of liquor stores and gas stations to fund a drug habit, or reminiscences from old flames about her sexual adventurousness. Sill died of an overdose in 1979 at thirty-five, and loss tends to be the theme of most retrospective efforts to publicize her music. The New York Times gave her an obituary in 2020 as part of its series about “remarkable people whose deaths…went unreported.”

A year later, Rolling Stone published perhaps the most comprehensive account of her life to date, including interviews with friends and collaborators such as Graham Nash, J. D. Souther, and Linda Ronstadt, along with insight from Sill’s surviving relative, her niece, Donna Disparti. The profile ably accounted for the career of a woman in the music business who didn’t parlay sex to sell her songs—an important distinction in light of the fact that she did actually sell sex prior to getting a recording contract. But it also makes a bizarrely off-color claim that her favorite way to be photographed was with a lollipop in her mouth—hardly consistent with the surviving images of her—and focuses on the conflicts that arose in packaging an artist who had enormous talent but little to no interest in meeting audiences where they were.

Beyond what Sill said about her own life, which the friends and industry people who survive her don’t dispute, there’s little factual information to go on. The Times and Washington Post don’t even agree on whether she was born in Oakland or Studio City, California. It’s perhaps inevitable that she has been filtered through others’ memories of her, coloring how new audiences will receive her work, but these portrayals of Sill suggest how many unconscious biases linger in attempts, even by purported allies, to reconstruct the lives of ever-overlooked female artists.

The Rolling Stone profile concluded with some advance promotion for a documentary, Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill, which premiered late last year at DocNYC. It quotes one of the film’s directors, Andy Brown: “Judee’s life and her lyrics are very intertwined…. You can’t separate them, and that’s what makes [her music] so timeless and powerful. I think people learning more about her will see that struggle and connect it to her music.” His film—codirected with Brian Lindstrom—marshals biographical material to support an argument that her work was intimately linked to her personal experience.

I have to wonder if he and I even heard the same songs. […]

Art historian Alexander Dumbadze’s new biography Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a kind of companion piece, or, as the author says in his afterword, “the second half to my first book,” the slim and elegant biography Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Both are about artists whose work is critical to the history of art in or from Los Angeles, as well as to Conceptual art, and both artists made work and led lives that have been subsumed by lore, for better and for worse. Both engage “themes of falling, leaping, gravity, abysses, suicide, and free will.” You might say these are the SEO terms of their artistic practices.

For Goldstein, words prompted images, and statements became objects in a process that was inherently recursive. Of the many sentences in the new book that could serve as a summary of his art, this one stands out: “He comes to the image, or it comes to him, and then it passes, until another arrives—a process that has no beginning or end, that both blinded and guided him.” In Dumbadze’s view, a critical concept undergirding the articulation of that passage over decades of multidisciplinary work is Martin Heidegger’s appropriation of a idea from Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Luther, Augenblick—“an instant, a sudden moment, the blink of an eye.”

I remember ambling into the library at the California Institute of the Arts around nineteen years old and, perusing the shelves, finding a spine with the title Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. A student in the art program—of course I read it, but I had no idea who this guy was. Turns out it was an oral history, published in 2003, the year Goldstein died, as I would later find out. And as Dumbadze makes clear in his book, the artist’s last meeting with CalArts Mafia’s editor Richard Hertz—then the dean of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, who compiled Goldstein’s blitz of dishing into a book, along with perspectives from his peers—was only days before Goldstein’s suicide. The book seemed to be about many artists whose names I did know, and much of it quite uncharitable. It seemed to detail the reality of “the art world” I was in a distant suburb of my hometown of Los Angeles to somehow get prepared for.

The book seemed hilarious at the time, a bravura example of what in contemporary parlance we’d call going off. I encountered Jack Goldstein as a narrator, not an artist, and one obsessed with dispensing the truth. With little else to go on, his account held water: a lone genius against a cruel world. I had no artistic inheritance, no cultural capital; the insider’s voice appealed. My education often took this form—finding, without introduction, a voice that spoke directly both to me and addressed the structural world which enabled our encounter. His bitterness read as authentic, resonating with my early sense of the resentment and intimidation my intelligence provoked. But authenticity is not authority; he could be true and still wrong.

