View of “Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists,” 2012.

Ulrike Müller is an Austrian-born, New York–based artist whose work investigates form as a mode of critical engagement. In 2007, Müller found an inventory list describing a collection of feminist T-shirts at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She distributed individual image descriptions from this list to 100 artists, inviting them to translate the texts into drawings. The result, Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists, is a collaborative rethinking of the queer, feminist archive. The project’s debut exhibition is at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria through June 24; it will return to New York for a reconfiguration at the Brooklyn Museum that opens on June 29.

IN FEBRUARY I went to Bregenz to see the space, and I realized that this show was going to be a challenge architecturally, institutionally, socially, and personally. I had to find my own position vis-à-vis my history of the place, my experience returning there, but also my familiarity with it. I do translation work and this was the biggest translation job I had ever been confronted with: to bring so many people with me, not in person but with their drawings, which are so much a record of a hand—of a mind thinking and a body moving, and one’s own subjectivity responding to a past that is a history sought out.

I was thinking about queerness, visibility, and absence. I wanted for the space to be a queer and social space, but at the same time I couldn’t assume there would be a presence of queer bodies or a familiarity with queerness as an idea, or an experience. What is a queer space without queer bodies? How could questions of social norms be activated in a space that could also possibly address bodies that don’t think of themselves as outside of norms? It was also important to consider language. I think for the whole project, making a claim and then using that to propel things forward has been an important strategy. The subtitle, “100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists,” intends to produce questions, to provoke. In some ways the whole installation, or my work in general, aims to spatialize problems and questions as something that can then be related to or talked about. That question of language, of what adjective to use and what to attach the adjective to, has so much to do with queerness.

I decided to create a more intimate space within the very cool monumentality of the museum, which is built onto a grid. I inscribed into the footprint of the square building a yellow rectangular floor that turned out of the grid and pushed up onto the wall creating a triangle, like a sheet of paper with one corner folded up. I thought of this 1,500-square-foot yellow floor as a painting space that came out of my own formal sensibility and vocabulary. To go really big with that was very exciting. There are four freestanding movable walls covered with 1970s-era wallpaper, playing with certain feminist tropes of domesticity. There are thirty-five drawings on the walls, partly originals and partly facsimiles. There is a table in the space where some are in printed reproduction and all one hundred are on an iPad slide show. There is a slide projector with details that I photographed and a five-channel audio installation of multiple voices calling out the inventory of T-shirt descriptions. The recorded voice is such a particular thing that is of the body without the body being present. It makes me think about the T-shirts in the archive as something that’s intended for a body but that body’s not there. A body trace.

The institution invited me to make a connection to local histories. I did research around the history of homosexuality in the region, but all that produced were records of repression, and I was looking for a more celebratory approach. The result of that investigation was one painting by Maria Lassnig that I found in the collection of the Kunsthaus, from 1975. It’s one of her first self-portraits with animals and she made it during her time in New York. That’s the only piece that went directly onto the concrete walls of the institution, facing the temporary walls with the drawings. It seemed a good way to open up conversation about feminism and imagemaking and politics.

— As told to Corrine Fitzpatrick

Left: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Andre, November 16, 2010, color photograph, 18 x 24”. Right: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Victor, November 21, 2010, color photograph, 18 x 24”.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Brooklyn-based artist. His forthcoming publication Studio Work documents the art he made during his residency last year at the Studio Museum in Harlem; the book will be available through D.A.P. starting this fall. Select pieces from that residency are featured in the group exhibition “Surface Tension” at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, which is on view until June 24.

I HAD BEEN READING Brian O’Doherty’s book Studio and Cube, and was influenced by his concept of time, for instance how elements of perception and so on can be very different in the studio, as opposed to outside of it. And, the perception of time—my vantage point within its progression—is something that comes across in my works, especially those made during my Studio Museum residency.

My awareness of the studio as a site that informs my work came to the fore during my residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2010. I developed a routine where I would get up, make work, go over things made before, bike down to the lab, print, do some more editing, bring these new prints back into the space, and then rephotograph them.

During my time at the Studio Museum, a week might pass when no one would come to visit me and then all of a sudden there might be a day when three friends would drop by. In between these periods—before and after people brought objects into the studio or left traces of their stay behind—I observed how their comings and goings slowly began to be reflected in my studio surroundings, and I began to photograph what I saw as this ongoing process of interaction, and accretion, between myself, my friends, and the studio itself.

Speaking of comings and goings, I often hear of situations where individuals meet on the street and say, “I’ve seen that picture of you in Paul’s studio—naked!” Wayne Koestenbaum, for instance, who contributed an essay for Studio Work, had this experience with my friend Victor. Wayne had seen Victor’s image and was, well, taken with it. Some time later he ran into Victor on the street. I guess it can make for an interesting icebreaker.

One of the things about the Studio Museum residency is that you know there is going to be an exhibition at the end of the period. After talking with Naomi Beckwith as well as with AA Bronson, I decided that a publication would be the best avenue to present the experiences that occurred within the framework of “studio time.” Although I had already self-published a zine bearing the same title around the midpoint of the residency, Studio Work in its current book form came about at the end of, and in response to, my time as an artist with the Studio Museum. Ultimately, the book depicts the ongoing, dynamic relationships between myself and the individuals in my life.

— As told to Joseph Akel

Charles Long, Pet Sounds (detail), 2012, mixed media, dimensions variable.

For Pet Sounds at Madison Square Park, California-based artist Charles Long has installed an interactive installation consisting of colored pipe railings. The project was organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy and will be on view until September 9, 2012.

I WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE WOULD LOVE. An artist can use the invitation to make public work as an opportunity to critique mass consumerism, but that kind of critical relationship does not appeal to me. What led me to the idea for Pet Sounds was in fact my connection to pop culture. The title of my project is also the title of the Beach Boys’ 1966 album, which profoundly affected me as an artist. For me, Brian Wilson’s songs combine the aesthetic complexity of high art with a universal appeal that fosters an unabashedly human connection between the work and the listener. My sight-specific installation Pet Sounds pays tribute to the Beach Boys, but it is foremost a way to enchant the park and stimulate its community in my own way.

I’ve been going to Madison Square Park regularly for several years and have spent a great deal of time trying out ideas and considering the best way to integrate my art into this public space. People really use the park to do their own thing, be it reading, sleeping, eating, or meeting friends. Ultimately, I wanted to create a work that enhanced the experience of the park—in terms of how people enjoy and use this outdoor public space on a daily basis. I didn’t want to make a sculpture for the park as much as I wanted to extend the park itself into some kind of fantasy of sculpture.

What developed was a system of vivid colored railings defining pathways that spill out onto the great lawn leading one to a surreal park-within-a-park. As the rails converge around a tree, they grow into human-scaled amorphous blobs lounging on benches and plopping down on a picnic table. During my research, I made drawings and photos of people and animals in the park and wanted to transcribe these images into three-dimensional abstract forms that would create a somatic relationship between the installation and visitors. Whether a particular sculpture appears birdlike, doglike, or humanlike—each is open for interpretation—the forms absolutely connect to the physical and biological aspects of park.

There is a tactile and audible component to Pet Sounds. The skins of the blobs are sensitized so that as one smoothes a hand over the surface, there is an instantaneous response: The entire surface vibrates, producing a range of sounds. It’s fun to see all these hands groping the forms and visitors discovering the acoustic element. I notice a lot of dialogue between visitors, as multiple people can play together on the same form.

I wanted people to connect to these blobs and be affected in a strange abstract way, so their bodylike scale contrasts an elusive figuration. You can’t place it, but you seem to recall it. The slippery skins are so smooth, undulating, and synthetically sexy that they beckon you to caress them. Art is seldom something people can touch. In the open-ended public space of the park I chose to make touch essential and connection more likely.

— As told to Mara Hoberman

Left: Cover of Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes (2012). Right: Enid and Rebecca in Ghost World (1997).

Daniel Clowes is an Oakland-based cartoonist and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter, known for seminal graphic novels such as Ghost World (1997), David Boring (2000), Ice Haven (2005), and Wilson (2010), which have redefined the language of contemporary comics. The retrospective “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” is currently on view through August 12 at the Oakland Museum of California and is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Alvin Buenaventura and published by Abrams.

THE BAY AREA CURATOR SUSAN MILLER approached me about five years ago and wanted to organize a retrospective of my comics, and I thought she was out of her mind. How many cartoonists get a museum survey of their work? It’s not like coming into a museum and saying, “We have a bunch of Cézannes, give us a show.” But I figured, why not try? We were looking at all the San Francisco–area museums, and I just wasn’t that enthused. San Francisco is such an overly precious city. Even though I live in Oakland, I probably go to San Francisco as much as I go to New York. Luckily, by the time our proposal was ready for submission, the Oakland Museum had received extensive funding that allowed it to be renovated from top to bottom. So they were like, “Yeah! Let’s do this!”

It was really important to me that the retrospective be in a “museum-museum” and not in a museum for comic art. The project was only interesting to me if it was in a different context from where my work is usually shown. That way, about 90 percent or probably even 99 percent of the people who come into the museum don’t know my work, which seemed like the only reason to do it. It’s as if cartooning was a way for me to sneak into the museum through the side door. I’ve done this my entire career, actually—I’ve snuck into being called an author, I’ve snuck into making movies, through comics. In a way, I feel weirdly guilty about it, but it’s also freeing. Most artists who have a museum retrospective—that’s a very loaded thing, in both positive and negative ways. But for me, it’s not even the main thing that’s going on with my life right now. It’s good I don’t have to obsess over it.

Right now I’m actually writing a screenplay, adapted from my graphic novel Wilson, and Alexander Payne is directing it. Wilson is a prickly character, and that’s the kind of character both Payne and I like. I won’t force a heartwarming moment in my work, unless the characters present it to me. At some point, they become sort of autonomous from me. Enid from Ghost World is one of those characters who wasn’t programmed to have likeable traits, and the audience’s relationship to her has really changed over the years. It used to be that about 90 percent of the readers loved her and 10 percent really hated her, but now I’d say it’s about 50/50, or even 40/60. Now people are like, “Why should I care about a girl who doesn’t even want to go to college?” I think things are more Darwinian out there nowadays, and it’s hard for people to deal with existential problems when they’re trying to get a job.

I used to be so anxious and stressed out about my career, trying to figure out my place in the world. Doing something and worrying whether people will like it or not, and what if they hate it, and then, “Well, this is it, this is the one everyone’s going to hate. I’ll never work again and I’ll have to go back to college.” And when my son was born a few years ago, then I was really freaking out and thinking, “Oh my God, what if my work doesn’t sell and we’ll have to go live in our car or something?” So I try to be happy and appreciative now about my career and work.

In terms of my schedule, I work every weekday from ten to five, and then a couple of hours later at night. As a self-motivated person you just have to train yourself like a monkey to do some of things that are real drudgery. But a lot of the actual making is still really fun. I can tell a mile away when somebody’s using a mouse instead of a pen. It’s you who’s in control of a brush or pen or pencil, and it’s some other guy who wrote a program that’s dictating the way you do things on a computer. There’s a big difference, even just psychologically. The sheer joy of it is really sitting down with that piece of paper and doing the work by hand.

— As told to Naomi Fry

Left and Right: Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett.

Matt Wolf is a Brooklyn–based documentary filmmaker. His first feature, Wild Combination (2008), focuses on the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell. Wolf is currently at work on his second feature film, Teenage, and his short filmic portrait I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard will play at The Kitchen on May 7.

OVER THE PAST FOUR YEARS, I have been working on an unconventional historical film about the invention of teenagers. The film is based on Jon Savage’s book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, and it looks at the history of youth in America, England, and Germany before World War II. While making the film I’ve sourced over one hundred hours of archival footage and thousands of photographs of teenagers. Early on in that process, I wanted to develop a smaller project—something that I could complete by myself and with limited means. I had been exploring PennSound, an online audio archive of poetry, where I found some wonderful recordings of the artist and writer Joe Brainard reading from his iconic text I Remember, which is probably my favorite poem ever.

I love I Remember because it gives me an immediate and visceral sense of Joe Brainard’s humor, self-deprecating personality, and his gentle demeanor. And hearing Joe’s voice only deepens those impressions—it kind of made me fall in love. I wanted to make something that would add context to these recordings. Something that isn’t just a nostalgia piece or a straight documentary.

When I started thinking more about Joe’s work, I read a biography written by his best friend, the poet Ron Padgett, titled Joe: A Memoir. Ron loosely mines the style of I Remember by detailing countless addresses, correspondence, and anecdotes from his lifelong friendship with Joe. At first, I found the approach to be a little cold or dry, but as I continued reading, I was incredibly moved. To be honest, I think it’s the most vivid account of a friendship that I’ve ever read. The book made me reflect on my own creative life and community, and the significance of the bonds I share with other artists. I contacted Ron, interviewed him, and he helped me access materials to make the film. But I was a little stuck; I couldn’t figure out how to combine Ron’s interview with the archival recordings of Joe, so the project languished for a while.

But then Nathan Lee, a curator at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, approached me to do a project. I knew he was interested in the archive and queer genealogy, and I had always wanted to make an elliptical film installation, since I usually make features. So I enlisted the help of a sound designer and radio producer Mark Phillips. He helped me edit the piece into an organic, nonlinear conversation between Ron and Joe. Their dialogue jumps between the past and the present, between the rich and universal experiences that are discussed in Joe’s poems and Ron’s specific memories of his friendship with Joe.

There was also a complexity to what they were talking about that needed to be creatively illustrated. I started experimenting with dozens of films from the National Archives in Washington, DC, one of my main sources for Teenage. I have a collaborative relationship with a full-time archival researcher there named Michael Dolan. I give him themes, specific images, and ideas, and he sends me films. And when I watch them, I discover unexpected imagery that pushes me in new directions. These are usually government-produced newsreels and educational films, but they star real people, and for my purposes usually teenagers. I like to transform these stock subjects into loose characters. For I Remember I use several of a boy in an educational film about syphilis. He became an avatar for Joe, you could say. I’ve mixed these films with numerous photos and some beautiful 8-mm films that Ron created with Joe and other friends in their early twenties.

In a way, I think of the film as a gay-straight guy buddy movie. I think that’s an interesting social dynamic, which hasn’t been explored much in film. I know Ron is not keen to canonize Joe as a “queer” artist or icon. Nonetheless, a lot of young gay people like myself are interested in exploring the biographies of gay artists who died in the early ’90s from AIDS––to reclaim that history, I suppose. Joe is an important, and often overlooked, part of that story. The subject of my previous film on Arthur Russell is similar to Joe in that regard. In some ways, this film felt like the perfect bridge for me in terms of making a queer biography and an archival meditation about adolescence and coming of age.

— As told to John Arthur Peetz

Pauline Oliveros performing at the Centre Pompidou in January 2011. (Photo: Vinciane Verguethen)

Composer and educator Pauline Oliveros is the recipient of the 2012 John Cage Award. This year, she will perform in several events. On May 3, she will present the keynote address at the Her Noise symposium at the Tate Modern, which will be followed by a performance of a score from 1970 that she describes below. On the 5th, Oliveros will perform in the Europa Jazz Festival in Le Mans, France, and on the 10th, a concert in a simulation of cistern acoustics from her seminal Deep Listening album will take place at EMPAC in Troy, New York. More information on Oliveros’s upcoming events can be found on her website.

TURNING EIGHTY HAS BEEN FANTASTIC. Forty years ago, people weren’t so familiar with performance, and they certainly didn’t know my work very well. But now esteemed groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble play my compositions, and it’s very heartening. Receiving this year’s John Cage Award was a total and welcome surprise, too. I thought this would be a relaxing time in my life—a time to retire! I was wrong.

As Cage said, composing is organizing sounds in time—and you are a composer if you are organizing the way sounds manifest in duration. It certainly isn’t necessary to be a schooled musician who knows how to notate pitches on a staff. Nonetheless, I have still noticed that women have had a more difficult time actually calling themselves composers. So many women go to school to study English or theory or musicology. Perhaps they don’t enter the composition programs because they don’t have enough role models who are women, and this must change. Several composers, and some former students of mine, are working toward amending that: Clara Tomaz, Maria Chavez, Jaclyn Heyen, Brenda Hutchinson, and Ellen Fullman.

Pauline Oliveros Performs at the Pompidou

In 1970, shortly after I read the SCUM Manifesto, I finished a piece that we’ll perform at the Her Noise symposium—To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation. I remember that I was impressed with Solanas’s politics and her structural thinking, and I began to wonder how a more equal distribution of rights in society could be manifested or paralleled in music. Monroe had died eight years earlier, and after Solanas shot Warhol in 1968, I began to see a connection between Monroe’s and Solanas’s lives as the growing, and very exciting, women’s movement gained momentum. I titled the piece this way not because I wanted to directly comment on Solanas or Monroe, but rather to reference the women’s movement in general and its various sides and the significant effects it was having on culture.

Structurally, the piece is based on Solanas’s exposition about equality and overall it is nonhierarchical: Each musician chooses five different pitches and one of the pitches has to be in a different dissonant relationship to the others. There are three sections to the work that correspond with lighting overhead—a yellow, red, and blue section. In a way, these changes really conduct the piece, as the players have to perceive them to understand the queue. The duration of each section depends on what is happening, on what the musicians decide to do. It could be a very long meditation, with each part lasting more than thirty minutes.

In the first section, the players can only work with one pitch, and somewhere in the middle of that a photoflash goes off and then the second part begins. Then the musicians are free to imitate the pitches the other players are using, so there is some exchange that begins to happen. They can actually modify those pitches, articulating them in very different ways, and they begin to play with different qualities of sound. In the middle section they introduce four more pitches each. In the last section they return to their first choices. Finally, there is another photoflash and after that they are back to the very first pitches they chose and they work it back toward the end of the piece. Of course, this is a very broad outline of the piece. We’ll see how it goes in London.

— As told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler