Required Reading
A day in the life of Peter Hujar, Mahmoud Khalil a year after detention, the madman theory of Trump, and more.
Ever wondered what the life of an artist is really like? The film Peter Hujar's Day is a day in the life of the renowned photographer — specifically December 17, 1974. (Spoiler: he's juggling work, rent, and a social life among the eccentrics of the East Village). For Artillery Magazine, Matthew Chan takes it a level more meta: He talks to writer Linda Rosenkrantz, whose recording of Hujar recounting his day spawned her 2022 book that the film is in turn based on, about what it's like to put together a reconstruction of a reconstruction:
An aspect of the book and the film that I find intriguing is how it demystifies the day-to-day life of the artist. Because so much of what you and Peter talked about was logistical. Like: I have to meet up with this guy, I got caught up doing this. I’m interested to know how this fixation with the minutiae of the past has continued to color your work.
Well, I’m very involved with my past in various ways. I’m still working on other tapes that I made at that period. There’s sort of a throughline in my interests: in names, words, conversation, gossip in all my work. I had intended to do a book of tapes of people’s day in their life and it didn’t work out. I just did a few of them, and Peter was really the only interesting one. It’s all the minutiae of my life, and that’s kind of always been an interest of mine ....
I thought, you know, why not take a tape recorder and try taping our conversations. At the beginning it was going to be more than three people, but that didn’t work at all, you couldn’t hear if more than one person was trying to talk. It was a mess. So I zoomed in on myself and the other two, one of whom was Joseph Raffael, who introduced me to Peter. So that’s how that all began.
A year ago, plainclothes ICE agents entered a Columbia University residential building without a warrant and arrested Mahmoud Khalil. For more than 100 days, he was unlawfully incarcerated in a detention center in Louisiana for pro-Palestinian speech, missing his graduation ceremony and the birth of his son. In an exceptionally moving piece for New York Magazine, Khalil writes on life in the "fog" — the sense of fear and contingency that has plagued him even after his release. But he also writes of hope in the form of fellow civilians:
I miss my life before the fog. I miss wandering with Noor through Times Square at night, letting it swallow us, that particular New York surrender to noise and light and strangers, necks tilted toward glowing screens. I miss Washington Square Park on a weekday evening, the city’s chaos gathered in one place. I miss Sunday brunch at Community, in Morningside Heights, followed by coffee at Qahwah House, and the long walk home along Claremont Avenue — that narrow, tree-lined stretch that always felt like a pause. Back then, we didn’t think of those walks as anything. That’s the thing I can’t get back: the not-thinking ....
This is, of course, not the whole story. The fog persists, but kindness keeps it from closing in ....
A young woman at Olive Garden, after serving us, insisted on covering the bill out of her own pocket. I do not know what she earned that shift, but I know the bill was a significant portion of it. There have been baristas at coffee shops around the city, more than I can count, who have looked at me and said, “It’s on the house,” pressing extra pastries into my hands and refusing payment. I remember the Italian owner and the Lebanese chef down the street who served us a meal, and when the bill came it was a slip of paper with $0 written on it and a note: “We support you and a free Palestine.” I did not know they knew. I did not know they cared. But they did, and they found a way to tell me without turning it into a moment.
For The Meteor, Yessenia Funes writes about ICE as a reproductive health hazard:
Asha Hassan, an assistant professor of women’s health at the University of Minnesota Medical School (not to be confused with the street medic), began collecting data on reproductive health impacts in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter uprisings sprang up across the country and, with them, a police response that often involved tear gas. She had heard whispers of menstrual irregularities and miscarriages, but after looking at the available literature, she realized scientists had ignored some key population groups ....
After putting out a social media call to hear from those who had been exposed to chemical weapons like tear gas, she received more than 600 emails from all over the world in just a few weeks. In 2023, she published a paper that included more than 1,200 responses from people exposed in the U.S. between 2020 and 2021. The findings confirmed Hassan’s fears: Tear gas exposure was linked to negative reproductive health impacts for anyone of reproductive age. “Even after one exposure, we started to see some impact,” she says.
Friction — inconvenience as rebellion to the technology-driven culture of making life more and more seamless — has been in the cultural ether recently. But what kinds of friction do we speak of, and to whom does it apply? In Dazed, Laura Pitcher writes on the uneven distribution of friction across class:
By speaking about convenience culture as a choice everyone can opt in and out of, we forget that millions of Americans would love to spend time making muffins from scratch, but are too bogged down by friction to look to it as a source of personal fulfilment. Psychologist Mic Moshel, who goes by The Cyber Psychologist online, refers to the type of friction people want to reduce (being overworked, money troubles, health issues and more) as “exhausting friction” and the more beneficial types as “productive friction”. Some people’s lives are “frictionless” precisely because they are outsourcing the more exhausting friction to low-wage workers.
“The friction is not being eliminated, it’s being passed down the line. For the person who does physically or mentally exhausting work, scrolling or a mobile game can act as a pressure valve,” says Moshel. “The product is engineered precisely for that moment, but because the brain is in this compromised state, it’s now harder to disengage.” It’s a feedback loop where exhausting friction drives people towards frictionless tech as a relief, only for it to further deplete their cognitive capacity. As Moshel puts it: “The tech is filling that recovery window, without providing actual recovery.”
For the New York Review of Books, Finton O'Toole writes on the madman theory in foreign policy, where a leader intentionally acts irrationally to stoke fear in political opponents, in relation to President Trump:
... these two realities—that Trump is playing out his own version of the Madman Theory and that his act has long worn thin—seem to point toward the same apparent conclusion. The first appeals to his fans, the second to his detractors. But both suggest that there is only the show. Some think it’s a great show, some think it’s terrible. Yet the truth is that Trump is always acting in both senses. There is no border between pretense and practice, shadow and substance.
Shakespeare gives us more than Lear or Hamlet, real or feigned mental derangement. There is a third possibility. Titus Andronicus begins by pretending to be mad and then becomes so in reality. To translate this into the history of the American presidency, we need only return to Nixon. Just because you’ve invented and acted on the Madman Theory doesn’t mean you can’t go mad: Nixon’s paranoia, enemies lists, conspiracy theories, and seemingly drunken order to nuke North Korea do not speak of robust mental health. The Madman Theory, it seems, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You simply must take a look at Leigh Davies's interactive musical cardboard town:
@leighdaviesstudio Replying to @Jukebox2307 Over 30 Million of you saw! Many of you asked. So HERE’s what The Playce does! #ThePlayce #InteractiveMusic #ArtsWales ♬ original sound - Leigh Davies
Everybody, meet Romelo at the Norton Museum of Art, who'll tell you why he loves Charles Marion Russell's "In the Wake of the Hunters" (1896):
@nortonmuseumofart Norton Favorites: Romelo and "In the Wake of the Hunters" ❤️ Hear from one of our security officers about how Charles Marion Russell's "In the Wake of the Hunters" is one of his favorite works of art at the Museum. He tells us that he knew this was a great work of art because it made him feel something upon first seeing it. See this work on view during your next visit to the Museum, and follow along with us for more Norton Favorites! Featured artwork: Charles Marion Russell (American, 1864 – 1926), "In the Wake of the Hunters," 1896, Oil on canvas, 23 1/4 x 35 in. (59.1 x 88.9 cm), Gift of Elsie and Marvin Dekelboum, 2005.51
♬ original sound - The Norton
They say that history repeats ...
An installation artist in the making:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
