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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Every aspect of the collaboration honored the 94-year-old artist’s authorship, from the dots on the editioned Louis Vuitton luxury items, the billboards, and every piece of digital content annotated and populated with her signature orbs and circles. An enormous sculpture of the artist herself was placed on the roof of the Maison Louis Vuitton on the Place Vendôme in Paris. A hyperrealistic animatronic Kusama figure stood painting dots in the store’s window. Not coincidentally, the Kusama collaboration came after Arnault’s father, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, declared that Louis Vuitton was more than luxury fashion, it was a “cultural brand.” His statement signaled a historic transition in the dynamic between art and fashion.

Dramatic moves into the cultural sphere by global corporations haven’t been happening at LVMH alone. In September, the Pinault family investment company Artémis (holder of luxury brands including Gucci, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen) bought a majority stake in Creative Artists Agency. Such congregations of creative industry giants are expanding the criteria for who constitutes the “talent” of the future.

Exchanges between art and fashion have long been seen as transactional in nature, a trade-off between the former’s cultural preeminence and the latter’s broad visibility. But the platforms and audiences for both are evolving into an expansive, accessible, algorithmically shaped viewing sphere that is pulling both art and fashion out of once-rarefied worlds. There has been a flattening effect, where the many talents involved in both arenas now form a shimmering pool of multi-hyphenate creatives.

Meanwhile, the terms “audience” and “consumer” no longer refer exclusively to a select and captive few who venture into museums, galleries, or luxury stores. The growing size of fashion and art audiences in our streaming-driven world imposes new demands on everyone involved. Ambitious visual storytelling strategies have become an essential tool for cultural play and broad reach. IRL experiences are still key, but viewership and engagement are cascading across increasingly fragmented communications media. We now create, operate, and consume in a world of boundaryless fusions. Creative directors and photographers are riding the crest of this new wave.

IT WAS THE LATE VIRGIL ABLOH who created the blueprint for axis-shifting multi-hyphenate creative talent. Abloh held the position of creative director of Louis Vuitton Men from 2019 until his untimely death in 2021. During his influential tenure, he positively disrupted the status quo. Abloh used his already pivotal role in the transformation of streetwear into luxury menswear as leverage within LVMH to construct an architecture for creative futures. He shared processes, platforms, and privileges with those who were coming up after him, and he blurred the lines between designer and artist while confronting the fashion industry with big questions about sustainability and cultural barriers to participation. When his exhibition “Figures of Speech” opened at the MCA in Chicago in 2019, it tapped into something in the culture, upping the museum’s attendance by 24 percent.

It was Karl Lagerfeld who established the turn away from the title of “fashion designer” toward “creative director” within luxury fashion houses, with his influential directorship of Fendi (from 1965) and Chanel (since 1983) until his death in 2019. Beyond just a designer of fashion collections, this impresario drove the brand into new realms of cultural presence. A landmark example of his extraordinary showmanship was the Spring/Summer 2008 Fendi runway he orchestrated on a stretch of the 2,000-year-old Great Wall of China, shortly before the Beijing Olympic Games.

Marc Jacobs’s tenure as creative director at Louis Vuitton (1997–2014) set a high benchmark for artistic collaborations in the luxury fashion arena. Jacobs worked regularly and successfully with artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Prince; in 2006 he initiated LV’s enduring relationship with Yayoi Kusama. In 2003 Jacobs collaborated with superstar Japanese artist Takashi Murakami on the hugely successful Monogram Multicolorecollection of luxury leather goods, with Murakami’s colorful palette and recurring motifs overlaid on the distinct historic visual language of the Louis Vuitton monogram. Murakami’s 2007 monographic exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles embodied the artist’s “superflat” philosophy, a decidedly postmodernist view that allowed the design of a handbag and the concept for a painting to share the same cultural value. In the center of it all was a Murakami x Louis Vuitton store displaying the Louis Vuitton MOCA Handscollection, created exclusively for the exhibition. The commercial intervention in a museum exhibition ruffled critics’ feathers and set a new standard for blurred boundaries of art and commerce. It also set a precedent for the influential role of the creative director.

Within the landscape of contemporary fashion communications, the role of creative director emerged from that of art director. While the latter worked within magazines and advertising, the former role came to include visual and communication strategies more broadly. The influence of Phil Bicker’s tenure as art director of Vogue Hommes International from 1997–2000 can be felt among today’s creative directors; he commissioned editorial projects from independent photographers outside fashion, including Judith Joy Ross, Larry Sultan, Samuel Fosso, and Joel Meyerowitz. For some of those artists, it was their first commission for a glossy magazine, and Bicker sensitively ensured that their individual visions and unique perspectives had a home in the editorial realm, setting the stage for what would become true creative collaborations across art and fashion. Around the same time, in 1993, Dennis Freedman relaunched W magazine, and a decade later, began their annual “Art Issue,” which opened up conversations about the relationship between fashion and art in a period when art was more fashionable than fashion, to paraphrase Bicker.

Freedman has always held the view that supporting artists working in new contexts such as fashion creates new ideas. As Barneys New York creative director from 2011 to 2017, he invited artists to create installations in the luxury department store’s windows. These special projects were the swan songs of the legendary emporium, which closed its doors in 2019. Freedman cocurated one of his final window installations in 2017 with the Easton Foundation and the Louise Bourgeois estate, pairing her soft sculptures with Rei Kawakubo’s unique sculptural garments. The window became a gallery for enjoyment and consideration, a dynamic point of congregation for unexpected encounters with exceptional creative minds.

THE COLLABORATIVE CAMPAIGNS that Freedman and Bicker helped pioneer exist today with the added dimension of visual strategies, and now require invention and sophistication for an increasingly visually literate multi-platform audience. For the 2020 Prada Flowers Resort campaign, creative director Ferdinando Verderi developed a multistep project with fashion photographer Drew Vickers and venerated street photographer Keizō Kitajima. Prada printed their photographs, added the brand’s logo, and distributed the sheets to flower stores as bouquet wrapping paper throughout Asia, America, and Europe. The intervention played into Prada’s focus on its heritage as an “everyday uniform” of luxury fashion. Pared-down still life images of the Prada-wrapped flowers with the season’s accessories and observational-style street portraits of the campaign’s models holding the Prada bouquets rolled out as a conventional magazine, billboard, and online collection campaign. But the real boost came from the flow of real-life encounters with the Prada-wrapped flowers that appeared on social media. The approach borrowed from the limited-release “drop” model, a marketing strategy that has its roots in Japanese streetwear culture.

In this age of Instagram-oriented campaigns, an artist’s authorship—and its attendant cultural capital—is invariably at the fore. For a recent Instagram commission from Miu Miu, experimental photographer Lucas Blalock created still lifes using the brand’s accessories in his signature colorful disorienting style that merges analog and digital techniques. Blalock’s pictures were an Instagram project for the Fall/Winter 2022 Miu Miu collection, commissioned by Be Good Studios’ founder Lina Kutsovskaya, a creative director moving between high-production, celebrity-endorsed, luxury brand campaigns and artist’s studios. Kutsovskaya was also a close creative collaborator with Abloh during his 2018–21 tenure at Louis Vuitton Men.

Blalock’s commission exemplifies how fashion can be folded into an established artistic practice, sidestepping now dated concerns that the artist might be seen as selling out, or diluting their artistic license. The products and visual language of Miu Miu enter Blalock’s preexisting image world as materials, his artistry uncompromised by this intersection, and are given a new context and reach by the collaboration.

Tyler Mitchell is one of the very few young image-makers in the past 10 years to have rapidly ascended into the pantheon of “top” fashion and portrait photographers, a cluster no bigger than the number of Justices on the United States Supreme Court. He’s an accomplished visual storyteller and key chronicler of Black creativity and celebrity who makes little distinction between his so-called commercial or personal work. His recent Fall/Winter 2023 Salvatore Ferragamo campaign heralded the arrival of the brand’s new creative director and designer, Maximilian Davis, and Davis’s first collection. Mitchell shot the campaign with backdrops from paintings by Botticelli and Piero della Francesca, seemingly pictured within working spaces in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Tuscan home of the Ferragamo brand. Every gesture and compositional detail in Mitchell’s grand photographs carry the intentional symbolic weightiness of a Renaissance painting, with Mitchell and his camera shown in some of the campaign images, asserting the photographer’s presence.

