A drone from above slowly spins as it sets its focus on an abstract emanation from the ground. A tessellated pattern is small enough at the start to barely merit attention, but its design takes shape as the camera zooms in on what reveals itself to be a public address system for emergency management. More visceral than the visual, however, is the sound: a tense, tangled mass of microtonal music made with (as the credits later divulge) “astronomical planetary data” and “electronics.”

The sound by composer Laurie Spiegel, an important early figure in computer music who made her name at Bell Labs, opens Preemptive Listening, a new documentary about sirens and the state of the world in which they resonate. A voiceover sets up the premise near the start: “The siren is an interruption, a jolt, a wakeup call that points to the possibility of escape, a threat that has erupted into the present.” Some more: “These are vibrations at the edge of danger.” And still more: “Each siren is a tombstone for a past trauma.”

Preemptive Listening—premiering Friday at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival—is less a didactic documentary than an essay film that follows poetic cues. The soundtrack is full of full of notable names from the realms of music and sound art: in addition to Spiegel, contributors include Moor Mother (poet and member of the fiery free-jazz band Irreversible Entanglements), Debit (who will be part of this year’s Whitney Biennial), Raven Chacon (Pulitzer and MacArthur winner with a show up now at the Swiss Institute), and Kode9 (DJ/producer and author of the 2012 book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear). All of the 19 artists involved were invited to “reimagine the sound of the siren, to think of it as a prompt: a call to attention, a call to action, an instruction towards the possibility of the future.”

The sounds created for the film accompany director Aura Satz, who, in voiceover narration, thinks out loud about sirens in discursive ways. Over impressionistic footage from a siren factory and sites full of flashing lights (strobe warning!), she nods toward the history of sirens as industrial-age warning systems and traces their genealogy back to such things as church bells, shepherd’s horns, and town criers blowing bugles to capture the attention of the masses. The sounds of sirens accompany all manner of crises, from accidents that call for immediate alert to disasters that play out at planetary scale. Earthquakes, floods, and catastrophes related to climate change count as points of focus in the film, which includes travelogue footage from ominous locales such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and a volcano-monitoring station in Chile.

Sirens’ presence in social disorder figures prominently too. Passages in the film are given over to meditations by Khalid Abdalla, an actor and activist in the Arab Spring; two co-creators of Mental Health First, a non-police-response initiative for mental health intervention; organizer and police-sound-weapons scholar Daphne Carr; Maori law scholar Erin Matariki Carr; and anthropologist and environmental philosopher Arturo Escobar. Each speaks about sonic warning signs and states of disquiet that often follow in their wake.

Preemptive Listening is a heavy film, but it also makes space for hope. One of the Mental Health First founders flips the foreboding mood of the script when, thinking about conflict resolution, she wonders what could happen “if we saw the siren as an opportunity instead of a crisis.” And Escobar, the anthropologist and philosopher, connects the notion of emergency with the chance for different kinds of emergence it allows. He posits, intriguingly, that “when there is a breakdown, possibility also arises.”

It started with a blast of static that faded away to reveal a gentle pulse of animal sounds: a serene reprise from seemingly alien birds and bugs going about their business on a planet other than our own. An enormous 60-foot screen showed aerial views of former forest land, where trees—or what remains of them—blaze in otherworldly colors. Then a jarring jump cut shifts to close-up footage of young Indigenous people in feathers and face-paint excoriating disgraced Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (“You filth!” “Parasite!”) for damage done to the Amazon.

All of that is part of Broken Spectre (2021), a bracing video work by Irish artist Richard Mosse currently on view in a new space for Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The show’s setting is itself a story, as the 1898 Italian Renaissance Revival building by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White will soon play home to a new Shainman space when it opens officially after further renovation later this year.

But the setting of the Amazon is of far more immediate and urgent concern here. Broken Spectre draws from travels that Mosse undertook to the Amazon Basin between 2018 and 2020, when he captured still and moving images of environmental destruction on a scale that boggles the mind. Wall text at the entry to the exhibition—which continues through March 16—states that more than one-fifth of the original rainforest has been destroyed in the last 50 years. The 74-minute video documenting the ongoing decimation shows no signs of that slowing any time soon.

