When Garner joined Johnny Carson on TV in 1982, she wore her famous “half suit,” cropped to reveal a muscular abdomen. On the broadcast, Carson calls her an “inventor,” and she presents herself as a businessman appearing on TV to show off new gadgets. In reference to the suit, Garner explains that the “abbreviated” style popular in women’s fashion ought to be adapted for businessmen too, since all its formality comes from the collar, tie, and lapel anyway. It’s an example of the deadpan logic that underpins Garner’s creations—logic that is as absurdist as it is indisputable.

Garner often gets labeled a “performance artist” because her personality seeps so fully into her work, and because she doesn’t bother with distinctions as to where her body ends and her art begins. She began transitioning in the 1980s, buying estrogen on the black market; she once described the endeavor as an “art project to create disorientation in my position in society, and sort of balk any possibility of ever falling into a stereotype again.” As a bona fide trans elder, her creative output has found an audience among young people today. Last year, her survey “Act Like You Know Me,” organized by Kunstverein München, traveled around Europe, and this summer, Primary Information published a facsimile edition of her Better Living Catalog (1982), which advertises provocative inventions like high-heeled roller skates and a virtual pet that predates the Tamagotchi. Garner’s current solo exhibition, at Art Omi in upstate Ghent, New York, through October 29, is accompanied by a new book surveying her practice, copublished with Pioneer Works. Below, the trailblazing artist discusses refashioning her works for a new era as the world catches up with her.

Tell us about your legendary tattoos.

My underwear? Well, I got a bra and thong tattooed because it just seemed logical. I figured, even if I gain 300 pounds, it will still fit. Also, I never have to wash it. The only problem is that I’m no longer allowed to go to nudist colonies!

I also got wood grain tattooed on my leg after I was hit by a car while cycling. They put me back together after three months, but my left leg didn’t match my right leg anymore. So I thought it was an opportunity to have some trompe l’oeil installed.

Rumor has it that Art Omi has plans to tattoo some of your drawings onto visitors to your show.

Yes, I might get some tattooed on myself. That way, I could be a walking portfolio.

You have characterized your transition as an artwork. How so?

Yeah, and it fascinates me that, these days, you can enhance the body to your own tastes, using silicone. Bodies like silicone; they don’t reject it. If you want to emphasize your cheekbones, just squirt some in! It’s like makeup. Fifty years ago, nobody would have thought of that.

I often wonder, What if all the politicians were transgender? Maybe we could blend the best of male and female and avoid some of the negatives. For instance, men have 10 times the testosterone that women have, and that makes them more aggressive. If all the politicians were transgender, maybe we could have a balance.

Sometimes you’ve called yourself an “inventor.”

At one of the three art schools I got kicked out of, I majored in industrial design, thinking maybe I’d become a car designer or something. I do have a US patent on a push scooter I designed. I rode the Santa Fe Century [a 106-mile cycling route in New Mexico] with that scooter.

Why did you get kicked out of art school?

Everyone took design so seriously. People were designing taillights as if it were the end of the world. I started making fun of it all. I made this thing that was half-car, half-man. The front part was a typical ’50s-looking car, and then it became this male figure—quite realistically sculpted—lifting his leg on a map of Detroit. That was it for them. They were getting a lot of money from the car industry and didn’t want to see that sort of thing.

I went to work for a toy design company for a while and started documenting LA, which at the time felt like an overgrown small town. People who were feeling restless moved west after the war. What do you do for freedom? You come to California! A lot of really goofy people did weird things to their cars and their houses. I noticed all this while driving around and kept thinking, Gee, I wish I could stop and take a picture. So I got rid of my car, and got a camera and a bicycle. That way, I could pull over and document postwar LA when it was still funky and whimsical.

How does that relate to your work Backwards Car?

