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For Eyes and Ears: New Sound Art Serves Different Senses with a Multimodal Approach

The book part of A View of a Landscape includes essays by writers including Fred Moten, Adrienne Edwards, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Thomas Lax (as well as this author, who first wrote about Beasley in 2015). The sound part of the project includes new recordings created by L’Rain, Moor Mother, Jlin, Jason Moran, and more. To all involved, Beasley granted access to an extensive image bank featuring photographs, videos, and other materials related to his work, with an invitation to draw on them however much or little made sense.

In advance of a release-related event at Performance Space in New York on March 23, Beasley spoke with Art in America about mixing mediums, abstaining from authorship, and finding new forms for work that looks backward and forward at once.

What was the genesis for the new book and LP set? When did you start thinking about adding that to the body of work it surveys?

Around 2017 I applied for a grant for a sort of eight-part project that would incorporate a soundproof chamber with a motor running, a listening room, and sculptures, and then some photographs and a publication that would possibly have a record and some writing in it. The publication was something I conceived as another channel for the work and a way to put out images and ideas I’d been trying to reconcile. This predated the idea for the Whitney show, so it was originally intended as an independent project that could work alongside the other works but channeled through a different medium.

What was the original conception for the “View of a Landscape” group of works as a whole?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the South and a kind of material presence of that channels through it, but not so plainly or very clearly. For me, in the studio, there’s always residue that drives my aesthetic choices. And then there’s this push to understand what a site or specific geography does to the way we process things like music or politics or experience. When I would travel from Virginia to New York, the way I would carry myself in different contexts was very actively different. I remember my mom being really specific about garments and clothes that I could or couldn’t wear. Those little details of geography and the way we navigate and move are really particular, and I want to try to in some way make sense of what that is and how we apply it to broader landscapes [and narrower ones], like how we view the relationship between the South and the Deep South.

There are things I’m trying to uncover in the work and in conversations with people who are also trying to uncover them. In a lot of ways, the publication tracks how I’ve moved throughout the United States. I haven’t lived in so many different places, but there are enough touchpoints to sort of graph what experiences of moving are for Black folks in America. For me, that was being in Virginia, and then in Detroit, and then New Haven. All of these places have some kind of fraught relationship, either with intense conservatism that makes it difficult for Black folks to navigate these spaces equitably, or just systemic racism that is manufactured very deeply. The image bank that I provided everyone with had traces of these things, but then seeing how people put things together was really interesting.

How did your idea for the image bank arise?

It’s strange because, even though the publication was an idea that I imagined would represent my work and be an actual object or thing I made, there was a kind of release of authorship. I gave almost 20 people the keys to do what they will and to bring their thoughts and considerations into the fold, and then I assembled that. It allowed me to continue a more collaborative—dare I say curatorial—direction to things that I’m processing. I said, “Here are some images and some stuff I’m thinking about. They may seem very vague, but what is your response? How do you process this?”

There were maybe 1,000 images: images that I’d taken off my family’s property and some videos, but also images of artworks and examples of projects of mine from over the years. It was like a dossier that I could hand to someone to show what I’ve been up to. It was organized by subject matter, but I didn’t provide descriptions for how to use any of it. It was more like, “Here’s some stuff I would like for you to see. Make time to go through and process what it is, and if you have questions, we can talk.” I feel like every artist has a cache of photographs and references and things they’ve collected throughout the years, and it’s just a matter of in what context they share them. I’ve had videos that I only share during a studio visit—I wouldn’t put them in an exhibition. Some things are reserved, and the image bank had items that were of that nature. But after giving them up and releasing them to people who would enter them with a certain amount of consideration and care, I felt like if somebody could justify pulling an image and using it, then that was enough for me to let go of what that thing is and let it live.

Did you have artists books or publications in mind as a model, however directly or indirectly?

We all have box-set LPs that have liner notes, but those are a different form because they don’t necessarily have extensive catalogues showing other aspects of someone’s practice. I really wanted essays for this as well, and it felt like a space to put all of this stuff into. To me it was important for it to exist in this box-set form, with a record in a slipcase in a tight container alongside a book, so that those things could exist on a shelf together.

What sort of prompts did you give to the musicians involved?  

I obviously had ideas around what everyone would contribute, but I think I did a decent job of refusing to guide them. I provided all of them with a set of stems—24 tracks from the recording of the motor—and the only stipulation was that they had to use those as a sort of starting point. But they could do anything they wanted with them. I’ve had some kind of relationship or some sort of proximity with all of them. They were all aware of the of the work already, so they weren’t coming in completely cold. But when I got each track back, I had no idea what they would be.

Were you surprised by any of the contributions, or were any of a kind that was unexpected?

There were quite a few. It’s less surprising in retrospect, because he’s been engaging in performance as of late, but when Fred Moten delivered his essay, he also sent me an audio recording of him reading it. It’s altered a little bit from the text, but I felt like he was wanting to bridge both [parts of the project, the book and the LPs]. I used his recording in one of the musical tracks, and he was happy about it. Some of the essays responded to my work, but also to certain aspects of my life and my family’s life as well. I didn’t really have a lot of expectations, but I was really surprised by how strong those things were. I realized I’ve known everyone involved for a long time, and all these things came from conversations that were natural and didn’t feel forced, all from relationships that have been built over a long period of time. It’s powerful to realize that all of these people have experienced the work in person and have been able to account for that through language in a real palpable way. Having people write about you is weird. It’s a strange experience.

What do you feel like the publication adds to the “A view of a landscape” project overall?

It’s very simple: it adds an object in lots of people’s homes. The attention we paid to it as a physical object was important to me, so that when people get it, they can handle the cotton paper, the plastic surfaces, the different kinds of textures and layering. It’s the first time I’ve been able to have so much input into a widely distributed object. And conceptually, materially, it’s interesting because it’s not so common to get a book wrapped in corrugated plastic.

What is the status of the cotton-gin motor now?

It’s in storage. We’re waiting for its next destination. There are some things being worked on to realize it again. We’ll see what happens…

Adriano Pedrosa has been artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) since 2014, having started after cocurating the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. At MASP, Pedrosa—who was also recently named curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale—has overseen a series of “Histories” exhibitions that began in 2016 with “Histories of Childhood,” followed the next year by “Histories of Sexuality.” His venerated 2018 “Afro-Atlantic Histories” has traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Its next stop is the Dallas Museum of Art.) In October, MASP will mount “Indigenous Histories,” an international survey organized in collaboration with the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, Norway. 

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As told to A.i.A. We are definitely returning to a sense of normality, little by little. In the past year we had some concerns about audience and attendance, and therefore about budgets as well. But we’re slowly getting back. Our “Brazilian Histories” exhibition was quite successful and drew a lot of visitors. We always try to acquire works from our “Histories” exhibitions—it’s the main channel of acquisitions, mostly through gifts from supporters of the museum. We had about 400 works in the exhibition, and we are in the process of acquiring some 45 of them. 

