In the 1970s, Semmel’s subject of choice, sex, and her medium, painting, were both taboo for feminist artists. The former was too risky at a time when women were asking not to be objectified. The latter was too commodifiable, and too burdened by centuries of patriarchal convention and bourgeois trappings to be useful as a tool for the feminist struggle. But Semmel didn’t care.

“I loved painting. It’s as simple as that,” she said this past October, sitting on a couch in Alexander Gray Gallery, where an enchanting 4-foot-square self-portrait, In The Pink (2004), hovered above her. Looking back at age 91, she recalled her defiance. “To give it up because someone told me it was dead seemed stupid.”

It was a bout of serious illness, in 1957, that first emboldened Semmel to disregard the expectations of others. That year, she spent six months in the hospital with tuberculosis—a traumatic experience, especially given that she was a new mother. And yet, suddenly she found herself free from the daily pressures of family. She read a book a day, and reflected on what exactly she wanted to do with her life, with newfound urgency.

Before getting sick, she had gotten a certificate from Cooper Union (the New York art school did not yet grant degrees). After recovering, she was determined to go back to school and get her BFA, so she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Soon after graduating, she followed her husband to Spain, where he’d just gotten a job as a civil engineer, but not long after their second child was born, they split. Divorce was not yet legal in Spain, and a woman was forbidden from renting her own apartment without a husband or father on the lease. She started to see and feel the ways her “personal dissatisfactions stemmed from political structures.”

It was then that Semmel decided to stop caring what society expected her to do as a woman, and with that, she started to feel freer as a painter too. While in Spain for the next eight years, she worked mostly in the Abstract Expressionist vein that many of the New York painters of her generation had been schooled in. But like so many feminist artists of the era who started out in abstraction—Carolee Schneemann, Maria Lassnig, Joan Brown, Judy Chicago—she soon grew frustrated, and felt sidelined within a genre that was supposed to be “universal” but in reality kept privileging white men. At first, she said, she didn’t want to be called a woman artist. But soon, she found that her “way to resist” would be to embrace her identity. “I decided to say ‘Yes, I am a woman. And yes, I paint like a woman.’”

BY THE TIME SEMMEL RETURNED to New York in 1970, she was working in figuration. Women were the protagonists of her paintings. She wanted her work to help “change the way women understood themselves and understood sexuality,” and she didn’t see how she could do that through abstraction. “I didn’t see how anyone could deal with those issues without painting the body,” she said. Still, abstraction had its role in her work. Her “Sex Paintings” (1971) offer glimpses of bodies engaged in erotic acts, the scenes teetering into abstraction: brightly colored blobby stains threaten to bleed together but remain discrete. There are glimpses of bodily contours, but most details are left to the imagination.

After the “Sex Paintings” came the series widely considered her most important, the “Erotic Series” (1972), paintings of models who would have sex in her studio. Intimacy-Autonomy belongs to that group of paintings, all of them sexual scenes rendered realistically and lovingly, but in unexpected colors, and with unusual compositions that betray Semmel’s background in abstraction.

Those paintings, which today are in high demand, couldn’t find a dealer to show them at the time. “Nobody would touch them,” Semmel said. It’s a surprising story, and yet, one all too familiar for women artists. Undeterred, she took matters into her own hands. Using her savings, she rented a storefront in SoHo and then came in every day to be her own gallery attendant. This meant she got to watch all the visitors’ reactions, whether it was the critic for the Village Voice, who loved them, or “working people coming in on their lunchbreak”—SoHo was still a factory district at the time. “People were shocked,” she told me. Still, she was uncompromising and determined. “I had something to say,” she said assuredly.

Semmel’s message was that “women needed to acknowledge their own sexuality, acknowledge their own desire, and not always deny it, not always be passive.” Historically, the nude was a genre that catered to male pleasure, and taught women acceptable ways to express their sexuality. Semmel wanted to center a woman’s pleasure.

Examples of erotic art by women a generation before Semmel are couched in enough metaphors to give them plausible deniability: Georgia O’Keeffe insisted her flowers were not vulvas. For years, Louise Bourgeois described herself as “inhibited,” saying any erotic connotations in her work were “unconscious.” But Semmel was painting in a New York that was home to Studio 54 and Times Square sex clubs, in a mediascape now saturated with pornography. Subtlety wouldn’t do. She distinguished her work from centerfolds by using unusual hues—greenish gray for the figures in Intimacy-Autonomy, chartreuse and tangerine for those in Indian Erotic (1973)—because “I was so afraid of being called a pornographer. I was insisting it was art.” Half a century later, her “Erotic Series” still feels unusually tender for sex scenes, testifying to the ongoing necessity of her message.

AFTER FINISHING THE “EROTIC SERIES” Semmel started painting herself. Starting in the 1980s, as she neared 50, the men in her canvas disappeared—though she insists these works are not self-portraits. Rather, she started using herself as a model because she “wanted to avoid the objectification issue.” She also “didn’t want to speak for other women. I was speaking from my own experience.”

To paint her own body, Semmel often works from photographs. For this reason, the bodies in these paintings are often seen from the vantage of the figure herself, head cut off. In Sunlight (1978) and in Spaced Out (2019), the view is looking down at a body the way the artist looks at herself. She takes care to make this perspective unmistakable. In her series “With Camera,” the image reflects the camera in a mirror, which means it’s also pointed at the viewer. In each case, she’s making sure you know you’re seeing the artist through her own eyes.

Semmel has been painting herself for decades now. She knows that all too often, images of women are taken to signify women in general, not a specific human being. Depicting the same woman again and again, she doesn’t let her viewers make that mistake. Her subject is a constant, but her style is ever-changing. “It was always about making painting interesting to me,” she said. She has continued to combine expressionism and realism, figuration and abstraction in infinite configurations.

As a colorist, Semmel is skilled enough to dispense with any signature palette: “I’m rather catholic with my color choices,” she explained. “I’ll try one [palette] for a while and work through it, and then I get bored.” Her latest show, “Against the Wall,” which was on view last fall at Alexander Gray in New York, was full of lemons and lavenders, hot pink and chartreuse. Meanwhile, paintings like The Unchosen and Transformations (both 2011) feature an iridescent palette dominated by icy blues. In lieu of reliable hues, then, her hallmark is a delicate balance of unlikely combinations.

Another hallmark of her paintings is her doubling of figures. When a few works from the “Erotic Series” sat around in her studio unsold for a couple decades, she eventually painted new, looser figures right on top of them for a series called “Overlays” (1992–96). Sometimes, she echoed the figures she had painted decades before. Sometimes, she layered newer ghostly ones over them. “I was never interested in depicting a narrative or telling a story,” she said of this doubling effect. “I wanted the image to feel like an icon, but an icon that isn’t static, that doesn’t stay still.”

WHAT SETS SEMMEL’S WORK APART from that of other feminist artists is the way her paintings are acts of world-building. When she started out, most of her peers—Hannah Wilke, Judy Chicago—were making work protesting patriarchy, work that makes clear what the artist is against, rather than what she s for. Semmel told me she wanted to make work that was “not pedantic to the audience,” that was “not a “journalistic diatribe. I wanted you to experience the art object, not to just have it talking at you.” 

Semmel’s version of feminist art is also striking for the way it makes you feel, not just think. This she often achieved by delicately balancing opposites: man and woman, intimacy and autonomy, and more often than not, reds and greens. These opposites feel neither in tension nor resolved: instead, they simply coexist.

But Semmel’s most crucial contribution to feminist art might be the way she finds strength in vulnerability—“Vulnerability cannot be denied, and should not be denied,” she stressed—and it is easiest to see that embrace of vulnerability in the arresting self-portraits she has painted as she has aged: the images of her graying hair and wrinkling body have been regularly praised as brave in the way they refuse a life in the shadows, into which so many aging women are thrust. (Look no further than the recent Sex and the City reboot for proof of our culture’s deep discomfort with aging women: the show made every effort to hide the protagonists’ wrinkles, sags, and grays even as it attempted to be “woke.”) Semmel said she “never thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to work on aging now.’ It’s just that my body changed.”

