I use myself as a model, but I don’t think of my works as self-portraits. Portraits talk about characters in more specific ways, whereas I just use myself as the model because it’s convenient, and because I don’t want to objectify anyone else. In this particular painting, I used two versions of the same model. The couch image has usually been seductive in nature, with a nude spread out and being relatively sexy. I’m painting myself, an older person, in contrast to that. One image is of my older body in a seductive pose, but the second image, [the one on the cover], shows me in a much more defensive posture. The figure is holding her arm up, almost as if warding off the viewer. 

The painting is a kind of play on vulnerability and power. This has everything to do with how the image of the female in art—in the past and even in the present—has always played on issues of vulnerability and seduction. But rarely does that woman have agency in any of that. She’s shown as passive. I’ve been interested in reversing some of that power dynamic.

I handled one body in a relatively realistic way; the other one is more expressive. I’ve always been interested in finding ways to use various styles without conforming to any one stylistic model. In Couch Diptych, I’m handling the paint in an expressionistic way and also in a more restrained way, trying to make them work together. At six feet high, this painting is pretty much within the scale that I typically work on, except because it’s a diptych with two panels—it’s double the width. I like painting my figures larger-than-life because I’m interested in iconic figuration rather than narrative figuration. I’ve always wanted my figures to feel iconic rather than to tell a story. 

By doubling the figure, I’m trying to break down the static nature of figurative painting. When you see one image superimposed over another, you start to feel motion and time. I don’t want to create static images that get imprinted as some kind of definition of an individual. Paintings are always an image of that individual in one moment of time. Time is built by layers of images, one over another.   

—As told to Emily Watlington

There was the man who rudely broke up with her by email. She had this document analyzed by 107 women, including linguists, clairvoyants, and even a female parrot, then turned their annotations into an installation titled after its final line: Take Care of Yourself (2007). There’s the man, Monsieur Henri B., whom she followed to Venice for Suite Vénitienne (1980). And there’s Paul Auster, the male author who based a character off her for his novel Leviathan. Calle responded by interpreting his metaphors and hyperboles as literal instructions, adopting, for instance, a monochromatic diet (orange on Monday, red on Tuesday, and so on) turning it all into a work of her own.

Recently, the French artist was asked to take on art history’s least invisible man—Picasso—when the Musée Picasso in Paris approached her for a show. Tourists from across the globe flock to that museum, seeking masterpieces by the famed Spanish painter; this year marks half a century since his death. Calle decided to keep just ten of his works on view, but most are occluded. For her, the weight of his presence was intense enough without having to show her work alongside his. With the exhibition, she figures Picasso as a ghost who haunts the work of many artists.

The weight of Picasso’s legacy made Calle reflect on what, exactly, she will one day leave behind. And so, she moved everything out of her apartment and into the museum, asking an auction house to inventory all her belongings. She’s not calling it a retrospective, but in the museum’s galleries, viewers get a career-spanning survey of the ideas she spent her life generating.

In several cases, she refashioned old works for a new setting. Her site-specific 1991 intervention commemorating masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is here reconfigured in a series called “The Phantom Picassos.” Five of his major paintings are covered with large curtains, then embroidered with descriptions Calle collected from museum staff memories while the works were away on loan. She also dedicated a floor to projects she never finished, and arranged works from her personal collection (by the likes of Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Christian Boltanski) to approximate the dimensions of Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

With this show, as in all Calle works, absence is present—Picasso is in the basement, but his spirit is felt on all floors. Below, the artist talks about how her practice can veer into obsession.

With all of your stuff gone from your apartment, where are you living?

Right now, I’m in the Hotel Grand Amour, but I change every month. [The auction house] Drouot made my inventory; I didn’t decide which objects they’d take. I got the idea after going to a sale of furniture owned by a friend of mine. It included a table I’d eaten at for 50 years, and I realized I could not buy it for myself. Suddenly, it had lost its soul and become just another object. I felt similarly when I saw my objects installed—it was as if they were no longer mine.

I have a few months to decide whether they will come back to my house; currently, they are not for sale. For the show, I made several catalogues: one is the inventory, and another is the ghost of that inventory—a book that tells the stories behind the objects. Picasso once said that he wanted to show the paintings that are behind his paintings, and I wanted to do the same with my objects.

You’re often respond to terms laid out for you by someone else—often, a man—but always with a wink and a nod. Here, you’re borrowing cues from Picasso, but you’ve also pushed Picasso out of his own museum, and made space for Sophie Calle. Can you talk about that decision?

I pushed him out because I was afraid of him! He’s too much for me. I could not imagine my work hanging next to Picasso’s.

At first, I refused the museum’s invitation. But after I visited the Musée during Covid, when his paintings were wrapped and hidden to protect them from dust light, I realized, although I cannot face Picasso, maybe I can face his ghost. Soon, I couldn’t think about anything else. I made three floors of new work in two years!

I wanted to play with him and with his museum, so I looked through his quotes and his objects for things that connected with me. I titled the show “À toi de faire, ma mignonne,” which basically means “Okay, darling, baby, you want my museum? Take it, show me what you can do.” Or more simply, “it’s your turn, now show me.” It’s the most complex show I have ever made.

I think it’s funny that he is in the basement and I occupy this museum, but I cannot pretend that my initial purpose was feminist. I didn’t put Picasso’s work downstairs because I wanted to cancel him. I did it because I could not be next to him.

What was it about Picasso that made you consider your own legacy?

I had seen a vitrine that contained Picasso’s hair and nails. He kept everything! I am also a little obsessive like that; I keep a lot of things. But Picasso was terribly afraid to write a will because he said that writing a will attracts death. I am also afraid of death. But I stave it off instead by writing 500 wills. When you write so many, they start to become a joke.

Your projects always involve risk, and turning Picasso into an occasion to think about death and legacy seems like one way you made him riskier.