As in work that Mosse has made in other neglected locales including the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of Congo and cast-out refugee encampments in hostile parts of Europe, Broken Spectre is a documentary that doubles as a call-to-action. It’s slow and poetic but also visceral and intense, mostly wordless and bolstered by a score that includes music and field-recordings of wild nature. The soundtrack is the work of Ben Frost, a musician and composer—and previous collaborator with Mosse—who mines fertile realms between contemporary classical music, dark ambience, and noise pushed to voluminous extremes. (The current show is a rare gallery happening for which earplugs wouldn’t be unadvisable.)

There would be no way to overstate how moving Broken Spectre is as a cinematic experience and a cri de coeur. The visuals owe to three different kinds of footage: multispectral video for aerial views (similar to those transmitted by remote sensing satellites), 35mm black-and-white film (which evokes the look and feel of old Westerns), and ultraviolet microscopy (suited for miniscule spans of space shown in a big dramatic fashion). Images come and go, sometimes splitting into four channels and other times spanning the whole of a 60-foot screen, with views requiring some neck strain to take in in full. The beauty of the imagery of the rainforest is haunted by its own transience. And the many shots of men with saws and other kinds of ecosystem-erasing machinery are enough to make the blood boil, especially as feelings of helplessness rise to the fore.

At one point in Broken Spectre, during a placid float down a river filmed from some sort of vessel, a small fleet of other boats passes by, filled with tourists toting cameras and craning for shots of a jungle cat slinking through some trees. Their ogling presence struck me at first as surprising, then kind of shocking, and then self-incriminating: mirroring us as viewers peering through lenses at so much beauty but also degradation on the screen. The most biodiverse stretch of our planet is being destroyed, and it’s hard not to feel desperate to get a glimpse before it’s gone.

“I was walking on the street. A car stopped, a few men stepped out, and pushed into my mouth, a liquid. The mouth froze.”

Those haunting words open two New York shows devoted to Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai-based artist who has taken over Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea as well as Amant, a non-profit space in Brooklyn. The text is etched into a brass plate hung next to a small sculpture—a cast of an open mouth made with gunmetal—suspended from the wall. The intriguing form lends the words more impact, especially the final three: “The mouth froze.” “The mouth froze!” “THE MOUTH FROZE!”

I felt estranged from my own mouth as I read that phrase, puzzled over the enigma of a first-person reference to “the mouth” (rather than “my mouth”). But I found the phrasing perfect for a pair of shows focused on literal and figurative voices and the many ways they can be both erased and amplified. In Listening Air (2019–2023), the central work in the Tanya Bonakdar show, a sound installation features microphones dangling and slowly spinning in a darkened room while broadcasting recordings of work songs and different kinds of folk and protest music from around the world. Voices resound from India, China, North Korea, Lebanon, Italy, and the American South (the last one recognizable from the refrain “we shall overcome”). The artist reverse-wired the microphones, transforming them into speakers for playback rather than receivers of sounds.

Upstairs, an array of wooden shelves is lined with glass bottles that might appear empty but are filled, in a sense, with Gupta’s voice: the artist says she recited poetry into these vessels, selecting works by writers who have been imprisoned for their words. The work is silent, but the voices conjured within it are palpable—and accompanied by a kind of catalytic clamor courtesy of Song of the Ground (2017), a nearby work that features two rocks banging into one another by way of a mechanical contraption. The stones are from a porous borderland area between India and Bangladesh, where conceptions of boundaries break down.

A standout at Amant—a mini-retrospective of sorts, with works dating as far back as 2012—is an untitled installation from this year in which Gupta revisits the reverse-wired-microphone apparatus, with a mic-speaker intoning the names of detained and incarcerated poets. Meanwhile, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2023) fills a room with vitrines displaying sculptural casts (in gunmetal, again) of books by those same poets bearing titles such as We Can’t Hear Ourselves, No One Hears Us and Two Silences Made a Voice.

That notion of a voice made by silence is one that Gupta seems to both appreciate and abhor, and her work is all the better for the tension between the political stakes it engages and the personal resilience it memorializes. Gupta refuses the idea of silence as an absolute state, and shows how voices persist in defiance of forces that might suppress them.

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.

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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.

As told to A.i.A. I was in a funk and I just painted it. I was like, Damn, it’s my birthday, and I’m really 65—shit! I can go get me a Big Mac for half-price, get me that Senior Melt. I was feeling all sorry for myself. Then I was reading this [Paul] Gaugin book and saw “no atou,” which is something Tahitians would say that means “I don’t care.” That’s how I felt, just at the moment. It’s like being bipolar and you shoot yourself: you’re in Hell or Heaven, and you think, Damn, I shouldn’t have done that. I should be happy I’m alive. I love it!

