Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists Artforum Magazine

Philosopher and writer Amia Srinivasan meets with artist Paul Chan for the latest episode of Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists. Together they contemplate fate, the distortion of reality caused by screens, their first experiences with philosophy, and making meaning through their respective disciplines. Chan’s exhibition “Breathers” is currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through July 16. Amia’s latest book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, is out now with Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States.

Photographer Roe Ethridge and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster discuss hysteria and mysticism, desire and repulsion, Florida and American unconscious for the January episode of Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists. Their conversation marks the publication of American Polychronic, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph out from Mack Books, as well as his exhibition of the same name, on view at Gagosian in New York though February 25. Webster and Ethridge also reflect on their collaboration Bad Flowers, created during the early stages of the pandemic for Spike Art Magazine.
“Artists on Writers | Writers On Artists” brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature for freeform, intimate conversations about the subjects that they wish to talk about. Roe Ethridge is an artist and commercial photographer in New York City. Blurring the lines between the two, Ethridge creates images that are simultaneously generic and intimate, often treading between glamor and irony. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; S.M.A.K., Ghent; the Tate Modern, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis(Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books. Her most recent book, Sex and Disorganisation is available now with Divided Publishing.

Author Sam Lipsyte first met artist Rob Reynolds decades ago as undergraduates at Brown University, after which they moved to New York, played together in the noise-punk band Dungbeetle and have remained friends ever since. On the occasion of Lipsyte’s newest novel No One Left to Come Looking for You (Simon & Schuster), the two talk about art, literature, and music, and how such things actually get made in this world.
This episode of “Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists” is sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).
Artists on Writers, Writers On Artists  brings together luminaries in the fields of art and literature for freeform, intimate conversations about the subjects that they wish to talk about. 
Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
Rob Reynolds received his B.F.A. from Brown University, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Reynolds’s work is in the public collections of LACMA, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the R.I.S.D. Museum, Brown University, and numerous private collections. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

For our November episode of Artists on Writers, Writers on Artists, writer James Hannaham and artist Nina Katchadourian cover many subjects including what it’s like to observe and experience change—whether that’s the changes to a city, or to neighborhood. James talks about infusing fictions with the textures of real life, and Nina addresses what it means to survive the unsurvivable, asking questions about what humans are capable of living beyond, or living with.

For our October episode, musician-artist Björk talks with author-scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer across subjects ranging from how language connects us to the natural world; the consequences—both personal and global —of living apart from nature; and what it means in our transient society to live in right relationship to the land. Bjork’s latest album, Fossora, is out with One Little Independent Records. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s most recent book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, is available from Milkweed Editions.

For the season premier episode of Artists On Writers | Writers on Artists, artist Lorna Simpson joins poet Simone White to talk about being in the practice of a practice, whether or not there is in fact a language to describe both Black experimental art and Black life, how to protect one’s own interiority so that a person can live most fully, and much more. Simpson’s work is currently on view as part of the exhibition “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. White’s most recent book, or, on being the other woman, was published this fall by Duke University Press. This episode of “Artists On Writers | Writers on Artists” is sponsored by the New-York Historical Society. A pioneer of conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson first came to attention in the mid-’80s for her large- scale photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory. Throughout her career, she has used the camera as a catalyst to comment on the documentary nature of found or staged images. Her works have been exhibited at, and are in the collections of, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Haus der Kunst, Munich amongst others. Important international exhibitions have included the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany, and the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. She was awarded the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2019. Simone White earned her BA from Wesleyan University, JD from Harvard Law School, and MFA from the New School. She is the author of the full-length collections House Envy of All the World (Heretical Texts, 2010), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Dolly (2008) and Unrest (2013). Her most recent, or, on being the other woman, was published this fall by Duke University Press. White has received fellowships from Cave Canem, a 2017 Whiting Award, and was selected as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America. She lives in New York and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.