Interview Text with Melissa Harris by Diana Kamin and Marvin Taylor on 8-22-2016

David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base Interview with Melissa Harris By Diana Kamin and Marvin Taylor August 22, 2016

DK: This is Diana Kamin and Marvin Taylor interviewing Melissa Harris on August 22nd, 2016 at Fales Library. We’ll just sort of ask you some questions and see where the discussion goes. I know Marvin has some particular questions about specifically the material we received in the Wojnarowicz papers that Aperture had some hand in organizing.

MH: Sure.

DK: But we’ll start first with your general exposure to Wojnarowicz. When did you first learn of his work? Can you describe some of your earliest encounters?

MH: Sure. In case I don’t remember well, I did write a little bit about this, I think, in the preface to the new book. But I was working at Artforum and I was fact checking and doing basically everything an editorial assistant does, and I must have been picking up some images. I mean, I’d been to Gracie Mansion, so I had seen David’s work, but everything to me was so overwhelming at the time that I knew that I took it in but that was probably it. And then I went when I was picking up the work – you’d have to check , because I think I looked to see what year it would have been then, but it wasn’t David’s work, it was somebody else’s work, and they were mounting a show, so his work was all over the floor. And it was one of those things where I was all alone in the gallery; it must have been a Monday. So I was by myself, or maybe it wasn’t, but they were installing, so the gallery was closed. And his work was just everywhere. And it wasn’t hung yet, I don’t think. And there was a lot of it. It wasn’t obviously a retrospective, he was still very much alive, but there was a great deal of work. And it was one of those moments when it was kind of quiet and nobody knew I was there yet, and I just had this moment where I could sit and look at each one very slowly. Which would never have been the case going to the East Village to look at galleries, because there were tons of people and the spaces were generally fairly small, and I just never would have had the intimacy. And seeing David’s work in an intimate way is really different. You see it very graphically. When you are there with a group of people, the colors are extraordinary, the design aspect of it or the composition is great, but you don’t get to sit and really read it when the work has text in it, and you don’t get to contemplate it in the same way. But having the privilege of being alone in a room with lots of it was extraordinary, and unexpected. I mean, I just thought I was picking up slides of somebody else. I had no idea I was going to see Wojnarowicz. And I don’t know how long I spent there, but it was a really long time, and I looked at all of it carefully. And then I went back to Artforum and Ida Panicelli was the editor by then, so it would have been late ’88 and ’89 that this happened. And I said, ‘You guys, you have to see this. You absolutely have to go and look at this work. We have to cover this show.’ And they did. They gave him the cover, and they did a beautiful piece, and that was certainly the first time that I really thought, ‘Oh my god; this artist is extraordinary.’ Everything about it is extraordinary, the way he works with whatever media he’s working with, his language. David as a writer is unbelievable. The politics and the social issues that he’s embracing, the sexuality, the intimacy, the sort of just raw aspect of it, everything about it kind of blew my mind. So that was the first moment that I really got overwhelmed. [3:45]

DK: And in that work I’m assuming you were seeing work that was combining photography, painting, text.

MH: It must have been. To be honest with you, I’m sure it was because David always used all of these or most often used all of these media, so let’s say yes, but I’m not certain. It was the total package of this that made it so interesting to me. I just had never seen anything like this. And I’m someone who’s old fashioned enough, maybe, who still wants to feel something when I look at art. I don’t want it to be all in my head. My head is really active. I can kill myself with it; I can’t stop thinking sometimes. So I don’t want it to be all in my mind. I really want to be overwhelmed viscerally, visually, whatever, and that’s what happened with David. It just swept me away. I mean it literally took my breath away, and there are very few moments that that has happened to me, and that was one of them. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t met him yet. I also really loved him when I met him, but that hadn’t happened yet. [4:54]

DK: So that was the next question. When did you first meet Wojnarowicz?

MH: Probably when we were doing that piece because I was fact-checking everything, and I would have been

DK: For Artforum, for a story?

MH: Yes. So I would have been fact checking that and I would have at least spoken with him then. And my guess is I probably met him then, because we were picking up work. And that show, I should say, was at PPOW, if I didn’t say that. That one wasn’t at Gracie Mansion. It was in Soho, and it was, I think, when PPOW was in Soho.

DK: It must have been, it sounds like time-wise, it may have been In the Shadow of Forward Motion, his PPOW exhibition in 1989.

MH: It might have been. I really did try to look this up, and I just don’t recall it because I didn’t re-read what I wrote, but if you guys look it up it’ll say, or Wendy or somebody can tell you.

DK: Okay. So you said when you were picking up work, were you picking up slides from him, or?

MH: Oh, you mean when I first met him?

DK: Yeah.

MH: That part I don’t remember. I know I was fact checking with him. I probably was picking up work mostly from PPOW. But at some point I’m sure that I met him, and I can’t remember whether it was, maybe I did pick up something form him, maybe he came in to Artforum; artists often did at the time, especially for fact checking and sometimes it was nicer if they were in New York to try to do certain things in person. So he might have come in. But I can’t give you the visual on that, but I’m just figuring that’s when I met him.

DK: Then how did the relationship progress from there? [6:20]

MH: Oh gosh, I guess, I should say I liked him immediately. David was exactly the kind of human being that I like. He was very intense, he was very smart. He actually had a great sense of humor, which one doesn’t always pick up on with some of the things that have been written about him, but he could be extremely funny. Not in a slapstick-y way, but in a kind of a very droll way. And he was so intense, and things mattered so much to him. So I think what happened was, I, well, I know it happened, I left Artforum and I went to Aperture. And at that point, at some point right when I started, they were really late, as always, on issues. [they laugh] I think there was an issue of the magazine that was maybe six months late; there was a problem. So I had this idea for an issue of the magazine that essentially was going to be about the culture wars that were going on then. I mean, this would have been, I got there probably in ’89, the fall of ’89, so this would have been then into 1990. The Mapplethorpe trial had happened in Cincinnati, and I think that it was right – I can’t remember the timing exactly, but it’s ballpark in this year, when Donald Wildmon did his nonsense with David. And so I decided I wanted to do an issue of the magazine on all of this, that became known as, the title of the issue, because we titled issues then, was “The Body in Question”. And it wasn’t just about HIV AIDS, it wasn’t about censorship only, it was about all of these issues that relate to the body. So it was about battered women, it was about all kinds of projects. I published Sally Mann and Sally’s photograph of Virginia at Four was on the cover, which caused us a whole other set of problems. But I think that that was when I first really worked with David, because I knew what was going on with Wildmon. I wanted to publish his Sex series, which I thought was unbelievable. It just was so formidable, the way he was working, again, both compositionally in terms of the text; and he had guts. I mean, he was just a really brave artist, and you couldn’t look at one of his works and walk away the same. So we were publishing that, I got David Cole to write, and Cole is – are you going to talk to Cole for this? Because he’s an amazing person; you should talk to him. Because he’s the one who represented David, all pro bono. He’s a lawyer; he’s at Georgetown. And he represented David pro bono in his lawsuit when he was suing Donald Wildmon, but also the NEA four, so, Karen Finley and the other performance artists when they lost their NEA grants. This is a really decent human being who has – I mean, he’s done a lot of work on the Patriot Act and all of these things. That’s his skill set, well, I don’t want to say that’s his skill set; all of this is his skill set. I guess he’s a constitutional lawyer, but these things matter to him, and the First Amendment really matters to him. And he’s an exceptional person and probably worth speaking with.