The other risk is that some people could not stand the fact that I’m putting Picasso in the basement. I was told that many Americans would be upset when they saw works by me instead of Picasso. So, I added a consolation room, where visitors can have a personal confrontation with a real Picasso. There are five works behind curtains and three self-portraits. The 10th piece is a goat sculpture [La Chèvre, 1950] that I wrapped in paper. Six are hidden, four are visible. I could see how saying “I’m putting Picasso in the basement and taking his place” could be badly received.

Do you like Picasso’s art?

Yes, I do. I wouldn’t have shown here if I disliked it. I don’t go to dinner at an enemy’s house.

After the 2007 Venice Biennale, and after the artist Daniel Buren said your shows look like books on the wall, you began to move away from your signature, deadpan photo and text combinations, and you started incorporating more objects and experiences. This show has hardly any photographs. How has your thinking about photography evolved?

I never really thought of myself as a photographer; I always needed text. At the same time, I was never a true writer; I always needed the image. But beyond that, I don’t notice these things much, because I’m not an art critic. I don’t look at my own work and analyze it with that kind of distance.

Tell me about the unrealized projects you’re showing on the third floor.

I was following the direction Picasso showed me. He kept everything; I showed everything.

I started wondering, what’s going to happen to my belongings when I die? My parents are dead. I have no children. Then, looking at all the objects from my house, I asked: what’s missing? What was missing was my studio and all the things I didn’t finish. I have tons of drawers and boxes with pieces of ideas, but I realized, if I die tomorrow, this will all disappear. No one else could understand those pieces of paper, those fragments of thought, those abandoned failures.

So, I started opening all my drawers and notes. I was cleaning my house, but also my thoughts. I’m showing 42 abandoned projects. For each, I wrote down the idea, then stamped it with the reason why I didn’t do it: too stupid, too time-consuming. Some projects still have hope; those are in a different room. Some projects I could not do for reasons I can’t control, like censorship or somebody dying. Now all those unfinished projects are, in a way, finished. If I disappear tomorrow, they have a life.

Can you describe some of the projects?

After Paul Auster wrote Leviathan using my character, I thought I would ask a writer to write a book, and then I’d take the book as a script for my life. It would be the reverse: Paul Auster took my life and transformed me into a character in a novel, but I wanted to take the character in the novel and make it my life. But all the writers I asked said no.

Another is a project I started with Wim Wenders. He asked me to wear these camera glasses and say everything I thought to the camera every day. But I realized, I would lose many friends if I did this. This one was self-censorship.

Another idea was to say yes to everything for one month, but I realized that my life was quickly becoming a complete nightmare. I stopped because I didn’t want to spoil my life completely.

In the past, you’ve been vulnerable about sharing romantic failures. But this time, you’re including some, shall we say, professional “failures.” I’m wondering if that feels different.

Often, failures in my personal life wind up helping my professional life. Plenty of the projects I made out of relationships were much more interesting than the relationship itself!

I don’t make these projects for therapeutic reasons. But anybody who is left in love will suffer less if she has a job than if she is stuck alone in her house. Some professional failures were sadder than personal ones and vice versa. When everything is going well, you don’t need to examine it. You just leave it alone. If I am happy with the man I love and with my friends, I don’t need to take distance and describe it. I don’t try to analyze my happiness.

Looking back on all your past work and thinking about your legacy, did you see anything different that you hadn’t noticed before?

I don’t know yet. I only know what I feel. After I showed Take Care of Yourself at the Venice Biennale, I thought that I would never do anything as exciting again. But I was wrong: I had that feeling again for “À toi de faire, ma mignonne.” It really became an obsession.

You commissioned an obituary for yourself, but then decided not to show it. Can you tell us about that, or at least about how it felt to read it?

I decided not to show it, but not because of what it said. It was a very professional obituary; the information was super banal and factual. The problem was how I felt when I read the verbs in the past tense: “she used to,” “she liked.” Suddenly, it all felt too real. I don’t know how I expected to feel, but I didn’t suspect that I’d refuse it. After all, it was my game.

The collectible print that I created for this issue is two photographs that I interlaced in the computer, so that they make a tabula scalata. You’re meant to fold the print, accordion-style. When you angle it in one direction, you get one image. When you turn it, you get another. The print is meant to be activated—that activity is latent in the object—but you can still see both images in the print without folding it. I like that there’s this potential energy.

For a long time, I’ve been folding images together in different ways, usually with techniques like double exposure or using postproduction tools on the computer. Over the last two years, I’ve been interested in pulling these techniques from the computer out into more analog realities.

The images are of a plastic pig nose and a clown onesie. I like this question: a pig or a clown? It’s as if there’s an unseen character who is choosing between these two roles.

For me, the camera is basically a tool for relating to objects. I’m relating to the world using the somewhat narrow vocabulary of photography, which I’m always trying to stretch in different ways. Usually, the objects in my studio are things that don’t hold a lot of status or value on their own, and that’s intentional: I’m elevating and activating the energy within those objects. When I’m making images for brands, bags and shoes are coming in with a high degree of value already. So in some ways, it’s a mirror of what I normally do. I’m playing the fancy objects into my game.

Hammel and his now wife Amalea opened the restaurant as friends and aspiring artists in 1999. Through food, the married duo have been able to build and foster a community in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.

In his role at the restaurant, Hammel considers the importance of innovation and the impact of hospitality. Below, he discusses his related interests.