I made the original Backwards Car in 1974. Cadillacs around then had these big tail fins, to make them look like they’re moving even when they were standing still. One day, it struck me: what would it be like if this thing was going backwards? Then I thought, That would take a phenomenal fabricator and all kinds of facilities that I had no access to.

But I just couldn’t sleep at night until the world had a backwards car. I settled on a ’59 Chevrolet, because they had flat tail fins. You wouldn’t be able to see over a Cadillac tail fin while driving backwards; it would block your vision. The Chevy was still very directional, but flatter. The whole car was teardrop-shaped.

I made sketches and sent them around. Finally, Esquire magazine said they wanted me to do it. They assigned a photographer and paid me a fee up front. I found a car and rented a space in a parking garage in San Francisco. I got everything unfastened; the body was no longer attached to the frame. By this point, it was just a matter of lifting it up and turning it around. I had a big party and invited all my friends. We ate and drank and, after a while, I said: “OK, everybody get around the car, shoulder to shoulder. On my command, I want you to lift.” And we did it! I didn’t know it would be possible.

By then, it was a matter of reconnecting all the controls and reattaching the body. I got that done, then got behind the wheel and started driving around San Francisco. Only some people noticed. I’d glimpse somebody on the sidewalk saying, “Look at that!” I went across the Golden Gate Bridge a few times and got some nice pictures for the magazine, with the car going 60 miles an hour looking like it’s about to have the most horrendous head-on collision you can imagine.

When it was over, I had the car shredded. I wanted it to exist as a ghost, something people either saw or thought they saw. Also, I didn’t want to kill anybody with it.

What has it been like reconstituting the car 50 years later?

I always thought that was the end of that, until the curator at Art Omi called me and said, “We want to do Backwards Car again. We have a fabricator and a budget.” I said, “You can’t possibly do it now with all the restrictions.” The rules were more lax back then: all I needed was a windshield wiper on the back window and to flip the headlights and taillights. Also, modern cars look the same on both ends. The only way you can tell cars apart now is by looking at the logo.

Then it struck me to use a pickup truck and put the bed around the engine. I made a few other suggestions to emphasize the directionality: giant truck nuts, and a couple of bumper stickers. One says women should be free (no charge). I’ll be interested to see how people react now that we’re moving into a revolutionary period of autonomous cars and electric cars and all that.

You also worked on a car assembly line.

I worked on the Chrysler gear and axle plant assembly line in Detroit for about six months. It was good money at the time, maybe $3.50 an hour, back in the ’60s. Maybe Backwards Car is a spoof on mass production—like, what if the assembly line backfired?

While working in Detroit, I got a notice that said: go back to school, or we’re drafting you. So I enrolled in the Art Center College of Design in LA, and lasted a semester or two, then got drafted anyway. I ended up spending 13 months in Southeast Asia as a combat artist. Nobody believes that job exists, but I was making sketches and photographs, and writing. The leaders referenced those materials when deciding what to do next.

Does the car symbolize something to you?

Back then, cars symbolized freedom, and all boys were interested in cars. Now, they don’t symbolize freedom so much as just transportation. In fact, they’ve started to behave as if in an army. When you see traffic on the freeway, it’s all lined up as if there was a sergeant telling them “Forward march!”

People are ready for something else. Autonomous cars will be weird, and then we will take them for granted. Maybe traffic lights will wind up as junk in thrift shops. Let’s see what happens with the Information Age as it moves forward. It may turn around and go the other way. We might wind up back in primitive times. Who knows?

On that note, you made a car without a motor and labeled it “the most fuel-efficient car in the world.”

I removed the machinery from a small ’70s Honda and made a pedal-powered car. I drove it around Burning Man. Now it’s in the Audrain Auto Museum in Rhode Island. I’m fascinated by human power. Of all mammals, humans have pretty limited strength. My Persian cat has the leg strength to jump the equivalent of me jumping into a second-story window! But lately, human power is being overlooked because of these electric vehicles. Everybody wants to put a motor on something.

What’s next for you?

