March 26, 2023

I interviewed a bunch of former mermaids at Weeki Wachee, one of Florida’s oldest roadside attractions, for The Cut. Read it here!

February 26, 2023

 

Last night, I somehow watched American Gigolo for the first time, right after Blood Simple (1984). All day, I’ve been thinking about this hotel restaurant where Julian and Michelle meet—pin-drop quiet, no artwork, 80s curves and lacquered cream wall detailing, saturated lighting, the little floor lights on each anonymous half-moon booth—and how much I need a drink there.

November 1, 2022

Some quieter images I’ve been thinking about lately:

—Two bleared Roman Kaval photographs kissing in the corner of the Public Access group show last month.

—Two folded, looping, washed-out paper vases in the window of an elderly center on Canal.

—This Tillman’s shot of postcards propped against a windowsill. I tack mine to the walls. 

—Smudged, blown-out iPhone photos, like this one, of flowers in those big concrete street planters that run along Madison Square Park. They make me think of hot violet nights, and the ocean, and a perfume my mother wore for decades—Fidji by Guy Laroche—which I always misread as Fiji.

October 24, 2022

Vogue sent me to the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, which is perhaps the closest I’ve come to party reporting?? Here are my findings. (I saw a lot of nuns.)


Photo by Kenyon Anderson

September 30, 2022

For years, I wondered where the high heel chair originated—that upholstered, surreal-seeming star of sex shops, dumpsters, echoing suburban mansions, salons and teen bedrooms. There was, it turned out, no commonly accepted history. It was as if they’d sprung from a vacuum, a trickle-down of a surrealist readymade peddled by Walmart and Ali Express. So I began digging around, and wrote about it for Architectural Digest.

September 23, 2022

In short new things: I wrote about the Gagosian’s latest Curzio Malaparte-adjacent show for T. Read it here.

July 22, 2022

My friend Haley Nahman, who writes at Maybe Baby, asked me to do a guest takeover on her substack. Here’s 15 Things I Consumed Last Week, with a cameo from Trey’s desk, where he has been developing fragrances.

March 29, 2022

Some quick notes on mice and men

The mice were visible for months. Five, maybe six. They entered by squeezing through wall cavities I could not see—holes lodged somewhere deep within the heating vents that sat below my home’s windowsills—a blur of fur across floorboards. I stopped throwing extra pillows on the floor at night. I stopped cooking too. I would write cross-legged on the couch, avoiding contact with the ground. I began to spend evenings at my boyfriend’s place, returning every few days to switch clothes and wipe the kitchen counter. Each time, I noticed fresh pellets of shit. 

Rodent infestations are not unusual in Manhattan, especially in buildings adjoining construction sites (mine). They’re framed as a rite of passage, likely by necessity, packaged with other small miseries like clanking pipes and bar fridges. Sticky traps were laid first, topped with globs of peanut butter, then plastic traps were loaded with a sugar mixture prepared by my landlord’s family. Mice died. Mice appeared. There were always more mice. One female, I learned, can have between five and 10 litters per year, each averaging six to eight babies. Eventually, after multiple appeals—and only when a corpse showed up in the kitchen sink—my landlord agreed to pay for an exterminator. 

They padded the walls first—gaps between the oven and the kitchen counter—stuffing them with steel wool pads that had been chopped in half. Along the cracks between the floorboards and walls, and in the interior corners of the heater units, the exterminator sprayed polyurethane foam from cool metal cans. The substance spurted out like whipped cream, before expanding and hardening. In its final form, it recalled Erwin Wurm’s tubby Fat Cars.

Even after physical evidence of mice stopped appearing, I heard them constantly. I hear them still, in the walls. My ears are attuned to the patter of their footsteps and to furious, faint scratchings at the new foam blockages. For a while, I was hyperaware of my apartment’s sounds: the hum of the refrigerator, a creaking wall. I bought more cans of foam, and late at night I filled holes that weren’t really holes yet, chasing three-inch ghosts in a trance.

Tonight, after another trip to the hardware store, I read that expanding foam retains its form for 80 years. Some brands claim the product can last a century, though I don’t understand how anyone could know that for sure. I like to envision a future tenant noticing it everywhere, spilling inward, onto the floors. By then, it will be the only indication I lived here at all.

March 24, 2022

For Vogue, I wrote about Sanibel, the unofficial seashell capital of America, mollusk shells as telegraphers of absence and death, conchlyomania, and our desire to make metaphors from nature.

(Importantly, a lot of my iPhone shell photos are now available to the PUBLIC.)

March 16, 2022

At the new public library on Fifth, I watch a woman in glitter hoop earrings and an old Census t-shirt sway gently from side to side. I imagine she is smiling underneath her baby blue hospital mask. On the library computer before her, three windows are open, each playing different YouTube videos. She has arranged the windows so their sides touch, but do not overlap, like security footage in a large store.

In the top two windows, women smile sweetly as they perform “touching hand” ASMR. Palms cup the chins of an imagined audience. Their arms extend forward, miming a caress. The bottom film is stock footage of red-hot flames—a roaring fireplace. I’ve puzzled over the arrangement for longer than I care to admit.

January 17, 2022

Whenever I can, I make short notes on cloud formations. Below, a few from my Notes app, looking like a writing 101 class prompt:

—Sometimes the clouds sweep so far and thick across the sky that they become sort of inverted: the blueness embraces the role of clouds, sneaking through gaps in the white.

