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Andrienne Edwards
in conversation with Zora Simpson Casebere
“For me, this is the power of Ailey: that a dance exhibition would also have to be an exhibition about cultural history.”
Glenn Ligon
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I use painting, but I’m not a painter.”
Collier Schorr
in conversation with Drew Sawyer
“I’ve always seen photography as the route to being in trouble. When people aren’t mad at me, I’m surprised.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
with Dawn Chan, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Irene Hsu, Juwon Jun, Eunsong Kim, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Rachel Valinsky, and Soyoung Yoon
“Her legacy isn’t lost, but continuously with us in various shapes and forms.”
William Kentridge
in conversation with Nolan Kelly
“At a certain point I couldn’t bear the work ‘on behalf of’—the condition of thinking for some other person.”
Claire Saffitz
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“I don’t think that it’s impossible to live a full life without cooking, but if you want to eat well, you have to cook.”
Kyle Chayka
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“We realized that living your life on the internet kind of sucks.”
Jonathan Crary
in conversation with Keegan Brady
“The humanities are in the process of either elimination or repackaging into revenue-generating digital enterprises.”
Jefferson Hack
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I think the future’s invented more by mistakes than it is by design.”
Mickey Down and Konrad Kay
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“If this doesn’t work, then we’re going to have to fucking find other jobs.”
Garrett Bradley
in conversation with Zora Simpson Casebere
“I’m most interested in making form work harder and in service of subject matter.”
Mary Gaitskill
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I didn’t know how to be socially, but I understood sex.”
Volume 10: On Narrative
By Johanna Zwirner
“There is no more mysterious force than the act of storytelling.”
Doreen St. Felix
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I love the idea of following one mind as it bobs and weaves around.”
Vivian Gornick
in conversation with Sophie Poole
“I am one of those feminists who concentrates on what we did accomplish rather than what we didn’t.”
Brandon Taylor
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“People betray themselves and others all the time.”
Olivia Laing
in conversation with Keegan Brady
“Critique is a tool for understanding, but it’s not the end of the process.”
Diamanda Galás
in conversation with Adam Putnam
“Performance often involves finding new information in the process of creating.”
Marc Newson
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“In the world of design, it’s not only beneficial to be a generalist, but necessary.”
Oneohtrix Point Never
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I didn’t know what the rules were, but then I learned that there weren’t any.”
Marcel Kurpershoek
in conversation with Sajdah Nasir
“Borders are just a nuisance and an obstacle, but now we have to live with them.”
Yxta Maya Murray
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“Museums and galleries kind of train people in passivity.”
Caroline Polachek
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“You need to have a solid structure to doodle around.”
Volume 9: On AIDS
By Ryan Mangione
“What does it mean to understand oneself within a specific juncture of AIDS history?”
AIDS Inc.
with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Ron Athey, John Greyson, Avram Finkelstein, and Ryan Mangione
“Nothing makes a community like a fucking disaster.”
Douglas Crimp
with Gregg Bordowitz, Rosalyn Deutsche, Juan Antonio Suárez, Rachel Haidu, Jonathan Flatley, Jules Gill-Peterson, Morgan Bassichis, Marc Siegel, and Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Douglas’ insistence on emerging politically out of the confinement of being labeled a problem remains life-giving.”
Alper Turan
in conversation with Tannon Reckling
“Withholding is not about opacity or refusal, it is about participating on one’s own terms.”
Fierce Pussy
in conversation with Adrianne Ramsey
“We have a sense of solidarity, not only across any social, political, or cultural differences, but across time.”
Robert Glück
in conversation with Dylan Huw
“Most of my books are, at heart, me banging my head against a brick wall.”
Brontez Purnell
in conversation with Joseph Akel
“For the men who died before us, we are definitely the generation that they were praying for.”
Jeff Koons
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“The way you walk out of Plato’s cave is through the removal of judgment and the practice of acceptance.”
Hua Hsu
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I think that there’s actually a dumb optimism in a lot of what I do.”
B.J. Novak
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I’ve never been interested in being consumed by the joke.”
Cynthia Carr
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“I couldn’t help but notice that other critics weren’t at the Pyramid Club or 8BC at 2 in the morning.”
Lynne Tillman
in conversation with Sophie Poole
“I’ve never felt quite like a woman because I disobeyed.”
Marcel Dzama
in conversation with Joseph Gordon and Johanna Zwirner
“Punk is that freedom to do it yourself, even if it’s sloppy and messy.”