For us, 2023 will be a very special year dedicated to the exhibition “Indigenous Histories.” It has been six years in the planning. “Brazilian Histories” was, of course, focused on Brazilian art and artists; with Covid, that was a way for us to be cautious in terms of loans from abroad and financing. But we are finally getting back to international programming with an exhibition about Indigenous culture, in Brazil but also everywhere [around] the globe. People in the art world are paying attention to that now. 

There’s been a big shift since the late ’80s, when every exhibition in the US and Europe was, basically, European and North American artists. At the end of the ’80s, you started to see exhibitions of Latin American art on the international scene. And then, in the ’90s, that activity increased and became almost a norm. You can’t talk about contemporary art now without including artists from all over the world. Latin America tends to lead the way, but the trend has expanded to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. You see exhibitions organized by curators from these regions all over now. 

I think the last chapter of this will be paying serious attention to institutions and museums outside Europe and America. In the last few years, people have started to take note of what museums in the Global South are doing, and those museums are organizing more ambitious exhibitions in their own right. It’s part of a continuum.

Banner images above, from left to right: Denilson Baniwa, Dead nature 1, 2016 [Courtesy the Artist]; Duhigó, Monkey Hammock, 2019 [Courtesy the Artist]; Adriano Pedrosa [illustration by Denise Nestor]; view of “Brazilian Histories” [photo by Isabella Matheus]; MASP [photo by Eduardo Ortega]

Pedrosa has been artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) since 2014, having started after cocurating the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. At MASP, Pedrosa has overseen a series of “Histories” exhibitions that began in 2016 with “Histories of Childhood,” followed the next year by “Histories of Sexuality.” His venerated 2018 “Afro-Atlantic Histories” has traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Its next stop is the Dallas Museum of Art.) In October, MASP will mount “Indigenous Histories,” an international survey organized in collaboration with the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, Norway. —Andy Battaglia

We are definitely returning to a sense of normality, little by little. In the past year we had some concerns about audience and attendance, and therefore about budgets as well. But we’re slowly getting back. Our “Brazilian Histories” exhibition was quite successful and drew a lot of visitors. We always try to acquire works from our “Histories” exhibitions—it’s the main channel of acquisitions, mostly through gifts from supporters of the museum. We had about 400 works in the exhibition, and we are in the process of acquiring some 45 of them. 

For us, 2023 will be a very special year dedicated to the exhibition “Indigenous Histories.” It has been six years in the planning. “Brazilian Histories” was, of course, focused on Brazilian art and artists; with Covid, that was a way for us to be cautious in terms of loans from abroad and financing. But we are finally getting back to international programming with an exhibition about Indigenous culture, in Brazil but also everywhere [around] the globe. People in the art world are paying attention to that now. 

There’s been a big shift since the late ’80s, when every exhibition in the US and Europe was, basically, European and North American artists. At the end of the ’80s, you started to see exhibitions of Latin American art on the international scene. And then, in the ’90s, that activity increased and became almost a norm. You can’t talk about contemporary art now without including artists from all over the world. Latin America tends to lead the way, but the trend has expanded to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. You see exhibitions organized by curators from these regions all over now. 

I think the last chapter of this will be paying serious attention to institutions and museums outside Europe and America. In the last few years, people have started to take note of what museums in the Global South are doing, and those museums are organizing more ambitious exhibitions in their own right. It’s part of a continuum.

This is a newish mode of work for you. How did you get started on it?

It started during lockdown, when I was revisiting older shoots because I couldn’t see anyone. I wanted to work against the idea of editing a shoot down to one photo, to the decisive moment. Because of the way I shoot, I always felt there was a limitation to that that could be frustrating. I follow the people I shoot, and there’s an exchange—it’s not like trying to grab the essence of someone, or controlling someone. I always wanted to find a way to use multiple images, so I started experimenting when I was in lockdown in Athens, Georgia. Then I started shooting this series properly when I went back to Berlin. Since it was Covid time, it felt very different sharing space with people. In the past I had been shooting people in my studio and erasing the background. But I wanted to do the opposite by going into other people’s spaces. There was a real charge to that.

What does the process for assembling these images entail?

I still shoot analogue, with an old Hasselblad from the ’60s, so I started to work with a process of compressing a roll of film all into one. There are 12 images [in each photo print], but some of them I make so transparent that they’re barely visible. Usually there are between five and nine images that are really noticeable.

How do you then superimpose them? Do you do that on a computer?

Yes. I scan the negatives, and then I stratify and layer them in the same sequence as they were shot. From there I play with the transparency of each, because not all 12 images in a roll are going to be great. Some are just barely visible, or completely transparent. They’re each really completely different. I thought there was going be a system when I first started, but then I realized that every image is completely different.

So there’s a lot of postproduction.

There is, but not in the single images themselves. Every image in a roll of film is treated honestly as a single image, but then they get compiled. I showed some of the first series of these works with Tif Sigrids in Athens in February [in an exhibition titled “In Flux”]. I was trying to stay with a somewhat realistic palette, to keep a kind of neutrality. But then I stopped fighting the fact that the images can change really fast. I didn’t try to compensate, to go against or nullify the process, because certain colors become really strong once you layer them. Layers of blue become more blue. They take on this real intensity. For this show, I just went with it.

It seems like there are some deep wormholes to go down…

I do a lot of them at once. For some, there’ll be like 20 versions. I’ll work on the color on each single one, then they get compiled and I work on the transparency for each. And then once that all comes together, I work on the images and the density and the color again. It’s kind of endless, because you have to make 12 perfect photographs before you even start playing with them.

You mentioned that, before, you more often shot in a studio and then erased backgrounds. What made you want to change from that?

The challenge of it. I shoot on film so it’s limited in terms of the light and everything. I wanted to have to respond to uncontrolled environments. Before, I was abstracting people from their environments to show figures out of context. You would just see the person. But during the pandemic, the idea of home and a sense of place took on a different gravity.

These really seem to ripple and move when you get up close. It’s hard to keep a sense of balance while looking.

There’s a dynamism to the images because the eye is going to try to catch different views. We are trained to recognize faces, so when different ones come at the same time, you see so much more. It’s like things come forward and recede as you travel through. Some of them are kind of lenticular-ish. They’re definitely not fixed.

How did you come up with the title of the show, “What If I Kept Looking”?

I came up with a lot of titles that were a little too analytical or too straightforward. I was trying to find a way to express the idea of duration, of looking not at a single moment but more at the fluidity of longer exposure. My friend Nick Theobald [a painter and sculptor] said it’s kind of like looking at water while being slightly stoned, when things come forward in a succession of moments that come and go. It’s a different experience of time, moving from sequential stop-motion frames and combining them to recreate movement in images. I’m really enjoying it, and I think there’s more to do with this process.

