interviews – greg.org

This Week At The Brooklyn Rail: Venice, Duchamp, Sepuya

The Brooklyn Rail was en fuego this week:

I spoil nothing by quoting the kicker from Jesse Weaver Shipley’s powerful, broad, and focused review of In Minor Keys, Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale, realized after her recent death by her team of collaborators [shoutout to one of that team, @siddharthamiter, for the heads up]:

The uniqueness of this Venice Biennale is in positing African curation as an ontological stance from which to watch, listen, apprehend, adapt, connect fragments of the world, and forge new embodied modes of communication.

Shipley has deep, full looks at many African participants whose contributions to the Biennale I’ve not seen discussed too much elsewhere, and certainly not with any depth. I only single out blaxTARLINES KUMASI because the Ghanaian art/teaching collective’s name has the same Marcus Garvey reference that moves through Kahlil Joseph’s collaborative film/installation BLKNWS.

Between In Minor Keys, BLKNWS and the expanded Arthur Jafa-verse, and Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s mindblowing 2021 Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost, it really does feel like a generative African/diasporic vision is coming into fuller view, not just of itself, but the world. And if white American/European critics and audience don’t recognize or resonate with key aspects of it, maybe that’s because for once/again, it’s not for them/us.

The New Social Environment panel with all three curators of the Duchamp retrospective: Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin was moderated by none other than Thierry du Duve. On the one hand, it’s amazing to have a moderator who’s as expert on the artist as the curators; on the other, a slightly less erudite interlocutor might have couched more things in the form of a question than a statement. But then we would not have had the fireworks of Francis Naumann refuting some of du Duve’s statements.

Though I don’t have enough basis to assess du Duve’s claims about Duchamp’s painting fails, I lean towards Naumann, whose decades of researching and dealing with Duchamp’s art objects feels of a piece with the material, chronological grounding of MoMA’s show.

I had a conflict and missed the NSE conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, but it’s online now, so none of us has any excuse left. Will report back.

I Did Not Know Jamie Nares Was British

A really great conversation at Hyperallergic between Valentina Di Liscia and artist Jamie Nares. Come for the essence of the brushstroke—one of Nares’s most intensive interests—stay for the incredible visuals like the wall of handmade brushes in her studio in Chatham, or the still from an early experimental film where Roman togas were doing a lot of long-unacknowledged gender work.

Besides Nares’s own work and story, there are a couple of moments where the difference between generations really comes through: Nares’s story of complimenting Frank Stella at an opening, and Di Liscia’s gentle deadpan, “It’s what we call a soft launch.”

Jamie Nares’s Enduring Romance With The Brushstroke [hyperallergic]

The Wives of Genius Club

a top down photo of small flowers growing in dark soil: purple, red, pink/white, light blue, a 1992 work by felix gonzalez torres of alice b toklas and gertrude stein's grave, this img via christie's 2005 — “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992, ed. 1/4+1AP plus some other prints now considered non-work, but which are conceptually very fecund, this one sold at Christie’s in 2005

One of the great surprises in the exhibition catalogue for Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Always To Return)—which I brought up to curators Charlotte Ickes and Josh T. Franco in our conversation yesterday—is the essay by Joshua Chambers-Letson about Felix’s 1992 photo of flowers, “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris). Chambers-Letson discusses the work as portraiture, and in the context it’s traditionally been seen in, of “queer death, queer grief, and queer love.” But then pivoting to the work as an affirmation of queer life, he proceeds to expand on Stein and Toklas’ relationship as a complicated but revolutionary and rather boldly open example of queer companionship in a hostile world.

Chambers-Letson traces the contours of Stein & Toklas’ relationship IRL and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Its queerness stands as “the open secret at the heart of the book” in which Stein places Toklas “among the ‘wives of genius.'”

Catherine Opie Goes To Washington

a horizontally oriented black and white photo of an extremely elongated skyway over a largely empty parking lot in downtown minneapolis, with a billboard or vinyl banner of some kind that says god bless america, and the glass grids of skyscraper windows in the background, the only strong visual element are two dark lampposts with four square lamps at the top, like weird minecraft shamrocks or something. this 2001 photo is by catherine opie — Catherine Opie, *Untitled #26 (Skyways),* 2001. Iris Print. 11 x 25 inches, ed 5+2AP, via TMN

“I did that big body of work, American Cities, for many years. And I’m definitely going to be going to DC to start again. DC needs to be photographed right now.”

