The NewCrits Podcast

Ajay Kurian sits down with writer Stephanie Wambugu, whose debut novel Lonely Crowds arrived last year to considerable acclaim, for a conversation that begins with the anxiety of ambition and opens into questions of friendship, artistic survival, and what it costs to keep working in a world where someone else's book lands on the shelf every Tuesday.Wambugu, the youngest child of Kenyan immigrants, talks about the novel's two Black women artists coming up in the 1990s New York art world, and the friendship at its center: one woman who decides very early to make herself secondary to the other. She and Kurian trace how Ruth and Maria felt real enough to believe in, why Wambugu finds them more self-sabotaging the further she gets from the book, and why friendships can wound as lastingly as romances while having little language to describe the damage. She explains why she set the book in the 1990s: a friend's thesis on the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which aimed to put white artists in the minority for the first time, struck her as a moment of hope that never fully materialized.The conversation also turns to the habit of reading Black writers sociologically, whatever the work is actually about, and to what Wambugu calls the defanging of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin into totems of feel-good inspiration. Along the way, Kurian shares the story of a gifted artwork surfacing at an Ohio flea market, and Wambugu reflects on how watching books arrive and quietly disappear at a bookstore shaped her sense of ambition and impermanence, and taught her how rare staying power really is.

00:40 — Introduction to Stephanie Wambugu and Lonely Crowds
03:32 — Family, immigration, and choosing a creative life
07:22 — Altered states, experimentation, and transcending the self
11:40 — Dreams, the unconscious, and writing fiction
16:19 — Creating Ruth and Maria: believing in fictional characters
19:26 — Codependency, boundaries, and the psychology of Lonely Crowds
20:41 — The novel’s circular structure and ambiguous ending
23:43 — Turning real experiences into fiction
26:57 — Friendship, emotional wounds, and the influence of Sula
31:18 — Protecting one’s inner life and maintaining boundaries
35:47 — Ambition, responsibility, and knowing your limits
38:08 — The single-mindedness required to pursue art and writing
40:29 — Publishing, professional anxiety, and sustaining momentum
44:51 — Why Lonely Crowds takes place in the 1990s art world
46:08 — The 1993 Whitney Biennial, representation, and artistic opportunity
53:19 — Race, sociological readings, and the limitations of criticism
57:31 — Jazz, Thelonious Monk, and navigating white institutions
1:00:25 — Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and the simplification of literary figures
1:03:53 — Why contemporary criticism should match the quality of the work
1:05:24 — Closing rapid-fire questions


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Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Alex Da Corte, whose recreations, personas and total immersion into figures from Marcel Duchamp to Eminem have made him one of the most distinct and prolific voices working today. So much so that he has been tasked with co-curating the Whitney Museum’s survey on Roy Lichtenstein with Meg Olni, opening on October 11th, 2026.The conversation begins with the sandwich as a transgressive object — central enough to his practice that the title of one show, As Is Wet Hoagie, is tattooed on his arm. It morphs into reflections on dressing up as Michael Myers to stalk his own parents, and lands with the strange intimacy of inhabiting someone else's body to better understand your own.Da Corte traces his practice back to his first video, made when he was thirty, living with his parents, and costuming himself out of grocery-store flour and coffee — a far cry from the eight to fifteen hours of prosthetics his work now demands. He describes the disorienting experience of being mistaken for Eminem by a stranger — and, for a jet-lagged moment, mistaking himself for Slim Shady too — an accident that led him down a decade-long road of playing the rapper. He and Kurian also discuss his recreation of a lost Paul Thek sculpture and his one-time-only performance as Duchamp at the Met.Throughout the conversation, Da Corte reflects on how objects and images shift as memory erodes and on what happens when you finally meet your own fantasy. Kurian, at the close, calls Da Corte a sort of “pop doula,” and the two end by giving thanks to not just one another, but also to the wind.

00:00 – Introduction to Alex Da Corte
04:00 – Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel No. 2
08:34 – Costuming, puppetry, and the body
11:17 – Illness, identity, and artistic practice
13:03 – The sandwich as a recurring motif
14:03 – As Is Wet Hoagie: Memory, fantasy, and fiction
19:19 – Religion, transformation, and memory
22:45 – Dementia and the architecture of memory
24:06 – Parade: Storefronts and nostalgia
28:40 – Letter writing, waiting, and time
30:06 – The Pink Panther and inhabiting characters
35:02 – Becoming Eminem
38:49 – Stalking his parents as Michael Myers
43:03 – Reconstruction as an act of love
45:55 – Recreating Paul Thek’s The Tomb
50:31 – Embodiment and becoming Marcel Duchamp
53:26 – Roy Lichtenstein at the Whitney
56:54 – Art, friendship, and personal transformation
01:01:05 – Giving thanks to the wind
01:02:48 – Audience Q&A
01:03:18 – Easternsports: Collaboration and production
01:07:48 – Acting, improvisation, and embodiment
01:11:20 – Artistic confidence, permission, and ego
01:14:01 – Closing

Full transcript available on Substack 🎧


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Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Vijay Masharani for a conversation that begins with a confession about hating the highway and expands into an exploration of cliché, mortality, and what it means to keep making work from inside an unresolved illness.Masharani, who showed in this year's MoMA PS1 Greater New York, talks about his approach to video and drawing — work that hits hard and fast, straight down the middle, refusing easy resolution — and traces how his practice shifted after being diagnosed with blood cancer twice, including a hospital stay where he was ordering drawing paper from Blick's website on bedrest. He and Kurian dig into cliché as a kind of sedimented truth, Drake's theory of what makes a pop hit work, and why Philip Guston's relationship to mortality and mass has become a constant reference point for him.Throughout the conversation, Masharani resists the idea that his illness is a resolved, past-tense event — describing himself instead as living in a kind of purgatory, mediated by a monthly blood test that's essentially binary — and reflects on impatience, discipline, and why, even at his lowest, he never stopped being an artist.

Timestamps
00:00 — “I hate the highway”02:47 — Cliché and immediacy04:53 — The deer in the green tank10:55 — Greater New York at MoMA PS113:01 — Cancer and recurrence14:25 — Art after cancer21:42 — A game of taste24:16 — Art and politics32:26 — The “stove toucher” tendency36:29 — Making exhibitions41:03 — Exhibitions as albums46:32 — Drake and the imperfect pop hit49:01 — Returning to art after cancer53:23 — Why keep making art?57:32 — Philip Guston and mortality01:00:54 — Soutine, painting, and mass01:03:01 — Living in purgatory01:05:27 — Modernism and illness
Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on the highway.
Ajay Kurian: Damn, I didn’t know this.
Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on there. I hate being in the car when someone else is driving on the highway.
Ajay Kurian: Really?
Vijay Masharani: I hate the highway, dude. I think the highway is wrong. I think it’s American thanatophilia, as an urban spatial form. I hate the highway.
Ajay Kurian: Vijay Masharani is an artist, writer, and educator based in the Bay Area. He makes drawings, videos, and texts that are obsessed with the letter, the glyph, the geometry of meaning. Work that hits you hard and fast and then refuses to let you go. His videos open cold. His drawings span from the highly structured to the loose and associative, and the whole practice is organized around a single conviction: if the problems of language make you uncomfortable, you can’t flee to the body. And if the body makes you uncomfortable, you can’t just retreat above the neck.
He’s currently showing at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, a survey of the New York art scene that happens once every five years, which is the most eyes he’s ever had on his work. I’ve known Vijay since he was in undergrad. My first visit with him was back in 2016 at MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Since then, we’ve gotten closer, collaborated on projects, and even spent a summer together at Skowhegan, where I was faculty and he was a participant. Not long after, he was diagnosed with blood cancer. Then diagnosed again. He’s made three shows since.
We talked about what it means to make art from purgatory — not after a near-death experience, but inside one, where the blood test every month is essentially binary and the book is not yet closed. We talked about cliché as a sedimented truth, about why Drake said there has to be something wrong with a pop hit, about what Philip Guston understood that most painters don’t. And we talked about what changed in the studio after cancer and what stayed the same, and about why, in the end, he couldn’t stop making things even when he had every reason to.
This dude was literally ordering paper from Blick on his hospital bed.
Here is my conversation with Vijay Masharani.
Vijay Masharani: I like clichés. I like so many clichés and I like stuff that’s right down the middle. I think in art there’s a bias toward the oblique, and every now and then it can feel really good to go down the middle. To me, that’s what a cliché can do. I think if people have responded to the work, for example, — especially the video work from early on — it’s because there’s something about the standard for video art, the way it stands apart from, or at one point stood apart from, though maybe still does from the more oblique or highly mediated kind of thing. I think the work for me was, hopefully, pretty visually forward and kind of frontal, but then not immediately digestible. That combination.
Ajay Kurian: So what you’re saying is the video form in early video art may come off as a little esoteric or oblique to people used to watching TV and films, but your work goes more down the middle — there’s something more immediately explosive, something that can just hit and grab. There’s a hook and then there’s something to unravel the hook.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. I like hitting ‘em… I know that sounds stupid, like sports. I actually listen to a lot of NBA podcasts and they’ve definitely changed my syntax a little bit — but I talk about art with it, which is very true. I like to hit them hard and fast, but not in a way where it’s over after that.
Ajay Kurian: Right. It’s not like that provides resolution.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah.
Ajay Kurian: It’s just one method among many.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. It makes you turn your head, but then you kind of stick with it, like, “Oh wait, what?”
Maybe it’d be good to put something concrete to it. In the second video I have on view in this trilogy at PS1 — the green tank with the deer in it —
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it’s very Twin Peaks. On a formal level, looking at a giant rectangle of neon green, and then noticing a deer somewhere in it, and realizing, okay, this is an aquarium. That piece is one of those moments that’s extremely satisfying to look at. It’s mesmerizing. You fall into a place that doesn’t feel resolved, but it also feels like it gives you enough to enjoy it.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it’s the opening shot of the piece — we’re already in it,there’s no ramp-up to that. Now, I’m like, do I do this with water Pokémon now?
Ajay Kurian: What?
Vijay Masharani: Because the other one opens with a crab.
Ajay Kurian: Oh, got you. A singing crab, yeah.
Vijay Masharani: A singing crab. A deer that can breathe underwater, whatever. There’s something about starting with water, and to me — I think I’m using the term wrong, but mentally I call it a cold open, because a cold open is when you’re just dropped into something. So you can see how I’m using different terms to describe the same kind of deployment of immediacy. When I say “straight down the middle” or “frontal” or “drop in,” I’m referring to the same kind of move in art with different words.
Ajay Kurian: And it always evolves. In terms of 3D animation and scoring, it seems like you’re a little more resistant to using pop music, or the quintessential rap song of the moment as a quick identifier — like, “oh shit, we’re here.”
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, totally. It’s really tempting. Early on I think that was what felt interesting about video — the infinitely recombinable game of music and visual media. There’s still a fair amount of that in the workflow — for example, while I’m editing in Premiere, whatever’s on is just on.
At least two of the songs in the new video, which is called O-----K — with five em dashes between the letters O and K, I can talk about the reason for that in a second — but two out of the three songs I kept as samples just happened to play while I was listening to NTS. One was a song I already knew, Young Thug’s “Love Me.” The other is by, I think, an indie rocker named Clarence Clarity has a song called “Cancer in the Water.”
That’s another good way to demonstrate the straight-down-the-middle thing. I was trying to figure out what to put over the driving sequence with me and my dad, where I’m wearing the mask with the spinning element. Everything felt like it was trying too hard to evoke some sort of unconvincingly poetic juxtaposition between sound and image. I liked the visual so much, and then this song came on the radio and I was like, “that’s the one.”