Her popularity has grown exponentially since. Her 2016 survey at the New Museum in New York broke institutional attendance records, and Beyoncé famously borrowed from Rist’s Ever Is Over All (1997) for the video for her 2016 song “Hold Up.” (In both, the respective artist wears a gown and a smile as she skips along the street and smashes car windows.) Rist’s breakout 2008 installation in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), was dismissed by some as a work in which visitors liked to lounge, practice yoga, and host playdates. But such criticism misses Rist’s genius: Pour Your Body Out managed to draw huge crowds and make them feel at ease despite its focus on a woman who is shown collecting her menstrual blood in a silver chalice. Rist insists on the importance and the centrality of the body in her work, especially those parts considered weird, gross, or taboo. With bright colors, alluring tempos, and lulling music, she’s made popular work out of an important feminist project.

Now, for a joint show opening November 9 at Hauser & Wirth and November 18 at Luhring Augustine—both in New York—Rist is debuting new furniture-sculpture hybrids, which marks a pivot for an artist who has until now worked with electronic and time-based media. Below, Rist talks about the transition leading up to the show, titled “Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon.”

Your work has long brought bright spots of color to a low-saturation art world, but color is growing more and more popular. Do you have any feelings about this?

You’re right—chromophobia is less bad than it used to be. But this development took a long time. Maybe you’ve read David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia (2000): he says that, for so long, black-and-white art was seen as more rational, while color was dangerous; as with music, you cannot control what you feel. This also gets linked with femininity: color gets described as something that might make you feel swallowed and seduced.

Another big problem is that color is often used in advertisements, and fine art wants to be distinct. Advertisements and prettiness are often perceived as dangerously seductive, or dishonest. My work often used to be perceived as childish, but this has really changed a lot. I haven’t gotten this critique anymore in the last few years. Though maybe that’s because I got older….

There’s this cliché of dressing in all black as if to say, “Oh, I’m so deep. I don’t need to draw attention to my outer side because my values are inside.” When I see people dressed in all black, I think about how a hundred years ago, it was only the priest and the teacher who dressed like that.

Tell us about your new glitter sculptures!

They are called “Metal Flake Milk Tooth” (2023), and they’re my first works that aren’t time-based. They have no video and no electricity; they’re a mix between sculpture and furniture. I think of every sculpture as, in a sense, un-useful furniture. They are made with layers of glittery lacquer, and the sparkles look different from every angle. They change as you walk around. It’s impossible to photograph the glittery effect, which I find very interesting. When you walk, in a way, you edit your own video.

Why are you splitting the show over two Chelsea galleries?

I consider Manhattan to be one museum, and I’m just playing in a few rooms. At Hauser & Wirth, I have two big new works you could call animated carpets. They’re both projections from above onto furniture and people. The light caresses everything with its beam. They are titled Welling Color West and Welling Color East: I’m not sure if “welling” works in English, but I like that I have some poetic freedom with my titles when I use a German way of speaking English. “Welling” has the double meaning of the well, with water that bubbles, but also alludes to this idea that the color might shower on people like a healing machine.

The other projection is two moving lights—big, round colors—called Petting Colors. I want to use electronic light to caress people and bring them together, whereas often, people watch videos at home alone. Visitors won’t be forced to look horizontally at walls. Instead, you can sit or lie on the carpet, or the sofa, or the bed.

You often re-create domestic furnishings—like your underwear chandelier (Massachusetts Chandelier, 2010) or oversize couch (Das Zimmer [The Room], 1994). And you often create comfortable surfaces for viewers to sit or lie down on while watching your videos. Thank you! What led you to meld the gallery and the home?

I made the oversize couch in reaction to the fact that, when we watch TV, reality seems to shrink in our perception. I wanted to do the opposite and expand reality. That’s why the monitor looks shrunken. The work is outdated now, but it’s still popular and still getting shown. I think it’s nice that younger people might learn about a time when families would fight over the remote control.

To me, all museums and all galleries look like living rooms. A hundred years ago, you had paintings hanging above each other on wallpaper in both settings, at least in the Western world. As the museum became a white cube, so did living rooms. The main difference is that museums don’t offer the possibility of rest. When people come to my exhibitions, I want their whole body to be welcomed, and in different postures. My second big wish is that viewers don’t ignore each other. When looking at a painting, if another person walks in front of you, it’s an inconvenience. But as soon as you give people the chance to lie down or sit, then suddenly, other people aren’t just a distraction but also part of the scene.

Is that why you moved away from making single-channel videos?

My mission is to use electronic light to bring us together. Single-channel videos are not in relation to a room; you can watch them anywhere. As a video artist, I want to give people something different than what they can watch alone in their bed, something that connects them with other people, too. But maybe I should make one again!

Some of your breakthrough pieces, like Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), were immersive video projections. But now, your immersive installations are starting to use colorful lights more than recorded images. Why the transition?

You’re talking about Petting Colors, and also Pixel Forest (2016). People don’t always realize that Pixel Forest is actually a three-dimensional monitor. I got the idea the first time I put on virtual reality goggles: I felt more isolated than ever! So I said to my friend, a lighting designer, can we put pixels in the air and walk between them, together? Pixel Forest is 3,000 dots, and it looks chaotic—but every pixel knows exactly where in the room it is. When I play a sharp image, it’s very hectic; with a softer image, the room almost pulsates. Every video is light, whether it’s on a monitor or a projector, and my wish is to free this wonderful light from the rectangle.

Video technology has changed so much since you started working. How have you thought about evolving alongside it?

I’m a walking technical history! When video evolved from analog to digital, it was a huge step. I think it’s important that young people understand that there used to be TVs in living rooms, and only certain people could send content to them; many people received this content. As the machines became smaller, and with the advent of the digital, everyone became a potential sender. It’s more democratic than it used to be.

Glitches are essential parts of some of your earlier works, but today, your works are smoother.

Analog glitches and mistakes are much nicer than digital ones. They are more physical. When we are nervous or angry, we also have these glitches. The analog is closer to our physical body than the digital. But I’m also finding nice mistakes in the digital world. It’s similar to painting: often, when your painting isn’t photorealistic, you can put more feelings and subconscious layers in. My theory is that the glitches are very similar to our subconscious. There is too much or too little wanted from us, and we react with psychosomatic problems. When our body glitches, it’s telling us we have to make a decision or change something. Embracing mistakes is important for me not only in a technical way, but also in psychological ways.