“If we’re lucky,” she added, “we get to age.”

Sometimes, however, these paintings garner praise that verges on objectification. In 2011 New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote of a show of Semmel’s: “With her unlined face and only slightly pendulous, full-figured body, she appears, at 78, a figure of remarkably undiminished erotic appeal.” This kind of response is exactly why feminist critics feared the nude was not a viable political strategy: in 1976 critic Lucy Lippard complainedthat the most iconic works of feminist body art still centered women who were conventionally attractive. But in Semmel’s work, pleasure is unspoiled by power.

Then there are the loyal Semmel fans who engaged with her work long before its recent leap to popularity alongside the current trend for figuration. In 1999 artist Robert Gober curated a group show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York that featured two paintings from the “Erotic Series,” alongside work by seemingly unlike artists including Cady Noland and Anni Albers. At that time, Semmel’s work, like that of many other figurative painters, was far less visible than it is today. Looking back at that show, Gober said he thought Semmel’s paintings “were powerful and unique, canonical but oddly ignored” and that he felt “they should be seen by another generation and fresh eyes.” Quietly championing women and queer artists for decades now, Gober also included the paintings in his 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, marking Semmel’s MoMA debut.

Figurative painting has since become the splashiest artistic movement of this century, especially those works representing and memorializing the experiences of long-marginalized groups. These days, Semmel’s work is seen as trailblazing by younger figurative painters like Jenna Gribbon, a New York artist who paints intimate scenes of herself and her wife. “Joan Semmel is a giant,” Gribbon told me just after meeting the artist for the first time, at the opening for a show—“Making Their Mark” at the Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation—that included them both. “Her work is very generous and very powerful. My work is obviously indebted to her.”

Over the past decade, figurative painting has become almost too popular, catnip for a speculative art market. I asked Semmel what it was like to watch the tide turn so dramatically: in her day, she was practically peerless. She reflected that “before the ’80s,” artists hardly imagined receiving “fame and money” from their work. But soon enough, “the incentive for people to enter the field changed.” As for Semmel, she did it “with or without acknowledgment. Making art is a compulsion.” 

There are echoes of Semmel’s story in that of another figure of her generation, Chicago artist Alice Shaddle. As Jeremy Lybarger writes in this issue’s “Spotlight” column, Shaddle struggled, living in the shadow of her art impresario husband—a contemporary critic who characterized her as “one of those riley, resentful ladies”—but was similarly determined, and in 1973 cofounded the feminist art co-op Artemisia Gallery.

Women artists of the past and present are benefiting from rehangs of museums’ permanent collections, a topic that Alex Greenberger explores elsewhere in this issue, with the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 rehang providing a template. More institutions rotating artworks more frequently—and being more inclusive in the process—is exposing audiences to a more generous art history, one that no longer ignores the contributions of women and artists of color.

Rewritten histories influence art made by younger artists and the kinds of work that is curated into major exhibitions. This spring is a good time for a litmus test: the Whitney Biennial opens in March and the Venice Biennale in April. (Our “Battle Royale” feature pits the two iconic events against each other—and provides a cheeky guide to both.) One of the Whitney Biennial artists, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, is featured in a profile by Maximilíano Durón in this issue’s “New Talent” section, where he describes a work he is making for the Biennial with amber secreted by trees, a material he sees as a healing agent. In a remark that could just as well describe the limited canon the new art history is trying to expand, Aparicio tells Durón: “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

FEATURES

Recycled Art
As the planet fills with trash, artists reconsider the ethics of making work from scratch.
by Emily Watlington & Andy Battaglia

Sheida Soleimani     
The Iranian American artist talks about how simple gestures inform perceptions. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.
by Tessa Solomon

Painting Pleasure
In her prismatic portraits, Joan Semmel builds feminist worlds.
by Emily Watlington

Perpetual Motion
No longer static monuments to an outdated art history, museums’ permanent collection displays are more dynamic than ever.
by Alex Greenberger

Witnessing Grief
Käthe Kollwitz’s melancholy works, the subject of a MoMA retrospective, capture the sorrow of daily life in wartime.
by Faye Hirsch

Nature Is Mind Made Visible
German exhibitions celebrate Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday and his iconic visions of people confronting nature.
by Kelly Presutti

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
A gallerist pines for press, and an aspiring curator ponders a “curatorial intensive.”
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Kay WalkingStick about her layered landscape paintings.
by Alex Greenberger

Object Lesson
An annotation of Hayv Kahraman’s Loves Me, Loves Me Not.
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Whitney Biennial vs. Venice Biennale—two banging biennials face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Indigenous art.
by Christopher Green

Appreciation
A tribute to Pope.L, a trickster-artist who offered lessons as to what was and was not real.
by Christopher Y. Lew

New Talent
Sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio captures the materiality of disappearance and resistance.
by Maximilíano Durón

Issues & Commentary
Why is Thomas Heatherwick the architect most beloved by billionaires?
by Andrew Russeth

Spotlight
Chicago artist Alice Shaddle was hard to classify—and all the better for it.
by Jeremy Lybarger

Book Review
A reading of Legacy Russell’s Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us.
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Cover Artist
Joan Semmel talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Shanghai
Shanghai Diary
by Emily Watlington

Montreal
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia”
by Barry Schwabsky

Miami
“Charles Gaines: 1992–2023”
by Maximilíano Durón

Los Angeles
“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”
by Liz Hirsch

Munich
“Meredith Monk. Calling”
by Emily McDermott

Sarasota
“Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories”
by Glenn Adamson

Minneapolis
“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”
by Alex Greenberger

Read the full list of 71 artists over at ARTnews.

Simensky deeply investigated systems of value, in his teaching and in his art. He made work using materials like pyrite (fool’s gold) that, by virtue of being underestimated, lay powerful claim to our collective imagination. Jeanne Gerrity, interim director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, wrote to me in an email, “Peter cleverly exposed the fascinating yet often sinister relationship between contemporary art and financial capital, offering genuine connection and community as antidotes.” Over time, he started using pyrite as a conduit in radio sculptures, live audio sets, performances, and workshops that, per Gerrity, “engaged a range of topics from regional issues to global politics,” whether the history of mining in the Bay Area and in Portland, or international currency exchange.

His 2021 project, Pyrite Radio,used fool’s gold to pick up pirate radio stations on the AM frequency, the pyrite itself hidden inside sculptural contraptions that resembled wind chimes, plastic beaded jewelry, and umbrellas for kids shaped like frogs. His friend, artist Cara Levine, emailed that Simensky came to the Pyrite Radio works “after a decades-long obsession with currency—its physicality, (connection to materiality/earth) and ethereality (connection to time and society/air).” He gathered us around these rickety contraptions with their jury-rigged wiring to listen to static fuzz as the pirate stations came in and out of audibility. People were alternately repelled by the noise or magnetized by it: the distortion lent the flimsy objects powerful agency.

In 2019, Simensky told me a story of coming across a group of workers on a break, squatting on plastic stools around a tiny transistor radio as they tried to tune in to an international soccer game. To him, this scene illustrated the ways we actually discover value—by testing signals, using trial and error to learn, and finding attunement around a common frequency.

Outside the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco in 2021, Simensky bounced a found AM signal of Mexican ranchera music off the bronze body of Rodin’s Thinker. For the final Pyrite Radio video piece, he edited that audio together with video footage that he shot while participating in Black Lives Matter protests, tearing down monuments of slaveholders and colonialists in Golden Gate Park. Simensky speaks about The Thinker’s “silent scream” in his 2021 conversation with curator Claudia Schmuckli. He also explained how his pyrite/pirate radio might transform settler colonial extractivism (gold mining, data mining) into an activist swarm of bodies coming together to renew their own inherent sense of value. The artist and curator Aki Onda, who visited with Simensky while he was working on that project, emailed me that he “found [Simensky’s] approach to radio unique and inspiring as he found its essence as a primitive transmission medium, whereas almost all artists and composers deal with its technological and aural contexts.”