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler
in conversation with Ricky Ruihong Li
“Sound allows us to both contract and expand the frame.”
Michael Govan
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Everyone told me not to move to Los Angeles because there was no money for art.”
Volume 8: On Semiotext(e)
By Keegan Brady
“It remains difficult to imagine an American avant-garde outside the publisher’s influential network.”
Bernadette Corporation
with Jim Fletcher, John Kelsey, and Bernadette Van-Huy in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“A corporation is a way to disappear, to have impunity. It’s a legitimate kind of thuggery.”
Harmony Holiday
in conversation with Amira Olingou
“Play is a form of thinking.”
Jim Fleming
in conversation with Taylor Lewandowski
“I’ve been erased from the official history of Semiotext(e).”
Chris Kraus
in conversation with Keegan Brady
“I’ve never been able to fully commit to the art world.”
David Marchese
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I would get bored only talking to celebrities for the rest of my life.”
Celeste Yim
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Comedy is just as much timing and sound as it is space and distance.”
Susan Buck-Morss
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“I’m not at all a left-wing melancholic.”
Martin Beck
in conversation with Ricky Ruihong Li
“What would ecological ethics be within artistic production?”
Lorrie Moore
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“Novelists are always living in an alternative universe. One walks back and forth through a gossamer curtain.”
Rizvana Bradley
in conversation with Jennifer Krasinski
“I want to refuse modes of interpretation that are ultimately aimed at putting the art object to work.”
Nora Turato
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I’ve realized that my work is about claiming monumentality through something more temporal.”
Lionel Boyce
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Season one of The Bear was a punk song. It was like a punch in the mouth. Season two is an album.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
in conversation with Zora Simpson Casebere
“Math calms me in a way nothing else does—by not calculating, I realized I’d starved my brain of oxygen.”
Bret Easton Ellis
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I do not know why Less Than Zero has stuck around. It actually has outstayed its welcome.”
Suneil Sanzgiri
in conversation with Drew Sawyer
“That’s the driving force in my work: what if this world didn’t have to be the world?”
Michael Imperioli
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“All I had at that time was a headshot and a resume full of lies.”
Ishmael Houston-Jones
in conversation with Christine Pichini
“I’m perhaps most of all interested in a sense of disorientation, and of not knowing.”
Rachel Tashjian
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Style, to me, means there’s something happening on the exterior that suggests an interesting interior.”
Devonté Hynes
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I don’t think I’ve ever had ambition, but I’ve had drive.”
Sara Marcus
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“I don’t come to this book as a parent; I come to this book as a descendant.”
Gus Van Sant
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I like stories about people who are secretly intelligent.”
Sasha Frere-Jones
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“When you’re working in a journalistic framework, you’re going to be making the donuts and you may like the donuts but you did not design the donuts.”
Christopher D’Arcangelo
with Mitchell Algus, Keller Easterling, Ciarán Finlayson, Bruce Hainley, Ghislaine Leung, and Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“The body generates administration. And then there’s the administration of the body.”
Jackie Wang
in conversation with Cyrus Dunham
“I do wonder whether it is such a good idea to make trauma the center of political demands.”
Ben Lerner
in conversation with Zoë Hitzig
“Like a worm or octopus, a novel can have more than one heart.”
Samuel R. Delany
in conversation with Keegan Brady
“Goethe remarked, back in the 18th century, that a man of 50 knows no more than a man of 20; they just know different things.”
Volume 6: On Process
by Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“We are believers in practice.”
Sigrid Nunez
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“You have to learn not to worry about what people are going to think of you personally.”
Savanah Leaf
in conversation with Zora Simpson Casebere
“We can’t walk in anyone else’s shoes. Maybe the goal—not just of art, but also of being here—is to walk beside one another.”
Julia Bryan-Wilson
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“Lineages that focus only on proper-named artists are not only Eurocentric and masculinist but plain boring.”
Lisa Yuskavage
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa and Johanna Zwirner
“An individual painting, it ends on kind of a period. Whereas a body of work ends with a question.”
Volume 5: On Writing
by Ryan Mangione
“What fantasy of salvation is left over for the writer?”
Stephanie LaCava
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“The most generative thing you can do as a writer is to go out and see other people’s work.”
Alison Roman
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“It was a lot easier to be yourself before the Internet, before you were constantly being shown what the other possibilities were.”
Lee Edelman
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“For me, the life of theory has been shaped by the experience of untimely loss.”