What’s your favorite work you’ve ever made?

I don’t know that I have a favorite work, but in honor of your question, I’d say Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava), 1994. [Editor’s note: It’s a small monitor installed under a floorboard and viewed through a hole. Originally shown at the foot of a Madonna and Child sculpture in Switzerland, it shows a woman drowning in flames and waving her arms, suggesting damnation.] It’s been on view at MoMA PS1 since it was in a group show in 2017, and at first, I was not aware that they had never taken it down. I saw it a year later, and I was surprised. But I said OK, I’ll do a long-term loan, though you have to clean it up. By then, it was full of dust.

I saw it again three years later, and suddenly, 40 guards were around me. They had gone around to tell each other, “She’s here!”—then got together to tell me how much they loved it. I couldn’t help but cry!

This article appears under the title “Pipilotti Rist Goes Glittery” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 26–29.

Like most cities anywhere in the world, New York is rich with history. In certain areas, that history feels almost palpable, especially in a city where so much has been lost or otherwise purposefully—and violently—erased, ignored, and hidden. One aspect of New York’s past that met such a fate is how the city’s economy was built on chattel slavery. Drawing out that history and thinking about it critically is the crux of Charles Gaines’s Moving Chains, a monumental 110-foot installation that comprises a wooden structure that resembles the hull of a ship, with nine sizable chains overhead.

From its site on Governors Island, Moving Chains, which had its closing ceremony this past weekend (and which will travel to the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati next year), was located at a locus point for different histories. It looked out to Lower Manhattan, the unceded territories of the Lenape people that would be seized first by the Dutch to create their settlement, New Amsterdam, and later taken by the British to create New York. There was a slave market on Wall Street, and even after the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, Wall Street still played an important role in the transformation of cotton into wealth. That the East River and the Hudson River meet just off Governors Island is also significant: the docks on the East River imported sugar from the Caribbean, while the Hudson connected the Eastern Seaboard with the interior of the US upon the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825.

But the view from Governors Island also represents hope with its proximity to the Statue of Liberty, which was given as a gift to the US to celebrate the final abolition of chattel slavery at the end of the Civil War. The most direct reference to this in the statue are the chains at Lady Liberty’s feet—chains that had once held her in bondage. Over the years, that history, too, has been slowly eroded, with the Statue of Liberty coming to represent the promise of freedom for immigrants arriving from Europe.

These facts and more are elucidated in a walking tour, titled River Years, made by Black Gotham Experience to accompany Moving Chains. The tour, which remains accessible on Creative Time’s website, gives a poetic and poignant telling of these stories, asking listeners to consider the ground they are on, the powerful force of the water roiling before them, and the histories of sites that can easily be forgotten or misremembered. “It’s meant to be more meditative, with pauses and considerations, versus a 25-minute Wikipedia firing hose,” Black Gotham Experience founder Kamau Ware told a group assembled for a live demonstration of River Years this past (very rainy) Sunday.

What I found most powerful about experiencing River Years and Moving Chains together, as the rain misted my face, was reflecting on the sound that the rivers made as they crashed against the rocks. As Ware pointed out, a large portion of Governors Island’s 172 acres were created with landfill. As we turned a bend around Castle Williams, with Moving Chains looming in the distance, we began walking on such an infilled portion. In the audio tour, Ware’s voice asks us to listen to how much louder the crashing sounds of the waves have become. “What if 1,000 human years equaled one river year?” he wonders about waters that have been around much longer than any human. The waters know their place—and they will stop at nothing to reclaim that history, no matter how slowly.

This interview, conducted in August 2022, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A.i.A.: How did your multipart work, The American Manifest, which the Governors Island installation Moving Chains is a part of, come together?

Charles Gaines: The project really started over eight years ago. I was asked to make a proposal for public commission for St. Louis, Missouri. They were at the time expanding their park grounds. They brought Creative Time to be the curator of the public art project. To my shock and surprise, they selected my piece. I went out to St. Louis and visited sites. At the time, director of Creative Time was Anne Pasternak, who is now director of the Brooklyn Museum. Working for her at the time as a curator was Meredith Johnson. And later, Jean Cooney joined the project. And Justine Ludwig, who is now the current director of Creative Time.

When I went out there and was looking at the site, realizing the history of the site, I came up with a project around the subject of Dred Scott. Three things at the site were notable to me. One, of course, was the Mississippi River. I should say that I didn’t go in with an intention of creating such a quietly political piece, but being there, the history of the region is so prominent. That history is framed by some pretty provocative subjects, which are memorialized there, like at the St. Louis courthouse, where the Dred Scott trials took place. And the Mississippi River was fundamental in terms of the development of agrarian capitalism—and essentially, in general, the American economy came out of that. The St. Louis Arch helped introduce the ideology of Manifest Destiny, positioning St. Louis as the gateway to the West. And to the west of St. Louis, at the time, were “unconquered” lands, so to speak.

So, I thought the centerpiece of this could be the Dred Scott case. The history of slavery becomes essential. Within the educational system in the US, the development of America and its relationship to capitalism is connected with democracy, but in a way that makes sure that our understanding of economic development was a noble enterprise—part of this general idea of progress, with America taking a lead position. But, it was not connected with the slavery, and neither was that idea of capitalism. Even though it’s so obvious, it could slap you in the face. American imperialism is taught still as a noble enterprise because it’s bringing “enlightenment” to the world, so to speak. But it was separated from the part of capitalism that deals with the idea of property. To connect them might suggest that this noble enterprise is really being driven by greed.