Artists now essentially operate as their own brands when they enter the fashion context. There is no luxury fashion brand that doesn’t collaborate with artists. Some examples from recent runways: for the Balenciaga Spring/Summer 2019 show, creative director Demna [Gvasalia] collaborated with post-internet artist Jon Rafman to make a tunnel of LED screens sequencing digitally rendered mash-ups and signals that conveyed the emotional and conceptual register of the collection. Raf Simons meticulously transfigured the gestures and palettes of Sterling Ruby’s paintings into haute couture fabrics and forms for his first Dior Women collection in 2012; the duo has now been collaborating for 20 years. The Spring/Summer 2023 runway of Spanish luxury house Loewe, under the artist-centric creative directorship of Jonathan Anderson, featured a confetti cube sculpture by Lara Favaretto that began to unpack and form new configurations as the models walked down the runway. Artist Mickalene Thomas created runway-ready photo collages (embroidered by the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai) honoring Josephine Baker and a dozen more influential women of color who inspired the Dior Spring/Summer 2023 collection. Pharrell Williams’s debut Louis Vuitton Men Spring/Summer 2024 collection included suits and denim separates embroidered with portraits painted by Henry Taylor. This was part of the score for a historic runway show that unfolded across the Pont Neuf in Paris this past June, in front of 2,000 Paris Fashion Week guests and an estimated one billion viewers online.

HOW WILL THESE COLLABORATIONS EVOLVE as we enter an age of subscription services and live streaming media? The jury is still out. Last year marked the debut of “live shopping” courtesy of Rihanna’s subscription-based lingerie label, Savage x Fenty. A live performance by the rap duo City Girls clad in the brand’s latest collection was streamed on the Savage x Fenty website, where viewers could purchase fashions the talent were wearing in real time. Given luxury fashion’s perceived core values of rarity and exclusivity, it’s perhaps no surprise that the industry has been slow to adopt media innovations within e-commerce, especially as they try to distance themselves from the unsustainable machinations of fast fashion.

But one thing is clear: fashion has a profound capacity to articulate who we are, where we come from, and what we desire from the future. This year marks an existential moment in the transfiguration of the fashion and image-making industries. Both rest in a dynamic of pendulum swings, involving mediascape evolutions and ever-changing creative and corporate leadership. This dynamism is both a blessing and a curse. What is certain is that the fertile ground of cocreation between art and fashion is where new possibilities and cultural ideas will continue to emerge. 

This article appeared under the title “Haute Culture” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 76-84.

Every corner of this issue incorporates instances of collaboration. The sui generis multi-hyphenate Harmony Korine, who is profiled in these pages, has estalished a new creative lab called EDGLRD that brings together artists from a variety of disciplines. “There is this kind of singularity popping up in the meshing of music and films and art and gaming,” Korine tells Art in America Executive Editor Andy Battaglia. And this issue’s New Talent artist, Edgar Calel, brought the staff of SculptureCenter, where he recently had a show, into the making of his work by having them light candles in an installation.

Also not to be missed is a moving tribute to the masterful painter Brice Marden, who died earlier this year, by critic Barry Schwabsky, who recalls watching people become transfixed by Marden’s paintings. Which goes to show that, in essence, every artwork is a collaboration—one between the artist and the viewer.

FEATURES

Bees & Potatoes
The climate crisis demands that we collaborate better with other species—and artists are showing us how.
by Emily Watlington 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Machine
Stephen Thaler’s quest to copyright his AI creation raises uncomfortable questions about the nature
of creativity.
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei 

Furniture
These artists make sculptures you can sit on and tables that tell stories.
by Emily Watlington

Haute Culture
These days, it seems as if there isn’t a luxury fashion brand that doesn’t collaborate with artists. (A special pull-out print accompanies the article.)
by Charlotte Cotton

Sartorial Studies
The New York–based artist collective CFGNY tailors its work to fit into new contexts.
by Claire Voon

Adventures in the Vapor World
Harmony Korine makes his next move—into new realms awaiting his twisted visions.
by Andy Battaglia

DEPARTMENTS

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

Hard Truths
An artist mulls his dealer’s no-confidence vote. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Curator Meg Onli tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton 

Inquiry
A Q&A with Pipilotti Rist about her pivot to furniture-sculpture hybrids.
by Emily Watlington

Object Lesson
An annotation of Judy Chicago’s In the Shadow of a Handgun.
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale 
The Met vs. MoMA—museum gift shops face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on art and fashion.
by Stephanie Sporn