Later I would understand him to be at best an unreliable narrator and find out how backwards a perception this was to have at all, considering that his work was seemingly about dispensing with authorship, getting rid of expressive signifiers whether by airbrushing paintings or modifying the MGM movie intro to make a very, very short film. I would come in time to see all of his work as if in a rearview mirror, and always accompanied by Jack’s voice of barren complaint, of someone who took everything personally. A voice saying no one understood how personal his artwork was, as he’d go on to claim in an interview from 2001, published posthumously in the catalogue for his 2012 retrospective. He was too far gone to realize he was undermining his own work’s authority with all this extratextuality. Later I’d understand that Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia was a container for the kinds of things you say when you aren’t planning on facing any of the people you’re talking about ever again.

The basic details of his childhood are more or less all we get and all there is, and maybe that’s for the best. Born in Montreal, Jack Goldstein moved with his family to West Los Angeles, attending the same public high school I was later zoned for; his father was an abusive schizophrenic. While this latter fact looms, there’s nothing much to be added to it besides a reader’s speculations on its effects on Goldstein, based on how we see he went on to live and behave. (Men would literally rather do Conceptual art than go to therapy. [But, then again, same.]) After graduating from Chouinard Art Institute, the precursor to CalArts, in 1969, he starts working in sculpture—piles of wood arranged into unfixed, even unstable forms—then in performance in graduate school, where he studies with John Baldessari at CalArts. He buries himself alive in a seeming imitation of Chris Burden’s own shots of danger, then makes vinyl records using stock sounds from film or television, the familiar made strange. Elegant films that last less than the length of a TV commercial eventually give way to enormous paintings that hit one’s eye with the flash of augenblick. The trajectory of Goldstein’s work is supported as it develops by a personal, romantic, and later professional relationship with legendary curator Helene Winer, who starts at the Pomona College of Art’s gallery and later moves with Goldstein to New York and onto Artists Space.

After years of working on those films and records, he’s included in the seminal exhibition “Pictures” curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in 1977, after which his career gradually takes off during the 1980s, comes to an impasse in the 1990s, and sees a resurgence before his death in the aughts. Goldstein offers his own take on this journey in CalArts Mafia and other published interviews, but it remains ambiguous how much of what he said was true. Dumbadze doesn’t address anything to do with whether the right people came to keep up Goldstein’s auction prices, which Goldstein groused about, for instance, but he is attentive and granular about tracking each exhibition as he becomes a major artist and, up to a point, how other people’s belief in his work made it possible. To his credit Goldstein never seemed to waver, at least per recorded sources, in crediting Winer as a singular influence and force in his career. The only page in Dumbadze’s book that leans remotely spicy is when his and Winer’s breakup is briefly detailed—of course it’s Goldstein’s fault—and he’s left muttering “Oh shit,” knowing he blew it.

Lightning storms, NASA documentation, war photography—these become some sources of his work in painting, and a lot of it was more recognizable then than now because we are not all looking at the same issue of Time every week. That’s a problem now inherent to the understanding of appropriation art circa the 1970s–1980s, before the mass adoption of internet and easily accessible images. That work has changed without the artists, changed despite them. I imagine this at least was as true then as it is now: His images become stranger the longer one looks at them. What you thought you knew becomes something you only recognize, and then finally it becomes unknowable. When it’s really working on you, you’ve completely lost in front of Goldstein’s work. He estranges your eye, yet he insists on the image as a sudden, isolated fact. Even when Goldstein insisted that he was “not trying to hide anything,” the work itself resists disclosure. Dumbadze insists that the artist was a latent and eventually unfashionable Platonist and also asserts a Heideggerian quality to his production, where “speech is critical because to say something makes it appear, while what is left silent hides.”