I guess it’s like this bedroom indie-pop thing but with a lot of weird producer flourishes — honestly, in a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy kind of way. So much maximalist production fluorishes. It feels super 2010 in that way. It’s not a very tasteful song, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it sounds like pop-baroque.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, a little pop-baroque, but really good. And the lyrics are like, “Fuck it up, put cancer in the water, put cancer in me.”
Ajay Kurian: Jesus.
Vijay Masharani: I was like, right, that’s perfect. Because in a way, it was too cute and metaphorical when there was a lyric with more interpretation that could tie back to what I wanted to talk about — but no, let’s just go for the most obvious, relevant, bluntest thing. Cancer in the water, cancer in me, period. Poison everywhere.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah.
Vijay Masharani: Like, word. You know what I mean? Hopefully that illustrates what I’m talking about.
Ajay Kurian: I really wanted to catch you in this particular moment because, for one, I haven’t seen you in two years. And two, you’ve been included in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, the survey show that happens every five years. This is 2026 — I was in it in 2015. It’s a really fun show to be in, an exciting, super generative moment. I’d say this is easily going to be the most eyes on your work that I could think of, for now.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Zurich was cool. But the nature of the eyes is different.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah — like at a Kunsthalle in Zurich, there’s definitely traffic and definitely plenty of people, it’s not some rinky-dink thing, but it’s just different.
Vijay Masharani: It’s different.
Ajay Kurian: There’s not a massive amount of tourists going through, whereas this is people from all over, just chilling, because MoMA PS1 is a thing to do.
Vijay Masharani: One hundred percent. It’s cool.
Ajay Kurian: You’ve been at this for a minute. We’ve known each other since you were an undergrad.
Vijay Masharani: I think a decade now, ten years now — probably first studio visit in 2016, around this time, honestly probably spring.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, there’s a lot of nice feelings I have about this weather that I was just realizing today.
But in that decade, I’ve seen you change so much — grow as an artist and as a person, come to terms with what making art means for you, what being in this art world means for you — and then having to deal with real-life shit, your whole life taking a turn toward something that could have been catastrophic.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I envy people who had leukemia once.
I go on Reddit, and people are on there with their first leukemia diagnosis, and I’m like, they have it easy.
Ajay Kurian: Jesus Christ.
Vijay Masharani: That’s just how far I am from being a healthy person. I’m like, “You lucky duck, you only had it once.” Because I had it twice. The second one is way crazier.
Ajay Kurian: Really?
Vijay Masharani: A second cancer diagnosis is way crazier than one, because with modern medicine, you get cancer and people are like, “Okay, it’s probably going to be this harrowing experience, but then you’ll be okay.” And then you get it a second time and you’re like, oh, fuck — because everyone knows you can’t just keep getting it.
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: Eventually you have to put it away for good, you know what I’m saying?
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I remember telling my dad you got it again, and the look on his face was not heartening in the slightest. I was like, damn, you didn’t even try to make me feel good about this.
Vijay Masharani: You don’t get to. You can’t just keep getting it. At a certain point you’ve got to kill every single cell.
Ajay Kurian: This is a cliché to ask, but — how did it change your outlook on what it is that you make and how you make it?
Vijay Masharani: I think it’s so total that, in a sense, everything we’re talking about is an answer to that question. It’s your life.
The way I’m speaking, even about being direct, being straight down the middle — if there’s one thing being discussed in an encoded way, it’s an answer to that question, because pretty much all the language I use to describe my work is post-cancer. It’s stuff I’ve written and thought through.
But to say something new and still try to answer it — I’d say, and people have asked me this, and I’ll quote my own interview: art problems aren’t problems. I don’t know, I’ve got real problems now so art became a lot of other things.
I used to be the kind of person who’d be in my studio and things felt really impossible. You’ve been a witness to things feeling really impossible for me. We did a studio visit in 2022 when I was in the studio in Fidi, and there was nothing.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, you had a desk, some paper on it, and your laptop.
Vijay Masharani: And horrible vibes like depression.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, the vibes were bad. The vibes were very bad.
Vijay Masharani: Dude, I got a drawing board delivered in a piece of cardboard from Amazon, and it was in the corner of the studio. After you left, I didn’t take out the recycling — I just left it there, and it became like my pad, that I would lie down on, because I just would not do anything.
I’d just lie down on a piece of cardboard on the floor. *Laughs* I’m serious.
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs* No, I believe it.
Vijay Masharani: That’s where I was at, dude. There was no art happening. There was just cardboard lying around.
Ajay Kurian: That’s sometimes, I guess, part of the process.
Vijay Masharani: It was so bad. I’m not saying that to dramatize it. Even though it is a mentally-ill orientation to melodrama, I’m not saying it to be dramatic. That’s descriptively what I was doing.
Ajay Kurian: And that’s pre-cancer.
Vijay Masharani: That’s pre-cancer, dude.
Ajay Kurian: But in retrospect, could you even imagine a moment now where your studio would bring you to the place where you would be curled up on a piece of cardboard?
Vijay Masharani: That’s why it’s so annoying. I look back on that time, when I was healthy, and I’m just like — honestly, sacko-pussy. *Laughs* Honestly, you know? I have real sympathy for… I don’t know, maybe I don’t have real sympathy for depressed people —
Ajay Kurian: I catch that as depressed in the studio, with the work you are making.
Vijay Masharani: In a way that it’s very self-produced. It was a “stop hitting yourself” kind of thing — you know the meme, where someone has a boot on their face, and then it pans out and the boot is on their own hand.
Now I don’t do that. And it’s super easy not to now. It’s super easy to make the decision not to do that. In my opinion.
Ajay Kurian: Mhm.
Vijay Masharani: I don’t think you have to get cancer to make that decision.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I don’t think so either.
Vijay Masharani: But I did choose to make that decision after getting cancer, for whatever reason.
Ajay Kurian: Right. I think a lot of times people are in a room of their own making, and it takes a set of things, different for each person, to realize where the door is.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. It’s made me impatient, in that way — like, it is actually a decision, so can you hurry up and make it, because if you’re a drain, that’s a problem for the people around you. You know what I mean? We don’t have infinite time, you know?
Ajay Kurian: I totally —
Vijay Masharani: Get that.
Ajay Kurian: But there are two sides of me when it comes to something like that, because there’s the pedagogue in me —
Vijay Masharani: Me too.
Ajay Kurian: — and I know you have that too, there’s never going to be a student who comes to you where you’re just like, “hurry the fuck up.”
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, like, get over yourself.
Ajay Kurian: There are nice, even critical, ways to say that so a person can actually hear it. I think we’ve both said some version of it more than once.
There are people who are building with me, and I don’t like when they waste my time. And then there are people I’m trying to help build — I’ve created that situation myself, so that’s on me, and I’ll put the energy in and I’m not going to rush them towards whatever they need.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it normally doesn’t work also, if you rush people — they dig their heels in. It’s tough. I think the whole inquiry into the charisma of forms, and what you described as a mesmerizing quality in the work, might be part of that — you can’t just push someone.
If there is a utility to what artists are good at: can we get people to rush toward that decision, through geometry, considered in the expanded sense?
Ajay Kurian: I did this with Whitney Mallett — we played a game, it was part of one of the Whitney reviews with K8 Hardy and Sianne Ngai.
Vijay Masharani: Oh yeah, I think I saw that.
Ajay Kurian: A game of taste.
Vijay Masharani: I don’t want to say I get embarrassed, but for taste stuff… I can try.
Ajay Kurian: In that particular moment — the embarrassed ones are harder. For classes I used to bring in something that inspired me that also embarrassed me, and it used to be anime, because I grew up getting made fun of all day long for liking anime.
Vijay Masharani: It’s in that category. There are things I’m embarrassed to do — every now and then I’ll pop open an incognito tab and play Pokémon Showdown.
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
You know what that is? You can doPokémon battles on the internet.
Ajay Kurian: No, I mean, I understand it, but I haven’t done it.
Vijay Masharani: I’m not really embarrassed about it, because I don’t do it very often. I’m just like, doesn’t everyone have some shit like that? It’s pretty mild — people are like jerking off to monkeys getting tortured.
Ajay Kurian: Jesus Christ. *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: I mean the president is a pedophile, you know what I mean? Like I don’t give a shit.
*Laughs*
It’s really fucked up, but I’m not that embarrassed compared to deviant activities going on in this great country.
Ajay Kurian: Okay, so the one category I think I might still get something out of you on is: proud to dislike.
Vijay Masharani: Ooh, proud to dislike. Okay. There’s so many —
*Laughs*
Ajay Kurian: I mean this is catnip for you.
Vijay Masharani: I need to be a little more secure in certain aspects of my life before I start being completely honest about what I think about things.
Ajay Kurian: Honestly, this feels really specific to the art world, and not so much other industries. Where, other industries, talking shit actually gets you something — you can monetize it.
Vijay Masharani: It is actually like that in the art world too.
I owe my career to talking shit about the Zabludowicz’s on Instagram. That was how I landed my first group show.
Ajay Kurian: No shit!
Vijay Masharani: So maybe that’s what I’ll still remain proud to dislike: the state of Israel.
But in a real way, which I mean — that was 2017, when I was starting to write about the Zabludowicz boycott. Tiffany Zabludowicz had that Times Square space, and I’d just learned about the boycott through Twitter, because they were in the UK but they had a presence on Twitter.
I was like, that last name sounds familiar. I’d just turned twenty-two. Clark Filio, a friend, had commented on it—he wasn’t describing it as a genocide in 2017— but he said, “this reminds me of the oppression of Palestine.” Something like that.
I was like, hey man, your comment was the only one that acknowledged the boycott in the context of this exhibition. That was the first piece of writing I sent you, which a few years later turned into “The Status of BDS in Contemporary Art.”
Ajay Kurian: Which is a really good piece.
Vijay Masharani: It was an essay I published in Extra magazine. And then, Clark ended up putting me in my first group show because of it.
Ajay Kurian: We should also say that piece wasn’t able to run in a few other magazines.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, ARTnews was the main one that pulled the plug at the last second, because the change of ownership to Penske happened during the editorial process.
The new guy came in and was like, “why the fuck are we publishing stuff like this?” I think the quote Andrew Russeth relayed to me — I was working with Andrew when he was there — was something like, “we’re going for the Kaws-and-Banksy crowd.” *Laughs* Like the bridge and tunnel crowd.
Ajay Kurian: That is a very different crowd.
Vijay Masharani: I don’t actually know, what is the bridge-and-tunnel crowd?
Ajay Kurian: It’s the people coming in from New Jersey.
Vijay Masharani: Right.
Ajay Kurian: Into the city to get fucked up.
Vijay Masharani: You don’t think there’s overlap?
Ajay Kurian: I think there is overlap, I just mean it’s a different crowd than who your essay was for.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, yeah. I was happy to have more time to work on it, and ended up working with Travis Steele, who was freelancing for Extra at the time, to write something much shorter and digest it a little more because it ended up being more lean and mean in the final version.
After it got cut, I ended up presenting it as a lecture, and rewriting it. Through that process it got distilled. The piece still has legs — it still gets cited, got translated into French, and even now, in this wave of activity in the Palestine solidarity movement globally, I’ll occasionally get a Google Alert about it. Which is cool, the circumstances are horrible, but it is cool in terms of being a contribution to an inquiry about aesthetics and politics that began in 2017 — right when I moved here.
It was a response to the Zabludowicz thing and this is a very roundabout way of saying Clark put me in my first show from that.
Ajay Kurian: So this all goes back to…
Vijay Masharani: Me and my art.
Ajay Kurian: You being able to talk shit.
Vijay Masharani: You can talk a little shit and be okay. You can not be super-duper mealy-mouthed, as is the norm in art discourse. And you can be okay.
Do some doors close? I mean, probably. *Laughs*
No one’s going to listen to this, so it’s fine, but I applied to an art fair once, and Kern was on the jury, and I had to tell them about our thing, and they were like, whatever, we already submitted the application, it doesn’t matter.
So I was like, is that door permanently closed?
Ajay Kurian: For instance — Marcus Jahmal just invited me to run a panel at Kern for a show he’d put together, and initially I told him, just so you know, I did this thing with Vijay Masharani. It was a performance there, and I don’t think Anton Kern was super happy about all that, so I don’t know if he’ll be into this.
They did have to check, and their response was basically just, “you’re just going to do a straightforward panel, right? You’re not going to fuck with us?”
Vijay Masharani: That’s funny as hell. Yeah, exactly. I mean— it’s a panel, and it’s a good thing you’re able to do that.
Ajay Kurian: All I’m saying is it’s not always that deep with every single thing.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. I guess my point is I think it’s fine.
And I think — on a much different scale — this is what Hannah, Chiara, and Toby were talking about: the whole point is for it to have some stakes. If a door closes, well, that was part of it having stakes.
Ajay Kurian: Exactly.
Vijay Masharani: That just is what it is. But also, most of the time the door doesn’t close, because no one will care in a few years anyway.
And even if it does, so what? You’ll have the benefit of having said your piece or being able to sleep at night or having some principles.
“Taking a stand” sounds really stupid, but, you know, you went for something.
Ajay Kurian: It articulates what is actually being censored, and if there is censorship happening. When there are actual stakes, when you say what you mean and mean what you say, certain things come to light that are much better than things hiding out because everyone is talking quietly, which is very different from talking shit.
You can talk shit about a show you just saw, saying “that show sucked.” But that’s no indictment of a person or institution. Whereas there’s a higher-level thing of, like — I don’t see anybody talking about the aftermath of the Whitney shutting down the ISP program.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve always had — shout out to my student Karwaan, he’s helped me think about this — it’s a certain kind of artist’s temperament, I call it the stove-toucher tendency.
There are some people who just want to touch the stove. I think my student’s a little like that. We had a great session where I told him I feel like I have a bit of a stove-toucher tendency, but you feel controlled by it more when you’re a young person— now I just notice it, like, “oh, there it is again,” from a bit of a distance. And he was like, “dude, that’s crazy, because when I was a kid I literally kept trying to touch the stove.”
Ajay Kurian: It is a thing, I did it as a kid too.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, it’s a cliché.
That does reflect the immaturity in me as a writer, when I was doing that BDS project — I still stand by that writing but there’s a way where it was too many problems of relevance and scale to myself, combined into a few things.
There’s a thing about transgression in art, and then a related question about understanding contemporary art as a set of codes and discourses around indeterminacy or obeyance, and the ways the exalted categories within art are correlative with what Suhail described as a tepid ideological liberalism — and then there’s also the concrete situation of the bleeding edge of global imperialism, all folded into one.
Now I prefer to completely disentangle those. If I’m going to talk about one of them, it’ll be on its own terms. That’s maybe why I don’t do much art-activism writing anymore — I don’t think it’s a particularly useful analytic soup to blend vastly different concerns with vastly different stakes. There are ways to suture them together in the social whole, but is it always analytically useful to take them on concurrently, in essay format?
I don’t know. I tried it, and it went how it went — I still like the writing, but that smoothie of concerns in essay form was personally as far as I wanted to take it. It was that piece and then I also did one on Strike MoMA for Artforum
Ajay Kurian: Right, I almost feel like there’s a correlation here.
I’ve seen a lot of students get their first solo exhibition and want to show everything they can do, everything they know how to do, everything on their mind. They put everything into the show. This happens with thesis shows, with first solo shows, and I’m always like — this isn’t the last time you’re going to show. It feels like they’re treating it like their last time but it’s their first.
Vijay Masharani: It might be generational — that feeling of, okay, I’m going to do this, and then, more void after.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. As opposed to building one step at a time.
Vijay Masharani: I relate to that, honestly — I feel like I did exactly what you’re describing. Even with my first show at Klima, to be honest, I felt like it was demonstrating breadth, betting that would lead to being able to do more exhibitions. Whether that was good or bad judgment, I ended up doing more shows despite that is really difficult for me to assess. The question of the good, focused presentation versus the everything presentation is still something I don’t feel I have fully found satisfactory answers for.
Ajay Kurian: I think it’s also just practice. It’s not that different from writing and realizing, okay, this analytic framework isn’t that helpful for me — and there’ll still be a writer out there who’s like, I like that soup, I think that soup is interesting.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it can go really well — like Peter Osborne, or something like that.
Ajay Kurian: You’d say he performs in that soup —
Vijay Masharani: At a much higher level, because it still feels pretty rigorous. Marina Vishmidt.
Ajay Kurian: I don’t know if you know her writing.
Vijay Masharani: Rest in peace, she died of cancer — she did more infrastructural critique, but much more elevated than what I was doing, because she was a real scholar.
Ajay Kurian: Right.
Vijay Masharani: Speculation as a mode of production, that stuff — I haven’t looked super closely at it.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, artists come to terms with how they want to make things, and it’s never final or set in stone. I remember feeling a certain way about an exhibition, getting advice, I followed that advice, and it wasn’t an unlock — it was more like, oh, I should actually just listen to myself, because at least I’d know I stood by what I really wanted to do.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, definitely.
Ajay Kurian: And you get better analytics for it.
Vijay Masharani: That part is really cool. Think for yourself — think for yourself is good advice.
Ajay Kurian: There’s a good cliché.
Vijay Masharani: “Think for yourself” is what Zhou Enlai — I don’t know, this should be substantiated — Samir Amin, a third-worldist political economist, gave these lectures on an alternate history of Bandung.
Normally when people talk about the Bandung Conference, they talk about the statesmen who led it — Nehru and Sukarno, maybe Nasser. But he was saying there’s a hidden history, that it was actually a group of — it’s been a long time since I looked at this — communists who reached out to Zhou Enlai for advice on how to organize Global South political feeling in the post-war moment, at a time when those statesmen weren’t particularly kind to communists in their own countries. So there’s a counter-narrative to how Bandung actually happened. And Zhou Enlai just responded, “Think for yourself.” And I was like —
Beautiful. Think for yourself
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: On the exhibition thing — I say this about you to other people too — I think you’re really good at the exhibition form, in a way I’m still trying to figure out. I connect it to some Ajay wisdom, which is: while you’re working on a show, you can think about an album that evokes what you’re trying to do. I think that’s very Ajay, because being an exhibition artist is kind of the correlation to being an album listener.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, for sure.
Vijay Masharani: And where I think we’re slightly different as artists — I get really fixated on certain couplets and verses, and I almost stop caring about the rest of the song. The rest of the album is even more…
Ajay Kurian: In the periphery.
Vijay Masharani: Far outside my purview, because I get so stuck on the couplet. When I made the Zurich show, I was listening to the verse in “No More Parties in LA” where he talks about how paranoid he is that he’s going to crash his car — because I have that same paranoia. I hate driving. It got worse after cancer.
Ajay Kurian: Oh God.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, I really try to avoid it. I’ll take a train ride that increases my commute three or four times rather than jump on the highway. I hate driving on the highway.
Ajay Kurian: Damn, I didn’t know this.
Vijay Masharani: I hate being in the car when someone else is driving on the highway. I hate the highway, dude, I think the highway is wrong, it’s American thanatophilia as an urban spatial form. I really can’t do it.
So he’s just saying, you know the verse, “that’s why I take the 405 — I’d be worried about my daughter” — and it’s like, over and over, such palpable fear of death in that verse.
Ajay Kurian: It made me think of Alex Da Corte. He’ll sometimes just play the same song obsessively, over and over, while working on a show.
Vijay Masharani: I’m one of those — one song, and even a short song, and even on the level of the line, the couplet.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, very different.
Vijay Masharani: And you’re an album artist, an exhibition artist. I think that’s something you have that I want to have. I think I can learn it, but right now, on this, you’re the sensei.
Ajay Kurian: It’s funny, because I think you learning about the album is much more doable than me changing my mindset to focus obsessively on the couplet or the line.
Vijay Masharani: Or the detail. Super detail, in everything, honestly.
Ajay Kurian: That’s never going to be me. That’s also — it’s a good George Saunders interview, where he talks about accepting that he’s going to fail at being everybody else besides himself.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.
Ajay Kurian: And make all the — literally, we’re just vomiting clichés at this point.
Really turning those negatives into positives, too. There’s a great James Blake interview with Rick Rubin, where he talks about being so shitty at melody —
Vijay Masharani: James Blake thinks he’s shitty at melody?
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. And his workaround was to put a ton of his own recorded voice and start layering it. That’s when he found something that felt like him.
But, like, can I do a Billie Eilish melody that just breaks your brain? No — not in my life will I be able to do that.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, dude, I really love that, actually. It’s funny, we both listen to pop-artist interviews for studio wisdom.
Ajay Kurian: I love them.
Vijay Masharani: I like Popcast — I hate the New York Times, but I listen to their Popcast, because I think Caramanica is an awesome critic.
Ajay Kurian: I think he’s all right — sometimes I think he’s great, other times I’m like —
Vijay Masharani: *Laughs* I wanted to say “awesome,” but I was like, is that an overstatement?
Ajay Kurian: In terms of majors, he’s legit.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, he’s legit. Too enthusiastic sometimes, but I also like Joe Coscarelli. I like both of them.
There was one bit of studio wisdom from Drake, on some random podcast, that I think is so good I almost don’t want to give it away. Drake said, to make a pop hit — which he definitely knows how to do —
Ajay Kurian: Over and over and over.
Vijay Masharani: — there has to be something wrong with it. I think that’s so good, dude. It explains him so well, and it’s so true.
Ajay Kurian: It is so true. It makes me like him a little more, honestly, that he’s conscious of that.
Vijay Masharani: Oh yeah, he’s too savvy.
Ajay Kurian: He’s a savvy fucking dude, for sure.
Vijay Masharani: The Tom Brady of rap music. The line I immediately thought of as illustrative of that, that is problematic, is “shout out to Asian girls, let the lights dim sum”
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: It’s in the first song of Take Care, it’s really early in the first song of his best album.
Ajay Kurian: That’s debatable.
Vijay Masharani: What’s the best Drake album?
Ajay Kurian: Nothing Was the Same.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Nothing Was the Same. Whatever.
Ajay Kurian: For me it’s Nothing Was the Same, honestly, though What a Time to Be Alive — the Drake and Future collab — is probably right behind it, or maybe before.
Vijay Masharani: I did listen to that one, but not very much.
Ajay Kurian: I like it when they team up. What a Time to Be Alive.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And I love that Future always uses those ready-made stock-photo album covers.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Dirty Stock 2’s cover is a stock photo.
Vijay Masharani: The ink in water. *Laughs* It looks so bad.
Ajay Kurian: It’s so bad. It’s fucking brilliant. There’s a contemporary artist out there who would do exactly that and try to write a thesis about it.
Outside of all that — checking in… more than checking in on you at this moment. We went to the opening at Greater New York and got to watch your new piece with you, which really meant a lot to me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.