—Clouds pulsate outward like water torpedoes.

—Today they are spread over the sky like clotted jam.

—I am watching the clouds in the New Jersey sky from the front passenger seat: enormous, floaty mounds of grey, curling like cigarette smoke, behind them, forms that make no sense at all, bright and white and skinny, shooting outward in all directions, as if fireworks. Eventually there was so much cloud I could no longer describe it, except as a Derwent pencil smudge.

—Clouds function like television: the image is constantly in flux, even as you are perfectly still, and thus our eyes cannot be bored of them. 

—When I was religious, clouds inferred something of the almighty and I imagined God inside of them, a man wrought from suspended liquid droplets, arms outstretched, awaiting me. I never conceived of God as a formless presence, because everything formless thing on earth becomes a body, or hints at its separate parts. We search for bodies in every abstraction, looking for more of ourselves.

December 9, 2021

Tis the season to consume! I made a gift guide for all the people you can’t forget: friends who like attention, friends with guinea pigs, your favorite bodega guy, budding magicians, and fans of Kathy Acker.

November 13, 2021

Dispatch regarding my current “mood” (read: sinking).

November 11, 2021

I worked with artists and creative technologists Tin&Ed on the naming and artist statement for their new installation, Speaking Vessel, launched at the new Apple flagship in Istanbul. You can read my words below:

In Tin&Ed’s augmented reality installation, Speaking Vessel, ancient-seeming objects materialize atop empty Apple store seating. One moment there is almost nothing—air, silence, space—the next, enormous, shimmering 3D vessels begin to reveal themselves in strips, like images caught in the process of loading. Their surfaces are swirling and kinetic, a moving canvas created in the app Procreate for iPad, and animated in a real-time game engine. Dancing around every curve, the variegated patterns not only recall ebru—the Turkish term for marbled paper—but aqueous surface design techniques first used in China and Japan, which arrived at Anatolia via the Silk Road. Used here, they’re an ode to the interconnectedness of cultural histories, and to open artistic exchange.

As viewers get closer to a vessel, they’ll spy gold line-work bisecting the abstract patterns: drawings of bodies, beards, small groupings of trees. Tin&Ed incorporated sketches from sixteen Turkish artists, which move and stretch and seem thoroughly alive. (The artists’ silhouettes are hidden in the vessels’ forms.) They also collaborated with Istanbul-based sound researcher Oguz Oner, whose soundscapes emerge from deep within the pots, like ancient spirits awakened. Moving between vessels, new audio compositions emerge, layering vocal textures and field recordings in Istanbul with modulated clips of Turkish percussive instruments, as well as the lyre, dulcimer, mey, ney, and oud.

Like phones, ceramic vessels are communicative objects; in fact, they may be the oldest “device” of their kind. They contain messages of beauty, pleasure, history, and faith. They are signifiers of human endeavor, evidence of our very existence, and of our attempts to connect with one another. In Speaking Vessel they call out to us, eagerly awaiting our reply.

 

October 9, 2021

From my notes app:
Things I dislike, while riding the PATH one evening in early October: title case on an advertisement for 88 Regent Street, a luxury Jersey City real estate development in which one can “Live The Dream”; a woman in a mottled grey turtleneck and Apple Watch, loudly proclaiming, with Muppet-like intonation, that her company directors are “billing the client two hundred percent”; a too-small-to-carry-anything Whole Foods bag emblazoned with abstractions like “harvest” and “love veggies” and “back to the roots”, which arrange themselves uselessly around a trio of illustrated carrots, smiling in stupid cursive.

October 7, 2021

Last week, to celebrate Out in the World with Gaetano Pesce, we staged a signing with Mr Pesce at Salon 94 on 89th Street. It was a perfect afternoon. Thank you to everyone for coming, and especially to him.



September 14, 2021

Brief dispatch from Jimmy Buffett’s almost* New York debut, a shiny, trompe-l’œil filled Margaritaville complex,  including 234 “island inspired” hotel rooms.


*Lest we forget Escape to Margaritaville, Buffett’s 2018 Broadway musical.

June 1, 2021

From my notes app:
Things I like, on the first day of June in 2021, spent in Bryant Park: a sparrow (or something like it) hopping jauntily along the length of a weathered stone baluster, its speckled brown feathers a tiny marvel to behold; cartoonish, inelegant topiary installed on the park’s West 40th Street end, shaped like teenage hair clips from Claire’s writ large, as in, a big, gaudy love heart and a flower-cum-windmill, both whittled from green leaves; a gratifying, full-flowing piss I took earlier in a public bathroom; the smell of pretzels; a kiss between strangers I allow my eyes to linger upon for longer than they should; the handsome serif splashed across a gospel flyer someone handed me just now; the sky, a sleepy, milky hue today, the inoffensive blue of a soft baby rattle; this line from an Olivia Laing essay on the gestural painter Chantal Joffe: “A painting betrays fantasies and feelings, it bestows beauty or takes away; eventually, it supplants the body in history.”

I’ve not ventured into a public library for more than a year, and I have to say it feels very fucking good to browse shelves at the finally-completed Mid-Manhattan venue—despite a cap on visiting time (30 minutes, standing only) and even though the great majority of it resembles, at best, a despairing, shiny corporate lobby.