In 2015, Simensky was interviewed by Kristan Kennedy, curator at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), about his 2015 work Surface Contents 1 & 2. That piece—a series of actions, architectural interventions, and a site-specific video—captures the specter of gold dust animating shafts of light in PICA’s warehouse space: “A speck of gold is nothing… but once cast off as a sea of particles moving in the air, it opens up, becomes a mass, a sculptural form, a column of light, a dancing vibrating hive—simply to go away again. The drama is in those moments of coming together, but ultimately, the work resides as well in the falling away, residue, absence, or memory,” he told her, adding that he was “equally interested in the remains of the event itself—as a footprint or a sparkling gold particle trapped in the crease of someone’s skin.” As with Pyrite Radio, the value is transferred away from the precious metal itself and toward its powers of transmission and entanglement.

As so many in the art world can attest, bureaucracies are rapidly finding ways to foreclose on our last remaining creative spaces. As friends, Simensky and I often discussed ways to liberate the imagination from the suffocating enclosure of capitalism, and tried to carve out time for spaces of meaning. In Peter’s case, this often meant mediating with the churning surf; conviviality with friends, children, and elders; learning through play; unlearning through art; and deep, deep listening.

So, what does our practice of mourning look like right now? Simensky was a Jewish American deeply empathetic to the suffering of Palestinians, and it is impossible not to acknowledge that to be Jewish right now is to have your very identity mined for the most horrible and murderous purpose. Had we held him tenderly enough? Inspired by his work, I find myself seeking signals in the life that remains. If we reimagine our pedagogy and practice in Simensky’s wake we might consider how we insist on the values that he held dear—the preciousness of all life, the value of creative spaces, leisure time, as well as coming together so that we don’t fall apart.

“I had the typical experience of falling through the tunnel and arriving at what looked like a blue star. Around it I saw little figures, little angels around a sphere,” Thaler, now 74, told Art in America from the suburban Missouri office of his AI company, Imagination Engines. “The most trusted people in my life—my dog and my grandmother—were there. And she said, ‘It’s not your time.’” When Thaler woke up in the hospital, his grandmother and his dog were waiting for him. That was perplexing. If they were alive, yet appeared in his vision, he reasoned, the powerful experience was no evidence of heaven but was fake or, more precisely, a visual spasm created by a brain at the apex of trauma.

That link between trauma and creativity (the vision Thaler’s brain produced) would prove instrumental for Thaler more than 50 years later, in 2012, when he induced trauma in an AI system he’d invented in the ’90s—Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, or DABUS—and it created an image that marks a stunning moment in this history of art: according to Thaler, it is among the first artworks to have been created by an autonomous artificial system. He has spent years trying to get that image copyrighted, listing DABUS as its author. The United States Copyright Office currently grants copyright only to human beings; Thaler’s invention, and his legal struggle, speak to one of the central debates currently raging in visual culture: can machines create art? “He is a mythical figure in the field of A.I. intellectual property,” Dr. Andres Guadamuz, a leading expert in emerging technologies and intellectual property, said of Thaler. “Nobody knows for sure what he’s about. Is he a crank? A revolutionary? An A.I. sent from the future?”

Many computer scientists have invented AI systems that create autonomously, but Thaler is one of the few who is comfortable using the word “sentient.” “Is DABUS an inventor? Or is he an artist?” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you that. It’s more like a sentient, artificial being. But I even question the artificial part.”

Thaler makes for an unassuming Dr. Frankenstein. He dresses in sweater vests, like a frumpy professor, his silver hair teased into tall strands that curl delicately at his forehead. His lab in St. Louis takes up an otherwise empty floor of a squat three-story building in a shopping center that contains a Sam’s Club, a Walmart Supercenter, a plastic surgeon’s office, and a church. There’s wall-to-wall carpeting, a microwave, some small robots, a bowl full of Nature Valley granola bars and a large jug of instant coffee. A plush orange and black striped spider hangs over his desk.

He grew up not far from there, a precocious boy who obsessed over crystalgrowing kits after receiving his first one in middle school. “I was fascinated with the idea of things self-organizing into such beautiful forms,” he said. He would go on to get a National Science Foundation grant in high school for a research project he devised. That led to a stint at a crystal-growing lab in Malibu, and eventually a master’s in chemistry at UCLA. He started his PhD at UCLA but found academic politics there distasteful, and followed his adviser to the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU).

“I wasn’t making a fundamental scientific discovery there,” he said, “and I always thought ‘I’m a pioneer, I want to be a pioneer, and do something truly outrageous.’”

MU happens to have the most powerful university research reactor in the United States, and Thaler used it to study how silicon reacts to radiation damage, thus potentially producing electronically valuable impurities within the material. One of his jobs was creating computer models that could simulate the knock-on damage of atoms.

“I started playing games. I was building lattice models in which I could actually freeze in smiley faces, and when I would damage it, it didn’t create arbitrary patterns but slight variations on them,” said Thaler. The experiments cemented something that he had suspected for a long time: “An idea is just a corrupted memory.”

In the 1980s Thaler was experimenting with neural networks, technology that mimics the architecture of the brain, and using damage to provoke what he calls “novel experience.” He would stress out the synthetic brain until the system started making erroneous associations between different concepts. He created the DABUS system in his garage in 1992. By introducing noise, a mathematical representation of randomness that human senses register as static, he found he could simulate perturbation. As noise was injected into the system, it began to make new associations between its different training data, thus generating new ideas. Simultaneously, DABUS could recognize which of these new associations was useful and which wasn’t, until it got overwhelmed by the influx of noise, and effectively stalled.

At the time, artificial intelligence was more science fiction than reality—it would be almost a decade before Steven Spielberg released A.I., his 2001 movie based on a 1969 short story about a robot child—and Thaler’s attempts to find investors for DABUS fell flat. “They thought it was crazy,” he said. “They said, ‘That’s impossible, machines cannot invent anything,’” In fact, Thaler and DABUS were ahead of their time. His implementation of noise is the same principle that powers the generative AI systems Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL·E that have taken over the tech world in the past few years. The only difference is scale: DABUS was trained to create from the 4,000 images Thaler had on his camera roll. By comparison, Midjourney was trained on 5.8 billion images scraped from the internet, and it receives constant input from its tens of millions of users. “I suffer from insomnia late at night over this!” Thaler told me over email. “If you actually have the patience to read through my patents, from the ’90s, and early 2000s, [big AI companies are] simply adding more money and resources to what I’ve already done. Those are my inventions.”

Despite the lack of investor interest, Thaler continued to tinker with DABUS. In 2012 he introduced a different kind of noise: simulation of the near-death experience he’d had as a child. He intentionally severed a portion of DABUS neural nodes from the rest of the network, and found that it caused a reaction similar to a human’s end-of-life light show, something Thaler calls “life review and then the manufacturing of novel experiences.” Afterward, DABUS began reviewing its data or, as Thaler puts it, its “memories,” and, from them, produced an image showing train tracks threading through brick archways that it called A Recent Entrance to Paradise.

“It’s proto consciousness, you have a continual progression or parade of ideas coming off it as a result of this noise inside,” Thaler said. “This is how our brains work, we think mundane things exist in some common state, and then the tiger is chasing you off the path and you climb a tree or do something original you haven’t done before. That’s the cusp that we live on.”

Thaler might never have sought legal acknowledgment of DABUS as a creator had fate not introduced him to a man named Ryan Abbott. A physician, lawyer, and PhD, Abbott was working as an intellectual property lawyer for a biotech firm when a vendor approached the firm with a new service: machine-learning software that could scan a giant antibody library and determine which ones should be used for a new drug.