So, I wanted to design a piece that would try to integrate these narratives. That I would not only be doing a critique of American capitalism and American economic development but also America’s investment in slavery and a critique of Manifest Destiny and imperialism, introducing quite provocative critiques that have been obscured in the education that I got. So, Moving Chains became the lead structure in that effort to address these narratives.

I proposed that piece. Creative Time was very excited about it. We took it to St. Louis; they were very excited about it. But for some reason, St. Louis’s idea of community development collapsed, and so the whole project fell apart. This was between six and eight years ago.

How did the project resume in its current manifestation?

I have to give credit to Creative Time, because they would not let the project die. They kept in communication with me, trying to find new sites, new possibilities, and new sources of funding. There was one point when we evaluated sites [in Manhattan]. That brings up another important element, this piece is site-specific. The objects are so dependent upon the history of sites, to have resonance. It had to be located in particular sites where that history is part of the development.

When Justine [Ludwig] was hired, the project was sitting on the shelf because it had been dormant. She really loved it, and she called me and asked me if I would mind taking it up again. She started the campaign—it’s an almost $4 million project. Almost simultaneously, Jean [Cooney] took on the job as the head of Times Square Arts and Meredith [Johnson] took on the job as the head of art for the Trust for Governors Island. And they asked me to come up with a proposal for a separate project. So somehow, because I didn’t tell them, [Meredith and Jean] found out about Justine’s interest in Moving Chains, and Justine found out that they were doing a project with me. So, they all got together, and came up with the idea of collaborating around reviving Moving Chains, and that’s how it came back into being.

How do the other chapters of The American Manifest, including the installation in Times Square and the planned travel of the work to Cincinnati, relate to Moving Chains?

When Meredith, Jean, and Justine got together to collaborate, they were each thinking about how they could uniquely contribute to the project. They wanted to think through the collaboration that way, rather than it just being a singular work and putting it up in one place. They wanted to use the fact that there was a larger group to make the project bigger—not only physically, but give it a bigger, critical presence. At some point, we had to think about it more than just Moving Chains, and we had to think of a title about what the project is proposing as a critique. To come up with a concept for the project based around this critique of these three integrated narratives: this critique of American culture, particularly with how these aspects of American culture have been dealt with today. With that mind, we came up with the idea of siting the “Manifestos” in Times Square. There are some technical problems with trying to do a physical manifestation of “Manifestos” in Times Square, so Jean asked if I could come up with another idea for a site work. That’s how the installation Roots [sculptures depicting upside-down trees in Times Square during July–September 2022] came to be. We also decided that the best place for the Moving Chains structure was Governors Island because it had all of the requirements in terms of site location, that I was talking about earlier.

And then Cincinnati [where The American Manifest will travel in 2024] came into picture because Justine, who had worked in Cincinnati for years [as a curator at the Contemporary Arts Center], suggested it. I’m trying to create a structure where these individual sites are employed to showcase the contributors to the project. Cincinnati is almost identical to St. Louis in terms of the history of the role the city played not only in the narrative of slavery but also in the narrative of economic development.

One of the things that I wanted to do in integrating these separate narratives was to include the history of the Native population in terms of this idea of American expansion. St. Louis and Cincinnati were created by removing the Native population from their lands, and that excavation and removal helped with this critique that I am trying to do. If we can’t go to St. Louis, let’s go to Cincinnati.

From that, we came up with the idea to divide the presentation into parts. The first metaphor was a fugue in three parts, a musical metaphor. But, then we got into a literary and historical model by calling them chapters. So, we can reveal this whole project in chapters: Chapter One in Times Square, Chapter Two on Governors Island, and Chapter Three in Cincinnati. And that also helped with the complexity of fabrication and construction.

How did the proposal change from the original St. Louis one?

In St. Louis, we were going to the courthouse [as a backdrop]. The courthouse was going to be used as the site of the “Manifestos” performance. Manifestos 4 is a piece where I take the text of the majority and minority opinions in the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, and I convert the opinions into musical notation and write a score for an ensemble. The way I do that becomes important because the whole process is systematically determined, so that the music is translated via a set of rules of transforming letters into notes. The product of that process was to be installed in the courthouse. We were also planning a one-act opera that would be performed in one of the courtrooms. This is a mutable process. It wasn’t a matter of being disappointed when something couldn’t be done because we came up with something else that could be done.

When you read both opinions in the Dred Scott case, they are written rigorously, under the rules of legal language. There’s certain logic that they have to maintain in order to sustain a certain legitimacy. And when you read it, what they are saying is nonsense. I think in the 19th-century, it even appeared to a lot of people as nonsense. The use of language is being motivated by feelings, so if you’re anti-slavery, then you’re going to find a legal way to justify that. More often than not, that language makes no sense in relation to lived experience.

Was the concept for Moving Chains always a monumental sculptural work that resembles the hull of a ship with chains?

The only thing that changed was that in my original version the structure was 400 feet long. [Laughs.]

The intention was to show that the United States has never come to grips with its real investment in slavery—it still hasn’t. But neither American democracy nor American capitalism has ever divested itself from a general idea of Enlightenment and how Enlightenment theory has provided a model of a humanist concern for the development of wealth and the development of capitalism. There was a so much religious fervor about that desire. The United States wanted to advance itself as being motivated for the general public good in the development of these areas. This explains why America is not interested in revealing the true history of slavery because it would dismantle and reveal this myth they had about being invested in the general good. These narratives are kept separate because if they were thought to be in harmony or in sync with each other they would reveal that what is essential to American development is violence. The violence that was part of the American development has been washed away, just like slavery, or the violence has been rewritten in terms of the good guy/bad guy, humanist interest in good. In this work, I wanted to make sure that people could understand the relationship between these narratives, although separated, are actually linked together and inseparable, and, simply by doing that, to reveal those uncomfortable stories.