There is enormous silence in Goldstein’s work. And Goldstein was an addict who never really stopped using, which renders truth as structurally unstable in both his life and his accounts of it. Though the author makes a remarkable effort, “truth” is a difficult thesis to maintain for Jack Goldstein—or for the Platonic distinction between perfection and idealism—when the book’s narrative is also incidentally tracking his descent into the consequences of his own lies.

Dumbadze’s book has qualities of a traditional biography of an artist, but overall All Day Night Sky is primarily an intellectual history of what ideas were driving Goldstein and other artists in New York and Los Angeles after Pop and post-Conceptual critiques of the fashioning of art objects at all. It’s a very specific lineage, a particular art world. Dumbadze is laser-focused on trying to closely follow every step he can retrace, and if the artist didn’t cross paths with someone, they do not exist in the world of this book. The reader becomes deeply immersed in Jack Goldstein’s world as it expands, then shrinks. After finishing it, I realized that I couldn’t think of a single mention of a world event, or a sign of any other kind of art going on at the time. It’s as if the translation of Baudrillard into English was a moment of more import than, say, AIDS. In this book it is, along with Plato, Heidegger, and Foucault. All Day Night Sky’s depth of focus indicates the author’s explicit and a reader’s implicit willingness to go along with Jack Goldstein’s own tunnel vision around production, theory, and insatiable ambition. All Day Night Sky does meaningful work to deflate some of the hot air from the tale of Jack Goldstein, and shows diligence in substantiating where it can the reasons for such dramatic shifts in his career and fortunes, but at time the writing itself also falls under the influence of the heady, cult-like atmosphere that one can get sucked into when deeply engaging with Goldstein’s work.

Take a scene from the artist’s studio, for instance. The late Ashley Bickerton—an assistant to Goldstein during an important period for the artist, when he focused mostly on a high-octane pace of painting production—described what it was like working with him in vivid detail for a posthumous remembrance of the artist circa 2012.1 Quoted at the end of “Night,” the second section of Dumbadze’s book, “[He] recounts Goldstein’s telling him, over and over again, that ‘only he and I could see the true light, and only he and I could save this world from itself.’” This sounds like a strange, messianic legend because it is. And it’s true.

For a series of articles about the philosopher’s Being and Time in The Guardian in 2009, Simon Critchley frames the concept of Augenblick like so: “Heidegger’s difference with Christian theology is that he wants to hang on to the idea of the moment of vision, but to do so without any reference to God.”

Much contemporary art criticism might find relevance in the fact that Jack Goldstein was Jewish, born in 1945, and used imagery circa World War II. It doesn’t matter in Dumbadze’s book, though, and he also makes a point of debunking at least one claim that would give further credence to this larger cultural context for Goldstein’s work. The artist’s 1977 film The Jump has been thought to be a rotoscoped version of a clip from a 1938 Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl.2 Dumbadze dismisses this, saying “the visual evidence refutes that assumption” and citing in an endnote what appears to be an NYU graduate thesis from 2020. There’s nothing quoted from the thesis proving anything one way or the other. And anyway, per the author, “Where the images originated is, in any case, beside the point; the world is awash in representations.”

Dumbadze goes further though, asserting that The Jump “is personal without saying so”—but why would it matter if it’s personal then? In another chapter, Dumbadze says in no uncertain terms, “Goldstein selected each image. There were reasons he had this picture and not another.” Then why does it not matter what The Jump’s source is, a fact that could speak to why we should read it as personal? This perplexing inconsistency is a flaw in Dumbadze’s argumentation as he makes a significant effort to examine aspects of Goldstein’s work that he claims haven’t been sufficiently considered before. Goldstein’s own words are cited throughout, and the artist continuously stressed that he thought of his works, his images, as facts: “I am interested in pure information, that which is factually based. The information presented factually is one and the same as being visual.” Dumbadze seems to agree, stating directly after that quote from the artist, “Goldstein’s images were specific in content and effect.” Then we should be specific about the content, and what information was being drawn upon. The book later relays an account of an assistant redesigning The Jump to play on a screen in Times Square in the 1980s (the film would screen in the very same square again in 2012, concurrent with a Goldstein retrospective in New York, with both occasions sponsored by the Public Art Fund). “Philosophically, however,” the author writes, “the Times Square Jump was a copy without a connection to its idea; the bond to the appropriated footage had been left behind on the emulsified surface of the film.” What bond? Seventy pages ago that was “beside the point.”