Appreciation
A tribute to Brice Marden, a painter who embodied painterliness until the end.
by Barry Schwabsky 

New Talent
Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel leads a new wave of institutional critique.
by Alex Greenberger

Issues & Commentary
Climate activists are targeting museums, affirming both the urgency of the crisis and art’s unique political power.
by Michael Wang

Spotlight
Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim merged modernist abstraction and spiritual symbology.
by Elise Chagas

Book Review
A reading of Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.
by Emily Watlington

REVIEWS

Berlin
Berlin Diary
by Martin Herbert

Cleveland
“Finnegan Shannon: Don’t mind if I do”
by Emily Watlington 

Seoul
“The Most Honest Confession: Chang Ucchin Retrospective”
by Andrew Russeth

New York
“Manet/Degas”
by Barry Schwabsky 

Chicago
“Remedios Varo: Science Fictions”
by Jeremy Lybarger

New York
“María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold”
by Maximilíano Durón

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.

These caves fascinated architect Kabage Karanja as he was growing up. “I experienced sleeping [there] when I was a teenager and it always stayed with me,” Karanja said over Zoom. “Just hearing all the sounds … caves are extremely visceral and they impact your senses.” In 2014 Karanja parted ways with the corporate architecture firm where he’d been working, and found himself dissatisfied with the state of the field, particularly with architecture’s complicity in ecological and imperialist catastrophes. “Because of its impact and capacity to cause so much destruction on the earth,” Karanja said on a panel last year, “as much as it is a tool of shelter and … a fundamental human right … [architecture] is, by its very nature complicit against the biosphere, and the earth systems.”

A colleague who’d also left the firm, Stella Mutegi, shared his feelings, not only about architecture, but about the caves. Together, they convened a small group of architects and researchers that they called Cave_bureau, to explore the caves as the origin of architecture. The group draws on local indigenous knowledge; they are interested, Karanja said, in “going back to the first human shelter.”

Karanja and Mutegi join a growing group of architects and historians who are interested in caves. Last year, an exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in New York, titled “In Praise of Caves,”focused on Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by architects Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain that likewise turn to the wisdom of these formative structures. Spyros Papapetros’s book Pre/Architecture, out this November, argues that interest in pre-architectural spaces like caves often reemerges in times of conflict—WWI, WWII, now––as spaces that suggest history’s paths not taken.

Karanja calls this pivot toward architecture’s origins the “indigenous renaissance,” a return to a time of earlier tribal life with its own “cyclic reality,” a time when our species’ existence was carbon neutral. Through their work over nearly a decade, Cave_bureau has shown that such ecological issues go hand in hand with decolonization, and they’ve recently extended their practice into an effort to repatriate African cultural artifacts. The great number of museums found throughout the Global North is the outcome, Karanja has said, of a “history of deep extraction. Where the global north raped, pillaged, and pulled all the resources out” of the Global South. Karanja and Mutegi ask, what if you could redefine the idea of the museum away from its Eurocentric concept of ownership and legacy of removing objects from their context? What would a museum model look like that is indigenous and unique to Africa?

THE FIRST CAVES Karanja and Mutegi explored were the Mount Suswa lava tubes east of Nairobi, which feature several levels of caverns and passages crafted by lava flow. There, they created 3D and 2D maps, then reproduced elements from those maps in bronze so that they could reflect on and exhibit their findings. They consider these scans a kind of “reverse architecture” that serves as a starting point for discussions with local residents, and draw attention to modern and ancient uses of the spaces. In 2016 they surveyed the Mbai Caves northeast of Nairobi, which Kenyan freedom fighters used during the 1952–60 Mau Mau uprising, an armed rebellion against British colonial authorities. The caves are full of artifacts, and their blackened walls bear traces of the Mau Mau fighters who lit fires at night as they hid there.

Although the Kenyan government declared the site a national monument in 2003, the cave remains primarily a tourist recreation site yet to be formally recognized as a museum; Cave_bureau has proposed that the government make it one. In Anthropocene Museum, a 7-minute video that narrates the history of the fighters and maps the caves where they hid, Mutegi contends that “the Anthropocene Museum already exists … It exists around the world as everyday sites. Like artifacts within the landscape.”