A lot of my work deals with the political subjects, but my interest in art is that art has to take part and contribute to the general understanding. That doesn’t necessarily mean that art has to have specific political ideas that drives it, although it could. In relationship to this piece, it is important to me, and this goes back to history of my work, that Moving Chains reveal the link in these relationships, and the reveal is done by the exposure of certain conceptual and linguistic structures that not only can explain why they were separated in the first place but also reveal why they’re linked. This is why I work in systems because I’m working on this structural level—or syntactical level in terms of language—whereby you can see how meaning is formed, and how then the formation of those meanings can take on very specific political interests.

The reason slavery and capital development are separated is because by seeing the treatment of slaves and the treatment of pigs, horses, and corn that would reveal how slavery was justified. But it would also reveal this real, serious level of violence. In other words, the commodification of the Earth and the commodification of human beings are both violent acts. They have violent consequences. The building of agrarian society doesn’t have to be done through a certain kind of laissez-faire economics. There are different kinds of economies that you can develop. But the ideological principles that govern American capitalism reside in and can be seen clearly in the way America dealt with slavery, so you can see how unique it is. The link and relationship between these parts I tried to make [visible] by showing structural resemblances between them.

I want Moving Chains to refer to more than one thing. I don’t want it to just refer to slavery; I want it also to refer to economic development. There is a system of signifiers that can link the two because of redundancies and similarities that can be seen between the narratives. For example, the chains themselves, both metaphorically and metonymically, bring up the narratives of slavery and trade. Chains are something that are a part of maritime life, used for hauling, lifting, and anchoring. But they’re also used for bondage.

In the structure, there are nine of these chains. Eight of them are aluminum, and one is a kind of rusted red. The silver chains move at the current of the river, and the red one moves at the speed of the vessels that traverse the rivers, moving trade around. We actually had to reduce those speeds because rivers move at 2.2 knots, and the speed of vessels are like 4.5– 4.7 knots. When you walk into it, you enter a really kind of intimidating space where these chains are above your head, and you can see them and you can hear them. They make this sound of what it sounds like to be in the hull of a wooden ship. But it also feels like you’re in the hull of a slave ship. So through analogy, we’ve tried to link these separate narratives, which is the personal intention that I have in the formal critique of this work.

Would you say that’s the system that has created the work?

That’s such a super question. My investment in art is to make a rule-based process to substitute my subjectivity being the driving factor. In the “Grid” works, you could see how the system works. It’s just a plotting and mapping system. But in the language pieces, it’s a little bit more mysterious. I don’t think it’s abstract. When we think of systems, we think of numbers. But we don’t think of systems when we think of structures. Structures are systems—it’s embedded in the word. What I’m using is language. So, the issue is that I’m not saying, “Here are some chains, and it creates this horrible experience, and that’s a critique of slavery.” What I’m saying is I can contribute to our general knowledge about the United States treats these narratives and how to reveal obscured parts of these narratives, simply by articulating through metaphors and metonyms. I don’t do anything directly. The chain is not a chain that you use for hauling or lifting or bondage. The chains become this tool for metaphor and metonym. By revealing the underlying structure of any cultural construction—a concept or an idea—by revealing how it’s constituted structurally or linguistically. In the linguistic mapping, you can make analogies. And that allows you, then, to link things that are otherwise separated. What I’m saying is that I didn’t make a slave ship—I made a structure, even if it looks like a ship.

Can you say more about how the “Grid” works and Moving Chains are conceptually related?

They’re related because they’re both systems. It’s interesting because the “Grid” works, there’s nothing mysterious about them. They can be easily perceived, but they run into this problem with people’s fear of numbers and systems. They think there’s a secret, hidden meaning. People are always going after meaning, which is great because I want them to go after meaning. But, they think that their ability to understand is made complicated by the fact that it’s high math. I mean, it’s this phobia. Some of the most sophisticated things I know have yelled at me for that reason. The only way I can rationalize it is that there’s still this process going on in art, particularly in the disrespectful way first- and second-generation Conceptualism is being treated by history. There is this attempt to erase Conceptualism out of the historical narrative because people think that Conceptual art is boring. That’s because it deals with words, and it deals with numbers, and it can have this sort of anti-aesthetic property. So, when they see numbers, they think it’s there not to give access to those experiences, but to obscure, to cloud itself, or to embrace boredom as an empowering gesture. It drives me nuts. Just as the United States, in general, has not come to terms with history of slavery, art hasn’t come to terms with its uncritical embrace of aesthetics.

I have an interest in my practice in critiquing representation. Through my critique of representation, I wanted to critique the idea of aesthetics. What I wanted to do was show how aesthetics rather than the modernist idea that the aesthetic experience is an experience that’s not informed by our cultural knowledge and that it’s universal. Rather than say that, I wanted to say that aesthetics is culturally determined. The feeling that we call an aesthetic feeling is culturally determined, and it’s also politically determined. As you watch how tastes change over time, I don’t know how you can avoid that.

What we critique are ideas. When you do a math problem, for example, you’re not involved in the critique. It’s just a tool. So, the making of my work is supposed to be like that—it’s playing out a math problem. Because of something that I do, you begin to question what it means to you, then that’s where the critique can happen.

Moving Chains is billed as your first public artwork. I’m curious why you waited so long to make a public artwork.