The literary qualities of Dumbadze’s writing, mostly a welcome change of pace from the dryness of typical art history, and his unquestionable commitment to rendering his subject in detail, can at times allow hagiographic effects. All Day Night Sky starts in the 1990s, but halfway through its 200-plus pages the central idea of the artist taking a “leap of faith,” a phrase that recurs throughout the book, has already “ended in despair.” The book has gone through a number of periods in the artist’s life and work without quite delving yet into the 1980s when he made the paintings he’s perhaps best known for. (A strict chronological order isn’t necessary, but the book does jump around in a way that can be disorienting.) At the point when he’s almost finished recounting that furiously, pathologically productive decade of work—Goldstein did not want to do, he wanted to have done—Dumbadze wants us to know, “[His] faith persisted even if he never knew whether redemption would come. He aspired to transcendence, always willing to sacrifice himself for something greater than flesh and blood.” Messianic legend once again. The way Jack Goldstein performed “sacrifice” for art isn’t romantic or noble. Many (all?) artists make all kinds of sacrifices to make their work, and practically any contemporary artist in New York would murder for the kind of studio space he had for making his enormous paintings.

If Jack Goldstein saw himself as disadvantaged by his working-class background, that grievance now reads as historically dated under contemporary structural pressures. Worse, the lineage he represents is devalued by a market that elevates work with no relation to the art histories his generation produced. Where is the audience for the distinction between perfection and idealism? Six feet under—or absent from the market. The art world I’m in doesn’t split the difference.

Still, it’s refreshing that Dumbadze steers firmly away from an indulgence in the “the rents were low, the women were beautiful, the music was Talking Heads, and the wine flowed” glaze of so many books about New York circa this period. Instead, he focuses on formalist studies of artworks and expands on their conceptual resonances and contextual relations while building a sturdy bridge to philosophy. All Day Night Sky works best when it stays the course of intellectual history, primarily what Goldstein was interested in and what influenced his work, and moreover the specific discourse of a specific time and place—the ideas, theories, and approaches to form that brought together brilliant people like art critics and historians Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens, curators such as Helene Winer, artists like Troy Brauntuch and Sherrie Levine.

Dumbadze’s description of the installation of Goldstein’s show at artist Robert Longo’s space Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, also serves as useful summary of a certain artistic milieu: “The moment was about striving toward a goal that had not yet been fully articulated but was loosely defined by finding one’s place in art history. Goldstein cared about symbolic capital. Money was secondary. Most of his peers felt the same because there was no other way to conceive of the art world.” This is the mid-1970s, and the culture around art would soon rapidly change—and Goldstein along with it, as he became desperate to surpass whoever happened to appear to be the most successful. But it’s sobering to realize that my generation was being inculcated with more or less the same ideal, long after the world had changed so as to make such ideals nigh impossible to live up to.

When reading Goldstein’s jeremiads in CalArts Mafia, the primary take-away one could have—the one I remember having—was how terrible the art world is. If there was ever a singular “art world,” both awesome and dreadful, Jack Goldstein appears not as its victim but as one of its most native creatures, produced through sheer tyranny of will. (Schtupping the Metro Pictures intern, Jack? Really, you are a rebel.) Such is the impression All Day Night Sky sustains, which is no small achievement in light of the volume of wounded perspective Goldstein left on record and the posthumous resurgence of his work.