“I thought, well, when a person does that, they get a patent,” Abbott, who is now a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law in England, told Art in America. “But what about when a machine does that?”

He began researching machine learning and came across Thaler. In Thaler and DABUS, Abbott saw a means of testing out patents and copyrights invented by autonomous machines. The two men began speaking with judges and other legal experts about the possibility of obtaining patents and copyright for DABUS’s creations. At the time, a decade before generative AI became daily news fodder, they were met with utter disbelief that DABUS was capable of such production. But even now, Thaler and Abbott find consistent obstruction to their goal of getting DABUS, and thus Thaler, recognized for its creative output.

“We submitted [A Recent Entrance] as an AI generated work on the basis that Dr. Thaler had not executed the traditional elements of creativity,” Abbott said, “with the aim that AI generated work should be protected and someone should be able to accurately disclose how a work was made.”

Abbott and Thaler’s push for copyright brings up a very basic question for artists today: how do we locate agency and creativity when we make things with machines? When is it our doing, and when is it “theirs”? This question follows the arc of history as humans design increasingly complex tools that work independently of us, even if we designed them and set them into motion. Debates have raged in public forums and in lawsuits regarding to what extent a model like Midjourney can produce genuinely novel images or whether it is just randomly stitching together disparate pixels based on its training data to generate synthetic quasi-originality. But for those who work in machine learning, this process isn’t all that different from how humans work.

“Everything is always going to be a product of how its system is trained,” Phillip Isola, an associate professor at MIT with a long history in developing AI-enabled artistic tools, told Art in America, referring to claims that because an AI has been trained on preexisting images, it isn’t displaying original creativity. “But humans are too.”

Two or three years ago, Isola said, he would have agreed that describing generative AI as stitching together training data in a “fairly superficial way would have been a fairly accurate characterization.” But AI models have grown more sophisticated from reinforcement learning via human feedback, or RL HF. With RL HF, humans rate not just accuracy—say, whether a human hand in an image has five fingers—but how much they like the image the AI model created. This process, Isola argued, has shifted generative AI from predictive creation—or fancy autocomplete—into something different. “Now, I think these [AI] are extrapolating in ways that are similar to the ways humans might be inspired by several different artistic styles, and precompose those into new creations,” Isola said. “Before, they were just imitating us. But now, they try to not imitate what humans would do, but try to learn what humans would want.”

This turn in artificial intelligence is something that German artist Mario Klingemann has been playing with in his artistic practice.

In late 2021, Klingemann launched Botto, an AI image generator that produces 4,000 images weekly. At the end of each week, Botto presents 350 of these creations to a community of more than 5,000 who have purchased stakes in Botto. The community then votes on which images to mint and auction on NFT sales platform SuperRare. Each successive voting period provides the AI additional feedback about what images are successful. Sales proceeds are then split between Klingemann, the community, and the cost to maintain Botto. Such a project makes it blatantly obvious that, yes, one can make interesting, engaging art with AI; it just takes a particularly interesting artist to make that happen. “The purpose of contemporary art is to constantly push the boundaries, make people question, is this still art? Why is this art? We got rid of everything in art over the past 100 years, all that at one point defined art,” Klingemann told Art in America. “Maybe we’ve come to the point where the only thing we can do is remove the artist, the human artist, and still call something art.”

Despite his best efforts, Klingemann hasn’t been able to separate himself from Botto. Even though Botto has its own style that diverges from Klingemann’s tastes, has exhibited and sold work, and has received press coverage and critical analysis, Klingemann knows that Botto will never be considered an artist independent of him. Botto is missing something critical: a self. Klingemann will continue to get credit for Botto, and Thaler will continue to meet skepticism that DABUS can produce work autonomously.

There is a reason AI models are called image generators: Generating and creating are separated, linguistically, by will. Creation implies action, causing, making, whereas generating has its etymological roots in the Latin verb generare, to give birth or propagate. Nature is the result of this supposedly automatic generation, while creation assumes a degree of consciousness. It seems likely that we will deem AI intelligent, creative, or sentient only when it betrays the barest whiff of agency, because intelligence without selfinterest is nonhuman intelligence indeed. A similar principle has undergirded art for millennia. Art is what people make.

In his 2022 book, Art in the After-Culture, art critic Ben Davis writes, “‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like.” Accordingly, the loose definition of art has changed to keep pace with the advancement of machines. Craft is not really art because machines can make tables and sweaters. The advent of cameras, which made rendering a realistic image as simple as pressing a shutter button, initiated Impressionism, Cubism, and the long arc of conceptual art. In contemporary art, the institutions, galleries, and other gatekeepers have increasingly clustered around the figure of the artist and the individual life story, and run away from the material object, which can always be replicated anyway. We are left clutching that indefinable spark as some final differentiator between humans and machines.

For Thaler, that differentiator is already meaningless. “What’s an artist? A bunch of associations, a guy with a beret on his head and a crazy mustache,” he said, arguing, in essence, that the designation comes from social validation, from playing the part. “Thanks to this AI, I do everything from medicine to materials discovery to art and music. I do everything as a result of it and that’s a dream come true.”

If AI images take over the visual field, copyright itself may become obsolete. At the crypto-conference FWB Fest last year, graphic designer David Rudnick proposed that sometime in the near future, most images online will be AI-generated. A 2022 research paper by Epoch—a research initiative on AI development—estimated that between 8 and 23 trillion images are currently on the internet, with an 8 percent yearly growth rate. Meanwhile, current AI models generate 10 million images per day with a 50 percent growth rate, according to researchers. If those numbers hold, we will see what art writer Ruby Justice Thelot recently called a “pictorial flippening” by 2045; “flippening,” according to Thelot, being the point where the visual data from which image generators learn shift from that produced by humans to that created by AI.

“The artificial will no longer try to mimic the human-made but this new amalgam of network-made and human-made,” Thelot wrote for Outland Art in July. “The blurring will be complete, and the modern world will be precipitated into a permanent state of hyperreality, where images will no longer be tethered to a human maker and images will be made for and by machines.”

Over the years, DABUS has been many things to Thaler: creator of spacecraft hulls, toothbrushes, and Christmas carols. It has invented robots and been trained as a stock market predictor. Whether or not it will ever be legally credited for its artwork is for the future to decide. In June 2022, Abbott sued US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter on behalf of Thaler when the court not only refused to grant DABUS authorship but also didn’t allow Thaler to claim copyright of the image as DABUS’s creator. The case eventually went before US District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington, D.C., who ruled against Thaler and Abbott this past August, writing in her decision that Abbott had “put the cart in front of the horse” by arguing that Thaler is entitled to a copyright that doesn’t exist in the eyes of the law. Absent human involvement, there is no copyright protection, according to Howell, because only humans need to be incentivized to create. The decision leaves DABUS in the grayest of gray areas: If, as Thaler claims, he himself had nothing to do with the creation of the image, and if DABUS lacks personhood—and thus a claim to copyright—we are left with a vacuum. No one made this work.

Soon enough, he started sculpting with beeswax instead of using it to make molds. And shortly thereafter, he began collaborating with bees directly. He built steel and wooden armatures, then covered them in beeswax, which naturally attracts honey bees. The insects then deposited wax and honeycombs of their own, building up the surfaces and forms. He had bees sent to him in the city, and told me that “before 9/11, you could ship 20 pounds of live bees by US Mail.” He called the finished works “apisculpture.”

Before he could even finish his MFA, the apisculptures made a splash. Works he showed in a 1985 group exhibition at Grace Borgenicht Gallery received a glowing review from legendary critic Gary Indiana, a write-up in People Magazine, and then, in 1987, had the honor of landing snapshots in a rare New Yorker issue to include photographs. The second apisculpture he ever made, at age 26, titled Mr. Zivic (1986), was promptly acquired by the Hirschhorn Museum. Gallerygoers were perhaps somewhat overexcited; a visitor took a bite out of a sculpture at that 1985 opening, hungry for honeycomb.