I wasn’t waiting. [Laughs.] This raises another issue that reflects my life and how I’ve been treated as a Black artist. Race is still an issue in the art world today. How it’s being played out in the narrative is different from the way it was 20, 30 years ago. But race has always been a complicating factor in an art world with a diverse structure. In the early days, Black artists just weren’t getting shown, just like women artists, or women artists were relegated to also-rans. I got out of art school in 1968, and my exhibition career started in the early ’70s. Racism has been a factor in everything I know about, so it’s been a factor in my life. It factors in in different ways, the same way with everybody. But ultimately, it was about getting access. I entered the art world at the time that the first generation of Conceptual art was reaching a kind of a populace, but before the begetting of a second generation of Conceptual art. I was between Sol LeWitt and Lorna Simpson, so as a consequence, I didn’t get the benefit of this interest in minority representation that happened in the mid- to late ’80s. On the one hand, I was being associated with first generation of Conceptual art, but then on the other hand, I was living in the art world as a Black person, so I wasn’t being properly represented by my galleries. It took me a long time to admit that. I started showing with Leo Castelli and John Weber in the ’70s. But I know that they weren’t fully representing me, putting the full power of the gallery behind me. I was sort of like the backroom artist. I just failed at getting the profile and never got to this point, even though I was showing internationally—nobody knew who I was. So nobody’s going to come and ask me to do a commission.

Then there was a period were I completely erased for about 15 years erased. Even though I was having exhibitions, my work didn’t become the favorite of certain collectors—that art world career stuff. I still today think it’s poisonous to start thinking about that stuff in the studio. But, at the interest of revealing what was at stake for minority artists during that time, I went through a period of 15 or 20 years without selling one single work of art, but I was working all the time. That started to change around 2007, when I was in the Venice Biennale. The attention today is as mystifying to me today as the lack of attention was mystifying in the past. I think with Hauser & Wirth, this is the first time I have the full weight of the gallery behind me. Now, I’m working on four public commissions.

In constructing these scenarios, which he refers to as plays, Tiravanija invites museum-goers to participate and consider the ways we interact with one another. As human interaction (or safeguarding against it) came to the forefront during the pandemic, Tiravanija’s plays have only become more relevant. And if they are not enough to satisfy, the show also includes films, drawings, and works on paper.

On the occasion of his show, which runs through March 4, 2024, Tiravanija talked to Art in America about restaging older works and being present in the moment he’s in now.

How does it feel to have your first US survey at MoMA PS1?

It feels like just another day. It’s interesting to see the works all together, but I never really made them to be seen like that. It’s kind of like an experiment. They were always made in very specific contexts and situations.

Untitled 1993 (café deutschland), for example, which is one of the older early works, started as a fax that I sent to Cologne. With things happening then in Germany, I sent the friend who curated the show to the Turkish neighborhood to buy a list of specific items and to set it up in a certain way, according to the instructions. But, to understand the piece, you have to know the things that were happening around it. The whole idea was that he would go to get all these things in places he would otherwise never have gone. Whether people read [into] the Turkish coffee or not, it’s another layer. The Middle Eastern way is the oldest way to make coffee, which is to boil the bean down to a ground.

Everything has different relationships and layers within it, and I never thought about having to redo it. A lot of it, however, is about the experience. It’s not about the objects or looking at the thing or standing around the thing because it’s going to tell you something. It’s more about being in the place, doing the thing, and being with other people.

Your works can change based on context and many were conceived before the advent of social media, which has greatly impacted the way we interact and experience our environment.

There are two parts to this exhibition. One part is a more active, open space, and the other is a set of plays that come with more instructions. There were different possibilities or different situations that I had to think about. For instance, if I had to do the work in a certain kind of condition, how would it be possible to present the idea? You cannot, say, cook in any place now. Maybe in galleries or some private spaces, but in institutional spaces it’s impossible. But, of course, untitled 1990 (pad thai) itself is already from the beginning addressing that difficulty or shift in how a museum thinks of itself.

The plays are a kind of experiment, but also a solution to presenting something that’s a bit more alive and also addressing the problem of being alive. To be a play, it’s already hinting at the fact that it’s not the real thing. You’re set up to watch something that’s happening in real time and space, but it’s not a performance or theater. The word “play” describes this in-between so that the possibility of viewing and experiencing can shift. There is a stage, but that stage is very low.

It’s a play with the opportunity to play. The people who are activating the work by serving coffee and pad Thai, etc., how were they selected?

It’s usually who’s available. A lot of the people participating are present and former students. I’ve been teaching for so long that I know many people who have an interest in taking part. When I first realized I wanted to do the plays, I thought about casting people, but it’s not so much about acting or doing—it’s about understanding the stream of the idea. There’s a kind of instructional score, but it’s very loose. When you give people instruction, they tend to follow it too well, and many things in the show appear as you see them. Just put it down. Don’t think about it. Just do it. It’s not about how the thing looks. It’s about the interaction. It’s about having been in the space, putting this coffee cup here, and that’s it. You don’t think about placement. That’s the way it should be. And that’s also what I feel the idea of the play is about.

The work becomes like the serendipity of the action or the action at play.

You cannot fix anything down. You cannot fix the reality. It’s about letting things happen. It’s about letting go.

That’s what I’m looking forward to, in terms of how we rethink the work, both the ideas and the ways they can be executed. I really want people to pay attention to details because we’re missing so much only focusing on a little screen. It’s important that one starts to look and to read or that one is carried into certain spaces. It’s a slowing-down.

This kind of exhibition is interesting post-Covid—the idea of bringing people together to create interactions and personal experiences after things became more centered around screens.

I started working on some slower works with less people during that time that prodded our speed, attention, and the tension that is between us. In Thailand, I put a glass wall in the middle of a space that people could approach from both sides. There, they could meet each other with a barrier of glass in between.

What do you hope visitors will get from experiencing this show?

Don’t come once. Come for the next five months. There will be different things happening. Why not spend time doing things like making coffee and tea, meeting people, and playing some music? Use it. And bring your friends.

There is time and space to do and to think, to pay attention, to read. There are some works that are about movement and moving through places, but they take time. It’s about making space for people to decide. I don’t see things as defined by a beginning and an ending. I see it as continuous time and space. It’s not about the work being finished or beginning somewhere. I keep it open. And maybe that’s also why, as I said at the beginning, it’s just another day.