Dumbadze has authoritatively written as stable a chronological timeline of the life and work of his subject as will likely ever be possible, and yet there are still open questions. Apparently there’s no information to be relayed about a commission he had for stained glass windows at Temple Sholom, an important synagogue in Chicago. Executed in 1989, they were made in some kind of collaboration with Greenland Studio, whose proprietor, Mel Greenland, was an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who restored windows in the medieval department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was the first American to work on the windows of Chartres Cathedral in France.3 (You won’t learn those latter details in this book.) A second commission for stained glass windows in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles doesn’t pan out for gobsmacking reasons that were unsurprisingly the artist’s fault. And I still want to know what happened to all the successive pets Goldstein had who he’d named “Jack.” Gleaned from other sources, it’s perhaps the most weirdly self-aggrandizing yet humanizing thing I’ve read about him. (The institutional afterlife is more complicated—e.g., the 2012 retrospective’s move from Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to the Orange County Museum of Art during Jeffrey Deitch’s brief tenure—a detail the book leaves unaddressed.)

If Dumbadze didn’t find out more about these details to put on record, I doubt anyone else will. This may be inevitable when your subject was an addict who never recovered, someone who considered his life the problem and drugs the antidote, someone to whom the phrase “the journey is the reward” would have meant nothing at all. He seems to have wanted to have a slew of new finished paintings, he wanted a review, he wanted a sale, and another, and so on. Rarely does one get a sense throughout All Day Night Sky that he enjoyed, or allowed himself to enjoy, a single task or effort that those results demanded of him and the people who helped him, or tried to. Say he got whatever undefined level of success he wanted, what would that have looked like? Without defining what was enough, nothing would ever be.

The ending of All Day Night Sky is perfectly structured with excerpts from Goldstein’s Selected Writings (1993–2000). These are collations of resonant excerpts from Kafka, Hegel, Nietzsche—a kind of biography of the artist’s thinking, if not his life per se—retyped from a process that involved literally reading backwards. Selected Writings appears to be the main, if not only, work he completed in the 1990s, when he was living alone in East L.A. and out of touch with former friends and colleagues. (If El Sereno was the end of the line for an artistic career in the ’90s, today it’s more likely where a young artist could afford a studio.) Each of the seventeen volumes of Selected Writings has about a hundred pages, all bound and formally standardized on a Kinko’s photocopier. Every page of the volumes had one centered slice of text, and Goldstein includes no documentation of where his material came from.

When I’ve written about this work, I called it a “materialist document of history à la Benjamin, with an apparent past quoted, ripped from its context, and obliquely coming around to representing a span of time in which, or as, Goldstein wrote it. It achieves the impersonal, at least superficially.”4 Put in another way by Dumbadze, “The statements become objects in the way his images do.” Selected Writings is strangely enough the most personal work Goldstein ever made—an autobiography, a structure of feeling, a collation of representations as self-definition. It is also the most devastated and devastating work of art I’ve ever seen.

One of its texts, cited in All Day Night Sky, is the following:

IF YOU SAY THE

WORD ‘’JACK” I PASS

THROUGH

YOUR MOUTH5

True to form, Goldstein was interested in how “representations generate feelings in the same way as something lived.” Dumbadze intersperses pages of the Selected Writings between pages of single quotes from various obituaries published for the artist. The sparsity of each type of text is fitting, allowing the representation of the artist—one who committed himself to the articulation of all images as representations, of us as representations after images—to finally supersede the person. The author writes that the artist “focused on the imbrication of depicted experience and actual experience—how representations generate feelings in the same way as something lived.” Looking back, Jack Goldstein once said that at nineteen years old, “I defined myself by a certain kind of look. I had the look I always wanted to have . . . a kind of representation I wanted.”

Light traveling through the eye is how images are formed, and names passed through mouths often enough become art history. I remember based on some light that once passed through my eyes. And the pupil of the eye is hollow.