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Making What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, 

 offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.

Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.

Can you outline your relationship to Duchamp’s work and legacy?

My story with Duchamp goes back to high school, like a lot of people. It was in 1968 in Advanced Physics class, which I really had no interest in whatsoever. The professor was getting old and he really had no control over the class. I found a book about Duchamp that had been published by Time Life in about ’64. This book just sort of came out of this Time Life series on art, and the general public didn’t really have any idea what it was about. I got this book from the school library and I was looking at it under my desk. Mr. Rosen came round and he looked at it, and I clearly remember him saying, “I have no idea what this is, but I’m sure it’s good for you, so keep reading.”

So, that was the first encounter. In college, I studied philosophy, then I became a painter. There was a time in my senior year when I had a collection of catalogues for graduate schools in my drawer and I was thinking of Duchamp again and asking questions—how it is that someone like me, who is so into Duchamp, happens to become a figurative painter. I think it really has to do with his example of following what compels you, and which isn’t necessarily something other people are doing. I studied Duchamp’s 

—that painting does something that paintings aren’t supposed to do, namely move. It seemed impossible. As I wrote to a friend, “I write about Duchamp. And he helps me with painting. My painting in 2019 gets an inspirational and conceptual shove from 

 from 1912. Painted nudes don’t move. Painted heads don’t think. They sit inert on a flat surface. Then again …”

A spread from Duchamp's Last Day, by Donald Shambroom.

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Why did you decide to focus on Duchamp’s last day?

I was interested in his last days and at first it seemed to me that he might have terminated his own life at a certain point. For example, he talks a lot about fifty years—the fifty-year delay that it takes for a painting to turn from nothing to a masterpiece or back again. That’s a recurrent thing. And the day before his death in 1968, he went from Paris to Rouen for the unveiling of a giant bronze sculpture called

(The Large Horse)—that was roughly fifty years after his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon had conceived the original work in 1914, and exactly one week shy of the fiftieth anniversary of Raymond’s death at the end of the first World War. Man Ray also wrote a statement published in Art in America in 1969—which I have included in the book—saying of Duchamp, “His heart obeyed him and it stopped.” So I was investigating this—which turned out to not be correct, by the way—and it felt like that was the first part of the process. Then, in 2012, I was visiting Francis Naumann, whose gallery shows Duchamp’s work in New York, and he said, “Donald, come out back, sit down, I have to tell you something.” He had received an email with a sort of grainy image of this postmortem photograph from someone working at Getty Research Institute. The picture was unlabeled, unmarked, and no one had ever seen it before. So, I kept working. And it wasn’t until maybe a year later that I focused on the fact that Georges Herbiet and Robert Lebel—two writers who visited Duchamp on his final day—had also written detailed accounts that were published within months of Duchamp’s death.

Does it not strike you as unusual that people were compelled to write these accounts?

I think it is unusual. Publishing an image of a dead person is very unusual—and in 1968, after the horror of two world wars, perhaps even more so. I talked with Carlos Basualdo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about this, and he described images of death as a form of “toxic pornography” in our culture.

But the thing is that, based on these accounts, Duchamp’s death was kind of an ironically joyful occasion. Duchamp even seemed to convey to his friends that he wouldn’t see them again. There was a sadness to it and that was in the air in their discussions, but there is also an excitement for Duchamp.

I think that this kind of conflict and darkly joyful attitude interested both of these writers as something to explore. Herbiet’s wife had died a few months earlier, and they talked about that. They just found something interesting and enduring and very Duchampian in their friend’s passing. The idea of play and death, which I mention at the end of the book, to most people is incomprehensible. How could those two things come together? But that’s what’s going on in this case.

This image is not something that Duchamp had anything to do with, as I conclude. I really did struggle with it, but basically, the epitaph he wrote says, “Besides, it is always the others who die.” The suggestion is that there is no transition. It’s the world that disappears, and it’s really no big deal. And that’s the way he lived: it’s good if you’ve done your work, and in his case, it’s good if your final work that no one knows about [the installation of Étant donnés (1946–1966) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art] is complete except for the Spanish bricks, which I mention in the book. This is an account of the end of someone’s life that people enjoy reading and that isn’t sad. I think that there’s an interest, and maybe a need, for something of that type, and I’d like to reach some of those readers. It’s not pontificating, it’s not telling you how to do it. And perhaps, within this culture we live in where death is controlled by medicine and that wants to keep you alive forever and ever and ever, it’s a story that might have some use—even for people who have never heard of Duchamp. He wanted it that way, in a sense. He wanted the effect of what he did to function in the wider culture.

In hindsight, has this project influenced your own sense of mortality or infiltrated your thinking in unexpected ways?

Well, in the course of writing, I explored a long list of books on photography and death. There’s Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and in the postmodern phase, there is an academic consideration of photography and death. A central question is whether freezing an image of someone is the same thing as killing them. It’s a discussion that goes back to the nineteenth century when photography was first invented; it was striking to people that you could capture a moment, and one of the major functions of photography was to serve as a remembrance, a way to memorialize someone.

At the end of 1998, my late wife gave me a bunch of books about writing. I had already delved way into the Duchamp thing, and she wanted to get me to write. It was our last Christmas together. She had a terminal illness, and it was the year I was starting to write about Duchamp. We spent a lot of time together and talked about it. It’s become important to me for death not to be taboo. But I think in the final version of this book, I really pulled back from that because I don’t want to be agitating anything one way or the other. I just want to present as good a story as I can.

, 2018. Photo by Kyle Knodell; spreads from 

Covers of the book Duchamp's Last Day, published in 2018.

Donald Shambroom

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Ruth Asawa: A Line Can Go Anywhere

Archives of American Art Releases New Video Featuring Ruth Asawa

Installation view of the exhibition Ruth Asawa, at David Zwirner New York, dated 2017.

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Ruth Asawa in "Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience"

, an immersive monograph on the artist’s life and work, published by David Zwirner Books, Tiffany Bell begins her essay with an insightful anecdote:

In 1971, the renowned twentieth-century inventor and visionary Buckminster Fuller wrote a letter of recommendation in support of Asawa’s application to the Guggenheim Foundation’s annual fellowship program. After noting that he had been writing these recommendations for various candidates for forty-three years, Fuller said: "I state, without hesitation or reserve, that I consider 

 to be the most gifted, productive, and originally inspired artist that I have ever known personally." . . . He cited her wire mesh sculptures, with which he had been familiar since the late 1940s when he and Asawa were both at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Also featuring a text by Robert Storr, who discusses Asawa’s work in relation to mid-twentieth-century art, culture, and scientific theory, this publication illuminates the depth and importance of the artist’s practice in the context of modernism. The book’s extensive imagery includes installation views, works on paper, and detailed photographs revealing the intricacy of Asawa’s sculptures, as well as intimate archival portraits of the artist by her friend Imogen Cunningham. Its design is also directly inspired by its subject. Taking the elongated form of the hanging wire works as a starting point, the book’s designer, Michelle Nix of McCall Associates, has addressed the challenge of conveying sculpture on the flat surface of the page through a vibrant combination of inset images and full bleeds, varying indents, and a playful approach to scale. As Nix noted, "One of the advantages for the Ruth Asawa project was being able to view the work at [David Zwirner] before even thinking about the book. . . . Seeing the works in person helped me form a better understanding of the artist, learn the details of her process, and see how the works interacted with each other, the viewer, and the space." Unrestrained by linear narrative, the plates mimic the varied approach one takes when viewing the works in situ, while the lightness of the layout for the essays and illustrated chronology—the freedom to "roam," as Nix puts it—was inspired by an installation view of Asawa’s smaller hanging works that appears on pages 74–75.

As the first major monograph about Asawa’s work published since the 

 accompanying a retrospective of her career at the de Young Museum in San Francisco in 2006 (where some of the artist’s works are 

), this book provides a timely overview that many argue is overdue. "In her lifetime," Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote in an 

 of Asawa’s work in the fall of 2017, "Asawa weathered storms of weak interpretation . . . that made too much of her positions as a wife and mother and not nearly enough of her contributions to modernism and abstraction."

A detail of a photograph of Ruth Asawa, dated 1950s.

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Interior spread from a book titled Ruth Asawa, published by David Zwirner Books in 2018.

Photo by Kyle Knodell

Ruth Asawa: Monograph from David Zwirner Books

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Interview with the Author: Christian Viveros-Fauné 

A photograph of microphones in a recording studio.

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Well, I’ve known Chris for years, mostly just from being in Trinidad—the island in the southern Caribbean that I love, that I’ve written about, and where Chris lives and works. But the idea of having me write on this new project, that came from Lucas [Zwirner], here in New York. I went to see the 

 show last fall—the exhibition didn’t actually feature Chris’s photos, which comprise this book, but it did engage similar themes: he had brought actual chain-link fences into the gallery, along with stark black-and-white paintings. But I gathered that Chris’s larger vision for the project also involved compiling these images he’d been making with his iPhone, of fences and life in Trinidad, into a book. Lucas showed me the photos—these mysterious snapshots, beautifully composed. I thought: right, chain-link fencing—it’s everywhere in the Caribbean. I might have something to say here. We got in touch with Chris, and he loved the idea of me doing an essay, and we just went from there.

In your essay, you discuss meeting Chris Ofili a decade ago in Trinidad. Do you remember where or when you first encountered his paintings?

Yes, I certainly knew Chris as a person before I really knew his paintings. I knew his name and had seen images on the internet or wherever; I knew about the kerfuffle over his Virgin Mary. But meeting him and getting to know him in Trinidad was about other shared interests—in film and in books, in exploring the wild places and wild parties of the island.

But I do vividly recall encountering his paintings properly, for the first time. It was at his big retrospective at the New Museum in 2014. That show included work reaching back to his London years—those meticulous, layered pieces, porno cutouts and googly eyes and mothers’ tears and all, with which he made his name. All potent and impressive—and hilarious. But what really blew me away in that show was his newer work from Trinidad. There was one dimly lit room, in particular—you kind of had to squint to see; the canvases were painted in such dark indigos and blacks.

I remember writing him, that they were midnight in Trinidad, in the best way. Bougainvillea and creepers and all. Those pieces were magic—they captured something crucial about this tropical place where every day includes twelve hours of dark; where there’s something deeply noir about the culture; where stories abound about the midnight robbers and diablesses and blue devils that people the night.

Can you talk a little bit about what you wanted to frame or think through in writing about Ofili’s first photography project?

For me, it was really just about responding to the work—flipping through the photos, looking closely, seeing what emerged. And of course what leapt out straight away were the chain-link fences. Their ubiquity in Trinidad, which relates to a certain set of anxieties, particularly around "security" and protecting one’s person or property, in a young nation that can feel pretty Wild West—a place where the rule of law’s sketchy and where crime, lately, has been through the roof. Chris’s images speak to all that. But it was also clear to me, in how he approached these fences—how he took notice of the ways their patterns could be turned into decoration, how he caught, too, the beautiful diamond-shaped shadows they cast—that they weren’t just that. There’s another kind of cage, particular to Trinidad, that one feels guides this project, too—the birdcages in which men there keep trilling sparrows. These were evoked, a couple of years ago, by Chris’s grand tapestry 

. Those cages—cages that evoke constraint, but also freedom and pleasure—keep showing up in the 

So that was the brew, as I absorbed this work, that was in my head. But I think as a scholar, my first instinct, in trying to figure out some sort of synthesis—some way to deepen context or furnish insight—is to turn to research: to actual materials, concrete history. Which in this case meant diving into the history of chain-link fencing. Into where this stuff—which was invented by a wool weaver in England, in the context of the Industrial Revolution—came from; into how it overspread the world; into the hows and whys of its ubiquity today as a way to bound off space. The hope, I suppose, was that diving into all that might shine some light on how and why Chris, in Trinidad, is encountering this material now—and what his images might say to us.

You have studied and written a lot about islands. What draws you to this particular subject matter, and are there recurring themes around this subject that you find in Ofili’s photos?

As a writer who went to school for geography, space and place are central to me. Questions around the means by which we turn space into place—location vested with meaning—are everything. And I think that islands, in general, are remarkable places in which to think through these questions. Partly because they’re at once "places apart," and places that are connected to everywhere, by the sea. But also because—especially in the context of the Caribbean—of all that’s been projected onto them, by western imaginations in particular: islands are utopias or prisons; they’re places we go to find ourselves, or lose ourselves, or be reborn. They have also long been conjured as paradises. Which is part of why when they turn out not to be paradise, but worldly and imperfect indeed (and crisscrossed, like Trinidad, by fences and anxieties of all kinds)—well, that’s when they get interesting.

What aspects of Trinidad’s modernity feel most foregrounded in Ofili’s "pocket photography"? Did anything surprise you while researching the history of chain-link fences?

In my essay, I quote a famous line from V. S. Naipaul, in which he describes Trinidad, where he grew up, as typified by a certain "flawed modernity." This cutting remark was typical Naipaul: he hated where he came from. But this sense of the island’s modernity—its stature as a place whose oil cash and ethnic mix and traffic-clogged roads feels modern—is typical Trinidad. Trinidad, in many ways, is unique in the Caribbean. Its economy isn’t tourism but industry. It has its own money, from oil and gas. And its culture is this vibrant mash-up of India and Africa and carnival and Shakespeare and steel drums. That culture and the mix of people in a New World nation, making it up as they go along; the music—all this helps it feel more modern than anywhere you can imagine. But there are so many ways, too, in which it can feel like a future to fear. A future where the planet’s heading—the traffic and the crime; the sense that everyone, living behind their metal fences, has something to dread. Those are some of the tensions attending Trinidad’s modernity. And they all come together, really, in a pretty neat little package: chain-link fences.

It was a pure bonus when I started to research fencing’s history to learn one particular detail. Norwich, England, where the fellow who invented chain-link fencing in the 1840s, Charles Barnard, lived, was for centuries a center for weaving wool and making textiles. Barnard’s idea was to retrofit a loom, to handle material stouter than wool—the idea for braiding steel into fencing came, literally, from a machine for making cloth. Which was rather perfect to find out while writing about Chris, a painter who’s been interested in metal and cloth alike. And who’s also worked, in the case of the textile he produced with the Dovecot Tapestry Studio, with a similar kind of alchemy—in 

, turning watercolors into yarn. But there was something there, too, that resonates: the ways in which one material, or process, can become another.

Sometimes, digging into history does that. It connects to the present, and the work, in these serendipitous ways that maybe aren’t so serendipitous at all: one feels the artist’s eye making connections that have been there all along. Connections that are there, in the images, to be discovered—or mused upon anyway. Engaging with Chris’s work in this essay, in that spirit, was fantastic fun. And I think the aim, in combining the words and images into a book, was to create a kind of conversation that people find interesting. I hope they do!

Interior spread from a book titled  Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost, published by David Zwirner Books in 2018.

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Five Questions for the Author—Joshua Jelly-Schapiro on Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost

, from essay compilations and autobiographies to interviews, art criticism, and historic talks.

The result of long conversations, studio visits, and archive access, 

 represents a monumental body of research and analysis. This volume includes the vast majority of significant essays on 

 written since 1999 and as the discourse on her work has broadened.

Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, 

 offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing. Thirty in-depth conversations chart the role of the critic from the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring writers and artists alike.

Featuring an introduction by Okwui Enwezor and new scholarship by Anna Schneider and Emma Enderby, 

 offers critical insight into Murillo’s complex, vibrant body of work that continually offers powerful observations of the world around us.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form

 documents the groundbreaking traveling retrospective curated by Elena Filipovic with the artists Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal, all of whom found new interpretations of 

 is a collection of never-before-published talks documents an exciting decade in the development of contemporary art and arts education, featuring interviews with renowned artists, curators, and writers.

 is a selection of conversations with diverse contributors who offer contrasting—and often unexpected—opinions about art and aesthetics. Featuring Vito Acconci, Yan Pei-Ming, and 

 illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Christian Viveros-Fauné picks fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s 

 (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action.

Beginning with her childhood in postwar Japan, 

. The book features dazzling snapshots of 1960s and 1970s New York and her encounters with its artists—among them Joseph Cornell, 

 chronicles the lives and work of five women, including 

, who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting.

 and Hal Foster over fifteen years, exploring Serra’s belief in sculpture as experience. As he has said, "The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work."




A photograph of three books stacked on a bench outside. The titles are: What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics; About Bridget Riley: Selected Writings 1999–2016; Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace.

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

About Bridget Riley Selected Writings 1999-2016

The cover of a book, titled About Bridget Riley Selected Writings 1999-2016.

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Oscar Murillo

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Specific Objects Without Specific Form

The cover of a book, titled Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form.

ArtCenter Talks Graduate Seminar The First Decade 1986–1995

The cover of a book, titled ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986‚Äì1995.

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Infinity Net The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

The cover of a book, titled Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama.

Ninth Street Women Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, And Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters And The Movement That Changed Modern Art

The cover of a book, titled Ninth Street Women Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, And Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters And The Movement That Changed Modern Art.

Richard Serra Conversations about Sculpture

The cover of a book, titled Richard Serra: Conversations about Sculpture.

Long Reads for Summer

long reads for summer

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.