Now this was the hyper-commercialized and sensationalist art world of the 1980s. There was little room for work so subtle and sincere. “The gallery system … was like a treadmill,” Puett recalled. His dealer helped him figure out how to make the works more archival, more market friendly: once the bees were done sculpting, he started freezing and sterilizing the wax forms, then showing them in glass cases, where no one would mistake them for snacks. Suddenly, they were collectible. But still, Puett was showing and lecturing alongside peers like Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor, who made big shiny sculptures that gobbled up the art world’s attention.

When Puett’s dealer pushed him to work on the larger scale popular among his peers, he had to explain that that isn’t how bees work. A swarm of 100,000 bees is the size of a mini fridge, he told me. “That’s a lot of bees. That’s a lot of energy. Those little brains are, collectively, doing a lot of work.” Even if you get “a swarm the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, they won’t necessarily make something bigger or better.” He was also pressured to make the works more attractive—“they really do look like pieces of chicken,” he admitted—and to cast them in bronze. But this ran against the spirit of the project. Bees were his collaborators, not tools. “They might just swarm out and go somewhere else,” he said, and that’s their choice. Besides, these weren’t sculptures for the human eye alone. “They’re not meant to be beautiful.”

All the attention had seemed encouraging at first: Puett hoped that it might benefit the bees, and finally correct their reputation as vicious stingers. (This was before they’d been declared endangered, before they became a species to save.) Honeybees, he said, “are nice, fuzzy little animals” who sting far less frequently than people think. They are also the only insect that humans have domesticated, besides silkworms. He hoped too that his work might encourage urbanites to reconnect with nature. His apisculptures often took the shape of human figures because he wanted to create an image of the hive overtaking the individual, nature overtaking humans.

But then Puett learned that all the while, his art dealer had been getting “someone to fly over his whole [residential] compound and spray insecticide every spring … even as he was promoting a bee artist!” And with that, he left the commercial art world, participating only in the occasional museum project. In 1995 he gave up on New York, leaving his $400 per month waterfront Williamsburg loft for full-time beekeeping in Hawaii. He now operates one of the largest certified organic honey farms in the United States, caring for 2,000 colonies.

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, interspecies artistic collaborations have been few and far between. If such collaborations made headlines, it was for the shock factor, and more often than not, constituted outright animal abuse. The most notorious examples have enlisted not insects, but furry friends. In 1974 Joseph Beuys locked himself in a room with a coyote for three days for a performance that became iconic, titled I Like America and America Likes Me. Three years later, Tom Otterness shot and killed a shelter dog for a film before reinventing himself as a whimsical sculptor whose plump bronze figures now bumble about New York’s 14th Street subway station. Then, in 2007, Otterness apologized and called Shot Dog Film “indefensible.” The 2003 video Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu shows dogs harnessed on treadmills, trying to run toward one another; it was removed from a 2017 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum after protests led by animal rights activists. And Eduardo Kac claimed, in 2000, to have had a rabbit named Alba genetically engineered using extracted green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to make her glow. Alba was never seen publicly, so some are skeptical. Still, Kac was accused of “playing God.”

These works aren’t so much collaborations as efforts to enlist animals as artistic materials or playthings, as symbols serving human-centered narratives. But as the climate crisis lays bare the devastating consequences of this anthropocentric approach to nonhuman life forms, artists like Jenna Sutela, Beatriz Cortez, and Candice Lin choose methods more like Puett’s and other eco artists’: they invite other species in as contributors or collaborators who might add their own perspectives. They are working with other species in order to ask how we might ethically and responsibly collaborate and cohabitate.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis tends to get the credit for helping artists and thinkers understand just how urgent interspecies collaboration really is. She argued against Darwin’s theory of evolution—which hinges on the survival of the fittest—and showed that instead, life-forms have coevolved interdependently. We humans, for example, don’t make our own food the way photosynthesizing plants do. We rely on and enable the thriving of other species; we don’t just compete and conquer. Margulis was dubbed the “patron saint” of a recent exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” by cocurator Caroline A. Jones. In the catalogue, Jones asked: “If we are dependent on other living entities to survive, how should we acknowledge and honor that affiliation? How shall we live with responsibility and reciprocity in mind?”

“Symbionts” is one of several recent landmark exhibitions ushering in this new era of interspecies art. It joins blockbuster shows by interspecies artists like Tomás Saraceno and Pierre Huyghe. Anicka Yi’s breakthrough exhibition in New York at the Kitchen in 2015 involved bottled fragrances that the bio art icon made from swabs taken from 100 women in the art world. Yi merged bacterial cultures with high culture. And for the grand finale of the most recent Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, kudzu and sugarcane slowly enrobed sculptural figures in an installation by Precious Okoyomon that grew throughout the course of the show.

HUMANS HAVE BEEN OBLIVIOUSLY shaping the evolution of other species for millennia. Aurochs, the progenitor of modern cattle, are extinct, ironically due to diseases introduced by domestic livestock (not to mention hunting). Domestic felines learned to meow in order to catch the ear of human caretakers. And though lantern flies are labeled an “invasive species,” it is humans who, by cargo boat, brought them to the United States, where they now threaten trees and crops. Interspecies relationships enable life at all scales: each human carries around 10–100 trillion microbial (nonhuman) cells; they are our symbionts. Margulis and other scientists have argued that multicellular beings (such as humans) exist today thanks to ancient symbiotic relations among single-celled organisms that, by merging, created new species. This process is called “endosymbiosis.”

Which is to say that we are constantly collaborating with other species, whether we realize it or not. Interspecies relationships are scientific fact, but, being relationships, they are cultural and social too. That is why we need artists to help us navigate and model these emotional and relational terrains fraught with imbalance.

Among these artistic models, Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s stand out. Her work draws attention to the ways other organisms inhabit our everyday life. Growing up, Jordan “was always with animals,” she told me on Zoom. Now based in Berlin, she was adopted from Korea and raised in the German countryside, where she “didn’t like people so much, especially in the area I grew up in … they were really racist, and I was the only Asian person besides my brother.” Kids called her “rice-eater” and “slits.” So she hung out with the family dog and the chickens, and even befriended an injured wild crow. At 27, she enrolled in Berlin Kunsthochschule, where she studied under the climate artist Olafur Eliasson.

Before art school, Jordan, whose Korean name means “goddess of the sea,” worked as a rescue diver. Underwater, she grew fascinated by the sea cucumber—a scavenger that isn’t considered very intelligent, but is, in a sense, immortal. This is true in that there is no evidence that sea cucumbers die of old age, but only from accidents or disease. They have come to form symbiotic relationships with certain fish, who hide from predators in the sea cucumber’s anus. (Usually, the fish knocks before entering.)

Jordan was inspired by this kind of symbiotic relationship when she started her project “Disembodiment” in 2012. But instead of a fish, she chose to open her own anus to another species with whom she felt a kind of kinship: the potato. The crop, like the artist, thrives in, but is not native to, Germany. Spanish conquistadors brought the Incan crop to Europe, and during a 1774 famine, Prussian King Friedrich II introduced the root vegetable to the Germans; now, it is a dietary staple. Wanting to deepen their relationship based on shared experiences, Jordan made an animation that shows a potato growing in her butt. This followed a 2011 collaboration called Compassion, for which she grew potatoes that she watered not with H₂O, but with her own blood.

In 2021 Jordan was invited to do a project at the reopening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Like many others, she had serious reservations about the museum, which houses looted objects from around the world in an Imperialist palace, so she proposed a site-specific version of “Disembodiment” with a budget she said was “like three times higher” than the one allotted. She figured they’d turn it down, and was surprised when they agreed to the version she titled Culo de Papa, or ass of papa—in Spanish, papa can mean “father” or “potato.” She scanned and 3D-printed 33 copies of her own butt, then turned them into potato planters displayed outside the Humboldt Forum. She chose 33 because it is the most butt-shaped number.