May 15, 2021

Forgive me for the book spam, but Document Journal interviewed me regarding the making of our debut: Out in the World with Gaetano Pesce. Read it here.

May 1, 2021

Alert! I am the editor of a new book on Gaetano Pesce, the master of Italian radical design.

A month-ish ago, my brother and I released Out in the World with Gaetano Pesce, our debut from Museum Books. TLDR: The hardcover volume features a puffy sticker cover portrait by Duane Michaels, and documentation of Pesce’s work from over two dozen image makers around the world. There is an essay and interview by the critic Sophie Haigney, and 19 histories of chairs penned by myself.

You can order a copy here.

April 25, 2021

Artists Tin&Ed have a new two-month installation, Life Forces, at Rockefeller Center. They asked me to write the window-sized exhibition text, which you can read below. (Go see it too.)


Tin&Ed during install

Me, visiting

Life Forces, exhibition text

Inspired by the dioramas of natural history museums—glass-covered portals where education and fantasy collide—Life Forces is a digital installation that renders the audience complicit in its creation. Each LED screen features an interactive landscape: a live, infinitely scrolling realm of mossy rocks, twiggy clusters, fungi, trees and flowers. Their forms are generated from 3D scans of plants abounding in US forests, meadows and deserts, paired with 3D sculptured lifeforms by the artists.

Each screen is powered by an iPad, which detects the viewer’s movement using live body tracking technology. Moving with their fictional surroundings, audiences roleplay as pollen and spores, embody feeding slime mold and mushrooms, even dance as (improbable) swaying rock formations. All around them, pulsing lights show trees communicating via root and mycelium networks.

The site of this installation is no accident. Over a century before it was the Rockefeller Center, it hosted the Elgin Botanic Gardens, America’s first publicly accessible botanic garden. (At one point, the 20-acre expanse contained 2,000 labeled species of indigenous and exotic plants.) Today, New York is denser—all concrete and metal—but we remain connected to nature, even if we can’t see it.

Life Forces is Tin&Ed’s urgent, joyful reminder of the interconnectedness of every living thing, and the fragile, complex bonds linking our every action to natural systems, like a network of invisible veins.

November 29, 2020

I think about the dismal COVID-era novelty of live audiences replaced by cardboard cutouts all the time.

November 13, 2020

This week, I was a guest on Haley Nahman’s podcast, Maybe Baby (an extension of her newsletter), to discuss Looney Tunes, Fleischer studios, the election, and whether art critics aught to prove the relevance or newsworthiness of a work. Come for the topics, stay for the low hum of construction I was unable to block out.

You can listen here.

And you can watch my favorite (though problematic) Fleischer cartoon, Bimbo’s Initiation, here.

November 9, 2020

On the day we found out Donald Trump would no longer be president, I went to Times Square and watched people embrace beneath a lot of flashing signs, advertising chain restaurants that have sat empty for months. (Who pays to keep the lights on?) Later, I went to Washington Park, where people were still whooping and crying. Between those public appointments, I went to Artist Space, which is showing a retrospective of ART CLUB2000, a collective of Cooper Union students who made work together from 1992 until their planned dissolution in 2000.

Among their radical, invigorating, occasionally macabre, always fucking funny output is an extended series on the mass fashion retailer Gap: spoof ads, featuring the artists costumed as fetishized, uniformed young ‘creatives’, and excerpts from employee handbooks and corporate memos, photocopied and framed, or writ large across the gallery walls. (These were all fished from Gap garbage bins.) Using Gap as a subject, two of the artists told Artforum back then, allowed them to critique institutional critiques in art, which largely focused on the operational patterns of its institutions and markets. Gap represented a symbol “beneath [artistic] contempt… not a serious subject, like HIV prevention or gentrification, subjects that we were criticized for not picking up on. We chose the Gap because it represented nothing: a gap.”

 

October 12, 2020

In the market for a giant martini glass prop to add a little Las Vegas chic to my apartment. Email me should you have one.

August 18, 2020

Small pleasures: Applebee’s in Hamilton, New Jersey, has opened for outdoor dining, complete with their filthy cocktail list. I hope they are thrilled about my impending patronage. (These weird photographs were taken from the passenger seat of my partner’s mom’s car, with heavy zoom.)

August 9, 2020

An incomplete list of Google search terms entered on and around my 31st birthday (the 7th August, if you were interested, and yes this milky-lime vest would not actually do up). 

—Website with window views of strangers
—Karma exhibition nothing but flowers
—Marinetti’s futurist manifesto
—Hooters 34th st outdoor dining
—Failed amusement parks USA

July 23, 2020

Note from my iPhone this morning: Giddy at the sight of these tiny, explosive heaps of ultramarine blue pigment dropped across the pavement on Eldridge and Grand street.

Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer, 1640-50

Prior to the development of a synthetic shade, ultramarine was made using lapis lazuli, a blue mineral mined in Afghanistan, which out-priced gold. It adorned precious sections of altarpieces, and was especially beloved by early renaissance painters—usually invoiced separately to all other materials. Sometimes, it is referred to as ‘Fra Angelico Blue.’ Michelangelo ordered huge quantities of the stuff—on the Vatican’s dime—for his Last Judgement fresco. Its regal qualities stretch back to ancient times: in stone form, it adorned the sarcophagus of King Tutankhamen, and a headdress buried in the Sumerian tomb of Queen Puabi.

 

 

I interviewed the brilliant, sharp San Francisco gallerist Jessica Silverman for Sotheby’s. Read our conversation here.

June 14, 2020

Five lines from Susan Sontag’s journals:

Forgive this entry, but I find myself in need of tenderness, or rage, or any emotion that feels outsized—especially now, especially as I age, especially this particular Sunday, which is at once sunny and utterly barren. Sontag’s personal writings are appropriate in moments of emptiness, so here are a few lines from As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-80. 

“My library is an archive of longings.”

“Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence.”

“I’m now writing out of rage—and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés [‘booby-trapped packages’] to the world.”

“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”

“I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of a greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.”

 

June 11, 2020

Spoke with four BLM protestors arrested in New York—all under 25—for The Face. Read about their arrests, cell conditions, and treatment in custody here.

Photograph by Adam Powell for The Face.

May 25, 2020

Wrote a little for my friend Haley Nahman’s newsletter, Maybe Baby, on Donald Judd’s floor boxes as a great mental relief for fellow brains tired of overanalyzing. Sign up!

A preternatural ability to eavesdrop at great distances means I am often—at least, anytime that is not now—catching fellow gallery attendees puzzling, “But what does it mean?” Here is a truth they already know, that you know too, but remains worth repeating: the profoundness of our encounters with art are not hinged on the unlocking of some enigmatic truth. (In his ‘67 essay, Death of the Author, Barthes argued viewers are complicit in generating a work’s final meaning, their own speculative associations activating a “space of many dimensions”.) I have always found this murkiness freeing. There is no singularity, only slipperiness. There is no way of seeing, only ways. Sometimes I imagine thousands of fragmentary meanings hovering over a sculpture or a painting or a film, like infinite drafts of a mind map, intersecting and doubling back, partially erasing one another. And sometimes, when I am exhausted by finding meaning in anything at all, I turn to a genre fixated on its erasure, in which there is nothing to decipher but the physicality of the object itself.

There’s plenty of dick-swinging machismo to be found in the obsessive formalism of the 60s minimalists, but I honestly don’t mind. For anyone desiring time with works that allow them to rest, to search for nothing beyond the immediate, I suggest this 1991 box by Donald Judd. Constructed from enameled aluminium, there is a potency—an electric pull—in its seemingly ordinary form, in the deliberate mundanity of its industrial material, the exactitude of its dimensions, the sameness of its separate parts. Even observing Judd’s floor works online, I am subsumed in their materiality; I take pleasure in the hard-soft dichotomy of their forms, the fact that they are solid yet empty. (A less shiny recommendation for the exhausted is Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, a readymade meditation comprising 250 yards of heaped dirt.)

May 24, 2020

My old roommate, a poet, used to leave a thumbed over, probably urine-splattered copy of Georges Perec’s brilliant Life: A User’s Manual atop a beat-up filing cabinet that was wedged between our toilet and the bath. I suspect all of us—the five people who lived in that sprawling home—used to read a couple of pages each time we took a shit. I’d choose excerpts at random. My favorite chapter revolved around a man whose job was to locate and kill words from the dictionary no longer in common parlance, so as to make room for new additions. (After killing off hundreds of thousands, he compiles a dictionary of outdated language.)

That chapter lingers over Sacha Ingber’s The Word Killer, a 2020 mixed-media sculpture that featured in her recent show at New York’s Brennan Griffin. In it, a half-body is positioned, seated, within a golden ring of words. A tiled book is propped upon its knee. I’d like to have seen Ingber’s show in real life, but for now, the gallery’s photo documentation must suffice.

 

May 23, 2020

Three trash tableaux that pleased me this week, all spied in downtown Manhattan:

1. This combination of shiny black bags and street-side portaloos, the latter’s ceilings curved like half almonds.

2. Forgive the fuzz of this image, but from memory I was taking a picture while clasping some 50-shot Margarita purchased to-go (I drank it on my couch alone. I am miserable like the rest of you!). Anyway, this trash can placed INSIDE a trash bag felt like it rhymed with the current national mood. (Read: everything is rubbish.)

3. I spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling as to what this tarp-like covering might conceal, if not a mattress. My inbox awaits your suggestions.

 

April 30, 2020

On longing:

I often think about this double DESIRE sign—how even the rounds of the letters D, S, and R infer a certain yearning, curving like a beckoning hand.

A while back, on my 30th birthday, I sheltered beneath a West Village awning, wet garments clinging to my skin, my umbrella somewhere I wasn’t. I had a few hours to kill before a dinner with my brother and his wife. I selected a walk-in tattoo spot via Yelp, a place where I could charge my phone and dry off and ‘get inked,’ as they say. The words DESIRE INCREASES were administered along my right side, in the first font that registered under ‘Gothic’ on dafont.com. I’d noticed the words a few years before that, on a medieval tapestry at the V&A. They were printed in Latin, across a woman’s dress. I thought about them all the time. DESIRE INCREASES. Desire seemed like a thing a person might pursue forever: greedily, desperately.

