Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists

Philosopher and writer Amia Srinivasan meets with artist Paul Chan for the latest episode of Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists. Together they contemplate fate, the distortion of reality caused by screens, their first experiences with philosophy, and making meaning through their respective disciplines. Chan’s exhibition “Breathers” is currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through July 16. Amia’s latest book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, is out now with Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States.

Photographer Roe Ethridge and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster discuss hysteria and mysticism, desire and repulsion, Florida and American unconscious for the January episode of Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists. Their conversation marks the publication of American Polychronic, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph out from Mack Books, as well as his exhibition of the same name, on view at Gagosian in New York though February 25. Webster and Ethridge also reflect on their collaboration Bad Flowers, created during the early stages of the pandemic for Spike Art Magazine.

“Artists on Writers | Writers On Artists” brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature for freeform, intimate conversations about the subjects that they wish to talk about. Roe Ethridge is an artist and commercial photographer in New York City. Blurring the lines between the two, Ethridge creates images that are simultaneously generic and intimate, often treading between glamor and irony. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; S.M.A.K., Ghent; the Tate Modern, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis(Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books. Her most recent book, Sex and Disorganisation is available now with Divided Publishing.

Author Sam Lipsyte first met artist Rob Reynolds decades ago as undergraduates at Brown University, after which they moved to New York, played together in the noise-punk band Dungbeetle and have remained friends ever since. On the occasion of Lipsyte’s newest novel No One Left to Come Looking for You (Simon & Schuster), the two talk about art, literature, and music, and how such things actually get made in this world.

This episode of “Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists” is sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

Artists on Writers, Writers On Artists  brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature for freeform, intimate conversations about the subjects that they wish to talk about. 

Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Rob Reynolds received his B.F.A. from Brown University, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Reynolds’s work is in the public collections of LACMA, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the R.I.S.D. Museum, Brown University, and numerous private collections. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

For our November episode of Artists on Writers, Writers on Artists, writer James Hannaham and artist Nina Katchadourian cover many subjects including what it’s like to observe and experience change—whether that’s the changes to a city, or to neighborhood. James talks about infusing fictions with the textures of real life, and Nina addresses what it means to survive the unsurvivable, asking questions about what humans are capable of living beyond, or living with.

For our October episode, musician-artist Björk talks with author-scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer across subjects ranging from how language connects us to the natural world; the consequences—both personal and global —of living apart from nature; and what it means in our transient society to live in right relationship to the land. Bjork’s latest album, Fossora, is out with One Little Independent Records. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, is available from Milkweed Editions.

For the season premier episode of Artists On Writers | Writers on Artists, artist Lorna Simpson joins poet Simone White to talk about being in the practice of a practice, whether or not there is in fact a language to describe both Black experimental art and Black life, how to protect one’s own interiority so that a person can live most fully, and much more. Simpson’s work is currently on view as part of the exhibition “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. White’s most recent book, or, on being the other woman, was published this fall by Duke University Press. This episode of “Artists On Writers | Writers on Artists” is sponsored by the New-York Historical Society. A pioneer of conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson first came to attention in the mid-’80s for her large- scale photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory. Throughout her career, she has used the camera as a catalyst to comment on the documentary nature of found or staged images. Her works have been exhibited at, and are in the collections of, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Haus der Kunst, Munich amongst others. Important international exhibitions have included the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany, and the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. She was awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019. Simone White earned her BA from Wesleyan University, JD from Harvard Law School, and MFA from the New School. She is the author of the full-length collections House Envy of All the World (Heretical Texts, 2010), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Dolly (2008) and Unrest (2013). Her most recent, or, on being the other woman, was published this fall by Duke University Press. White has received fellowships from Cave Canem, a 2017 Whiting Award, and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America. She lives in New York and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Artist Dewey Crumpler and author and scholar Saidiya Hartman first met years ago in the Bay Area, and in the hour they spent together for this episode of Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists, they discuss many subjects including their work, the responsibilities that attend a calling, the exhaustive process of transformation, and the powerful “hum”— the potent frequency—of Black lives.

Dewey Crumpler is an associate professor of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. His current work examines issues of globalization/cultural co-modification through the integration of digital imagery, video and traditional painting techniques. His works are in the permanent collections of the Bank of America Collection at Harvey B. Gantt Center, California African American Museum, Triton Museum of Art Los Angeles and the Oakland Museum Of California. Crumpler is the recipient of the Flintridge Foundation Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as the Fleishhacker Foundation Fellowship Eureka Award. He has exhibited most recently with Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Cushion Works, and Derek Eller Gallery.

Saidiya Hartman is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the former director of the Institute for Research on Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University, and was a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University (2002), a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2016–2017), a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2018) as well as a Macarthur Fellow (2019). She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W.W. Norton, 2019), for which she won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In addition to her books, she has published articles in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Brick, Small Axe, Callaloo, the New Yorker and the Paris Review.

Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature for free-form conversations. This monthly video series is a joint production of Artforum and Bookforum.

This episode reunites two old friends—novelist Elif Batuman, and artist Sibel Horada—who began their conversation years ago when they met in Istanbul. Here, they commiserate about the uncomfortable relevance of Russian novels, how archeology reveals something about the present time, and ways to leave enough room inside a work for readers and viewers to find their own way inside of it, as well as many other topics. Batuman’s newest book, Either/Or, is out now with Penguin Press. Horada’s work is currently on view in the 5th Mardin Biennial, which is up through June 20.

Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Based in Istanbul, artist Sibel Horada focuses on collective and personal histories with an interest in urban, archaeological and ecological cultures. She investigates memories of erasure with stories that weave together strange, coincidental details. For her, memory is not only the act of recollection, but also a process of reproduction and transformation. Using text and forms, she materializes her encounters in poetic sculptures and installations. Horada has shown in many institutions in Turkey and Europe, including MAC museum Vienna, Depo Istanbul, Ludwigsburg Kunstverein, Hannover Kunstverein and Matadero Madrid.

Artists On Writers Writers On Artists |brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature to have the conversations they themselves wish to have. This monthly video series is a joint production of Artforum and Bookforum.