The Humboldt Forum is housed in a palace once home to a number of Prussian kings, including King Friedrich II, aka the “Potato King” or “Frederick the Great.” Jordan’s project was a cheeky retort to the colonial histories of both the crop and the institution. At the end of the procession of potatoes was a kiosk that distributed postcards detailing the potato’s colonial history. “Visitors were shocked, and they started to scream at me!” she told me on Zoom. “They were like, how dare you! Don’t you know where you are?”

Jordan’s projects cleverly respond to a tendency in art and academic circles to privilege those creatures we consider worthy based on qualities valued in humans, like intelligence and productivity. Tuomas A. Laitinen, for instance, collaborates with puzzle-solving octopi, and Agnieszka Kurant made a series of sculptures with mound-building termites, in a gesture meant to highlight their collective intelligence—and to ask how we humans might learn from their cooperative model. Jordan, by contrast, takes care to honor species like sea cucumbers and potatoes that are regularly dismissed as banal, but are nevertheless worthy of care and attention.

Jordan, whose debut US museum show opens at The Bass in Miami December 4, is inspired, like many interspecies artists, by writer Donna Haraway. In 2019 Jordan made a video installation titled after Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble (2016). The artist’s version tells the speculative story of a five-generation, symbiogenetic relationship between monarch butterflies and humankind. Jordan’s communing with other species is echoed in Haraway’s influential 2007 book When Species Meet, where the author critiques philosophical, theoretical, and overly intellectualized accounts of interspecies relations that forgo everyday acts of care. She notes that in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer a theory of “becoming animal,” then add that “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool,” as if interspecies care were too sentimental to be serious. She also pokes fun at Jacques Derrida, who once wrote a philosophical essay about his fear of being naked in front of his cat.

In an art world where interspecies collaborations get framed as intellectual or scientific endeavors, Jordan’s humble care for ordinary species stands apart. Her work is that of someone who has spent time with other creatures in everyday ways, like Puett with his bees. As it happens, Puett has decided to return to the art world. He has a new dealer—Jack Shainman Gallery—and plans to show new work next year at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, as part of the sprawling, multimillion-dollar Getty-funded initiative called Pacific Standard Time, with the theme “Art & Science Collide.” He’ll show 3D-printed armatures, and visitors will be able to watch the bees work throughout the show’s run, as they fabricate sculptures depicting humans carving sticks and making clay pots. “You know,” he said, “humanity before the algorithm.” 

But that was all before my time. For me, the great moment was 1987, with Marden’s first show at what was then called the Mary Boone/Michael Werner Gallery, when we saw that Marden had fearlessly taken his work apart and put it back together, differently. The subtly hued and densely textured monochromatic panels of the previous two decades had shed their skin, as it were, to show their gestural bones and sinews. Like Philip Guston forsaking abstraction for images, but within the realm of abstraction, Marden had chosen renewal over repetition.

There are a couple of experiences that come to mind when I think of Marden. One took place in 2000, when I was visiting London. A friend had organized a show of Marden’s work at the Serpentine Gallery and invited me for a walkthrough with the artist and some students ahead of the opening. 

I don’t remember exactly what Marden said, but I remember vividly his physical comportment as he spoke in front of his paintings, a certain way of pointing toward things that came not from the shoulder or the wrist but from the elbow, with the upper arm down, close to the torso, and the forearm moving freely. I thought back to pictures I’d seen of Marden in his studio and realized that this must be something like the way he used his arm in painting.

That seemed like a notable observation, but hardly a surprising one—the same motor neurons being involved in pointing and painting, probably. The surprise came later, when I attended the exhibition’s opening. As I strolled around trying to get another glimpse of the paintings through the crowd, I noticed that people who’d stopped in front of this or that work to discuss it—people who had not been present at the walkthrough to see Marden as he spoke—were using gestures very similar to the artist’s own. That was the revelation: that this art could induct its viewers not just into the painter’s way of seeing but into his way of physically inhabiting the world. It was the most concrete possible demonstration of what I already knew intellectually: that Marden’s was an art of rare power.

My other Marden anecdote dates a full decade before that. I was in Pittsburgh for the opening of the Carnegie International. Some of us invited visitors were offered a bus tour of the area, including a visit to Fallingwater, the amazing Frank Lloyd Wright house about 70 miles out of town. As we were wandering through the place, I stopped to check out a painting on the wall. The style, probably from the 1950s, was unfamiliar, and there was no signature visible. Who do you think the artist is, I wondered out loud to whomever happened to be nearby. Standing next to me was Marden, who immediately answered with the name of an artist I did not know. I don’t remember what else he said, or even what the name was, but I do remember his reply when I expressed my wonder at the fact that he could instantly recognize such an obscure artist. He brushed it off. “Painters know painters,” he said.

Those two stories sum up two facets of Marden’s art that were rarely so harmoniously integrated as in his work. There’s the immersion in tradition, the urge to know all that had been done in the thousands of years that human beings had been painting; in this sense, Marden was totally inside painting the way an angel is inside paradise (or a devil, as John Milton knew, is inside hell). This is the aspect of Marden’s work that has always made it enjoyable to see his exhibitions in the company of painters, when one can learn from their amazement at what they’re seeing and how it was done that would never occur to a non-practitioner. But then, as my experience in London showed, Marden’s paintings are extraordinarily generous in their way of quietly inviting viewers of all sorts into this inner world of the painter painting. He managed to make each of us a little bit more an artist. 

This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue, p. 36.

Korine hit play and opened a portal to a strange realm in which hazy memories of cultural detritus fought for supremacy with a surreal sense of future shock still reverberating decades later—all to the tune of “Sweet Dreams,” a jingle for Nestle’s Alpine White chocolate bars. A taste of the lyrics, which cast a spell while breathlessly spelling out the brand name over ethereal synthesizer tones:

Sweet dreams you can’t resist, N-E-S-T-L-E-S
A dream as sweet as this, N-E-S-T-L-E-S
Creamy white, dreamy white
Nestle makes the very best, N-E-S-T-L-E-S

The soundscape put him into a kind of time-twisting trance. “It reminds me of being in a shopping mall as a kid buying nunchucks from the ninja shop,” he said, “and that reminds me of the time a throwing star got stuck in my friend’s neck. It really gets me in the zone: listening to this, smoking cigars, sometimes putting on some tap shoes.”

Korine’s studio regimen of late falls in line with the kind of extremely specific and decidedly skewed free-associating he has been famous for since he wrote the screenplay for Kids, the scandalous 1995 movie about lusty teens in nihilistic New York directed by Larry Clark, and subsequently went on to cut a singular figure as a filmmaker and artist in pretty much every other conceivable medium. As he made his name directing his own movies, including Gummo (1997), Mister Lonely (2007), and his surprisingly Hollywood-scale breakouts Spring Breakers (2012) and The Beach Bum (2019), Korine worked simultaneously as a visual artist with a practice based in painting, drawing, photography, and other old and new forms.

Related Articles

How Art and Fashion Collaborations Have Evolved Over the Decades

A New Book, ‘Art Monsters,’ Shows the Impact of Feminist Art on Formal Innovation

The Hauser & Wirth show that brought him to LA was the first with his new gallery since leaving Gagosian after nine years. He was tired from travel related to the premiere of Aggro Dr1ft at the Venice Film Festival, but not tired enough to pass on dinner the night before with his friend Al Pacino (did he have any good Al Pacino stories? “They’re all good,” he said) or to refrain from getting amped up while showing off paintings that look like nothing else he’s painted before.

The new works related to Aggro Dr1ft were transfigured in oil paint that seethes with color. To make them, Korine projected frames he chose from the film onto canvas and worked, in a controlled manner unusual for him as an artist, to refine the radiant aesthetic of the movie. Aggro Dr1ft follows a cast of “rainbow assassins” as they brood and kill their way across heat-streaked Miami vistas, in a style that evokes the sort of moody interstitial scenes that might play out between different levels of a first-person shooter game. The paintings share a similar kind of hyperreal atmosphere.

