“Bringing Your Ghosts to Life” - Interview with Film Director Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas has spindly limbs, wears terrific T-shirts, and speaks softly and rapidly, with convulsive energy and a nervous stutter that suggests nothing so much as fleeting blockages in an otherwise steady deluge of ideas desperate to be liberated from his brain. He is 58 years old and one of the most youthful and prolific artists I have known. He grew up in Paris in the 1970s, in the wake of the preceding decade’s tumult, and was a painter and a critic before he made films. His youthful struggles to balance the dictates of the era’s radical leftist ideologies with those of his own artistic ambitions form the foundation for his latest film, the eloquent and ebullient, suffuse and semi-autobiographical Something in the Air. These struggles are also the subject of his memoir A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, which was published in English translation last year by Wallflower Press. Assayas’ other films include Cold Water (1994), Irma Vep (1996), demonlover (2002), Clean (2004), Summer Hours (2008) and Carlos (2010). Our conversation took place amidst the creaking elegance of Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel and was lubricated by several glasses of Bordeaux. – José Teodoro 

I. A MOMENT OF CHAOS

THE BELIEVER: Après mai and Something in the Air, the French and English titles of your new film, are very closely related in implied meaning and associations, but I confess that I think I prefer the latter. It emphasizes not just a particular zeitgeist or set of circumstances, but any zeitgeist, any circumstance. It’s resolute in the distance it takes from the ideological positions staked throughout the film. 

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: I’m fine with both. Après mai, for the French, really does convey a very similar notion, because it has to do with the aftermath of something, of dealing with the echo of something of which you had no firsthand experience. It has the same diffused notion of history and politics. I suggested Something in the Air because Après mai just does not translate into English. 

BLVR: Although the English title of your memoir, A Post-May Adolescence, has retained this idea.

ASSAYAS: Yes, I think the context of that book supported the idea more. And it’s easier for a book’s title to be allusive than it is for a film’s.

BLVR: And in the book you also have the opportunity to explain precisely what a post-May adolescence means. 

ASSAYAS: Yes, exactly.

BLVR: Regarding the ways in which Something in the Air and A Post-May Adolescence overlap, I’ve been thinking a lot about the patterns of artistic self-realization conveyed in both. Did you ever feel like the decision to become an artist was an inherent compromise to your political convictions?

ASSAYAS: If you were involved in the politics of that time, the early 1970s, and if you were involved in the hopes and ideas of that time, it was very difficult to accept the notion of any kind of work that might alienate. Nothing was acceptable if it did not have a direct relationship with the coming revolution, which was not a question mark, it was not a dream; it was a fact. The revolution was going to happen—so what are you going to do for it? You were not making art for the revolution. Art was petit bourgeois. Art was about individualism, which was anathema to the politics of the time. People were very serious about this. When Jean Eustache made La Maman et la putain it was denounced as petit bourgeois.

BLVR: Which in retrospect is ridiculous. 

ASSAYAS: Which in retrospect is demented! But anything that had to do with using the first-person was unacceptable. So when you had those aspirations as a very young man it was difficult to feel accepted or understood in the political context of the time. What does your petit bourgeois art mean to the working class? It was a very difficult question to answer.

BLVR: In A Post-May Adolescence you talk about visiting London in your youth. Given that you were a painter then, I wondered if you had encountered the work of John Berger and if he was any sort of influence on your feelings about art in the service of politics.

ASSAYAS: I didn’t read him. Though I knew his son, Jacob. 

BLVR: I ask because his Marxist readings of art history were something that made a big impact on me some years later.

ASSAYAS: The seventies was a moment of chaos, especially for people of my generation. I was 15 in 1970. It was extremely difficult to find your way, to harness the available ideas. Because you were living in the wake of events that you couldn’t fully grasp. You had two antagonistic sides of the same coin. There was the Marxist theology of the time, meaning kids who were organized in political groups, various strains of Trotskyism, eventually a tiny minority of anarchists, different types of Maoists: that’s one side of it. The other was all that had to do with the counterculture, the music, the drugs, the free press, et cetera.  And there was ultimately very little communication between those two groups. In France, the political side was the majority by a wide margin. 