DK: That’s a great idea; yes, we’ll add him to our list. [9:42]

MH: Because it’s a whole other way into it for you, you know? So he sued Wildmon on behalf of David, and they won. I think David got a dollar. But at any rate, so I had that text, and as we did the Sex Series, and then I asked David to perform. Because I guess the other thing is, I suppose I had seen him perform before I met him, so I had a visual on him, because I was watching a lot of performance work then. I don’t remember if I saw him at a club or whether I saw him at a performance venue, but

DK: Maybe The Kitchen?

MH: For sure I saw him at The Kitchen, and I’m just trying to think if I also saw him at any clubs. I saw Karen Finely a number of times at the Pyramid Club, I guess, but I don’t think David I saw there. I must have seen him at The Kitchen, and then later, of course, at PS 122. But I had seen him perform, and he was so great. So Aperture was still on 23rd Street then in this kind of funky little brownstone, and we did an exhibition for The Body in Question, and I asked David to do a performance, which he did. We had people lined up around the block. It was incredible – that wasn’t our normal draw. [laughs] So, it was really great. And that was before we ended up – then we did an issue, but that was later, I mean, an issue of the magazine.

DK: What was the performance? What was the content of the performance? [11:12]

MH: I don’t remember what he read, I’m sorry. And we unfortunately never recorded it, because it was when we were doing the Brush Fires, I was looking to see if anybody -- I mean, it wasn’t the moment where every single person walked around with a video camera. [they laugh] So, and then I thought maybe we had recorded it, but we hadn’t. But whatever it was, it was just him at a podium, and he read, and he just riveted the entire audience. He was a hypnotic reader. And he had this very -- I mean, you know, he was just very – charismatic presence. He was very tall, he was very lanky, he had these big two front teeth like I do [they laugh] – but you notice them. And he read so wonderfully. He wasn’t a crescendo reader. It wasn’t like a dramatic rendering. He just read, but he had this intensity that you just could not escape it. You couldn’t remove your eyes. You couldn’t space out. You couldn’t so anything that most people do at some point when they’re listening to somebody read or watching a performance. You just were absolutely fascinated by him. And this is a guy behind a podium in a t-shirt. So it wasn’t like he was – there were no special effects. David was a special effect. So that happened. And then, well, here, let me ask, you may have other questions, so I don’t want to [12:47]

DK: Oh no, we’re sort of leading into where I think the discussion was going, which is talking through the process of putting together the Brush Fires issue, from its genesis.

MH: Well that, what happened was, we did that and Michael Hoffman, who was

DK: You did The Body in Question.

MH: We did The Body in Question, David did his reading, and Michael Hoffman, who was the editor in chief of Aperture then and the publisher, and probably the only reason we existed, had not known David’s work. And when I brought it in for him to see for The Body in Question, because everything had to be run by him – not from a censorious point of view. It was never going to be about content; it was whether or not he thought it was good, which had nothing to do with whether or not it was problematic or controversial or provocative or anything, but was it worthy of being in Aperture. And he was absolutely undone by David’s work. And that was fantastic for me because I had never been able to undo him about anything. [DK and MT laugh] So for me to both show him something he’d not seen before and also have that kind of reaction, was really cool, I just have to say. And part of it was because David wasn’t in any way part of the photographic realm or circle. He just wasn’t. He was using photography. Photography at that point was much, I’m going to say straighter, but I don’t mean it in a particular – it just was very much about a kind of celebration of the f-stop, or something. I don’t mean to be so snide, but it didn’t embrace as much as it does now. It just didn’t.

DK: Sure. Well, it had taken a long time to even get to that point with the embrace of photography as a fine art. [14:30]

MH: Right; it was just being embraced at that level, and then, all of a sudden there was this work that used photography, like the way Martha Rosler or somebody uses photography. But my god; he used paint; he used type; he used all kinds of stuff! And sp was that was something that Aperture had done – not David’s work; they hadn’t published his work before. But they had done a few things here and there, because Aperture wasn’t, despite the fact that they were founded in a very purist way by photographers, they had always been – because that’s what existed then. But they had shown people like Frederick Sommer, and they’d shown Joel-Peter Witkin, so they were not adverse to showing work that didn’t fit a very kind of conservative definition of what constituted photography. So there were no issues there. But still, it was kind of ground-breaking for us at some level. All of it. So what happened was, at that time Aperture was doing -- it’s a quarterly magazine, and it did three different kinds of issues, mostly. It did monographic issues because it was founded that way. It was founded by a group of photographers, and so many of the first issues they did were about individuals’ work. They were done as magazines because they could sort of disseminate it to a broader group. It wasn’t a big, heavy, thick book. It was just different. Aperture was founded as a quarterly magazine. It became a book publisher, but not at first. And so this was a way of sharing work with each other. And so many of the early issues were monographs, and so Aperture kept that tradition, then other issues were usually about the photography of a particular place or ethnic group. And then, it was thematic, so The Body in Question would have represented a theme issue; a monograph is a monograph. And we did something on Native American photography, and we did something on photography from Germany, so those were other kinds of examples. But all of our monographic issues up until that point had been on long-dead photographers, basically. The tradition had started – of course, they had been alive at the time they were doing it, but then when I was there we did Josef Sudek, we did Munkacsi, we did Renger-Patzsch, all excellent photographers, the criteria being that they’d just not been looked at closely enough, or they hadn’t been seen closely enough in the United States, and so to disseminate their work to our audience would be meaningful. But these were sort of long dead, straight, white guys, on some level. And doing very diverse photography. I mean, certainly Munkacsi was very different from Renger-Patzsch. I mean, Munkacsi is the person who led to Avedon, at some level, and it was full of joy. And Sudek was his own Czech guy, and Renger-Patzsch was his own German guy, meaning they all had very diverse sensibilities. So it wasn’t about a common sensibility, but they had always done these monographic issues very historically. And so I proposed to Michael that we do a monographic issue – well no, I’m skipping way ahead. So, sorry. We do The Body in Question (you may want to reorder this when you do your transcript). So we do The Body in Question and then I say I want to do a book on David’s work. And Michael immediately says, go ahead, do it, because he was so blown away by it.

DK: So he had seen work in the Sex Series?

MH: He had seen the Sex Series. He had seen

DK: Photo text pieces? [18:15]

MH: Whatever was in The Body in Question he had seen, and then he had seen some other work, too. I would have shown him a lot of work. At that point it might have been the exhibition catalogue from Normal, Illinois, was probably published, Tongues of Flame. So I probably showed him that, or maybe I borrowed work form PPOW. But it took no convincing. Based on what he saw and based on hearing David read, and based on the things that Michael believed in, it was the quickest yes I probably had ever gotten. So that was great, and I probably called up David about it, and he was really interested in the idea. Because he liked the idea; photography interested him. You know, Peter Hujar had been his lover and had been an incredible mentor to him. And he liked the idea. I mean, I hate the idea of speaking for him, but my sense was, at least, that he liked the idea that somebody from the photography world was taking him seriously. Now I guess I wasn’t exactly from the photography world. I came from Artforum and I was writing about dance and performance art, so my being at Aperture was already kind of quirky enough at some level. But I had the support of Michael, because in some ways he was always of the photography world but he was interested in photography as a vehicle to get you somewhere else. It wasn’t just ending and beginning with the photograph; it was about how you could be moved or transported or what you could learn, or whatever, with all of your body, not just your mind. So I talked to David about doing the book. He loved the idea, so that was not a problem. And I wanted to talk to him more, but then he went into the hospital; David did. And he had been in the hospital several times, and I had had several friends who were HIV positive, so I understood that somebody could go into the hospital and come out of the hospital. I preface this just by saying, because then I went to see him in the hospital, which maybe would sound weird but it just wasn’t, because he wanted to work and he wanted to think about projects. And he was in there for a while, but he was getting whatever treatment he needed, it seemed, and he was perfectly cogent and thinking like himself. He was a little drugged so he got tired, but other than that, he was fine, and it was okay to do. I’m saying it now because it probably sounds weird to go to talk to somebody in a hospital about a book and their contract, but that’s what we did. And Tom Rauffenbart was there, who was his partner. Tom, I think, was a social worker at the time. He didn’t have any engagement, to his absolute joy, I think, with the art world. But he was there, and he was lovely. And so I spoke with David and it was all good. He wanted to do it. He wanted me to ask Jean Foos to design it. Jean was a painter. She wasn’t a designer per se, but she had designed Tongues of Flame and he thought that – at that time, Aperture had all different kind – we had an in-house designer but we had several designers that we worked with, and it was fine to work with somebody new, and it was better from my perspective to work with somebody with whom I thought the artist would collaborate and appreciate. I saw no reason for there to be tension. Some people like tension; they think it builds to something else. Maybe, but it’s not my thing. So he wanted Jean and he wanted Lucy Lippard to write the introduction. Because I asked him about that. I said, we want one principle text; who would you like to do it? And it was Lucy, which was really interesting because Lucy I don’t think had ever written on him then, I mean in fact, I’m pretty sure she hadn’t.

DK: Had the Art in America piece already come out? She wrote a cover story for Art in America.

MH: Oh, maybe.

DK: She interviewed him first. I assumed, I had seen that note before and I assumed because was pleased with that piece.

MH: You’re probably right. Just check the timing on this. I probably was talking to David about this in ’91, I’m guessing. And you’re probably right because he would have had to have some reason for wanting her. But it was still an interesting choice. There were a lot of people that were writing about the issues that he was engaged with, and she wasn’t so much. She’s a marvelous writer, but it was just – so I was thrilled. I actually love Lucy’s writing and I had read her a lot, I think on earthworks, probably, and all. Marvin told me also if I say anything that seems off or wrong – because I’m trying to remember all of this now. So that was it. So Jean was going to design it, and Lucy was going to write the principle text, and David would write something, and then we would all work together on this book. I really wanted to collaborate with him because I just thought – I actually was really looking forward to getting to know him better because I just thought he was brilliant and interesting. Unfortunately, then he died. I can’t remember whether he got out of the hospital and then went back into the hospital, but it was, I don’t even know that we – we must have signed the contract. Yes, we must have, because I think he signed it from his hospital bed or something, and Tom was there, because I would have brought him the contract to sign. But we never got to work together. But we did get to have at least that initial discussion. So he dies, and I’m going to follow everything he wanted. I write to Jean about designing it, I write to Lucy about doing this. But then two things happened. One is, I talked to Michael – this goes back to where we were before – and I say, ‘Look. We’ve always done these monographic issues on long-dead photographers. I would like to do one on David because I think it’s really important.’ And I can remember this, he looked at me and he said, ‘Look. You’re going to lose a lot of your subscribers if you do something on David, but,’ he goes, ‘I’ll support you. So if you want to do it, do it.’ And so we did. And just to get to the subscriber thing because it’s a quick footnote to this, we of course had subscribers who just really couldn’t deal with the material of David’s work. And they were mostly from the Bible Belt. We always knew who was writing; it was the same people who wrote me when I published Sally Mann. They didn’t like nudity in children. They were fine, by the way, with female nudity. So, boobs were fine, breasts were fine. They didn’t like nudity in children. They didn’t like any kind of sex. And they really had a problem with anything that was homosexual. They didn’t want to look at penises, and they didn’t want any kind of suggestion of gay sex. And so that was that. But I would say that I got an equal amount of letters that said this is not photography. This being the Aperture audience, it was kind of like, “There’s paint! [they laugh] There’s text!” And so that was really interesting. Basically, and it’s always been this way, everybody who writes to me or – I’m no longer the editor-in-chief of the magazine, but in the period in which I was, or at that time when I was the editor of certain issues of the magazine where we had different editors, I would always write back to everybody who wrote to me. Unless they were really nasty. There were a couple of letters which were basically, ‘You’re going to burn in hell.’ All right, I’m probably not going to write to that person because it would be like writing Donald Trump; I mean, what’s the point? [they laugh] But basically anybody who’s grappling with it, either from the photographic end or from the content end, I will talk to. And usually they are so shocked because they never – and this is pre e-mail, so you have to know that if somebody writes a letter, this is a different kind of effort. They’re sitting there, they’re typing it up or handwriting it, they’re finding an envelope, they’re figuring out, they’re getting themselves a stamp, they’re finding out how to address it. I know this sounds quaint, but it’s an incredibly different effort than sending an e-mail to a Web site. And so you know if they write, and they’re not saying I’m going to never subscribe to you again and you’re sick and burn in hell – as I said, that kind of stuff, why bother? But everybody else I got back to, and that was a really interesting process, and it’s always been an interesting process. So we did David, so we probably lost some subscribers, and I think we probably gained others, so, I don’t think there was any great loss. But I have to say that Aperture, and we don’t always do everything right, but on the level of having courage at certain moments in our history, we’ve had it. We had it when we published Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency. We had it when we did Sally Mann’s Immediate Family. We had it when we did Diane Arbus’s book when MoMA wouldn’t do it. And we had it when we did David Wojnarowicz. So, three women in that group, and David. And I don’t think any other publisher, especially a commercial publisher, would have done this. Because also removing it from an exhibition was very different, too. And you know, Barry, they had so many problems in Illinois, and he was courageous. Basically at that time, anybody who decided to do this was saying: I don’t care; I believe in this. And I don’t care if I lose subscribers or if I lose my funding. Because what you have to remember is, all of this stuff had a – oh god, there’s a word for it. It wasn’t just about losing funding. So what happened with somebody like Karen Finley, people got afraid to produce her. It wasn’t just like oh, she lost her grant. It was, oh, we’d better not produce her because we’re going to lose our grants. So there was a chilling effect that all of this had, so there was this collateral damage to this kind of censorship that could be very prohibitive and made life for the artists very difficult because other people might worry too much. So for me, it’s one of the reasons I’ve been at Aperture in various degrees for so long, because I just thought, this is great; they believe in something and they’ll stand by it. So we did David’s work as an issue of the magazine, and what I decided to do then, because he had just died, was to bring in many of the people who were in his circle at the time, like Karen Finley, like Vince Aletti, Nan Goldin, Fran Lebowitz, and some others, so that they could have the chance to essentially grieve through this issue of the magazine. The timing was such that it is the weirdest issue that I have ever done, at some level, because I was asking people to write about David at this moment where they were still grieving. It wasn’t the shock of his death any more, and I think people were shocked. It wasn’t -- people at that point who got AIDS weren’t really living. The cocktails weren’t as effective then. And so, people who were HIV positive, at some point obviously lived wonderful lives. But at that point, if they came down with AIDS it was very unlikely that they were going to survive it. And David had AIDS. And so I don’t think that people were shocked that he died, but they were shocked that he died way sooner than anybody thought he was going to. Because I think everybody just assumed he was going to survive this moment in the hospital and have – and I shouldn’t really say that. Maybe I just assumed it, but people seemed shocked. So it was catching people at this moment of maybe just having gotten over their shock at his death, but they were still mourning him and they were trying to process it and digest it in whatever way you do it. So the texts for this issue of the magazine were really raw and visceral. They were very beautiful. They weren’t remotely academic; even Lucy’s text wasn’t. And it was more so than some of the others, but because she was always going to write that way. I mean, she’s not an academic writer, so I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, but she was trying not to be so overwhelmed by emotion, let’s say; she was doing what we had asked her to do. Before he had died, we had already asked her, and then all of a sudden she was writing about someone who had died. And then all of these people were, who were close to him. So that’s pretty much what happened, and we published the issue of the magazine, and we published it as a trade book as well, which is just what Aperture did at the time. When we did these monographs, we would make it available to the trade so that we reached that audience. Aperture has always been primarily subscriber based, so that you had your subscribers who would get the magazine, and then if you wanted – sometimes we were in some bookstores, but not so much. So if you wanted to make it available to a larger public you would do it as a trade book. So we didn’t do it with every issue of the magazine, but almost all of the monographic ones; so we did it with David’s, too. And they’re pretty much the same. There was nothing that was taken out. The cover is maybe slightly different, but that’s about it. Same image but just slightly different design, because the trade book would have been hard cover and had a jacket, so flaps and all that.

DK: And Jean Foos did design it? [32:25]

MH: Did the whole thing. She did not do the covers. And that’s something that we and other publishers sometimes do. She had the opportunity to do the covers, but we somehow didn’t get to a place that everybody had approved. I think she must have had the opportunity; we never would have not given it to her. Maybe she might not have wanted to. I don’t remember. But if she’d wanted it she would have had the opportunity to do the covers. So then we went to Peter Bradford who did many of our cover designs. He did Sally Mann’s for Immediate Family. He did __[32:58] He just did a lot at the time, because it’s kind of a different skill, and he did that for David.

DK: So you’ve already talked about how this issue then was performing a number of different functions beyond what a typical monographic text on a photographer might do.

MH: I can’t say it was so conscious, just to be really clear. I think I was mourning too, so it was kind of – I don’t “think,” I know I was. And I wasn’t that close to him. I just really liked him. But it wasn’t that I knew him so well. It was easy; we got along well. But I hadn’t spent tons of time with him or anything like that. But I had so wanted to work with him on this, and then, I couldn’t. And I was really upset. I was saddened by that, you know. So I wanted to say that it was much more of an emotional decision than it was a pragmatic or intellectual decision. I just felt like David had spoken all the time to an idea of community, or he used the word “tribe” often in his writing. And I thought that it was important to embrace that community in what we were about to do. But it was from that. It was very much a heart decision as opposed to a mind decision, if that makes sense. [34:25]

DK: Was that feel incompatible or was there a struggle, or just a decision to forego some of the art historical pressures of a monographic exhibition where you’re putting some form around his photographic practice over time?

MH: I don’t think I thought – I would love to tell you that I was that conscious. I sort of just allowed – I figured: Lucy is brilliant; she writes extraordinarily well; this is what she does; she will take care of that. And I think the rest was, I guess I should say, I had never worked on an artist who died while I was doing something with him or her. And that’s very powerful, especially if they’re a young person. It’s one thing if you’re working with somebody who’s in their 80s or 90s or 100s and all of a sudden they pass away. It’s never okay, I suppose, but it’s different from somebody where, to this day you wonder, what would he have done? How would he have evolved as an artist? What would have happened if he had survived and been living with HIV? What would he be doing with Trump? [they laugh] I can only imagine. We know what he thought about Reagan, so can you imagine, like, Bush, and then Trump? It would have been, oh, my god, fantastic to hear him. So I think that it wasn’t a conscious effort to forego anything. I was trusting Lucy Lippard to be the extraordinary art historian she has always been. And then, I think I was trying to celebrate David. I guess it was just that, or be true to him by bringing a lot of his close friends and colleagues together and giving them a physical space to talk about him in whatever way they wanted to. I guess with Nan Goldin in particular because I knew she had this great interview that Interview had published, and I wanted David’s voice in here, because of course, I had planned on having David’s voice in here, other than in his work. I asked her because that had not been – Interview has a good audience but it certainly had not been seen by the majority, let’s say, of an Aperture audience. I had asked her if we could publish that because they hadn’t published it in whole. That was great, so we had a lot of material that hadn’t been published before. So in the case of Fran Lebowitz, she was much closer, I think, to Peter Hujar. She hadn’t known David so well, although she knew him, but she, first of all, she’s just also a wonderfully funny and smart thinker and writer, but also she could talk about Peter and talk about David through Peter, which was important, I think, at the time. And I just didn’t know. There are people who I asked in this new iteration of the book, which is much more art historical, in a way, even though. So to answer your question, in retrospect, I don’t think the issue failed. I think it was exactly what it needed to be, and it was also a magazine. It was conceived as a magazine issue, which is very different than conceiving a book, even though it ended up as both. But I think it was so of its time that when the idea came of reprinting it, I just felt I needed to add to it. I didn’t replace anything that was in it, but I thought there was a way to rethink it and add to it that would allow it to have the kind of telescopic or whatever, that view from now, so many years later, and to rethink the work. And I gave everybody who wrote for it an opportunity to rethink what they’d written, or add to it. I didn’t really want to delete anything that had been in it, but I was very happy to add to it. So I think that’s when the art historical consciousness and the distance that allows that, I suppose, at least in someone like me, that’s where it kicked in, in what we did a couple of years ago. [39:00]

DK: So then, returning to these brief conversations that you had at the very beginning of the project, we’d love to hear as much as you recall from them, particularly if there were discussions around his practice in general, around photography, around Hujar.

MH: They weren’t those kinds of conversations. You have to remember, he was lying in a hospital bed, and except when I first spoke to him about doing this when he wasn’t, but that was a phone call. It was like, ‘David, we want to do it. Is this something that would interest you?’ “Yes!” So, that was that; okay? And then I think, when I went to see him I was pretty goal oriented because I didn’t want to tire him out. He was on a lot of drugs. He had a lot of visitors. And I had a list of things that I wanted to address because I wanted to and needed to start the process of doing this, and I wanted to do right by him. So it was things like, who do you want to write it? So it was really pragmatic. Who do you want to write it? Who do you want to design it? It was truly that pragmatic. I don’t think – I never made those distinctions that some other people make who are sort of steeped in photography. I couldn’t even imagine doing it. It never occurred to me to be so media-centric. That’s why, later on, when it suddenly embraced everything, it was like, really? This is a big deal? I just didn’t think that way. I guess my interest had been performance art early on because I thought it embraced all of these media in a really new way. This was the early ‘80s, so performance art was on the cusp; it was becoming a medium, in a sense, and it was some marvelous mixture of theater, of painting, of poetry, of dance, of all of these different media. And that interested me. I was much more interested in something that was eclectic than I was in something that could be so easily defined. And with photography, because I had never – I came to Aperture probably because somebody who – and this is probably not so interesting so feel free to delete it, but – you know, somebody who had worked at Artforum told me that there was job opening at Aperture. I’m not sure it ever would have occurred to me to apply for a job there, because I would have thought, well, they’re just about photography. And then Chuck Hagen who had been at Artforum and was now at Aperture, called me up and said there was a job opening. But I knew they had done Eugene Richards’ Exploding Into Life, which was about his wife dying from breast cancer. I knew they had done Eugene Smith’s work. I knew they had done Nan Goldin’s Ballad. I knew that they had taken all of these risks, and I also knew at that point I was never going to be a political organizer but I had these ideas about things that I believed in, which in all sorts of ways I had begun to understand I couldn’t fulfill at Artforum. Plus, I was just ready to grow. So when the idea of Aperture came up and they wanted me, I went there. But it was not because I was in love with photography as a medium. I think photography as a medium can be spectacular, just as dance can be or music can be or any other medium can be when executed innovatively and brilliantly and with guts and poetry and beauty or ugliness but interesting; whatever. But it wasn’t -- there are some people who just swear by a medium, any medium, and that’s just not me.

DK: And not Wojnarowicz. [they laugh]

MH: And not Wojnarowicz.

MT: Not at all. [42:50]

MH: So for me, I didn’t feel like I was breaking ranks or breaking allegiances to embrace somebody like Wojnarowicz; okay? It was a no-brainer for me. It was actually an excuse. I did anything I could at Aperture to embrace other artists. Clemente, I think I found he did something with photographs – we could do a Clemente piece. With David it was like: Oh, thank god, I can do something! Because he’s not really a photographer by a very conservative definition, but it was a way for me to bring in this extraordinary person. Leon Golub I put in a magazine because of the way he worked from photographs. So I was pretty much doing anything I could to bring in other artists who were probably better known for their work in other media, where I could find some link to photography to justify it. And I was never challenged on that, to Aperture’s credit. And so with David, I doubt I had any deep and real conversations with him about photography, because I wouldn’t have felt like I needed to. I loved the way he used photography. He was smart. He was one of the smartest artists I’ve ever dealt with. And he loved the medium in certain ways, but he -- yeah, we probably didn’t talk about it at all. I think I probably spent a lot of time wondering how he was doing, how he was feeling, so I don’t think I had those kinds of conversations with him that probably would benefit our conversation now. I think I dealt with whatever was pragmatic. [44:35]

MT: I actually have a really specific question about production.

MH: Sure.

MT: In David’s collection, his papers, the photographs were organized, and contact sheets, all organized, and some of them have Aperture numbers on them. So who did that? What did you get from David?

MH: That’s what I was trying to remember before coming here. I’m sure – you’re talking about contact sheets?

MT: I’m talking about contact sheets. We have, in the collection, we have contact sheets that were in manila envelopes that had Aperture written on them with a number.

MH: I probably looked at those, which I would have gotten from David, or he would have told PPOW to give me.

MT: I see; okay.

MH: So it would have either been David directly or David allowing, because they also, very respectful of David, so they wouldn’t have given me anything that he didn’t allow. And then we must have marked what we wanted, or David might have, and that’s what I can’t remember. David had never printed up the image that’s on the cover. Oh god, all right, let me back up a little. I’m sorry, I forgot something. So, in ’92, so wait a minute. We had done The Body in Question, and in ’92 David was fine. He was not in the hospital and we were doing, no wait. Let me just try to remember the chronology here. Because the other thing that happened was, when Aperture was doing its 40th anniversary, I wanted David to be a part of that. And David wanted to be, and for that, he wanted to give us a real photograph. And so he printed up, for us, it had never been printed before, that image of his face that’s on the cover of Brush Fires, the face in the dirt. And so that, and I think it’s because of that, that I ended up putting it on the cover of Brush Fires, because I learned that he had printed that up for us. So that is something he probably marked, if it’s that contact sheet, or he might have been marking other ones to try to make prints up to see which he wanted to give us. But I wish I could remember and I just can’t remember if we had contacts. Because I’m guessing, we wouldn’t have published anything he hadn’t approved, because I just don’t do that. So if he -- once David had died, I didn’t take anything that he hadn’t already made into art, that he had sanctioned, because I wouldn’t have. So if it’s that piece or other pieces like it, it’s very likely that he had marked them up with the idea of getting them printed to see which he wanted to give us for our 40th, which would have been published in ’92. So he probably would have been working on it in ’91, I’m guessing. So I forgot about that middle thing. [47: 47]

DK: Gary Schneider had mentioned – this makes sense of something he was trying to recall, which is that he remembered bringing a print of the face in the dirt by the hospital, but he said it wasn’t for their monographic issue, he was like: I think it was for another __[48:01]

MH: So that’s it.

MT: That’s it.

MH: The monograph came after. But everything I’ve said about the monograph is true. It’s just that it came after this. So basically, David made this choice. I really wanted to include him in Aperture’s 40th anniversary. I thought that that was really important. Because, you know; look. It’s also good for Aperture. It’s important to show that Aperture can evolve from something founded by Minor White, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Barbara Morgan, but a very strong group of photographers. They would have embraced David Wojnarowicz, some of them anyway, I’m sure of. It’s sometimes more curators who make these strange boundaries between mediums and all of this. Artists don’t always do that. I can’t imagine an artist saying, “Oh, well, he’s not a photographer.” I’m sure there’s somebody who would, but I don’t think it would have been those guys. And I thought it was important for Aperture since we’d now worked with David in The Body in Question, so I wanted him to be part of the 40th. And he loved that. I think it was cool for him that I asked him to do that. It was the same with Alfredo Jaar. When I had published Alfredo’s work and I asked -- who also is not known as a photographer. He also is somebody who uses photography, someone whose work I adored, and it was just like David. It was like a way to get somebody in – if there’s a moment of photography, I can bring them in. Also someone who is a very political artist, in a very different way from David but nevertheless. And so that would have been for Aperture’s 40th, which would have been published in ’92.

DK: Did it end up in the 40th?

MH: Yes, sure; absolutely. So Gary would have done that, because Gary was printing most things for David at the time. And then after David had died and we were trying to figure out what to put on the cover of Brush Fires, we did that, but it was only working on this new version of Brush Fires that I learned that David had actually made it specifically for us. He told me that he wanted to give me a real photograph, I believe was the language he used. And I was kind of like, you don’t have to, but that was what he wanted to do. So that was fine. And it was actually smart of him. It was strategic. Because in the grouping, it actually works really well. Of course, I ended up putting Rauschenberg on the cover of that, [laughing] but whatever. I like to screw around a little bit. But I think it was only when we were doing this last iteration, the second iteration of Brush Fires that came out a couple of years ago, that Wendy must have told me that David printed that specifically for us, that he had never printed it before. So my guess is that any markings you’re finding on it were not me or Aperture, unless he asked us to pick which one. That might be possible; and I don’t remember. But other than that, it probably was David, or maybe he looked at it and it was Wendy. Have you talked to the PPOW ladies yet?

DK: Yes.

MH: Okay, because they could probably answer that better than I can. Or Gary could.

MT: And Gary was really helpful. It was fascinating, the things we learned from him.

MH: Gary spent much more time with David. I was so peripheral to all of this. I just really liked him and I really believed in his work. And I also on the enlightened self-interest front, really thought that Aperture should go there. You know? Which it did. [51:50]

DK: But then just returning, making sure we get the information you were interested in for the finding aid materials, because we have, there were 58 manila envelopes that were numbered by Aperture. Were the interior contents numbered as well?

MT: That I don’t remember; I have to go back and look.

MH: And they were all contact sheets? Or they were everything?

DK: Containing negatives and contact sheets.

MT: Negatives and contacts sheets.

MH: When we did the first publication, certainly there were no scans yet, because it was before that. So it’s very possible, at that point – we would have wanted a certain quality of something. Some of the slides that the gallery had would not have been – which is normal – reproduction quality. They weren’t using it for that purpose, or it would have been okay for a review small, but not the way -- Aperture really needs good materials because we also print really well. So it’s very possible that those were put together by Wendy or Penny.

DK: The negatives.

MH: The negatives and everything, so that we would make great prints or great slides or something to work from.

DK: Okay.

MH: I was about to say, we wouldn’t have had originals, but then at some point – I always hated taking originals because that scared me, taking somebody’s negatives. And I can’t imagine that we would have had David’s negatives. I know at some point when we were working on the second iteration of Brush Fire, so, a couple of years ago, we had some original slides, but we didn’t get those from you, we got those from the gallery, so those probably are not, unless you got things from the gallery after that.

MT: No.

MH: So that wouldn’t have been that. And we had some original slides just so we could choose the best one, if we couldn’t get to the work and we had to do something. But for the first book, we would have been working from transparencies when they existed, or slides, and we would have tried to make prints. We would never have taken negatives for the black and white work. Just because we never would have wanted that responsibility. So certainly we would have asked Gary or somebody else to make prints for us, but we never would have sent negatives off to the printer or anything like that. And it’s unlikely that David would have marked up those envelopes at that point, because he had died already by the time we were doing the book. It’s possible, and I just don’t remember, unfortunately, that he started doing an edit and doing that. That’s very possible, because he was working also closely with Jean, and I always gave the artists I was working with an enormous amount of latitude. So I wouldn’t have said, “This is what I want to do.” I would have been waiting to work with him and have him say to me, “This is what I’d like to do,” and then try to have a collaboration with that as the starting point. So it’s possible that he would have been working on it. I can look at the handwriting if you want, and I can certainly tell you – I won’t recognize it necessarily if it’s David or Wendy’s or Penny’s, but I can certainly tell you if it’s mine. [55:20]

MT: I think that would be helpful, because

MH: If it’s mine it’s super sloppy.

MT: Because this is an unresolved issue of provenance in the archive. We just don’t know what it means. So we preserved that order number, because it might at some point have some relevance.

MH: We should look at it. I mean, we don’t have to do it today but I live close by and I can just stop by. And let’s look at it and let’s have the original Brush Fires next to us, and just see if we can discern any relationship. And if I look at the handwriting, I might be able to tell if it’s – I won’t remember Jean Foos’s handwriting.

MT: I know her handwriting.

MH: You know her handwriting. You’ll know David’s handwriting.

MT: Right.

MH: Do you know Penny and Wendy’s handwriting?

MT: No.

MH: So let me look at it, and then if I don’t recognize it, I would show it to them.

MT: Sure.

MH: Because if it says “Aperture” somebody was doing this. I don’t think it was us because we just, as I said, would have been really hesitant. Because I mean, we were sending this stuff off. We never would have wanted the responsibility for somebody’s original negatives or slides; ever.

MT: It worries me, having the originals. [56:30]

MH: I’m sure. And so it’s something that we never – it wasn’t something that we asked for; it was something we tried to avoid. But we want a great quality work. And certainly some of these things, I’m sure, had to be printed or gone through.

MT: That’s fascinating.

MH: But let’s look at it together. I have to go out of town Wednesday through Labor Day, but then after that I’m around, so, any time you want to. Do you need it before that?

MT: No.

MH: You’re sure?

MT: It would be very helpful.

MH: Okay. Let’s do that; I’d really like to see it, too. I’d be curious. Because it might also trigger something that I’m not remembering. I never wrote journals; I’m sorry. It would be so good if I had. [MT laughs] I’m sorry if I’m being too vague for you.

MT: No, not at all.

DK: This is really great. Thank you so much.

MH: Is there anything else?

DK: Just this also might be included in what wasn’t your interest in the work at the time or in the discussions that you were having at that time because of the larger context and also because of the impact and power of his work, which was the primary focus, I think, for you and for the issues that you put together, but part of what we’re trying to do on the resource is gathering more details around his production process, for the wealth of materials and interviews and recollections that have been recorded is a class of details that has been lost, so if you had any information about equipment or technique or processes in the darkroom.

MH: Have you talked to Vince Aletti at all?

DK: We haven’t yet. He’s also on our list; we haven’t scheduled him.

MH: Vince knew David fairly well and lived very close to where he and Peter Hujar lived, and I think he visited them there, so he probably will have a sense of what was in the studio. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m trying to remember if I heard any stories. The other person who actually would know is maybe Marion Scemama.

MT: We interviewed Marion.

MH: Okay. And did she have any?

MT: She did. She remembered a fair amount as did James Romberger and Marguerite, because they did a lot of installation work with him.

MH: They did installations with him. Unfortunately, when I worked -- for The Body in Question, the work was done. I was picking work that I wanted for this, at that point, because it was my theme and I wanted to publish David, and I wanted to, when I knew what was going on with the Sex series, that’s what I was going to publish. I don’t know if I published the whole Sex series; I might not have had room for it. But I published at least three or four, I think, and then one or two other works, like the one with the plant, I think, that’s growing out of the bills and all of that. I’m sorry I don’t recall the name but I can show you; you can look at it. But I would have been picking the work for that because -- he would have given me permission, obviously, but it wouldn’t have been something that he was picking, and we weren’t talking about his production, we were talking about the lawsuit with Donald Wildmon.

DK: Right. [1:00:00]

MH: By the time we did the 40th anniversary, he had died. Because in my editorial or introduction to that piece, we got the print from him but we had asked each artist to write something about photography, and David had died by then. So I must have been working on that kind of simultaneously as we were beginning to work on Brush Fires. Because he gave us this piece, but he died before he had the chance – he was working on it, he told me, but before he had the chance to write this. So in the editorial I mentioned that, but I didn’t know he had printed the piece for us. So Penny, or Wendy probably even more so, can tell you more about his working process, because they, representing him for so long, probably would know that.

DK: It’s funny, she also was sort of like, ‘Well, I didn’t really go to the studio much.’ Gary Schneider, too, was like, ‘Oh, I think he used this technique in the darkroom but I can only guess,’ and it wasn’t something that he talked about because it wasn’t something that he cared to talk about, because he had more important things to talk about.

MH: I think David was so content driven, and that’s what I remember talking to him about. It’s much more likely that we would have talked about something that had to do with politics or censorship or AIDS than it is that we would have talked about his process. And that’s probably the kind of person I am, too. It’s what drew me to his work. For me, the process worked. The work was riveting. And I didn’t kind of need to know more, which doesn’t make me the best editor on the planet, by the way. [MT and DK laugh] But I’m just being super honest with you. I just thought it was extraordinary. Now, again, for your readers, they need to be reminded that this is way before computers and Photoshop, so all of these things that they can do so easily on a computer now, however David was doing it, it was labor-intensive. And that’s really important to remind people, because I see when I teach sometimes, that they’re kind of thinking, whether it’s about David or anybody, ‘Well, what’s the big deal?’ You guys, there was a world before Mac. [laughing] So, that’s important.

DK: Even just the trafficking of some of this material back and forth that you’re describing.

MH: Oh yeah; it was on foot. [laughing] Let’s just put it that way. As I said, I didn’t even know about his printing this until recently. I don’t know. But David read a lot, he looked a lot. So he would have been interested in every technique imaginable. But he probably, in a utilitarian sort of way, if he thought it would work for him. I don’t know that he would have sat there and wanted to think about pigment, or, maybe he did. I don’t know. I really don’t know. He used it very effectively. He understood color. He understood composition. He understood a lot of things. He understood the power of juxtapositions. He understood theater, voice. He understood a whole lot. But what he studied and what he did consciously and what was just second nature to him because of his own visual intelligence or visual literacy, I truly don’t know. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.

DK: That’s okay. It’s interesting, this is a place where the archive is really interesting, too. Marvin has pointed out, he has lots of sort of experimental prints throughout the collection __[1:04:00], including solarized prints and playing with emulsions, that didn’t end up in the final work, or the exhibited work, as far as we know. So he was clearly doing experimentation.

MH: Which makes sense. It’s so complicated with an artist like David, because you don’t know what he would have done if he didn’t think his time was running out. Because you had the content, which was so driven by anger, which probably would have been that way whether or not he himself was sick. It was exacerbated, I’m guessing, because he was sick, but I think it would have still – because he was angry about things that had nothing to do with HIV AIDS also. But I don’t know what happens to an individual when they know that they’re on, essentially, borrowed time, and when those experiments happened, and when he just thought he’d better produce, produce, produce, produce, produce. I just don’t know psychologically how that goes, and especially how it is with somebody like David. I didn’t know him well enough to be able to – and even if I did, I’m not sure I would have been able to hazard a guess. Because that’s something, it seems to me, so personal. All I can say is that there was nothing haphazard about his work. That whatever it was he chose to do, he had thought about it, a lot. And so how he got there, I can’t tell you. How many versions of the Sex Series he did before he landed on what he wanted to do; how many different kinds of background landscapes he experimented with before he decided: I want this bridge, I want this forest, whatever; I don’t know. Maybe he tried all kinds of urban and country scapes before landing on this. So that part I don’t know. But there’s not one thing about his work that doesn’t feel deliberate and intentional to me. And that, I think, is partly what makes it so strong; you feel his will, always. And that’s amazing. There’s nothing lazy about it. So it doesn’t surprise me at all to know that there’s all kinds of experiments. Because I think that he didn’t draw attention to his own interest in being an artist, in a sense, but he got it; he knew. He had a lot of friends who were photographers. He had a lot of friends who were artists. He was showing his work. He was working in every medium, pretty much. So something was always going on, and it was intentional, and therefore he must have – this was a smart guy, so he must have been really thinking this through. I’m sorry I can’t tell you how that manifested itself, but I’m sure of it. Because really, the work wouldn’t be strong if he wasn’t – you can have one happy accident but you can’t have a body of work that rests on that.

DK: Thank you so much. Are there any other thoughts or things that we missed in our discussion?

MH: I don’t think so, but if you look at the intro that I wrote to the new Brush Fires, I did check the chronology and all of that, then. I was careful about it. So you might want to just have some footnote to this that gives

DK: We’ll cross-check it.

MH: Just cross check it.

DK: And put in parentheses; yes.

MH: Because I’d like to have it be accurate. And I probably should have re-read it. As I said, I’m working on this book and I just didn’t have the time. But I’d like it to be accurate, so if you just do that it will sort of tell you the correct order of things. The only thing I guess I’d like to add, was how interesting it was to work on the new iteration of this book. Is that interesting for you to hear?

DK: Absolutely. [1:07:50]

MH: Because, based on the question you asked earlier, the first iteration was certainly very visual. We thought a lot about it. But it was also exceedingly emotional. This one, because I decided I wanted to rethink -- all of the work that was in the first book is in this one; there’s just more of it. All of the texts that were in the first book are in this one; there’s just more of them. And then there is the sort of more retrospective texts, like the one that you wrote. But I wanted to really rethink how to organize his work. Because also for the first one, I mean for the publication, it was, even though it became a trade book, it was organized as a magazine is organized, not as a book is organized. So you had somebody’s text, and then I picked images that I thought had a correspondence with the text, or maybe they mentioned it specifically, or whatever. So part of it was illustrative, part of it was coexistence, but it was very much conceived as a magazine and it was conceived for this kind of much more vertical, larger format. So when we did this, I decided I wanted to do something really conceiving it as a book, this new iteration, make it more intimate, and rethink the sequencing of the work, not what work was included but how to sequence it. And if you compare the two, they’re really different that way. And it was an education for me and a kind of open sesame to how brilliant David really was as an artist. It’s not that I didn’t know it or doubted it, but he was incredibly consistent. He was extremely deliberate, as I said before. He was doing themes and variations always. He was working on themes endlessly to figure out how they might play out, to think of different ways of manifesting it. And I mean visual themes now. We had worked on his content themes, I think, in the first iteration of this publication, and now I went back in and I let the visuals drive it. I decided, let’s just keep the text and the images much more separate. Let’s not even think about illustration except in a few cases where it makes some sense. But let’s see what happens to this book if we let it be visually driven, which is what we would do with a normal monograph, as opposed to something that was first conceived as a magazine, even though it was a monographic issue of the magazine. If I had just had Lucy’s text, that would have been different. But when you have ten different texts, it’s something else; it’s a different rhythm. And I broke that rhythm for this. And it was really interesting to start putting, like, David’s critters together, or the way David thought about space, or time. And just to begin to think that way and break away from the other themes and think about just what’s relating visually and what’s relating in a kind of esoteric way visually, made me just have – and I always respected him, so it’s hard to say I respected him even more, but I just understood how visually sophisticated he was. And this was a guy who did not live that long, relatively speaking. So you think of – who is it? Mozart died really young; right? So let’s think of him as Mozart. He accomplished so much so well in a very short period of time. And when you begin to kind of suss out his work as a curator or an editor might if they’re only working visually and not thinking only about content, what you get is an extraordinarily coherent and cohesive body of work that really speaks for itself. And it’s not that that surprised me, but it elated me. And I guess that would be the only thing that I’d want to add, because it was a really interesting experience to go back into something so many years later and have this kind of open sesame thing happen.

DK: Sort of across years, across media, that consistency of visual language. [1:12:00]

MH: Everything. And that he had a very, very developed visual language at this very young age and despite the fact that he seemed so driven by content, that what was happening visually was really considered, and it was in no way secondary. It’s just that the content is so overwhelming, you allow the visuals to be the wings that get you there, as opposed to really examining them sometimes in themselves. I’m sure the curator at the Whitney is doing that kind of examination, speaking as someone who is editing a magazine and looking at it in a very different way, and who was blown away by David’s content. Lots of people wrote, and wrote politically. David wrote incredibly well and powerfully, and his delivery method or his package was exceptional. But for me, it started with the content, and then I knew the content was powerful probably because of the way he packaged it, let’s say. When I went in the second iteration and spent time more with the package, I was like, “Oh my god!” And I wasn’t, as I said, surprised, but I was just like getting this incredible second wind of David, and it was wonderful. So there you go.

MT: Thank you.

DK: Thank you so much.

MH: I’m sorry if I don’t have the answers to all of your questions.

MT: No one does. [they all laugh]

MH: But let me know after Labor Day when it would be a good time for – I’m blocks away. I’m teaching at NYU Wednesday mornings, so it’s really easy. And I would love END of interview at 1:13:46

August 22, 2016 Melissa Harris