For the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, Cave_bureau hung 1,700 pieces of Kenyan obsidian from the central pavilion’s dome at precise heights to replicate a section of the Mbai Cave ceiling. They named the project Galileo Chini Dome, after the artist who designed the dome’s Art Deco frescoes. The simulated cave created just as contemplative a space as the frescoes, which begged the question, Why don’t we bring the kind of attentiveness typically reserved for viewing art to the world outside, where humans have been leaving traces of history and culture for thousands of years?

Last year, Cave_bureau released their film Anthropocene Museum 2.0 “Slave Caves” (2022), in which they tell the story of the Shimoni caves, located on the nation’s southern tip. These caves served as holding chambers for slaves on the East African coast until ships came to collect and transport them to Zanzibar, home to the main slave markets, and then on to the Arabian peninsula. The history of West African transatlantic slave trade is well documented; less is known about trade from the East African coast, which the Portuguese and the Arabs led with aid from some locals. In an essay for the Architectural Review, Karanja and Mutegi imagine the horror and discomfort the prisoners must have felt as they packed into these dark humid caves, recalling the emotions that they themselves felt when they began their research. The name Shimoni comes from Swahili for “the place of the hole,” and many slaves attempted escape through the cave’s myriad tunnels, which extend 3 miles from the coast.

The film sets images of the Shimoni caves alongside historical photographs, stories, and footage showing artifacts that remain in them. Today, remnants of metal chain can still be found in the caverns. In one scene, the two architects sit with a curator named Nyamwami Ramadhan from the National Museums of Kenya, and elders Sheikh Omar Malago and Hassan Juma, officials elected by the community to be the caves’ custodians. The elders describe in Swahili (a hybrid of the local Bantu language and the foreign Arabic) how their ancestors used the Shimoni caves as spaces of ritual and healing, with chambers dedicated to the local shamans. “It seems to us,” Karanja and Mutegi wrote in the April 2021 issue of the Architectural Review, “that the Shimoni caves are what a ‘museum’ on the African continent should be.”

A RETROSPECTIVE of Cave_bureau’s work at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark that runs through November 26 includes all previous iterations of the Anthropocene Museum project—which combine video, sculpture, and installation—as well as the premiere of a new video. “The Louisiana has given us the opportunity to actually sit back and look at, where is this Anthropocene Museum?” Mutegi said. The exhibition is conceived as a partnership between the two museums: the Louisiana Museum helped Cave_bureau coordinate the exhibition of a painting by American artist Bernard Safran that was donated to the Anthropocene Museum. The 1959 portrait of Tom Mboya, one of the founding fathers of the Kenyan Republic, resonates with African freedom movements. When the exhibition concludes, the Louisiana Museum will help ship the painting to Kenya, where Cave_bureau plans to build a structure to display it.

Mutegi and Karanja want to act as a resource for repatriating cultural objects to Africa, in a process they call “reverse curation.” “There’s a lot of restitution talk which is all about these artifacts that guilt-ridden museums feel they need to return very slowly with compensation,” Karanja said. “We feel their avenues to do this are limited, and we think that we can generate and creatively assist in bringing these artifacts back.” They don’t want objects to come back into another warehouse of things, or another Western-style museum. Instead, they want to build infrastructure to assimilate them thoughtfully into the communities that were most affected their loss. If those communities feel the need to ban or destroy those objects, that’s fine: the sentiment that objects must be cordoned off and pristine is a Western construct that, in many cases, overrides the object’s intended use. It is not a universal value.

For Anthropocene Museum 10.0, they will premiere their first physical manifestation in Kenya, a project they’re now beginning to design. Although their projects rarely adopt a physical structure, they are excited to have a site for this iteration. “It won’t be in the conventional sense of OK, this is where the audience or the visitors park their cars. They walk into this grand architecturally designed building and then experience the artifacts as this sort of static objects that don’t really do anything,” Karanja said. “We’re flipping that completely.” Sometimes the building is a distraction from their real intentions, they contend, and now that they have developed a more robust software for their version of the museum, they feel ready to venture into the physical realm.

“There needs to be a reversal,” Mutegi said. “Not only in terms of reflecting on indigenous lifestyles and modes of existence and being that were always here, but finding ways to leave minimal impact on the planet. We have no other option but to go back to our cave states of reduced presence on the earth.”