“I was experimenting with paint trying to make things as vibrant possible, mixing colors to try to replicate the thermal imaging,” Korine said. “I was seeing how far I can push paint. They’re heat-based energy, which is always something I’m interested in. It’s like the vapors of a character, chasing something like vibrations. Besides the fact that I thought it was really beautiful, I like the idea that it blurs the line between abstraction and figures. It’s like a living image, like documenting souls.”

He was in downtown LA for the opening of his show, dressed in a zip-up sweater with the collar flared, periwinkle corduroy pants, and blue suede slip-on shoes completing a look that—especially with his perpetual impish grin—might be described as country-club deviant. We were talking about souls made manifest in the form of heat registered by the infrared cameras he borrowed from NASA, and I asked if he had followed the recent capture of an escaped prisoner in Pennsylvania after searchers in a helicopter identified his warm body hiding in the woods. He had, and put a Korinian spin on a scenario that involved a short Brazilian fugitive slinking through the suburbs for weeks: “I heard the cops were worried that, because he was only five feet tall, he was going to put another short guy on his shoulders and wrap up in a trench coat—and try to pretend to be a taller guy.”

Conversations with Korine tend to careen around and take off on such flights of fancy, as if he’s too creatively restless or dispirited by convention to stay rooted in humdrum reality. His mindset matches an artistic style that, from the beginning, has been less multidisciplinary than omni-disciplinary. “I just wanted to make things, and I always really saw everything as one thing,” he said of art he has made going back to childhood. “I never put any type of hierarchy or structure or any type of importance of one over another. I always saw it all as unified. Even at that age, I wanted to do everything.”

When he happened upon success in the movies, filmmaking was just one of many creative pursuits he followed in his ecstatically slapdash style. “A lot of times I go into the studio because I need an outlet, because other stuff gets too complicated or boring, or something happens and I’ll just need to be in the studio alone, with no one around,” Korine said. “Painting is similar to writing in that there’s something completely direct about the process. When I’m feeling an urge to create something I can’t do in other forms, I’ll go into the studio. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s not.”

In previous phases as a painter, he has worked through different periods with aesthetics ranging from splattery abstraction and hardscrabble psychedelia to figurative takes on distended characters and haunted apparitions. “In the beginning, a lot of it came from drawing and sketching, like cartoons and illustrations,” he said. “I would find something interesting, a little form or something I would then try on canvas. Spontaneous action painting was where I was at. I love the physical act of chasing the energy, but it doesn’t always work out well. And these new paintings are different: these were labor-intensive. For me, a couple of weeks is a long time for one painting. I used to make a show in a week. But whatever I’m trying to achieve dictates the process.”

For new paintings like 6LINX (2023), focused on a masked murderer behind the flash of a firearm, and PARADEEZ (2023), lit up by a speedboat racing across an electric red sea, he worked with assistants in his studio in Miami’s Design District to remake dystopian fever dreams from Aggro Dr1ft in a medium with many centuries of history behind it. “It’s painting over a projection, distorting it a little bit,” he said. “Sometimes it changes on its own. The film took a lot of time, a lot of post-production work and a lot of experimentation, with a lot of people involved. This was pretty simple: just paint on canvas.”

Thinking back to why he has long turned to painting when there are more movies to be made, Korine said, “There are a lot of things I couldn’t say in films, so I would want to make paintings. There were things I didn’t want to have to explain, so I would turn it into an artwork.”

Asked to explain what kinds of things he hasn’t wanted to explain, he averred, “The films I make are an attempt to make something that is beyond my ability to articulate. I feel compelled to tell a story, but I don’t exactly know why. Painting is an even more extreme version of that. It’s more immediate, and I don’t have to explain anything in a narrative way. Sometimes it comes from just seeing a color or a character. A lot of the time, to be honest, I’m working on my phone, on painting apps and drawing things with my fingers. That’s usually how it works: turning pictures into images, and turning images into paintings.”

“HE HASN’T CHANGED A LOT—he was full of energy, and he had a million ideas,” Aaron Rose said of first meeting Korine in the early ’90s at his Alleged Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. Korine hadn’t yet found stardom with Kids, but he was a memorable sprite from the start after moving from Nashville to go to New York University. Rose recalled him describing in detail an exhibition idea he was mulling that has since been lost to time. “I remember being struck by how bold it was that he would walk in and not ask to check out his drawings but immediately propose a fully realized installation,” Rose said.

Korine’s early success in movies—he was not yet 20 when he was commissioned to write the script for Kids—set him up to follow peculiar muses into uncharted territory, as an artist and a personality both. “There was always a part of him that was rooted in performance art and street theater,” Rose remembered. “He would embody characters and become them fully. I’d never met anyone like that before.”

Neither had David Letterman, who hosted Korine for a running string of TV appearances on The Late Show that began with the release of Kids (when Korine claimed to have conceived the movie as a sequel to Caddyshack) and ended four years later with rumors (which may or may not be true) of backstage misdeeds involving Meryl Streep. The small-screen vignettes—with Korine coming off as a sort of antic vaudevillian prankster spinning absurdist yarns—did as much as anything to establish his public persona, which he put into play in an art world receptive to his energy.

“As Zaha Hadid once said, there should be no end to experimentation, and that’s very true for Harmony,” said curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who first met Korine in Paris in the ’90s and included one of his new video works in “Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age,” an exhibition he organized for the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf. “What brings it together,” Obrist said of Korine’s multivalent practice, “is that there is really no end.”

Obrist got to know Korine through a mutual friend, fashion designer agnès b., who took in the artist in Paris during a time when he was burned out from filmmaking, and strung out on drugs. (“She’s like my fairy godmother,” Korine told me.)

“He wanted to escape from New York. He said he was bored,” said b., who published an issue of her magazine Point d’ironie with him (featuring sensuous blurry photos of “boys fucking and sucking each other,” as Korine wrote in a press release at the time) and showed his work in several exhibitions at her Galerie du jour (including a 2003 show that featured a drawing of Osama bin Laden posing affectionately with E.T.).

“I think he’s a great poet, and a very great artist,” b. told me. “There is something tender about him. He has grey hair now, but he still has childish eyes.”

Gallerist Jeffrey Deitch remembers Korine from the downtown New York scene in the ’90s and recently worked with him on a painting show at his gallery in Miami in 2021. “There is a world particular to Harmony that is based in reality but extends into an extreme,” Deitch said. “What interests me the most is where the lines between what is reality and what is fantasy blur, and basically disappear.”

The Deitch presentation featured works that revolve around Korine’s recurring character Twitchy, who, according to a show description, “functions as a surrogate for the artist’s own mischievous personality.” (Korine himself wrote in a mission statement: “These light creatures hang out with dogs, or dance on the abandoned boat dock. I would sit outside alone by the water and create alien-like friends on a low-key cosmic tropical playground.”)

“He’s a more mature person now—he’s not the kind of person who sets his home on fire,” Deitch said, alluding to tales of multiple house fires (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) that Korine has made part of his ever-evolving life story. “But he’s retained this childlike manner, and he continues to have access to a childlike sense of wonder—and a childlike perversity. He’s not like artists who had their brilliance extinguished by art school pushing them into an academic mode. He never had that, and that makes his work fresher and more interesting.”

Artist Rita Ackermann, an old friend for whom Korine once conducted an imaginary interview published in a book of hers (first line: “rita it’s so nice to bump into you like this on the streets of the Philippines”) called him the “funniest human being I ever met—a nonstop prankster enfant terrible with the biggest heart.”

KORINE’S BIOGRAPHY DOES NOT LACK for fertile settings and milieus. As the story goes, he was born in Northern California to hippie parents (agnès b. recalled him talking about watching his mother give birth to his sister on the beach). As a kid, he moved to Nashville (home of his favorite shopping-mall ninja shop). Then came college and star-making ascendance in New York, followed by respite in Paris, some time back in Nashville (where he hung out with the likes of William Eggleston), and a move to where he lives and works now: Miami.

