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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did the chickens have anything to do with his move?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fox has also created a series of monumental public artworks in Australia with the most-advanced laser technology currently available, including Sunsuper Night Sky in Brisbane (2020), Beacon in Hobart (2022), and Monochord in Melbourne (2022). During a discussion with Art in America, Fox talked about his work in different mediums on different scales and the ways his synesthetic visions have come to life.

How would you characterize TRIPTYCH and how it fits into your work?

It’s the latest installment of audiovisual pieces that I’ve been making for almost 20 years. The first installment was work for an oscilloscope, audio-visual films that were my first attempt to create a sort of mechanical synesthesia, with synchronicity between audible and visible voltage. I was obsessed with that and toured around the world, carrying an oscilloscope with me around to noise and punk venues all over. I could make beautiful images on the oscilloscope that were crystalline and clear, but back then I had a Sony Handycam that was running into a shitty projector and then projected onto a sheet in a punk squat somewhere. I became increasingly frustrated with the sound-to-image results.

Then I saw a laser in real life for the first time. I’d never been to raves or clubs in my youth. I wasn’t involved in club culture at all. But when I was playing a show in Melbourne, I walked in and there was a green laser in the corner that had been left on, shooting smiley faces and unicorns in sync with the house music that was playing in the background. I saw that and had a weird epiphany. It was a green laser, and my oscilloscope works were green. A lot of my early work being green is not a conscious choice or an aesthetic decision. It was technically determined. The oscilloscope works were green because oscilloscopes are green. It takes less energy to make a bright green light then it takes to make any other color, because our eyes are ultra-receptive to green light. That’s why technical equipment, like old monochromatic computer screens, are green. We’re geared for green, and that has to do with discerning predators in foliage. We have a much greater level of detail with our green vision.

Anyway, when I was working with mechanical synesthesia, it was never the most common form of synesthesia, which is sound to color. Instead, I was working with shape and movement. I was working with the dynamism of a sound wave and what I discovered to be the inherent geometry nested in a sound. I was able to tease that out visually.

Is that term “mechanical synesthesia” yours?

As far as I know. Somebody else might have used it before, but what it describes for me is the feeling that I had the first time I saw a sound and an image connect in that geometric way. Not all of them did when I first plugged noise into an oscilloscope and started looking at it. A lot of it was rubbish—a lot of it was messy and wasn’t very interesting. And then there was this crystalline second or so where the wave form rectified. The wave form distorted and clipped, and when it clipped, it created corners in the image. I felt like I experienced synesthesia for the first time: I was listening to something and seeing the same phenomenon, literally—not an aestheticized or mediated representation of the sound but an actual physical manifestation of what I was hearing. The two things connected in a neurological way that felt to me like what a synesthetic experience would feel like. I felt like I’d found a way to manufacture it.

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Can you explain the way in which the sounds you create and the light you’re projecting are one in the same?

Well, they’re connected. I’ve called it signal simultaneity. The way I used to work is that I would take the voltage that is required to make a sound come out of a speaker, which is a waveform in a kind of Platonic or abstracted sense. It’s the voltage that moves speakers backward and forward. I take that voltage and apply it to two mirrors that are spinning inside a laser projector. There’s an X axis and a Y axis—they’re the things that displace a single laser beam to create a show. If you’re driving the X and Y mirrors with the left and right voltage of a stereo signal, you’re essentially looking at the voltage that you’re hearing.

So, if soundless, a laser beam would project in one direction, but you introduce waves that displace it?

It’s the way that old CRT [cathode ray tube] televisions with big tubes worked. They had three RGB color guns at the back. Voltage would be sent to those and they would scan using electromagnets on either side. The voltage would pull things from side to side, up and down, and create images through the persistence of vision phenomena. The reason I can draw what seems to be a solid three-dimensional cone of light with a single laser beam is that I’m displacing it so fast that your eyes perceive it as a solid. It’s like when you get a sparkler and spin it around, it looks like a solid circle. Picasso did a whole series of photos like this, where he lit things up and then these sort of drawings in the air were captured in long-exposure photographs. That phenomenon of persistence of vision means you can create all kinds of images just using voltage.

I was trying to recreate sounds visually, and then I realized I could do that three-dimensionally and essentially have people standing inside a sound, or the realization of a sound. When I saw the possibility of making a three-dimensional version of sound with light, that was extraordinary. I thought, that’s what I want to do!

