Hilton Als

JZ

I wanted to start with White Girls—I think it was two years ago that I read it, and I just revisited it. It’s an amazing collection. It’s been almost 10 years since it was first published; when you think about it, what do you think about? What was the process of putting those pieces together?

HA

It’s so funny that you ask, because that book—the title of it began as a kind of joke. I was walking with a colleague from The New Yorker, and he had been talking to my editor about my writing. And the thing that is so weird about writing is that people can see it before you can see it. They were laughing, like, “Oh, Hilton writes about women of color, and crazy artists,” and I said, “Oh, yeah, one day, I’ll write a book called White Girls, that seems to be the missing category.” The thing that was so weird about it was that I started to think about when I had worked in fashion, and the language that was used for women, especially, was always these really diminutive words. And I didn’t like that. And shortly after that, the woman that I wrote about in that book [Diana Vreeland, in the essay “Tristes Tropiques”] got sick. And we were caretaking, her men, the other man that’s in the story. And I just knew somehow that my friendship with him wouldn’t survive the illness, because he would identify with her to such a degree. They had been kind of my core family for many, many years. So, when he kind of left after she died, I had been working on a project that I will go back to soon—and I started thinking about them. The way I think about the writing was a way not only to memorialize them, but to be with them again. And the more I thought about her, and him, the more I could see that the story really wasn’t just us; it was these other events in my life, my consciousness. One of the things that I wanted to do that was so important to me was to take a kind of freedom for myself, that doesn’t really exist—when you work for a magazine, as Janet Malcolm said, “it may be your piece, but it’s their magazine.” I think it was also a way of speaking to two of them without any audience. I wanted to speak to those two people without anyone listening in. And when I started writing it, I wrote it really quickly. When the Central Park Five movie came out and I went with Junot Diaz to see it, it was the lawyers getting out of the car—this image of the women getting out of the car reminded me of how much criticism my friend and I, the male friend in the story, had engendered with women. So I had written this thing that was partly me and him, and partly the silent twins who appear in the story. I showed it to Dave Eggers and he said, “I want to wallpaper my house with this, it’s amazing.” And then when you get to the twins, it was like a lightbulb going off that I had left one person out of the story, which was her [Diana]. And once that happened, I just finished it very quickly. I wanted also to have that feeling of looking back at the confusion of memory in a way that was powerful at the time. But it would be specious to say that I remembered everything.

JZ

And that’s maybe part of the power of it, that it switches between those structures of memory.

HA

I think so, I hope so. And also, that the way my mind thinks and works really is to have associations, and the twins didn’t belong there—or they did, but just a little bit, not as much as I had written.

JZ

How do you think of Joan Didion as fitting into the framework that you introduced in White Girls?

HA

Joan is amazing, she’s every woman, she can fit anywhere. I was always interested in her relationship, not only to myself, but to what people told me was just her “political” stuff. And I was interested in how her development was so distinctly American, and you would begin with the sort of anguish of the self and then it would go out into the anguish of the world. Her ability to believe in this idea of individuality that she had grown up with in California, and how that individuality had been messed with, in what she called “political fictions.” And you know, that was really about the party, and not the individual anymore. I think maybe my view was romantic, but I was very interested in that trajectory from individualism to a kind of collective criticism.

JZ

Do you think she was one of the first of those writers to popularize that form?

HA

I think so. Then, in the sixties, new journalism was emerging through books like In Cold Blood and writers like Gay Talese and Norman Mailer, who were using these techniques to tell true stories. I think that Didion was part of it, along with a woman I love and who nobody reads much, Gloria Emerson, who was a Times reporter about Vietnam, and Frances Fitzgerald. These are all writers who were extraordinarily brilliant—Michael Herr was another. They were all brilliant at using subjectivity to tell their story, to tell the story of what they saw. So I felt it was more truthful to say, this is a totally subjective account of something, it’s not just me talking or observing, but it’s me thinking. And my thinking is as much a part of the story as the event. That’s the really beautiful thing that Didion taught me as a writer, which is that you, the writer, have value, too. And the real trick is to know how to balance the event with the fact of the self.

JZ

You’re really at the nexus of curating and editing and writing, and all with very personal connections to these projects. How was the transition from working in galleries to a place like the Hammer in Los Angeles?