From my notes app:

Things I like, on the final day of April, in 2020: a black cap, owned by a man I’m enamored with, whose front panel reads “FUCK, THAT’S DELICIOUS!”; running my tongue beneath the same man’s front teeth, because they are angled to allow just that; a whirring, all-purple Bernie Worrell instructional DVD cover, which helps viewers to “build grooves” on their keyboards; the redemptive feel of an orange foam roller along my ass, as I wobble to and fro, attempting to loosen some unnamed tissue or muscle, or at least remind my body I’m alive; a pound of gleaming mussels from the good fishmonger, with whom I exchange a silent nod behind my mask; bran cereal served with plump golden raisins, the kind I always loved growing up; a sanguine text from my dad, proffering advice to my newly-sacked roommate: that suffering is “only a blip in time,” even if that is a lie; butter-yellow tulips flowering in tiny plots beneath traffic lights on East Houston; at least twenty glittering chandeliers, festooned with trimmings of pink and gold, calling out to my friend and I from their glass-window prison.

The store was closed. Every store is closed. We were overwhelmed by their great, gaudy beauty, and stopped to take it all in.

April 7, 2020

I wrote a little about how strange and sad it is to sit inside for a long time, adding to a pile of isolation content. If you’d like a hyper-specific, COVID-19 update on the wedge of Chinatown I inhabit, have I got the piece for you! (It’s here, for The Face.)

February 27, 2020

Things I like, toward the end of February, in 2020: white clouds furling in the space between skyscrapers, as though purged from the ends of giant cigarettes; whiffs of tonka bean in a bottle of Margiela’s ‘At The Barbers,’ which I lather over my wrists at Sephora, but never actually buy; a 2:28 YouTube clip in which a man screams while applying yellow paint to a canvas, somewhere that is not Manhattan, because there is space to scream; supping upon Pret’s broccoli and cheddar soup alone in Bryant park, without the eyesore of Christmas markets, just tourists and trees and garbage bins; coffee with four shots at 11am; the quaint, ordered greenery in Giusto Utens’ lunettes of the Medician villas, all of which feel like holy images; a line my friend wrote, in a sort-of goodbye letter, having quit her editing job to fumble in darkness with the rest of us: “Safety and certainty aren’t so comforting when their maintenance requires the quieting of a deeper calling. They’d never stay constant, anyway.”

February 25, 2020

Forgive the half-blur of a finger over an iPhone lens, but I passed this ceramic man yesterday—playing his forever-mute violin with what appears to be a sword, sitting on top of a tiny cottage—and keep thinking I’d like to speak with him, should he ever be able to.

January 27, 2020

On banking:

I rewatch John Berger’s 1972 BBC four-episode special Ways of Seeing around once a year (available freely, in full, on YouTube). All of it feels like seeing a vista, shrouded by fog, suddenly reveal itself. Especially this bit.

October 12, 2019

Some publishing news!

One thing I spent several (sleepless) months co-editing this year—with Chandelier Creative in New York and Rizzoli editor Julie Schumacher—was a mammoth, cloth-bound coffee table book celebrating two decades of democratized design at Target. The bullseye brand was the first big-box retailer to collaborate with fashion designers in an attempt to make their work accessible (read: affordable) to ‘ordinary’ Americans. It’s published by Rizzoli and available America-wide.

There is a Forward by Kim Hastreiter. There is an afterward by Molly Young. There are exciting bits in between all of that, including an Isaac Mizrahi interview by Trey Taylor, a Cynthia Rowley interview by myself, and a special conversation I recorded between old friends: the model and activist Bethann Hardison and Harlem icon Stephen Burrows.

There are also a lot of stock photographs of the cover floating around the internet. Here’s one.

September 8, 2019

A note on aging, found on my iPhone, dated 7 August:

It is my 30th birthday today. I am having breakfast alone at Waverly diner, a popular neon-lit place on Waverly and Sixth. Upon arriving, I slipped into my favorite spot: a row of compact booths accommodating solo diners and pairs. The vinyl seating is the color of a caramel eclair.

I am eating banana pancakes with a side of bacon. I am drinking an iced coffee, sans straw, which means the ice sometimes rushes forward when I take a sip from the massive glass (it has aggregated into one gargantuan, problematic block) forcing the liquid to flow out too rapidly. I have coffee on my shirt.

I am eavesdropping on a conversation, because you should always do things you love on your birthday. A middle-aged woman is telling her friend she feels guilty about not wanting to reside near her elderly mother, but they do tend to keep going so long these days. Her friend’s mother lived to 109—what a fucking nightmare.

Woman #1: “She outlived all her doctors. It was terrible!”

Woman #2: “Oh my god.”

Woman #1: “She just kept going. You couldn’t get rid of her! After another successful operation, my friend received a card from someone who really got it. It said, ‘My condolences. I’m so sorry to hear your mother pulled through her procedure.’”

Nicholeas Maes, c. 1646, oil on canvas, Old Woman in Prayer or Prayer without End

August 7, 2019

Pictured: a 30th birthday token, purchased off Avenue A from a tabletop stall. Three dollar bills and the heavenly being—amorphous, off-white, and clasping an accordion—was mine.

June 20, 2019

I interviewed archivists Nikki Igol and Nicholas Harst for The Face. The pair consult, respectively, for a very top secret icon of the beauty industry, and one of America’s art-world heavyweights. I couldn’t name either of these important people, but you should still read the interview.