How does TRIPTYCH relate to Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski?

Stanislaus—in Australia he’s called Stan—was an incredibly prolific artist. From his arrival in Adelaide, in the mid-1950s, he was doing a lot of paintings and a lot of design work. He also did huge murals in the city and sculptures with all kinds of materials. He became quite well known in the visual art world in the latter part of his career for getting involved in computer-generated imagery really early on. When everyone was going crazy for Mandelbrot sets, and computers were starting to draw images, he was there bringing his Op-Art sensibilities into computer-generated imagery.

What’s amazing is that I’d never encountered his incredible body of work before, and I’ve been working in the field for 20 years. It’s just bizarre to me. I’d heard his name in passing when I was working on a commission years ago to build a giant Theremin—a huge interactive instrument that sat in the middle of Melbourne for a while—because he built paneled musical instruments that work like Theremins. But I had no idea he made laser work, and that he was one of the first people to do laser shows.

All artists go through periods of personal epiphanies where they think they’ve discovered something, and very often they haven’t discovered it at all. When I realized that I could do what I was doing with oscilloscopes with lasers, I was discovering a technique that was used by all laser-show makers in the 1960s and ’70s. They would prototype their laser shows on oscilloscopes and then move them across to laser projectors that were much more expensive. So I wasn’t discovering anything new, but for the materiality of what I needed to do, I was discovering it for the first time.

How did you come to start looking into Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work?

I was invited by someone at the State Library of South Australia to go through a collection Ostoja-Kotkowski materials, and that happened to coincide with the establishment of a festival called Illuminate Adelaide. I created a work for that called Library of Light (2021). In a blurb for that I mentioned Ostoja-Kotkowski and a couple weeks later I just got a Google-translated block of text from Przasnysz, Poland, where he had lived, saying, “We can’t believe you’re interested in Ostoja-Kotkowski’s work. Would you come and talk to our historical society about him?”

I booked a ticket and it was a beautiful experience. They were so surprised that I turned up that it was a bit like the Beatles coming to town. They were disproportionately happy that I was there, which was really endearing and lovely. I got a tour of the town and the street named after Ostoja-Kotkowski, and a cultural center that’s being refurbished. Hopefully I’ll go back and perform at the opening.

How sophisticated or not is the laser technology you use for TRIPTYCH?

I’m using standard laser projectors that are built for performing laser displays. That technology has increased remarkably since I started. Like all technology, the price, the size, and everything else gets better and faster and more efficient.

There’s nothing particularly special about them—they’re a known quantity. But the ones I use for the large-scale shows are definitely not. They are industrial cutting lasers that companies won’t really sell for entertainment purposes. All the ones that I know are available have been bought secondhand from solar-panel manufacturing companies that have gone broke and sell off their equipment. People buy them and then repurpose them for making displays, but they’re extremely dangerous, and working at that larger scale is a completely different proposition.

How did the prospect of using that kind of larger-scale laser originate for you?

It happened because of the pandemic, when the world changed quite suddenly and led to a complete wipeout of all work for me and a lot of my colleagues. For the first time in 20 years, I was looking at my studio gear for things to sell. Then the director of the Brisbane Festival, Louise Bezzina, called out of the blue and said, “We’d love to talk to you about coming to Brisbane and doing a citywide installation, something that will be visible from a lot of different places and be quite spectacular.” They didn’t want anyone to gather because of Covid, and they didn’t want anyone to have to be in just one place to see it. It’s an oxymoronic brief in a way: to make a spectacle that doesn’t have a particular place from which to view it.

I tried to back out of it because I had done something similar in Melbourne from a skyscraper, using what were for me then the most powerful lasers I could get my hands on. I used them first in an installation called White Beam for the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania in 2013. That was a commission that I did on a tree-lined boulevard with a 30-watt beam. It kind of worked, but I had open fires creating smoke and misters in the trees with moisture coming from the sky—I made a whole environment there. But when you’re up on a skyscraper there is nothing to articulate the light, so I wasn’t sure if it would work. Everybody wants Tron, with lasers shooting all over the city like some kind of science-fiction film. But in Melbourne it was quite muted. There was a counterintuitive kind of light in the sky. People were thinking, What the hell is that—are we being invaded by aliens? But it was very subtle. It wasn’t spectacular.

I explained this to the Brisbane Festival director and said, “I don’t think I can create what it is that you want.” But the more I tried to back away from it, the more they wanted me to do it. Brisbane normally has a massive fireworks display with rock music called Riverfire. They couldn’t do it during the pandemic, so basically my project happened because they couldn’t do the fireworks. I was saying to the festival director, “People love fireworks, and you’re going to disappoint 4 million people by telling them this is fireworks. I can make something else, but I can’t make fireworks.”

How did the equipment you had access to change?

Two companies contended for the job, and when the second one sent the technical specifications of what they had, I didn’t understand what I was reading. I read the specifications of the laser, and it was kind of impossible. It was very powerful, and very, very tight. There was almost no divergence in the beam, which means you can see it for a really long distance because it doesn’t get wider. In this kind of Shakespearean betrayal, I gave the job—a very big job—to the company I’d never worked with. I didn’t sleep for two weeks while making the decision, but I really wanted to see this thing. I thought I might disappoint 4 million people with this project, which would be disastrous, but I decided to take the risk. And the first time I saw one of these lasers shoot from a rooftop, my jaw dropped. It was stunning. You could see it all across a well-lit city, a beautifully articulated beam. All you had to do was make it move a little bit and it would sweep. It was gorgeous. All of the sudden, everything felt possible.

In what ways are lasers of this kind dangerous? I’ve read their beams can travel as far as 160,000 kilometers?

There are all these metrics when you’re dealing with laser safety, particularly with civil aviation, because laser light, generally, even from a standard show projector, can travel really long distances. The light is well-columnated, and its energy is all in one direction, so it just keeps going. There’s a distance within which you should not hit a human being with a laser in the eye—that’s what they call “ocular hazard distance.” Normally, that’s hundreds of meters with a standard show laser. But with these industrial lasers, the ocular hazard distance is 8 kilometers [nearly 5 miles]—you have to be that far away from this thing for it not to damage your eye immediately. That’s incredibly powerful.

The final gradation in the metrics is called “glare distance,” which basically means that if you were looking in the direction of the laser, you would detect or feel something. You wouldn’t necessarily see it, but you might detect it, and that’s enough for them to be worried about from a civil aviation point of view, for pilots with so many distractions.

When you say you wouldn’t “see” it, what would that mean otherwise?

It’s actually just a bit of math, because it’s so abstract. No one’s ever actually stood 160,000 kilometers away from this thing and gone, “Oh yeah, yeah, I can detect something.” It’s an extrapolation.

What kind of damage would it do to the eye? Would it burn it?

You could write a book on the kind of misinformation and mystery that that surrounds ocular safety with laser displays, even within the industry. There are international standards for what they call “maximum permissible exposure,” the MPE, which is very conservative. I do shows legally within the MPE, and [in club and theater shows] I use all kinds of things like lenses to make the beams wider and take the power down. I like to do the show safely because it is not comfortable or enjoyable if you don’t. The International Laser Display Association, ILDA, would have you believe that you can operate a show at 10 times the MPE and it would be OK. But in their estimation, most laser shows that you experience are about 100 times over the maximum permissible exposure. The thing with laser damage to the eye is that it’s not immediate. Generally, the damage would be minor and subtle, and what would happen is you start getting headaches like five years later when you’re reading. It’s not a burning of the eyeballs, but it’s still something that you don’t want to inflict on people. I recently had to get reading glasses. I went to the optometrist and said, “I’ve been working with lasers for 20 years and I’m worried that I might have damaged myself when I didn’t yet know what I was doing.” But there was nothing wrong with my eyes. What that suggests to me is that the international standards are very conservative. But there is still danger if it’s done badly or incorrectly.

How did the first large-scale work at the Brisbane Festival go?

It worked, but I would never do it the same way again. I had to make that one on Zoom. I did all the site visits on Zoom, and I was using Google Earth because we couldn’t travel in Australia at all while we were in lockdown. I was making the piece in a very abstract way, and I remember arriving in Brisbane the first day just and thinking, Oh my god, it’s so much bigger when you’re standing in it! For that project, I had seven of the big lasers, and they were put on seven different buildings.

How much does one of the big lasers cost?

Between 60,000 and 80,000 euros (around $66,000-$88,000). But by the time you’ve done the work to have the refrigeration system that it needs, put a scan head on it, and all the other things that need to happen to make it safe, you probably get to 100,000 euros ($110,000) per unit. The ones that I had in Brisbane were owned by a consortium of laser companies, and they travel around the world. They were in Dubai, and then in Las Vegas. I managed to get seven of them, and I think there were 12 available in the world.