I never cut the cake. I started it on my birthday, but I was still painting the cake last week. I wanted more details. I actually started two paintings on my birthday. One was another portrait that was really bad. I sometimes just do that to document myself. But for this I had a cake and I was thinking about Wayne Thiebaud. I thought, Shit, I can’t cut this—it’s the most beautiful cake I’ve ever had. Then there’s my little 3-year-old daughter in the background. You want to celebrate with folks, sometimes.

My partner bought the cake for me. I was watching a Korean film the other night on Netflix and they had a cake similar to that. I was like, Damn, it must have come from a Korean bakery. I get all my croissants in LA from a Korean bakery. Anyway, I cherished it, and I probably had it in my refrigerator for a month or two. I was working on so many other paintings, so I would come back to this, and I like to actually have the real thing. So did Wayne Thiebaud. You want the actual cake, you know what I mean? Do you know Wayne Thiebaud? You don’t know him personally—you’re not a time-traveler, are you? He’s a California painter. You’ve got to know your people.

My daughter in the background—her name is Epic. I actually made a painting of her, and it was behind me when I started this one. I was alone and missing my daughter. Of course I snapped out of it. Sometimes I exaggerate my emotions. It’s like being in Iraq and you’ve got to FaceTime your daughter. But really, honestly, I was just going, making paintings. I didn’t want to overthink it. I was just sitting there and it was like, Bam—this is what I’m going to do.

It also reminded me of a painting I made in Somerset, England, of a butcher shop that had all these meats. Anyway, there are a lot of things that give me incentives. I just want to tell a little story. If I were writing in a journal, it would say “Alone, with a beautiful cake, in my studio”—and that would be the work. It’s basically just me talking about a day.

The children playing by the 1920s-era carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park had no idea what was about to fill their ears when guitar tones and drones from a violin started surrounding Nicholas Galanin’s imposing public sculpture nearby. Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman—two friends of Galanin who had been commissioned by the Public Art Fund to perform this past Sunday afternoon—were positioned with the iconic bridge as a backdrop, but the structure most integral to the proceedings was In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra, a 30-foot-tall sculpture made with the same kind of steel used for border walls between the US and Mexico. The work, with the word “LAND” rendered in the style of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, has a commanding sort of beauty about it. But there is a darkness—a disquieting acknowledgement of the violence and forced separation perpetrated in conflicts related to land—in it too.

Chacon and Ortman improvised a set of music that came just two days after Galanin and fellow artist Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to remove their work from “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” a survey that counts as the first show of contemporary Native art at the institution in 70 years. Offered as a protest against America’s plans to provide funding to Israel for its military actions in Gaza, the move was a way to show how, as Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Johnson wrote, “the work we do as artists does not end in the studio or with our artist statements, it extends into the world.”

Chacon (Diné) and Ortman (White Mountain Apache), for their part, played noisy, spikey, discordant music that was impressively uninterested in the kind of uplifting style you might imagine at a daytime performance in a public park. They had just a few speakers at their disposal, but their sound was loud—and very much in line with the mood of a day that was both triumphant (it was the same day as the New York City Marathon, always an incontrovertible celebration of humanity) and distressing (it was yet another day when what seemed to be protest-provoked shouts in the distance signaled increasing unrest).

At one point, between spells of distorted static and shrieking lead lines that wouldn’t have been out of place at a heavy-metal concert, Chacon was hunched over his bank of guitar pedals when he looked up and spied a helicopter in the sky. He kept on looking, craning his head and twiddling the knobs at his feet while waiting for the chopper to follow its flight pattern and circle back. When it rounded a bend and crept closer, he locked his sound into a digital delay—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—that he timed almost perfectly with the slashing of the blades. Through these sounds, it was as if the earth and the sky had become one, with machinery brokering an accord that it also managed to mangle beyond recognition.

“Indigenous care for Land and community is rooted in connection based on mutual sustainability,” Galanin said in a statement around the unveiling of his sculpture, which went up in May and will remain in place into March of next year. “Rather than nationalism or capital, this perspective always embodies a deep respect for life beyond any single generation.”

The notion of a collective “deep respect for life” has felt cruelly elusive of late, as has the idea of any kind of collectivity that could continue for generations. But there both were, in a sculpture that seemed to suggest that the land on which we live is land we should share.

The move ends Bove’s arrangement with Zwirner, with which she signed on for co-representation with Maccarone gallery in 2011, and which featured her first solo show in London in 2015.

In an announcement, Larry Gagosian said, “Carol Bove is a leading voice in sculpture today. I’ve been following her work for years and was struck by her installation in the Swiss Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2017. Her intervention into the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 further impressed me, revealing her acute sense of architecture as a framework for sculpture. Carol exhibits a unique capacity for illusion in her use of materials and color. It’s a privilege and honor to partner with her and pursue more ambitious projects together.”

Bove’s first show with Gagosian will open in November at the gallery’s Park & 75 location in Manhattan, a short subway ride from “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” an exhibition co-curated and designed by Bove that opens October 4 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gagosian will also feature new sculpture of Bove’s in October at Paris+ par Art Basel, “integrating her work within the context of the gallery’s wider historical program,” according to an announcement.

Born in Geneva and raised in Berkeley, California, Bove has been based in New York since 1993. Her work with found objects and finely rendered materials has involved different modes of display, ranging from bookshelves stocked with esoteric countercultural tomes to columns and plinths that serve as sculpture in and of themselves. Her recent work in steel has evolved in terms of size and form, with numerous sculptures shaped and painted in ways that twist perception and play with tensions between dynamism and stillness.

Her work featured in Documenta in 2012, when she exhibited four outdoor sculptures inspired by 18-century statues of mythological gods, and on New York’s High Line, where in 2013 she installed glyph-like sculptures in a then-undeveloped part of the park. In 2021, Bove installed a series of contorted steel tubes adorned with reflective aluminum disks in empty niches at the Met in New York (under the title The séances aren’t helping) and presented “Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.

The special pull-out print that accompanies the Summer 2023 “Icons” issue of Art in America features o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin), a painting that Jemison made around 1974. Below, the artist tells A.i.A. about the context in which it was conjured—and how the work wound up in parts unknown.

As told to A.i.A. In 1971 I got invited to be in an exhibition at what was then known as the Museum of the American Indian [before it changed to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian] in New York. It was the first time I showed with other Native artists. Around then, I was just beginning to search for more about my identity. I grew up in an all-Seneca community, but there wasn’t a lot of what I would call “cultural immersion” then.  

I’d just started a job as a counselor for children who had attention-deficit disorder. The kids would get a timeout period during the day, and I started spending a lot more time outdoors with them. I started to really look at the natural world for patterns and ideas for my work as I was contextualizing it within our cultural traditions. 

I was looking at trees and how they had influenced our way of life. Before the first trade occurred, everything we used had to be made. We manufactured our own cooking pots, our own tools, our own utensils. I was learning about all of that, but more in the form of reading than through active participation. 

The next step was to spend time meeting people in my community who I had known but hadn’t seen in quite some time. I also began to exhibit with other Native artists on a regular basis. Actually, there was an article in Art in America in 1972 by Lloyd Oxendine, who wrote about 23 contemporary Native artists. The Today Show interviewed him about the article, and we did an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum [“Native North American Art: Contemporary Works by American Indian Artists”] that year too. That all pushed me to really look at the kind of iconography that I wanted in my artwork and that spoke to my identity. 

My painting o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) falls right at the nexus of me revisiting questions like: Who am I? What are the traditions that I come from? What does it mean to be a contemporary Seneca? What are our issues and concerns? In the Seneca language we have this phrase Jõhe’hgõh, which means “the foods that sustain us.” There are three primary foods that we raised to be the source of our sustenance: corn, beans, and squash. The pumpkin is a squash, and it’s one of those vegetables that can be stored and then used during long winter months. 

The background of the painting represents tree bark, but it’s painted in an abstract manner with colors that would not be present in an actual tree. I wanted to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. Rendering what in reality is heavily textured as flat makes for a kind of breakdown of the picture plane.

This work was stolen after an exhibition at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City in 1983. There was a break-in, and they stole o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) and another painting of mine, both of which I never recovered. A friend of mine actually found the paintings after they were stolen; there was a guy trying to sell them down on Canal Street. They wound up getting confiscated by the New York City police, and I went to the station house in Tribeca and identified the paintings as mine. It was like a scene out of Barney Miller: I’m standing in the middle of the police station, and every cop that comes in says, “Who’s the ahhhtist? Are you the ahhhtist?” The next guy comes in and asks the same question.

