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CITY at Agence De Voyages Paris

The text I wrote for the exhibition CITY at Agence de Voyages, curated by Stephan Steiner and myself in Paris. May 10-31, 2025

AGENCE DE

VOYAGES

CITY

Stefano Faoro & Birgit Megerle

Agence de voyage is happy to present CITY, an exhibition of works by Stefano Faoro and Birgit Megerle.

Imagine an urban population on a street corner. In CITY the show is organized like a snapshot, but the tableau is split into two parts, portraits on the walls and bodies in the room. Stefano Faoro has populated the space––an apartment in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, near the Gare de l’est––with a crowd of mannequins clothed in outfits purchased at an outdoor market. These costumes accompany Birgit Megerle’s drawings, mostly portraits from the waist up of people in various modes, turning to address the viewer.

Weather Permitting, On Edward Steichen’s delphiniums by Graham Hamilton in Picpus

Weather Permitting, On Edward Steichen’s delphiniums by Graham Hamilton

Extended edit - A slightly shorter Version of this text appeared in Picpus # 33 under the title On Edward Steichen’s delphiniums

For one week during the summer of 1936, the photographer Edward Steichen exhibited cut delphiniums in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I thought I had first encountered Steichen’s show in an Artforum review of Heike-Karin Föll’s work by Quinn Latimer. Latimer’s review features an image of a sculpture by Föll: a bucket full of delphiniums atop a pedestal accompanied by a case of Evian, rebranded with the word “home.” The work is a strange and uncanny homage to Steichen's MoMA installation, a room of delphiniums in large vases on risers. In Latimer’s review she unpacks Elaine Scarry’s essay “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium)” which she found on a windowsill in the show. Scarry seems to describe all the space around Steichen’s show––poetry and theory mustered to tell why flowers are the perfect imaginative objects “what is the feeling when image rubs against image?”––but Steichen is nowhere in the text.

Closing time

Closing time, below is an unpublished text, written to accompany the closing and rehanging of the exhibition "November or Bouvard and Pecuchet" at Alienze Paris

Is the art world shuttered? Taking a break? Is the Paris post-Brexit post-Covid boom already bust, or do I always feel this way in January? A popular artist, not a friend but a party acquaintance, told me in 2023: “This won’t last, the excitement will fade and Paris will go back to its old ways.” Enthusiasm is so often short-lived, especially in the arts. Everything feels so inconsistent! I’m into giving up what is melodramatic in art making, but aren’t things really bad—stalled, inoperative, mean? My friends reflect all this to me: it's so hard to get by and no one even bothers to answer emails. Kasper König was said to be fond of a quote by Robert Filliou: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” In König’s Artnews obituary the quote is paraphrased as: “Art is too important to take too seriously.” Some folksy encouragement, but I guess that’s what I’m after. Feeling a bit dejected, I'm going to rehang my show—to make it open at its closing.

EVERYTHING IS LEAF at BPA Space, Cologne

The exhibition runs from July 13th to the 31st and is accompanied by a text by the poet Lisa Robertson.

“Everything is Leaf…”

Like Rousseau, Goethe botanized.

At the 2013 De l’Allemagne show at the Louvre, pages from Goethe’s 1790 herbarium were exhibited alongside Paul Klee’s, from 1924. Nearby were his ink-wash sketches of clouds; a series of small watercolour studies for Theory of Colours; and a five-foot-diameter octagonal piece called “Grand écran de la théorie des couleurs” constructed of colored paper squares pasted over canvas, in 1791-92. I was attracted to the vulnerability of the 225 year-old dry, pressed plant material pasted down with little blue paper strips in the herbarium. It made me think of the pressed and delicately mended sea-foam embroidered silk 1930’s lingerie once belonging to my grandmother, sent to me in the mail by my mother that year. I should make of it an herbarium page.

The museum wall-text reminded viewers that it was Goethe who coined the word ‘morphology’; he was also responsible for bringing the word ‘metamorphosis’ forward from the classical literary and mythological canon, into the contemporary discourse of the biological sciences. He defined morphology as a dynamic formal process inherent to organisms. The form of a plant was a changing unit; morphology studied that form as it changed. “Everything is leaf” he wrote in 1787, in a letter to Charlotte von Stein, but for Goethe a leaf was not an actual unit, but an idea realized by diverse manifestations: seed cotyledon, foliage and floral organs are all different forms of the ‘leaf’ idea. In 1786, he had written to von Stein “It is a becoming aware of the form. . . with which nature is always only playing, as it were, and in playing, brings forth its manifold life.”

Form is game, vitality, love, and part of a thinking about language, which Goethe did too, in a 1815 manuscript poem called Ginkgo Biloba—three four-line stanzas above a pasted-on pair of double-lobed ginkgo leaves. Translated to English, the second and third stanzas read:

Is it a living being,
Which has separated in itself?
Or are these two, who chose
To be recognized as one?

Answering this kind of question,
Haven't I found the proper meaning,
Don't you feel in my songs,
That I'm one and double? (1)

When I was looking at Goethe’s handwritten poem in the display case at the Louvre, I overheard the man next to me knowledgably telling his companion that it was a poem about the lungs. Not able to read German, I immediately accepted the stranger’s interpretation. Leaf and lung seemed similar enough. Having later found a translation, I learned that he couldn’t read German either. But his explanation doesn’t feel wrong. He was reading the ginkgo.

In a public conversation with the poet Trish Salah in Toronto several years ago, (2) I was too hasty to oppose politics to aesthetics, and Trish reminded me that aesthetics is desire. Her inference was that where there is desire, there is politics, and I’ve been thinking about this ever since. It’s not the unit, not the substantive iteration, that makes form potent, but the manifold variation in response to desire or need. We could say that history’s formal relationship to the present is morphological. The poem is one place where we can observe this dynamic; politics is another.

I’d like to give this ginkgo biloba back to Trish now, this little sprig, this lung-camisole. (3)

(1) anonymous translation by wikipedia contributor
(2) We were participating in Margaret Christakos’ Influency Salon.
(3) An earlier version of “Everything is Leaf” was originally published on April 29th, 2013 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2013/04/everything-is-leaf-

"Concerning Jealousy" at Scherben, Berlin

Maybe I’m wrong, 2024
Custom cabinet, euroboxes, found box, XXL hydrangeas, Sarah Bernhardt Extra peonies, ivy, West German ceramics, plastic bottles, found hammer, gifted bowl (broken and repaired), Gaudi bronze powder, vinegar, acrylic paint, brilliant blue.

Published to accompany the exhibition "Concerning Jealousy" at Scherben in Berlin

DTR

Im wiring (sic) ab jealousy rn

What are you jealous of

Other ppls freedom to make bad work

You can make bad work too!

Don’t hold yourself back!

1. Fairness

I remember this basic cool fact; “you cant see words without reading them.” I say remember because I’m sure it's not such a simple and true tenet, but it was an intriguing idea to me when I was younger, opening a whole new way of beginning to think about how complex the relationship between seeing and reading was. Is.

Sylvere Lotringer: The interviews, or what people say, it's just text.

Kathy Acker: Yeah. But even when you’re doing art criticism, paintings are a text.

S: It's like plagiarism without plagiarism.

K: Exactly.¹

Interview with Nick Mauss for DOUBLE 47

Nick Mauss for DOUBLE 47

If you look close at the works in Close-fitting Night, Nick Mauss’s new exhibition at Chantal Crousel in Paris, you see a lot of bodies. Most of the figures are in pairs, either leaning on or holding onto each other, but there might also be a lot of figures sitting, sketching or painting other figures—reflections. In the abundant show, every type of surface is accompanied by every type of mark. Some pieces of ceramic on satin achieve the luminosity of a screen; a moire effect of the glazing and scoring suggests the backlit crystal of a phone. Don't we also scribble all day on tablets?

Mauss excels at detailing the richness of gestural histories. The multidisciplinarity of the works in the show echo the broad reach of his practice, which encompasses curating, writing, sculpture, painting, and performance. In his new book, Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, written with the art historian Angela Miller, Mauss explores the legacy of George Platt Lynes, a photographer famous during his life for his celebrity and fashion work, and known today for his queer nudes. Complicating the various flattenings of Platt Lynes artistic output, Mauss likewise elaborates on a historical scene, pre-Stonewall queer culture whose ideas and expectations about identity and expression were different from how we might sometimes conceive of them today.

While installing Close-fitting Night, his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mauss was gracious enough to answer some questions about all these things.

Graham Hamilton: We've met before, at a dinner party at Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s studio. You recommended I go see Trajal Harrell’s “Koln Concert,” which I think was premiering in Paris. I did, I loved it. I cried. It began a relationship I have with Trajal’s work where I try to go see it whenever and wherever I can. He’s wonderful. This was just a friendly recommendation I'm sure, but it really gave me something. How much does your research practice have to do with pedagogy?

Ser Serpas and other Americans in Paris

Ser Serpas at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection and Mark Rothko at Foundation Louis Vuitton

A German friend offered a take, lukewarm at best: the Parisians are obsessed with American mythologies. It is hardly revelatory to read the PR of three new exhibitions in Paris as subtext. The Mike Kelley and Ser Serpas shows at the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection and Mark Rothko at Foundation Louis Vuitton profess themselves to be about just that: personal mythologies, and American one’s specifically. The French and the Americans share a love of mythologizing, in state and person. More interesting here is the success or failure of the narratives of ghosts and ghosting (haunting?) specifically alluded to in the Mike Kelley and Ser Serpas exhibitions at the Bourse, but certainly always hanging over Rothko’s evacuated oeuvre. In a toast at the pre-opening of the Mike Kelley exhibition one of the functionaries invoked Kelley’s spirit and his oft quoted wish to become a ghost; hoping that he was here with us. I don't imagine Kelley as a very friendly ghost, overseeing these ministrations of oysters with mayonnaise and bite sized entrecote, happily. When he said he wished to become our ghost I believe it to be in a more tragic sense. Wanting to stay and having to go, a way of insisting. A striking difference between Rothko and Kelley is that so many of Kelleys works are one-offs, unique pieces within a dramatic system. There is no scarcity here, or fear of losing one part of the expression in the field of the idea and feeling. Rothko on the other hand is something of an emotional capitalist (or pugilist, one wall text proudly quotes: “I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every square inch of their surface”), replicating states over and over, endless spectral horizons. There is not nothing there though. Rothko is still transcendent, if transcendence is what you're after.

Poetry after poetry readings

Life, isn't everything,

isn't everything,

isn't ever–th–ing...

its not personal.

Its rare to meet artists who can write well,

well we’ll see.

Sonnet to address, basic proficiency with language required for fucking,

seduction,

selection (Im hearing suction).

Se- prefix meaning: apart

depart, derange, digress,

now i'm just rhyming.

The best part of poetry!

The ethics or the sex?

What did she say, 'lay me poems'?

Strange digression into witches, ahem magicians,

who lose their power in sexual misadventures.

It feels like those (poets!) who are willing to air out the esoteric, new age and homegrown in our logic, do us service.

It’s there looming.

I heard my mother speaking when she spoke;

that soppy enthusiasm, it was belief speaking.

She brought us belief.

When belief enters the chat

it's a bit hard to bear, you should be prepared,

because it is out of the ordinary.

And everything is extraordinary now,

but is this moment sufficiently extraordinarily different?

In our representations of it?

In our representation of ourselves in it?

The world as I found, the world as I left it.

Press Release for Stefano Faoro: Students @ Caravan, Oslo

https://crvn.no/SF-Students.pdf

Decor and Dancing Divider at Reto Schmid's Studio Maria, organised by Ali Hassanzadeh

+ videos

A conversation with Stefano Faoro (in advance of his show at Carvan in Oslo)

18/09/2023

Graham Hamilton: Where are you?

Stefano Faoro: I'm at my brother's place in Bologna. I'm gonna stay here this week, then I'm going to my hometown to work a little bit in the studio. At my parents' place, I have a basement where I have some basic things, and I need to work a little bit on things there.

G: Do you have stuff already in the basement there? Is it kind of a steady studio?

A conversation between Amelia Stein and Graham Hamilton, 21 April 2023: painting and photography and printmaking

A conversation between Amelia Stein and Graham Hamilton, 21 April 2023

painting and photography and printmaking

AS: So, should we talk about photography? We started talking about how photography is different to painting…

Settlement

for one who loves counting, and daybreak is less precious than dusk:
a handful of rubies, or less precious red gems, or glass beads, or pomegranate seeds

for another, who loves dawn and has come to fear the evening, is afraid of transition:
a hemmed up bunch of lavender, wound with silk

in a box under the sink is a collection of wings of all genera - moth, butterfly, princess of taffeta and toile, unicorn - next to the box a bag filled with shavings of hoof and hand, small discarded scraps of bone.

also behind these a quite large collection of silver glasses...

in the next room there is a thing that is waiting, in a dark room with a large body hidden in shadow and not yellow nor golden eyes - it is ominous but not unkind, it is looming surely, but it is not bad or evil or death or wrong - a large presence

and somewhere or imagine: a room full of letters, and all the ways angels are metaphors for communication - or the other way around, letters like metaphors for angels, dispersed - to bless and protect, and to keep company in an infinite in-between, past and future

David Rimanelli Critic's Pick for Artforum - highlight of my year (!)

https://www.artforum.com/picks/graham-hamilton-90487

FULL REVIEW:

Graham Hamilton’s exhibition at Theta feels familiar yet off, like its title, “Dearly.” What a curious adverb. What on earth can you be doing if you’re doing it dearly? “Dearly beloved” evokes a wedding ceremony at the outset, though it’s a particular sort of matrimony for those loved very much; the minister might be Protestant but not fire-breathing; and it’s the ’50s, maybe the ’60s. “Dear” is so basic—that, too, is beginning to show its age, its staginess. I myself still address correspondence with the salutation “Dear,” especially when writing to strangers, but that’s all very affected, maybe counterproductive. And so Hamilton’s show is suffused with affection, with one thing married to another, even as it is so clever and cunning: contemporary retardataire.

Among the works on view—sculptures, silk-screen prints—is Parade 1, 2023. Its materials, right from the checklist, are “ink-jet print on cardboard, storage box, Gaudi bronze powder on water, kick drum pedal.” It’s a sublimely arty ensemble, so quotidian, yet shot through with the otherworldly, like Gaudi bronze powder: made from the metal of sculpture since barest antiquity; atomized, dematerialized, dispersed upon the air, or rather upon water (and a name, like Antoni, architect of the Sagrada Familia cathedral of Barcelona, industrialized Gothic that’s very niche modernism and very touristy all the same). The kick-drum pedal invites our participation, and with that summons certainly a few art-history courses, tripping from Dada and Duchamp through neo-Dada and Fluxus. I feel a little nervous saying this name but let’s just do it: John Cage. I’m thinking of Cage as he appears on the classic television talk/variety show I’ve Got a Secret, where he performed Water Walk, 1959. Beforehand, host Garry Moore says to the magus of dust and racket and silences, “These are nice people, but some of them are going to laugh. Is that all right?” Eliciting one of Cage’s best lines: “Of course. I consider laughter preferable to tears.”

While there are no obvious tears in Parade 1 or in “Dearly” overall, the show has a kind of barely there tenderness that is both cagey and Cagean.

- David Rimanelli for Artforum

Wonderful Flyer for Dearly by Julian Krause, and Party poster by Jordan Barse

www.juliankrause.net

my show "Dearly" in NYC at the fabulous Theta closes this week

theta.nyc

fr

Do you think everything happens for a reason? really - do you believe in the rapture? a functional forever? can you count the stars as sand like the blessings you’ve got - seven holes in your body and the possibility - to be fulfilled - devotion - someone by your side - do you know who you are?