Dec 11: Leah Mensch, Melancholia

 

Melacholia

Leah Mensch

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An adult woman bearing the weight of another adult woman always means grief this. It is a grief, and so when I watched the newlywed Justine holding onto the walls to stand up straight, trying to get herself into the bathtub, or more accurately, her sister Claire trying to help her into the bathtub, I wept. Claire heaved. She shoved her hands under Justine’s armpits—lift your other leg Justine, just a little higher, she coaxed. Of course, outside, dead birds fall all around the wedding venue as the planet Melancholia obscures Antares. The world is going to end, but Justine doesn’t know this. Or maybe she does. But she’s getting married, and she’s trying to dance and this is what I’d remember. Her crumbling façade. The way her unraveling spared nobody. I thought I knew her. 

     The first time I watched Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, I was twenty years old, and I felt the pin on the hand grenade in my head coming loose. Was I particularly interested in stopping this? Not back then. Probably, I was stoking it, the sadness and madness, because I didn’t yet take my precious life seriously enough to consider the outcome of true crisis. Knowing everything I know now about the way my grasp on life splintered and unraveled in the years following, I occasionally want to slap twenty-year old me hard across the face for wringing my body against the early moments of what would become a yearslong depressive episode rather than plunging for its heart. But I ignored the geometry of crisis for all the same reasons twenty-year-olds do what they do. I still believed I could will away the inevitable. 

     Melancholia is the second movie in Danish filmmaker’s Lars Von Trier’s unofficial Trilogy of Depression, all of which star Charlotte Gainsbourg, none of which are inherently related save a theme of despairing women in a fucked-up world. Melancholia is the perfect fatalist film. It begins where it ends, presenting you with a ruined basket of fruit, images steeped in a paralyzing hopelessness. The opening scene is not a scene at all, but a series of images set to a mournful violin score: the planet colliding with the earth in breaking motion weaving through black birds croaking, a rain cloud, a sundial casting twin shadows across a barren landscape. It leaves nobody to witness because it makes everyone a witness. The film’s most famous image arrives within the first few minutes: Justine in her bridal gown, floating upstream like a bloated fish. 

     Structured like a Diptych, Melancholia focuses on two sisters: the depressed bride in Part 1 (Justine) and Claire (Justine’s sister) in Part 2, though Claire’s portion of the movie is still witness to Justine’s deterioration, as the planet Melancholia is about to collide with the earth and collapse the world. Justine’s depression appears connected to the solar event, metaphorically and magically so. I know things, she tells Claire after her wedding, declaring the outcome of the collision. She then proceeds to tell Claire exactly how many wooden beads were in the guessing jar at the wedding. 

     To say Melancholia moved me at age twenty would be a misnomer—Melancholia, at least as a whole, didn’t make me do, or even want to do, anything. I considered it memorable only because Kiefer Sutherland played Claire’s husband in a way that made me want to tell him he should remain permanently in the action genre, and because nothing really happened in its two-hour run time. But in the months and years following, I thought often of Justine. After I graduated college, I moved to New York, and by then, I was no longer washing my hair or changing my clothes and my façade was collapsing with a rapidity that I understood was beyond my control. Our house in Brooklyn had a bathtub and no showerhead, so we had to turn on the faucet and wash our hair with a mason jar on our hands and knees. One day in October, two months after I moved, I undressed and tried to get my leg over the rim of the tub, and I thought I couldn’t go on anymore. 

     At twenty-one, I did not register Lars Von Trier as a prolific and careless grown man lobbing his depression and pain at a film budget,. I only recognized him as a man who had experienced the kind of depression so profound he could not lift a fork to his mouth. 

*

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In college, before New York and the bathtub, right around the time I first watched Melancholia, I read the esteemed poet and literary critic Al Alvarez’s study of suicide, The Savage Gods. In the first chapter, anchored in Alvarez’s friendship with Sylvia Plath and her prick of a husband Ted Hughes, Alvarez remembers visiting Plath at her home in London a few weeks before she killed herself. Plath was gardening, and writing, but even then, he attests, “she was far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her.” His ultimate assertion at the end of the book, using Plath as the keynote example, is that some people are just born suicides. There is little we can do to save them from themselves. 

     I was trying to grow tomatoes on my fire escape in Pittsburgh that spring. The plants languished and grew sideways, their stems so brittle that a stiff breeze ended my endeavor one afternoon. Because most depressed twenty-year-olds believe they are both the wisest and only depressed twenty-year old alive, I was also reading and writing about Voltaire’s Candide, which tells the story of a man banished from his utopian homeland, only to find a world threaded with lost riches and dead lovers and a mentor gone mad with syphilis, which eventually ends with Voltaire’s famous line: we must cultivate our garden.

     Everything is a binary, or else a direct exchange, when you are young, and I thought Voltaire was vying to oppose fatalism: if we take care of ourselves, the world will take care of us in return. If I care for my tomatoes, they’ll bloom. If I somehow endured the crushing sadness, I’d come out the other side healed. But I couldn’t save my dying tomato plants and I thought this was an argument against cultivating a garden. I thought, some people are just born suicides. I didn’t realize tomato plants needed full sun to grow. 

     After I wrote an essay about Voltaire and my dying houseplants, my professor, an artist in his seventies, told me that he tried to kill himself when he was twenty-four because he didn’t want to do his laundry. His sentiment was the first in a long string of grown men disclosing suicide attempts and periods of debilitating depression in their twenties to me. I didn’t understand. He concurrently challenged my reading of Voltaire. Maybe, he suggested, cultivating the garden only meant trying as hard as we could to be gentle, to care for ourselves and one another, and divorce that effort from outcome, from fate. Then, he tried to do an impression of an old therapist he had—a southern lad who smoked cigars during psychoanalysis and wore straw hats in the winter and said, I don’t wanna go to heaven; all the good people are in hell. Except he could not get the words out of his mouth without bursting out laughing mid-sentence at the seemingly irrelevant commentary (he was known for digressions), choking on his own spit, shaking his head in apology, tears in his eyes. He sent me onward while he chugged a Diet Pepsi.

     At the end of the semester, he called me into his office and told me he thought I had the makings of a real writer, so long as I was (his words) ready to be broke as fuck and overworked to the point of humiliation. 

     I asked him if he had any advice. 

     “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just don’t kill yourself.” 

*

*

One of my friends feels such disdain toward Melancholia that, each time I bring up the film, he groans and says I fucking hate that movie in a way that makes me wonder if he is about to break into a visible rage sweat. I don’t feel this way. I don’t feel anything about the movie at all, really, which makes me sad. The writer Kate Braverman used to tell her students that literature should make the reader want to drive a stake through their forehead. Melancholia doesn’t make me want to do anything. It’s all bones and no heart. Despair lathered on despair lathered on despair. There’s no love. Not even love of language, of sisterhood, of landscape. With the exception of Kiefer Sutherland’s character, John, who looks at the planetary eclipse in awe. In one of the movie’s most quotable lines of dialogue, and I mean this in a derogatory way, Claire calls melancholia “that stupid planet,” and John corrects her. 

     “That wonderful planet,” he says.  

     Claire’s part of the film leaves us with wedding carnage and a further depleted Justine, as the three slowly realize that Melancholia and earth will collide. The horses go quiet in the stables and Justine sits in a porch chair, proud of her nihilism, waiting for the inevitable. It is clear now. Biblical catastrophes loom in an echo chamber as Claire runs for her life, toward nothing, and gets caught in a hailstorm. Claire finds John dead in the stable: the talisman of hope commits suicide. There is no longer a point to anything. And maybe this is the sentiment that I find so exhausting. I’ve spent enough of my life around dudes waxing poetic about how life is meaningless via melancholia and the news and poorly interpreted reads of Camus, who, in fact, argued against suicide and for revolt: a survival inside of meaninglessness. 

     Not all of Von Trier’s work makes me feel like I’m being lectured over drinks by a guy I met on hinge. Some of his movies do have heart, but I stopped watching Von Trier’s films about a year after I first saw Melancholia, largely on account of an extended tirade he embarked upon at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival—ironically Melancholia’s premiere—that landed him on the festival’s “persona non grata” list. He didn’t love what Hitler was all about, he told media, but he also kind of understood Hitler: “I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end...,” Von Trier said. “I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit.” 

Then, he clarified later that he didn’t hate Jews, nor was he racially prejudiced or anti-Semitic in any way. In this case, in all cases, the artist and the art are inextricable. The artist who has no regard for language has no art. Or maybe I just distrust any artist who believes they can polymorph monstrosity into language. 

*

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When, my senior year of high school, my English teacher asked if anyone knew who Sylvia Plath was, I raised my hand. In earnest I asked: is she the one who stuck her head in the oven or the one who put stones in her pocket and walked into the river? The answer earned me a few laughs from my fellow classmates, but the implications are clearer now. I grew up in a generation of literary women who knew Sylvia Plath by way of her manipulated eulogy: she was not an artist, but a mere metaphor for self-destruction and the caricature of the pretty sad woman begging to be hurt. 

     I knew Ted Hughes and Al Alvarez—the poet and critic who wrote The Savage Gods, who hypothesized, using his observations of Plath during the last month of her life, that some people were just born a suicide—were good friends. But in 2023, after reading Emily Van Duyne’s book Loving Sylvia Plath, the context of The Savage Gods became much clearer to me. It was Alvarez, Van Duyne argued, who first initiated the framing of Plath’s suicide as inevitable, a losing gamble for her art, largely to shape a mythology that did not implicate Hughes and his alleged abuse in his wife’s death. After which, Van Duyne writes, “people began to look for events in her life that corresponded directly with her poetry, in ways that mirrored Alvarez’s claim that ‘Lady Lazarus’ predicted Plath’s death by suicide.” 

     That Ted Hughes tarnished and sealed Sylvia Plath’s legacy was not a new idea, but here was a tangible example. I thought about all those years I walked down sets of subway stairs, hiked through canyonlands in Arizona, thinking about suicide Those years in college I quoted Alvarez in my journal, and decided like Plath, my own suicide was inevitable. I was mere carnage in Sylvia Plath’s false legacy, her false archive. My grand theory of suicide was anchored in a false pretense, a false mythology built by one powerful man vying to protect another. One man with power saying, this is how it is.  

     Maybe what I am trying to say is that I have seen enough sensational iteratives of depression as no way out, depression as a calm nihilism at the end of the world, depression a storm with no exit wound. I have lived this. And I’m no longer interested in this metaphor. 

*

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I lived in New York for five months before I checked myself in the psych ward. It was voluntary and unceremonious and probably, it saved my life. I’m still not convinced the hospitalization alone helped redirect the next several years of my life, though I know I did not leave the hospital worse off, and for that, I am grateful. What really helped heal me was everyone else in my proximity. We are all voluntary, which is to say some part of us wanted to be alive even if many of us were so depressed we often wished to be tranquilized. I was no longer unique in my suffering, nor was I unique in my desire to survive. I was relieved.  

     Upon discharge, I wrote to my professors about missing coursework. Along with suggested accommodations, one specific professor, with whom I’d spoken only once the entire fifteen weeks, disclosed that he’d had a rough go several decades ago in his twenties, too. It kicks your ass, he wrote. But you keep drinking water and putting one foot in front of the other, and it gets so much easier. 

     I don’t know if I ever responded to his email. I could hardly take care of myself back then, and thus, I doubt I was showing up in return for anyone who tried to help me. But sometimes when I’m driving through Tucson, when I’m watching the crossing guard hold children tenderly as she helps them across the street, I feel a love so strong for my fellow humans that I feel vaguely like I might puke. I cry fast and hard these days mostly about love. I understand that my other professor, who challenged my reading of Voltaire at age twenty and disclosed his five-decade-old suicide attempt, was trying to say the same thing as the professor who emailed me after my hospitalization: Me too. But look, I’m still here. 

     Or less eloquently, everything will turn out fine so long as you fucking keep yourself alive. 

*

*

In my memory, I always stabilize more quickly than I really did. I spent another semester in New York, and while I wish I was softer, I was mostly a bystander to my own rage. When someone walked too close to me, I wanted to pull my mask down and scream; when a  man elbowed me in Times Square on the way to the doctor’s office, I pictured my fist shattering his jaw; when my classmates told me my work was funny, I wanted to pound my fist on the table and say fuck every one of you. 

     I was writing about my own pain. I was writing about Kate Braverman, who was, at the itme, doubling as my pain doppelgänger back then. When I wrote about her walking around in the bathrobe, drugged up on lorazepam in the hills of Napa Valley, I was tracing the path of my own concurrent unraveling. My classmates were not interested in these images, brutally anchoring my work, and were instead pointing to moments that elucidated humor, asking me to spend more time writing about wonky phone calls I had with university librarians, the story about Kate’s estate executor calling me in the morning’s early hours from Greece. Your work is funny, people would often tell me. I hated this, as if humor somehow negated scholarly value.

     But the writers around me weren’t wrong. Or rather, we were all right. My work was brutal and it was also really funny. It was really fucking funny to be so obsessed with an obscure dead poet that I found myself on the phone with an 80-year-old former friend of hers every Saturday night, that the Sonoma State library groaned when they saw my correspondence, so desperate to get Braverman’s master’s thesis. My classmates saw something inside my work I was trying to resist. They were vying to communicate that, despite the stale crackers and the weeks crossed off a calendar sans a single shower, I was making them laugh. It was easier to lob my pain and rage at everyone in my vicinity and call it art than examine my own vulnerable turmoil, out on the page. These lines are blurred. It is a practice of generosity and self-awareness, two things that I am not always good at, but to which I remain committed. 

     It’s a commitment born mostly from G, the poet I fell in love with after moving to Arizona in 2023. When we met, I still felt, though I’d have denied this, that there was something virtuous about suffering, about melancholia, about the death drive. I told them, one night about a patient in the hospital who used to yell in bed at night that he was tired of being alive. G, I thought, would understand this. 

“Sure,” they said. “But I’m also pretty tired of wanting to die.”  

*

*

In the translation of Candide I read in college, a woman he meets at the end of his journey tells him: “A hundred times I have wanted to kill myself, but always I’ve loved life more.” 

     In a different translation, also of prestigious acclaim, she says, “A hundred times I have wanted to die, but still, I love life.” 

*

*

Today, as I write this, it’s been four years since I was unceremoniously discharged my ten-day psychiatric admission in New York City. Most years, on the anniversary of my discharge, I count down the days. I send my roommate a postcard, or at least give her a call. Last year, I baked a pie. 

This year, though, I would’ve forgotten completely had my phone not shown me the photo my mother took outside the ER entrance: I hold my arm up toward the camera, a FALL RISK bracelet still wrapped around my wrist, and give her a thumbs-up. All my clothes are stashed in an NYU hospital system branded bag. When I see the photo, I’m begrudgingly watching Melancholia for the second time in a week.  

     The first time I watched the movie, I kept waiting for something to happen, and then the end arrived, and Claire’s soul-crushing fear metastasizes and explodes as the rouge Melancholia planet collides with the earth. Flames gut the field where the women sit, and as Claire screams, Justine is calm through the annihilation, as if to suggest her depression prepared her for the apocalypse, as if to suggest she was the apocalypse. And from the kitchen, G starts screaming OW, GOD DAMN IT, FUCK FUCK FUCK. I turn to see them standing at the kitchen sink holding their (attached, thankfully) pinkie finger, blood rushing down the side of their hand and onto a pile of dirty dishes. That stitches are in order is evident within five minutes, and so, here I am, four years later, on the other side of the country, back in the emergency room. This is the Von Trier experience, my friend says. When the doctor comes into the exam room to apply adhesive, he speaks to both me G and earnestly. So about an hour ago, you sliced your pinkie finger with a butter knife? A butter knife. G and I look at one another across the room. They’re still holding their hand above their heart. We both burst out laughing. 

     When we arrive home several hours later, the Christmas tree lights and TV glow illuminate the living room. My streaming service asks if I’d like to rewatch Melancholia. I select no and subsequently delete the movie from our que completely. I wash the bloody butter knife and G draws a bath, since they can’t put their hand in water for the next five days. Love makes every day feel like a miracle. It’s nothing new, this love, nor does it arrive in despair’s absence. I practice finding, I practice feeling. Look at us. We’re still here—all this love, all this despair—working with what we’ve got. 

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Leah Mensch is a dues-paying member of the Ander Monson Alumni Association. Find more, if you dare, at leahmensch.com.

Dec 10: Julija Sukys, Weeds

Weeds

Julija Šukys

*

I first discovered the work of Piet Oudolf on a day trip with my son. Sebastian was eleven when the three of us—my husband, our son, our two pets, and I—spent a year-long sabbatical in Princeton. One Saturday, we escaped by train into New York City. The husband went off to a guitar lesson with a low-key famous jazz musician, while Sebastian and I explored on foot. He and I would poke around some galleries, I decided, and then we’d walk the length of the High Line garden to the Whitney Museum of American Art. I didn’t know much about the High Line, except that Oudolf had successfully turned “the ruins of an abandoned railway viaduct into a botanical adventure, without hiding the remains of bygone industrialism.”¹

After a cup of hot chocolate in a café under an old railway bridge, we climbed a set of stairs to discover the unexpected sight of birch trees, ornamental grasses (“How can these jewels of the garden have been virtually ignored for so long?” asked the great German plant breeder, Karl Foerster in 1957² ), and perennials at various stages of their life cycles. Here, sandwiched between buildings and overlooking busy streets, the presence of goldenrod felt fresh yet familiar. In short, the High Line did not disappoint. And it was while walking the old railway that I began to suspect for the first time that a garden could be a work of art. “To us,” writes horticulturalist Rosie Atkins, the New Perennialists were part of “a movement like the surrealists or the Bauhaus.”³

That gray late-autumn day turned out to be perfect for my first encounter with Oudolf, the most famous of the New Perennialists. Because, above all, the Dutch gardener is famous for his interest in plants that look good when they’re dead. “A key part of Piet’s philosophy,” writes his close collaborator Noel Kingsbury, “is to seek beauty in nature where it has not been sought before. Seed heads, yellowing leaves, and emerging spring shoots will grab his attention as much as a colorful flower—in fact, rather more quickly.”⁴  Ghostly plant skeletons are essential to the Oudolf aesthetic. “I discover beauty in things that on first sight are not beautiful,” he says. “It is a journey in life to find out what real beauty is—and to notice that it is everywhere.”⁵  Indeed, his first book with Kingsbury contained a surprising section called “Death,” which, according to Kingsbury, “was quite possibly the first time a garden book had used it as a heading, without being negative about it.”⁶

 
In the summer of 2025, almost seven years after visiting the High Line, I mapped out a journey that would begin in Amsterdam and end in Frankfurt. Between those two cities, I would visit a series of gardens designed by or in the spirit of Oudolf, that is, gardens that skirt the edges of order, wildness, and demise. I had only the vaguest of agendas: to contemplate the fleeting beauty of cultivated spaces. What might it mean to think of a garden as art object, I wondered. How should we consider artwork that is essentially unfinishable? What does it mean to make art that spirals out of control or withers if neglected?

 
These guiding questions stemmed from the hours I’d spent digging, weeding, and planting in the two rain gardens in front of my house. Surrounded by berms and boulders, each depression fills with water during our rare but dramatic Texas storms. Over several hours, rainwater seeps into the aquafer below, rather than rushing off our land and into the city’s sewers. At the base of each “pit,” as my husband puts it, I’ve planted a mass of native pollinators that can withstand both deluge and drought. These attract monarch butterflies as they travel to Mexico. “You’re almost there,” I cheer them on as they feed and rest on my mistflowers.

 
I began planting in my mid-twenties in the spirit of all my artistic endeavors, including essaying. That’s to say, I undertake both gardening and writing according to instinct, trial, and error. Before I started writing, publishing and, eventually, teaching I had never taken a workshop class; I am an equally untrained plantswoman—for all my botanical successes, uncountable victims have nonetheless ended up on the compost heap. In graduate school, one of my crueler peers called me a dilettante. Though the remark wounded me then, I now wonder if there isn’t something to praise in dilettantism, or rather, more charitably put, in a kind of amateurism that is nonetheless serious when sustained. What I mean is that a person may start as a dilettante—a naïve garden enthusiast, for example—but end as a visionary, who, through sheer repetition, dedication, and successful experimentation ends up radically changing the way we think about our relationship to plants.

 
As the Dutch designer, Mien Ruys (known as the mother of the modernist garden), stressed over her long career, anyone can grow a garden. Oudolf, for one, started his career and practice by putting plants together in ways that pleased him, rather than according to formal rules. Far more resilient and naturalistic than those of preceding traditions, his are some of the greatest public gardens in the world.

The first garden of my journey is just outside Amsterdam, at the Singer Museum in Laren. I arrive by train to explore and photograph it from all angles. Two Dutch women flag me down to consult the garden map I hold out in front of me—it’s a copy of Oudolf’s original hand-drawn plan, bought in the museum’s gift shop. The women are trying to identify a bushy, blue-flowered shrub, about three feet tall and wide. Cloudlike, with fine leaves, it sports small star-shaped flowers. We consult the plan, but it doesn’t help. The garden has changed. Oudolf’s reproduced sketch no longer corresponds exactly to the garden before us. Plants have migrated, died, or sprung up in unforeseen spots. The Dutch women and I pull out our phones, instead, and determine that the plant in question is amsonia hubrichtii, or Hubricht’s Bluestar. It will reappear in each of the gardens I visit over a two-week period.

 

Piet Oudolf’s garden at the Singer Laren Museum, June 2025

Soon, I duck inside to look around. Perhaps the museum works will help me see the outdoor art object—the garden—in a different light. Like a palate-cleanser, I tell myself. In a blank corridor on the way to the exhibit entrance, I spot a dandelion apparently growing out of the crease between wall and tiled floor. It’s so lifelike that I think it’s real. I stop to wonder how it came to grow here. Suspicious, I crouch to examine it, summoning all my self-control to avoid touching its leaves and testing its reality. Perplexed, I straighten up and keep walking. Down the hall, I discover a second dandelion, this one with yellowed leaves, spent blooms, and browning fronds. It, too, is utterly, astonishingly lifelike. A small plaque above the plant tells me it’s made of bronze (more shock) and that this is the work of the American artist, Tony Matelli, whose “weeds constitute ‘an art installation that does not at all resemble art.’”⁷

Tony Matelli’s bronze dandelion (2024) at the Singer Laren Museum

I am Matelli’s perfect mark. I have reacted to his weeds exactly as he intended: with confusion, surprise, suspicion and, finally, understanding. “I wanted them to be experienced, first, as simple weeds,” he explains.

I didn’t want them to be experienced as a sculpture—I hoped there would be very little art meditation… The Weeds really work this way; I think people initially engage with them as real weeds, which allows them to function in the mind of the viewer as real interlopers, strange and out of place.⁸

 
I later learn that Matelli is known for his so-called hyperrealistic sculptures.⁹  “Hyperrealism has the ability to infuse life into inanimate objects,” he says. “There is an alchemical aspect when materials like bronze, stone, or resin are transmuted into objects that evoke a sense of wonder and awe.”¹⁰

Whereas Oudolf’s gardens never stop changing, dying, and regenerating themselves, Matelli’s weed sculptures defy decay by stopping time. Unlike Oudolf’s creations, Matelli’s plants will never die. Ultimately, this is the greatest challenge of thinking of a garden as art: a living work is never fixed or finished; it’s never the same from one day to the next.

I discover more bronze plants sprouting up in odd spots throughout the museum. Eventually, I give in and snap a surreptitious shot of a black-eyed Susan poking up from the base of a stone hollow cast in fiberglass. To my mind a black-eyed Susan is no weed; I’ve sown dozens of them in my rain garden and celebrate their blooms each summer.

“Officially, no photos are allowed, but I’m not looking,” a museum docent says with a laugh. My agitation amuses her and, together, we marvel at the flower’s wilting petals and (now eternal) windblown state.

The Singer Museum’s weeds are not Matelli’s first connection to Oudolf. From 2016 to 2017, Matelli’s sculpture, “Sleepwalker,” found its home on the High Line. The work depicts a balding, middle-aged man in white briefs seemingly somnambulating. The same sculpture made its controversial debut at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 2014. In response to “Sleepwalker’s” appearance outdoors on campus, students submitted a petition to the administration, requesting the sculpture be moved indoors. The lifelike figure, students claimed, was a source of fear, anxiety, and distress. On the night of May 20, 2014, vandals defaced “Sleepwalker,” splashing yellow paint over its face, leg, and foot.¹¹   Of the attack on his sculpture, Matelli reflected: “After all that infamy, I felt the work was kind of damaged; my intention was obscured by all that. I felt the High Line offered an opportunity to rehabilitate the work in a sense and let it be seen clearly again.”¹²

Unlike later bronze specimens, Matelli cast his first series of weeds in PVC. As in Laren, for Abandon, a site-specific installation for the University at Buffalo’s Lightwell Gallery, the plant sculptures sprouted from gallery corners and floor cracks. PVC was a “clever choice” of materials, writes curator Lisa Fishman, “since weeds are known for their ‘plasticity.’”¹³

 
But to me, the great seduction and delight of the Laren weeds was my slow realization of their bronzeness and all that the molten and monumental metal implies. To cast a weed in bronze is, at once, funny and mind-blowingly beautiful.

 
Materials matter. Matelli understands this. He has described his insistence in creating “A Glass of Water” (a sculpture that looks exactly as it sounds—the water glass, two-thirds full, sits atop what appears to be a plain carboard box¹⁴) from solid blown glass rather than plastic, as glass fabricators tried to convince him to do. “That work is a lens,” he says.

 

There’s a poetry to it, and this brings us to the really simple, dumb stuff that art is sometimes, but that actually has a lot of power. We have connections to certain materials and certain efforts. A painted plastic thing does not register the same as a painted stainless steel thing—it just doesn’t. It’s not because it looks different, it’s because we understand the materials differently.¹⁵

 
So, if water blown from glass is a lens, then what is a weed cast in bronze? A monument, I suppose. But to what?

 
“Gardens are a process.”¹⁶  They are, as gardeners like to say, the slowest form of performance art. Though this nugget of wisdom comes up repeatedly in horticultural discussions, despite my attempts, I’ve failed to ascertain its origins. Maybe gardeners have been saying this to one another, nodding solemnly as we do, for as long as humans have been performing. That’s to say, pretty much forever.

At the Mien Ruys Gardens, Dedemsvaart, June 2025
 

Impermanence is on my mind as I follow a series of floating steps through water lilies and reeds. I’ve left Amsterdam, but rather than going straight to Den Haag, I’ve deviated from my planned itinerary and headed far to the Netherlands’ northeast, to visit the gardens of Oudolf’s foremother Ruys, in Dedemsvaart. “Plants find their place,” I read of her marsh garden. Oudolf, too, values collaboration and happenstance over control. In filmed footage, I’ve watched as he walks through his home garden at Hummelo and reaches up to release the fluff of seed heads into the wind, inviting them to germinate where they land.

Plants die – this is inevitable. You can start a garden with a vision, but the best gardeners learn to move with the land, soil, water, and sun. We dance with heat, frost, drought, deluge, and hail. Every garden is both a compromise and a negotiation, at least for the gardener who refuses poisons and resists mechanized irrigation, as I do. What would it mean to try and preserve a garden? “Sometimes I have seen clients with an old Mien Ruys garden,” Oudolf has remarked, “but I cannot see anything remaining there of her…people have to move on, gardens have to change.”¹⁷

As for us, the family-garden of three humans and two pets, we have changed, too. Alas, the dog that came with us to Princeton is no more. The cat has grown older and soft around her belly, just like me. The husband continues to play guitar, but his hair has grayed. And Sebastian, that eleven-year-old who came to explore the High Line with me all those years ago, is now far from home and studying to become an architect. He has, as it were, grown like a weed.

Every winter, a perennial garden dies a small death. Each spring, it’s reborn. In an essential way, I think gardens are not only about change but about time itself. “It’s not time passing that’s interesting,” says Matelli, “it’s the effect of time on the human mark that’s important.”¹⁸

Months after my return, our Austin rain gardens will undergo their curious December regreening—a result of late-fall rains and cooler temperatures. I know this moment of color and beauty will be short-lived: soon, a January freeze will come, and the blooms will die back. But by February, the bulbs will begin to peek through the soil. Life starts over. Time marches on.

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Julija Šukys is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahr Djaout (2007).

¹Mateo Kries and Viviane Stappmanns. Garden Futures: Designing with Nature. Vitra Design Museum, 2023: 146.
²Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury, Hummelo: A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life. Monacelli, 2015: 155
³Oudolf and Kingsbury 165.
⁴Oudolf and Kingsbury 202.
⁵Oudolf and Kingsbury 205.
⁶Oudolf and Kingsbury 201.
⁷Matelli qtd. in Lisa Fischman, “Art That Gets Away,” University at Buffalo Art Gallery Overview, ed. Karen Emenhiser. University at Buffalo Art Gallery Research Center in Art + Culture, 2001. 36-38: 37.
⁸Matelli qtd. in https://marlborougharchive.com/uploads/20300203/1590167614518/tonymatelli_weeds.pdf
⁹Matelli in Frank Benson and Tony Matelli, “Beyond Realism,” Elevated: Art on the High Line, ed. Cecilia Alamani. Monacelli, 2024. 70-73: 72.
¹⁰ Matelli, “Beyond Realism,” 73.
¹¹Cait Munro, “Wellesley College’s Sleepwalker Sculpture Vandalized.” Artnet.com. May 23, 2014; Hili Perlson, “Disputed Scantily Clad ‘Sleepwalker’ Sculpture Comes to the High Line.” Artnet.com. Jan. 7, 2016.
¹²Matelli, “Beyond Realism,” 71.
¹³Lisa Fishman, “Tony Matelli: Abandon.” University at Buffalo Art Gallery Research Center in Art + Culture, 1999-2000: 36.
¹⁴The box is made from painted polyester fiberglass.
¹⁵Matelli, Glass of Water, Verlag der Buchhandlung, 2011: 66.
¹⁶The quote, attributed to Mien Ruys, appears on a sign posted in the Tuien Mien Ruys (Mien Ruys Gardens) in Dedemsvaart, Netherlands.
¹⁷Oudolf and Kingsbury 140
¹⁸Matelli, Glass of Water, 58.

Dec 09: Cathy de la Cruz, A Mess, a Museum

A Mess, a Museum

Cathy de la Cruz

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“Well, this is my house. I don’t know what it is: a sitting room; a music room; a mess; a museum …” 

—Serge Gainsbourg, April 1979

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The best art I saw in Paris this year was the art I was not allowed to take any pictures of. The best art I saw in Paris this year was somebody’s house. The best art I saw in Paris this year included me listening to the narration of a grieving adult daughter as she told visitors through headphones which items and rooms reminded her of favorite memories of her dead father. The best art I saw in Paris this year included a lengthy moment of me staring at the bed in which this narrator’s father died in. The best art I saw in Paris this year was Serge Gainsbourg’s house. 

I have always loved art. I have an MFA in Visual Art, which I guess doesn’t necessarily mean I love art, but I do. Living in New York City for the past eleven years has turned me into a sort of art-junkie, taking in as many museums, gallery and unconventionally housed art shows as possible. 

Art that I saw in my eleven days in Europe to illustrate my art-junkieness:

• Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
• Is that a Delacroix? The Art of Copying at the Musée Delacroix
• Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais, as well as throughout the city 
• Ellicit Es Festival Feministe De Films De Patrimoine at Cinéma Saint André des Arts
• The Third Man at Cinéma Le Champo
• Berthe Weill. Art dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde at Musée de l'Orangerie
• The Musée Rodin
• Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten at the Grand Palais
• ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought at The Palais de Tokyo
• Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal
• So much street art
• Many street performers and dancers

For the last two years, I have had the good fortune to apartment-swap with a friend-of-a-friend in Paris and call me art-naïve, but I am starting to wonder if Paris is even a better “art-city” than NYC. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but it didn’t become glaringly so until my most recent visit to Paris, just four days after the now infamous Louvre Heist. 

October 19th is when the 2025 Louvre Heist occurred. I swear I was sitting in my Brooklyn apartment taking selfies of my new French-inspired bob. I swear I was taking a screenshot of my Parisian friend, Mile’s flight itinerary since we were about to apartment-swap. I swear I was sitting at home looking at cool things I could do while I was in Paris for 11 days (Full disclosure: I ended up in Portugal for three of those days). I swear I was taking photos of my cat, Fig. I swear I was downloading an app to see what I would look like with blonde hair. I say, “I swear” because in the days that followed it became the obnoxious running joke of many who knew me in the U.S. to tease me about how I was I was in Paris because I was part of the Louvre Heist. 

I know none of my friends actually thought I was involved in such a thing, but the fact that it was a running joke during my trip, yet I never heard or saw any mention of it while I was actually in Paris felt the way news works; how sometimes my family in Texas calls to tell me about something that happened in New York City that I don’t know about. 

I even thought that I heard the police sirens on October 25th catching the Louvre robbers, but when I check my notes in the form of the time stamped pictures on my phone, I heard those sirens on the 26th. 

I have only been to the Louvre once and it was on October 25th, 2024. I was at the Louvre within 5 hours of landing in Paris. I had never been to the Louvre and somehow had the energy to do so after a hard landing that involved my iPhone breaking as in it was completely unusable in a foreign country where I was traveling solo. In those 5 hours, I managed to nap and plop my sim card into the mutual friend’s phone all while he was preparing to travel to New York city to stay at my place. We went from apartment-swapping to me having his teenager daughter’s old cell phone. 

Once at the Louvre with my tiny retro cell phone, I bought a ham and cheese sandwich, some potato chips, and a coke like the American tourist I am. Then I made my way to painting after painting until I saw her. You know who. She was this tiny little painting on a black wall surrounded by paparazzi. There were at least seven rows of people in front of me. I took photos and videos of people taking photographs with her, the spectacle. And then I got closer. And closer. And then I found myself taking a photo with her. I was close. So close that my partner at the time upon seeing the photos later asked me if I had been given a private tour of the Mona Lisa. And then it was like I had her all to myself. And that’s it—once you reach the closest you can get to get to her, you are ushered out and it is in that moment where you are actually the closest to her and almost have a private moment—while you’re saying goodbye. It’s sort of like paying your respects at a popular person’s funeral. 

 

Now it was exactly a year later—to the day and I had an appointment to visit Serge Gainsbourg’s house. Opened to the paying-public in fall 2023, the house is now a designated historic landmark and while I do not claim to be the biggest Gainsbourg fan, I used to be a huge fan of Yé-yé music to which his contributions are unparalleled. Additionally, I understand his place in French history, and I was an American tourist in France—so visiting his home seemed right. I was also intrigued by how far tickets to Gainsbourg’s house sold out in advance. For this visit, I bought my ticket four-months in advance. 

 

I did not understand when I bought the tickets that part of the reason the tickets sell out so far in advance is because Maison Gainsbourg is an actual historic house, only a limited number of visitors are allowed in at a time. I recall only seeing two other visitors when I was there and then several staff keeping eyes on us. Though interestingly, we had full reign upstairs. Mostly I think there would have been nowhere for staff to sit upstairs. Once upstairs, I touched the door to Gainsbourg’s bedroom like a creep. 

 

What does someone who isn’t the biggest Serge Gainsbourg fan in the world get out of touring his home? I genuinely loved some of his music. I loved many of the songs he wrote for women artists, many of whom he was romantically linked to. I love the music and art of his daughter, Charlotte who narrates the entire tour. I love the fact that Gainsbourg was such a controversial weirdo who for me seems Frencher than French. Of course, I wanted to see his home on my third ever visit to Paris. 

What surprised me was how much the tour was about family life. Once inside, I sort of forgot Gainsbourg was a pop star and saw him as just an older multiple times-broken-hearted man and father who drank a lot and lived in a relatively modest house for such a star. I started to think about both my grandfathers in the final years of their lives—alone in their homes. 

Once I arrived at Maison Gainsbourg, I was given headphones, but I did not realize the soundtrack I was listening to was created by a group called Soundwalk Collective who have also collaborated with Patti Smith and Nan Goldin, among others. Their work is so subtle that I almost didn’t consider it as “work,” which I think is why the visit ended up being so powerful. Those unreleased sounds of Gainsbourg mixed 30 years after his death with his daughter’s narration and sounds collected within the space, create a feeling that is hard to explain. I felt like I was peeking in on my own childhood—like I was witnessing visions of my own family that don’t exist anymore. When I left, I could not stop thinking about what the Maison Gainsbourg version of my family’s home would be like. Then I decided everyone needs to do this with their home, as if it’s possible—as if our homes full of memories don’t get sold or bulldozed. What a gift to be able to preserve something like a family home and share it with others. 

(Photo by Pierre Terrasson from the Maison Gainsbourg website) 

 

This experience got me thinking about The House/The Home as an exhibition. Of course, a house, a home is an exhibition—a curated collection. I was so deeply moved by this personal half-hour experience. For some Gainsbourg fans, I can imagine the carpet that is pulling away from the floorboards and the paint that is chipping along with the darkness due to the closed shutters (closed for conservation purposes) might burst a celebrity-bubble, but I thought it was perfect. This is intimacy and it’s not for everyone. 

(Photography by Charlotte Gainsbourg from the Soundwalk Collective website)

 

Nothing about this tour feels forced—everything just flows. The kitchen was so small that it made me think about the home my mother grew up in in San Antonio, Texas. These were not feelings I expected to have in 2025 Paris, France. 

This is where Gainsbourg composed most of his songs. I want everyone reading this who writes or makes any sort of art to imagine someone 30 years after your death visiting the space where you made things—your first drafts—visiting that space frozen in time. It might not age well, and it might disappoint someone who held you on a pedestal. 

This space was beautiful and chaotic, and I loved the imprint of where Gainsbourg sat on his couch. I am regularly embarrassed of my own couch imprint. I loved the table of police badges that he collected from law enforcement who were not supposed to ever give anyone their badge—it was obsessive and almost pathological. I loved the upstairs room of dolls. I loved the bathtub that apparently Serge never used, but is famously photographed in. In fact, this was my favorite detail: “Dad hated taking baths.” And then a few minutes down the street at the official Serge Gainsbourg Museum, there Dad is photographed in the bath he hated taking. Home versus official-museum or reality versus public persona. 

(Photo by the author)

 

The museum itself was a bit of a letdown. Lots of memorabilia, a gift shop, and a bar—but nothing that really tells a story or evokes any real feeling. I would not recommend going to the museum without also going to the house since tickets are sold separately. The museum is the flashy clothes. The house is the body underneath those clothes. 

In comparison, the Gerhard Richter show was like exploring a cave with a bunch of fellow explorers due to the nature of how huge and magnificent the Fondation Louis Vuitton is. The Musée Delacroix felt like a claustrophobic old home that was too bright and crowded—like being at the mall the day after Christmas. Art Basel was essentially an art-orgy—decadent and fun, but also overwhelming and exhausting; I walked out it thinking I needed a break from art for a while. The feminist film festival I went to was enlightening, but very similar to things I have already experienced in my life. The screening of the Hollywood classic The Third Man at Le Champo might have been second favorite art experience of the trip because it was at 11am on a Friday and seeing an old film I’ve always meant to see at that time of day at a legendary old Paris theater made me really feel like I was on vacation. I even got yelled at by a grumpy old Frenchman for accidentally kicking his seat. He yelled something at me in French and instead of being embarrassed, I felt like I was getting a real Parisian cinemagoing experience, and I was absolutely delighted. I saw great art at the Musée de l'Orangerie, but again the experience was crowded and bright and a little tiring. The Musée Rodin was great even though I am not a huge Rodin fan—I am so glad I went. Let’s just say when I got to the Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten show, the museum attendant looked concerned and said “I don’t know if you’ll be able to see everything since you only have two hours” and I knew it wasn’t going to be my favorite experience. His saying that caused me to rush through with time to spare and sweat on my brow. The show at The Palais de Tokyo was all artists I had seen before in the U.S. and while I appreciated it, it felt a little too close to home to dazzle me on my last night in Paris, but the space also had a restaurant, and I was starving so I’ll always think fondly of them for that. The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art on my spontaneous trip to Porto, Portugal absolutely blew me away and I would go back there in a heartbeat, but somehow the Serge experience is still my favorite of the trip.

The tour of Serge Gainsbourg’s home was only thirty minutes long, but it stands out in my brain as so much longer. I’m sure part of that sense of time elongated was because I was not allowed to use my phone to document anything. Whether or not it was her explicit intention, tour organizer and narrator, Charlotte Gainsbourg succeeded in capturing my full attention.

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Cathy de la Cruz was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In 2009, she received her MFA in Visual Art from the University of California at San Diego, having completed a series of short experimental live action and animated nonfiction films. In 2014, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a Senior Metadata Manager for Penguin Random House. 

Dec 08: Scott Dickensheets, In the City

In the City

Scott Dickensheets

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“One eye sees, the other eye feels.”

—Paul Klee

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45°, 90°, 180°, City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy of Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Ben Blackwell

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It’s been 900 days since I walked into City, Michael Heizer’s enormous and complicated work of land art, situated in the Nevada outback three hours north of Las Vegas. It’s 299 breathtaking acres of precision-manicured plazas, hillocks, terraces, pathways, mounds, viewsheds, and berms, sculpted mostly from compacted dirt and gravel excavated on-site, and punctuated here and there by massive concrete objects, sharp Euclidean counterponts to the site’s organic swoops and curvatures. Somehow the artist’s implacable minimalism coheres these many elements into a holistic experience.
     That was June 21, 2023, and I can still conjure the physical inhalation and emotional exhalation of wandering in and being absorbed into City’s immensities of space, time, isolation, and intention—some of which I had expected to encounter, given the gale-force PR of its opening nine months earlier, but which, once there, I was immediately unable to transcribe. That was one of City’s first effects, to deflate the speculative vocabulary I’d prepared ahead of time; none of my synonyms for really fucking big would do. “My main problem will be finding the words for this,” I told another visitor—six people are allowed on the site at a time—shortly after we entered. I’m not an art critic, so my linguistic grip on the nonverbal aspects of the experience was already loose, and the more I wandered the multileveled expanse, a mile long and half-a-mile wide, trying to reconcile my seeing and feeling eyes, the more words fled my brain.
     Leslie Jamison once explained that “to me the defining trait of the essay is the situation and problem of encounter.” That’s certainly the case here. Nine hundred days later I’m still trying to pin it all down, from my perch in a city that’s the exact opposite of City: dense with people, noise, marketing, and distraction, profligate and garish, mercantile in the extreme, deep-faked, and riddled with surveillance. As is yours, no doubt, mine is a life saturated by screenloads of media, so City’s unplugged power chords served, and still serve, as a resonant outlier. It doesn’t try to mediate much beyond your experience of it, and that to no insidious effect; it stimulates no consumer desire, fritters none of your attention, promotes no bogus facsimile of reality, encourages no brain rot; the only algorithms at work there are the original ones—time, space, geometry, awe.
     On one hand, I don’t want to oversell the experience; it’s not like I met god or anything. On the other hand, if I haven’t thought about it every one of those days since, I have more than I haven’t. Which is to say, it delivered as heavy, complex, enveloping, and sublime an aesthetic wallop as I’ve ever received. I’ve been trying to affix words to it ever since.

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City, 1970 – 2022 © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Eric Piasecki

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Hang on for a moment while I speed-run the backstory. City is the career summation of land art pioneer Michael Heizer, the supersize payoff on everything he learned about the uses of mass, scale, geometry, geology, light, and time during decades spent making art out of massive boulders and negative-space excavations. (His father was an archaeologist who studied ancient cultures in Nevada and Central and South America, with a particular interest in the quarrying and moving of large stones for ceremonial purposes.) Notably cantankerous and private, Heizer spent 50 years building City while guarding its secrecy, mostly on his own, at considerable cost to his health and finances (though ultimately much institutional support arrived, in the form of the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art and others). I’m pretty sure he intends it to last forever.

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City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Mary Converse

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Okay, so let’s encounter. You’re given three hours to wander the site at will. The first thing I saw and felt were the long sightlines. In the foreground: the idealized curvature of City’s edge hills—something I read claimed that Heizer used satellite-linked graders to scrape everything just so. The backdrop: the rugged, chaotic mountains of Nevada’s basin-and-range geography, the whole scene overtopped by central Nevada’s huge, empty sky. Among other effects, this shrewd horizon-management sets up an enlivening duality between inner and outer, between wild nature and perfected abstractions of it. There are no conclusions to be drawn from this, I don’t think—my fugitive vocabulary notwithstanding, City vibes primarily on a preverbal wavelength. One eye sees, the other eye feels.
     The second thing I perceived were its magnitudes of time. As I strolled through a lowered gravel plaza with a massive raised terrace at one end of the installation, it wasn’t hard to imagine this space filled with pre-European peoples in the throes of a religious fervor. It struck me that Heizer, familiar with those ritual gatherings, is trying to use the secular tools of geometry and engineering to access that same capacity for human awe in the presence of a larger reality.
     And so one of the maximalist aspirations of Heizer’s minimalist project began to reveal itself, at least in retrospect: using space and time to confront and astonish you with your true, small place in the cosmos.
     You needn’t take my word for it. Look at the December issue of Vogue. It has page after page of sumptuous Annie Leibovitz photos of Dune star Timothée Chalamet wandering in various fashionable outfits through Heizer’s sere, serene vistas. And yet, despite his interstellar celebrity and charisma, when Chalamet isn’t depicted as literally too small to matter, he is, as my friend the author and cultural geographer William L. Fox notes, “simply in the way of the view, and your eye slides around him.”
     Whatever you’re wearing, walking City is both an intensely physical undertaking, keeping you aware of your body at all times, and remarkable cerebral: you notice that, while indisputably of this place (Garden Valley, Nevada), City’s smooth perfection renders it oddly placeless, too, as though you’re in the middle of every desert. Despite its ambient enigma, there’s no sense of inherent folklore here, either, which is perhaps curious for an installation proximate to the quasi-occult mysteries of Area 51, the mythology-generating machine that is Las Vegas, and the tech-bro shamanism of Burning Man—Nevada may be rich in modern signifiers, but this place traffics in deceptively simple effects:
     The front of “Complex 2,” a 24-foot-high trapezoidal mound, seems, from a distance, to be framed by solid concrete beams. It’s only when you approach that you see the truth: the “frame” comprises separate beam-pieces protruding from the structure at different distances, each carefully sized and place so as to appear solid from a distance. At this point you might feel meh about such a basic optical illusion—or you get that it bookmarks a fundamental truth about the desert, and maybe life: You can’t trust your eyes. Perception out here is tricky, and distances are rarely what they seems to be.

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City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Photo: Joe Rome.

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“Yeah,” one of my companions said when I mentioned that business about feeling small. “But the desert will make you feel that, too.” I didn’t have a good response.
     Here, 900 days later, is what I wish I had said: Before pop culture downgraded the word sublime into a synonym for cool, it generally denoted a beauty so vast it evokes both awe and terror in the powerless viewer. In that sense, yes, the raw desert doesn’t need Heizer’s help to impress your insignificance upon you, and its venomous creatures and potential for deadly exposure will certainly sharpen the point.
     The magic of City, as I grokked it, is that Heizer has retained the sublime but changed its terms — more awe, less terror—to create a site that deliberately makes you feel small, even as you examine yourself feeling small. But Heizer’s minimalism gives it a twist. Yes, you’re rendered miniscule, but, as you and your companions trudge through City, the lone active, living elements in this vast setting, you also become the entire focus of the place. This has been created explicitly to make you grasp your place in the cosmos. So, sure, you’re tiny. But insignificant? No. I found this discombobulation of the self profoundly affecting, and I’d like to think Timothée Chalamet would back me up on that. (Or not. “It’s just a totally remote experience” was all he had to say to Vogue about his time at City. Eh, give the kid another 900 days, I’m sure he’ll level up.)
     Smallness has a kind of power here. Late in my three-hour visit, as I shambled along a wide pathway lined with concrete curbing, the sunlight slanted in low over what, just a few moments before, had been a plain, monochromatic beige hillside, tranches of larger gravel began throwing thickets of tiny shadows, dramatically shifting the visual aspect of that hillside—simple light and the logic of ruthless subtraction altered what counts as dramatic. You can brain up a life lesson from that if you like, or just marvel at it, as I did. Doesn’t matter. Like Donald Judd once said, “Intellect and emotion, thought and feeling, and form and content are the same false dichotomy."

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4/5 Pit, City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Mary Converse

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Not everyone feels as well-disposed as I do toward City. It’s drawn heavy criticism: as an example of white-male megalomania; as too elitist and exclusive (it costs $150 to visit and isn’t easy to get to); as reifying the colonial mindset that stripped Indigenous peoples of their homelands; as exemplifying American technological imperialism by laying a heavy hand on the environment. All are valid discourse points that simply did not follow me onto the site, nor did they arise from it when I was out there. The effect of Heizer’s determined minimalism, late art critic Dave Hickey wrote in Gagosian Quarterly after visiting City, is that “you are forced to distinguish between what you see and the preconceptions you brought with you into the desert.”

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Complex One and Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

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My visit to City occurred early in a devastating run of family losses: five deaths, six if you count my favorite dog, plus a rabid political party gone off-leash, the abandonment of decency and American principle—and no, I’m not going to turn this into a trauma narrative; no need to involve Parhul Sehgal. I’m quite sure that Heizer, who dislikes his own biography being used to discuss his work, wouldn’t appreciate me ladling my pathos onto his creation to score points with Essay Daily readers, either. He didn’t spend 50 years breaking himself and his bank just to make something that’s fucking therapeutic. Anyway, while many believe art can heal, I’m not all-in on that one. Art’s elevated my mood, enhanced my mind, and improved my manners, but I can’t recall an instance in which it truly healed me. Reader, I’ve tried.
     But I do believe art can model alternative ways of being in the world.
     In my case, accumulated grief, while viscerally writhing in my chest, also frequently propels me deep into anxious, abstract reveries—after all, what’s death but the ultimate abstraction?—in which I am often adrift, depressed and detached from the world, small against the despair. It’s just a totally remote experience.
     But my long-tail takeaway vibe from City has been the inverse equivalent: floating in a realm of abstractions, yes, but leaning into those wordless contemplations, and finding the whole process levitating in such a way that it returns me to the real world. No doubt that’s why I reflect on it so often. I’m not saying the one sensation dispels the other, not at all. Actual time might heal, but art about time probably won’t. Still, on some stubbornly inarticulable level, I sense a useful feedback loop between the two...
     I know, I know, sounds iffy when I type it out like that. I guess I’m still looking for the right vocabulary.
     But maybe, over time, my encounter with this massive art project is slyly proposing different ways to inhabit formally similar experiences until the awe I saw and the sadness I feel work themselves into another false dichotomy—just another instance of things not being what they seem.

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Scott Dickensheets is a freelance writer and editor living near Las Vegas. His work has appeared.

Dec 07: Emiland Kray, Even Robots Feel Sad Sometimes

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Even Robots Feel Sad Sometimes

Emiland Kray

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Emiland Kray, Robots Woah, diptych, ink on paper, 5.5”x4”, digitized into a gif, 2025

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In a bout of sleepwalking at 17, I was visited by a robotic child in my dreams. In a miraculous feat, while completely asleep I imagined following this child from my bedroom into the hallway. Her head had pulsating electrical charges beneath yellow plexiglass and I remember the clicking of her feet upon the tiled floor outside of my bedroom. Pressed up against the garage door, she extended her hand to me. As I reciprocated the gesture, a few things happened. To anyone who may have been watching, I collapsed. Completely breaking the sleep/wake trance and fading utterly into unconsciousness as a pile upon the garage floor. To the robot, I grabbed her hand and a part of me transcended humankind and my body transformed into a shimmering metal sheet unburdened by breath and sleep and food. And to me, I saw stars and my vision sparkled for a brief moment as our fingertips touched.
During this time in my life, I was dealing with the onset of generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and at the cusp of a drug addiction. It was routine that I would starve myself in my childhood room, chewing on the heads of my erasers to experience the mouthfeel of aluminum while drawing on my ceiling, walls, and floor. Matched only by amphetamines, my hand never slowed, aside from sleep, which was riddled with nightmares. My thoughts were like pistons as I spent several sleepless nights drawing simply because slowing down was mixed with a shame that came with mortality. Most of my mental breaks resulted in thoughts of wishing to be robotic, to simply work, unrelentingly, in an inevitable climb to production. And it seemed that very early on, this behavior was not only tolerated, but encouraged. Consistent positive feedback from academia and gallerists that were now expectant of that quantity of work from me fueled my now obsessive desire to draw and write and make.
     A year prior to my robotic sleepwalking experience, I remember scanning the clearance aisle in a Borders for crossword or sudoku books. Instead, I was immediately drawn to the last copy of a Taschen art book, H.R. Giger, for $14.98. A pittance really for the 240 page, color illustrated hardcover book about the Alien-Porno-King himself. I was introduced to Giger’s work, like most folks, through the iconic monster and set designs in the 1979 film Alien and perpetuated through that entire franchise. Simultaneously phallic and feminine, Giger’s aliens stalk spaces that are both android and organic. Before purchasing this book, I had never given any thought to his earlier career, or to how he was hauntingly like me and so many other artists: prolific to a fault, addicted to drugs, and sliding up and down from manic episodes. It seems as though Giger was also playing a balancing act between self-harm and artistic success.

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H.R. Giger, Head |||, 1969, Oil on cardboard, 54 x 63 cm

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Giger’s early work was pornographic and grotesque. It formally reflected a masturbatory speed and desperation within the quick quality of his marks, and the content that he drew was equally disturbing. His pen and ink work created in his twenties mostly depicted decapitation, fetuses, and/or inexplicable limbs. The speed that was prescribed to each mark coupled with the experimental nature of both composition and content consistently broke basic rules about anatomy and several social norms with his depictions of pornography and Satan. And it’s in that sweet spot where I see a glimpse of things that were special to me in moments of mania: a boldness to the ink, unified chimeric shapes, and the sheer fucking quantity of work. Did Giger want to be a robot too?

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H.R. Giger, Self Portrait, 1962, ink on paper, 15.3 x 20 cm

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The trope of the self-harming mentally-ill artist is a stylish framework within arts education and art history from which to view the art historical canon, and also to help define the avant-garde. Its edgy allure makes it easy for artists to feel pressured to suffer for their work in order to fit within that familiar narrative, but the consequences of this stereotype are terrible. In the winter of 1888 Vincent van Gogh had a manic episode after an argument and cut off his own ear, reporting the next day that he had no memory of the event. Amy Winehouse, one of the most unique jazz singers in our lifetime, battled alcoholism, drug addiction, and bipolar disorder until she died of substance abuse. In a letter to his father, Michelangelo Buonarroti said, “I lead a miserable existence and reck not of life nor honor—that is of this world; I live wearied by stupendous labors and beset by a thousand anxieties. And thus I lived for some fifteen years now and never an hour’s happiness I have had.” The list is seemingly endless, but when actual medical intervention is taken, it reflects an inept healthcare system. After Britney Spears’ public health emergency in 2007, she was prescribed Lithium and incorrectly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a tragic but not unique story how medicine and psychiatry control women rather than help them. The psychoactive drugs prescribed to Sylvia Plath to treat her depression are suspected of being the very substances that actually enabled her to take her own life. And when I sought mental health care after consistently having panic attacks in my studio, I was put onto a 6 week fast-track therapy program that resulted in no tangible change.
     Furthermore, it also seems like artists who make while manic, depressed, or while pushing through panic attacks are celebrated for doing so and that experience becomes a selling point and a status symbol. As an art student, two mentors of mine were open in their discussions with me about their drug abuse. One was a prolific draftsperson who continually blew out his shoulder after long hours in the studio and was prescribed Percocets for the pain. These opioids eventually made his drawings sloppy, but gallerists then described his work as ‘showcasing a truer anguish’. The second insisted that I try coding while high after describing his ideal cocktail of drugs containing fentanyl and mdma. A touring musician friend of mine whenever visiting town always asks me for an Adderall connection (to which I have none), and it’s situations like this where sometimes I ask myself which came first? The artist or the addiction? Because, it’s obviously both a behavior that is encouraged from the outside, purported by gallerists, art writers, and critics spinning a stereotype, but it’s also perpetuated from within through initially well intentioned treatment, but also through good old fashioned peer pressure.
     In an interview between Giger and Dan O’Bannon, a film screenwriter and effects supervisor most famous for the screenplay for Alien and The Return of the Living Dead, he confirmed Giger was an opium addict. Originally dosing opium to treat his night terrors, one of O’Bannon’s first accounts with Giger was at a hotel in Paris where Giger approached him with some tin foil and said bluntly, “Would you like to do some opium?”
     Dan: “Why do you take that?”
     Giger:”I am afraid of my visions”
     Dan: “It’s only in your mind”
     Giger: “That is what I am afraid of.”
     Maybe it’s prewritten, where those of us who use art to purge, must also treat the poisoned well with chlorine or fluoride. But it’s also those very moments where drugs blunt the hopeless life ahead of us, and sharpen a focus that delivers us to a flow state with ease. Again, interviews with Giger feel like a mirror as I am transported back to watching my dilated pupils flick back and forth in a mirror, or drawing portrait after portrait upon my friend’s printer paper after a night of dropping acid and watching the sunrise.
     The first time that I wanted to be robotic was actually before my sleep walking adventure in the garage. It was because of the pain that the developing calluses in my fingers were causing because of my rigorous drawing habits. I grip my drawing utensils between my middle finger and my ring finger and, growing up, it caused a noticeable divot in the tip of my ring finger. Even into adulthood the finger is misshapen around a now beloved callus. When this was developing, I was around 14 years old and was regularly filling up sketchbooks with ink and pencil drawings of robot dogs, and robot peacocks, and robots with scoliosis. The very mechanism that my body was building up to make it so I could draw more, was the very thing I sought to eliminate. My wrists were unyielding engines, but my finger muscles just couldn’t keep up. The more it hurt, the harder I gripped, and thus the more I wished for oil to flow through my veins.

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Emiland Kray, Call Me Mr. Bicycle Chain, chalk pastel on paper, 18”x24”, 2015

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There’s nothing in interviews or biographies about Giger wanting to be a robot, but it was in part because of his work that I knew I wasn’t alone in at least imagining it. In his middle and late career work, much of his figurative work includes androids. Somehow the human body transformed into a mechanical one. Leaning into monochromatic and analogous color palettes, his predominately airbrushed paintings give us the succulent repetition of a well oiled machine. In disgusting awe, Giger oftentimes reduced uniquely human behavior, like fucking, birth, and dying, into mechanized motion. Giger suspended death, and showed us a painless and grotesque world. Decapitation was still prevalent in his work, but the expressions were placid instead of stained and horrified – they were expressions of a robot suspended in the land of the living-ish. 

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H.R. Giger, Passage Temple (Life), 1974, acrylic and ink on paper on wood, 240 x 280 cm

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If we were robotic, then we wouldn’t have to turn to drugs to stay awake or to numb the pain. My mechanized esophagus could drink unleaded gasoline, no actually, I could drink leaded gasoline and be completely unscathed. I could harness the highest octane creative power, carpal tunnel be damned! EntireContribution84 asks Reddit: “What is the problem of becoming an emotionless robot?”, and here I am still wrangling that same question. Getting past two factor authentication may be a short-term issue, but thinking long-term, I could probably make 2-3 good fucking drawings per week. I wouldn’t need to take time to eat or sleep, but instead I could consistently be working. My calluses would go away along with my back pain and migraines. The biggest fear that I have though, is would the art then truly be mine?
     One of the main reasons that I haven’t taken hard drugs in over 5 years now was because it changed the quality of my artwork. Although it increased my productivity levels, the comedowns resulted in crippling impostor syndrome and hellish shame. The artwork felt dry, despite being expressive and opulent. Is this the consequence of being a robot? The marks looked feverish, the work seemed suspended, everlastingly pregnant with an ideal that was ultimately empty. Little information is known about Giger’s drug addiction, but it’s alluded to in his paintings. Heroin syringes for example are repeated motifs in several of his works, but whether or not the artist partook in those drugs is speculation. Even less information is known about any attempts at sobriety for the artist. There are several accounts from partners and friends about potential alcoholism, but nothing concrete and again no professional diagnoses. In a 1994 interview with Steven Cerio, Giger claimed that drugs are completely forbidden in Switzerland, but his romantic partner Li Tobler on multiple occasions has confirmed that drug use was ubiquitous within their relationship.

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Li-||, airbrush on board, 1974

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I cannot deny that something in his artwork reminded me of my years of dissociating while drawing under the influence. From a formal point of view, we share repetition, we share paper and canvas, and we share the robot. The external pressure to create and produce is an ongoing issue with horrific productivity trends like the 5-9 routine, and side hustles just to meet basic needs. Production at a high level has become a necessity for folks just to keep their heads above water, and having a healthy work-life balance is so rare that I am beginning to think that working under capitalism is really just a scam. Fueled by a desire to please an internalized quota at such a young age, I felt compelled to produce constantly. Not only did drawing quiet the pounding in my head, but it also seemed to please those around me and thus my quota got higher and higher. When looking at the late career of Giger, I can’t say for certain that he ever did slow down. Still filling sketchbooks with pornography while also working with industry monsters on projects like Dune, two covers for Heavy Metal magazine, he designed the entire architectural interior for a bar and lounge down to the detailing on furniture design and the patterns in the fucking tiles. The breadth of work that he produced is astonishing, and his signature style is still sought after by artists, make-up artists, screenwriters, and interior designers alike.

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Table, chairs, and tile designed by H.R. Giger for the Giger Bar

Giger Bar interior crop

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Now though, only one of us is still pumping out drawings. H.R. Giger lived until the age of 74 until he died from complications after a fall, and now I am alone to reflect on the high I get from making drawings until my calluses are rubbed raw or my eyes become bloodshot. Not even the Alien-Porno-King himself could keep his pedal to the metal forever with death being the final boundary. While I’m down here, dreaming of the dopamine rush of making 2-3 drawings a week, but realistically hitting my wall at 1, I still think about that little robot girl who visited me when I was a kid. A wordless, outstretched hand. Maybe, at 74, Giger had taken it, and he was the one now transcending in the circuitry. Maybe he’s basking in the joy of everlasting creation alongside his own robots. One day, I’ll be there too, and it won’t be Percocets or fentanyl or MDMA, but maybe it’ll be a fall, or maybe it’ll be the last breath of my iron lungs during a peaceful night in bed. 

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Works Cited

Boniface, Sadie. “Back to Black: Amy Winehouse Biopic Reviewed by an Alcohol Expert.” The Conversation, 11 Apr. 2024, theconversation.com/back-to-black-amy-winehouse-biopic-reviewed-by-an-alcohol-expert-227609. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Giger, H. R. WWW HR Giger Com. Taschen, 2008. 

“HR Giger - the Official Website.” HR Giger - The Official Website, HR Giger Museum, 12 Dec. 2012, www.hrgiger.com/biography. 

Madahi, Doha. “Britney Spears’ Allegation of Abuse by Doctor Unlikely to End Conservatorship, Experts Say.” NBC News, NBC, 13 July 2021, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/britney-spears-alleged-her-former-psychiatrist-was-abusive-it-probably-n1273769. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Poetry Foundation. “Sylvia Plath.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2016, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Rose, Steve. “Alien Designer HR Giger: “I Am Afraid of My Visions.”” The Guardian, The Guardian, 14 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/14/hr-giger-film-artist-alien-i-am-afraid-of-my-visions. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Vercillo, Kathryn. “Michelangelo Buonarroti: Art and Mental Health History.” Create Me Free, 2 Nov. 2023, createmefree.substack.com/p/michelangelo-buonarroti-art-and-mental. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

Yashi Banymadhub. “The Tortured Artist Is a Dangerous Myth. It’s the Way Creative Workers Are Treated That Causes Breakdown.” The Independent, 10 Oct. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/voices/world-mental-health-day-tortured-artist-dangerous-myth-pain-art-depression-suicide-a8576971.html. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025.

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Emiland Kray is a visual artist working primarily with book arts and game design. His work investigates the complexities of memories and dreams, by manipulating our attachment to nostalgic forms. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and in 2023 he received his MFA from the University of Arizona with a portfolio of traditional watercolor, book arts, and game design. Kray was the winner of a 2025 Distinguished Book Award from the Miniature Book Society, has work in notable special collections such as the Arizona Poetry Center, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections, and the Lilly Library in Indianapolis. Kray continues to make art with a focus on community involvement and collaborative projects, through initiatives like Troctopus Press, The Octopus Anthology, and partnerships with several non-profits and public libraries throughout the American Southwest. With a focus on accessibility, you can find many of his books in libraries around the United States and find his games free to play online.

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