January 5, 2019

One of art history’s greatest themes involves ‘Blemmyes’ (also known as akephaloi), the headless men rumored, throughout antiquity, to inhabit far-off, remote territories. Their faces, so myriad stories go, appeared on their chests, with eyes positioned on the chest or shoulders. Their forms often appear on medieval maps—perhaps a warning against exploration at a time when sameness was synonymous with ‘good’.

December 22, 2018

Christmas at Kmart is sad and strange.

 

November 28, 2018

iPhone note:

Things I like, toward the end of November, in 2018: a line in an article about Jacquemus’ Sac Blue Le Minho that dubs the minuscule bag “gender-reveal blue”, and another that calls it “as inconspicuous as a colonial crown jewel”; black coffee from Dunkin Doughnuts, because you can get it with a couple of quarters; sinking into an abyss of self-loathing watching infinite Made in Chelsea episodes, gaining nothing, surely losing everything; potatoes baked in oil and butter; a rainbow check scarf bought somewhere I don’t remember; liking my face as it ages; the deep, ultramarine sky in Manhattan, right before it fades to black; the line “salmon are bullying their way upstream”, which appears in a Kaveh Akbar poem about alcoholism; the mental image of wet mattresses, which reminds me of myself with a hangover; the fact that I can walk along the streets now and sometimes close my eyes.

I loved the Sarah Lucas show at the New Museum, with the exception of a car skinned in cigarettes, because it felt like an old magic trick. I feel the same way about Sarah Lucas that I feel about Tracey Emin, which is to say I’m impossibly fond of her, and that fondness is tinged with nostalgia—she was among the first feminist art makers I connected with when studying art history at university, because she was lewd and smutty and made simple, remarkable gestures, because she was also from working class stock.

I thought Lucas’ show nonstop when I was writing an essay on Midtown’s new Playboy Club. I thought mainly about the room that is full of her Bunny sculptures: headless, anthropomorphic forms made from stuffed tights and bulldog-clipped to office chairs, like secretaries. In Lucas’ installation, Bunny Gets Snookered, the forms appear next to a billiards table, with pool cues and colored balls laying about. I thought about Playboy, which now allows women to have memberships, and which still has its waitresses dress up as animals, this time with accessories by Roberto Cavalli. The truth of the club was in Lucas’ install: all of the Bunnies were playing snooker, but none of them could win.

November 1, 2018

In breaking news: I have a new piece up on Man Repeller. It’s a review of a knitted sheet mask, one doused in truffle essence but available for the low, low price of $6. Come for the mummification disguised as K-beauty treatment, stay for my humiliating selfie!

October 22, 2018

To celebrate the release of the new issue of Museum—themed Souvenir—we threw a party with Swiss house BALLY in Sydney, complete with a pop-up souvenir shop, where guests could buy one-night-only merchandise using a cardboard currency built into their invitations.

In short: it was good!

Below, some snaps by Chloe Paul.

October 8, 2018

Announcing the latest edition of Museum—themed Souvenir—with three very fresh covers. Inside, there are conversations with artists including Catherine Opie, Rachel Maclean, Yasumasa Morimura, Yinka Shonibare, and Haroon Mirza—who recently translated a centuries-old miniature of the Prophet Muhammad to an electrical-sounding score, and installed a Stonehenge-like arrangement of standing stones in Marfa.

August 24, 2018

A declaration!

The best thing, aesthetically speaking, about New York is the giant mounds of garbage-bagged trash—of which the city apparently generates 14 million tonnes per year.

 

August 9, 2018

Ignore the terrible iPhone documentation: if you’ve not seen the new Cindy Sherman show at Sprüth Magers, London, and you are in that great, sweltering city for the summer, you should promptly make your way to Mayfair.

It’s Sherman’s solo exhibition in London since 2011, and the large-scale colour portraits follow a similar trajectory to her entire physique-altering practice, but this time the artist re-casts herself as various grand dames of 1920s Hollywood, each aging and fading into irrelevance, wrinkled fingertips belying their more youthful, made-up faces. I found these carefully-staged faux publicity shots both sad and tender, perhaps in part because I’ve listened to almost every episode of You Must Remember This.

None of the images have the traditional glass protection—Sherman has used a process of dye sublimation to transfer the dye directly onto metal, rendering it unecessary.

The show runs until 1 September.

July 25, 2018

The perfect Etsy listing doesn’t exi—

July 20, 2018

For approximately ten glorious weeks each year, NYC Parks refills 53 of the great concrete chasms that otherwise lay dormant throughout various boroughs and turns them into free pools. I reviewed eight of these for Man Repeller.

July 19, 2018

Every time you eat an entire tub of olives alone for lunch the Pope gets a new zucchetto.

July 9, 2018

Occasionally, you (re)discover a word so succulent and oozing and mellifluous that you cannot wait to use it. This week, mine is gelatinous, as per Orwell’s 1984. (“Winston,” he writes, “was gelatinous with fatigue.”)

July 2, 2018

Can’t stop thinking about this brief, macabre exchange from Ingmar Berman’s The Seventh Seal (1957).


June 8, 2018

Some personal news: this California virgin just visited the thrilling suspension bridge that spans the Golden Gate!!!!!!!

