Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Shorts is a regular column with links and commentary on family culture.
Matt Copson (KW Berlin)
Matt Copson, the artist whose laser animations are instantly recognizable, has his first major exhibition up in Berlin at KW with “Coming of Age. Age of Coming. Of Coming Age.” The main work is a trilogy following a baby that grows into / attempts to swallow the world, an everyman character born out of the fundamental contradiction in which we exist today: everything is horrible, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And also, it’s an opera. The baby is an artist, a politician—all of us. Last weekend Copson and the writer Dean Kissick invited three children to join them on stage for a panel conversation on “Art and Meaning in the Contemporary Age.” It sadly doesn’t seem to have been filmed but perhaps we can cajole Dean and Matt into sharing some of the highlights with us.
Kasia Fudakowski (ChertLüdde)
This work popped up on my feeds last week and I’m not sure exactly why, but since we’re on the topic of art and children in Berlin exhibitions I thought I’d share it here. I like how the pro and the con are presented side-by-side with no resolution, making permanent the state of the question, the debate, rather than the decision or the outcome.
Kasia Fudakowski, Reasons to Reproduce, Reasons Not to Reproduce, 2023
This was initially part of a solo exhibition by Fudakowski a couple years ago that was thinking about energy in the context of art, and she made some really interesting comments about how the question of reproduction becomes an energy sink at a certain age, to say nothing of reproduction itself. “You will dilute your energy just when it reaches prime levels.”
Sylvia Sleigh (Lévy Gorvy Dayan)
Rather unexpectedly the artist of the spring has been the late Sylvia Sleigh, whose solo exhibition with Ortuzar Projects ended in early April and then has been quickly reaffirmed by the tightly curated Lévy Gorvy Dayan group exhibition “The Human Situation,” which puts her alongside Alice Neel and Marcia Marcus. As with Neel, one of the most engaging aspects of Sleigh is the network of relations that is embedded into the portraiture.
If Neel’s talent was for leveling and humanizing, sympathetically stripping everyone down to a psychological essence, Sleigh’s was more like a drag show, swapping familiar figures into new and surprising roles. She’s been getting a lot of attention, for instance, for the way she strips down her male colleagues and lovers, turning art critics into odalisques, turning he who gazes into something to be gazed upon. In many pictures the textures of body hair and tanlines sit against foliage and patterned textiles, a delicate riot of sensation and experience.
And sometimes it’s a literal drag show: this is her husband Lawrence Alloway in a wedding gown, to my eye the very face of Orlando. There’s also a great episode of the Great Women Artists to listen to.
Coco Chanel’s La Pausa (New York Times)
Coco Chanel’s residence in the south of France has rejoined the house of Chanel after a half-century detour through Texas. Initially designed by Robert Streitz with reference to the Abbaye d'Aubazine where Chanel spent some of her childhood, the house has now been restored by Peter Marino to what is described as its 1936 state. From what we can see in the photographs released so far it is minimal and modern but not radically or dramatically so, of a piece with her mirrored Paris showroom, and seems like it would have made for a naturally informal and lived-in mode of entertaining.
Her many guests included Dalí, who lived and worked there in an unofficial artist-in-residence capacity. It will be exciting to see if Chanel’s art and culture programs will reinvigorate it in an interesting way—it says there will be a literary program in the fall and perhaps more to come.
Christopher Adams
Finally, as we are coming out of Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas this week I want to share a couple projects by friends locally in Taipei. The first is “Island of Another Scene,” a stunning small-scale solo exhibition by Christopher Adams, which I somehow knew nothing about until it opened. I was blown away by the work and by its framing: Christopher presents some dozen portraits of artists, sometimes their faces, sometimes their work, sometimes a combination of the artist in the work.
Left to right, portraits of Luo Jr-Shin, Michael Lin, and Item Idem, with fragments of Fameme, Su Hui-Yu, and Su Misu
In the introduction to the project he talks about how the idea of relational aesthetics changed our understanding of what art is, and how the relationships that constitute art and its audience become a part of how we see the art. You could call it a practice of relational portraiture.
Penghu Perennial (PILL)
The day after Taipei Dangdai closed I flew to Penghu, an outlying island off the coast, for the inaugural edition of the Penghu Perennial hosted by the Penghu Institute of Labor & Leisure, a new art space founded by the Paris-based multihyphenate Item Idem. We gathered for the premiere of the new film Joss Joss by Cheng Ran and Item Idem, and I moderated a talk between these two brilliant artists while food designer Slow Chen conceptualized a hospitality experience using foraged local ingredients.
I think this can become an exciting place to gather and look forward to future iterations of the Perennial—but it will also be a great spot for artists and particularly artist families to rest, recover, and make new things.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Bookshelf is a regular column that reads books for, by, and about artist parents.