Bob Colacello
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“That was the cleverness of Andy’s business structure: you could be the editor of Interview if you could figure out how to pay for it.”
Matthew Williams
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“Something lived-in and repaired in a beautiful way is itself beautiful.”
Ottessa Moshfegh
in conversation with Dawn Chan and Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Why should I be reading something that isn’t going to change or influence me to have a new feeling?”
Hal Foster
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Critical theory, not art or architecture, was the avant-garde of that time.”
Theodore (ted) Kerr
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“Activism can be, and often has been, about bringing dignity to life and death.”
After the Revolution
by Michael Shorris
“The new tools ended up in the same old hands.”
Ann Hamilton
in conversation with Nolan Kelly
“I think the hardest thing as an artist is to find form for your questions.”
Institutional Critique
with Gregg Bordowitz, Tom Burr, Aria Dean, Andrea Fraser, James Meyer, Nicholas C. Morgan, Christian Philipp Müller, and Blake Oetting
“Where’s the anti-aesthetic? The critique of practice is gone.”
Flue-ed Times
Correspondence with Bruce Hainley, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Sherrie Levine, and November
“These terms—‘What do we own?’; ‘What is the same?’—were among the modes of address floating around at the time and seemed to fit.”
Volume 4: On Postmodernism
by Aria Dean
“There is now a postmodernism cobbled together from these antecedents that hangs over contemporary culture.”
Senga Nengudi
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“I’m not interested in just looking but in having an experience and then expanding from there.”
Denise Ferreira da Silva
in conversation with Stefanie Hessler
“The ability to self-represent is crucial; it is the first condition of possibility for any kind of representation.”
Malcolm Harris
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“The futurist California never happened—it was never tried.”
Sylvia Plimack Mangold
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“I’ve never been someone who could be influenced very easily.”
Emma Cline
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“I’m always cognizant of life being the most interesting thing, and writing coming out of that.”
Hedi El Kholti
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“I’ve only lived my gay sex life in English.”
Yve-Alain Bois
in conversation with Valerie Mindlin
“Painting can only live if it wants to die.”
Hua Hsu
in conversation with Arthur Ou
“What does it mean to problematize your own memory or your own sense of self?”
Thelma Golden
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I had the most boring job of all of my friends who were working in the early days of Hip-hop.”
Adrienne Edwards
in conversation with Aria Dean, Emmanuel Olunkwa, and Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“My body, your body, was already implicated in the zero degree of painting from day one.”
Stuart Comer
in conversation with Aria Dean
“I have always wanted to fight cultural amnesia, and I don’t know how we do that without museums.”
Keller Easterling
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa and Ricky Ruihong Li
“I’m writing to anyone with a political imagination.”
Laurie Simmons
in conversation with Drew Sawyer
“There is this moment when you have to reject everything in order to push yourself forward.”
Lucy Sante
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa and Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“I like a kind of writing that’s irreducible—just itself and nothing else.”
Volume 3: Conversations at Karma
by November Eds.
“How do we labor to bring ourselves into the present?”
Hilton Als
in conversation with Johanna Zwirner
“I think we need to de-frame art and let it be free.”
Hélène Cixous
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“I spent my youth in a world of women who were, and who insisted to be, witnesses to the fate of women.”
Jussi Parikka
in conversation with Ricky Ruihong Li and Isabelle A. Tan
“What matters is not only the writing of time as history but the writing processes of technologies.”
Lucy Sante
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa and Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“All my life I’d been having arguments with myself that I couldn’t properly solve within the jurisdiction of myself.”
Christoph Cox
in conversation with Valerie Mindlin
“I’m interested in all the forces that liberate and constrict sound.”
McKenzie Wark
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“Trans women have never had an ongoing, well-documented, accessible, aesthetically varied, interracial culture.”
Dan Graham
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“My work is about staging and confronting our reality with fiction.”
Tom Burr
in conversation with Blake Oetting
“I like to be both inside and outside.”
Susan Schuppli
in conversation with Ricky Ruihong Li
“The ecological is a sensibility.”
Where the Skin Ends
by Quang Truong
“It’s too easy to be curious, but not optimistic; or optimistic, but not curious.”
The Environmental Self
by Alexandra Tell
“Torture and therapy here are not antipodal.”
Our Most Haunted Place
by Dawn Chan
“Simulation faced the same unceremonious end as its referent.”
Volume 2: On Architecture
by Emmanuel Olunkwa
“We are forever circling the drain.”