“I like the idea of Florida against everything,” Korine said. “I think it’s the greatest place in the world. If you say something is set in Florida, it’s automatically science-fiction. You can believe anything. Say the word ‘Florida’ and it’s endless.”

It’s in Florida that Korine has navigated his latest phase change and entered new stages of his career on several fronts. The state’s skin-tingling, mind-melting environs have played home to his latest movies, starting with the bikini-clad-gangster-girl fantasia Spring Breakers and moving on to The Beach Bum, which stars Matthew McConaughey as a mystical poet named Moondog who cavorts with a cast of characters including Snoop Dogg (playing a rapper named Lingerie).

It’s also where Korine has taken a next step as a visual artist whose paintings and other works continue to evolve. He insisted there was nothing especially momentous about his move from Gagosian to Hauser & Wirth, two of the biggest galleries in the world. “I just had been there for a little while and thought it was a great time to switch up,” he said. “And I love the spaces here—I think this is their most-banging space”—referring to Hauser & Wirth’s downtown Los Angeles location in a sprawling former flour factory, with different gallery spaces, a feted farm-to-table restaurant (Manuela’s), and even a coop for chickens in an open-air garden area that serves as a haven for contemplation.

Did the chickens have anything to do with his move?

“You know, I love me some chicken,” he said.

Thinking back over his start in the art world, Korine lit up when recalling points of entry provided by figures he continues to revere. “As a kid just out of high school, I happened to be around this crew of really amazing artists,” he said about early relationships he struck up with the likes of Mike Kelley, Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, and Paul McCarthy. “That was my introduction to how an artist functioned. When you don’t really know how an artist lives—the relationship between life and work, where one thing begins and another ends—it’s interesting to see how people wake up, eat breakfast, and then go to the studio. I was like, That’s actually a job?! I grew up around dudes, like, washing cars. All of that was popping off at the same time, and it didn’t seem as serious as it got later—people still seemed to be having fun.”

As much as Korine has had ready access to multiple means for making art, he said he still feels restless, especially now. “I just try to entertain myself. I get so bored and just need to see what’s out there—like, what comes after all of this,” he said. “That’s what I’m searching for. That’s why I set up EDGLRD.”

Unveiled this past summer when news of Aggro Dr1ft was announced, EDGLRD is an ambitious new “creative lab and art collective” conceived to make movies, video games, clothing, wearable masks in whose eyes content can be projected, skateboarding gear, digital avatars and accessories, and many other things still in various embryonic stages. In September, the Miami-based enterprise employed around 30 people, and Korine said he planned for it to grow. “It’s difficult to articulate, but I know there are new forms coming. I honestly feel like we’re at the end of something and the beginning of something else,” he said. “There is this kind of singularity popping up in the meshing of music and films and art and gaming. We’re starting to see things coalesce, and the way people are enjoying or taking in entertainment has completely shifted. Now, it’s not just about one thing directly—you’re watching, you’re listening, you’re playing two things at once, you have filters on and avatars. This whole vapor world is starting to rise up.”

The company—which Korine started with a few partners, including a private-equity investor who is also president of the board of The Paris Review—has high-tech applications involving AI and as-yet-untapped platforms for both making and creating content of different kinds. But it began with a simple prompt, Korine said: “How can we assemble an interesting group of kids, game developers, hackers, and designers, and then be like, I have this idea: where can we go? Is it possible to do this? No, not yet, but we can do this. It’s always the creative before the tech. Is there a way to make aesthetic drugs? You can create worlds now, both physical and digital, and tech is advancing in such a way that it’s almost parallel to dreams. For me, it’s the first time I’ve felt like the relationship between tech and dreams is even.”

EDGLRD was conceived to be a highly collaborative entity. “Collaboration is how I’ve always functioned,” Korine said. “On the film side, that’s just the way you make things. Even if you’re completely visionary and take an auteurist’s stance—one person, one idea, one vision—you’re still collaborating in the end. I’m used to that. But this is something else, because I’m trying to develop something that doesn’t exist. I definitely need to be around people.”

But latitude and creative freedom are part of the model. “Harmony is someone who lets people work. He’s not obsessively looking over every detail,” said Joao Rosa, a cofounder and head of production for EDGLRD who worked closely with Korine on Aggro Dr1ft and other visual-effects-intensive projects currently in the works.

Korine said he has already made another movie to follow Aggro Dr1ft called Baby Invasion. “It’s close to a horror film in some ways, and close to a first-person shooter game, mostly told through GoPros and security-cam footage,” he said. But he hopes to give the tools that EDGLRD is developing to other creators too. “I’ll make a couple more, but then I’m going to step back and let the kids use the tech and VFX and gaming engines and stuff like that,” he said. “I’m so curious to see how other people start to use this.”

IN A ROOM OVERLOOKING his show at Hauser & Wirth, Korine kicked back while talking about his favorite kind of cigar (Padron Family Reserve No. 46 Maduro, from Nicaragua) and how he went about choosing images from Aggro Dr1ft to rework into new forms hanging on the walls around him. “There’s no science to anything, and I’m not always right. A lot of it is instinctive, the same as everything,” he said. “It’s like when you look at something and it pops, and you’re like, What if I did X, Y, and Z to it and pushed it into something that’s hyperreal? I always want to go beyond meaning and closer to something like a vibration, something that has a physical component to it.”

At the opening the night before, gallerygoers had sipped drinks like the Florida Man (blueberry-rested mezcal, vermouth, lemon, African basil) out by the chicken coop when a mysterious sight streaked across the darkening sky, causing half the people around me to seize up in fear of apocalypse while the other half remained blasé about what they said was obviously a SpaceX launch of something or other. (Reports later identified it as a US Space Force rocket launch from a base some 160 miles away.)

The gallery was quieter the next day, save for snippets of electronic music playing on repeat as part of a video work with two double-sided monitors showing a few seconds of Aggro Dr1ft in a sort of micro-movie medium. “I’ve never been a big fan of video art that goes on and on, but there’s something interesting in isolating 10 seconds of a beautiful moment and having it endlessly melt into itself,” said Korine. “It’s like loop music, trance music, like rave cinema.”

Thinking through the many means he has enlisted to express himself as an artist, I asked if he could identify any through line or aesthetic allegiance across his decades of work. He did not pause. “I’m just like a child. It’s arrested development,” Korine said. “The same things that made me laugh when I was 12 are the things that make me laugh now. I like the same kinds of things. I really haven’t even probably evolved at all. I work more, but my sensibility and my sense of joy is tapped into the 12-year-old moron. The most base shit is what makes me happy.”

The paintings around him, by no means base with their troubled-over surfaces and luminous hues, suggested other sensibilities at play. I asked, amid so many other modes of making, where painting falls on the spectrum for him: Is it an anachronistic curiosity, or is there something in the timelessness of it that goes beyond? “I like the rules that are set up with it,” he said. “And just when you think there’s nothing else left and nowhere else you can go, something happens, and it changes. Rap music is like that too, and horror films. Those and painting are like the only things where you are allowed to be transgressive, and deconstruct. There’s no fixed point—it’s constantly becoming something else.”

A few minutes later, a photographer showed up at the gallery to shoot Korine’s portrait for this story. Not one to find comfort in standing still, he got an urge and started to move his feet, working his way into a fit of tap-dancing, as he is wont to do. “I always wanted to be a Nicholas brother,” he said, referring to the dancing duo who lit up the silver screen in the ’30s and ’40s in movies like Stormy Weather (especially with their routine  to “Jumpin’ Jive” as played by Cab Calloway).

His feet went fleet and kept moving until whatever he was hearing in his head stopped. Looking over the results of the shoot after, Korine seemed pleased. “That’s OG, right there,” he said. “We got some OG shit up in this Art in America!”  

This article appears under the title “Adventures in the Vapor World” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 88–95.