Intimate Addresses: Recording Artists Live

Tess Taylor: Hi, I’m Tess Taylor, host of season two of the Recording Artists podcast. We called the season “Intimate Addresses” because it was quite literally about letters and addresses, in particular the personal letters of six great artists. Each letter was a jumping off point for so many narratives—about art and endurance and friendship and stamina—that it was hard to narrow them down to create short and cohesive stories for each episode.

So we hosted a live event to share some of the back-stories—and even more letters—that didn’t make the cut for season two. Getty curator Pietro Rigolo, and author Maya Binyam joined me in front of an audience at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. This special bonus episode is a recording of that event.

I hope you enjoy our conversation, and that it inspires you to write more letters to your friends, your family, and your beloveds—savoring each stamp, postmark and ink smudge. And I hope you feel more connected to the art within and around you. Happy listening!

Hi. It’s really exciting to be here tonight. Thank you all for coming in when the weather outside was so beautiful. It’s too bad we can’t do this and watch the sunset at exactly the same time.

So, we had this wonderful journey together with, with these letters and uh, we spent all of this time in the archives, both of us, Pietro and I, selecting letters to make this podcast. And yet there were still—we delved deep, we sucked up stories, we, you know, engrossed ourselves, and there was still more, always more, things that got left out, things we wanted to say, sort of outtakes. And so we decided to have this conversation together.

I wanted to start by asking people who are here, Maya Binyam, Pietro, what their relationship to letters is.

Pietro Rigolo: Shall I start? Sure. So, I was born in the early 80s, very early 80s, and I remember my parents, I think they got the first desktop computer in our place towards the end of my high school years. So essentially from that point onwards, you know, all my life as a writer, as a correspondent, has been filtrated through a screen and through a keyboard, but there’s one earlier instance of, you know, writing correspondence that I, that I remember, which is um, kind of the summer ritual of writing postcards to friends during, during the summer.

You know, particularly when you are in grade school, the summer is this extended period of time in which you are separated by your peers and your friends that are so important at that point in your life. And so writing and receiving postcards was this beautiful way to just keep up to, to date to what, what your, your peers were, were doing, right?

And I remember also the pleasure of, there’s something beautiful in postcards, the way you have to flip them and the relationship between image and text.

What about you, Maya?

Maya Binyam: Um, well, first of all, it’s so nice to be here. Thank you both, and thank you all for coming.

I was recently thinking about this question, and, and I remembered that my mother recently told me that when her mother died, which was when she was quite young, uh, my mother discovered a collection of love letters that had been exchanged between her mother, my grandmother, and her father, my grandfather.

And she told me that when she found this collection of letters, rather than reading them or keeping them for, you know, future generations, she decided to make a fire and burn them. So she destroyed these letters. And as I was hearing this story, I felt very sad. My mom, my mom said, you know, she was doing it for her mother, who was a very private person and wouldn’t have wanted anyone to read these letters.

But as her granddaughter who never knew her, I heard this story and I felt a kind of, I don’t know, a sense of loss, because it felt like those, those would have been, you know, vestiges of her self-expression that I don’t otherwise have access to. And so I found myself becoming very indignant and entitled to these letters, which were never intended for me.

And it was a kind of a ridiculous feeling, but it, it made me realize that most of the letters that I’ve read in my life, have not been letters that were intended for me. They were letters that were intended for other people, either because I was encountering them in personal family archives or in public archives.

And I think we’re all sort of in that position today, looking at these letters from artists, which were never intended for us. But there’s a kind of, um, luscious voyeurism in, in intercepting those letters and becoming a part of someone else’s intimate address. And it’s a very active mode of, of reading that I’ve been very attracted to.

Letters are impartial as expressions of, of someone’s character and consciousness, of relationships, of plot. And as a writer of fiction, I, I love the kind of speculation and invention that, that is necessary when you’re reading a letter that wasn’t intended for you. And there’s something a little, I don’t know, uh, naughty about it, too.

Um, which is fun. I don’t know, what about you, what about you, Tess?

Taylor: So I, I do remember letters in my childhood, and my grandmother was a great correspondent. She was a witty—that, that would have been her art form. She wrote long, garrulous letters that told sly stories about other people in the family. And she expected you to have read them when she got back from wherever she’d been. And she would clip articles from the newspaper if she thought that you should read them. And if she didn’t read them, that would also be a problem.

And I, you know, I, I love her ephemera, you know, very much. She’s a woman who took a book of, um, English literature that was written in a time when only men were allowed and she just forcefully inserted Jane Austen in pencil mark on the timeline of English literature, literary greats, and I loved that she did that, you know.

So, another thing that happened was we were away, my mother is a historian of India, and we lived in India in the 90s, in a time before the internet, and when all of your longing for the place that you were not had to be put onto an aerogram. And when you longed for aerograms to come, and when you, this like, great longing was put on this very, in the smallest words possible, tiniest print on this flimsy paper that was the lightest paper possible and all of that was carrying all of your longing for home.

And so I remember that kind of world where the letter was a special vessel for, for the stories of your day, and for what, for being with people who you couldn’t otherwise be with, and the feeling of pouring your heart into them. Yeah.

But I think we loved them no matter what. Like, it isn’t as if you have to be a letter writer to have enjoyed the feeling of going down in the archive. Like, going down in the archive is just incredibly pleasurable. Pietro and I went down again today to just look at some boxes and we were just lost for, you know, we almost didn’t want to come out.

But I really think this amazing project began with Pietro in the pandemic, um, with the process of going alone into the archive to find these letters and that, that’s when in the middle of dark days of the pandemic, you began dreaming up this podcast and I would love for you to tell that story.

Rigolo: Yes, sure. Well, you know, at the Getty Research Institute, we have this treasure trove, really, of unpublished primary sources for the study of art history and visual culture. And we’re always trying to find new ways to make this material available and to engage and reach new audiences. So over the years podcasts have been a very, a very powerful tool in this sense.

And this particular podcast, podcast is the second season of Recording Artists. So the first season was all about a series of audio cassettes, audio interviews that we have of women artists from the 60s and the 70s, which were conducted by art historians of whom we have the archive here, Barbara Rose and Cindy Nemser.

The idea of working with artists letters for the second season sort of came naturally, I would say, because artists’ letters are really kind of a pillar of our collecting, something we have collected since the very beginning of this institution in the early 80s, and are to be found virtually in every type of archive that we have. In artist papers, of course, papers of gallerists, papers of collectors, of scholars, and so on.

And yes, me working and starting the research for this project coincide actually with the first lockdown. The GRI was closed to the public from March of 2020 to about July of 2021. And we soon, everybody pivoted to working from home. And we were very lucky because, you know, everybody kept their job.

And actually also in, you know, trying to figure out how to be able to work from home and being productive, the collection of artist letters proved to be very useful because we have hundreds of these letters that have been digitized. And so we set up a transcription project. So colleagues at home would have access to the digital files of the letters and help us transcribing them. And, and I did transcribe some myself also from, from Italian and from French.

But then we got to a point in which we, I really had to come and have access to, to the actual boxes. And so we came up with a whole structure and a whole plan that would allow me to come and be safe and kept everybody else safe, right? According to, you know, CDC guidelines and local guidelines.

So basically, you know, the boxes would be pulled. And this was the very, very beginning of the pandemic, when we didn’t have a vaccine, we didn’t really even know how the virus spread. It was at the very beginning, you know, when we were wiping all the groceries and stuff.

So some of my colleagues would pull the boxes from the vaults. The boxes would sit there for two days. Nobody would touch them. Then I would come one day when I knew I was going to be just by myself, spend a day reading and taking pictures and then the boxes would sit again for a couple of days until they would be put safely down in the vault. So it was a little bit, you know, complex and cumbersome, but it worked out.

But on a more personal level though was a very kind of strange process being here in this, you know, huge place by myself and being confronted also with this text that in a way are all about trying to bridge a distance, right? And they’re all about longing and missing people and I, myself, was going through all that, you know, having all my family in Italy. And of course I was in direct contact with them every day. But, yeah, it was a strange overlapping of what was going on in my life and in everybody’s life, pretty much, and also what I would find in these texts, in these letters.

Taylor: So, when I was called for this project, I was offered, like, 14 letters to read, to assemble somehow into six. But in some ways fourteen was you narrowing down a number of—you were just finding story after story and kind of treasure trove after treasure trove. And do you want to just talk about one of the letters that really haunted you or stuck with you?

Rigolo: Yeah, sure, so even before you came on board, we played with some ideas, of course, in trying to figure out how to organize this material and how to build a narrative.

One of the first ideas we were playing with was the idea of having each single episode being about a specific kind of relationship. So we were looking at friends, colleagues, we were looking at, you know, mother-child relationship. And I was immediately drawn to this letter by Yvonne Rainer, which I thought would have been a perfect case study for an episode devoted to siblings, relationship between siblings, between a sister and a brother.

And, well, Maya, do you want to read a little excerpt?

Binyam: Sure.

Monday, May 12th, 1958. My dear brother, this is the second letter I am beginning to write to you. The first one I knew I would not complete, even as I sat down to write it. Your letter was in some respect almost heart rending, and I knew at that time that anything I could say at that particular moment would only sound trite. And it did.

So I am trying again, although it is very late, and I will probably not be able to finish tonight. You see, Ivan, I have not even experienced the ambivalence that you seem to assume I feel. As you do. I can explain this. Since coming to New York, I have pretty much resolved whatever conflict I had in my feelings about daddy and mama.

The feelings seem almost to have taken care of themselves when I begin to realize that the only real phantom I was carting around was Ivan and Ivan’s ideas and Ivan’s identity in Yvonne. In other words, I was coping with the new urgencies in a new place. I was able to solidify the old knowledge of the old problems with a new significance. So it is that one acquires a slightly different picture of the old picture, and in doing so is freed to do things that one could not do before. Much of this was confirmed in subsequent sessions with the psychologist you probably know I’ve been going to.

It is now past 2 a. m. and I’m too sleepy to make any more sense out of my thoughts. I read over this letter and it sounds like cement. Making a reality of sentences is a long, hard process. Just so as learning to dance will be a long, hard process, for my age is against me and also certain structural oddities of my body that does not lend themselves to flexible movement.

Yet for the first time in my life, I have a certainty. I know I will dance. I will either overcome the oddities or turn them to account, but I will dance because this is what I want as I have not wanted anything in my life before. Enough for now. I’ll see you and Belle and baby soon. Can’t say when yet.

Yvonne.

Rigolo: So here we have Yvonne Rainer, this pioneering, celebrated dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker that really changed the way we think about dance and film in the last 60 years. But here she’s 24, and she had just moved to New York, and she had just started dancing, like, a few months prior writing this letter. So it’s such a beautiful, early declaration of intent. And that’s, I think, the main point, I think, that makes these letters so important and so striking.

I also like the stopping at 2am, the picking up the next day, like the, it really brings home this idea of the slow pace of writing and thinking when you’re writing such a letter to your brother, right?

Taylor: And then also the, the way of sorting it out on this notebook paper from the drugstore and filling it up slightly with doodles and then overflowing onto the side margin, just as if there’s too much, there’s more than, I mean, there’s so much to say.

It was really poignant to look at it in person today. And we realized that she’d gotten the envelopes back and labeled envelopes in her correspondence, conversation with Ivan, um, about dancing, and then another envelope was like, after breaking up with Al, so that the letters had come back to her and she’d sorted through them and cataloged them and saved them as a kind of record of herself to herself.

So, this pouring out to her brother, this argument with her brother had become, also, a way of keeping herself, too.

Rigolo: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor: But at that time, you were thinking about a podcast about relationships.

Rigolo: Mm hmm.

Taylor: And then, you had other ideas. I mean, I got so many different kinds of letters. It was sort of like, oh, what will I do with this?

Rigolo: Yeah, there were all kinds of different relationships and all kinds of different messages and tones. And yeah, for example, we have a letter between René Magritte and his dealer. You know, in the archive, we also have a lot of fan letters, for example. So folks who write to their favorite artists.

So we had a beautiful letter, for example, that a young student in South Carolina, I think, wrote to Robert Mapplethorpe once he read in some newspaper that Robert Mapplethorpe was ill. Um, and Mapplethorpe received that letter about a month, I think, before he passed.

So, but then you came on board and of course starting with that first selection, I feel like from the very beginning you had this idea of starting with Marcel Duchamp, right?

Taylor: Well, that’s so interesting. I mean, I tried to think—There were some letters that came that I knew that I wanted to use. One was from Frida Kahlo. For instance, you don’t say no to talking about a letter from Frida Kahlo. It was so beautiful. And then there were letters by artists I didn’t know and people I didn’t know that felt really fascinating to me.

And there was art movements that I myself hadn’t thought about much or didn’t really know, like Fluxus, for instance. And as I was reading about all these characters, a lot was pointing back to Marcel Duchamp. And if you’re an art history person, that’s no surprise to you. They sort of tell you that that’s the case.

But the thing was, a lot of times if you take art history, they talk about Marcel Duchamp in terms of a few big pieces like this urinal that he called art in 1917. But there was another piece of his that really caught my attention, and that was this piece called The Green Box. And it was one of a series of boxes that Marcel Duchamp made. And this box, actually, was full of all kinds of mysterious fragments and pieces of incomplete writing and doodles and ideas. And this was the piece of art. The piece of art was actually Marcel Duchamp giving you a performance of his archive.

And they’re totally tantalizing. It’s, there’s a little piece of graph, graph paper that says “to classify combs by the number of their teeth.” And you’re like, what is that? But the thing is, the feeling that that gave me was the feeling that I have in archives, that there’s something where they point towards art and then you reshuffle them endlessly and you’re always looking at clues and conversations.

And I thought, it isn’t just because Marcel Duchamp is like this famous 20th century artist. It’s because he’s actually made the archive into a piece of art itself, or he’s pointed at this congruence between archives and artwork. And I was just fascinated by that.

But then, in the archive of Marcel Duchamp was this cache of really fascinating letters and one of these letters was to his friend, Man Ray. Duchamp is writing to Man Ray pretty frantically really during 1939, 40, 41, 42, as the place that they’ve lived and shared in Paris is becoming no longer habitable to either of them. And Man Ray is actually Jewish and there’s one letter where, you know, he’s advised not to go back to Paris.

And meanwhile Duchamp is leaving their art in Paris, he’s, he’s actually fleeing Paris and he’s, he’s building this little archive that happens to be in a box, which he actually calls a suitcase at the moment that he’s leaving his country, potentially for good, after the Nazis have come. So that one of those letters is the first episode. But, but there were so many more and I wanted to you to just can would you mind reading that?

Binyam: Sure.

Dear friend, Dear Man,

We did receive your letter a few days ago. I would have answered your telegram immediately with a telegram. This was about 15 days ago. I hope you two haven’t tried to go back to Paris. If it is possible to make your way down to Arcachon, come here for some time.

Here, life is enjoyable. A lot of Germans, less refugees, the Crotis are here, also Cecile, Éluard, and Beckett. The Dalís have left already a long time ago, I imagine, to Spain.

Warmly, to the two of you, from the two of us,

Marcel.

Taylor: So, there you have art as a network. Art as a diaspora, art as changing under pressure of catastrophe, and a kind of, basically a catalyst of 20th century art, or mid 20th, late 20th century art, just right there in that correspondence and in that letter.

And of course, isn’t it kind of amazing to see these envelopes where eventually Man Ray makes his way to 1245 Vine Street, Hollywood, and we can sort of feel the present beginning. Like, it doesn’t know that it’s coming to us, and we don’t know that it, you know, but we see it in this envelope, and it’s kind of amazing. So all of that, suddenly I was like, Duchamp is the one.

But you know, as I started working with him, and, and with the other artists, there were all of these moments where there would be these funny tendrils back to Duchamp. Like, Frida Kahlo got in trouble in Paris, and she got—André Breton actually treated her really badly, and Marcel Duchamp came to her rescue.

And similarly, in each of them, there would be kind of threads between each other. This idea that art is a conversation and a network and, and a series of relationships, as much as it is objects, that kind of kept coming back as well.

Rigolo: Yeah. And, and so we have Marcel Duchamp, we have Frida Kahlo, which are two of the most celebrated and famous artists of 20th century, right?

But then you pivot to MC Richards, who’s probably somebody that, you know, most of our audience have never heard of. So, how was it like to then work on somebody that is not that well known and that maybe it requires some more contextualizing and explanation.

Taylor: Yeah, I mean, M. C. Richards is a really interesting case. She was in the circle of John Cage and Merce Cunningham and all the people who came through Black Mountain College, which is this incredible experimental college, also formed by people fleeing the Nazis. And she was a very brave woman who got her PhD at Berkeley in 1942, in a time when very few women got a PhD. And then she went into an even more experimental college to teach.

And she did so many things. She translated avant garde French plays and she wrote poems and eventually, like many of the artists at Black Mountain College, she crossed over and started doing other things as well. So she started throwing pottery and then she wrote this incredible treatise about creativity that’s really about pottery, poetry, and the person, is her book called Centering.

But, you know, she wove between things, and she’s kind of like this ghost figure. Eventually she ended up doing something like social practice art, and raising community gardens, and working in prisons, and working having a lot to say about building community through art, and, and through gardens as well.

But really, the thing was, her letters were just amazing. Like, that was also it, like here’s a person I have to talk about and the letters come off the page and she was writing on like onion skin, sometimes she was writing on crayon with like these long poems in crayon and she was all in love.

And she was writing these love letters. One of them said, “I’m sitting in bed with my naked back against the cold plaster and a candle stub for light. Only to say hello. I hope everything’s well.” You’re like, okay, I want to write about you. But would you read some of these incredible, like—

Binyam: Yeah, I’m gonna read from three separate missives. So I’ll pause in between, so hopefully you’ll get a sense for which is which.

It’s been a long day of typing, and I’m too tired to use the shift key, even except here and there. But I do want to love you in Colorado, as I loved you in Spain, and any way I got a present for you. This here chapter, you were a wanting to see. Here it is, revised and rejuvenated, read and heed.

Honey, I wish you wuz here. Love, MC.

Good night, darling. I’m in the soup without you. Mended your underpants tonight out of sheer love. Only four more days, zowie. Tenderly, MC.

Taylor: She’s also always doing all these things at once. She’s like throwing pots, the kiln explodes, she’s buying like special wheat, she’s stone grinding it, she’s making caramels for John Cage’s birthday.

And there’s these people next to her who are inventing all kinds of avant garde American art. And she’s really going back to the land earlier than many people, and she’s inventing avant garde American craft. And she didn’t really get credit as a poet. The pottery is, a lot of it is gone or not really saved. And she’s kind of one of these artists who has left us so many processes and not necessarily products.

But the, the feeling of verve and energy and life and, and stamina in the letters and in her and the story just, I mean, I just fell into her. In fact, I wanted to like, imagine who would play her in a Netflix series.

And then when she had her breakup and her letters, I was like really disappointed and I kept waiting to see what would happen. And you know, I really felt like I was, Zoe would come and see me and I’d be like, can I tell you more about how I’m feeling about M. C.? So that was, she’s a really amazing character if you don’t know about her.

Rigolo: The box we opened this morning was wonderful, was a box of letters that she was sending from Mexico. And she would always send flowers. There are all these dried flowers. And at a certain point she writes, I hope you got my last letter, but I’m not sure, because I figure out that sending flowers is actually contraband.

Taylor: And then next to it, because it’s an archive and because all of these tenderness can be saved. There was actually a little plastic bag of dried flowers. So that was kind of magical. Yeah.

Rigolo: Yeah. So now I wanna jump to the end of the podcast with a letter by another wonderful artist and writer, Meret Oppenheim. Um, this is a very long and somewhat complex letter. How did you land on it?

Taylor: Well, a lot of people, if they do know Meret Oppenheim, know her for this one piece of work called the Fur Tea Cup. And she made it, actually, in the 30s in Paris when she was circling around Marcel Duchamp, for instance, and other people like that.

But she had a very, very full life after this. She went back to Switzerland. She was ready to fight off the Nazis with a bag of rice and a pistol in her office. And she went through various phases of creative growth. And at the end of her life, she was invited to be in this exhibition by this man, Harald Szeemann.

And he chose a piece of her work from when she was 17 and put it under a category Femme Fatale. And she wrote him the most dignified, furious letter I’ve ever read. Where she just, I mean, she’s just speaking truth to power about why that category doesn’t match with her work, and why that category doesn’t even apply to the lives of ambitious women. And it is such a beautiful letter.

And the thing was, we did a whole episode about the dilemmas of writing such a letter. You know, how do you tell someone in power that they’ve really offended you? Um, that’s a question, I think, that we think about even, you know, it makes all of our hearts flutter.

In the archive, it turns out, his response comes to her. And we weren’t able to include it in the episode. But it’s really a, like, a sweet letter that says, “ I’m sorry, I forgot to send this letter for a long time. I did put a new label on the next exhibition. Thanks for writing. I think of you fondly always.”

I don’t actually know, we don’t know what their relationship was like, but it was really neat to kind of recover that.

Rigolo: Yeah. And the rest of the podcast is dedicated to two Fluxus artists, right? Benjamin Patterson and Nam June Paik. And, you know, when it comes to Fluxus, I think archives are particularly important, specifically because of the conceptual and ephemeral nature of this art.

The archive is often the only thing that is left, right? And it has all sort of ephemera, and posters, gallery invites, telegrams, sketchbooks, scrapbooks. So I was just curious to know, how was it for you to work with such a plethora of different type of materials and different type of voices in these archives?

Taylor: Well, I just, it actually, you know, it had been a very hard time for me during the pandemic, to be honest. I had two books that both represented about 10 years of work, um, and one came out in February, 2020, and one came out in April, 2020. And instead of going on tour and, and really bringing them to the world, I kind of read them in my basement, on Zoom, looking out at my laundry, which most often needed to be done.

And there was this feeling of enormous sadness that I had in like the fate of the creative life. And what was really amazing about working with each of these artists was that each of them offered a portrait in creativity and a portrait in artistic stamina and a portrait in living through really challenging times.

And, and sometimes the place where you would see an artist gathering up their strength or making their argument would not necessarily be in the piece of work that would end up in a wall, but mostly in the notebook and like that willingness to go on making notes in the notebook just began to seem like a kind of strength.

And there were also just so many wonderful things that maybe again, are more about process and more about stamina and more about whimsy and delight and the kind of like desire to give muscular attention to the world. And so for instance, here’s this thing by Benjamin Patterson, which we looked at today and we realized, um, he’s cutting up a Life article from 1967.

This is a period when this artist probably had already told a bunch of other people that he was retiring from art. This is an article, uh, during the Vietnam war. And he’s made this crazy, but very deliberate collage. If you see it in person, it’s crafty. I mean, you could make something like this with a five year old and have a great time doing it.

But the words were so meaningful to me. Keeping in mind that Patterson is a musician, and so when he talks about a pause and a rest, it’s a kind of a musical notation as well. We don’t have it all on the slides, but I wanted to read to you.

“The Case for Bombing Pause First, it would save lots of money, and it might also save some people their lives. In any case, the pilots and the bombardiers could stop and relax and have a cup of coffee or a glass of beer. If the pause were long enough, some airmen could play golf and attend concerts at rest camps. Others might go home to see their kids. And then, maybe, if the pause lasts a long time, we will stop fighting and go home to raise sheep.”

I think we could use this notebook now.

But I also just felt like this kind of catharsis of craft, right? This is not a person who’s actually actively making art as a career at this moment. But this is a person who is just like, can’t stop. Oh see, here’s the kind of scores and this is the delightful pieces of art that we would find from Benjamin Patterson. This is what a musical score looks like in his hands.

But this is a postcard from Nam June Paik to David Tudor, who was M. C. Richards lover, that she was writing, she was writing all those like, she mended David Tudor’s underpants just a few years before this postcard was being sent, just for context. But, if you look carefully at this postcard, you can see, first of all, all of the Kant and Hegel, and this pipe, and there’s like a little pipe joke in tiny handwriting, like "ceci n’est pas une pipe," that joke.

And then, there’s this little tiny ear that’s cut out and turned sideways into a mouth and it’s collaged on. And one of the amazing gifts of being in the archive was to kind of run your finger over the collage and see the absolute deliberate joy of making this postcard quite this way. And um, that was kind of what kept me going.

In the same folder is something called a robot opera, and there’s a hilarious almost program for an opera. “Opera with aria is banal. Opera without aria is boring. Wagner, too long. Money, too short. Met opera, too dirty. Soap opera, too cheap. Pollock, too sad. Pop art, too pop. Zen, too much. Paik, too fake. Drug, too boring. Sex, too banal. Zero to X, X to zero, Gluck contra Puccini, Wagner contra Puccini, robot opera contra soap opera. Time indeterminate, date indeterminate, place indeterminate, audience indeterminate. If you meet, please don’t watch it more than three minutes. Sorry.”

Like who invites somebody to an event that way?

Rigolo: Oh, and we have this. Maya, would you read it for us?

Binyam: Sure. As you can see, it’s in all caps. I’m going to try to convey that through my voice, but I’m happy the visual aid is here.

1222 p. m. Pacific Standard Time, February 12, 67. David Tudor, Music Department, University of California, Davis, California.

Moorman and Paik in serious trouble. Please send petition telegram before Tuesday to Mayor Lindsay and to the New York Times stating that you consider Moorman Paik’s performance as art of high artistic quality. Thanks.

Taylor: And, of course, Charlotte Moorman is the one performing naked with a cello bra, like, anyway, I love that there’s this passionate plea.

I wonder if he did it.

But again, like there’s these subterranean connections between all of them, right? Paik is writing to Tudor, Tudor and M. C. Richards have just broken up, Tudor was just, you know, in Europe, where he probably ran into Ben Patterson. He studied with John Cage, who was a disciple of Marcel Duchamp.

And you could see the fact that it was like, you know, Nam June Paik is somebody who really figures that the network is art, and art is the network. But you could see this in kind of this living, mycelial connections between all of these artists, and that the, it felt like this sort of substance of the conversation was really important.

This morning we found that near the Nam June Pa—like next to the Nam June Paik folder was the Yoko Ono folder. And, and you could see in her art also parts of this conversation happening. And, and I guess it was like this feeling, kind of endless desire to plunge into these conversations. Like you might never come out again.

Rigolo: Yeah, that’s the thing with archives like this. I mean, the artist who created the archive might have kept maybe carbon copies of the letter they send, or, like in the case of Yvonne Rainer, might have retrieved the letters she sent at a later date. But then, of course, most of the archive is letter received, right?

So through the archive, you can really reconstruct the network of relationships and collaborations and love stories and fights.

Taylor: And desire. So much desire. Yeah. And then there was this moment where you look up and you realize you’ve kind of been an empath of sorts and you look up and you’re kind of exhausted from entering this other person’s life so deeply.

It kind of quivers, uh, It quivers in me the way the beginning lines of a poem will quiver in me. There’s something really promissory. There’s something like the tip of an iceberg that’s waiting to be, you’re never gonna see all of, and yet you know it’s there, and you just feel this kind of sense of the enormity of its presence.

I think we’re almost at time, and I think what I’m supposed to do now is to ask us each to reflect on the role that archives play in our lives. Is that, is it that moment?

Rigolo: Let’s do that, yes. Yes, it’s very much that moment.

Taylor: And why do they matter to you now?

Rigolo: Yeah, well, shall I, shall I start? You know, archives quite a big part of my life working at the Getty Research Institute.

Taylor: It’s my job.

Rigolo: For sure. I would say, you know, as art historians we are always trained to contextualize the artwork we are looking at, right? So contextualize in terms of understanding where the artist was at that particular point in their life, understanding what was going on, you know, in culture at large, what was going on in the world.

And I feel like archives and, you know, this kind of primary sources certainly help you doing that, they’re necessary. But also at the same time, they offer you so much information that you probably won’t be able to do anything with it, like what the artist dreamt the previous night before writing that letter, or what kind of food gave them an indigestion, or something like that, that in a way are pointless data, but they really help you familiarize with, um, with the personality of the artist you’re working with, I think.

And also I might say, you know, working as a curator here, I work a lot with elder artists who are starting considering their legacy and what it means to go back to their paper and look at the archive and how they want to construct the narrative of their life and their own legacy, as well as, you know, with heirs and family members who are grieving the loss of loved ones.

So it really makes you think also, of course, about your own legacy and what you’re doing and what sort of imprint you want to leave in the, um, in, in the world. What about you, Maya?

Binyam: Yeah, I mean, I think like anyone who has consulted archives or relied upon them, I have a kind of vexed relationship with the institution of the archive.

I think all of the feelings of delight that attend working in an archive for me are, are coupled with feelings of, of sadness.

There was this archive, I was living for a while in Addis Ababa and there was this archive there that housed materials from this period in modern Ethiopian history that’s been very important to me and to my family. And it was an amazing place to come upon.

And I recently, just this past spring went back and I was excited to go back to this archive. And when I got there, I found that it was completely destroyed. There was a car that had driven into the front of it. All of the windows were shattered and presumably the materials in them had either been destroyed or, or relocated elsewhere.

And that’s a very extreme example, but I, I do think that it’s kind of representative of the feeling that I often have when I’m working with archival materials. The sense of discovery is often coupled by grief at what isn’t there. Especially because archival materials can be so transporting and transporting in a way that doesn’t really seem to cohere with what they are. Like it’s strange that you should be able to look at a piece of paper with writing on it and feel like you’re, you’re in another world. And that’s sort of the magic of, of language and of and of material.

But my sort of ideal experience of encountering an archive is encountering the sorts of intimate ones that I was referencing earlier, like coming across letters tucked into a suitcase in a living room or in a closet or something like that. And, um, so many institutional archives don’t have that feeling.

And yet you do sometimes, like, when you’re reading something alone, even if you’re in a sort of illustrious building, that can seem impersonal, like you can have such an intimate transporting moment that again, yeah, it doesn’t seem to cohere with the setting or with the physical thing that you’re looking at. And yet, and yet something amazing comes of that.

I mean, I mean, I guess that’s just the experience of looking at art or, or reading a book or something like that. It’s like something happens in your mind and in your imagination that seems like it shouldn’t be happening and yet it does. And so I think alongside the grief and the violence around like what’s absent, there is always sort of that amazing, imaginative thing that happens too. And that’s why I, you know, continue to rely on, on archival materials.

What about you, Tess?

Taylor: They’re so radically imperfect in so many ways. And they’re such records of, mirrors, really, of every erasure and every kind of historic violence. You know, they, they’re as imperfect as we are. And yet, I’ve never been to an archive where I didn’t come out feeling more compassionate and more tender and more alive to this, like, sort of furious complexity of being human.

And that can be like the strange ads for sundries in an 18th century newspaper, or it can be the doodles alongside these letters, and really the evidence of this human hand.

And I feel like it is such an imperfect process, and I think it makes us aware of our mortality in a way. And I think it makes us aware that the terms of our moment are not the terms of every moment. And then we come out kind of being asked to bridge. And I love that. I love that so much.

Each of these letters also, like the physicality of the way that somebody wrote a letter that day on the, the torn out piece of, of lined paper or this particular kind of stamp. They carry with them more than themselves, I think. And they make us aware of, like, the entirety, a texture of a world that’s gone. And I’m really grateful to them for that.

And I really was grateful to be able to spend time with these six lives. It was a time, like I said, where I felt like I was able to gather strength from being with these particular six ancestors. And I’m sure that if it was six other ancestors, it would have been different stories, but a similar kind of like joyful communion.

So, um, yeah, I guess archives make me grateful.

Alright, thank you all so much for coming.

Rigolo: Thank you.

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Taylor: This podcast is sponsored by the Getty Patron Program.

Intimate Addresses was produced by Zoe Goldman with audio production by Gideon Brower. Our theme music is by Bryn Bliska.

Special thanks in this episode to Pietro Rigolo, Maya Binyam, Janani Subramanian, Chris Boyett, Chris Jeong, Andrew Weigart, and Adrian Cazares.