I recently read The Long Form by Kate Briggs, who is also a translator of Barthes and dragged a whole bunch of Barthes into this important novel. The title sets of up the terms of engagement: “the long form” is a term that Barthes uses to refer to the novel, and Briggs plays with the question of how the masculine, continuous, monumental conception of the novel (the Great American Novel and its ilk) intersects with other experiences of time, particularly the fragmented days of early motherhood. Over the course of a day, or a couple days intertwined—who can really tell in that haze—the narrator tends to a young baby, walking, bathing, nursing, napping, holding, reminiscing, and occasionally reading a freshly delivered secondhand copy of Tom Jones. This is the situation:
Caring for a baby was an activity, productive of its own relationality, and therefore open to anyone, to everyone. Its meaning came from the day-by-day walking and carrying through of an ancient set of gestures that were new to her, while also keeping on with her own self-care activities - feeding herself, washing herself - and finding original ways of doing them too (now accompanied, often while holding someone else). Undertaking these tasks, thinking about them: also, by necessity, doing the thinking that arose from the doing of them: testing and wondering, querying and revising, inventing and projecting. And it was true that they sometimes gave rise to unexpected, open-ended, unusual sorts of thoughts. Her days with Rose were making her look at herself, and the world, from other angles. They were making her do things (and think things) she had never considered doing (or had thought of) before. They were bringing her up against old questions, big questions, strange combinations of questions, hyphenating them and bracketing them and reaccenting them. They forced open the imagination in ways that might one day reveal themselves to have been transformative. For now, though, she just felt stupid. Or was it disappointed.
The narrator is much better versed in the history of the early modern English novel than I am, and of course also in the ins and outs of being a mother. But the fragmentation of time is instantly recognizable. It pulls me back to my first year with a baby in the apartment, to the frantic blocks of work wedged in during naps and quiet moments, to the single-minded bouts of activity aimed at attending to a newly awoken or newly upset or newly hungry baby, and to the sheets of pure presence that fell in between all of that, the skin and the smells and the smiles. It’s enough to call up a sentimental mood.
But why not ‘sentimental’ also in the sense that poet Friedrich Schiller ascribed to it? As one of two distinct attitudes towards writing and the world (towards writing the world). On the one hand: ‘naivety.’ The direct reporting of experience. Telling it. On the other: ‘sentimentality,’ a mode which draws on and makes explicit the poet's relationship to the materials, to the situation, to the experiencing of experience: ‘sentimental’ on his terms meaning situated and self-aware.
That resonates nicely with the way that I’ve been thinking about biographical criticism and autofiction, gently pulling together a framework to evaluate the degree of self-awareness that these modes of writing or making art bring to each other. Briggs is extraordinary for the way her criticism is built directly into her fiction. The Long Form plays with the way that language is broken up, both within the narrative of the text and in the housing of the narrative. I love this bit in particular, as a demonstration of this point but also because it’s a beautiful realization of what it means to be alive, the weight of responsibility for the self and sometimes others that we wake up to every day:
… no one had taken her aside and warned her. There would be no sudden extension to the space of her character, no instant expansion of patience and tolerance — no. To be clear: there would be no immediate, radical inner change. Instead, there would just be —
THE DOING OF IT
It was her discovery.
Listen - she wanted to tell someone: this is what it involves.
Doing it.
That line that’s written all in capital letters in the middle? That’s a section or sub-chapter heading. The passage preceding it ends a left-hand page, cutting off the sentence right in the middle with the dash, and then the title of the next chapter resumes the sentence. After which the body of the chapter continues on, so that the chapter heading isn’t an interruption at all but a bit of concrete poetry that carries on its own weight within the story. The book, which achieves the length of its form through an accumulation of fragments and is all the richer for it, becomes a vessel for the holding of all of this poetry. And holding is what the whole things is all about—it’s what occupies the narrators day:
Their day was the story of their holding arrangements: an ongoing narrative of finding (sometimes planning, sometimes inventing, making up) and holding to (for as long as they lasted: believing in), then collapsing little scenes.
Allowing them, stretching them out.
The meaning of holding: to maintain, to sustain, to support. To stop and stay. To keep to, and persist in. A situation involving an intentionality as well as the promise of a certain duration.
This practice of holding is something that is familiar to anyone who works as a caregiver to children, anyone who works as a homemaker, but also to anyone who works with creative people and helps to guide the creative process. (As an aside, my favorite thing about the physical format of these Fitzcarraldo Editions novels is how the blue slowly wears down to white, revealing a how the book has been held over time—its holding pattern.
Tolerating the collapses and the breaks, committed to re-establishing the sorts of environments that hold steady enough and prove flexible enough to accommodate someone else's discoveries: the provision of a mutually invested setting to imagine out from.
This is what I love about what I do, in my professional work as someone who tries to make interesting contexts for artists to bring their work to the world, and equally also in my personal work as a father to someone who is struggling every day to bring herself out into the world. Love is holding space, building an architecture for that space to appear. I’m fond of saying that love is a practice:
It’s alright if love feels like a rhythm of reaching and falling short. Then an unexpected receiving—a sometimes wholly unsought interaction, having nothing whatsoever to do with ambition. A dispossession. Not an achieved steadiness.
It’s alright if the feelings you feel are so mixing and mixed. If there can be patches of the day when you feel panic, then nothing - not a thing for anybody, not even for yourself.
The key is to keep going.
It’s alright if the whole project can sometimes feel like an unsupported invention, an unprecedented co-production.
It’s alright. Say it's alright.
It’s okay. It is (going to have to be) alright.
In her reading of Tom Jones (and not just Henry Fielding, also E.M. Forster and Bakhtin, among others) alongside and throughout her rituals of love and holding, the narrator establishes that the novel always contains disruption and discontinuity, and that to pretend otherwise is to be blind to their rhythms. In my favorite sub-plot, the driver delivering the novel rings the doorbell and awakens the baby, which seems thoughtless to the narrator and of course completely innocent to the driver. But we get to follow the driver for a bit on his route through the neighborhood, and we come to understand that he is waiting for a text from a paramour. With the Barthes connection in mind, I immediately jumped to A Lover’s Discourse and the temporality of waiting, the expectant yearning that Barthes unravels so beautifully: the lover is the one who waits. The lover carries the weight of that empty space. As the driver continues through the streets and alleys and the narrator attempts to hold her baby we become privy to two kinds of time running in parallel. Intertwined processes of reading and writing bring the text into life.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Essays is an occasional column that teases out in greater depth how family life appears in culture.
Towards the end of the Suzanne Valadon exhibition, in the valedictory bit where the museum reminds you which key points you’re meant to take home with you, some objective claims are made about the daring nature of her work. She was, we are told, the first woman to paint a full-frontal male nude (Adam and Eve, 1909). She is Eve, and her lover André Utter is Adam, some 20 years her junior, guiding her hand—or perhaps arresting it?—towards the forbidden fruit. Today we see Adam/André with his genitals covered with a fig leaf belt, a later addition, and we are supplied with a photograph of the original version of the work, a double image of play and propriety. Valadon was also the first woman to paint a large-scale full-frontal nude self-portrait. And, whether or not they were the first to anything, there is something striking and raw and courageous in the way she depicts her body as she ages, as we saw in Part IV of this essay. In the 1931 Autoportrait aux sens nus we looked at last time she would have been 65.
Seeing Valadon at the Pompidou, tracing the thickness of her line and the wrinkles on her faces, brought me back to another visit to the same museum in the fall of 2022, when an Alice Neel retrospective occupied a somewhat smaller, denser space downstairs. Full of stunning pictures, that was probably the exhibition that made Neel contemporary for me, and again was one of the important links in helping me understand portraiture. It had a certain angle: it was particularly interested in Neel’s activism, and in helping the viewer understand that her sitters were not selected at random, not selected on aesthetic grounds. Neel chose who to paint out of a sense of radical social solidarity, an insistence on reflecting back a shape of society as it interested her. It was very much Neel for the high water mark of social practice. Because of how she grasps at these various cross sections of society, Neel’s work now constitutes an archive that lends itself well to such readings at a certain angle. More recently, Hilton Als curated “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World,” another gathering of characters from her universe that has a lot to teach us about life in the queer family.
When Alice Neel painted her famous Self-Portrait (1980) she was 80, some 15 years older than Valadon in the picture we looked at previously. What is surprising about the Neel is not that she would depict herself in the nude at that age, but rather that she painted herself so rarely, and that it hadn’t happened sooner. The title “self-portrait” appears in her work only one other time, with the Self-Portrait Skull (1958), an ink drawing of a gaunt and leaky skeletal face that forms a stark contrast with the ruddy and very much alive version of herself that Neel actually encountered towards the end of her life.
And while she might not have called them self-portraits, there are a few other paintings that Neel made of herself. We see one in Mother and Child (Alice) (1930) [on the estate's website this one is titled Alice and Her Child]. Even exhibitions of Neel’s early work rarely venture this early; the style is nigh unrecognizable, though still pretty cool looking. At the risk of sliding into the kind of biographical interpretation that we have by now agreed can be simplistic, it is important to understand that she painted herself in a cemetery here because her first-born daughter died at the end of 1927 at less than a year old. Her second daughter, born in 1928, was taken by her then-husband to be raised by his family in Cuba before she was 18 months old. There is another painting, another Mother and Child, this one from 1927, in which the baby’s eyes are open, and there are no tombstones in the background. In her brilliant essay “Futility of Effort: Alice Neel and Motherhood, 1940-46,” Lauren O’Neill-Butler speculates that an even odder painting, Degenerate Madonna (1930), is a “psychological portrait” of this trying time. Her essay is titled after a third 1930 painting of a baby asphyxiated by the bars of its crib.
Until I looked at these paintings, I hadn’t thought too much about Neel’s daughters, rest their souls. I think often about her sons, whose life trajectory seems like a nightmare for the creative parent: one became a “self-described ‘right wing’ investment adviser,” and neither of them had much affection for the bohemian milieu of their childhood. Her grandchildren, fortunately, count among them an abstract painter and a filmmaker, the latter of whom shot a touching documentary that weighs up the rewards and risks of an artist’s life. To be fair, her sons share a respect for her accomplishments, if not a full forgiveness for the price they paid. The arc of history is long.
Neel’s sons come to mind often in large part because she is the first artist analyzed in one of my favorite books, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Already in the title Julie Phillips refers to an anecdote from Alice Neel’s life: Isabetta, the daughter who was taken to live with Neel’s in-laws, was later told that Neel had left her on a fire escape while she was painting. As with This Dark Country, I have learned a lot from this group biography about the limits and possibilities of writing about the artist’s work and the artist’s life side by side (“her awareness of parental entanglements often gets into her portraits”). For the most part, Phillips writes about writers: Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorder, Alice Walker, Angela Carter. Neel is an exception, and this is perhaps what makes her case particularly compelling. Across these figures we read about different approaches to love and romance, to the labor of child-rearing, to domestic responsibilities, to creative labor, to gender in general. There are no answers, no conclusions, no one right way to do things. In the end, there is only the way things happened. Ginny Neel, who married Alice Neel’s youngest son, says that Alice “became famous … so it was worth it. Just the slightest twist and she could have never been much heard of. And then what, it wouldn’t have been worth it?” Towards the end of her life, Alice herself answered. “What will they think of me afterwards? You know, I had to do this. I couldn’t have lived, otherwise.”