The only accepted music in that atmosphere was free jazz. It was considered okay by Leftist standards—but not rock. There were Leftist rock and roll bands, but they were there largely to attract kids to the meetings or whatever. There was no real interest in the music. It was mostly despised, same with the free press, same with the drugs. The politicized kids would not touch drugs. They were considered an anti-revolutionary tool of the bourgeois state. The logic of all this would have been very clear to anyone who had been involved in May ’68 movement. But for kids in the seventies, you were attracted to both. You had to be involved in the politics, but simultaneously you would be listening to prog-rock, smoking joints, reading the free press or Zap Comix. These things were all elements of that present and offered a sense of rebellion against the bourgeois society. It was hard to understand why the two sides could not really come together.

BLVR: One of the things that defines adolescence is the ability to know when you’re really having fun. What you’re describing is a constant suspicion of any activity that might be construed as fun.  

ASSAYAS: Oh, no! No, it was definitely not okay to have fun. Fun was extremely suspicious. The notion of having fun implies that to some degree you accept the society you live in. And you couldn’t accept the present. The present was bad. It was like a religious was of thinking, a mystical notion of the future. Someday we will have a better world, a better society where finally you will be able to enjoy yourself.

BLVR: Yet having fun seems like an essential element in making art. In the book you describe your determination to become an artist as a way of—to use the English translation—“saving your own skin.” 

ASSAYAS: Yes, because when you practice an art you are on your own. Somehow it teaches you to think on your own. It teaches you to try things, to escape the hive-mind of your generation. It’s not a very pleasant situation in many ways. At that time being an artist would make your weird. Practicing an art is a drug. And I had that addiction. Art dragged me into some imaginary world, and in some ways this world saved me from the dead ends of the seventies’ ideologies. I did not go all the way in terms of politics, or mysticism or drugs, because I wanted to go all the way in terms of my art, whatever it was, and it was extremely naïve at the time.

II. A FILM SET IS LIKE A HAPPENING 

BLVR: To jump back to Something in the Air, I find it very interesting to track Gilles’ development as an artist. First we see him doing figurative work, later we see him doing abstract work, and then later still some combination of the two. And there’s this key moment in the film where a debate erupts regarding whether or not radical content requires radical form. I wonder if this is something that you’ve struggled with, or continue to struggle with, the question of what form is the right form for the art you want to make.

ASSAYAS: That question is more of a description of where I come from. You could not escape that discussion at that time. It was a key issue, and the answers were complex. Much of it boils down to similar questions about social realism. For the same reasons that the Soviets wound up suppressing modern art and abstraction, Leftism was suspicious of anything that was not understandable or that could disturb the working class sensibility. Ultimately the radical Leftists of the time had very classical tastes in art. They despised art in general, but they tolerated straightforward or figurative or documentary formats. They did not believe in fiction or formal radicalism. On the other hand, the history of modern art in France is connected to formalism, to abstraction.

Something in the Air is similar to Irma Vep in that I’m trying to show the conflicting theories of what art is about. It’s way to express how when you were taken into the turmoil of those years you defined yourself in terms of those options. And my option has always been, in one way or another, figuration, representation. I’ve always thought about it in terms similar to those of Balthus or Lucien Freud, who chose the path of representing human beings instead of using just form and colour, who believed that there was a modern path that included figuration and narration, that figuration and narration were not petit bourgeois in themselves, that representing nature, representing mankind, representing the world as it is was not inherently petit bourgeois. Maybe these elements have something to do with the very nature of cinema.

Maybe fiction is no less documentary than documentary, in terms of dealing with the dreams of your time. I ended up coming up with my own answers, but those were the questions. And they do stay with me. Whatever I’m doing I try to define it by answering all of those questions.

BLVR: I’m interested in your choice to write A Post-May Adolescence as a letter. Did this form allow you to apply certain useful constraints, to contain what might otherwise be too open-ended a subject? There are moments, for example, where you note that you don’t want to digress too much about the music you were listening to at the time.

ASSAYAS: Yes. Yes to all of that. Because this is not exactly an autobiography. It was a more an attempt to reconcile my fascination with the writings of Debord and the practice of an art. I never really felt a deep connection with the politics of the time. I was never a Maoist, never a Trotskyite. When I was very young I was drawn to different forms of anarchism. But my ideas only really took shape in connection to the writings of Debord and eventually to the Frankfurt school. Those were the writers that structured my politics and view of modern society. Yet everything Debord wrote was about the destruction of art. Everything Debord wrote concluded that art was impossible in this age. Debord despised any form of artistic practice.

To become a filmmaker, to take that giant step to make my first short film, I had to accept that I felt a little schizophrenic about all of this. What I believed in, deeply, in terms of my politics, should have made it impossible to make films. Then I made my first short film and realized that it was not alienating. There was a path towards cinema, towards art, on which you could work along with a crew, within a team, and create something that was not alienating. This was a discovery. I then had to try to make sense as to why I found in cinema something that gave me a satisfaction that work in itself could never give me. And why it was not a total contradiction of my readings of Debord. I needed to understand why I had always stayed in touch with Debord’s theories and felt no conflict between this and my practice as an artist. I started writing this book to answer this question. I did not know the answer. It seemed possible that there was no answer. And in the end I got to what is maybe the beginning of an answer. 

BLVR: And directing this question to Debord’s widow was the most appropriate way to focus those thoughts?

ASSAYAS: Yes, because I had just met Alice at that point. We had become friends, and somehow I felt obliged to try to make sense of this stuff. If only for her, within the terms of our relationship. This is also why later I became involved in reviving the films of Debord. That was a lot of work. It was extremely complicated. I had to sort out an enormous number of contractual and practical problems. But I did it all out of admiration for Debord and also for Alice. 

BLVR: You mention in the book that you would have loved to recreate something like Andy Warhol’s Factory had you the sort of character that lent itself to such an enterprise. But, of course, managing a film set—especially on a film like Something in the Air, where you have all these great party scenes that seem to always be spilling out of the frame—feels not entirely dissimilar to facilitating that kind of situation.

ASSAYAS: You’re right. A film set is like a happening. The film set is a work of art in itself. To feel this formidable energy, with everyone focused on something, on creating an illusion. There’s a beauty in that. And everybody shares that experience. A film set is a more intense form of everyday life. Even guys who are there to do what seems like the smallest job, they feel part of something bigger, something worthwhile, in a way that very few things in modern society offer you. You are disconnected from reality. You create a bubble of complete freedom, a bubble in which people all work together to create something they believe in.  This is why I dislike the industry so much, because it turns this utopia of the film set into a factory. Which is something I try to represent in Something in the Air. (laughs) It’s a token of my love for the film industry, as represented by Nazis. But the metaphysical difference between independent filmmaking and industrial filmmaking is exactly this: on an independent film you protect this utopia.

BLVR: Right. And some directors can protect that utopia on a large scale and some can’t. I always liked the metaphor that Robert Altman used of building a sandcastle with his collaborators and then watching it all get washed away.

ASSAYAS: Absolutely. Robert Altman was a great, great filmmaker. I’ve been rediscovering his work recently.

BLVR: I’m a huge fan of 3 Women especially. 

ASSAYAS: I like 3 Women and basically everything he did in the seventies. Thieves Like Us, California Split, Nashville, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. I hadn’t watched that stuff for ages and when I returned to this work I just couldn’t believe it. Everything from that period, taken altogether, is a huge achievement.

III. GETTING RID OF THE PAST 

BLVR: There are several moments in Something in the Air where art is treated as something disposable. Paintings and drawings get ripped up or thrown away, poetry gets burned. Is this something that gets easier to come to terms with as an older artist, this idea that art just comes and goes?

ASSAYAS: Yes, but it’s also to do with the fact that the seventies were not concerned with money. Anything material was despised.  Art was practiced for the beauty of it. Anything successful was suspicious. Especially movies. It took me a while to come to terms with the notion that there could be anything good about a movie being successful. Anything recognized by the majority was suspicious. That was the spirit of the times. So there was this auxiliary feeling that art was gratuitous, that it was created out of hope, love, faith. It doesn’t matter. It’s ephemeral.

BLVR: As I watched Something in the Air I thought about two other films in particular. I think this film is such an interesting companion piece to Carlos, and the reasons for that are largely self-evident. But on the other hand, and more interestingly, for me at least, is the fact that your film feels to me like a sort of prequel to Le Diable probablement.

ASSAYAS: Well, I’m certainly not going to contradict you there. I feel that Le Diable probablement is the best film about the 1970s. I think Bresson did it too late for it to be properly recognized. He should have done it three years earlier. I could not watch Le Diable probablement when it was released because it showed exactly what I did not want to see of myself. In 1977 I was into punk rock and getting rid of the past. I just didn’t want to look back. Le Diable probablement captures that seventies like no other movie. I certainly hope this new film has echoes of Le Diable probablement. The character of Gilles, when he grows up, will probably become closer to the character of Antoine Monnier in Bresson’s film.

BLVR: I was very charmed by the way you chose to end Something in the Air, with Gilles working on this ridiculous-looking movie in London. We’ve talked about the hugely ambitious but ephemeral nature of everything that Gilles was involved in throughout the story, and there’s something very irreverent about leaving Gilles in this place, working on something that’s comically insignificant. We know that he’ll likely move on to live an interesting life.

ASSAYAS: He works in this movie factory, making a film from another era. Which was my experience, actually. I worked similar jobs on similar films at the time. But he sells the free press in front of the consulates and he watches experimental films. He witnesses the resurrection of Laure in an experimental film. And all of a sudden he understands what art is about, what cinema is about. Cinema is about resurrection. Cinema is about dealing with your own ghosts and bringing them to life. Cinema can explore your subconscious and your memories, but mostly it allows what is lost to come back. This is really where the path starts for Gilles. Finally, he has arrived at the point where he understands why he wants to make films. And to me it’s a way of making sense of his whole journey.

BLVR: I appreciate the relatively breezy delivery of that last gesture. It’s in keeping with the lack of emphasis throughout Something in the Air, the absence of those moments designed to tell us what the film’s thesis is. Scenes just seem to tumble forth, and it’s only through their accumulation that we sense their forward movement. 

ASSAYAS: I’m glad you say that, because I did not want this film to have any built-in artificial narrative.  I wanted it to have moments that were as true as possible to the times and bet that somehow by connecting them, juxtaposing them, letting them echo within one another, we could make sense of the whole puzzle. Many elements in this film are elements I’ve used in previous films, but I’d used them in the context of more classical narratives. This is a very different type of narrative. I just wanted to put everything on the same level, to not exaggerate anything, and just trust reality, trust fleeting moments. I didn’t want to be sentimental about it. I didn’t want to be emotional about it. It has to come by itself.

José Teodoro is a critic and playwright and is the co-author, with Mexican photographer Laura Barrón, of a 3-meter-long bilingual book of text and images entitled Cathedral. He lives in Toronto. 

Interview with Art Historian, Jennifer Doyle

(The audience at Sin-a-matic in Los Angeles, c. 1994. Photographer unknown.)

I first encountered Jennifer Doyle’s work through her essay “Queer Wallpaper,” written for a survey textbook on contemporary art. Meant as a pedagogical primer on queer theory and queer politics in art, the essay was personal, affecting, and for what felt to be most important at the time, it conveyed what it might mean to write about visual art with an actual affinity and care for writing itself. 

So when her newest book Hold It Against Me: Emotion and Difficulty in Contemporary Art was announced, I followed the release date assiduously, eager to see how Doyle weighed in on “controversial” art (usually performance) by figures like Carrie Mae Weems, David Wojnarowicz, Nao Bustamante, Franko B, and Ron Athey. The book follows up on theories of affect and emotion that have gained large amounts of currency in the humanities, but resolutely sticks to a pedagogical, writerly, and accessible style of criticism meant to complement and expand the ‘difficult’ work on display.

I spoke with Doyle over a long Skype conversation, jumping to touch not only on the points in the book, but on her experience programming, attending, and writing about performance art in my hometown of Los Angeles. Doyle’s current book project is titled The Athletic Turn: Contemporary Art and the Sport Spectacle. – Joseph Henry

I. THE FLINCH MOMENT 

THE BELIEVER: The emotional quality of art is never the same for any one person – one viewer could find an artwork difficult or challenging and another could be bored or unimpressed. How do you approach emotion as subject in Hold It Against Me?

JENNIFER DOYLE: One of the things I’ve been saying is that we’re so used to using emotion or feeling as a kind of synonym for the subjective–and I think people that work in art criticism know this well–but there’s a subjective dimension to any critical practice. I’ll start with that: it’s not necessarily that the emotion we encounter in or around works of art is so much more subjective than elsewhere so much as it is the case that we’re very particularly invested in emotion as the place upon which we encounter the subjective. 

I’m interested in artists who work with that kind of head on, rather than say, represent emotion for us. Their work has a particular character that makes it impossible to understand it without thinking about the politics of emotion, or the politics of emotion as historically or politically conditioned. This kind of work sometimes forces a confrontation, too, with the politics of taste – I love the performance artist Franko B’s work. It can be mawkish, and that’s actually one of the things the work is about. You actually have to take on the sentiment, you have to take on the sticky and even kind of abject aspect of our own sentimentality, the narcissistic dimensions of romantic impulses, the attempt to actually make a work of art about love. I was interested in the difficulty of writing about it, of trying to figure that out.  

I think I mention this somewhere in the introduction or in a note, but when I first started working on this project, people thought I was writing a project on Minimalism. They hear that word “difficulty,” and that’s what they think about. There is an emotional landscape around Minimalist sculpture, and I’m not going to say it’s easy to write about that. You have to work at appreciating it, and being able to appreciate it is a mark of a certain kind of sophistication. It’s Spartan. As critics we understand that economy of restraint and withholding - we are taught to appreciate Minimalism’s difficulty. Its difficulty has a cultural value. But in this book, I am writing about other forms of difficulty.  

BLVR: When reading, I kept struggling to identify what would be the “difficult” aspect of any specific artwork. And, I think in the popular imagination, when people think of difficulty in performance art genres, they think of graphic bodily violence. But you seem to be expanding the whole idea of difficulty itself. 

JD: Yes. I am working out from George Steiner’s writing on forms of poetic difficulty. Performance art is an interesting case because its difficulty is often simplified in certain kinds of criticism. Take artists like Ron Athey, a performance artist whose practice considers the proximity of pain and pleasure. But with a gesture like the cut or exposure to the wound, there’s an obvious form of difficulty that goes right back to something like Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, a basic and existential kind of problem around the body. But Athey’s work has a reputation. There’s a photographic practice around work like his, which is often the primary way through which people encounter it. We have language about the difficulty of their work, which to my mind, is determined by the difficulty of photographs of their work, by the difficulty of the idea and the image of their work. Another form of difficulty is crowded out by that image, by that idea.

You, for example, flinch at something that’s happening in a live experience of a performance. But that thing keeps happening, and you accommodate yourself to the fact that you are in a room in which this thing is happening. As an affect, that flinch is what Sylvan Tomkins described as a “transitional affect,” something like being startled. So when thinking about the difficulty of their work, there’s this very powerful transitional affect around their work in performance that has come to stand in for the performance as an event, as a whole experience, and this flattens out the experience of the work. With a live performance, in which you’re keeping company with a body that you imagine is uncomfortable if not in some kind of pain, or exposed or vulnerable, you don’t sit in that startled response, you actually get used to it. That’s actually what the work is about: the way in which we keep company with something, and even maintain and nurse it. That is what his audience is drawn to - that is, in fact, what can render that audience ecstatic.

BLVR: The works tend to focus on physical pain, oppression, violence, or death. What motivated your choice of objects, and how you would approach works that seek out to generative positive, affirmative emotions? The one piece that I would have loved to see in the book was Tracey Emin’s 1995 film Why I Never Became a Dancer. I was dying to see an analysis of that work - I felt there’s a different emotional valence there, perhaps of a hopeful quality, than the work you selected in Hold It Against Me. 

JD: I’ve written a lot about Emin’s work so that’s why I don’t go there. And I do think Aliza Shvarts’s work with abortion (which I do write about) is more difficult. That said, I don’t think about the set of affects, emotions, and feelings that circulate around the works in Hold It Against Me as positive or negative, as affirmative or negative. There’s something about that either/or structure that I don’t think really captures this work. 

One of the best comments I got about this project was from Lauren Berlant. She pointed out that implicit in my writing was that people take pleasure from this work. She asked that I make that more explicit. You can’t narrate what feels important or valuable about say, Carrie Mae Weems’s piece, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried in terms of pleasure exactly. You can’t say that it’s negative or positive. That is, in fact, one of the ways that critics dismiss this work - by representing it as “merely” propaganda.

BLVR: “Reparative” would be the term that I would use instead of “affirmative.” 