I’m very spontaneous. I never really know what’s next. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with something poking me. It’s like there are two versions of me: when one starts to get comfortable, the antagonist comes in and stirs things up. I love that—it’s good to be separated. It’s like when I look in the mirror and think, My body is just an appliance. It’s mine to play with, so I’m going to have some fun with it.

I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia, ostensibly from my exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. It’s affecting my vision; it’s given me pneumonia. I’ve been a big gym rat for the past 50 years—I feel responsible for keeping this thing [points to body] in the best shape I can. We don’t live forever.

I want to make an animated video that’s set in the wilderness. You’d hear this rustling that turns into a rumble until suddenly, streaks of materials come out of the ground—windows, steel, and fuel would flow up and form a car. This beautiful, shiny new car would sit there for about 15 seconds. Then, it would start to tremble. You’d hear the same roar, and it would all just get sucked right back into the earth.

I think of myself as a shorter-lived version of that. A car, if you don’t grind it up, can last a couple hundred years in some form or another. Humans don’t even come close. I’m going to be 81, and with my issues, I’m lucky to have gotten this far.  

Sometimes, property owners add devices that look like medieval contraptions to them. I exhibit these spikes as sculptures, and usually place them at roughly the same level as the standpipe they were originally installed on. Each work in the series takes a different form according to the aesthetic decisions of the developer who commissioned it or the fabricator who made it. The sculptures make the removal visible, since they’re not meant to be noticed. But the work is also about the growing series of absences across the city, and the increased possibilities for loitering.

That means I make most of my works by walking around in the streets, then use my studio as a space to store objects or try out installations. I’m invested in highlighting the ways that forces like real estate development, or the ongoing privatization of the city, continuously encroach on different aspects of daily life. I try to find moments where those forces become visible.

I’m looking for objects that are physical forms of policing. Another example is planters that are strategically placed to prevent access to areas where there might be shelter or a covering, such as under awnings. Often, they’re not even filled with plants but, instead, bricks or cement, making them too heavy to move. I’ve been removing some of these structures and reconstituting them as actual planters, growing things inside them. For a 2022 show at Artists Space in New York called “Everything is Common,” I placed three of these planters in the windowsills and grew parsnips and carrots in them. Those reference this group of 17th-century radical Christians in England known as the Diggers. The Diggers would grow edible crops on other people’s property, since they believed that everything is communal under their god. —As told to Emily Watlington

Video Credits include:

Director/Editor/Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

Additional Footage by Tomas Abad, Karla Coté/NurPhoto, and Mastershot via Getty

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.

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My current body of work deals with involuntary migration and materiality. A lot of my work is autobiographical. I was born in Bosnia, and came to the United States as a war refugee in the ’90s. The Balkan region has always been a place of war and empire changes. It’s never really had a stable identity, but it still feels like home.

My dad’s side of the family migrated from Turkey to Bosnia through multiple empire changes, and every time they moved from place to place, they were kicked out, usually for religious reasons. It made me think about the material baggage and the historical baggage that we carry.

I make sculptures out of objects I collect from the streets. Hauling materials in the city has always been a challenge. How do you carry lumber on the subways? I just walk around the neighborhood and find things spontaneously: maybe stacks of egg cartons, or some little yellow plastic thing that clearly belonged to someone. I find myself wondering where these things came from, what their history is.

I definitely have a weird obsession with objects. Lately I’ve been embedding them in vessels: you’ll see all kinds of materials, salt and pepper, glass, hair. I like to imagine people digging them up 1,000 years from now.

I’ve also been emulating objects of antiquity, specifically rugs and pottery. On relic (35.3658650, -10.1964504), 2021–22, I collaged a vinyl picture of Poseidon that I procured from the New Museum, where I work as an art handler. They were just going to throw it away, but I thought it was so beautiful!