TFW you’ve gone and done it, and now Catherine Opie has to come photograph your kakistocratic, militarized, depopulated cityscape for her 25-year-long series.

A Brush With… Catherine Opie [theartnewspaper]
Catherine Opie on her American Cities photos in 2006 [The Morning News]

1000 Hours of Staring, The Making Of

a photo of a square sheet of white paper which the artist tom friedman stared at for 1,000 hours over the course of five years. in the collection of the museum of modern art — Tom Friedman, 1,000 Hours of Staring, 1992-97, “Medium: Stare on paper”, 32 1/2 x 32 1/2 in., a 2007 gift to MoMA from Dean Valentine & Amy Adelson

In this moment in his Brooklyn Rail interview with Tom Friedman about his new paintings show, Andrew Paul Woolbright is everyone who’s ever seen 1,000 Hours of Staring (1992-97):

APW/Rail: …I value your work so much, and I value the way you think so much that I inherently trust this new step. It’s just like how I trust that you really stared at that piece of paper for a thousand hours in 1000 Hours of Staring (1992–97).Which, by the way, did you really?

Friedman: Oh yeah. I meditate every day. It was just my meditation for the day.

Rail: So was it a thousand days of an hour each? How did it work itself out in terms of time?

Friedman: I would just mark it down, and this is where I really wish I had the paper that I marked it all down. It was an hour here; an hour and a half there; ten minutes here and there. I remember there was a bug that got stuck in the middle of it—a moth—maybe three quarters of the way through. And so it was just there, and I’m meditating on it, and I think it died on the piece of paper. And so when I wiped it off, it left a little mark. I guess it excreted something. I thought, should I keep that there? I didn’t. I scraped it off. It’s one problem that I have with that piece that no one really knows about.

[a few days later update to confirm a suspicion: the medium “stare on paper” predates MoMA and is part of Friedman’s early deadpan Minimalism. But good for them for going along with it.]

Tom Friedman with Andrew Paul Woolbright [brooklynrail.org]
Tom Friedman, Detritus, 4 Sept – 18 Oct 2025 [lehmannmaupin]

Francesca Fuchs’ Paintings of the de Menils’ Paintings

A few weeks ago Francesca Fuchs talked with Tyler Green about her show at and about the Menil Collection and the de Menils, John & Dominique, and their house. The Space Between Looking and Loving: Francesca Fuchs and the de Menil House grew out of Fuchs’ archival research into a letter John de Menil had sent to her archaeologist father about a Roman sculpture the de Menils owned. It expanded into a multi-layered engagement with the house, the art in the house, the collectors, and the works she discovered in the Menil archives.

Fuchs makes paintings of photos, and paintings of photos of paintings, so ofc, I am already onboard. But two pieces of the exhibit really resonate:

the entrance through a pair of white doors to a francesca fuchs exhibit at the menil, is dominated by white walls and the museum's dark stained wood floor. through the doors is part of a wall-sized painting of wood paneling, in pale tan and caramel colors, that imitates an imitation wood paneling in the de menil's house, painted by their decorator charles james. — Francesca Fuchs, Fuchs Faux Bois, 2025, installation view at the Menil, photo: Paul Hester

The de Menils’ house was designed by Philip Johnson, but decorated by couturier Charles James; it’s the only interior James designed, and it remains intact. At the entrance of her show Fuchs made a version of a faux bois wall treatment James painted, I think in the living room or the library. It’s a modernist wall that looks like pale, teak veneer paneling, but it’s not. So kind of weird, and Fuchs clearly makes hers a painting of a paint treatment.

a white wall at the menil collection in houston has several artworks related to matisse cutouts of a palm frond. from left, a black on green original matisse in a white frame; two snapshots of a red matisse cutout in the de menils' kitchen; a green matisse copy made for dominique by william steen under a desaturated red painting of a matisse cutout by francesca fuchs, and next to that, a larger painting by fuchs of what looks like two archival black and white photos of the matisse installed in the de menils' house, stacked on top of each other. very meta, via the menil — [L to R] Matisse Matisse, archival photos, Steen Matisse, Fuchs Matisse, Fuchs Matisse photos, at Menil

The other thing to highlight is the Matisse cutout hanging in the Menils’ kitchen, which everyone knew was green, because it’s in the Museum, and Dominique had the longtime framer at the Menil, artist William Steen, make a copy of it to rotate in and out.