I recently found myself traveling to Riga, Latvia (verdant and green, both clean and overgrown), for the inaugural Riga Biennial. Among the good things to happen there was a chance meeting with Sissel Tolaas, the Norwegian-born, Berlin-based smell scientist, who I interviewed many years ago for Museum, but had never actually met in the flesh, and who produced an installation work for the fair that included 15 scents gathered from the Baltic Sea.

Anyway, here is Tolaas’ business card (phone number obscured by a coaster—I’m not a monster), which she embedded with a scent. I left Riga last week, and I can still smell her.

May 28, 2018

Reminiscing.

Goodbye to Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s last living artwork. I still visit Figmentthe live video stream of his grave in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—every week, to see what flowers have been left there, or marvel at the little stacks of Coca-Cola cans, lovingly arranged.

Agnes Varda and the cast of Lions Love…(and Lies) on the cover of the first issue of Interview, 1969.

Diana Ross, painted by Richard Bernstein, on the cover of Interview, October 1981. (Signed by Warhol.)

May 22, 2018

Stumbled upon a nice review of Museum‘s latest issue—themed 1972—on MagCulture. It’s sold out a bunch of places but you can get it via their online store.

May 18, 2018

Pictured, left to right: me after writing all week, my responsible friends.

May 10, 2018

Recommendation: At least one heavenly body attending 2018’s Met Gala festivities should have copied the embroidered cape donned by the angel Gabriel in Hans Memling’s The Annunciation—the perfect garment for kneeling before the Virgin in her narrow bed chamber. (The painting, should you be in New York, is on view at Met Fifth Avenue, gallery 953.)

May 7, 2018

Here is one sculpture I couldn’t stop thinking about after visiting Frieze New York over the weekend: a pair of witchy, elongated shoes rendered in nickel-plated bronze by the Canadian painter Sascha Braunig. Surreal, fantastical, slightly disquieting. Garb for not-quite humans. An optical illusion made real. I could say a lot about them, but as I’m on deadline, I’ll leave it at that.

Giantess (2017), 25.4×38.1×58.42 cm. On show at Foxy Production‘s booth.

April 12, 2018

PSA: I have moved into a new apartment, and somehow convinced my partner that this Cheetos-hued rug I spied online was ESSENTIAL to our very survival, that it comprised all five rungs on Maslow’s heirachy of needs. It has arrived, and it turns out I was right.

March 14, 2018

There’s no greater cookie on earth than the $2.17 Chocolate Chunk served at Pret, so I wrote about it for Munchies. Salivate here.

March 5, 2018

For those in need of a quick debriefer on 1972 before taking the plunge and purchasing our new edition of Museum, my editor’s letter—a very partial timeline of the year in events—is online now. Read it here.

(Pictured above: The damaged face of the Virgin Mary from Michelangelo’s Pieta at St Peter’s, Rome, prior to restoration. In 1972, Laszlo Toth jumped an altar reiling in the monument, and smashed parts of it up with 12 hammer blows.)

 

Issue 8 of Museum is out now, worldwide. It’s themed 1972 (that’s right, every single story in the issue is connected to an event, figure, artwork or happening from that year, and arranged chronologically) and the covers feature Gilbert & George, photographed by Jack Davison.

Order a copy here.

February 12, 2018

There is a nice “shout out” as they say, on LitHub (“The best of the literary internet!”) to my new Paris Review story on dining at Planet Hollywood.

 

December 13, 2017

Some notes on Art Basel Miami for L’Officiel USA.

November 24, 2017

Can’t stop thinking about the sizzling, overwhelming retrospective of Emirati artist Hassan Sharif—I am the single work artist—currently on show at Sharjah Art Foundation. If you can get to the UAE before 3 February 2018, it is unmissable.

              

October 23, 2017

A big Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective is opening at the Art Gallery of NSW. I spoke to two of his muses—including his last boyfriend, Jack Walls—for VAULT ahead of the show. Eyeball it.

Kate Tucker has been making new work, and I like it:

“In the last year, Kate Tucker’s paintings have shrunk. They have, in fact, significantly reduced in size—some, such as the small, rectangular Holding Pattern 13 (2017)  are a mere 13×12 cm, both shorter and skinnier than a classroom ruler. In tandem with this palpable shrinkage, Tucker’s works are infinitely more complex, and arguably, more pleasurable to experience. They are layered with found imagery that is deconstructed or obscured to the point it becomes unrecognisable—another abstracted shape, a manipulated element that exists only within the whole—or with digitally printed cotton overlaid with acrylic and oil. Their canvasses are frayed and cut and bandaged in linen.”

Read my interview with Tucker for Museum. It’s the last installment of our series supported by Calvin Klein.

 

 

October 10, 2017

We’re running a four-part artist interview series on Museum, supported by Calvin Klein. I just spoke with Jonny Niesche for conversation #3—you can read it here.

Picture this (installation view at Station Gallery, Melbourne), 2016. Photograph by Jack Willet, courtesy Station Gallery and the artist

September 24, 2017

The File came to visit my apartment in Chinatown, full of nice furniture that isn’t mine, and asked me some Very Invasive questions about my dubious skincare routine.

More here.

In champagne updates: to launch Issue 7 of Museum, we threw a party with BALLY in Sydney, creating a cardboard box warehouse in one of the rooms. This involved hand-folding more than 300 screen-printed cardboard boxes and installing a giant cardboard floor, one panel at a time. Party photos here. (Thanks to BALLY for the outfits.)