I started making rugs after playing around with pouring paint on the ground, then peeling it off. I’ve used these kinds of paint skins in performances and nailed them to walls, but over time, they start to crack. So I started adding cloth to stabilize them, and they sort of turned into tapestries and rugs. Sometimes I draw inspiration from Slavic folk patterns.

When pouring paint, you don’t necessarily have control. It feels sensual and cathartic. Maybe, when I peel it off, I’ll decide the back should be the front. Then I’ll start incorporating the fiber and embedding garbage, and eventually ask, How do I make this less chaotic? Sometimes I start with a sketch, but my process is intuitive. It’s all about trial and error, and finding solutions.

The works are both heavy and humorous: I’m thinking about things like war, but also, how do I soothe myself? How do I create a future? For me, the point of making art is to fuel my endless curiosity and to get excited about the little things.

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.

Art in America takes you behind the scenes of those working in the art world as part of our “Hands On” column. For this iteration, A.i.A. associate digital editor Francesca Aton and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited the conservation studio at Modern Art Conservation to catch up with paintings conservator Joanna Neville about her latest projects. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, Neville talks about conserving paintings by Géricault and Warhol, as well as a new database aimed at preserving works by African American artists.

I am near the end of a treatment of a painting by Théodore Géricault, which is an oil study for his famous painting the Raft of the Medusa [1818–19], held at the Louvre in Paris. The study that I’m working on is owned by the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. When this painting came to us, it had a number of condition issues, such as large tears through the canvas, a very old and discolored varnish layer, and various campaigns of retouching that were not well-matched to Géricault’s paint either in color or tone. The treatment involved stabilizing the paint that was flaking and fixing the tears, as well as removing discolored varnish and old retouches. Then I did an aesthetic reintegration of the object by reconstructing the lost or damaged areas with reference to the final painting in Paris. The goal is to refocus the attention on Géricault’s work so that it can be viewed as a whole.

One of the challenges of repairing the Géricault study was putting myself in the shoes of the artist. I prepared by doing a lot of art historical research into the artist’s techniques and his materials. I had to do a lot of research into his pigments and consult a number of other oil studies and drawings that he did for the painting. Luckily, there was a huge amount of documentary evidence that I could consult. I also did a number of sketches and mock-ups myself. There were many publications that I could consult about how he used his materials in terms of the layering and pigment. I put all of that together before I started retouching in order to give the best opportunity to imitate his style. All of the paints that were used for the retouching, however, are conservation-grade reversible paints that can be removed in decades time should somebody need to alter them.

At Modern Art Conservation, we are fortunate to have an archive of Andy Warhol’s original materials given to us by the Andy Warhol Foundation. We have on hand a collection of samples and excess from rolls that he painted out on canvas and didn’t use. We have parts of rolls for many different colored paints that he has used, and we’ve compiled them into binders with paint-outs of his paints. The pieces have aged just as his paintings have, which makes these fragments incredibly useful for testing, color matching, and taking impressions of the weave. There are a lot of Andy Warhol paintings that come through the studio, so it’s been an invaluable resource for us.

In addition to this work, I started making a database of conservation treatments that have been done on paintings by African American artists. It includes information on materials and techniques, as well as commonly encountered condition issues and past treatments. The project is still in the early stages, but I hope to formalize these efforts and share this knowledge with others in the field. Many of these artworks have been historically underappreciated, but are now being more widely collected and exhibited, particularly as major institutions work towards diversifying their collections. This project could help with the future care of these works.

Video credits include:

Director and Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Francesca Aton
Footage of the Louvre, Paris via Getty

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, Justin Chance talks about fascination with materials and carving space for curiosity.

My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

Recently I was Duolingo-ing Norwegian, and decided to make a Norwegian-language web drama called Svak. I wanted to write a script in Norwegian to explore the materiality of weakness; I’m weak in that language. The project was about carving space for curiosity without utility, learning just for the sake of it.  