ANDY BATTAGLIA When did you first become conscious of the fact that you lived in the Southwest?

LUCY RAVEN My dad is from New York, and we would visit now and then when I was a kid. My first visit was when I was 5. We went to MoMA. We went to the Bronx, where my grandma lived. It made a big impact on me, and that was the first time I was conscious of where we lived as being really “other.” There was a kind of grounding, another pole, one being Arizona and the other New York.

BATTAGLIA What do you remember first feeling was distinctive about Arizona?

RAVEN One part of it is sensation-based and the other is visual. I still have a physical memory of the feeling of getting into a car on a 110-degree day, when you breathe in and everything around you is hotter than your body temperature. That feels very Tucson-summer to me. It’s hard to place if this came later or not, but visually I remember the horizon. Everywhere you looked would be a horizon, because Tucson is in a basin and there are very few multistory buildings. But it’s not a flat horizon like in Montana or Wyoming—there are mountains all around, so as a kid I had the sense that I was bound by a square. The horizon didn’t feel infinite. There was also something about the way that the streets go through the entire flat city, and then certain of them end and a handful become viaducts into the surrounding desert. I remember traveling through that while looking through a backseat window.

BATTAGLIA Do you remember when you first thought of Arizona as a distinct place within the region as a whole?

RAVEN Growing up, I was conscious of it as a very conservative state. Tucson is a Democratic island in the middle of it, and there’s a rivalry between Tucson and Phoenix, part of which has to do with politics, part with sports. I was aware of our proximity to the border with Mexico and spent time around it on both sides. I knew that Arizona was thought of as conservative, but I didn’t realize to what extent until I moved to New York [in 2001, after graduating from the University of Arizona] and saw people’s reactions when I said I was from there. Until this year, I thought the political situation might be changing, but the tide seems to be turning back again, hard.

BATTAGLIA How would you characterize Arizona’s status within the region itself? In what way is it most unique?

RAVEN This is an area that feels tricky, because it’s hard not to essentialize. I’m interested in the notion of regionalism, but I’m also skeptical of it. Coming up with the core sentiment or property or whatever it is that is Arizona … I don’t know. It’s like I never knew, and I almost know less now. The more I’ve worked out West and also read about it and watched and talked to people, the less I feel like I know. But I do have an immovable relationship to the landscape. It’s embedded in how I look at the world and my relationship to space.

BATTAGLIA When did you first engage with Land art? How far back does that go?

RAVEN I didn’t know much about it in high school, but when I was in college I got really interested in geography and photography, and then the history of large-format and landscape photography. I wrote for a history of photography class on the Central Arizona Project Photographic Survey, which documented the massive aqueduct that brings water from the Colorado River to Tucson. Later, I encountered the work of artists associated with Land art—Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria—and then more process-oriented stuff like work by Robert Morris. One early memory I have is taking off from the Tucson airport and seeing the sewage treatment plants as brightly gradated shapes. I can see now that I first encountered those aspects of industry as an abstraction.

BATTAGLIA When did you begin to think of making artwork related to the Southwest as a subject?

RAVEN I met someone who turned me on to Matthew Coolidge and his Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). I ended up doing a residency there on and off for three years, out of which came several works, including China Town. It was really from New York that I began to think more critically about “the West” as such. The residency was pretty much a trailer on the airstrip of a decommissioned military air base in Wendover, Utah, right on the border of Nevada. When I first got there, Matthew met me, showed me around, took me for lunch at a casino, and told me, “Have a good month.” It was totally independent. There was a map with points of interest, with Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, and other things that were within driving distance. I explored all that stuff from there, but I hadn’t been to any of them before. I just went to The Lightning Field a couple years ago, which was fantastic, interesting, weird.

BATTAGLIA What did you work on during your CLUI residency?

RAVEN My original idea was to make a piece at the Bingham Canyon Mine, which is a massive pit that Smithson wrote about in an essay, describing a proposal for a piece he never made. If you fly into Salt Lake City, you can see it as you’re landing—you see the Great Salt Lake from one side of the airplane and the Bingham pit on the other. You can see it from the moon. It’s one of the biggest holes in the world. It was started and owned by the Guggenheim family. The money that came from their smelting company went into making the museum in New York. It’s an interesting history. But it was tricky to film there to the extent that I wanted, so I ended up making a different project about a real estate development that the current mining company was building atop the old tailings ponds.

China Town started at a different mine, not too far away in Nevada. Where I was staying, in Wendover, a very loud truck would barrel down the otherwise rarely used road every hour, 24 hours a day. It looked like it was carrying ore. I followed one of them one day, and it led me to another mine where they were excavating copper ore, processing it partially on-site, then sending that material to China to be smelted, refined, and sold there. I didn’t set out to make a work about the West. China Town started with questions about a source that was also a giant void—the excavation of a resource that would get broken down and reformed into a conduit of connection through an extremely discontinuous, globalized production process. The recent work I’m thinking of much more as a kind of riff on the genre of the Western.

BATTAGLIA When did you first see Walter De Maria’s 1969 film Hard Core?

RAVEN I saw that in the context of making an “Artists on Artists” piece for Dia with Deantoni Parks. I’d known for a number of years that De Maria was a drummer for the Primitives, a rock band that prefigured the Velvet Underground with members also including Lou Reed and John Cale—who, coincidentally, Deantoni now drums for. The fact that De Maria was a drummer inflected how I thought about his work—the rhythms he set up within individual pieces—and seemed like a way into the relationships in his work between violence, abstraction, and materiality, which I was also thinking about. I was surprised to see Hard Core because it was connected to other structural film that I’m interested in but hadn’t associated with De Maria. It’s really homemade in a way that his sculpture isn’t—you get the sense that he and Michael Heizer are just handing a camera back and forth while doing their shootout scene at the end. There’s a humor to it, despite the long-duration shots and the genre violence. It’s a kind of droll Western.

BATTAGLIA What was the genesis of the idea for Ready Mix?

RAVEN It started in some ways with a residency I did in the Philippines. The location where I found myself was in the lowlands below Mount Pinatubo, which is a massive volcano and the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the 20th century, in 1991. I landed at Clark Air Force Base, the largest base outside the United States. I had been taught in school that the Philippines was a Spanish colony—but not what happened after, when the US purchased it from Spain, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, in 1898, and ruled it as a colonizing power for the next 48 years. There were protests over the presence of Clark for decades after the Philippines gained independence, but the US refused to leave. When Mount Pinatubo erupted, it was so powerful that it extruded lahars, a kind of ashy pyroclastic flow. They’re brutal because they flow like lava and can engulf entire towns and then harden. They call it “wet concrete.” Entire areas were destroyed. The event and its aftermath are what finally pushed the US off the Air Force Base, though it left a Superfund site behind.

Manila is also largely a concrete city, and the master plan in its city center was designed by Daniel Burnham, the grandfather of city planning in the United States. I got interested in that moment in US history when the Gold Rush had ended in California—and with it, some idea of the frontier myth—and the concept of Manifest Destiny was projected farther west. From the Pacific Coast at that time, the Philippines could be seen as an extension of the Western frontier.

BATTAGLIA How do these ideas relate to the form that Ready Mix took?

RAVEN I spend a lot of time in Idaho and knew someone with a concrete plant, so I visited that to see what it was like. One of the things I felt was important to me while thinking through these questions was the material state change that was an element of the lahars. When I went to the concrete plant and saw what could happen there, I started doing some camera experiments, with drones and with different kinds of close-up camerawork. Then Dia got involved.

BATTAGLIA How did that change or inflect your thinking, given Dia’s history?

RAVEN Many of the artists Dia has worked with are part of my personal art history, so a lot of affinities were there already. What was transformative was the support, in every way—production support, but also the legacy of how Dia had worked in decades past supporting ideas for longer-term projects, allowing the scale to take shape in a way that didn’t feel restricted.

BATTAGLIA What was the genesis of the idea for your Demolition of a Wall works?

RAVEN I had been researching various imaging techniques through which you can arrive at an image without an object—without a subject, essentially—while still capturing movement. I had been looking at several 19th-century techniques that can register changes in light’s movement, through heat or pressure, as a density gradient. In some ways my interest in this dates back to the initial CLUI residency in 2005, because that airport in Wendover is where the Enola Gay took off from to drop the atomic bomb. I became very interested in Harold Edgerton’s work and the images he made of the early stages of atomic bomb detonation: those images look cellular. They were made with a rapatronic camera that Edgerton developed as a commission from the military to understand what the bomb looked like before a mushroom cloud formed. The kind of camera I used for Demolition of a Wall is a different system, but comes out of an evolution of those ideas. I spent some time in Berlin and did research in Ernst Mach’s photographic archives there. He was the first person to photograph shock waves; we got “Mach speed” from him.

BATTAGLIA Why did you choose New Mexico as a setting for the Demolition works?

RAVEN I knew I wanted the landscape to be primary to the piece, which meant shooting outside. The techniques I used are more often employed in an interior lab context, but in pursuing what might be possible on an outdoor explosives range, I was introduced to an engineering professor specializing in optics, Michael Hargather, at New Mexico Tech, a mining college in Socorro that’s connected to a blast site. I think of the Demolition works as series of short films, rather than one longer narrative film. It’s more in the tradition of what Tom Gunning called the “cinema of attractions,” very early pre-narrative cinema where just one thing happens and makes up a film—one gag, one spectacle, one gesture. Shock waves from one explosion pass across the screen, that’s the movie.

BATTAGLIA You’ve talked about Ready Mix and Demolition of a Wall as two parts of a trilogy of Westerns. What does that mean to you exactly?

RAVEN My focus, rather than being based on narrative or characters, is on material and material state change. I think of Ready Mix as something to do with solids moving into a granular form and then into sludge before being reformed back into a solid. Demolition of a Wall has to do with air, pressure, force, extreme speed, histories of speed tests, and legacies of nuclear radiation and fallout. The third part of the trilogy will have to do more with fluid dynamics and water.

We all have an idea of what a “Western” is in our minds, and, with that as a baseline, I like thinking about it as a genre category. There are other genres I’m thinking about too, most specifically horror. But there’s a way to think of Westerns as horror too, if a Western is the telling of the genocidal fighting-it-out for property and land ownership.

This interview also appears in the November 2022 print issue of Art in America, pp. 62-65, along with a pull-out print by the artist.

Most recently, Palmer was a curator at New York’s Public Art Fund, which he joined in 2016. While he there, he oversaw exhibitions and major commissions for artists such as Melvin Edwards, Awol Erizku, Carmen Herrera, Harold Ancart, Tony Oursler, and Liz Glynn.

He previously worked as a curator at the Jewish Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has written for publications including the New York Times, Mousse, Kaleidoscope, and ARTnews. (His 2016 ARTnews essay titled “Go Pro: The Hyper-Professionalization of the Emerging Artist” proved prescient in ways revealing themselves still.)

Palmer’s move coincides with the 10th anniversary of the museum at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In a statement, Kari Herrin, executive director of SCAD museums and exhibitions, said, “Daniel Palmer is a prolific curator who brings to SCAD MOA a wealth of knowledge and experience and a dedication to representation, amplifying the voices and impact of international artists. As we usher in an exciting second decade, Daniel will be an inspiring curatorial and programming leader who will move the museum forward with vision and tenacity.”

Palmer, for his part, said, “It’s an honor to continue this dynamic institution’s mission of bringing emerging and eminent artists to inspire students and the community at a pioneering university like SCAD. I look forward to leading the museum’s superb team as we encourage creativity and spark dialogue in idyllic Savannah.”

Readers of the 840-page book, which consists of daily memories dictated over the phone and edited down by Warhol confidante Pat Hackett before publication in 1989, come across all kinds of information. Some of it is numbingly banal (recitations of petty gossip, records of dollar-amounts spent on taxi rides), while some of it is impossibly glamorous (nights out at Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger, meeting the Pope at the Vatican). Part of the thrill of reading the Diaries, for those who find it a thrill at all, lies in learning how to reconcile one kind of discovery with another kind that might be its opposite, in a way that makes the plain parts interesting and the interesting parts plain. For those who fall under Warhol’s sway, the process can be perspective-changing in the way that it is exciting and inspiring to watch one of Warhol’s long and plodding—or even entirely static—films. As Warhol himself wrote in his book Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980), “That had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or on a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or a play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way.”

That ascetic approach presents a challenge to a documentary treatment of The Andy Warhol Diaries that seems insurmountable early on, when the mundanity of so much of what is featured runs in opposition to the need for it to be, somehow, dramatized. As has become common for documentaries on TV, re-enactments are frequent, with a would-be Warhol stand-in shown from behind or otherwise in obscured views shuffling around at home and going about his day. The effect is jarring at first, but it becomes innocuous enough as the rhythm of such scenes fits into the first episode’s slow and patient pacing (which grows even slower and more patient in the five episodes that follow, each around an hour long).

More eyebrow-raising is the presence of narration by a simulation of Warhol’s voice made by way of artificial intelligence. Drawing on text-to-speech technology layered with recorded readings by an actor (Bill Irwin), the digital simulacrum of a voice effectively recites the diary entries as Warhol originally transmitted them over the phone. It would seem to be a terrible idea, and moments are rare when awareness of the post-human process is not top-of-mind. But it turns out, against all odds, that the novelty of it not only works but, in fact, becomes surprisingly moving as the series progresses. It may well be that employing “deepfake” voice simulation is bad in every way in every other instance, but Warhol—a stoic cipher who tried to speak as little as he could and, when forced to, made a game of evasion—proves to be a special case, especially as much of the subject matter of the Diaries is highly emotional in ways that the artist himself never was in a clearly articulated way.

Andy Warhol in The Andy Warhol Diaries.

The emotional highs and lows of the Diaries are the main focus of the series, which has been advertised with the tag line “The art you know. The artist you don’t.” And not just emotional highs and lows in general but particular manifestations of each pertaining to Warhol’s love life and his relationship with different aspects of gender and sexuality.

The first episode makes quick work of Warhol’s rise, from his upbringing as a child of Slovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh to his ascent to stardom in New York, before settling into the years when the text of the Diaries begins, in 1976. The rush of the formative Factory years comes to a decisive breaking point after Warhol is shot and nearly killed by S.C.U.M. Manifesto author Valerie Solanas in 1968, after which point the glam-minded artist turned more guarded and private—and also fell in love with Jed Johnson, an interior designer who moved in with him to help him convalesce.

The air of domesticity that Johnson and Warhol cultivated together in Warhol’s townhouse on the Upper East Side is a focus of the first two episodes, which move back and forth between Warhol’s evolution as a “business artist” painting pricey portraits on commission and his much more secretive private life. Johnson’s twin brother Jay Johnson speaks openly and movingly about the relationship that his brother (who died in 1996, in a commercial plane crash) tried to nurture before Warhol started to squirm. At one point in episode two, Warhol speaks (via the simulated voice) of blushing when Jed Johnson’s parents paid a visit and thanked him for being so nice to their son. But as they spent more time together, Warhol began to devote himself to nightlife debauchery at destinations such as Studio 54, seemingly as a way to be away from home. By the end of the episode, their relationship has fizzled, with more than enough sadness to go around.

Enter Jon Gould, an executive at Paramount Pictures to whom Warhol started sending flowers in an exerted effort at courtship that surprised everyone around him. Bob Colacello, one of the artist’s closest associates at the time and author of the 1990 Warhol tell-all Holy Terror, notes that, like Johnson, Gould also had a twin brother—perfect for Warhol’s “fascination with twins, which is very Pop art. Repetition. Andy loved repetition.” That Gould could pass as straight and often did is of great interest to Rossi, the director, who devotes the bulk of episodes three and four to Warhol and Gould. Through differing degrees of closeness and distance, the two of them seemed to navigate happy times—such as a group trip with friends to Cape Cod captured with amazingly intimate personal video—while remaining a mystery to those around them. At one point, Colacello says, “I remember Steve Rubell, who Andy sort of confided in … Steve once said to me, ‘Jon Gould just dances naked for Andy, and that’s their idea of sex and whatever.’ … I love that Tallulah Bankhead comment when she learned that Montgomery Clift was gay, and she said, ‘How would I know? He never sucked my cock.'”

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Tension between the asexual aura that Warhol projected and the queerness he was so clearly enamored with remains a focal point of the series as it ventures into other subjects, such as Warhol’s collaboration on a series of paintings in the 1980s with Jean-Michel Basquiat. At one point, dealer Larry Gagosian says, “I’m not a big fan of collaborations. Commercially I think they’re problematic. A lot of time, like oil on water, it just doesn’t make sense. But that really clicked.”

Colacello says Warhol “was fascinated with Jean-Michel, in both a paternal and homosexual way.” While their work together brought both artists helpful bursts of attention (Warhol’s fame was flagging at the time), their relationship was complicated. In one of his many appearances throughout the series, the artist Glenn Ligon says, “I think it is possible to hold two opposing views at the same time. There’s a lot of affection there, even though in the Diaries and other places he says horrible things about Basquiat.” (The show then cuts to a Diaries entry that reads: “I think he’s going to be the Big Black Painter. I think Jean Michel’s early stuff is better … how many screaming Negroes can you do?”)

While it comes up as a subject in several instances starting early in the series, the specter of HIV/AIDS and the ways it devastated queer communities in New York becomes a dominating presence in the later episodes. A lot of time is devoted to a storied Diana Ross concert in Central Park in 1983 that was beset by a Biblical downpour of rain, with ominous symbolism lost on no one involved. Gould was a producer of the concert, and the way it’s represented in the series makes it seem like one of those moments that, as Don DeLillo wrote of the assassination of JFK, “broke the back of the American century.”

Warhol’s fear of AIDS features prominently in the Diaries in the ’80s, with many entries similar to one about Calvin Klein: “And then Calvin came in, and he kissed me so hard and his beard was stubbly, and I was so afraid that it was piercing into my pimple and being like a needle giving me AIDS. So if I’m gone in three years…”

The Netflix series is very powerful on the subject of AIDS, and it sets the epidemic well into the context of Warhol’s interest in religious art late in his life. It also figures until the very end, as Warhol’s fear of hospitals and all that they represent haunted his experience of the gall-bladder surgery that ultimately killed him at the age of 58. (After putting off the surgery for years, Warhol went through with the procedure but suffered a heart attack in recovery.)

The series is also very powerful for what it reveals about an artist who occasioned so many different kinds of revelation around him. Rossi seems to have earned the trust of the confidants and observers he interviewed, soliciting considered and contemplative ruminations from the likes of Bob Colacello, Christopher Makos, Vincent Fremont, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn Ligon, Lucy Sante, John Waters, Rob Lowe, Fred “Fab Five Freddy” Brathwaite, Greg Tate, Benjamin Liu, and Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh who shares perceptive readings of artworks and finds from the artist’s archive. Rossi also seems to have dived deeply into an enigmatic text that holds secrets far more revealing than what shines most brightly on the surface.

In moving footage from a memorial for Warhol at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, John Richardson, the distinguished art historian, says, “Although Andy was perceived, with some justice, as a passive observer, I’d like to recall a side of him that he hid from all but his closest friends: his spiritual side. Those of you may be surprised that such a side existed. But exist it did, and it’s the key to the artist’s psyche. The knowledge of this secret piety inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, and glamour. And that he was cool to the point of callousness.”

Speaking in a way for the thoughtful and sensitive Netflix series as a whole, Richardson continues, “Never take Andy at his face value. The callous observer was in fact a recording angel, and Andy’s detachment, the distance he established between himself and the world, was, above all, a matter of innocence and a matter of art.”

Among the fair’s offerings presented by some 65 galleries from all over, a special booth titled “Maps and Legends: Featuring Works from the Collection of Michael Stipe” includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Thornton Dial, St. EOM, Dilmus Hall, Bessie Harvey, Howard Finster, R.A. Miller, Royal Robertson, Juanita Rogers, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, and other artists engaged by Stipe beginning in his early days as a student at the University of Georgia. The exhibition was curated by Phillip March Jones, founder of the new March Gallery in New York’s East Village and formerly a director at Andrew Edlin Gallery, the namesake shop of the Outsider Art Fair’s director. (Jones also founded Institute 193, a nonprofit art space in Lexington, Kentucky.)

While he was working on gathering works for the exhibition, Stipe spoke with ARTnews from his home in Athens, Georgia, about his history with different kinds of folk art, his visual work with R.E.M., and what he learned from teachers he still reveres.

ARTnews: What initially interested about the prospect of showing outsider artwork from your collection? What was the genesis of the idea?

Michael Stipe: I’ve had a long interest in what we would call outsider artists or untrained artists. I grew up here in Athens, Georgia, surrounded by them and integrated that into the work that I did as the visual deputy for R.E.M., bringing work from several people who are part of the show into the artwork for different albums over the years. Andrew Edlin Gallery [run by the Outsider Art Fair’s owner] is really close to my apartment in New York, and I’ve been stopping by for years to see what he’s up to. Andrew approached me because he knew I had a collection. I don’t think of myself—and never have thought of myself—as a collector, but I have bought things over the years that I found inspiring and wanted to live with. That became, over the course of my long life, quite a collection. The idea of being able to share it with people is really thrilling for me.

ARTnews: The title for the Outsider Art Fair show is “Maps and Legends.” What resonates most about that reference for you?

Stipe: That was [curator Phillip March Jones’s] idea. The presentation is centered mostly on Southeastern artists, people I either met or whose work I came in contact with in the 1980s and ’90s. “Maps and Legends” is a reference to the Southeast and clearly a reference to an R.E.M. song that I wrote way back—I don’t remember which record it’s on, but it’s one of the early ones…

ARTnew: It’s on Fables of the Reconstruction.

Stipe: That makes sense—that’s in keeping thematically with that body of work.

ARTnews: How far back do you trace your interest in this kind of folk art or whatever we might choose to call it? What was the very beginning of it?

Stipe: It’s what was available to me, not living in a city center. Traveling through cities, museums and galleries were available to me going back to 1979. I distinctly remember seeing a Peter Hujar photograph in a small show that I went to in New York that radically altered the way I thought about portraiture, the human body, portrayals of sexuality, and what have you. But my teachers at art school, at the University of Georgia, were very interested in the outsider artists who were available to us, like Howard Finster and St. EOM (Eddie Owens Martin) and Dilmus Hall and Billy Lemming (though I never met him—the one time I tried to meet him, he ran inside when he saw me; he was quite shy, and he wouldn’t answer when I knocked on the door). I never met Juanita Rogers or Bessie Harvey, but I wish I had.

ARTnews: Who were some of your early teachers in this context?

Stipe: The interest really came from Andy Nasisse, who taught sculpture at the University of Georgia. He had a huge collection of outsider artists’ work here in Athens. I would go to his house and ask him questions about the stuff he had. He and I traveled to Mexico in 1987, all around the Yucatan Peninsula with Jeremy Ayers. The three of us traveled around for three weeks and visited artists and Toltec and Aztec ruins. I found artifacts on the ground—it was insane.

Through Andy Nasisse, I met Jim Herbert—he was not as interested in outsider artists, but when we became acquainted with R.A. Miller, he followed the band up to Gainesville [Georgia] to R.A.’s house, which was on this hill with all these whirligigs on it, like hundreds of whirligigs. At that point R.A. was just selling them locally. Jim followed the band up there to shoot footage for a video for us to turn into MTV. At the time, we were not creating video content that they were asking for. We just said, ‘Fuck you, we’re going to do our own thing.’ Jim was so inspired by the footage that he got that he did an entire album-side-long film called Left of Reckoning, which you can find on YouTube. It’s very beautiful. We decided to include it as a part of the [Outsider Art Fair exhibition] because it shows this environment at its absolute peak, with four handsome guys in our mid-20s wandering around. It’s a beautiful Jim Herbert film. I’m so thrilled to have been able to collaborate with Jim as a filmmaker on many R.E.M. videos, but that one in particular is stunning.

ARTnews: Did you send it to MTV?

Stipe: Oh, yeah. And they showed it on the show on Sunday night that that was for indie music…

ARTnews: 120 Minutes?

Stipe: Yeah, I think it was. They wouldn’t show it with their regular programing—it was too weird for them.

ARTnews: Who were some other formative influences, outsider-art-wise?

Stipe: There was Art Rosenbaum, who was also a teacher of mine. Art and his wife Margo are renowned throughout the folk-music world for having made field recordings all around the South, including The McIntosh County Shouters: Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia, which is one of the most stunning field recordings ever made. Their interests in that continue to this day. Margo is also an astonishing photographer—she recently released a self-published book that I’ve been looking through, and it’s marvelous. It’s unbelievable the mixture of people she photographed. There are all these legendary people going back to the 1960s that she and Art had access to—Elaine de Kooning and James Baldwin among many others.

I also met Tom Patterson. He’s from North Carolina, and he traveled all through the Southeast; he would spend time in Athens and use it as a kind of base to go visit people like St. EOM, Howard Finster, R.A. Miller, J.B. Murray, and Athens’s own Dilmus Hall. And then Roger Manley, who is now the director of North Carolina State University’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design. I think the thing that all these people have in common is that their understanding of what these artists were doing allowed them to put it alongside contemporary artists who were trained, or modern artists who were exalted, and see the parallels between, for instance, a Jasper Johns and a Billy Lemming, or a Duchamp and a Leroy Person. They saw these incredible connections by not separating artists into “went to Yale, studied art” vs. “grew up in a shack, never had electricity.” They acknowledged that these are people who, for whatever reason, had to create, and this was what was available to them, either through the mediums that they chose or the education that they had or did not have. That’s something that was profoundly important to my art education: being able to look at something like a Leroy Person and put it in a timeline with a contemporary or modern artist who I also appreciated.

ARTnews: Who among these artists were you the closest with? Would it have been Howard Finster?

Stipe: Yeah, we had a true friendship. I believe it began when he came and gave a speech at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia in Athens. I went as a student. I think Andy Nasisse recommended it and said, ‘Oh, you have to check out this artist. He’s amazing.’ That introduced Howard to the entire Athens punk-rock scene. And then R.A. Miller I had a friendship with. I went to his house time and again and would just hang out with him. He’d show me his chickens and we’d talk about how funny they looked. I really loved that guy. He was he was an incredible, warm, gentle, very, very smart and very funny human being. And he was a preacher at one point: I come from a line of preachers, so I have a deep appreciation for that. You know, the kind of the levity of humor that comes men of God. Howard had that as well.

ARTnews: What was your relationship with Howard Finster like?

Stipe: Spending time with Howard was like spending time with me when I’ve had a double espresso. You just basically sat and listened. There was no real exchange—he was just jacked all the time. And he had “the sugars,” which was diabetes; he would have a couple coffees with sugar and just go. If you could connect the dots and follow along, then you were doing well. With R.A. there was much more of a give-and-take, and he understood that we were artists who were doing our own thing through music and working with them through the through the graphic art that was going along with the music. They understood that we were out in the world and that their work was going to be seen by a wider audience because of my interest. I was thrilled to be able to offer that to these artists who were doing incredible work and were sweet people.

ARTnews: Did they have did they ever share their thoughts on the band or the music you were making at the time?

Stipe: They had younger people around them who had a clearer understanding of what we were doing and where we sat in the lineage of American music. I think they had an understanding of it, but I don’t know that they sat around and listened to it.

ARTnews: A drawing by Juanita Rogers features on the back cover of R.E.M.’s Life Rich Pageant, and Howard Finster’s work features in the “Radio Free Europe” video and also the Reckoning cover art. Was there other such stuff that figured in the R.E.M. visual sphere?

Stipe: There was there was an early merchandise item that we sold that was completely designed by Howard, a handkerchief with a beautiful drawing of his that will be in the show. It shows the four of us, and it’s the size of a record album—12 by 12. It’s a very sweet and funny Howard piece.

ARTnews: Oh wow. Can you find any of those out in the world?

Stipe: I don’t think you could…

ARTnews: Here’s one on eBay, for $349.99.  

Stipe: Good Lord. Well… [Editor’s note: The lot available at the time is no longer online.] Our friendship with Howard I’m really proud of. “Radio Free Europe” was our first music video and we were like, “We’re not going to do what MTV wants—we’re going to do what we want.” And what we wanted was to go to Howard’s Paradise Garden and create a little narrative there. So that’s what we did.

ARTnews: Some of the work in the Outsider Art Fair is for sale. What made you want to part with it after all this time?

Stipe: I’m at that point in my life where I’m getting rid of things and rethinking belongings and material things. I’m reexamining and rethinking what I have around me. I’m clearing out a bunch of stuff, getting rid of a lot of things.

ARTnews: You’ve spent a lot of time in Athens during the pandemic. Is there something about being in the South that makes you commune with or think about this kind of work differently than you might elsewhere?

Stipe: I think there’s an acceptance and understanding across the South that might surprise people. For people who take their own path and people who choose to live on the fringe or to follow certain urges, it seems like there’s an acceptance here that is unwritten and [different from] other issues and other concerns that are often associated with the South. There’s a tolerance within what we think of as a very intolerant place for people to be who they are and to allow for that, and that’s something that I don’t think has ever been really fully understood. I feel like I have to defend the South quite often, and sometimes I’m deeply embarrassed by the choices that are made by people here. But then I remind myself that, you know, the state of Georgia alone gave us Jessye Norman, James Brown, and the B-52s. Gosh, that’s not bad. Throw in Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr., and Georgia’s looking pretty good, along with a lot of a lot of people who are quite easy to disregard or hate.

An alternative response is to say that there’s something in the water here in Athens. I don’t know how to explain what it is, but there’s something about here. It might be that we are at the end of a mountain range—a big part of Georgia and the Carolinas is the end of a huge, very old mountain range moving into the Piedmont. There’s just something very special here. I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t know what it is, but I feel it, and it’s very strong. For someone who has never felt at home anywhere, this place as a base for me is profoundly important. And I feel like that strongly resonates in the work of a lot of the people we’re talking about.

In a statement, National Gallery director Gabriele Finaldi said, “Covid-19 had a catastrophic impact on the arts and culture sector. As we move beyond the pandemic, it’s vital that we build on our strengths and, respond to challenges and opportunities. Underpinning these proposals is a concrete desire to build the foundations of the Gallery’s future, consolidating our role as the nation’s art gallery.”

He continued: “With millions of visitors each year, it’s vital that we futureproof our buildings and reinvigorate the public realm immediately surrounding them. We are delighted to launch the first stage of public consultation and welcome feedback on these early concept designs.”

Annabelle Selldorf, the founder of Selldorf Architects, said, “The entire design team has worked very hard alongside the National Gallery to develop a brief that celebrates the Gallery’s historic setting, whilst also providing a better, more welcoming and inclusive experience for visitors. The development of a new and truly accessible Research Center, open to anyone interested in studying and learning more about art, as well as opening up the spaces of the ground floor and bringing more light into the Sainsbury Wing, are primary examples of this.”

Information related to the undertaking can be found here.

Along with the film, Kline’s show—which runs through April 9—also includes related photo works, sculpture, and installation. All of the work is a continuation of an ongoing project titled Climate Change, first shown at 47 Canal gallery in New York in 2019 and, as an exhibition description designates it, “part of a larger cycle of installations concerned with the unfolding political, economic, technological, and biological changes that will shape life in the 21st century.”

To learn more about Adaptation and the context in which it is being shown, ARTnews conducted an interview with Kline over email.

ARTnews: The film has a distinctive look and sensibility. What kinds of reference points did you have in mind when first conceiving of it?

Josh Kline: During pre-production, in 2019, I was thinking a lot about Alien and the original Blade Runner—both of which used analog special effects like scale models, matte paintings, blue screen, etc. These techniques are more grounded in reality than CGI—there are real objects with real lights shining on them. This approach is free of the associations that contemporary tools of digital image manipulation are burdened with, especially their relationship to post-truth technologies and disinformation. They’re more honest about engineering a fiction. I also love the really creative low-budget special effects used in BBC sci-fi from the ’60s and ’70s. Working with these tools is something that I’ve wanted to do for years. The style of CGI animation that’s defined so much video art in the last 10 years (including my own work) had become a negative reference for me. I want to run far away from it.

The costume design in Alien and Blade Runner is really interesting—their approach to portraying working people in space. Science-fiction novels by Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, both of whom frequently depict labor in the future, have had a lasting influence on my thinking as well. So much science fiction comes equipped with main characters who are heroes—single individuals or small groups of individuals who change the world. I want to get away from heroes. Adaptation isn’t a film about a special person saving the world, it’s about ordinary people who will have to clean up after a catastrophe they haven’t made—and live inside it. The same way we’re all living through the Covid pandemic.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about French Impressionism and its historical context over the last few years. Paintings from the late 19th century of the French bourgeoisie at leisure on their day off. In Adaptation, I wanted to show working people in their time off—at rest—even if it is inside a dystopia. In this world, work is an ugly necessity. I wanted to leave that work to the imagination and show the work crew at the center of the film off the clock on their own time. After everything we’ve all seen in the last two years, I think it’s crystal clear for everyone now that the Protestant work ethic is a fraud—part of a cruel pyramid scheme masquerading as an economy.

Josh Kline, Adaptation (film still), 2019-2022.

ARTnews: How did you discuss with Galcher Lustwerk what you wanted from the soundtrack? What sort of language did you use in talking it through?

Kline: I’ve been a fan of Galcher Lustwerk’s music for some time and had been listening to his album Information a lot in 2019. Galcher mostly makes minimal techno and house, but this album starts with an ambient track that’s bursting with feeling. And I love the synths and the music under his beats. In my early conversations with Galcher, in 2020, about composing music for the film, I was referencing his own music a lot, basically asking him to make an ambient soundtrack—and sharing which of his tracks I responded to. Some of the other references I shared with Galcher in our early conversations were A Guy Called Gerald’s album Black Secret Technology, this album Las Vegas by Burger/Ink (which is Wolfgang Voigt), and music by Gas (which is also Voigt), Drexciya, and Vangelis.

Galcher came back to me with some initial ideas that were really minimal. The drafts had this feeling of loneliness, isolation, and sadness that really spoke to not only the mood of the film but the feeling of being in quarantine during Covid (at least my experience of it). He came back later with more embellished versions, but in the end we stripped it all back to his original sketches—which were spot on.

ARTnews: How did you arrive at the title Adaptation?

Kline: Adaptation was originally a working title, but it outlasted all my other ideas. The film is about these people who have no choice other than to get on with it in a radically transformed world—in most ways a devastated world. When scientists talk about Climate Adaptation, it means accepting the reality that it’s too late to reverse much of the damage that’s been done—that a great deal of change is now baked in. The Paris Climate Agreement targets that the governments of the world are almost certainly not going to meet already assume a violent rise in sea levels and hundreds of millions of deaths. That’s the least bad scenario we’re facing later this century. Climate Adaptation means building sea walls, relocating populations, basically planning realistically based on the science—moving beyond denial and wishful thinking. For me, Adaptation, especially after the last two years, means trying to save as much as we can and preventing as much suffering as possible. It’s about claiming dignity, joy, hope, and some basic humanity in the middle of an inherited dystopia.

ARTnews: There’s a line of dialogue in the film in which someone says, “There is oxygen in the water. But not for you.” What were you trying to evoke with that?

Kline: It’s about the flood water that’s coming as a kind of denial. Human beings breathe oxygen—without it we die. There’s actually a lot of oxygen in sea water—and it sustains animal life. But not us. The oxygen becomes a metaphor for New York—which for me and 8 million other people is home. If you flood it even six feet high, all the streets are gone along with the sidewalks, the subways, all the infrastructure that makes it a functional city. It becomes impossible to live here. New York ceases to be a human place and becomes part of the sea—a place for animals with gills instead of for animals with lungs. People in the future will be able to visit, but they won’t be able to stay. They won’t be able to make a home here. The pandemic has made me conscious of breathing in a way I never have been before because of the masks we rely on to keep us safe in so many places (and because I have asthma).

ARTnews: The press release reads: “Originally intended as an image of resilience and survival, as the global health crisis continues, the film takes on additional meanings in relation to our current moment in history.” How did it change in your eyes, and did your recognition of it in-process affect the way you finished it?

Kline: I shot the footage for the film in 2019 and made my rough cut in early 2020 before lockdown. I made a second pass through the edit in April and May 2020 during lockdown in Brooklyn. My feelings about the meaning of the film had absolutely changed. The silent empty city, the scene where the divers disinfect themselves after coming out of the water—this all suddenly felt like it was about the present as well as the future. The cast were already supposed to be the equivalent of construction workers in the future—climate refugees returning to work in their former home. Working on the film in 2020, they became essential workers. Because of all this I recorded new voiceovers and wrote the text that accompanies the film. I sent microphones to the actors and directed them on Zoom in summer 2020.

Josh Kline, Adaptation (production still), 2019-2022.

ARTnews: What about the medium of film most interested you, in terms of turning to it for your own work?

Kline: I studied film in college (I went to film school at Temple University in Philly), and I worked for 10 years as a video art curator at Electronic Arts Intermix, so the moving image has always been the foundation of everything I do as an artist. In college I turned against film. I saw it as anti-democratic compared to video. As a college student, it was more expensive to work with film and in some ways more wasteful. Now, though, working in the context of crewed shoots, collaborating with cinematographers who know how to work with film, the economics of shooting film or video aren’t that different—for film you just shoot less and plan ahead so you can be more economical with footage.

I feel like video from the last decade has a very specific look—slick HD video, hyperrealistic CGI animation, and graphics inspired by and critiquing (or glamorizing) commercial imagery. This kind of video art is everywhere. Film as a medium, because of its long use in cinema—and in sci-fi movies—is largely free of those associations. If video art looks like 2013 right now, film can look like anything. It isn’t tied to any time. There’s also a deep nostalgia that comes with film that I want to tap into and work with. I wanted to make the audience feel a nostalgia for the present and feel the possibility of its loss. Because of how omnipresent it is on social media and how it’s being manipulated to spread lies and disinformation, video feels less honest now than film, and I didn’t want to make another work about deception.

ARTnews: How much or little do you think of elements in a film as “sculptural”?

Kline: I approach filmmaking (or making videos) in the same exact way that I approach sculpture and installation. The difference is that with moving image works, the audience can’t walk around inside the work—the camera and the edit frame what the viewer sees. But on set, you actually can walk around in the world I’m building. It’s temporarily a real place. I consider the design of a set, the color, the materials, all the elements that it’s built from exactly the way I plan all my other three-dimensional work. On set, the camera becomes a proxy for the eyes of the viewer. I think about cinematography in the same way I think about looking at art. It’s recording the experience of looking at an artwork. For me screen space is installation space. And in my actual installations vice versa—exhibition space is media space.

ARTnews: How did you conceive of the sculpture and photo-based works to be shown alongside it? How much are they connected to the film versus meant to be regarded on their own?

Kline: Both Adaptation and the other works in the show at LAXART are all part of a larger installation called Climate Change. The melting wax sculpture, Consumer Fragility Meltdown, was originally shown at 47 Canal in New York, and the photographs being washed away by water in their frames were in the Whitney Biennial—both in 2019. The sculptures aren’t directly connected to the film, but the film and the sculptures were all imagined as part of a larger whole. With projects like Climate Change, I make an installation in parts, as exhibition space and financial support that comes along with it becomes possible. All my sculpture and moving image work is intended to be able to stand on its own, but when brought together with the other work that it was conceived with, it becomes another thing entirely—another artwork.

ARTnews: Given that this is your first institutional show in L.A., does the sense of place hold any special significance to you?

Kline: L.A., and California in general, has had a massive influence on my work. Going there for the first time from the East Coast was a revelation. It’s the truest urban expression of postwar America’s urban ambitions. Also, it’s the origin point of so much of our culture—what we think of as Blue America. A lot of it started in California.