JD: Yes, I was a student of Eve Sedgwick’s, I was the indexer for the book Novel Gazing, for which she wrote “Paranoid and Reparative Reading,” it’s like that essay is tattooed on the back of my hand. It may be the case that in every single work in Hold It Against Me, the artist is not offering a paranoid reading, but is making a reparative attempt within a circumstance that would seem otherwise to demand a kind of paranoia. So you actually have both: a reparative gesture made in a situation demanding paranoia. The dialectical turn is a reparative one. It’s a reparative gesture made as a refusal of the universal or transhistorical claim. Some of what I discuss – work by James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems and David Wojnarowicz, for example – makes a strong critique of universalizing discourse, and of certain ways of practicing criticism and art history. But that is not where their work starts or stops. Sedgwick describes the practice of a “weak theory,” in contrast with “strong theory,” as smaller in scale and intimate, local. The performances and the works that I write about – their most interesting dimension to me tends to be a quite small, local turn that’s very sensitive and profound. 

II. “YOU WANT TO WRITE LIKE BARTHES, BUT YOU CAN’T. YET.” 

BLVR: Touching on your literary background, I’ve always associated your work with a kind of belletristic, almost confessional style. You’re very explicit in Hold It Against Me about writing for a general audience and writing pedagogically. Can you talk about what structures your approach to writing, both academically and in your other kinds of work?

JD: I would like to write in a way that lets readers feel like there’s room for them in the text. I think this is a reflection of my class politics; it’s not that I don’t appreciate difficult writing, nor do I think that something that is easy to read is necessarily better written than something that’s hard to read. But, it is the case that a lot of people spend a lot of time being made to feel stupid, especially in their own encounters with contemporary art. It’s bothersome – it’s something that thing I wish I could change, because it’s one thing to feel humbled. But it is another to be exiled from the conversation, to be identified as not the right reader by virtue of one’s lack of access to a pretty rarified set of terms. Maggie Nelson writes really wonderfully about how cruelty and certain kind of intelligence seem to go together and curl around each other.    

In graduate school I wrote a no doubt ridiculous seminar paper for Toril Moi. We met to discuss the paper and she said –I think she gave me an A-, I’m not sure, she did not give me an A - she said:  “You want to write like Barthes. But you can’t. Yet.” There was a long pause between each segment of that, and I felt so called-out, because it was completely true. 

If I could write like anyone, the people I think of are the Roland Barthes of Lover’s Discourse, the Monique Wittig of The Straight Mind, the Audre Lorde of Sister/Outsider, and Theodor Adorno as we know him in Minima Moralia – that’s like the wildcard element. It’s a strange sort of cocktail. I read Adorno just because, I think with Adorno a lot. It’s preposterous for me to say that I want to write like Lorde or Adorno. But I want to write like the people who turn me out as a reader. They all have in common a capacity to make you feel them thinking in their writing. That’s a high art.

My job is to provide the context within which my writing will give the reader an experience that will help them to understand a work they might not understand otherwise. It is not to mark out the gap between their experience and the experience that’s required to understand the work, to say, “I, the author, have that experience and you, the reader, don’t.” I am perhaps inspired by some aspects of the very kinds of belletristic practices in art criticism, that say, the folks associated with the contemporary art journal, October, defined themselves against, and for really good reasons. But you know, why throw the baby out with the bathwater? By that I mean one can access the hard, historical ground of contemporary art through one’s writing - in the form of that writing. If critical theory in art history considers the politics of the form, why not consider that same question as it plays out in our own writing?

BLVR: It still feels like a hugely controversial aesthetic dynamic though. This discrepancy happens not only in what we would call academic platforms, but in seemingly “general audience” venues writing about art, too. There seems to be a contradiction where academic writing is taken to be not only bothersome and difficult for contemporary audiences, but the accepted critical standard at the same time.

JD: Yes, and depending on what you’re writing about. This is where my blogging is actually sort of like a funny contrast. If you did that to sports, people would just revolt: it is not ok to write really obscure sports criticism. People have no patience for it, no challenge for it – I don’t think that’s a good thing! I think there’s actually as much room for really difficult writing about sports. So much of sports discourse really just goes to oiling the machinery, by which I mean the sports world as a commercial enterprise. I may be in relation to sports where art critics were in relation to contemporary art in the 1970s. I may want to found like the Artforum or October for sports criticism. I’m kind of half-joking. I’m finding that as I turn to writing about sports as a scholar, my writing is becoming much more philosophical. Not dense, exactly, but abstract.

III. FEAR AND BLEEDING IN RIVERSIDE, CALIFORNIA

BLVR: I was thinking about your upcoming project on athletics and art, and the first thing that came to mind was Kevin Ware’s basketball accident, where he fractured his leg.

JD: Oh yeah, eugh!

BLVR: That’s it precisely, that dynamic of you cringing. You mention in Hold it Against Me that the violence in sports is naturalized within certain cultural contexts whereas the violence in art becomes controversial or shocking.

JD: Actually, there’s a great story behind this. I started producing sports writing totally independent of my writing about contemporary art. I was a fan, I was playing soccer, I got obsessed, I started a blog. It was a post-tenure project, I never expected that this would actually become the next book project, which of course it has.

But around that time, I collaborated on a project at UC Riverside with Ron Athey. About two months before the event, we had some difficulty with the institution –we basically got exiled from the art space in which the performance was supposed to happen. 

This was in 2009. Riverside, California, for those who don’t know, is one of the epicenters in the collapse of the housing market. There was actually a clear solution to getting kicked out of the art space. I walked around the pedestrian mall in downtown Riverside and called the numbers on the signs of the empty storefronts, of which there were many – and there still are. With shockingly little effort, we managed to rent a big storefront space just two blocks down from the gallery that we were supposed to perform in.

I had to work directly with officials in our risk management office at the University of California, Riverside, because they’re the office that signs lease agreements. I called the chief risk management officer at the university. These are masters of the dark arts of university life. These are the people that actually control our lives. 

I described the performance to him: “This is a very gay event, there will be nudity, there will be piercing and bleeding. And Ron is HIV-positive and has Hep C, as well.” And this is known, right. And then I explained the way the performance would unfold, and the protocols we would take, and how we we’re working with the space, and the precautions that we were taking, etc., etc. 

BLVR: Which piece was this?

JD: Self-Obliteration Solo. In this piece, he’s on his hands and knees. It opens with him brushing a long, blonde wig. Then he sits up on his heels, flipping the hair over and then he proceeds to take the wig off and it’s this flinch moment definitely, where you realize it’s actually pinned to his scalp.

BLVR: No, I know the piece, I’m already reacting to it.

JD: There’s another chapter to it now, where he fists himself, but he hadn’t quite gotten there yet in the development of the work. Anyway, I just described the piece to the risk management guy, and he was not an art person, at all. And I was like, so this is what’s going to happen, and I explained, he’s been controversial in the past, there have been phobic reactions to his work, etc. So he says, ok I’ll have that paperwork for you at 4:30. I was like, what, why is it that easy? And he said, “Well all I need to know is what’s happening. My job is to manage the risk and to produce the right paperwork so that the university is protected.” 

So I asked him, “How is this not a big deal?” And he said, “You’re not serving alcohol.” And then he said, “You know what I worry about, I worry about rock concerts that we have on campus, I worry about basketball games.” People get hurt at sporting events routinely, that’s the risk of playing a sport, that you might break a bone. And then he said, “People don’t get hurt at art events, even when it’s really weird.” 

This is a place where affect is really important: there’s a feeling that we are risking something, a feeling that the artist is risking something, but that’s an idea, that’s a fear, that’s a thought – it’s not an actuarial reality. The fear is the controversy; what we fear is the phobic response that becomes the headline, that becomes a story, that leads to the university maybe getting less political support. It’s important to me, ethically, in terms of the kind of the material that I work on, to be willing to take on the public responsibility of not just being a defender of that work, but actually an advocate for it– to proactively support this kind of performance. 

We had 150 people at the event – I think it’s one of the most well-attended art events that have happened in that area in terms of the kind of event that it was. There was not one complaint, not one complaint, and in fact I got a lot of very moving emails, particularly from gay men living in Riverside. Their emails went something like this: “Never in my life did I think something like that would happen in Riverside, and that it would be sponsored by the university, thank you.” Ron’s work feels like home to some of us, those emails spoke to that. That means the world to me – that someone felt recognized as a part of my university’s community, somebody who never thought that that would ever happen. Ron’s work has the capacity to do that, to actually make room for people who otherwise don’t feel that there is room for them in the world. So, yes, it is affirmative.

Joseph Henry is Assistant Editor at ARTINFO Canada and writes freelance on contemporary art. He’s published in venues such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and esse and worked at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives and works in Montreal.