How did you first conceive of this exhibition?

In 2021, when I had my first retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the director Tom Campbell talked about how my work had been marginalized by the art world. Working with [New Museum artistic director] Massimiliano Gioni on this retrospective has helped clarify why I’ve been so marginalized.

Gioni’s doing a comprehensive retrospective of my work and then he’s having another exhibition on the fourth floor within the context of my show, called “The City of Ladies,” which chronicles an alternative art paradigm going back centuries. Most people accept the male-centered paradigm as a universal art history. It is not. It is an exclusionary art history that has not only omitted women but also artists of color, nonbinary artists, trans artists, and regional artists. In the last few decades, we’ve seen an effort to add around this patriarchal art history a few women, artists of color, and nonbinary artists without disrupting the basic institutionalized patriarchal art history.

I cannot imagine a male artist allowing the work of 80 or 90 other male artists to be in their retrospective. They don’t have to. We all have all those other artists in our head, but to properly understand my work one must be aware of this alternative paradigm of imagery, subject matter, and technique from which I have drawn. Gioni is providing an entire historic context for my work that male artists take for granted and women artists often want to be integrated into.

How did you decide on which female figures and works to include in “The City of Ladies”?

We collaborated on it. The title comes from Italian French poet Christine de Pizan’s 15th-century book of the same name. When they say two centuries of feminist struggle, that’s not accurate. Historically, the origins of contemporary feminist discourse traces back to Christine de Pizan’s “The City of Ladies,” which challenged the misogyny of Renaissance writing and stimulated a European-wide movement, called La Querelle des femmes, of intellectual discourse on the role of women. That is the beginning of modern feminism. One work in the show was created a bit earlier and it’s an illumination by saint Hildegard von Bingen, who has a place setting on The Dinner Party table, along with Christine de Pizan. The show, ultimately, is a mix of works that Gioni and I both proposed.

Let’s talk about some notable works in the show.

The imagery in Birth Hood [1965–2011] was so reviled in the ‘60s when I first made it. Originally, they were paintings in my graduate show, but my male professors hated my imagery and my colors, and they made me feel so ashamed of my natural impulses that I destroyed the paintings. I went to autobody school right out of graduate school, and I transferred some of the images from those paintings to car hoods. I put that female imagery on what was considered a predominately male object. It was one of my first images of birth.

Later, when I started “The Birth Project” [1980–85], I thought there were no images of birth in western contemporary art, other than the Madonna and child, which is not exactly expressive of the birth experience. It was until I saw the exhibition “The Great Mother,” which Gioni curated [in 2015, at the Palazzo Reale] in Milan, that I learned that was totally untrue. In all contemporary movements there are women, but when these movements are historicized, women are eliminated from the narrative.

I realized after seeing this show that I had never considered a whole other form of eraser of subject matter, such as birth, that the male-centered art world does not consider important. When I made Birth Hood, it was such an anomaly that male artists and art professors could make me feel ashamed of my impulses. As it turns out, there a whole context for that work.

Your point about multiple kinds of erasure is so important. It’s wild to think that those works exist but are still difficult to access.

Art usually grows out of art. That’s one of the problems women artists are still encountering—they don’t know their own history. And so, they reinvent the wheel and they make images that have been made multiple times before. As a result, they can’t build.

Because it has become the norm.

But for so long everyone has just accepted it.

Another work, Guided by the Goddess [1985], picks up some of these same themes.

Yes, it’s another stage in my exploration of the subject of birth and creation. And it’s a totally different technique. It’s sprayed fabric paint, applique, embroidery, and [a] pulled thread work, [the latter of] which was executed by Marjorie Smith in Ohio. Directly on my painted fabric surface there are some types of fabric like linen, where the weave allows you to pull the thread out in a grid. There are whole areas of pull thread work, which opens the space and references the celestial sky from which the goddess descends and creates life. And then the nipples, for example, are appliqué. The whole thing is embroidered.

At five feet tall and 14 feet long, it’s a beautiful and massive piece. It really aggravated me when feminist theorists in the ‘80s said that scale is male. Scale, as a tool, conveys a certain amount of meaning.

And, as women, we should be allowed to take up space.

Right! Guided by the Goddess grew out of “The Birth Project.” I heard so many stories from so many women about the range of experiences they had had—everything from abysmal to ecstatic—that I wanted to represent many aspects of the birth experience, including the early creation myths where a female goddess creates life.

There are other works in the show that speak to different kinds of female experiences. Gun violence, for example, is taken up in In the Shadow of the Handgun [1982–87].

After spending basically 15 years in a female community, I realized that women aren’t the problem. I started shifting my focus to men and began researching gender, which in the 1980s before queer and gender studies, the only thing that came up were books on women, as if only women have gender. At the time I did [In the Shadow of the Handgun] in the early 1980s, male violence was a problem. Now, we live on a global level in the shadow of the handgun. And it’s promoted and mythologized in our culture.

While I was living in a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this guy started harassing me in the driveway and he was becoming increasingly more aggressive. I became friends with a group of young male artists, who I told about this guy. One day, they came to my house and took me to the outskirts of the city where they taught me how to use a gun for self-protection. It was unnerving—at one point, I almost show off my foot. But, at the end of the day, they gave me a gun with bullets to keep at my house. It was then I realized the secret to the patriarchy: shut up or I’ll shoot you.

There’s such a shift in the power dynamics at play, even in your personal experience, while working on In the Shadow of the Handgun. And, again, you use scale to your advantage in this painting too. What do you hope people will take away from your retrospective?

I really want young women to discover the richness of their heritage. We need context, not just shows. We need a level of knowledge that is completely lacking. The association between women and spirituality, for instance, goes back to von Bingen in the Middle Ages. Think Teresa of Ávila, Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant—they all fit into a huge tradition that has been marginalized.