K Allado-McDowell
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“There’s something freeing about not owning every word.”
Abortions Will Not Let You Forget
by Aliza Shvarts
“At this edge of legibility, we can find new language, frameworks, and tools.”
Lena Dunham
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“People sometimes thought I cared more about myself than I did.”
Bell Hooks
with Lyle Ashton Harris, Dawn Chan, Ricky Ruihong Li, Parissah Lin, Darla Migan, Emmanuel Olunkwa, and Aliza Shvarts
“Not having moments to grieve is a combination of raced, classed, and gendered positionality.”
Dennis Cooper
in conversation with Ryan Mangione
“I was already the enemy to a lot of the activists, because I wasn’t representing gays in a positive way.”
Three Poems on Art
by Yxta Maya Murray
“They stood around, laughing, while drugs crumbled in their blood.”
Hito Steyerl
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“If I ever reached a milestone I would run away in horror.”
Sianne Ngai
in conversation with Alec Recinos
“We could say that the entire enterprise of art has a gimmick problem.”
Godzilla
with Tomie Arai, Dawn Chan, Howie Chen, Ricky Ruihong Li, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, and Paul Pfeiffer
“‘Asian American’ identity may be a construction but the social and psychic life of racialized people in America is very real.”
Dodie Bellamy
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“My attention tends to focus on the micro, on what’s right in front of my face—I let associations spiral out from there.”
Knobkerry
with Charles Daniel Dawson, Kyle Dancewicz, Carmen Hammons, Joanne Robinson Hill, Svetlana Kitto, Kathleen McDonnell, Seret Scott, and Ken Tisa
“The store was about conversations between worlds and how those conversations meshed together and only Sara could do that.”
Gregg Bordowitz
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“I decided to schmear my queer Jewish pinko self in schmaltz and go out and grease up the stage.”
Elizabeth Diller
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I can’t think of architecture as anything other than a performative art form.”
Black Bataille
by Aria Dean
“Blackness presents the possibility of a thoroughly anti-Idealist aesthetic and theory of objects.”
Catharsis in Ten Fragments
by Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“I’ve never understood catharsis.”
Michael Taussig
in conversation with Nancy Goldring
“Sacrifice is a pointed instance of dépense, an exquisitely sacred combustion, and one that runs throughout Bataille’s economics.”
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
in conversation with Valerie Midlin
“L’informe comes out of WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.”
Matthew Barney
in conversation with Aria Dean
“At the core, I think of my creative language as being rather formless.”
L’informe
with Aria Dean, Bruce Hainley, Ruba Katrib, Emmanuel Olunkwa, and Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.”
Volume 1: On L’Informe
by Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.”
Andrea Long Chu
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“I experienced my transness as a shape the Internet made when it looked at me.”
Amie Barrodale
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“The idea of three-act structure is in my head a lot, destroying my stories before they really begin.”
John Akomfrah
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“We don’t need to go beyond blackness. It’s not a before and after question.”
Hal Foster
in conversation with Aria Dean
“Even though I don’t see criticism as art, I don’t see it as secondary to art. I see it as a practice parallel to it.”
Howardena Pindell
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“There will be gradual changes in the art world, but the arts are often the last to change.”
Mark Wigley
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Architecture is not about the wellbeing of humans at all. It doesn’t simply house the human, it remakes the human.”
Mimi Thi Nguyen
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“One mantra in particular strikes me in this moment—and it is from John Waters’s Female Trouble—‘crime is beauty.’”
Ruba Katrib
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“The modern manifestation of the museum has its origins as a colonial and disciplining institution.”
Nell Painter
in conversation with Lauren O'Neill-Butler
“Things improving for old women artists is like things improving for Black Americans. Things improve. But things stay shitty.”
Sarah Schulman
in conversation with Emmanuel Olunkwa
“Historically, queer women have been on the front lines of every progressive movement, but not always openly.”
Christopher K. Ho
in conversation with Dawn Chan
“The paradigmatic Hongkonger, especially from the generations between 1949 and 1997, is transnational and neoliberal.”
Frank B. Wilderson III
in conversation with Aria Dean
“The essential antagonism is not between the workers and bosses but between the Humans and the Blacks.”
Adrian Piper
in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler
“When living honorably is more important than staying alive, you’re ready to fight effectively for what you believe in.”
Volume 0: Introduction
by November Eds.
“November is both a map and an archive of our cultural present and possible futures.”