So I’m thinking, I’m going to get these back! But the police took them to where they took stolen material. I can’t recall if it was Long Island City or Rikers Island, but, in any case, I went and tried to go through the process to recover them. When I got there and asked, a guy looked at me and said, “Do you see this warehouse? Do you think you could find them here?” I walked away shaking my head.  

Six paintings by Taylor—all made between 2006 and 2018—feature in the tour, with each show rotating through four of them on an alternating basis.

“We wanted a kind of show that didn’t depend on LED walls or anything like that—just backdrops revealing themselves over the course of the show in a lo-fi, theatrical, old-Broadway type of way,” said Mike Carson, the show director and co-designer with Lamar and his longtime collaborator Dave Free. “When you go to a festival or a show, there are things you’re always going to see. One thing I love about Kendrick and Dave is that they’re always like, ‘How do we flip that on its head?’ If people at a festival see the same thing for eight hours in a day and then you come on at 11 p.m., how can you refresh the palate?”

Lamar met Taylor during a studio visit last year and proposed the idea later when trying to figure out how to follow up his elaborate “Big Steppers Tour” with something more pared-down and direct. “Henry’s a fan of Kendrick and there’s a lot of mutual respect and admiration for each other,” Carson said of the two fellow Angelenos. “They were both really excited.”

Together with Lamar and Free, Carson mocked up a sketch of what they imagined, and then Taylor and his team at the gallery Hauser & Wirth sent images of artworks they thought might make sense. Once that was whittled down, Carson figured out how to enlarge the works and print them on a polyester silk surface that could be trucked around on the road and unrolled to star onstage at showtime.

“Some of the art we had printed at 60 feet wide by 34 feet tall, so you see the details of this stuff bigger than ever,” Carson said. “On the poly silk, the colors pop, and it’s also light enough to travel with and safe enough that, if it blows like crazy, it doesn’t knock Kendrick off the stage.”

Taylor’s works—his art also stars in Pharrell Williams’s recent debut menswear collection for Louis Vuitton—started appearing in Lamar’s show at Primavera Sound in Barcelona in June, and featured on Friday night at Lollapalooza in Chicago. More shows will follow in the fall in North America and Asia.

Throughout the tour’s run, Carson said, the art of Henry Taylor has been a suitable co-star for Lamar and his incomparable tales told in the form of rap.

“Henry’s use of color and the storytelling within his art is really impressive, but there’s something about it that feels like homemade and attainable that I think that speaks to the stories of the characters in his art,” Carson said. “We all see a lot of things that are so polished and overly stylized or overly computer-generated, but I really feel the stories in Henry’s art. As a Black man, I definitely see a lot of my history and a lot of my family’s history—and I’m sure a lot of other people do too.”

As the exhibition heads into its final weeks before closing on August 13, Kline talked to Art in America about his experience of the show over time, what he learned from its reception, and what he’s thinking for the future.

So much of your work is rooted very specifically in the time it was made, to the extent that some of it can be called “dated.” While seeing your show I thought a lot about how the notion of art that is dated, though it sometimes gets cast with a dismissive or negative connotation, can in fact be very valuable—and maybe even more valuable—for being so. Do you have any thoughts on this? 

All art is a product of the time in which it’s made. Everything becomes dated eventually. I try to work with this instead of against it. For me, time-specificity is just as interesting as site-specificity. You can deliberately connect a work to a time in the same way that you can connect it to a place. It doesn’t make sense to me to describe 2023 using slang from 1971.

The earliest works in my Whitney show were basically period pieces set in the present. Formally, I was looking at what aspects of the time I was working in were specific to that moment. For instance, what made 2008 or 2011 or 2013—the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession that followed—different from all other times? Design, architecture, fashion—an era’s surfaces—can tell you a lot about that time’s economics and culture. The fact that today the interiors of so many houses and restaurants are being painted in gray institutional colors speaks volumes. 

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What have you taken away from the ways the exhibition has been received? Have any reactions surprised you, or recast anything about your own work for you personally? 

The biggest surprise for me was how much people have responded to the video interviews with blue-collar workers. I didn’t expect those interviews to be the most popular videos in the show. Every time I walk into that gallery, there’s a big crowd listening to people who worked at FedEx or in chain restaurants or as cleaners of hotel rooms talk about their lives. Middle-class people see these workers a lot in the background but very rarely hear their voices. It makes me think that if more of these stories could make it out into the wider culture, maybe it would be harder for politicians and voters to dismiss working people and their concerns.

The show included a discussion event titled “A Century of Displacement: Climate & Mass Migration,” organized in collaboration with artist and conservationist Haley Mellin and featuring scientist Benjamin Strauss, human-rights advocate Amali Tower, and writer David Wallace-Wells. What did you glean from that? 

The most frequent questions that came up were about what people can do, and the answer again and again came down to voting for candidates who take climate seriously. Yes, if you can avoid flying, gasoline-powered cars, and red meat, this will help. But the impact of personal actions like that is dwarfed by the consequences of actions and policies of governments and corporations. 

The media does a really poor job of communicating with the general public about what the climate crisis will look like in our own lives and how soon we can expect things to get bad. They also don’t do a good job at explaining what’s still possible in terms of mitigation—and the difference that can still be made today. Finding ways to make this personal and understandable is vital while there’s still a possibility of doing something. Amali Tower’s talk brought home the real human consequences in the Global South of the rich world’s policies.

You also moderated a panel titled “Beyond Art: Artists Making Movies,” with Makayla Bailey, Aria Dean, Catharine Czudej, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Andrew Norman Wilson. What was your experience of that? 

As the art industry in the US becomes both more conservative and unaffordable because of the cost of living and renting studios in cities like New York and LA, it makes sense that artists who aren’t interested in making paintings will try to take their ideas and ambition elsewhere. For a lot of American artists working with video, the art world feels increasingly untenable.

In his catalogue essay, Christopher Y. Lew mentions you having referred to the sculptures in your Blue Collars series—3D prints of parts of various workers’ bodies—as “solid videos,” and in a recent Instagram post you emphasized the importance of the video work in the show. Is the role that video plays in your practice in any way different than it was at the start? What kind of role might it play in what comes next? 

Everything I do comes out of working with and thinking about the moving image. I went to film school, not art school. Those works made with photogrammetry—photographic 3D scanning—go through a post-production process in the computer that amounts to sculpting in real-time video space. It makes sense to me to think about those sculptures as a kind of solidified video. There aren’t hard boundaries for me between the sculptures, videos, and installations that I make—or between media in general.

Over the last few years, narrative and storytelling have been creeping into my video work. Originally, as part of my Personal Responsibility installation, I planned to make a long narrative film that was going to be split up between the tent sculptures. As I worked on the screenplay during the pandemic, I realized that my story couldn’t be broken up or experienced in a non-linear way, and I made fictional interviews with future climate refugees instead. I’m hoping to shoot that other script in the next couple years as a feature-length film.

Your new Personal Responsibility works—sculptural installations set in the aftermath of imaginary climate disasters, with videos of people recounting tales of horror and forced migration—have been disturbingly on-point in recent weeks, with ongoing fires, flooding, and so forth. How has it been for you to see reality match your imaginings of such catastrophes in real time? 

The Personal Responsibility works are all based on extensive research into firsthand accounts from survivors of climate disasters in the US over the last two decades, most especially hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, and the California wildfires. Sandy was a very personal wake-up call for me. Seeing the lights go out in Lower Manhattan for two weeks in 2012—in supposedly the richest, most-powerful nation on Earth—revealed just how fragile our society is. The pandemic was another, much larger, lesson in disruption. I’ve come to see Covid as a dry run for the kind of disruption and dislocation we will experience as the climate crisis accelerates. Intellectually I know things are going to get really strange, but I was still totally shocked when the sky over New York turned yellow in June.

Has anything about your experience of this exhibition changed or otherwise figured in the way you now think about making new work in the future? Have your priorities evolved? Are there any new kinds of questions you might like to ask and answer? 

I’m approaching a turning point in the cycle of installations about the 21st century that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years. I’ll complete the cycle’s fourth chapter—my project about the Climate Crisis—for a solo exhibition at MOCA in LA in June 2024. After that, when the space and funding is available, I’ll move on to the final two chapters that I have planned, which are utopian. As important as it is to understand how bad things could get, it’s also important to make images of a future that people want to live in—to have something to work towards beyond mitigation and austerity, even in the context of climate catastrophe.