HA

Well, I didn’t have my gallery crew. You’re in this space that’s basically three times the size. Right? I had never worked with these people. And I hadn’t realized that we’ve been working with them for three years during the pandemic on Zoom. It was such a trip, because I didn’t have my ladies [from previous gallery projects] with me. So that was the big shock. I didn’t have my ladies with me. And to know when I get crazy that I can hear them coming down the hall saying, you have to stop now, we’re opening the show. So that was the big administrative difference. And then I had also never worked in such a big space before. I didn’t even realize, because it’s always abstract until you’re in the room. But it was great that Connie Butler—who’s the head curator there—and Adam Pena obviously know the space super well, so that when we were laying things out with the digital model, they would know that there was more or less space. The thing that was also weird was being in California, right?

JZ

I was just about to ask you about that.

HA

So even though it was a show that I completely envisioned for California, I had also never worked out of state before. I couldn’t even go home and take a nap. And the thing that was also different in galleries, I think, is that even though things are set up, I know that when I walk in, it’s going to be different, because I’m going to improvise some things. That’s not the case for museums, where they have to plan because they have many different shows a year. What was different, really, was learning how to work the museum way, and for the museum to get used to my way of working, too. By the third day we were in sync, but it took some time, and when I ran out at the last minute to get a painting from a gallery that we needed, my colleagues could see I had a different way of working, for sure. But I love that stuff—the not knowing and fixing problems at the last minute stuff. I learned so much; I learned how to work with bigger spaces, higher ceilings, and that you can work with what you're given in an effective way if you use your eyes, and imagination. I want to talk about California a little bit because it’s a different way of working. It’s more space, like you’re working in a larger, flatter world. It’s a different light. And it’s also different energy. Have you spent time out there?

JZ

Only very little, and I would be curious to spend some more time there. I was chatting with somebody recently who was saying, you know, “You have to live on the West Coast at some point if you’re from the East Coast, you just have to know what it’s about.” The time I’ve spent there has been very alienating. I guess I grew up here, and I’m very much a New Yorker who doesn’t understand Los Angeles. But I actually wanted to ask you about that because I came across such a beautiful passage of yours. It was in a New York Review of Books piece that you wrote on Joan, and you wrote that “like any great American author, [Didion] was building a world, brick by brick, based on the world she knew, a universe founded on home, or ideas about home.” I was thinking about your split between UC Berkeley, Columbia, and now Williamstown. You’ve had to kind of figure out how to make yourself comfortable there and make a home there. And it made me think about not only what is crucial to making a home for you, but also, if you’ve found homes in a lot of these artists whose work you’ve curated and researched?

HA

That’s a great question. It’s so prescient that you’re asking me this, because I was feeling so kind of baffled this morning about that very question. This goes back to a lot of writers that you love, too, where they leave their countries, for some reason. I haven’t left the country, I left the city and I wanted to have more time out of the city for a little while, because I would like to have other experiences. I haven’t traveled that much, I haven’t experienced other cultures that much at all. And California seems like an opportunity to try that. But also, Northern California is so different. It’s like here, except colder. It’s all about reading and walking and all of that; as a friend of mine says who was raised in Palo Alto, “You can’t even believe it’s in the same state.” It’s like another island with less density. You get that kind of Western drift feeling, but you’re also with other people and you have privacy. I wanted to have those feelings because New York can be really exhausting and wearying on the soul, because you have to be on, and then I think it was such a pleasure for me to go to a place where I could just walk and think my own thoughts, not see another soul for four blocks—it’s amazing. Many years ago, I went out to give a talk at Berkeley, and I made a friend. And he drove me around. And he was living in Berkeley in Grizzly Peak, like in the Berkeley hills. There’s a photograph of me asleep on a little cot in his garden. And I just couldn’t even believe this air. I would go every summer, because August is their winter, and I would bask in this beauty. And then I met a wonderful professor at Berkeley, who asked if I wanted to try living there, and I said, I know I can do it half the year if I can arrange it. So that’s what I’m doing—I’m there from mid-January till the end of April. Five months is perfect. And if I need to party and be ridiculous, I can just get down to LA and party. Because San Francisco is all about water, and then you get to this desert—it’s a weird split. From my bedroom, I can see Twin Peaks, and then I’m reading like at three o’clock in the afternoon, and all of a sudden, the fog starts to come down. You see, it’s like an event every day. But I didn’t answer your question properly: the idea of home depends on love, and where the person that you love is. I think James Baldwin said, “You carry your home with you.” Otherwise, you’re homeless. And I agree. And then I also think that you establish further intimacy with a person who wants you to come home or wants to be there when you come home, or they’re waiting for you; I think that’s another part of it. I’m looking forward to having that experience again. The great thing about New York is that you run into people by accident, and then the accidents are wonderful, happy accidents. But I think that the happy part of it is chance encounters in New York that are really rare in San Francisco.

JZ

You have to make more of a plan for it.

HA

Yeah, that’s another thing I have to be careful about—as someone pointed out, they said, “I’m not going to let you be a hermit,” because I could so easily just be in bed looking at that fog. So when I go back, I’ll make more of an effort to connect with people. But I think that the home thing has a lot to do with that feeling of finding that person who wants you to come home.

JZ

You have that intimacy, that love that makes home, and with these artists for whom you’ve curated shows, you’re so intimately acquainted with them. You love them so much, you know them so well. How do you even begin to sift through and decide what to include?

HA

What’s great is artists like Walter Price—I just liked those paintings. I liked the childlike quality of them for that beginning of Toni’s life and career. Johanna, this is so brilliant on your part, because you’re just describing the feeling that you have, but with some of them, I didn’t know. I try to make an atmosphere of intimacy so that people feel that they’re in something with the curation and with the artists. Even if it’s the same kind of stuff that goes into a little Frank Walter show, where I want you to understand that the art grows out of that self that we’ve been talking about, that Joan wisdom that’s related to the power of the individual. How does the individual work collectively with other artists? So, my feeling is that I would have to be interested in them to begin, and have kind of a knowledge of their range. But I think that, for me, it takes a long time to make these shows. It’s like a two-year minimum to do it, and to write the stuff, but also, to see how they would fit together and to keep in mind that artists get prickly about sharing space. And how do you make them feel happy about that? Like, I’ve never had the experience of an artist being unhappy in the shared space.

JZ

Well, because you’ve created what really feels like a temporary home for each person coming in.

HA

That’s right. Thank you for that. That’s a great analogy, that I’m making almost a little museum of their work.

JZ

Yes, exactly—the gallery space can be so tricky, because it doesn’t really feel intimate to me. Not the point, maybe, fair enough, but every time I go into your shows, whether it’s with Baldwin, Morrison, especially the ephemera of the Toni Morrison show, tactile stuff, the letters, or the parts of her life that she was parsing, it all feels part of this cohesive whole.

HA

And in a way, we have to think about the gallery space as, by necessity, being neutral. It has to be kind of neutral. Like, you can’t have a gallery and differentiate between the artists, you have to kind of give them the same space. With galleries, it’s square one every single time. I never thought of it like this before—you’ve given me goose pimples. I’ve never thought of it this way, but I say no, it has to be a recreation of a new kind of space. It’s funny that you say this. There was a gala, and a woman who was married to one of Sigmar Polke’s sons, she came up to me and she was the first person to speak to me. As I was going into the Didion show like, I had finished at 11:30 that morning, gone home, showered and came back. And she was so brilliant. This woman stopped me. I realized before I walked into the space, that people were getting it. And it was just on a bigger scale—she was having the reaction that you would have, the head was working like that.

JZ

It’s intergenerational, too. You see it when you walk in, and that’s what also makes it feel so special—it’s kids, parents, grandparents, everyone is kind of just looking around and not believing what they’re seeing.

HA

That’s right. And this woman had walked in, and was just speaking to me. And then someone came up, a grown man, and he was crying, saying, “This is amazing,” and another friend was like, “Can you tell me why?” And he said, “Because it makes you meditate.” Like, it makes you stop. You don’t just glide through and do selfies in front of a thing. You’re looking at the connections that are pretty obvious if you really are taking your time. But I think we have to kind of destabilize the gallery a little bit more; the destabilization is part of what makes it magical. I always want to recreate that feeling that I had when I was 15. I was one of those nerds who would cut school and go to a museum. And I went to MoMA, when I was in high school in the city. There was a goat with paint on it and a tie. It was a Rauschenberg retrospective, and I didn’t know what that was at all. They used to have docents then, and I went up to the lady and she said, “If you come back tomorrow at 3:00, I’ll be giving a tour and I’ll explain.” And I went back. And she said, one of the important things to realize is that art can be anything that the artist sees. That idea got stuck at the top of my head, and I sort of want to have that experience always when I walk into a space where I don’t recognize it. I don’t want it to be—it shouldn’t be recognizable to me on some level. I want the mystery.