Vijay Masharani: Same.
Ajay Kurian: It feels like a bookend, in such a crazy way — I was faculty at Skowhegan in 2023 and Vijay were a participant, and it was after that that you were diagnosed with cancer.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I started showing symptoms probably two and a half months after.
Ajay Kurian: It’s just been wild, the whole thing. You’ve produced a handful of shows now.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, it was okay. It was my transplant anniversary yesterday — one year post-transplant.
Ajay Kurian: Congratulations, man.
Vijay Masharani: They say that’s normally when you start working. I’ve done three shows.
Ajay Kurian: Big shows.
Vijay Masharani: Veronica, which was a project space; a solo at Klima; and the PS1 work, which was the most labor, not in terms of quantity of pieces, but the twenty-minute short film and two big drawings. I spent longer on those drawings than on anything previous — the one with a lot of geometry in it took about two and a half months, that much compass-and-straightedge level all the time really slows you down.
I got to the point I just started making other drawings too, because I don’t always have it in me to be doing something that deliberate. People have responded to the fact that the two PS1 drawings — one so loose and freeform, one highly structured — which is really reductive, there’s a way that, actually, they’re kind of the opposite of what people assume.
I get what people are saying, descriptively that’s kind of true too. But part of the reason the loose one exists is that doing that much geometry gets so keyed-up.
Ajay Kurian: It’s not like you flagged at all, or lagged — it was as if you weren’t in recovery, like you were working like you didn’t care if you died.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, I did have to take a month off — about five weeks after transplant you’re really, really weak. I was in the hospital for thirty-three days.
The first drawing I made after was the blue drawing in the Klima show, it’s called Ocean of Despair — that was late May, I got out of the hospital around May 6th. I got back to drawing pretty quick. I live with my parents, in the basement — all I had to do was go downstairs. I mean, I wanted to get back to it.
I was in the hospital ordering paper from Blick’s website.
Ajay Kurian: What is the urgency around making artwork after recovering from cancer? Why? Why do you care?
Vijay Masharani: I’m still working on my answer to that. I am, and have always been, an artist.
Ajay Kurian: Did it certify that compulsion?
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. It’s so cheesy, but that’s just what I do.
Ajay Kurian: I’m here for that.
Vijay Masharani: There’re some people who are so obviously meant to do what they do — it sounds really cocky, but it’s just the truth. I just do this. The kind of work I make does change depending on who’s watching and what it’s for — it has that relationship with external structures — but I’m always doing it.
I got the Zurich show, before my second-to-last cycle of chemo in my first round of cancer, and before that, the creative thing I wanted to spend more time on…
My attitude toward making art was basically, fuck all this art stuff, I’m just going to keep making music. I was hitting up Coco, trying to convince her to sing again, and she didn’t want to, which is completely her decision.
Ajay Kurian: Coco Klöckner, who’s also in Greater New York right now.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, we had a music project together. I was like, can I use cancer to guilt-trip my friend into singing over my tracks was my master plan.
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: Because I was too tired to chase down studio visits to try to get a show, and had no desire to, in that state. I was in California, thinking, I’m just going to make beats and music is pure fun, I’ll be doing it for myself. And then Otto reached out, and — so I guess that’s the other thing, it’s not all about enjoyment.
Maybe, it’s changed. I do get a lot of pleasure out of making visual art, and talking about visual art, whereas before I had a little-brother complex toward music. It was the thing that was most fun and also the thing I’m probably the least good at — of the four things I do, drawing, video, writing, and music, music is probably the most fun and the one I’m least distinguished at.
But going back to your question — why invest in art after cancer — I don’t know, dude, it’s just what I do. I don’t really feel a need to defend or justify it, because I’ve always done it. I’m just going to keep doing it.
Ajay Kurian: If anything, an answer like that needs no defense. This is just what living is.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah — living is a good term as a coordinate to start thinking about that. I’m obsessed with Guston now. He comes up basically every time I talk about art.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, he’s one of the greats.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. The title of the Michael Blackwood documentary is A Life Lived, and his monograph is called A Life Spent Painting. There’s a clip of him, standing in his own show, saying something like, you’re trying to stay alive and not die.
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: There’s an established discourse around Guston’s relationship with mortality — I didn’t realize this, but Ross Feld, who had lymphoma, writes about being more sympathetic to Guston after his heresy against — the church — he describes it as the Protestant church of Abstract Expressionism, in his book.
Feld’s friendship with Guston was struck up because Feld liked the Marlborough show that got panned, where Guston debuted his return to figuration — panned as “a Mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum,” which I always loved that headline —
Ajay Kurian: Who the fuck would have a headline like that.
Vijay Masharani: I know it’s just so good.
Feld responded to the work, and — he doesn’t go so far as to say it’s because of this, but he basically says he understood the work and was able to strike up the friendship because he’d just gotten out of the hospital after being treated for lymphoma.
Ajay Kurian: Shit.
Vijay Masharani: I don’t want to say that’s the thesis of the book, but it’s a very important moment. And then there’s Guston’s own relationship with mortality — right after he gets out of the hospital for a heart attack, he goes with Feld to a deli and orders a sandwich with the fattiest cut of beef.
And Feld’s watching him like, dude, you just got out of the hospital for a heart attack because of how you eat — are you really going to do that? And Guston’s like, yeah, I’m going to eat the fucking fatty sandwich.
Ajay Kurian: I don’t know how I feel about that.
Vijay Masharani: It’s intense. I’ve been trying to figure out, like, why did Guston ate the sandwich — for him the relationship between painting and eating is super palpable, it comes up multiple times.
Ajay Kurian: Many times.
Vijay Masharani: He describes a Soutine painting he loves at the Yale Art Gallery as “engorged” — it’s like Soutine ate the whole house. And when Guston talked about the Klan paintings, he said he wanted them doing regular things, eating burgers, drinking beer. There’s this constant recourse to eating in Guston. And then Feld, as someone who likely wasn’t able to eat much, describes himself as quite emaciated after cancer.
So there are these poles — Guston, the big guy who’d talk about what he gets out of painting that he can’t get out of drawing, which is mass, obviously, which is just true, and interesting to think about with him specifically because he’s basically the best at mass. There are these poles to becoming attenuated to becoming almost a shell, or almost a shadow… Being bloated, and having mass, and eating paint that are really active in the Feld-Guston relationship.
Ajay Kurian: Like a yin-yang pairing.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I love that book, it really resonated with me.
Ajay Kurian: Is there any artist or body of work whose meaning shifted for you the way Feld re-identified with Guston after his own near-death experience? Did your near death give you “oh my God, now I finally get this?”
Vijay Masharani: The first correction I’d make is I wouldn’t call it a near-death experience — even though that might technically be what it is — because, unfortunately, that puts it too far in the past.
I won’t be cured for another four years. I’m actually in a kind of latency, or purgatory, because of how high my relapse risk is. It’s not like I went through this thing hat’s over.
Ajay Kurian: Right, right.
Vijay Masharani: So I’m looking at work currently from the vista of purgatory — of getting a blood test every month. It’s essentially a binary cancer test. If it’s zero, you’re chill. If it’s anything above zero, you’re basically fucked.
So, that is a constant lens mediating all of experience definitely , including every artwork, especially my own. So with something that prismatic, it’s tough to give a really specific answer. Which is unsatisfying but I’d say it comes back to impatience in the studio practice.
In terms of artwork I was drawn to after being in this interval, I wasn’t super into painting before, and now I can’t get enough of it — especially modernism.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, that’s wild to me.
Vijay Masharani: I think there’s a way I agree with T.J. Clark’s hypothesis that modernism, being more temporally proximate to the present, is actually extremely unrecognizable to us — there’s an argument “we understand the ancients better than we understand modernism, even though we have video clips, prints, all of that.”
For Clark it’s really about a relationship to socialism that’s difficult for us to recognize now. I’d offer that a relationship to illness, it’s not something that’s a headline when you teach undergrads modernism, though it has this relationship to perception, mediated by a sense of individual, but also, social convalescence.
Once you start seeing it a little bit— like de Chirico, for example, finding metaphysical painting right after getting out of the hospital, sitting in a city plaza with everything feeling liquid — there are a lot more comments like that in the tradition. I’m like, is there a way that this just is modernism?
Ajay Kurian: Has anybody written a book about that?
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, here’s stuff, I wouldn’t say there’s one book — I’m not the first to notice a pattern like this. There’s scholarship, though I feel it could be pushed further. Andrew Stock sent me a paper on late style as proto-disability studies. There are comments like that scattered around.
Ajay Kurian: It’s interesting to think about modernism’s relationship to illness and that being maybe constitutive of how we see it, in a purer way.
Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly.
A lot of times when people talk about that relationship, they mean psychological illness — there’s a lot “madness and modernity” as a book. John MacGregor’s The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, the relationship between the asylum and surrealism, all of that.
I’m more interested in the fact that it was an intestinal illness for de Chirico. Nietzsche is the classic guy who had both — and de Chirico famously said something like, “I’m the only one who ever understood Nietzsche.”
Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*
Vijay Masharani: Even the monograph I learned that from doesn’t really dwell on the fact that they shared being ailing — it’s treated as a biographical resonance and then it stops there. There’s a lot of writing about it in relation to Nietzsche and in relation to Proust. So through the study of those figures it’s definitely an active discourse. There is a way I think it can be pushed more, and updated. I don’t know.
Ajay Kurian: Maybe clarified into a sharper distillation. But yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully imagine what it feels like to live in that kind of binary purgatory, checking a blood test every month.
Vijay Masharani: It sucks, dude. I wouldn’t choose it.
Ajay Kurian: I’m glad you’re here. I’m really glad to see your work, glad to see it at PS1, I hope I see it in a lot more places. Even when we first met I was like, Jesus Christ, this kid is bright.
Vijay Masharani: *Laughs* Thanks man.
Ajay Kurian: It’s always awesome to talk to you, and I want to thank you for doing this, for spending the time.
Vijay Masharani: Thanks, bro. It was fun — my first podcast appearance.
Ajay Kurian: Ayo!
Vijay Masharani: All right, are we wrapped?
Ajay Kurian: That’s it, man.


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Screenwriter Ed Solomon discusses The Christophers and reflects on his career and creative process. Solomon discusses mentorship, writing intuitively, working with actors, navigating criticism, and finding a way through creative blocks.

Hosted by Ajay Kurian

00:00 — Welcome to The Forum
00:18 — Garry Shandling
02:34 — Writing The Christophers
04:05 — Trusting the writing process
06:37 — When success gets in the way
08:37 — Letting the project evolve
10:08 — The four stages of competence
12:24 — Letting characters surprise you
15:04 — Writing for great actors
17:35 — Rehearsing with Ian McKellen
18:47 — The power of silence
20:19 — How scenes change each other
23:10 — The terror of letting go
25:28 — Finding the flow state
26:17 — Inspiration is bullshit
28:51 — When Lori became his mirror
34:17 — Give your characters a history
35:48 — Cultural tension in storytelling
38:08 — The pain of criticism
40:16 — How to take notes
43:34 — Managing creative emotions
46:28 — His mother’s influence
49:55 — The importance of mentorship
52:41 — Audience Q&A
52:59 — Getting through the second act
54:17 — Getting unstuck
55:00 — Working backwards
56:00 — What would be the coolest thing to happen next?
58:38 — Closing


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Three artists reflect on their experiences working as assistants to established artists. Ian Cheng, Darren Bader, and Jamian Juliano-Villani discuss apprenticeship, authorship, studio culture, and the lessons—both practical and personal—they carried into their own practices.
00:00 — Introduction02:36 — Becoming Assistants04:10 — The Studio as Education07:37 — Learning the Craft09:13 — Building the Impossible10:54 — Authorship14:54 — Power & Studio Culture18:37 — Learning Through Failure22:50 — Good & Bad Habits30:23 — Assistants as Teachers34:30 — Knowing When to Leave40:12 — Assistants & Authorship42:03 — Learning the Business45:28 — Art & Precarity47:42 — Why Do It?

00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: Next to me here is Ian Chang. He’s an artist known for his live simulations, works that unfold over time using game engines and AI. His work has been shown at the Serpentine Galleries, MoMA PS1, Gladstone Gallery, and earlier in his career, he worked with Pierre Huyghe, which I think informs, uh, some of the ways that Ian had started to think about his work. But I’m curious to see what that relationship was. Pierre is an internationally renowned artist and has worked in massive ecosystems, taking over entire museum spaces and building things from bacteria to, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff. Um, going down the line. Next is Darren Bader. Darren is an artist whose work spans objects, language, and instructions, often questioning what an artwork even is or who it belongs to. He’s exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Uh, sorry, the Museum of Modern Art in Dallas and his practice consistently unsettles ideas of authorship, making him especially interesting voice here. And he worked for the artist Urs Fischer. Um, you mentioned another artist you worked.
00:01:11 Darren Bader: For, Donald Bachelor, whom, um, the late Donald Bachelor whose estate I work for now, but he’s um. Well, yeah.
00:01:19 Ajay Kurian: We’ll get there.
00:01:19 Darren Bader: I did, yes, I did my time with two artists, um, very, very educational.
00:01:25 Ajay Kurian: And last but not least, Jamie and Juliano-villani is a painter whose work moves quickly between images, cartoons, art history, and the internet, held together by a sharp, instinctive sense of composition. She’s shown with Gagosian, Jeffrey Deitch, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. And earlier in her career she worked for Dana Schutz as well as the painter Eric Parker. So, uh, that’s actually how me and Jamie met Eric. Studio and Banks’ studio were right next to each other, and we were both assisting these artists. And yeah, Damien was just like, yeah, she, she was just in a little room and we were all just working away. So everybody give it up for all these, all the artists here. All right. Who wants to go first? No. Um, what I’m curious about is, uh, in the studios that I mentioned that you all worked for, were those studios that you sought out yourself or was it just a job? Yeah.
00:02:36 Ian Cheng: Um, yeah, I was in grad school at the time at Columbia, and I was, um, had a terrible time there. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. Um, I really just sat in my studio checking my email, getting no email and just, uh, just looking at the wall, waiting for the next crit to happen with nothing to say. And at the end of those two years of grad school, um, the one positive relationship I had was with, uh, Liam Gillick, who was like a kind of visiting professor. And I was like, what am I gonna do with my life? I’m gonna, I’m gonna apply as a UX designer to Google New York because I just need some totally no response rejection. And I thought, what else could I do? And I said, Liam, you know, can you hook me up with PR wigs, email? Like, I’d love to. I’ll be his dream printer. I literally pitched myself, I’ll be his dream. I can just like make anything. Um, and Liam was like, I’ll get back to you. And he gets back to me. He’s like, he used the words Pierre offers you his email, which was kind of interesting way to not like do the CC connection, but just to like, just take it from here, kid. Uh, email Pierre like pitched him like, you know, had a, had a quick meeting like, oh, I didn’t have no, had no credentials. Um, and simultaneously I thought, oh, fuck, like I need another job too. So I went to like Paul Chan’s website. Wow. Um, national philistine and just like emailed him like, hey, hi. I think like we have a lot in common. Like, can we meet? And so the next week, I met with both of them. And suddenly I had two artists kind of assistant jobs. Oh, wow. And yeah, it really kind of really began their shoot.
00:04:07 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really good taste too, you know?
00:04:09 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Those are great artists.
00:04:10 Ian Cheng: Well, how’s it go with people that you respect? I just thought like, oh, grad school is so bad. I didn’t respect anyone that came through. I should go to somewhere where I can speak a lot about this. Like, uh, it was the best school. Those two were like being effectively an apprentice and seeing how they lived life, like what they had for breakfast, what time they woke up, how they said no to people, how they protected their mornings was better school than school.
00:04:34 Ajay Kurian: Totally agree. Totally agree. Darren. Was it a job or was it a college?
00:04:39 Darren Bader: No no no no it was I mean, it was certainly a job insofar as you you lack the freedom that you, you um would prefer at many, many moment. But uh, no, it was a extraordinarily educational, especially with, with ers in particular. He is a real force of nature. Uh, and so, I mean, he’s just, he’s a presence. He, he’s. Always, he, he’s one of these people who, if you look at his work, you may say he’s phoning it in at times. There are also many, many, many times when he’s just creating very compelling work. But he’s he lives and breathes art every minute of the day. And, uh, it was just a very compelling environment to work in. Uh, it wasn’t always easy. I learned a ton. Um, much like what Ian said, you know, you learn about the routines, but it’s more about the relationships and how an artist can exercise power. I don’t mean that in any sort of, you know, um, manipulative or abusive way. Um, it’s just he, he was also very good at it. He if anyone I don’t Urs Fischer is physically also quite an imposing presence. He’s not Pierre um not or he’s he’s I mean he’s he’s he’s maybe five ten, but he’s very big. Uh, he’s very muscular. He’s covered in tattoos, deep voice, piercing gray eyes. Um, and so that’s a whole nother thing. And he makes these, this, this very fanciful at times and very tender art. So it’s a, but I learned so much just to just watching him operate. And then when he would let you in.
00:06:29 Ajay Kurian: Right.
00:06:30 Darren Bader: And he would say, hey, come over here. I want to talk about this work with you. What do you think of this? You’re like, okay, I’ll give my two cents. He’s like, oh, thank you. Fuck off. But he’s also but you know, he’s listening the entire time, right? He’s taking all this new account and he, he understands what it takes to make an artwork, which is not infrequently, uh, you know, no artwork in Ireland. It really does require a lot of hands on, you know, hands on deck and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t.
00:07:00 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, if anyone’s interested, there’s a good interview that Rick Rubin did with Urs Fischer.
00:07:06 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really?
00:07:07 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It’s long and sprawling, and, um.
00:07:12 Darren Bader: There’s some moments.
00:07:13 Ajay Kurian: Tetragrammaton.
00:07:14 Darren Bader: This is.
00:07:15 Ajay Kurian: A weird plug for another podcast.
00:07:17 Darren Bader: With Urs is also very, very bright. But he does he he’s not he. You wouldn’t know it until you meet him. And he’s extremely versatile. He’s able to jump around from topic to topic and we’ll get to that at some point perhaps. Yeah.
00:07:34 Ajay Kurian: Tell us about tell us about your time.
00:07:37 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I remember.
00:07:37 Ajay Kurian: And Eric.
00:07:38 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I, it was funny, I as a painter at the time, I never painted anything that wasn’t on a desk, so I actually just lied. I did not know how to paint at all. And I showed up and I was such a nervous wreck and he knew I did not know what the hell I was doing. And, you know, I think I got fired like twice in like a week. And then, uh, I think he felt bad for me. And then I really learned really quickly. So, um, yeah. And working for Dana too, I mean, working for painters is such a weird thing because you can’t really interrupt them when they’re doing their thing. It’s like someone like breathing or fucking or, you know, you’re like, hi, you know, you just gotta like leave them alone. Then when they’re done, you’re like, okay, maybe I can assist, you know? Um, but yeah, it was really strange. Just like, um, it’s such an intimate thing to help someone with, you know, I don’t know if, if you guys have ever seen anyone make a drawing, but can you imagine like getting in the middle of the drawing and trying to help? So I did that for people exclusively for years. So I’m just very annoying. But yeah.
00:08:42 Ajay Kurian: It was, it is very different, like the, the experience of working for a multimedia artist versus someone who has like a craft of painting is really different. And like the skill sets are really different.
00:08:55 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I remember I would see Ajay at work and it looked like someone just got murdered. Like he was just like, he would look so drained and exhausted and like lunch break because I don’t know what you guys were making over there.
00:09:06 Ajay Kurian: We were making a lot of things.
00:09:08 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Um, I’ve never seen anyone so stressed out from a job, honestly. No offense.
00:09:13 Ajay Kurian: Well, I was more stressed before I worked at Gladstone right before that. And that was definitely more stressful than working for, for an artist. Um, but, you know, banks is the kind of artist who, uh, when you look at it, everything looks really shiny, super fabricated, and it looks like everything has been shipped out to some faraway place to get made and then sent somewhere. We made everything in the studio. And what that meant is like, um, you know, when he didn’t know how to do something like he wanted, he wanted a wall of mirrors that broke itself. Uh, so the mirrors would just shatter. And of course he didn’t know how to do that. And so it was like, okay, well, we need to learn about hydraulics. So he just buy a shit ton of hydraulics. And then it would just be like, the studio would just be filled with oil everywhere because he didn’t know what he was doing. And then we’d start welding things together, trying to see if we can break a mirror. If you’ve ever tried to, um, you know, like with a can, like if you have a soda can, it’s really easy to crumple this way. But if you took your hand and tried to crumple the can that way, it’s very, very hard. That’s the problem with trying to break a mirror from the sides. So all of these engineering problems, things like that, that’s what we’re here to sort of figure out with him and how that process like gets started. He wanted to make things out of aluminum. And so he built a foundry. And I mean, it was totally illegal, but like we had a foundry and we were pouring metal all day long. So yeah, you might have seen me after pouring a ton of metal and just feeling like I may not have eyebrows anymore.
00:10:51 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. Yeah.
00:10:54 Ajay Kurian: But what’s, um. I mean, let’s say like, there’s walking through the doors, there’s walking through the doors and like starting your job and then there’s leaving, like, what were the, how did you feel about authorship in the middle of it? How did you feel about you contributing? Like, did peer did ers? Did they make you feel like, um, that you were all in this together or did they make you feel like, all right, well, this is what I’m doing. This is what I need done.
00:11:24 Ian Cheng: Definitely. This is what I need need to get done. Um, but with Pierre, he was so interesting working for him because he was constantly. What I respect about him is he just kept reinventing of what he was doing as an amateur. So when I started working for him, he had this idea that he really wanted to make aquariums. And it’s like not an easy thing. And not only do you want to make aquariums, he wanted them to combine like, like animals that didn’t live in the same ecosystem. Same kind of water. He just wanted to make it work. And we hired an aquarium company. And they, like there were so many moments at the aquarium company where like, you just can’t do that. And it fell on me to research how you kind of do it. And so we figured it out, figured it out, figured it out. It kind of like all the clearest memory I have was like, freeze. I think it was twenty ten.
00:12:07 Ajay Kurian: He had an art fair. For those who don’t know.
00:12:10 Ian Cheng: He had a special project there where he was gonna do an aquarium of, um, a hermit crab inside of a shell. He’s like, his shell is a Brancusi like head reproduction. So super beautiful idea, this Brancusi sculpture kind of walking amongst the the rocks. And then you see it’s this crab that’s inhabiting it. And so I had to figure out, because the aquarium people couldn’t figure out how to get this crab to live in this sculpture. And it turns out like hermit crabs, their, their, their butts are very sensitive. And that’s why they like, hide it. They’re hermits for that. Um, and we tried all these different techniques and it fell on me like, I think ten days before we just ship out where I just went like, fuck, we, I gotta go to Chinatown. I gotta buy ten conch shells, you know, conch, like these giant snails boiled them in his rice cooker. I ate them and then cleaned it out and like stuck that the idea was to stick that into the enclosure, the the the, the shell of the interior of the sculpture. So secretly it’s a real shell inside. And the hermit crabs were like, so happy. I was like, oh, I finally slept in like two weeks. Um, and so like these little puzzles were, I mean, I have strong memories of them. Um, but yeah, I mean, those are the, that’s pretty brilliant. Like not authorship level, but like engineering like this was really fun. Yeah.
00:13:24 Ajay Kurian: That’s. Yeah. Oh, I always wondered how that sculpture came together.
00:13:29 Ian Cheng: It’s pretty cool. Chinatown conch.
00:13:30 Ajay Kurian: Shells. Do you feel I mean, you said you don’t have a sense of authorship to it, but, um.
00:13:40 Ian Cheng: And I wouldn’t want it either. I mean, I felt I learned so much by being able to not have the pressure of any authorship. I could just sort of absorb by osmosis, be, you know, sometimes I would write an email and try to write it in his style and like so enjoyable, so freeing to just mimic someone. I think that’s the best way to learn. And that was for me, the best way to learn just to be this mimetic thing. And then, you know, I, I would have to go to like another memory just briefly is going to reinstall that same work a year later in Miami Basel. And it’s like the air conditioners were broken. It was like one hundred twenty degrees inside this convention center. And he wasn’t there. I was there on remote installing.
00:14:18 Ajay Kurian: Oh boy.
00:14:19 Ian Cheng: Fucking Marian Goodman, like, God bless her. She comes up to me in the middle of like, trying to put the rock here and the crab here and get everything working. She’s like, you respect that animal you respect. I do not like how you’re handling this. And you all have Pierre on the phone saying like, no, the rock has to go this way. And then Marion yelling at me for the rock kind of endangering this crab.
00:14:38 Ajay Kurian: Marion is, uh, was Pierre’s gallerist. Uh, she passed away at a hundred in.
00:14:44 Darren Bader: Late nineties.
00:14:45 Ajay Kurian: Late nineties. Okay. Um, but one of the great gallerists of of the world. Really?
00:14:50 Darren Bader: Absolutely.
00:14:51 Ajay Kurian: Um, any, any similar memories? Darren.
00:14:54 Darren Bader: No, no, it was, it was a different relationship. I mean, with your lead question. Uh, it was more of this kind of communal effort. He was he, I, I assume he still is to some extent, although he has a smaller crew now. Um, he, he nurtured this environment. He was certainly, you know, at the top of the food chain as well as, you know, it was very patriarchal, let’s say, yet it was. So he has a very he has a generous streak and he, he knows how to get people to do things and make them feel included. Mhm. Without it being this, this, this very stark line between I am the author. You are, you know, the the worker. Yeah. The subordinate, the clear subordinate, you know, And yet, of course, he was clearly the author through and through. Yet I see he does have this unique, if not unique. You know, he does have this ability, this capacity, this, this, um, you know, uh, propensity to just manage. He’s a good emotional manager.
00:16:01 Ajay Kurian: Was it almost like a like lead singer of a band kind of thing?
00:16:05 Darren Bader: Well, I mean, which band? You know.
00:16:06 Ajay Kurian: Some.
00:16:08 Darren Bader: I don’t know. I don’t I wouldn’t say that, uh, more more like, you know, Don Henley on drums. Uh, but, uh, I, I, it, it was just this unique experience. I also started later, uh, I mean, I had already done a number of art jobs and, um, basically I was looking for work as when a job would come to a close. Not just, just, it just ended. There was no understood that it was, it was, uh, finite. And I hit him up because we’d worked together, I met him when he did a show at Gavin Brown twenty two thousand and five, where I worked for Gavin part time then, and he was just approachable. We were able to talk about arthouse films and I asked him, can you want to be in the group show? The first group show I curated a show I created, and he was like, sure. Like, I had seen a piece of his in a book and he was just like, he was open to things. And so I think he appreciated my openness and invited me to be part of things. And I was there kind of at this, this, um, you know, uh, inflection point where moment where it was right as he was rising to these great heights. So I kind of got to go. He was swimming in cash because the art market was very, um, healthy then. And all the galleries he had worked with from a very young age, um, we’re doing extraordinarily well. And he was extraordinarily good at, um, making art and exhibition. So it was just this wonderful journey from he just basically took me under his wing. And it’s a very it was more personal in a way less task based. He just kind of liked having me around. And I, I could not be more, um, you know, grateful for that opportunity three, three years. And he basically and he kicked me out. He’s like, you’re doing well. You’re not focused. Get the hell out of here. I’m like, all right, I’m done. But we’re still friends.
00:18:16 Ajay Kurian: That’s good, that’s good. I’m glad it’s on good terms.
00:18:18 Speaker 5: It’s on good terms.
00:18:19 Ajay Kurian: Jamie. And for you, it’s because there is more like craft and skill. I mean, even though you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing in the beginning, you clearly learned and like that relationship over time. Did it feel like. Did it feel different? Does it feel like you were, um.
00:18:37 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I felt like I was growing with the people I was working for. Yeah. Which is really nice, you know, because you can just come in and then there’s like, you know, obviously everyone that you work for, you always have to placate to the maestro complex. That’s what we always call it maestro complex. It’s like they’re the boss, you know? Um, so there’s always that, but, um, I was, I felt like I was growing with the people I was working with because they could see me learning stuff in real time and getting stressed out and fumbling and messing up. Like I’ve worked for many artists. And I remember this one artist wanted me to prep these canvases a certain way, and I’m used to just gessoed canvases. You know, you paint the thing white, it dries, you do it a couple more times, you sand it, you’re good to go. You have your surface. This guy was so OCD. He wanted me to get like, um, I was like, you know, gesso on like the palette knife. And then you got to like scrape it on and you have to do it for like hours and hours and hours until the thing looks like glass. And I did it for like four different canvases. And then I realized I did them all backwards and I was like, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I’d do the whole thing again. I mean, I would never put my canvases like that. Why would you make anyone do that? I don’t know, it’s like, you know, um, but like, you know, there’s all these learning curves and like, I feel like when you are fucking up, they sympathize with you because they see that you’re really trying and they’re trying to, they’re trying to beat a new skill into you, you know, and you have that skill for the rest of your life. But does that make sense?
00:19:57 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, yeah. For sure.
00:19:59 Jamian Juliano-Villani : You know, and like, they, they kind of want to I mean, like I said, I’ve been fired from jobs like a million times. I’ve, you know, I’ve worked for other artists where I worked at, uh, Kremer pigments, which is closed, but I worked at the pigment store. So I learned how to make paint from scratch for people like I’ve done all the stuff. So like, you know, you learn all these skills as you go. And I think people really enjoy teaching you their way. You know, like my one, my one boss, Eric, um, he was a painter. He’s a painter. He, you know, like, see that table over there with all the glasses and stuff? Each one would have the most, like, esoteric name that you would never think of, like Rip Van Winkle and like neon cookie puss and like, you know, just like, you know, and each painting would have, like, I don’t know, like one hundred and twenty colors and all some stupid ass name and I have to memorize all of them. And, you know, just learning things like that. Like, you know, not everyone works like that, but that’s how he worked. So I would that became part of my habit, like working, working, you know. Um, does that make sense?
00:20:57 Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:20:58 Jamian Juliano-Villani : So everyone has a different method of working and they, I feel like, I mean, when, even when, you know, I’m a artist and when I hire people, I’d kind of put them through the ringer.
00:21:07 Speaker 5: Oh my God.
00:21:07 Ajay Kurian: Does she.
00:21:08 Speaker 5: Ever.
00:21:08 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. No. I’m surprised. Like I’ve not been cancelled yet. Straight up. But, um, I really do enjoy putting people through the ringer too, because I was put through the conceptual meat grinder as well. And I also feel like it’s good practice. Maybe I’m crazy, I don’t know.
00:21:24 Ajay Kurian: Jamian is crazy.
00:21:25 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. But yeah.
00:21:26 Ajay Kurian: I for context, um, the first time I ever took acid, I went Jamian took care of me for a portion of that, and I went to her studio and, um, initially I thought she was taking care of me. Um, she gave me a pillow, she gave me some gummy worms, and I was just chilling on the floor because I was like, there’s too many things happening. And then all of a sudden I start hearing like, jungle sounds, and then the jungle sounds have other music on top of that. And then I start hearing monologues from The King’s Speech and I’m losing my fucking mind. And I’m finally like, what is going on? And she’s cackling in laughter.
00:22:10 Speaker 5: And then.
00:22:11 Jamian Juliano-Villani : What he needed, you.
00:22:11 Speaker 5: Know.
00:22:13 Jamian Juliano-Villani : You don’t put on like a monologue from The King’s Speech when your friend’s like, tripping balls. I don’t know, eat some gummy worms, sit on the floor, let me put on the projector and put on a horrifying speech. Yeah.
00:22:24 Ajay Kurian: And then I asked her to turn that off. And finally she was like, she put on Frank ocean. She’s like, you like this shit, right? And that was. So just to say that Damien has a lot of idiosyncratic working methods that, um, not every artist has, but she works nonstop. Like there’s, there’s never, there’s never rest. Like you are an artist every day.
00:22:48 Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:22:50 Ajay Kurian: With habits though, that’s like another thing that I feel like is a really important thing that we learn from artists, good and bad.
00:22:57 Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:22:57 Ajay Kurian: So for instance, um, when I worked for banks, banks is very open about his past with drugs. Um, I had a conversation with him about it that you can watch. Um, when I got to the studio, I was the only one who didn’t do drugs and there were deliveries of drugs to the studio. And so just seeing the habits of that studio and how they work, like they would work till four or five in the morning. And if you’re not doing cocaine, that’s very difficult. Um, and so I would just go home at like two because that’s as much as I could do.
00:23:31 Jamian Juliano-Villani : That’s why you were so tired.
00:23:32 Speaker 5: Yeah. No shit.
00:23:35 Ajay Kurian: I was working on a reasonably normal schedule, but that was, um. You know, that was one of the bad habits. Whereas, uh, for, on the flip side, a good habit is banks was eternally curious. Like, if you didn’t know how to make something, he would figure it out. And we were all autodidacts in that way. Like you, you have to just keep learning what you don’t know. What are the habits good and bad that you guys learned?
00:24:00 Ian Cheng: Um, well, both Paul Chan and Pierre didn’t want me around until like eleven o’clock, eleven thirty. Oh, and it was because they wanted to protect their morning and they wanted they just couldn’t work when everyone was around. They were just reacting to people when like, can you answer this email? What do you think of this decision? And so they protected their mornings. And I mean, selfishly, that was the time where I really began and grew as an artist because I had my mornings, which were so precious. So that was a really good habit with Paul. Like he really knows how to say no to people on email, on phone calls, just I really learned that like, sometimes it’s n o send, it’s like you’re saying two, like you just say less, you know?
00:24:39 Speaker 5: Wow.
00:24:39 Ian Cheng: Just say no. Just say no.
00:24:41 Ajay Kurian: I gotta get better at it.
00:24:42 Ian Cheng: It was really cool.
00:24:44 Speaker 5: Um, yeah.
00:24:46 Ian Cheng: And sometimes, you know, you don’t, you know, like it’s, you know, have you guys seen like, J. Mail the Jeffrey Epstein interface with all the emails? What’s so cool is when you browse that you see his like crazy punctuation. And it was like a, you know, he will do like five commas in equal signs. And you’re like, he’s talking like a head of state or something. And you’re like, oh, it’s like he, he has like, it’s a, it’s a sign of status. Like he can just fire one off like that. Wow. Um, and.
00:25:11 Ajay Kurian: Now I don’t want to.
00:25:12 Ian Cheng: Do that. No, no. I mean, there’s this whole email world of like, yeah, how you play email?
00:25:17 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. No, I get that. I get that, that there is like a.
00:25:19 Ian Cheng: I don’t know if it’s good or bad habit, but it was definitely a habit.
00:25:22 Ajay Kurian: Right, right, right. Establishing almost like the relationships of power to.
00:25:26 Ian Cheng: Just like the punctuation or lack of it.
00:25:29 Speaker 5: Huh. Oh, there’s one for you.
00:25:32 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I was like, chain. We all were chain smoking, which is like I quit smoking a year ago. Thank you everyone. But it was like a cloud of smoke in that one studio. It was insane. Like, it was like the best and worst moments of my life, you know? But, um. Yeah, it was just like, you know, paint, smoke, paint, smoke for like hours on end. So I don’t know. Now it’s really hard for me to paint because I’m, I link it up with smoking so much, which is like really kind of lame, but it’s true. But, um.
00:26:11 Speaker 5: So do you.
00:26:11 Ajay Kurian: Have like.
00:26:12 Speaker 5: A.
00:26:12 Ajay Kurian: Do you just keep something in your hand now?
00:26:14 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. Another paintbrush. But at some point it was just like frankincense, you know? Um, uh, and then at one point I was like, maybe if I just hold incense and it didn’t do the same thing, but, um, yeah, no, it’s like we all were smoking and we all were listening to music so loud. Now I can’t hear anything, so I don’t know. I mean, like you were saying, like, there’s so many bad habits to that you can have. Like when you’re in a studio, it’s like, kind of like if you’re a runner, you know, you wake up every morning, you start running. You know, I’d wake up every morning, have a cup of coffee and buy a pack of cigarettes, chain smoke, and just paint all day long. So now, you know, doing that, like healthy, what am I supposed to do, hold an orange? Like I don’t really, but I may have to. Um, I smart.
00:27:02 Speaker 5: So.
00:27:03 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Smart.
00:27:04 Speaker 6: Yeah. Cigarette for instance.
00:27:05 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Totally. Have you guys seen that bubble cigarette? No. Oh, my God, it’s like a vape cigarette. That’s like a bubbles come out. Yeah, I may need that thing. If anyone knows, my address is three Stillery Road, Lebanon, new Jersey, zero eight eight eight three three seventy one. No, I’m just kidding, but, uh, that I may have to take it to the next level. So.
00:27:26 Ajay Kurian: Darren, any, any good habits? Bad habits?
00:27:28 Darren Bader: No.
00:27:29 Ajay Kurian: Oh. Sending the email? Yeah.
00:27:32 Darren Bader: Um, no. I mean, I just think, uh, you just you you learn where. I mean, I never had any full time assistants as an artist, but, uh, I learned that it’s what was, was very good at. Not always, but letting reminding his assistants that they were people, you know, they weren’t merely help. Sure, there are moments like, I’m paying you fucking get to fucking. We have a deadline. You’re working your ass off right now. Yes, I procrastinated, I will not admit to that for one second. We’re all burning the midnight oil and there will be no cocaine. But you know, you can. You can drink if you’d like. Um. And he would chain smoke to the guy. Can’t quit smoking. But, um, I it’s just just understanding boundaries, understanding, you know, I mean, it’s it’s just like any relationship. Sure. There’s certainly a power structure, um, uh, a power differential differential, but it’s just good and bad habits. I mean, art’s good and a bad habit. What are you going to do? It’s like this because once you get, you get you just can’t. Yeah. And you saw it consuming him. Um, even when he was a new you know, he had his, my first year, about a year in, he had his first child. And even seeing him wrestle with that, you know, because he had these, he had this major, major show at the new museum. He had three floors.
00:29:05 Speaker 6: Um, wow.
00:29:06 Darren Bader: Yeah. I mean, actually for, I suppose he, I think he had the lobby too, but, you know, it was just learning how to manage a career alongside life. And, you know, that’s just anyone’s good and bad. And I don’t think there was any, any, any kind of salient bad, uh, short of, you know, there are moments when we all go too far right and we can’t. We forget to press stop or pause and. And I don’t mean that that’s not you euphemizing anything. It’s just, you know. Yeah. It happens. There are deadlines and we must deal with them. And why was there waiting around for three weeks to work on the catalog that I was assigned to work on? Well, because he didn’t want to deal with it for three weeks. That’s on him. I’m still getting paid. But then I burn the midnight oil and it’s totally fine. It’s a great education. Um, and I think I find that’s all. I’m sure it’s the same for most any industry. It’s all any industry is. You just learn constantly. You’re reminded of things and then you, you, you’re taken aback because there’s some twist you could never have predicted. And there it is. So it’s just an education, always neither good nor bad. I mean, certainly plenty of good. But you know what I mean. There’s, there’s a.
00:30:20 Ajay Kurian: It’s, it’s sort of value neutral.
00:30:22 Darren Bader: Exactly. Yeah.
00:30:23 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the speaking to like feeling like you’re all included and that like you’re all valued in that way. That was something that banks did very well too. Like it was, uh, I remember a gallery that he was working with. I was liaising with them. And so, um, the gallery director was just being so rude to me, like horribly rude.
00:30:50 Speaker 6: Impossible.
00:30:51 Ajay Kurian: It was, it was impossible. Impossible. Exactly. Um, and it was, it was making my job harder. Like it was just harder to get things done. It was harder to liaise back and forth. And finally I had to bring it up to banks. I was like, I look, I’m not trying to make a stink about this, but like, this is making things very, very difficult. And he got on the phone in like two seconds and chewed them the fuck out where he was like, you will treat everybody as if they are me. Like anybody that works for me needs to be treated as if that’s like, we’re all the same. This is my studio and everyone’s going to be respected that way. And it really set a tone where it’s like, oh, we’re not subordinates. We’re not like people that are just getting this job done. Like we are the Banks Violette Studio. And when we like it felt like we felt like a band, kind of like when we’d go places, it was like we felt cool, you know, like it was, uh, it was a cool thing to feel like, oh yeah, this is our show. Like, of course it’s Banks’s vision. And of course, no one’s trying to take credit for that either. But yeah, we did that shit. It’s like it’s not easy to do. And, um, when an artist sets those grounds, it’s like you’re excited to do those things because like, you can, you can build this together and you can share ideas and, um, and it doesn’t feel like, I don’t know, I think sometimes people think that there’s this immediate exploitative thing about artists and assistants and that, oh, they’re getting all the credit while they’re doing all the hard work. It’s not that simple. It’s just never that simple. The worlds that we inhabit. Like, so this the movie, um, you know, Michaela, in the beginning, she’s she’s purportedly his assistant. Um, she’s actually there to forge his paintings. And, um, she’s employed by his two kids who are trying to get their nest egg because they burn through their money. So, um, she goes in and that’s, that’s the job that she’s meant to do. And then she fesses up to that’s what she’s doing. And then the relationship switches again, where in a sense, she’s almost telling him about himself. Like he starts learning from her. He, he, she becomes his mirror. So like, I think maybe my final question before we open it up is, did you ever feel like you were teaching them? Did you feel like there was a way that, uh, all of a sudden like, oh, okay. Uh, let me, let me tell you what I know now.
00:33:29 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. For sure. I mean, even just like bringing in some, you know, because every artist is kind of set in their habits. Like that’s how they make their work and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, I remember one time I brought in like a, like a digital projector and everyone’s mind was blown like, oh my God, you know, it’s like, we don’t have to use like this vis a vis marker over the fucking, you know, and, uh, that changed the game. And then another time I brought in an airbrush and everyone was like, I was like, you know, you ever see that Maxell ad where the guy’s in the chair like this? That’s what happened. You know, everyone was like, you know, so really like, you know, shook things up. So, um, but yeah, I think it’s really exciting when that happens too. But I remember those were two instances where, you know, like the whole trajectory of like how we’ve been working the whole time for like years was just like, completely like, like a giant bone in the spoke, you know? Um, and it was really exciting because everyone was looking like a fool together with these new tools. Yeah.
00:34:24 Ian Cheng: Yeah, I think I made Paul and Pierre install slack.
00:34:29 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Oh my.
00:34:30 Ian Cheng: God. I’m like, it’s so lame. But but it’s not because it’s like, oh, we don’t have to do every single thing as an email, right? Imagine how psychotic. I mean, it’s hard to imagine now, but it was just everything was in email. Yeah. Maybe the other thing was on the way out with Pierre. I started to not slack, but like my attention started to drift. I had to like, I took more and more time off. And at one point we just sat down together and he was like, what’s going on? Like, this is not working and this part’s not good. And like, you fucked up on that aquarium in Miami. Marion was mad about the the crab. And I just I said this thing, I read this thing recently about someone had like reorganized, I think a guy called Tim Urban had reorganized a person’s lifetime in terms of weeks.
00:35:13 Ajay Kurian: Oh, yeah.
00:35:14 Ian Cheng: It was like a, it was like a calendar with just the weeks that you’re alive, if you’re roughly like die at seventy or eighty. And then you can also get one with days and it was like twenty seven thousand days. You’re alive. Jesus. And when I saw that, I’m like, Pierre was having this intense conversation. And in that moment, I just, I guess I kind of fired myself. I said, like, uh, I have like, we have twenty seven thousand days. He was, he learned that he was like, holy shit. And, you know, he’s, you know, when he’s older, he’s like, and I already had like, I’m like, I don’t know, like, I don’t know, like, uh, I’m bad at math, but whatever. I’m like ten, twelve thousand days in or something and like, you’re like, way more like, I gotta just, I gotta just love my life. Yeah, yeah. And I think that he really understood when I phrased it that way and what was going wrong. Like he really understood and like, we’re good friends now. We’re good. Still good friends.
00:36:08 Ajay Kurian: That’s crazy. That’s crazy that it it’s just funny that a like a firing. One firing yourself would start with like, Everything is finite. I have to go. It’s a pretty serious conversation to have. Darren, do you have a.
00:36:28 Darren Bader: I forgot.
00:36:29 Speaker 6: The question.
00:36:29 Ajay Kurian: The question? The question was, um, did you did you start teaching us a thing or two?
00:36:35 Darren Bader: I, I may have, but it didn’t it, it was never of any interest to me. I, I just I, I as, as the oldest child in my family, I’m the oldest of three. I’ve, I think I’ve always sought, you know, kind of mentorship and big brothers, older siblings. And so if I taught him anything. Sure. Great. Uh, he, I don’t know if he would let on to it.
00:36:57 Ajay Kurian: Mhm.
00:36:58 Darren Bader: Um, and my other employer, Donald, was twenty two years my senior. So, um, it there was nothing of that. I, it just, I was there to learn, I suppose also to pay bills, but um, um I, I, I, you.
00:37:15 Ajay Kurian: Have like a very mature relationship to it. Like it’s the way you talk about it. It’s like it’s a very fluid relationship, but it’s also.
00:37:21 Darren Bader: one I wasn’t mature. Um, I, I may be mature now, but perhaps arguable, but I, I, it’s just, I think it’s just, just how I’ve, I, I, I, I take orders pretty decently. Doesn’t mean I don’t kind of, you know, uh, uh, yeah. What, what’s the word? Uh, not flinch. You know, there’s a word, uh uh.
00:37:42 Speaker 6: Uh uh.
00:37:42 Darren Bader: Uh, it’s b r it’s a b r word. Uh, in any case, um, Bristol. Bristol, Bristol, Bristol. I do bristle like, constantly. I do not like people telling me what to do, yet I know how to swallow my pride and get things done. Um, I just absorbed what I could, you know, whether it was memetic, as you said, or just, you know, osmosis. I just learned and I just knew I had to get out there and do it if I wanted an art career. And what was the best job I’ve ever had? Um, I didn’t have a great social life at that time because I always had to wake up and I was always. I was also the chauffeur because he. This big guy, is terrified of driving. He still can’t drive. Uh, so I got to drive a seven series. It was.
00:38:30 Ajay Kurian: I remember you coming.
00:38:31 Darren Bader: Around Manhattan like I learned how to drive. Uh, yeah. I got to learn how to drive in New York in a seven series. I’m like, well, it’s smooth. I’m still scared out of my mind. But, um.
00:38:45 Ajay Kurian: Now I remember you coming to my studio in that seven series.
00:38:48 Darren Bader: There we go. Uh, Ditmas Park, huh?
00:38:50 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:38:51 Darren Bader: Um, yeah, it was just. I think I’m just open to learning. I don’t want to be seen in various ways being seen and just, uh, being seen for as a human was enough for me. It still is. You know, I don’t need a pat on the back. I can get a thank you, and I’ll feel like a million bucks.
00:39:13 Ajay Kurian: I want to open it up to questions.
00:39:17 Speaker 7: Thank you. I worked for a famous writer one time, and, uh, I didn’t do any writing for her, but I. I did figure out things that she was hopeless with, like simple math and organizing her income taxes and things like that. But I recall, uh, on a tour through Venice, uh, guides talking about how in, in art schools, uh, for like Tintoretto, I think was mentioned where they would have, uh, assistants who would fill in the secondary figures and things like that. They would complete the master’s work. Was there any of that with, with, uh, your assistantships, did you ever do the corner of, uh, something that the artist was too busy to deal with or was on to the next thing?
00:40:12 Darren Bader: Let me jump in here because it’s, it’s a, it’s analogous, but it’s, it’s, it’s totally different. And so first I was just left at, for instance, at the new museum, it’s like, you know, I’m not going to show up or I don’t want to go to my own. He has some social anxiety. Like, you know, I’m going to arrive at my opening, you know, with ten minutes left, I ended up becoming just this kind of he just kind of like, let’s see what you do, you know, walk. I walked Jerry, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith around a new museum show like it was. I wasn’t told, go do this. I just it was left to me. He’s like, I will upset myself and perhaps you can figure this out. And so in a way, it was I you know, I’m certainly I’m I’m no, I’m no, you know, studio assistant in that, but it is a it is an analog of sorts.
00:41:00 Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
00:41:01 Ajay Kurian: I mean, I mean, that seems like.
00:41:03 Jamian Juliano-Villani : That’s all I did.
00:41:04 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:41:05 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. Cross the T’s and dot the I’s. I was there for that. So um, like literally for hours on per day, just go in and fill stuff in, you know, and like, just assume the role of the artist. Like what, what would blah, blah, blah. Like, and I would just do it for them. So it looked like they finished themselves, you know? So basically, you know, if you even look at my paintings, it’s almost like I don’t have a hand. I’m kind of working with everyone else’s hand. So.
00:41:33 Ajay Kurian: Is there any other questions right there?
00:41:36 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:41:38 Speaker 8: Yeah. Um, I appreciated your comment about, um, learning how to say no effectively. Um, from here, uh, Paul. Paul. Um, I’m wondering more concretely what you learned as an assistant or an apprentice in managing yourselves as artists, like within your business interests and financially.
00:42:03 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Don’t Google yourself at work and let them catch you. It’s the worst. Yeah.
00:42:10 Ian Cheng: Well, I think just in a basic way, like when I went to grad school, you don’t learn any of that, how to manage that side. And when you work for an artist, it’s literally the best. Could you get three? You get the whole thing, all the parts. And so I really am at pains to think of how I would have become an artist without working for artists I like, really respected and were like deep in the game. Um, you learn how they move, like not just in their work, but in the world and through people like you just can’t learn that without just being there and absorbing all the details. And so yeah, um, all the business stuff, you know, Paul’s a pretty savvy guy, pairs very ambitious, you know, huge budgets. You know, I, there’s only, uh, only one way to learn that and just doing it.
00:42:55 Speaker 6: Yeah, I, I concur there that’s, it’s just you’re just there.
00:42:59 Darren Bader: And you just absorb.
00:43:00 Speaker 6: It.
00:43:00 Ian Cheng: And it’s the best. It’s really.
00:43:01 Darren Bader: You’re not even conscious of it. You’re just, I mean, when, when I get, you know, thrown, you know. Kick kicked off the boat, You know, it’s just incredible. What I knew, I mean, I had a lot of hours to fill and I was like, cool, I got to make. What the hell am I doing? There are a lot of hours in a day. Um, but yeah, you just kind of. It’s incredible what you absorb. It really is. It’s it’s it’s it’s yeah.
00:43:28 Ajay Kurian: I mean, also the things that you don’t want to do, uh, banks had back taxes for the last ten years and I had to sort through that.
00:43:38 Speaker 8: Like how external to the art, but foundational to it, finding the resources to run a studio to stage a big exhibition.
00:43:46 Darren Bader: I mean, I had to oversee like this, this he basically hired a, a contractor, basically this, this warehouse got, you know, basically building up, building it up from scratch. He’s like, you, you liaise with the contractor. It’s my first job.
00:44:03 Speaker 6: I’m like.
00:44:04 Darren Bader: Like, okay, I get to drive the seven series down to Red hook and talk to the you know, it was it was crazy, you know. Oh, we need we need an expert. We didn’t he didn’t know what an expediter is either. Did I go find an expediter? Okay, here’s an expediter. We need these permits. Fast, fast, fast. Oh, we’re in violation of of, you know, um, whatever DOB is. Okay, we’ll figure it out.
00:44:29 Speaker 6: It’s who the.
00:44:30 Darren Bader: You just go. You just run with it back. Taxes too? Yep. Been there.
00:44:34 Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
00:44:35 Darren Bader: And, uh, you just go with it, you know, it’s all real. And then it’s incredible moments when it’s like, you know, uh, it’s like, Holy shit. You you understand what? Where the finances are not not that, not that it’s your job to be, you just kind of get it. You’re like, Holy shit, this is very real. And all of a sudden, you know, angel investor, you just don’t know. It’s just like, you know, that one work sells that keeps the entire operation afloat.
00:45:03 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:45:03 Darren Bader: Because so much money was put into this or that project or these, This combination of work and it’s just. And all of a sudden it’s all just hanging by a thread. Truly, truly hanging by a thread. Truly. It’s crazy. It’s all so real because the money is so, so real in the business. And it’s so, you know.
00:45:28 Ajay Kurian: That’s another thing to distill. Like, I think a lot of people think that there are successful artists that are making money hand over foot and, um, they’re living this lavish life. But like, if you’re running a business with the ambition that these artists are running their business, it’s every project is taking you close to bankruptcy. And then like all these people’s jobs are on the line. And if, if one thing doesn’t pay off or if one thing doesn’t go right, or if there’s a delay on something, who knows what the next step is. It’s even at those levels, there’s precarity. Like there’s very few artists that are free of precarity. And I think like understanding how you build that in is not something that we’re taught and like not something that’s taught in school. And sometimes it’s hard to learn even when you’re on the job because you just keep growing. Like you just want to keep growing things. And like you’re not necessarily thinking about how to keep that sustainable. But, you know, I, I think we all.
00:46:27 Speaker 6: Learn.
00:46:27 Darren Bader: And also rarely, I mean, I’ve never encountered, even though there are so many of them are just extremely generous, kind people. A gallery will not tell you how to manage your career. They may say yes to this project or no to that, but they will not say, hey, you’ve got. We’re pretty confident you have a modest nest egg right now. Invest wisely. This won’t last forever. They will never tell you that. And that’s that’s really fucked. I’m sorry. It’s one of the great, uh. Yeah, there’s a word for this, too. I’m just not myself tonight. But blame it on the kids, okay? My fucking kids, they. No one will tell you that this is as precarious as temporary as it is.
00:47:15 Ajay Kurian: Yeah.
00:47:15 Darren Bader: They’ll just keep feeding you because you’re feeding them. Yeah. And they’re like, oh, we forgot to tell you this very critical thing, which is no guarantees. Never, never. Yeah.
00:47:30 Ajay Kurian: But you still do it.
00:47:31 Darren Bader: Of course you’re you’re addicted.
00:47:33 Ajay Kurian: We’ll take one last question and then we’re gonna wrap. Yeah.
00:47:42 Speaker 9: Um. Thank you. You guys said some really amazing things. Um, I’m thinking over here a lot about just from a philosophical standpoint, like this dissolution of ego and identity and self in a lot of ways. And how do you really reconcile with committing that deeply to that precarity and the, the precarity that is not yours to own? You know what I mean? And being committed to, you know, the vision of this artist or this thing that you’re building. Perhaps you feel some investment in that. But I think, you know, right now, in this current moment and many other moments, there has always been this collective energy that we’re working through of precarity as well as personal. So yeah, how do you really deal with determining where you draw the line or, or how much of a, I guess, value that commitment is for you? And I think that goes for like a technical perspective as well. Yeah. Like, as well as an artist that is participating in that making process.
00:48:40 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I feel like it’s kind of like someone rolls up on a monster truck and they’re like, do you want to ride? And then you just have to decide if you want to get on or not.
00:48:49 Darren Bader: Mhm. Uh, for me, the monster truck is just. Yeah, I’ve been just, just totally enamored of art since I knew what it was as an adult or a young, young adult, and I just signed up with these people, whether they were. I mean, I worked in a museum bookstore, I worked for galleries. I, I don’t care, I don’t care where it takes me. I just care so much about the end here, the end product, it’s, you know, it’s, I care so much about walking into an art space and chancing upon a work that will just make me feel like it’s all worth it. And it’s just, I cannot it’s been such an it’s like, it’s like sitting in the sun after the winter. It’s sixty, you know, whether it’s sixty five, seventy, you feel like a million. Again, I keep saying a million bucks, a million bucks, a million bucks, a million bucks. It’s the same thing. You’re you’re you’re just I’m just bathe in this this wonderful glow and I will do anything. It’s a madness, you know, it’s a pathology, potentially. But I will do anything to get that high again, and I will do it with people as long as they treat me okay. And I expect I that I would treat them okay as well, you know. You know, just just care ethics, um, common cause for the same dream really, which is that wonderful moment when you say, aha. Thank you for that artwork to whomever the creator is to whoever, whoever the creator is. Yeah.
00:50:30 Ian Cheng: Um, well, this might be a different time, but like when I was working for those two artists, it was around twenty ten. So in my mid twenties and I really did not want an identity. I didn’t have an identity. I didn’t want one. I didn’t know who I was. So I was happy to get on the monster truck because that’s like there’s an adventure right in front of me. Like I’m like, that’s better than anything. Um, I didn’t want to like, come to them with like this big ego of like, I’m going to be an artist. Like, it’s just that wasn’t even crossed my mind. I just, I was just clay, you know, like I wanted to just be around, have an adventure.


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