On that 2022 trip to Paris, when Alice Neel was showing on the mezzanine floor, I attended a cocktail back upstairs hosted by Chanel’s Yana Peel for the rededication of a terrace in memory of the recently passed architect of the building, Richard Rogers. During the ceremony Ruthie Rogers gave a moving speech in which she recalled a conversation they had in their Paris years, where they lived during the construction of the Pompidou. She remembered that they had stopped at a cafe late in the evening, she in her 20s and he in his early 40s, and they were watching an older couple on a night out at an adjacent table, and he projected forward a future idyll: to be elderly, in love, and fully alive—in Paris. Paris represented something for them, a way of living that would have consequences for our understanding of how a city should work. I often listen to Ruthie’s Table 4, a charming podcast in which the host talks over her famous guests indiscriminately and retells their stories as her own, as all good storytellers do. Recently she had on Bella Freud, and they reminisced over Lucien Freud’s midday drives from Soho to the River Cafe. I love these stories, generation to generation, splintered family to familiar splinter. Bella Freud has her own equally charming podcast called Fashion Neurosis.
What a thing to imagine the early 1930s, this moment of overlap that materializes across the floors of the Pompidou: an aging Suzanne Valadon facing the mirror topless in Montmartre, her grown son by then also an artist, while in Greenwich Village a bereft Alice Neel painted through the loss of her two first children, not yet settled into her neighborhood, her apartment, her practice—not yet settled into the language that would become her own. She had to find her way there. She couldn’t have lived, otherwise.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Shorts is a regular column with links and commentary on family culture.
Peter Cook’s Play Pavilion (Serpentine)
In a bit of serendipitous timing the Serpentine announced the launch of their new Play Pavilion the week that Hans Ulrich Obrist arrived in Taiwan for the first time for a few days of lectures, interviews, studio visits, and meetings with architects and collaborators. Intended to provide space and context for activities involving families and young people, the inaugural pavilion will commission Archigram’s Peter Cook (who also happens to have an exhibition at MoCA Taipei later this year) with the support of LEGO. This is something that I think every museum and perhaps every park should be doing: commissioning artists for playgrounds. (Indeed this is one of the imperatives of Nostos and one of the categories of projects we are pushing forward most urgently.)
I think we are as direly in need of novel approaches to play as we are so desperately in need of new ways to engage with art. They can be permanent or temporary, they can be sculptural or interactive, they can be huge or tiny, they can even be fun or frustrating. In 2022, the Serpentine worked with Alvaro Barrington to build a basketball court in Bethnal Green, which he brilliantly referred to as a landscape painting. That year will probably be remembered as the high-water mark of social practice, which now appears to be shifting and evolving in response to the demands of our new political moment. This summer, Cook and LEGO together are an inspired choice for an initiation because LEGO is such a fundamentally metabolic, revisitable, plastic way of thinking through material. The Play Pavilion opens 11 June and I can’t wait to visit.
Louise Bourgeois (Fubon Art Museum)
Our first stop in Taipei last week was to Fubon Art Museum’s ongoing Louise Bourgeois exhibition “I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.” I first visited when it opened in mid-March, which turned out to be a highly araneidan week as we moved from the mid-sized spider in Taipei to the enormous one installed outside of Bangkok and finally to a diminutive one at a gallery show in Hong Kong. The exhibition in Taipei has traveled from the Mori Art Museum, where it was a slightly larger presentation. Exhibitions at the Mori are invariably installed with an enviable level of slickness: you’re dumped right in, then impelled onward through a combination of narrative and crowd flow, and finally extruded through the gift shop, where the merch is reliably excellent. Everyone I know now has “Hell and Back” either on a throw or on a hoodie. In Taipei the museum, which just opened last year, is exploring how its space can be used with each exhibition. The triumph of this show is the installation of Crouching Spider, the only work that can really make use of the architecture. FAM is essentially a Renzo Piano pavilion, open to the street with dynamic glass windows, and this nesting sculpture can take advantage of that relationship between inside and out to a powerful degree. I imagine we’ll see more of that kind of dramatic use of the space in the future.
The second spider of that week was the epic Maman installed at Khao Yai Art Forest a few hours outside of Bangkok. (I say second but of course there were multiple other spiders at Fubon as well, including the excellent 1997 version crouching over a cage.) It is truly one of the great experiences of public art wherever you encounter it, whether in Tokyo or outside Seoul (or Arkansas or Ottawa, though I haven’t had the pleasure). Originally commissioned for the Turbine Hall—the first work to occupy that space—it will be returning to the Tate Modern next month to mark its 25th anniversary. Context is everything, and in Khao Yai the spiritual dimension is activated to particular effect, part of a day-long trail through secondary forest and blazing sun that also includes the rewilding stupa fragments of Ubatsat and a mesmerizing fog by Fujiko Nakaya. Here you can put your back to the ground, your hand to the bronze, and squint up at the marble eggs against the sky with just the sounds of wind and insects and a little laughter.
But my favorite spider was probably this delicate little one in a corner of her show “Soft Landscape” at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong, which opened as we arrived there from Bangkok. All of the bronze spiders come in different textures and there are distinct preferences among collectors and curators: Maman is rough-hewn, almost industrial in its composition, while Crouching Spider is considerably more naturalistic, tense with twisted muscle. This tiny Spider falls somewhere between the two, with the welding marks of the former but also a bit more of the hand to it, its body with something of a Giacometti to it. What makes me tingle is the one limb that so tenderly cradles the ostrich egg with an effervescence of care and affection.
It is well known that Bourgeois ascribes to her mother/spider the qualities of creation, industriousness, and protection. Here we see that this nurturing is not a function of scale.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Essays is an occasional column that teases out in greater depth how family life appears in culture.
Earlier this winter I was lucky to catch the retrospective of Suzanne Valadon at the Centre Pompidou on what I imagine will be my last visit to that museum until it reopens in 2030, god willing. It was a rare personal trip to Paris outside of my annual fall pilgrimage for the art fairs. This time it was romance that brought me there, a fact that everyone I told almost uniformly agreed was the best reason to visit their city. So I was in a certain state of mind as I stored my dripping umbrella and made my way up through the escalator tubes to the special exhibition galleries, making my way between the spaces of the in-between, endings and beginnings, hellos and goodbyes and all of that. I had never heard of Suzanne Valadon and had no idea what to expect, other than it came highly recommended, but there is a certain freshness to seeing something in the right company, in holding one’s eyes open out of curiosity and hope, and I was rewarded immediately. From the opening salvo of the exhibition, Suzanne’s paintings assert themselves with the immediacy of gestural brushwork and an imposing weight of meaning and consequence.
Although I am no expert, assuming that some readers will be as unfamiliar with her work as I was, I will share a brief biographical sketch: Suzanne was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon in 1865 to a single washerwoman in Montmartre, and came into contact with art when she began modeling (among other odd jobs) at the age of 15 for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who gave her her nickname—after the biblical Susanna. She also drew, and received encouragement from Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. Becoming a single mother herself at the age of 18, she continued living with her mother, and developed a practice of portraiture based on her mother and son, as well as lovers and friends from a wider circle as she rose in social status through the reception of her work.
It should be clear from this description alone how Suzanne’s work fits into the story I have been telling about how the life of the family fits into and alongside the life of the artist. With Adam et Eve (1909) she became, some say, the first woman to paint a full-frontal male nude; her new husband guides her hand towards the forbidden fruit. Portraits de famille (1912) pictures her surrounded by her mother (whose face is deeply scarred with wrinkles here and nearly everywhere she appears), her son (dreamy and erect), and her second husband (resigned; at peace). One of my favorite pairings in the exhibition captures the arc of childhood: Marie Coca et sa fille Gilberte (1913) finds Suzanne’s grandniece with a doll on her lap, leaning against her mother’s legs. Later, in La Poupée Délaissée (1921), the girl is grown, turning away from her mother and absorbed in her own reflection in a handheld mirror. The titular doll—the same one from eight years earlier—rests on the floor. Suzanne had a special love for mirrors, both handheld and wall-mounted, and for boudoir scenes, and in particular for the twisting and stepping poses of getting into and out of the bath. (See La Petite Fille au miroir, 1909.) She is, I believe, the patron saint of the rear three-quarter-angle nude.
Suzanne made what I consider her best paintings in her fifties and sixties, in the two decades prior to her death in 1938. The Pompidou exhibition opens with La Chambre bleue (1923), one of several pictures that are so stupidly brilliant that they could pull the wall straight down into the floor. A heavyset woman in a pink camisole and striped green pajama pants rests on one elbow, books at hand, an unlit cigarette between her lips. The bedspread is Matisse and the wall behind is Joan Mitchell. From the same year, Catherine nue allongée sur une peau de panthère (1923) has a reclining nude on a leopard skin over a rug, pink poppies in a blue glass vase perched perilously close to languorously draped fingers. The rainbow skin of this buttock slam in the center of the frame—it contains the universe.
In a series of self-portraits made when she was 62 or 63, Suzanne depicts herself in what I can only describe as the harsh light of loving self-acceptance. She has none of the luscious skin finish of her nudes, and none of the cinematic airs of some of her other portraits. She is not young, but she is not old—at least she has far fewer wrinkles than she gave to her mother earlier in her career. My favorite is Autoportrait aux sens nus (1931). At this point she has been painting herself in the nude for decades, and yet it can’t have been common for a woman of her age to look back at the viewer so defiantly dignified, so much a part of herself. In the way she handles the skin of her left shoulder, partially in the shadow of her face, I see something of Celia Paul’s palette. And, of course, this brings us to Alice Neel.
I am hardly the first to notice the shared sensibilities between Suzanne Valadon and Alice Neel. First and foremost, the thickness of line with which they both tend to outline the bodies of their sitters; it is visually striking and makes for a unique conversation across time between these two women. And of course, the empathy for affect and feeling in the body of the sitter, particularly in the seated domestic interior portraits that form such a significant portion of both of their work. If there is one significant point of departure, however, it is in Suzanne’s sumptuous attention to the textures and patterns of her interiors. In Alice’s pictures, everything beyond the person—sometimes everything beyond the face, even everything beyond the eyes—fades into irrelevance. For Suzanne, a person must be situated: placed within the context of their costume, of the furniture, of the room. We see the same couch, the same throw in many pieces, and we see her own environments shifting and evolving over time. Where Alice pushes back at the encroaching domestic sphere (a topic I will turn to in the next part of this essay), Suzanne indulges it in all its messiness and improprieties, painting a universe perfectly parallel to the escaping tulips of Dora Carrington’s still life.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Shorts is a regular column with links and commentary on family culture.
Hervé Guibert (Magic Hour Press)
My car is in the shop so I have an extra hour or so of reading time on the bus. This morning I read, twice, through Hervé Guibert’s photo novel Suzanne and Louise. Guibert has become one of the most important touchpoints for autofiction, and this book I find fascinating for its beautifully skewed take on how an artist might turn family life—his own and, simultaneously, someone else’s—into the material of his work. It’s a weird, weird little story, consisting of 44 black-and-white photographs of his two elderly great-aunts in their Paris home interspersed with snippets of text on their day-to-day lives, how they came to lives such lives, and his process of getting to know them and, indeed, work with them, as they become artistic collaborators.
What emerges, unexpectedly, is a lived theory of photography, not so different from how Roland Barthes’s theory of photography in Camera Lucida emerges from a photograph of his own recently passed mother as a young girl—a photograph Barthes describes but never shares. In his text, Guibert describes his aunts’ approach to their images “as if photography were a sacrificial practice.” In the prologue: “They perform, for him, a dramatization of their relationship.” The young artist participates in an improvisation that becomes a real part of his life. The art is the life, and the life is the art. There’s no distance between them. Guibert published the book at the age of 25; he died of AIDS at 36, which is also my age as I write this.
Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie (Isabella Bortolozzi)
Annie Ernaux, too, has become one of the core reference points of our current strain of autofiction or memoir, though on the opposite end of the spectrum. She lives within memoir, speaking to the truth of experience conveyed through literature. This past weekend marked the close of an exhibition of photographs by Ernaux and Marc Marie at Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin. Titled “BEDROOM, CHRISTMAS MORNING” after a photograph in the show, it is a simple project of 14 images: over the course of their year-long affair, the lovers photographed the mise-en-scene of the morning after, the state of the room after their liaisons—mostly clothes on the floor in varying states of disarray.
They, too, turned their relationship into an art project, writing short texts to accompany each image that they only shared with each other after the close of the year. A book bringing together their words and photographs has just been published by Fitzcarraldo, though I have yet to read it. The affair coincided with Ernaux going through chemotherapy, a context that shifts ever so slightly the suggestions of touch, of intimacy, that are inherent to these pictures. A superb essay by Jonathan Alexander in the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at both of these recent books in terms of the “theatricality of the quotidian” and the structures for living that they propose. I think that structures like these are some of the most life-giving things that we can learn from artists. Life as a project.
Ruth Asawa (New York Times)
By way of previewing Ruth Asawa’s upcoming retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hilarie M. Sheets visits the artist’s home in the city. I have to present this without comment:
A lot of times she worked right here,” [Asawa’s youngest child] Paul said, pointing to a discreet hook at the center of a double-wide door frame between the living room and kitchen, where Asawa would hang her looped-wire works in process. “She could sit, or she might have to lie down,” Paul said, as the scale of her curvaceous forms grew, adding that it was a convenient spot to monitor what was cooking for dinner. At the long butcher block kitchen table built by [her husband] Albert, Asawa led group sessions sculpting figures from homemade baker’s clay (a mixture of flour, salt and water), or decorating eggs or making origami by day and family meals by night. “The most important thing to this family was that we sat down to dinner together every single night,” Asawa once told an interviewer. “There were eight of us at the table, plus friends."
There is a new book out by Jordan Troeller that I am dying to read called Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury that looks at motherhood “as a means to reimagine the terms of artmaking.”
Rose Wylie (Great Women Artists)
Nonagenarian painter Rose Wylie opened an exhibition at David Zwirner in London this week, and promoted it with a series of wonderful studio visits, including an excellent episode of Katy Hessel’s "Great Women Artists" podcast. Born in 1934, Wylie studied art, stepped away from her practice to raise her children, and then returned to the work in her forties newly invigorated and feeling like she had a lot more to bring to it.
I love to hear the stories of how different artists position the work of the home and the work of the studio in relation to each other: for every famously uninvolved mother like Alice Neel or Celia Paul there is a Ruth Asawa building sculpture in the kitchen or a Rose Wylie putting children first. In the podcast Wylie says that she believes that being a mother was an important part of life, and that being a wife was an important part of life. She recalls how her tutors in art school looked down on women who they expected to marry and have children and walk away from art. They were right, she concedes—but not exclusively right. She came back. And, for her, the walking away was not a defeat but part and parcel of the whole thing.
Ed Atkins (Tate Britain)
I can’t wait to see Ed Atkins’s retrospective at the Tate Britain this summer, which by all accounts is an expansive staging of his career. For me Ed is the ultimate poet of the digital self, reflecting back at us how we collapse and inflate ourselves in spaces we can hardly understand with our physical bodies of flesh and blood. Family has become an important part of his work, particularly in the last few years after he became a father—his artist books’ of the post-it note drawings for his daughter’s lunchbox first brought him onto my Nostos radar. But since then, I’ve come to think of this lens as less specifically about artist parenting and more generally about how artists situate their practices within their lives, and Ed’s work on his own parents fill out this picture. Some of his most significant films frame these relationships one by one: The Worm (2021) was a conversation between his own avatar and his mother, focusing on a family history of depression in the depths of the Covid pandemic.
In the new film Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me (2024), an actor reads journal entries that Ed’s father wrote as he was dying of cancer while the artist was in school. In his review, Adrian Searle describes the triangulation of parent, artist, and child:
After the reading is finished Peter and Claire play a game devised by Ed Atkins’ young daughter Hollis Pinky. Peter has now adopted a further persona, and lies on the floor, and Claire, taking the role Ed Atkins used to play in this once-private game, first pretends to be an ambulance, then some sort of doctor, who attempts miracle, fantasy cures for imaginary ills, games of coping and resuscitation, of childhood fears being allayed through play.
Writing on these attempts to “catch the irretrievable moments as they pass,” Laura Cumming says that Ed’s child resists “all this projected significance.” So it goes.
The Guardian loves Ed: Adrian Searle gives him five stars, Laura Cumming only four, and Tim Jonze shares an interview.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Essays is an occasional column that teases out in greater depth how family life appears in culture.
Portraiture for me has become a practice of autofiction. When I started my career, I was obsessed with technology and bored by painting. I was undereducated and under-informed, and have only learned a little bit since then. A lot of my writing and thinking in the first decade of my career was on what we called post-internet art, which Karen Archey and I defined as contemporary art “consciously created in a milieu that assumes the centrality of the network.” A key point of reference for us was David Joselit’s idea of painting beside itself; I remember Karen telling me about a dream in which she titled an exhibition “Everything Beside Itself.” Up to a certain moment, the only painting that made sense to me was conceptual in nature, playing with the codes of digital culture to make painting about its own production. Following David: Jutta Koether, Wade Guyton, Seth Price. Serious and impersonal painting.
Through approaches to portraiture like Celia Paul’s, I have slowly come to understand how every painting stands beside itself, how the social diagram of the production of art is actually visualized in many kinds of painting, if not most, and acknowledging this reality is, in fact, one of the primary directives of looking at and talking about art. In her current exhibition in London, Celia recomposes a famously staged photograph of Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Michael Andrews out to lunch in Soho in 1963. This is not a biographical anecdote. This is painting fully beside itself. There is zero distance between Celia’s Colony of Ghosts and Jana Euler’s “GWF (Great White Fear)” paintings.
At the London Review Bookstore a few years back I picked up a copy of This Dark Country, a striking book by the curator and scholar Rebecca Birrell that has become enormously important to me. Subtitled Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century, it is something of a group biography of Bloomsbury, and a project of criticism that invigorates still life as a visual key to the interpretation of the domestic lives of the artists. One might call it still life beside itself, or the domestic interior for the age of metadata. The basic observation is unassailable: these artists were living and working in unusual and radical domestic configurations, and so the visual environments pictured in their work bridge the practice itself with the life around it. Another way of describing the modernist mode.
In This Dark Country, Rebecca’s observations are always striking. Often they are elucidating; sometimes they seem to be reaching, and yet when they are reaching they are also at their most creative. She calls her form of close reading “overreading,” after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and says she is “more interested in possibility than proof.” This, I think, is where the creative possibilities of criticism come into play, where criticism can be more than biography, and where the reading of a critic might open up new windows into the work, and for the work into the world. And this, after all, is why we write criticism to begin with.
On the cover is a detail from the Dora Carrington painting Tulips in a Staffordshire Jug (1921), in which Rebecca identifies two tulips “attempting to distance themselves from the rest of the bouquet,” leaving behind “intimations of disappointment, need and discord.” She goes on to connect the composition to her lover Ralph Partridge and the triangulation of their relationship within Bloomsbury. As a reader, you have to learn a lot about the biography before you can begin to see anything in the paintings other than genre and technique. In my generation we are sadly inured to the spiritual life of a still life with flowers.
Studying theory and criticism in college, we learned to be suspicious of the biographical fallacy, of the idea that the narrative of an artist’s life might help us understand his or her work in any meaningful way. We should start from the work itself, we learned, and from its reception in the world, and never take the original artifact as illustrative of an external reality. For the past 25 years, literature has been so dominated by autofiction that it has become as natural as breathing. This is not the case in contemporary art. Despite diversions into things like new sincerity and identity art, art has largely tried to preserve a further layer of mediation, even distance—to cling to the position of the critic rather than the artist.
Anna Kornbluh would disagree: in her book Immediacy she argues that the immersive installation as a medium is cut from the same cloth as social media and memoir. I counter that immersive experiences are far enough from the central thrust of what artists are actually doing to undercut this line of thinking. I also wonder if the act of interpretation that Kornbluh wants to see happening, the work of critical engagement, might actually be taking place immanent to the surely self-conscious authorship of much of this culture supposedly opposed to mediation.
Frances Lindemann, writing in The Drift, takes inventory of autocriticism in the literary field: Emily Van Duyne on Sylvia Plath, Rebecca Mead on George Eliot, Jenn Shapland on Carson McCullers, Joanna Biggs on nine women writers. She describes the problem:
Three distinct but related types of identification are at play in this genre, which we might call auto-criticism: the author’s personal identification with a character, her identification with the writer at hand, and her identification of that writer’s life with her work. (This last type is also known as biographical criticism.)
Rebecca Birrell’s biography of Bloomsbury does not reach into memoir, other than in brief asides that mention her research in the first person, but I almost wonder if that might further enrich it. Rather than trying to get rid of mediation, this winking inclusion of the author for me can celebrate the relational nature of the twinned acts of writing and reading. Frances concludes her argument:
Auto-criticism, and its identificatory principle in particular, is most fundamentally flawed in its false understanding of the directionality of reading.
When we willfully misread art or literature, we accept that we are seeing our reflection in the glass along with whatever we are looking at. We recognize that we cannot possibly imagine ourselves in the exact circumstances of the artist—and that we would not want to even if we could, because the whole point of art is to somehow speak across time, across subjectivities, from your universe into mine. Reading is a multi-dimensional practice. We create new dimensions with every reading. When we peer through a frame and into another plane of being we see an act of imagination tied to a real person in a real place and time, and we—real too in our own place and time—must commit another act of imagination. And this makes it no less real. It resonates back and forth, sometimes forever.
What I have learned from Rebecca Birrell is that there are interesting things to learn out there, and archival research plus a trained eye can unearth stories that enrich our readings of art. This is a creative act, and the stories that resonate with us have as much to do with us as they do with the artists.
My mother is visiting Taipei this week and while we were browsing moom bookshop I picked up a copy of The Bloomsbury Cookbook. She is here to spend a couple days with me after a week looking after my daughter while I was away on business at the art fair in Hong Kong. Paging through recipes from Charleston as we recover from a meal of oden and Czech wine, the importance of domesticity, of cooking and eating together, of a good interior, of a communal energy could not be more obvious. In the case of Bloomsbury, the radical impulse comes right up against the domestic appetite, and they are seen to live not in opposition but in harmony, bound up together. I am learning to see in a still life with tulips the whole world we are trying to build around us. I am learning to map it out in an omelette and a loaf of bread.
Nostos is a weekly newsletter about making a home at the intersection of art and life. Shorts is a regular column with links and commentary on family culture.
Noah Davis (Barbican)
The Noah Davis exhibition at the Barbican is a celebration of the intersection of painting and community. Painting can be a solitary practice, particularly in LA where the commute from home to studio can be undertaken in the automotive bubble, but with Noah there is a considered approach to painting as a social practice that I find formally beautiful.
First there is the way that he worked beyond painting, founding the Underground Museum, a unique neighborhood institution that turned the experience of the contemporary art museum into a community project. The Barbican exhibition includes restagings of several UM projects, including its infamous debut exhibition, “Imitation of Wealth,” for which Noah recreated well-known artworks held in museum collections that, at the time, could not or would not lend to UM, as well as a later William Kentridge exhibition that UM organized with MOCA curator Helen Moleseworth.
Then there is how this whole social practice was a family affair: Noah founded the UM with his wife and brother, both of whom are also artists: Karon Davis comes from theater and creates sculptural tableaux, while Kahlil Joseph is the director behind important films shot in collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, and FKA twigs (as an aside, his work is fantastically adept at capturing the sense of place, m.A.A.d. for Los Angeles and Fly Paper for New York).
Finally, there is the content of Noah’s painting, which alludes to social dynamics on a macroscopic level in operatic compositions of bodies among modernist architecture and then zooms in on the person-to-person connections that make and break these wider structures. One of my favorite paintings of all time is Single Mother with Father out of the Picture, its title defining its composition and making space for the most incredible interplay of faces, skin, domestic interior, painting-in-painting. Or 1984, which pictures his wife Karon as a seven-year-old in a Halloween costume. Not everything is biographical; many of Noah’s most important bodies of work are more conceptual in nature. But I’m pulled in by the place where biography meets practice.
The pièce de résistance in London is Painting for My Dad, an oversized piece more than two meters wide, a dark and looming picture hung on a black wall. Finished shortly after the artist’s father died and a couple years before his own untimely death from cancer, Painting stares into the void with terror and longing and tension and cold acceptance. In his short career, in his short life of 32 years, Noah packed in far more than the exuberance of some fantastic paintings—the rich scaffolding of a social structure for how life might be lived.
Homework Magazine
I was very happy to recently receive in the mail a copy of the first issue of Homework, a new Chinese-language magazine published by Eileen Chien. I met Eileen and learned about Homework through its creative director, Amy Chang, the brilliant graphic designer who I first worked with when I was editing LEAP and invited her to guide our editorial art direction. Since we both moved to Taipei she has become a close friend, so it's great to see her making creative strides while bringing up her family!
Eileen, too, runs a very creative family (her husband is a music producer who has published on music appreciation for children). The tagline of Homework is “Celebrating Real Life,” and it’s positioned as a lifestyle magazine for people with children, featuring profiles of parents and families of various interests and configurations, as well as Taipei restaurant reviews, recipes, and recommendations for toys, apps, products, books, and music. It’s an approachable sensibility, and a nice addition to the stable of design parenting magazines, which has been lacking ever since Kindling decided to stop publishing after just three issues two years ago. Lately I’ve also been enjoying the offerings from Anorak, which are delightful but a slightly different thing—magazines for children rather than lifestyle magazines for people who happen to have children. Homework positions itself somewhere in the space in between; let’s see how they grow.