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The 15th Sharjah Biennial Does Better At Excavating The Past Than Pushing The Present

The Painter of Modern Life: Kerry James Marshall Aims to Get More Images of Black Figures into Museums

When Marshall graced the cover of Artforum in 2017, inside, artist Carroll Dunham called him “one of the most consequential painters among us.” Around then, his goal was to make seeing Black figures in museums no longer exceptional. By and large, his plan worked: around the 2010s, as critic Julian Lucas put it in the New Yorker, matters related to the representation of Blackness became “a national conversation,” led by artists like Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Charles White. Now, the conversation is shifting beyond representation, and as ever, Marshall is two steps ahead. His new commission for this spring’s Sharjah Biennial is not a painting at all. Instead, the artist created an installation resembling an excavation site that engages histories and fantasies of slave trade and colonialism in the Arab world.

It’s rare—and risky—for an artist to depart so dramatically from an approach that’s brought considerable critical and commercial success. But Marshall’s departure is less surprising when you look closely at what he’s doing: his paintings have always incorporated critiques of painting, and even as figures dominate his canvases, they’re also emphatically elusive and opaque. A.i.A. spoke to Marshall about his big pivot.

Why did you decide not to include a press release or any text for “Exquisite Corpse: This Is Not the Game?”

I didn’t want to give anybody a crutch for figuring out the show. I wanted them to really look. It’s become common for people to lean too hard on the press release to try and figure out what the artist is saying. I wanted to break that chain of behavior. I put a lot of energy into doing the work, and it’s not that opaque. The title is a clue to let you know that it’s not random choices being made.

What are some of those choices?

Each exquisite corpse has four segments, and each segment has a different version of my signature. They all represent me at different stages of my development. There are Black figures that look a lot like the images I do all the time, but there’s also some cross-hatching—I don’t use that technique much now, but I used to.

With each piece, I started with a head, then created a body. Together, those segments constitute relationships and meanings. I’ve described myself as a history painter, and that’s relevant here too. I’m looking at history and trying to draw out connections that people don’t automatically make.

What’s an example?

In Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Iceberg), 2022, there’s a man’s head at the top, connected to an iceberg. The iceberg becomes a pair of pants, and his feet are in sneakers on a basketball court. The portrait is of a man named Tippu Tip. He was one of the wealthiest African slave traders. He’s from Zanzibar; some people also describe him as Arab. There are viewers who might recognize him.

All kinds of people have profited from imperialist, colonialist, and commercial transactions, and all the exquisite corpses speak to those complicated histories. Today, you have the NBA and all those basketball players flying around and slam-dunking—this is happening in the wake of that history. History isn’t always tragic, but it is always complicated. My paintings tackle history in its most complex form. Nobody is getting off the hook.

Still, I really tried to avoid making any parts look grotesque, as the Surrealists often did. You can demonstrate how much you care about the representation of Black people by not treating Black people like silly putty that you can make into any kind of form you want. If “exquisite” means anything, it means do the thing well, make it elegant. I will not make monsters; that’s just too easy.

Doing the thing well has always been essential to your work, but at first glance, some of these paintings might look less finished. Have you experienced pressure to keep making art in your signature style?

Yes. Artists are professionals. There’s nobody who goes to art school who doesn’t mean to come out of there and be a professional. No matter what they say, all the things we do are aimed at a certain kind of mission. Part of that mission is to achieve recognition, and to establish the kind of singularity that sets your work apart from everybody else’s—and, in doing that, to try and produce something that might be meaningful. Some artists might call that a careerist position. But I think the moment you sign up to go to art school, you sign up for a profession.

Your project for the latest Sharjah Biennial, Untitled: Excavation, was certainly not recognizably Kerry James Marshall.

But it is consistent with the way I think about everything. The Sharjah Art Foundation asked me if I’d make a permanent installation. The title of the biennial is “Thinking Historically in the Present,” which is what I do. I developed a proposal for land they acquired in Al Hamriyah. In that square, the Foundation is building a café and doing some landscaping, expanding their footprint. I thought I’d do something to interrupt that development.

What disrupts development in that region? Hitting an archaeological site! Suddenly, you have to pause and figure out how to build around it. So I decided to create an excavation site. First I asked if there were an archaeological site in that particular place in Sharjah, what would it be? I had never been to the Middle East, but I did know 1001 Arabian Nights, that set of fairy tales from the Middle Ages based in the Islamic world. I wanted to confront how history is part fact, part fiction, and part fairytale, because people tell stories that sound nice and exciting to them.

The biennial also dealt with the impact of colonialism. Well, the Arab world participated in colonialism too. Egypt was a colonial empire, and today, people speak Arabic in a whole lot of places where Arabic didn’t originate. Egypt has been occupied by the Sudanese, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs—like an exquisite corpse, broken up into four parts. The installation includes a mosaic with four segments. The top segment says “head” in hieroglyphics; then “torso” in Arabic; “pelvis” in Roman; and “feet” in Greek. That mosaic is in an empty pool, part of the small villa I created.

What else is in the villa?

It has three rooms and a small courtyard. You view it from a footbridge that hovers above the site. It’s all connected to the 1001 Nights tales, and to the Arab slave trade out of Africa. Maybe the villa belonged to a merchant. In all the 1001 Nights tales, there are genies, or jinni, as they’re called in the Quran—mischievous or evil spirits. In fairytales, you rub a lamp, and the genie comes out, then gives you three wishes; they’re servants. In the 1001 Nights, they are always Black.

I read an early translation by Richard Burton. In that version, the whole narrative starts when two sultans discover that their wives have been cheating on them with a Black man. Then they decide women can’t be trusted. You marry them one night and kill them the next morning!

It sounds like for you, combining exquisite corpses with history painting is a way to get at the idea of history as a combination of fact, fiction, and fairy tales.

Exactly. I want to undermine that tendency to project a certain kind of image of who we are into the world, and to interrogate our relationship to the struggle, and to the history of slavery. None of it is as simple as it seems.

You were making figurative paintings before the big boom, and now, you’re onto something new.

I’ve always gone against the grain. In 1966 Ad Reinhardt declared he was “making the last painting which anyone can make,” referring to his monochromatic black abstractions. Well, that was just a few years after I was born.

You told an interviewer that when you were applying to school, someone said your portfolio was too varied, that they wanted to see more consistency.

That comment has haunted me for most of my career. I make works because I want to see what they look like. I make works because I want to understand how images operate, so that I can best use those operations to do the kinds of things that I think need to be done. I’m not limited to doing one thing, because one thing never covers all the bases. When Jackson Pollock hit the end of the road—when he couldn’t see himself doing any more of those drip paintings—he crashed his car. Mark Rothko, too [he took his own life]. You can only make ephemeral rectangles for so long.

Some younger artists have expressed skepticism toward the rise of figuration. It’s less a critique of a work itself, more an uneasiness toward the tokenism institutions bring to it. They’re also wary of the way representation gets conflated with material change. Such criticism is only possible because of the work that artists of your generation have done: now, it’s no longer so exceptional to see Black figures in museums. But do you share any of that skepticism?

You can’t be all that worried about what other people might do with things that you produce and also reap the benefits of making them. It’s all about finding a formal solution to whatever problem of representation you’re trying to address. The market forces people to look for a gimmick, but those things won’t last long. Novelty is not that interesting, but for a moment.

The best way to sum it up comes from the avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor. An interviewer asked him about how he felt watching younger artists, who seemed to be capitalizing on his innovations more than he’d been able to. The interviewer asked if he was bitter. He said [paraphrasing], “Bitter?! I am not bitter; nobody asked me to do this.”

For me, I’m just doing what I think needs to be done. I do the pictures I want to. I always have. If they have an impact on people, that’s fine. 

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, sculptor Catherine Telford Keogh explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington