 We're so happy to have Madeleine Bresendorff here, and it's such a joy, actually. And I would say we're here to celebrate your work and discuss your work, but also your wisdom. Yes, like in a birthday, but also your wisdom with a S8. W-I-S-H-D-O-M, as you like it. Artists, culture, teacher, collector. But also the great impact of fun of your past, present and future contributions to the world are basically what we're so excited to be celebrating like in a birthday today. And in this world, like the idea of your contributions to the world means a lot when we talk about Madeleine Bresendorff, because you're one of the actually few living people that has your own world according to the Swiss Architectural Museum that in 2019 did this amazing exhibition and book, The World of Madeleine Bresendorff, an exhibition that actually shocked everyone when the photographs of your apartment in London started to circulate, your amazing collection of dictators and dead figures, and all these things started to be seen with this big thing live without objects. That still shocks me, too. However, I think that it's also something else. I think it's a homecoming. You came to New York in 1972, right? No, it's 1972. Actually, the year I was born. And you went to Ithaca, right? The first place. And I cannot imagine what it would be to have you in the same room that Colin Rowe, for instance, in Ithaca, right? He was around at that time. This very abstract notion of architecture that could be explained through the maths of ideal, maths of the home, and whatever, all these things that we were reading, and then Madeleine Bresendorff unfolding architecture in all these different layers, realities, scales, presences, lives. So it's so exciting somehow to think that you're coming back to New York after many years, right? You haven't been here for many years, right? Many years, yes. So this is a homecoming and a celebration for us that you're doing this here in GESAP, in Columbia GESAP. It's actually the 12th Kenneth Franton lecture. This is a series that is honoring the legacy of Kenneth Franton with whom you've been in conversations and discussions often and probably many, many other things. But I want to remind everyone that Franton actually wrote about the early team, the founders of OMA, and he wrote something actually very, very beautiful in 1976. He said, OMA presents an alternative reality of radical potential and one which is equally critical of the positivistic constraints of both capitalism and communism. The city for OMA is not paved with gold, but with culture. And I wonder what it means culture here, what we could actually interpret that means culture here, but I think all this density that you bring into architecture, it's probably what we could make of this culture now. Madeleine Bresendorff studied at Redbelt. She then worked on restoration and frescoes and as a designer of estate customs, books, and jewelry, right? Five years later, you enrolled at Central Saint Martin School of Art in London, right? That's the time that you left that to came to New York, right? To Ithaca first and then to your paintings. You produce paintings for books, magazines, covers that were exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Max Protect Gallery, the Pompidou, the Stetlick, Amsterdam Museum, the Gallery of Math, Tokyo, and Berlin. That was probably the time that you did the cosmic man, right? And the cover of that, right? That was more or less that, which I totally love this month, this kind of made of bubbles and it's a cosmic presence. From mid-1980s, you taught art and designing a number of schools, including the A.A. and the Edinburgh School of Art. You worked with Charles Yanks through your entire life, right? And you will talk about that later. You worked with your daughter, Charlie, on several books and art projects and many, many other things and your work is everywhere. And we've been discussing this and it's collected in all the major museums and published everywhere, so I don't think we need to go through that. But I want to also say that for many people in this room you are clearly working as an architect through architecture. But also I know that you prefer to say that you're not an architect, that you laugh about architects, right? I'm not an architect. I know, I know. And that you laugh about, you make fun of architects, you laugh of architects, right? No, I only laughed about Corbusier. Mostly what he wrote, he's a very good architect, but something she wrote is just so funny. So this is an opportunity to laugh about many architects, about many architectures, about many other things with you. And now I have a chance to laugh about me. Yes, and laugh about you, with you and through your work. But I think it's very important what is happening here and the format is going to be very informal. I would say you're going to speak for a while. We will then go through a series of thought images that you selected and we will have a conversation that at one point we will open to the audience. So make sure to take notes about everything that you want to ask afterwards and we will go through that. And before we start, I want to show this image that you sent us. This beautiful image here in New York in 1972 probably, right? In your apartment on Seventh Street, right? I just found that slide. I never knew it. So this is a great moment. Please join me in welcoming Madeleine Brissender. Okay, we'll tell you something about my very time before I was born. And that's a bit about my first contribution to my family. I was born at a time when ADHD hadn't been invented yet. In 1945, in a small town sandwiched between Utrecht and Amsterdam in a street called Vermeerland, Vermeer Lane, yeah? Never feeling the weight of art history on our shoulders. Two months before peace broke out and the worst hunger winter in memory. I acquired the prenatal reputation of having saved my family from starvation when my mother, who was massively pregnant with me, took a ride on a bike made by my father with his home carved wooden tires just before her, not just before her, but for many in the village as a robber was unavailable for five years of German occupation. She cycled to nearby farms to exchange precious goods for flour, eggs and potatoes, etc. At some point, several German soldiers motioned her to the top and demanded to take her bike, but she was able to show her obvious pregnancy and birth certificates of her three starving children at home, and thankfully they let her go. So this was my earliest contribution to my family. But later this was somewhat more nebulous. I was the youngest child with two conflicting needs, wanting both to be left alone and to be heard. I had an extreme ability to close myself off from the record around me while drawing and constructing, and at the same time demanding attention by screaming over my family's arguments. I still have that terrible thing that I scream over people when they want to be heard. And they say, shut up, let me finish. There were two schools for us to choose from, a brutal, old-fashioned one where kids were still beaten and a Maria Montessori school. So it was an easy choice for an enlightened family with a lineage of artists and poets. At this Montessori school my nursery teacher, Madame Boc, was a trained expert in dyslexia, and she spotted me as early as five. I stayed with her for three weeks, and I was ecstatic, surrounded by kindness, and her two affectionate daughters. I felt like an only child for once. As a part of her teaching, she placed words like door, wall, kitchen, bathroom, all around the place. And while I didn't appear to notice them, my visual brain must have perceived them subconsciously. So these random words taught me to read without me realising. I could not attach sounds to one letter. Visually to me the letters D, B, P and Q were all the same, only turned around and upside down. So later my party trick for my friends was writing whole sentences backwards and upside down. My traumatised parents having to survive through the war with very young children through extremely cold winters with no sign of global warming on the horizon started to write a crime novel together, as if that was a normal thing to do. My grandfather had his own publishing company for the sole reason of publishing his calculating dictionary that he had been working on for years. By the time he finally finished his hefty book, calculators had already been invented, but he still shipped some of his books to small cash-strapped businesses in Holland, Denmark, Germany and maybe more. When he died he had a room full of dictionaries all piled up to the signalling. I don't know what happened to them but I took one home. His petitioned family came from a wealthy shipping company so he could afford to follow his dream. However slight her grant, he married a frail artistic girl from a respectable family of horse painters and poets. She died before I was born but the pictures of her showed a sad face with lowered eyebrows. Maybe I speculated for having married a domineering man with such a self-righteous character. His military regime style of upbringing didn't blend with my father's gentle and kind character, more resembling his mother. So his daughter and older son were his blatant favourites. When he acquired the dog he threw the puppy in the river to see if it was tough enough to join his family. He forced heaps of calcium powder down his children's throats to give them strong bones. This made my father suffer horrendously with painful kidney stones. But otherwise as a grandfather he was kind and adored as all. His cookery, he cooked every Sunday and was too stubborn to look at recipes so his puddings were so tough and robust that when my father once flipped his pudding up in the air it stuck to the ceiling. And when he caught it back on the plate it was still intact. We all clapped. He was swift and always offered us rock-hard cooking chocolate from an elegant crystal bowl. The incongruousness, I can't say that word, was not wasted on us. He had been educated in Germany in the wood trade and as a young man he travelled the world to buy wood. Russia, Argentina, Canada, etc. He was not a natural storyteller but we insisted to tell us about Russia. Very, very cold. People and good food. But we insisted, how about Moscow? The underground, very deep. He couldn't expect more. He loved figure skating and carried on till he was 80. And we would skate next to him to make sure he wouldn't hit the eyes. And despite occasional wobble he never did. His brother was equally following his dream to breed exotic chickens. Seen on famous old paintings, the ones with enormous feathery boots, which came in all colours. Once he had managed that he died. And when Ram introduced me to his parents for the first time, his father, who worked for Polygon News, asked me, are you family of that freezing-dorp that breeds chickens from old paintings? He had interviewed him on his chicken farm. Yes, that's my uncle. And that was my introduction to the Kulhas family. Now I tell you a story I wrote when I was... ...years ago. Which is now, what is it? Ten years ago. I woke up with an incredible storm outside the window and I remembered this story of... ...a thing that happened in my family when I was 14 or 15. And this is a Dutch colouring book. And we always were sort of colouring these books. Very Holland-themed. So this is the start. A man who asked his friend Spike Milligan, where are you, was giving the answer, somewhere. You always have to be somewhere. This doesn't apply to Holland. In Holland you can be nowhere. In fact, there's a lot of nowhere in Holland. You can be in a place, look around, and it's exactly the same as somewhere else in Holland. A flat green plain, a miniature skyline at the horizon, with several spires pointing up, like sharpened pencils. A testimony to the multiple... I can't speak any more. I have to get my throat oiled. A testimony to the multiple religions Holland traditionally accommodated. Some houses scattered about, one interchangeable with the next, for lack of compelling features. A few trees, a moat, a fence, and there it ends. Except it doesn't, it never ends. The landscape unfolds with unrelenting sameness, mile after mile. When finally you come to a forest, you can be pretty sure that behind it, this flat green will appear again with provocative nothingness before your eyes. We, the Dutch, have learned to love it, just as we've learned to love potatoes. To counteract the destructive boredom of colorlessness, we filled our Dutch nursery coloring books with screaming, primal color crayons. It made us feel that we were somewhere doing something. You always ended up with a red cloud, a blue cow, and a yellow windmill. My sister had a boyfriend who came along one summer to our rented cottage in the north of Holland, in the middle of this unyielding green. My family consisted of my mother, my stepfather, and his son, my two older sisters, my older brother and me. It was raining with a constant, constant typical of Dutch summers. My brother would stand in front of the window, days on end, and sing his dismal little song, a dissonant version of, I can hear the rain. Oh, how it's raining, how it's raining. I can hear it from my warm bed. I hear the rain singing. Can you, do you know that song? How no one notices this sad state of affairs. In this miserable collective family mood, we had blazing arguments. Who's turn is it to peel the potatoes? As families invariably pray on outsiders to point out the ills of the world, we collectively turned to the unlucky boyfriend, suitably named Martin Fiers. He realizing immediately this was not just the potato peeling issue, refused to comply. A family row ensued, wholly inappropriate to the scale of the matter and the setting. My brother stayed silently at the window, his eyes glazing over as if to soft focus the racket around him. Martin took his stuff and stormed out the door. My sister was praised extensively for letting him go. It is notoriously difficult to storm out into nowhere and end up somewhere. So he walked a mercilessly flat crossland for about an hour. Without looking back, we checked. Every now and then someone would go to the window and we would call out, is he still there? And the answer would invariably be, yes, I can still see him. Or he still is out there. And then I can still see his head. When finally he disappeared there was no sign of relief. Just a muted acknowledgement that nothing had been achieved and nothing lost. His lack of imprint on the landscape had left the past more hostile and more horizontal than ever before. Now that's about Holland. That's where I grew up. Now some serious business. We move on. Well, first this, I guess. You sent us this slide and I was wondering if you could explain a little bit. This is a funny guy who put this on the internet. He's called Drew Two-Spaced. He's called. My friends made a nice frame for me and they made a sort of a line where I can put a star where I am. And it's permanently on fuck off. But it always was my working for the thing. We always went too late and then did all the work by crying the deadline. We organized your images in eight blocks. We're going to start with early work, right? Before that I want to say I see there's a lot of people standing in the back. There's plenty of empty seats here in France. So please, Ernest, if you want. Come forward everybody. We have to fill this. Okay, early work. So I'm going to pass them slow. Sorry. First the first round and then I'll go back. Oh yeah, I was 16 or 15. That was my cartoons that I made when I was that age. And I made them for all my friends in high school. And my first boyfriend in high school sent these to me quite recently. I had forgotten about them. This was at Montessori. I don't know why it was all about nuns and priests. But there you are. This was son of your early works, right? Yeah, it was very early. And who did you make? That was in the center school of art. I did etching. And were these student exercises? Or were they made for galleries? I did it for myself because I was doing it at night. And during the day I was driving around to get publishers to give me work, book covers and things. So I colored them all because it was more interesting. New York. What do you think now about this? I mean, in every word. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more. The very first one, right? I really have to tell you my thoughts. Maybe we'll start with... I made this disgusting painting because I thought they must have terrible taste, these two. It's the best painting. And then the Italians didn't want to use this cover of Delias in New York, so they took out the painting and they just put the figures in bed. That was very funny. They couldn't stand it. They obviously didn't see the point of it. And then it became the sort of Miami lighthouse in the next... And then Rims insisted that modernity would interrupt this love affair. And so I put the modernist... Well, modernist now. Well, people still make this sort of RCA buildings now. They make them in other shapes or other... We have to ask the students, but... Maybe Madeleine, maybe it could be good to know a little bit the story of the image. How did it start? Well, people say Rally put buildings in bed together, but then it was sort of at the time that everybody was in bed together and it was the 60s free love. And my brother-in-law had already done two airplanes in bed together and Steinberg had already done an exclamation mark and a question mark in bed together. So it was not so... Now it looks a bit funny, but then it was sort of quite a normal thing to do. Normal. But they're kind of surprised. They made it like to do this in a normal way. But in a way there's so much violence here in this image. They're surprised by this person kind of this building that is lighting them. There's all these people watching through the window. There's also... I mean, your work is always so nice, so fun. But those are so dark, right? There's sort of a dark side in these images. There's violence always. Now my dark side? No, I was very obsessed with Statue of Liberty. I was sort of identified with her a bit, if you can. But you don't call her the statue of... You call her Mrs. Caligari, is that...? Yeah, but that was... We just seen the cabinet of Dr. Caligari and we were completely obsessed with that film. It was so funny because that film, everything is crooked. But when you come out of... It becomes normal. So when you come out, you think, oh, everything is strange. This is a watercolor, right? Yeah. And you draw it first with pencil? How do you work? I just pencil, drawing, and then color it. Color it in. And always had an incredibly small sort of intricate skill, right? Like in the first image? Well, as you can see, it had a very small table. Yeah. There was no... It was underneath our loft bed. Was it really? It was a tiny little alcove. Was it a practicality thing? It was very small, yeah. I mean, I think Andres' earlier question about the darkness, I want to push a little bit on that as well. I had the same question, but there's so much... Well, there's the people sort of gazing in, there's Lady Liberty sort of missing her arm, but also some of the other... Maybe we can go like a few of the later works. There is all this brokenness, things sort of falling apart. And I agree, I think your work is incredibly optimistic and positive in many ways. There is always this sort of dark undertone. Here again, this is a self-emulation, I think it's called so... Well, I don't know, it's... Yeah, well, at that age, you're a bit dark, aren't you? When you're 25, that is sick. You're all dark souls. You look for drama, you know. And I collected all these postcards about New York. Yeah, because some of the postcards that are highly categorized, there were also themes of electric chairs, I think I read somewhere you were collecting, there were some of them. Yeah, we used to call this... I used to call this Wish You Were Here cards. Most horrors of cards. From prisons and long tables for the prisoners that have crazy cards. Why do you make postcards of this? You can't say Wish You Were Here, can you? Or a guy on an incredible crevice, you know, a gorge sitting on the edge. Wish You Were Here. How much of this was... I mean, you were collecting postcards. You were going around the city, you were talking to everyone. There were supposed to be postcards for the New Yorkers, but I saw this crazy postcard of Americana, the biggest potato, Idaho potato on a train, and the biggest... Everything the biggest, the highest, the deepest, the most dangerous... of the gigantic strawberries. The biggest jackrabbit. But in a way, this, for instance, for me, is fascinating when we see it from a perspective like now. I mean, in the 70s, for instance, New York was also facing many difficulties, right? It was a city that was... There were all these issues that the city was facing. But when we look at it from a contemporary perspective, and we see the floodings on the grid, we see the broken symbols of the U.S. and the U.S. democracy and welcoming tradition. It was also a time of... super actors, super famous actresses, and, you know, the... Celebrity culture. These buildings were also sort of the super famous actors in architecture. So it was sort of like... They were all iconic, Marilyn Monroe and, you know... So celebrity was... architectural celebrities, basically. What about the other parts? For instance, there's always a huge presence of nature. There's always a huge presence of, for instance, many of them, of territorial dimensions. There's always the clouds. There's all these other things that are also brought in in the grid and in dialogue with the buildings. How do you feel about that? We lived in a small town with lots surrounded by forest and trees. So when my mother brought me out once to... I saw these clouds and I cried because I'd never seen this heavy stuff above us. It was always sort of covered. So I always had nature around me, so there's always a bit of hunger for nature and sea and water. Water was a big thing in Holland. I don't have to explain this to anyone. I don't think. It always flooded. How was the reaction of architects to this? Because this was not happening, let's say, in an invisible place. All these drawings were exhibited, were, I mean, incredibly famous. But, for instance, in the interview that you did for the world of modern Britain, there you explained, and you respond to it saying, she's the culprit. Don't ask her. But the presence of your drawing on the cover made people very successful, right? The previous version. People thought we were totally taking the piss. It wasn't... This was not academic work. This was just joking around. In a way, I've never stopped doing things that didn't make me laugh. I just want to... You said it was not well received in New York at all, right? You said it was not well received at all. I was basically taking it away in New York from the people who were really seriously studying New York. What was their critique? Well, there was a lot of things that were myths and that were written as if it... Like, there was one myth that all the Indians were the ones who were working high up on the skyscrapers. It is not true. You know that. And that was a nice myth. And he felt like these myths are more interesting than the reality. So, in a way, it's sort of embracing all the untrue realities about New York. I heard you're quoting Einstein at some point. Einstein said, if the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts. And this was happening while... You have to listen to Einstein always. Madeleine, this was happening while Rem was... Also, basically, there's an inevitable dialogue between these and, of course, the lyrics of New York as a text. How was that relationship? He wasn't wanting to have that. He had a very nice cover for Ilias New York already, which was the Cinerama of the World Fair. Nice blue, all the things in a round. It was a very nice cover. But then James Reims, he went to Frankfurt and booked her fair and he said, there was an Italian guy, Baroni, who had your cover, your painting, on his cover. And everybody was looking at it, so you're crazy if you don't use that painting for your cover. And then he decided, alright, we'll do that. And then he put all my paintings that I had been painting, the whole series, in every chapter. I was quite surprised because he thought it would fit perfectly. Because the paintings existed? Sorry? The paintings really existed in their own, right? There was no... There was no connection to the store, to Ilias New York. But... Before you said that you were collecting the big potatoes and these other things, the Postcards, the Americana, Reims was doing something different. How different it was? He was looking at every old book. We were collecting magazines and he said, take all the magazines that are from 1929. That was his main time that he thought everything happened then and was written about. So we collected everything, 90, all these old magazines. It was... I didn't know why he wanted 29, but then that was when the skyscrapers, one wanted to be higher than the other and one did it spire a bit higher so that it was higher than... There was this competition. It was very funny. Maybe when we spoke earlier, you mentioned when you were living in Ithaca first before going to New York, you would go to all these thrift stores and one thing I noticed, you would explain how you would purchase all these things, but they're always Art Deco. Art Deco bracelet, Art Deco ties. So what's your relationship with Art Deco? You seem to have a... No, I was very interested in... It's so beautiful. All the beautiful dinos, they were all Art Deco streamlines. That didn't... There was such an Art Deco explosion in the 30s. So everything, every scub, every spoon, there were always Art Deco things. So I collected whatever I could. And the depression plates, what do they call the depression plates? All the different colored square plates. Just us. It was so different. We were so Calvinist in Holland. Everything was great, grey, brown, white and black. No, nowhere. So it was an exciting moment to be in New York at that time. And everything was cheap. I even, you know, plates that were 25 cent that plate. I can get them from 15. Now I'm sorry that I've been buy them all. Now then people started to, after that, people started to collect them as well. This one is called Greed, right? Yeah. Now that guy that eats New York, that is from a painting in, I think, an Italian church. I've got in which city it was. Bologna or something. Do you know where that church is? Any Italians in the room? No. It also looks like the Saturno and the Prado, right? Yeah, it was the time of disaster movies. What about the pipes here? We have pipe lovers here. Well, that was a postcard. We saw the belly of New York, the underbelly. And I thought it's so Freudian. You have the subconscious of New York. And then you have the Freudian images, the gorge, the tunnel. Only the window has a constructive theme. You said the subconscious of New York? The subconscious. And where would it be? Underneath the water. There's so much underneath New York. When you realize... Right here, there's water streaming under the auditorium. This was for... In Holland you have a thing in Holland that is 1% ruling. And every building that's being built has to have 1% art. So there was a competition and I entered a competition with this broken thing that goes through the window. Was it for a mural? And the 1% was consumed by all the other things they did. So it disappeared. So it wasn't done. And this was for this magazine. I signed quarterly and they wanted the cover. So I made it a birthday party of the two buildings. Ten years later. And all the postmodern buildings there. Because I think those were basically their children. Postmodernism. And the gilandes, what do you call them? The trains. They're all upside down entries from the Biennale. Postmodern. Postmodern Biennale. How was your work received by the postmodern architects? God knows, I don't talk to... I don't talk to postmodern architects. There was a postcard stamp I made for... And I sent them to somebody who collected my painting. And he just gave it to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The painting of the first painting of the buildings in bed together. And I collected all these juicers. That's one of the streamlined juicers that came from... That came from crippled civilians in Toronto. Ron was giving a lecture and I thought, I've heard that lecture. So I'm going to... I'm going to Swift stores. And I've found this enormous box in crippled civilians. This old metal sink. And I thought, I said to the guy, what is this Nazi helmet doing there? And he said, that's a juicer. And he put it all together. The thing that fitted perfectly, it was amazing. It was a real belgadis kind of thing. It's so beautiful. What about electricity? There's no electricity. No, but they mean the kind of storm. Oh, the lightning. There was a lightning rod in that building. I've never seen it happen, but imagined. Then my friend Terry, who I met in Ithaca. Like my friends who are sitting there. I met them in Ithaca as well. And they stayed friends forever. And I met her there. And we went to collect things. She collected quilts. And I collected the cards and postcards. Anyway, so when we were all back in Europe. We went to Berlin one day where they had a house. And she said, we must make it. I'm doing a Paris, New York. There was all this Paris, Moscow, Paris, New York exhibitions. We have to do something because she worked for a television company. So we said, okay, let's do something. And we shamelessly put all my paintings and made a story. It's all the paintings from one to the other. It's very funny. And then Jean-Pierre Jacques, he was at the cartoon farm. He had made a cartoon for us of that storyboard. It was all sort of disaster movie type. It was broadcasted, right? On French television? Yeah, it was broadcasted. Here, that's the Italian version. Cleaned up version. I love this story. Yeah, well, I thought if you do it in Japan, the book is different. So I said, why don't you do it