JZ

It doesn’t have to be immediately legible all the time. I think the one pattern I can see from the earliest shows you’ve done is that you are definitely looking to the past for these figures. Have you been compelled at any point to look at young artists, contemporary artists? Would you think about doing one of these shows with them?

HA

It’s funny, because I just did a little show at Greene Naftali with Brett Goodroad, a wonderful young painter, but I’m thinking about how to tell a story of now. And it’s so weird, I’ve been struggling. But in a good way. It’s really hard, because a lot of stuff, I think, is getting hampered or double-framed by ideology. And it’s sort of making people not see the work. They just want representation, as opposed to seeing what can be found about the self. I want to do shows that make us not think that way, and so I tend to avoid younger artists who are working in that idiom, because it’s not really where I live intellectually. One of the things that I’m very, very interested in is how to make a show that can include these younger artists, but I want to take that frame off. I don’t like the frame, because you’re telling me how to think about something. And it makes me very angry, actually, because it’s ultimately condescending. And so sometimes younger artists who are working in that idiom, I just tend to avoid, because also, it’s visually not so interesting to me. I think that we need to kind of de-frame art at this point and let it be free, and it’s not that this present moment is the only culprit in it. It’s been going on for generations. I was reading about Douglas Crimp, who, in 1977, did a famous show called “Pictures.” In those days, you just wouldn’t even think to look at people, like he just wouldn’t even have been thinking about it. What would it be like to make a “Pictures” show now? That’s kind of what I’m thinking about: how do we make it contemporary? How do we let it not be about one aspect of viewing, but many different aspects? In “Pictures,” Sherrie Levine was the only woman. I have the misfortune, or the great fortune, of really loving history, and showing that we all come from someplace, so a lot of shows that bug me or irk me are the ones that pretend that we don’t have that relationship to the past. Like, how do we connect that to the work?

JZ

It’s a strange feeling—I think your idea of centering the self and subjectivity is compelling and could be one way in. Is anybody connecting with this when subjectivity is lost? I don’t know. It’s not how I feel walking into one of your shows, where you’ve created a history, you’ve created a map. But I do wonder what one solution, or one answer, might be?

HA

Well, it’s sort of like, how would Douglas Crimp feel if I stood up carrying a Mamma Anderson painting and saying this should be in your show, too, this visual representation and culture is amazing, or Paula Rego’s work. She’s doing politics, too, but her work doesn’t sacrifice the paint for that. I feel kind of anxious to make the connections for people. I had one student, when we were talking about artists, say, “I don’t understand why we’re dealing with the biographical.” I said, you’re dealing with a subjective artist who is looking for ways to talk about things nobody still talks about, which makes it tough not only to sell, but also to sell to a museum. I mean, it’s a tough thing, because it’s fifty years now, and these artists and writers are still ahead of us in terms of expressing the weirdness of being and the beauty of it, too. I don’t know, there’s something afoot that takes away from that transmogrifying part of art, to make me feel like a different person when I leave the gallery or the museum. I don’t understand why people want to take that experience away. Do you?

JZ

I don’t. I also think you’re in a really compelling position, because you’re having conversations with younger folks making and thinking about art. Do you feel that this mindset is completely intractable? Do you feel like there’s a little bit of flexibility and you can bring young people around to the way you see the art experience? Or is it just two ships passing in the night?

HA

You’re giving me hope today, though, like, I’m so moved by this interview, I can’t tell you. You’re giving me hope that even our dialogue about it can make the difference somehow, you know; your generation would recognize that what I’m creating is a different space. I’m thinking about how David [Zwirner] just said, “Help the viewers a little bit with a little text.” And it was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me. He said, just help them a little bit. And it completely illuminated the world for me. You’re giving me such hope to pursue an idea like “Pictures,” too, where you can have the wall text saying Douglas Crimp did this, that converges with minimalism, and AIDS, and there are other kinds of pictures that were left out of the argument still for fifty years. And then you can show something beautiful like Mamma Anderson, you can show something that has politics and art, where they converge, not one forsaking the other.

JZ

And there’s a dialogue, they’re not just standing alone in the ether.

HA

It’s not just “representing” something. It’s representing something that isn’t even speaking to me necessarily. It’s assuming, in the way that “Pictures” assumed it was for me too, in the '80s. But what if we kind of join these two ideas? I don’t know. It’s giving me a lot of hope.

JZ

I think it’s certainly something people are thinking about in publishing as well: what do you think about the state of the book world right now? Does it give you hope?

HA

Total hope right now. You know why? Because publishers are understanding that people read in a different way now. Let’s say it’s a place like New Directions. I think that publishing is figuring out how people read—during COVID people were reading loads, but they were also watching TV loads. I think that it’ll be very interesting, how we adjust to this new attention span. People pick up their phones. One of the things that I’m relying on for young publishers like yourself is to know that reading is connected to the way we live. Reading used to kind of dictate the way we lived before, you know, people would get the New Yorker, or maybe a Forbes article. They’d wait a month for the next article. But people don’t want to wait anymore. Things are more accessible. So I’m wondering how we can make it possible for us to have the beauty of literature with the gorgeousness of time, so that we don’t have to feel imprisoned by long-form. How do we make that?

JZ

And being at the New Yorker...

HA

It changed. Long-form is shorter now. I mean, it’s still publishing what people consider long pieces, but I have to train myself not to think something’s shorter if it’s 8,000 words. There’s a kind of way in which we can work together. Barbara Epler does that brilliant thing with César Aira. It’s like a story. Right? And it’s a book and it looks beautiful. You have this kind of pleasure of the text, and you have the pleasure of knowing that it’s long-form, but short. I think she’s figured out something brilliant.

JZ

I was going to ask you about My Pinup, and your work with New Directions, because of course that’s a shorter-form project. Can you see yourself doing another one of those?

HA

Absolutely. It was such a great experience. I have all this stuff, and Barbara was just like, “Can you just keep sending ideas?” It made me pay attention to book publishing again. Because you’re always—you know how it is, your sleeve is caught in the machine that you’re working with? And it was such a pleasure.

JZ

Sometimes it takes a smaller publisher to innovate that way.

HA

I’m telling you…I had a strange experience with one publisher, but then recovered with the wonderful people at McSweeney’s, which was great. I wanted to start de-traumatizing myself, and Barbara was the next step. It’s funny, I was walking home, and all of a sudden, I see my face in the newsstand. Because I’m on the cover of Bookforum, and I was shocked. Barbara texted me the image, and she said, “You’re my pinup.” She has made me feel so much better about book publishing—I’m not talking about catalogs, that’s a different experience, a lot of fun, very fast. But this was different. It wasn’t about an artist, it was myself. So I’m feeling almost buoyant about continuing. And why not? Why wouldn’t it be a story like César does, and then, all of a sudden, you have like twelve little books that become a big book?

JZ

Would you do a longer essay? Would you write fiction?

HA

This would be a short story. It’s funny doing the Berkeley change, and now it feels like I’m making all these little changes to supplement that. I will be there from January to May and then come back and focus a little on that new writing. I just feel filled with possibility for the first time in a long time, that there’s this way in which life is getting better, because I’m able to make decisions about my own life, instead of being a kind of weird participant.

JZ

Would you write another sort of paean to a person, as you did in My Pinup?

HA

I think it would be a different kind of thing. One of the wonderful things about writing is that you can be whoever you want to be freely, and I’m becoming more and more interested in the world of my imagination. I feel really clear about taking this time and having the fullness of the art and the writing, and having space curatorially. It’s good that the shows take so long, because you immerse, but it’s not a deluge. One thing that I really want to do is a show on Richard Prince as a writer, and work with artists to commission new things, but to really highlight his writing. I’ve been in touch with his estate through different avenues just to see if I can get ephemera from people, but I think it’s going to take a long time. I’m thinking that something like the “Pictures” show would be a good bridge. There’s also the historical fact of the images of the opening and the curation, and a different way of thinking about pictures now. I see myself writing as many different kinds of things as I can.