The new issue of Museum, themed Factory, is out now. There are two softcovers available and one super-limited edition hardcover (with only 100 copies worldwide). You can buy all three at galleries and newsstands through Australia, America, and Europe, or just order yours here.

August 15, 2017

I first watched Carry On Again Doctor three decades after its release, as a ten-year-old inheriting my parents’ guilty cinematic pleasures. I remember it well. It was December; summer holidays in Sydney, and the blistering, wax-melt yellow sun was stretched out like a Southern drawl. I was sitting in our living room—fan blasting, limbs spread across the couch—guffawing uncontrollably at jokes I half understood. And then, without warning, Barbara Windsor appeared on-screen, and the matron revealed her tawdry two-piece. Everyone on-screen was watching her. I fell immediately in love.

Wrote about the glorious Babs Windsor for The Paris Review. Read it here.

June 19, 2017

Chronicles of Her took some photos of me for their site—plus we chatted about editing Museum. Apologies in advance that I’m very awkward with my hands.

June 16, 2017

I selected some pleasurable (read: erotic) literature for the Par Femme book club.

June 3, 2017

You may not have been to the state of NSW, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but you’re likely familiar with its shiny, fabled imagery: the feel-good stuff populating Instagram feeds and thumbed-over travel brochures. You will have seen pictures of Bondi Beach dotted with glistening bronze bodies, of cheery lifesavers with zinc oxide smeared across their cheeks. These sugary images repeat ad infinitum, they reinforce a narrative of nationhood. They perpetuate myths about freedom and choice, about a certain kind of good life available in that sprawling continent at the bottom of the world. And yet, in this place of sundrenched freedom, women completely lack the autonomy to make choices about their own bodies.

I wrote about abortion—and why it’s still criminalised in NSW—for Teen Vogue.

May 12, 2017

Wrote about some of my picks from Frieze New York for Museum. (Below is one of them: Farhad Moshiri’s ‘Girl Tuning Violin’, 2017, hand embroidered beads on canvas.)

May 8, 2017

Athens-born Sofia Stevi—a graduate of Central Saint Martins—was a standout at Frieze New York. Her paintings were sensuous, muliebral, charged with hallucinatory intensity. Something about the lines felt like calligraphy. Below, one of her works on show: 2016’s ‘just like honey,’ made from ink, acrylic and gouache on cotton.

May 2, 2017

The new issue of Vault is out, and with it, my cover story on Harlem artist Tschabalala Self. If you are in Sydney, it’s vital you see her work at COMA’s new group show A Screen of Flesh. It runs from 26 May until 23 June.

April 25, 2017

What’s more disappointing than a young Victor Hugo’s uncanny resemblance to Taylor Swift? I’ll tell you! My favourite tidbit from Hugo’s biography—that he wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame in the nude, under self-imposed house arrest—is likely untrue, or at best, an exaggeration. In more robust historical accounts, it’s noted he wore pyjamas or bed clothes while writing, locking his clothes away, thus ensuring he wasn’t tempted to abandon his deadline for the great outdoors. One particularly attractive alternative to full nudity has Hugo swathed, head-to-toe, in a grey knitted shawl, his fleshy bits airing underneath. Ravishing.

(Above: Hugo’s bedroom.)

April 18, 2017

Instant noodles bear all the hallmarks of a real meal without actually being one: they’re hot and almost filling, come with a slurpy soup-sauce, and necessitate cutlery unless you’re adventurous. I wrote a thing for New York Magazine’s The Strategist on Mamee Monster Noodle Snack, a common instant treat found in Australasian school canteens. Read it here!

March 30, 2017

Looking like a washed up Saturday Disney host for the good people at Chronicles of Her. Enjoy many photographs of me crossing my arms.

March 28, 2017

I spoke with Bangalore artist Sheela Gowda for Museum’s ‘Sorry… have we met?’ edition (an issue all about schmoozing, bad manners, social convention, role playing, identity and hoaxes).

Read it here.

March 15, 2017

Interviewed two of my favourite booksellers (Raquel Caballero and Emily Hunt) for the new issue of Vault: Australasian Art and Culture. They run Big Ego Books, which you probably know about if you live in Sydney and enjoy buying rare literature and photo books on art, design, architecture and erotica. If you don’t, well, it’s best described as the online-come-physical bookshop of your ACTUAL DREAMS. The headquarters are in a carpark.

The pair have a knack for finding the impossible. I am currently enamoured by the look of this 1995 hardcover, Scarecrows, by Colin Garratt.

 

March 10, 2017

The new issue of Museum—the magazine I edit—is out now, and available in stores around the world. We made a limited edition hardcover version, which you can find in Colette and at Beautiful Pages and Big Ego books and a few other other places. Or order one from us direct. (We only made 80, and there’s not many left.)

Here is a video of a very happy customer, Daniel del Valle, unwrapping his delivery one-handed and with gusto.

February 14, 2017

For Par femme, a new site about sexuality and sex and similar topic areas, I penned a history of the female orgasm, an ‘enigma’ whose very existence has been denied, suppressed and now, sort of embraced.

 

February 1, 2017

Wrote this piece last year on the complex, loaded imagery of Austrian ethnographer Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, who spent the mid-40s cataloging the ritual practices of Apatanis, Nyishis and Hill Miris.