How does the sound component of your large-scale presentations work?

I had to develop a way to synchronize the soundtrack. The sound was on a web app, and you could walk around and experience the audio with the display. You wouldn’t have to gather around a PA system to do it—it could be delivered to a device. Which is also fiendishly difficult to do, because everyone’s got different devices and different operating systems and different Bluetooth headphones. To try and coordinate that was difficult, but we got that working. It’s a web app, and you just hit play.

Your next big project like this was Beacon in Hobart, Australia, in 2022. The photographs from that look quite dramatic…

What I decided to do with Beacon was gather the lasers in one place from which I distributed all of that power. It created a corridor of intensity. When you were standing underneath the lasers, you could see them shoot out into space, and they were so bright and so articulate and precise. It was quite amazing. At one point, there were these little explosions in the beams, and I asked my laser guy, Arthur Ipsaros of Genius Laser Technology, “What is that?!” He said, “Those are insects dying. It’s a massive bug zapper that you’ve created!”

Anyway, it created an optical illusion with planes of light. They went over the mountain, and it looked like the beams just stopped in midair. I got so many messages from people saying, “How did you make the light stop? That’s impossible!” I was like, “Yeah, it’s not happening—it’s a complete optical illusion.” What was amazing is that when you were standing under the lasers, a beam would sweep from left to right. But when you were at the other end, the beam comes from kilometers away and sweeps right over your head in this beautiful slow arc. It was a completely different experience. Since the beams were directly above you, you could turn around, and it looked like there was another laser the same distance in the other direction shooting back. It almost triangulated, as an optical experience, so much so that I started to think that maybe the world was flat. Not seriously, but the scale of something so big distorts everything. You can’t make sense of it.

Would you make large-scale work of the kind again? Do you have any current plans?

Absolutely. I have pitches around to do various things. I’ve learned a lot every time I’ve done one. I made a joke with a journalist in Hobart who asked, “How do you prepare for something like this?” I said, “Well, I don’t have a Hobart to practice on!” It’s not like I can prototype these. These are works that are happen in my little studio in Melbourne, very much in the abstract. When I arrive on site, I see and hear them really for the first time.

The cast of subjects is widely international, and the roster includes architects at different stages in their careers, including David Adjaye, David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller (of Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Bjarke Ingels, and Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg (of SO – IL), among others.

The new volume follows the 2020 book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, for which Szántó interviewed museum directors in the midst of the pandemic about the state of art institutions going forward.

Below, Szántó spoke with ARTnews about aspirational architecture, museums’ new trend toward humility, and how the art world can help guide society at large.

ARTnews: Before getting to the new book, what was the response like around The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues? Was there anything that surprised you or stood out?

András Szántó: Just the other day I was having dinner with a museum director and he was talking about it. That book came out before the end of 2020, when we were still deeply in the pandemic, and he said, “You know, we were at a moment when we were questioning so much and losing faith, and just the fact that there was a book about the future—with that word in the title—was tremendously reassuring.” That’s been the big surprise: how many people found it somehow reassuring, or optimistic. Which I found very interesting for a book of conversations with museum executives who were, without fail, experiencing the most-difficult, most-trying time of their careers, talking about a cultural/economic landscape that was treacherous and ominous in so many ways. I was very pleased that that it didn’t turn into some sort of bummer.

I think the underlying root of that optimism was [the belief] that the museum can overcome difficult phases, which we can now see happening in light of bounce-backs in terms of audience and funding. And also that the museum, as an institutional typology, can evolve. Contrary to public perception, the museum is not this ossified, high-end elitist institution trapped in a travertine box, a Greek temple that is static and unable to change. It is an institution that is very much capable of evolving and becoming relevant in contemporary society. I have to say that that message wasn’t obvious to me going into the book. I was aware of strains of new thinking about the museum, but it was reassuring to see so much evidence of this new thinking and willingness to the push the museum outside of its old comfort zone into a more contemporary form that is aligned with the needs of today’s society.

AN: What made you turn to architects next?

When I was explaining the first book to people, I found myself saying that it’s almost like there’s new software running the museum. There’s a new set of ambitions animating the museum, and a lot of those ambitions have to do with functions like engaging the community or creating more space for education and entertainment, and new types of art that are not paintings or sculptures, creating community hubs for cities, engaging the natural environment, and things of that nature. It is logical to ask, “What kind of a museum building is going to be a catalyst for all that?” What I found is that architects are not only willing to answer that question but are able to lead museums toward answers. Museum-making is probably the top thing you can do as an architect, and the architects who get to design museums are also engaged in many other spheres: they build universities, factories, governmental facilities, parks, churches. Architects have a broad set of references and are able to bring them into questions of what sorts of forms to give to institutions.

AN: How did you go about putting together the list of which architects you would speak with? It’s a quite diverse group working in different places in different ways.

When I did my first book, because I work in the museum field a lot as a consultant, I knew a majority of the people. For the second book that was not the case. It was important to me to have a global range and gender parity as well. I gradually came to the conclusion, based on a lot of conversations and advice, to use the book primarily as a way to give voice to a younger, incoming generation. Architects don’t mature too young, so the young generation can be people in their 40s and 50s. Would I have liked to have Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano? Absolutely. But I think their voices have been heard, and in many ways they speak through their acolytes. Many names will be new, and I think that provides a service to the field, because these are the people who are in the vanguard and, in some cases, will be building museums for the next 10, 20, 30 years.

AN: How hesitant or eager were architects to speak with you? It’s a very ideas-driven field, but then it’s also very contingent on clients. Architects also operate on such different scales of time, from the idea stage to the execution stage.

For the younger generation, I think it was an opportunity to think out loud about something they really care about. And architects are very collaborative. Another thing I’ll say is that architects are absolutely fascinating interview subjects because they are incredibly good verbal virtuosos. Architects are—forgive the word—seducers: they have to present these incredibly expensive projects to all kinds of stakeholders, and they convince people to do extraordinary, even revolutionary buildings. These are people endowed with a finely tuned capacity to make arguments.

AN: In your introduction to the book, you write, “A museum should never be confused with its building—it is so much more.” What do you mean by that?

You can make a great museum in a mediocre building, but no amount of great architecture will make a good museum out of an institution that doesn’t have a good program or a good collection. We’ve all been to old dusty museums that have the world’s most extraordinary collections, and, by contrast, we’ve been in shiny buildings that are just boring. In this moment, post-Covid and post-starchitecture, this has a more current meaning as well. Since the 1990s, we had a post-Bilbao style, where cities invested enormous amounts of money in extraordinary, flamboyant architecture that in some ways began to dominate museums. The assumption was that these buildings were to serve as magnets for cultural tourism and as emblems for their cities. They were very successful at that, but I think today there’s a kind of disenchantment with that notion of the museum that competes with its own contents, as a sort of giant sculpture in an urban landscape. We are looking at more humble museums that are much more woven into their surroundings and speak a different language.

And then, during the pandemic, we really came to terms with questions like: Who is the museum for? How is the museum an institutional construct, and how should it serve communities and serve society? Service to society involves a range of activities that are not confined to what happens in museum buildings. It’s about pushing beyond and beginning to think of the museum as not just this thing trapped in its own building, but something that is fused with its city through a set of relationships, collaborations, projections beyond the walls.

AN: In the intro, you quote an architect saying, “We can make sure museums are pioneers, part of the avant-garde. Not just the artistic avant-garde, but the social avant-garde.” What constitutes that social avant-garde?

That was Bjarke Ingels who said that. He is as close as it comes to sort of a wunderkind of this younger generation, designed the Googleplex [Google’s tech campus in Silicon Valley, conceived in collaboration with Hearthwick Studios] and Mars Science City [a campus for outer-space simulation outside Dubai]. He’s one of the most successful architects of his generation, and as a Danish architect, he is particularly invested in climate as a subject. He said that in the context of work that they are doing with port cities around the world where they are creating green ports. Ports are so substantial and so important to the economy of their regions that, if they go green, then everybody else is forced to go green.

The conversation we were having was about the impact of the museum. I think what that quote reflects that is that very often we confuse things we do in the very small art world bubble and think that that is driving society forward. But, in fact, a lot of what happens in the art world is fairly insular, speaking to a fairly narrow audience—it’s a bit of a hall of mirrors. I think what Bjarke meant there is that we can really drive society forward by making the museum a platform of public awareness around these issues. And maybe architecture can play a role in that in in terms of how we integrate museums in different scenarios with other configurations of buildings and institutions. Architects are trusted advisers and have their fingers in all these other pies. They can nudge institutions to look beyond their immediate functions serving an art public.