Then Fuchs found an early color photo under all the black & white documentation, and it turns out the Matisse was red. So Fuchs and the Menil curator had to piece together the history of two Matisses [SPOILER: John & Dominique gave the red one to a kid for a wedding present, and @thelegendaryhitchhiker just posted it on tumblr. Turns out the kid and/or spouse sold it at Sotheby’s in 2007.] And to the Matisse original and Steen’s copy, Fuchs added her own copy of the red Matisse, or an archival photo of it, anyway, and other archival photos of it in the house.

It all makes sense as Fuchs and Green discuss it. And there is an entire panel discussion on the de Menil House on September 11th, #neverforget.

Deposition, Reviewed

a screenshot of richard prince, an older white guy with short receding brown hair, in a white shirt and dark blazer, sitting at an office chair against a blue chroma backdrop, with a bottle of water next to him. time codes in this video screenshot indicate the date and hour in 2018 when he was recorded giving a deposition in his second and third big copyright infringement lawsuits, a supertitle, watch the full deposition, is left over from the very brief moment in 2023 when this video was viewable online at deposition row dot com — Screenshot from 2023, when Richard Prince’s second deposition was streaming at depositionrow.com

Since Richard Prince’s video recording of his 2018 deposition in the McNatt & Graham lawsuits briefly surfaced online in 2023 until it was screened at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis as a work, Deposition (2025), it feels like the number of people who have watched the full 7-hour thing would not have filled the smallest theater at the Quad Cinema.

And yet, it is, over and over again, described by those few who have seen it all as one of the major artworks of our time. Prince himself, in a conversation with Rick Rubin, talked about it as wanting to make a work like Andy Warhol’s Empire. Benjamin Godsill could not stop raving about it on Nota Bene. And now Andrew Russeth has delivered one of the most incisive, close readings of Prince’s Deposition I’ve seen anywhere.

If you’re not going to watch it—again, it’s almost seven hours of Richard Prince talking extremely slowly in an adversarial conversation with offscreen lawyers—Russeth’s take and highlights will get you the gist. And the importance.

For me the standout of this second deposition is the extent Prince will go to to maintain an artistic process of freedom and experimentation, almost five decades into his practice. True, it may be the kind of freedom only available to someone making $45 million/year—the tens of thousands of billable dollars per hour represented by a conference room full of the most expensive lawyers in America doesn’t begin to account for the cost incurred to realize this one video work.

But if you’re an artist with the means to re-create the circumstances of your most surprising, innovative moments of creation, wouldn’t you do it? Shouldn’t you?

The Second Deposition Of Richard Prince, Trade Edition

a screenshot of search results on amazon showing my new publication, the second deposition of richard prince, which is available for $20 right now, and another book, The Deposition of Richard II: "The Record and Process of the Renunciation and Deposition of Richard II" (1399) and Related Writings (Toronto Medieval Latin Texts)
by David R. Carlson | Jan 1, 2007
Paperback, which is currently unavailable. — I saw “2 results for ‘the second deposition of richard prince'”? and then this loaded.

In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.

This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.

I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.

Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.

[next morning/evening update] I found a 2009 review of Carlson’s collection of Latin texts by Chris Given-Wilson that makes this accidental algorithmic pairing feels unexpectedly relevant. The embedded quote is from Carlson:

“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion.
And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”

The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”

With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.

Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.

Buy The Second Deposition of Richard Prince in softcover on Amazon for $20 [amazon]
Buy one, two, or three copies of David R. Carlson’s, The Deposition of Richard II for $29.70 each, plus $13.44 shipping to the US [abebooks]

Riding The Rail: Laib, Washburn,

How did I miss that Wolfgang Laib is talking on The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series today? And Joan Washburn on Thursday? With Lydia Millet and Diana Al-Hadid in there, too. This is the last week of Rail talks until September, btw.

David Hammons H&W DTLA: The Making Of

One day you’re wondering where all the stories are about peoples’ experiences with David Hammons’ artwork, and the next, you’re seeing an entire oral history of working with Hammons that almost fills a whole issue of Ursula Magazine.

Randy Kennedy spent almost a year collecting accounts of the many, many, many people involved in Hammons’ massive 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth LA. That show, a culmination of almost two decades of interaction with Hammons and his crew, is already the subject of a whole-ass book. Though that book basically has no words.

The latest issue of Ursula (Issue 12) makes up for it. With thousands and thousands and thousands of words, it could be the most comprehensive account to date of working with and observing Hammons. [Obviously whole books of criticism have been written about Hammons’ work, which is not the same as Hammons working.]

Ursula 12 also includes Linda Goode Bryant’s essay about Concerto in Black and Blue, and this one quote from Ian White resonates with Bryant’s account, too. White, the son of artist and teacher Charles White, was hosting Hammons in 2018 when he was scouting out H&W’s LA space for a possible show. White is alongside Hammons, seeing how he sees:

Because a show for David is not just object-driven. He’s thinking about the space, he’s thinking about how new and existing works will interact, about how the work sits in the space, about whatever is happening around the gallery, out on the streets. He calls himself an urban archaeologist, something to that effect. So a lot of the time when you’re with him, you just wander around for hours. You’re looking for oddities and identifiers of whatever community or culture—or supposed culture—is evolving around you. He’s great at keying into that shit. He’s got a gift. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it, but David’s different. He sees things that are easily overlooked. Things that, if you bring them to light, give you a different understanding of the world around you.

Literally two minutes later update: Am I going to have to liveblog reading this thing? Can you have a better shoutout for your book than this?

[Stacen] Berg [H&W partner & exec. director]: I think he was waiting for some constraints to be put on him. And if we just kept saying yes, then there was nothing to fight against. Our approach was: “We’ll do anything you want. If you want that space, you can have that space. You want all the spaces? You want the courtyard? You can have it.” I mean, he also carried around a book titled Tell Them I Said No, by Martin Herbert, about great artistic refusals.

OK, this one sticks out. On the one hand, there’s a decades-long cultivation of relationships with Hammons’ intermediaries, then him; which includes a conventional exhibition in Zurich in 2003 [with a misremembering of the text stenciled on the side of the boxes in the sculptures]:

[Marc Payot, H&W president]: …It was never going to operate like a conventional exhibition. There was no checklist or price list. There were no dates and very few labels on works, except the work of others that he included in the show, like Agnes Martin, Jack Whitten and Dan Concholar. The commercial side of the show was very limited and came very late. It would have been OK with us if it had never happened. Most of the work was not for sale and came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York after it was over.

The commercial side is not a show with a price list, but the timeline does not make it any less conventional. The talk at the time was that H&W bought the entire show, which is not just conventional, but traditional. This comment by Payot seems to belie that, but a lot of title transfers can fit behind the statement that most of the work “came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York.”

Conversations: The Best Tailor Makes The Fewest Cuts [hauserwirth/ursula]
Buy Ursula: Issue 12 in print [shop.hauserwirth]

Pausing The Pod for Neptune Frost

I’ve been working my way back through David Naimon’s Between the Covers, and was listening to a 2023 conversation about translation and African language with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, when I had to pause the pod’ for Neptune Frost. The 2021 Afrofuturist musical was made in Rwanda by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman in February & March 2020, escaping a global pandemic shutdown by four days, like the Deathstar plans leaving Scarif.

The 2022 US trailer from Kino Lorber is kind of choppy, and more about the film’s critical reception, while the earlier, 2021 Directors’ Fortnight trailer gives more of a sense of the film’s atmosphere.

Uzeyman and Williams’ conversation with Eugene Hernandez at the 2021 NYFF gives a sense of the project’s origin, their artistic influences, and the euphoria of pulling it all off.

Koyo Kouoh RIP

a screenshot of an instagram post of an elegant Black woman with thin, straight braids in a white dress, with her arms crossed over her crossed legs, sitting on a low bench in an art space, with several elements of a painting behind, presumably it is an official portrait of koyo kouoh, the director and chief curator of zeitz mocaa, the south african contemporary art museum which posted it to instagram while announcing news of kouoh's sudden death

Extraordinary and sad news, that Koyo Kouoh, most recently of Zeitz MOCAA, and the curator of the next Venice Biennale, has died. Aruna d’Souza posted the Zeitz MOCAA Instagram announcement on bluesky.

Having never seen a show of Kouoh’s, I found the most insight and inspiration from her two-part interview in 2024 with Charlotte Burns for Schwartzman &’s What if…!? podcast. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.

Just a person of extraordinary and urgent thinking and action, now gone.

The Art World: What If…?! Season 2, 9, Koyo Kouoh, Part 1 [schwartzmanand]
The Art World: What If…?! Season 2, 10, Koyo Kouoh, Part 2

It’s Juddtown

The September 2020 zoom panel for Judd, MoMA’s mononymous Donald Judd retrospective is already a fascinating document of its moment. For a show that was closed for four months by COVID restrictions, there was much discussion of the people, and the physical experience of Judd’s work. Spatial qualities, social distancing, the reflectivity of its surfaces, the subjectivity of seeing one’s masked self seeing.

Rachel Harrison’s mesmerizing photos of details of the work and Leslie Hewitt’s discussion of how photogenic it is drew insights from curator Ann Temkin about how much she’s learned from watching visitors photograph the show, and how they’d debated whether it was safe to allow photos at all, and how much our relationship to photography has changed since even the last major Judd retrospective at Tate Modern in 2004. Harrison pointed out the historical shift in Judd photography, citing James Meyer’s catalogue essay, about Judd’s first show is documented by just two black & white installation photos by Rudy Burckhardt.

John Waters’ Visit Marfa, 2003, six-color screenprint by Globe Poster Co., 30 x 22 in., ed. 100, on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, as sold on eBay

Jeffrey Weiss’s last comment was to suggest Judd saw people–and museums— as things to be avoided, not courted, though, which is why he kind of withdrew to Marfa and set up his own spaces. When Temkin said we’ll end thinking of Marfa, Harrison piped up to say, how about John Waters instead? And his great poster, which she paraphrased fondly as, “Welcome to Marfa, the Disneyland of Minimalism,” inviting everyone at home to Google it.

It is actually, The Jonestown of Minimalism,” of course, but the misquote was a clue, probably, of what Harrison was reading up on for her Judd panel. Waters’ 2003 poster was on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, which was largely dedicated to the first major museum exhibitions historicizing Judd and Minimalism. It included articles by Temkin [on Judd conservation], Weiss [on artists’ writing], and Meyer [on scale]. Waters’ poster is the lede for a spectacularly grumpy review by Yve-Alain Bois of three museum shows—including Judd at Tate:

“Take the Whole Family to Marfa, Texas,” exhorts the broadside, beneath a Li’l Abner–style middle-class family, grinning like they’ve just won a vacation to Disney World. A bubble on the poster advertises “The Jonestown of Minimalism,” mocking the tenacious cliché of the movement’s “spirituality” by likening it to a senseless sect.

Bois’ review, the whole issue really, including the lengthy back & forths in the letters, reads very much as of its moment, when the entire art world was talking to itself in the magazine of record [sic * 3 obv]. When I’d go back and read my blog posts from the early 2000s, I used to think my self-referentiality and -importance was insufferable, but now I realize I was soaking in it. It really did be like that sometimes.

So some art world things and faces are the same, but what’s changed? For one, you actually can fly to Marfa now—and some of us [sic] did. In April 2020, the early freakout days of the COVID shutdown, Nate Freeman reported that a private jet flew from Teterboro to Marfa with three passengers. Who quarantined at addresses of the Chinati Foundation, and a studio compound owned by Christopher Wool & Charline von Heyl.

But I think the most salient—and terrifying—development is revealed in Harrison’s prescient malapropism. Does anything capture our dire cultural moment more clearly than the conflation of Disney World and Jonestown?

Riding Rail With Caspar, Maggie & Cy

This coming week in conversations from the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series I’m trying to squeeze into my schedule:

Tuesday 4/22: The Curators from the Met’s Caspar David Friedrich show;
Wednesday 4/23: Maggie Nelson talking book with Darcey Steinke; and,
duh, Friday 4/25: Carlos Basualdo and Michelle White talking about 30 years of Cy Twombly Gallery

See the whole schedule and sign up for free. [brooklynrail.org]

Riding Rail with Danez Smith & Jack Whitten

Just looking at the upcoming conversations in the Brooklyn Rail’s The New Social Environment series, and they are, as usual full of bangers. Me, I just booked into poet Danez Smith talking about their new book, Bluff, with Mananda Chaffa on Wednesday and a full-on roundtable on Jack Whitten with MoMA curator Michelle Kuo and assembled luminaries on Monday.

See the whole schedule and sign up for free. [brooklynrail.org]