and then go around? But then they just cut it off. So it made no sense in the end. But I find this so telling. They just said, yeah, okay, we do it the other way around. But the idea was that the Rockefeller Center would be around the back, you know. But I love this story because I think it's so telling of... Something misunderstanding. I think it's so telling of the sort of fragment. I don't think there's many artists who would want to have their image basically flipped. Or mirrored, I should say. But there's a certain... It was just because the books are opening this way. Not that way. The French version. Yeah, everybody had their own lettering cut. And this is the original. And this is the original Baroni who took skyscrapers. And that's why this book happened. So this book existed and then the publisher of the... No, it was just... Well, he had written the book, I suppose. But it was just a cover because in the Frankfurt Book Fair, people, publishers go and look for books. So that's why James said you must use that cover because everybody was looking at what a strange cover. So then he seamlessly used my other painting and turned it around for his other book. But I never knew this. Because of Beatrice Columina, I had this book exhibition about magazines and books. And there was a guy there that worked for you. He suddenly gave me that magazine, that book. He said, did you know? I said, no, I never knew. So I thought I'll ring them up and they'll ask for some money. You've never been paid. I rang them up and he said he's dead. So you can't ask any money from a dead person, right? That's what I learned. And I always use this slow and inevitable march to oblivion. I call this... First this one, then that one, then that one, then that one. New York Daily. He was right. He was really wanting to know whether his book, because everybody said, yeah, they would buy this book because it was a funny cover. No, he wanted to know, does that book sell without the cover? And of course it did sell because it was a really interesting book. And it was very popular. So without the cover, it was okay. These are some of my postcards. I'm interested in the obsession with big trees. People always standing around with all these men around the tree. Look how big it is. America is always so obsessed with biggest, tallest, deepest... I think we have one of the biggest strawberries in the world as well. The houses built from tree trunks. In the tree trunk. There's a house in the tree, cut off and just a roof on it. But also buildings, like the ones that you do, are meant to be very big, right? They were celebrated as gigantic and kind of big milestones in architecture, like this discovery channel, engineering, whatever. Also these trees are kind of funny, right? And you presented the buildings like the one that has the little kind of tunnel for the car to go through. It's kind of all these massive trees, but then it becomes little kind of funny pass for cars. And also the buildings that somehow you're also making fun of them. You're putting them in a weird situation, like we're exposed. There was so much invention also in America. People had no money and they just invented a way to make a house, you know? And then all the endlessness of New York, the tunnels, the roads that end in this sort of nowhere. We once were driving in, I don't know where it was, in the middle of America, from the east coast to the west coast. And in the middle there was this... I looked at a mileage. And we had such an old ranch wagon. And all the nines went on zero. I said, Ram, look, there's nothing on the mileage. I said, what day is it today? And he said, it's the 24th of August. And he said, wow, we've been married for two years. Let's celebrate. So we went to the first diner and had a big BLT. And a glass of beer and we clanked and said, happy anniversary. Potatoes. The big potatoes. Potatoes and the strawberries. Biggest potato. And a man on top as well. He's trying to point out how big it is. So funny. And babies in all shapes and forms. Let's move to number three, Oimee. Yeah, that was Oimee. Am I doing this? Yeah. I'm making a thunderstorm now. Lightning in a minute. So what was your participation in Oimee as a non-architect? We were just coloring their drawings. We were not participating in any way. Not in the design process. Not in the design. But the techniques must have contributed in some way. We first just colored it in and then I made some collages for the first forum. And he orchestrated the collages. And some I did by myself. It was sort of this trip in New York. The Casabella competition. They used this competition to make a continuous monument, basically, through London. The Exodus project. I think we have a slide of that as well. Here we go. Yeah. So they made sort of, it was because Ram went to Berlin and to a surprise he realized that the people who were free were completely imprisoned by the wall. We always thought, yeah, we put a wall in between. He said, no, it was complete. And that made his idea that you could imprison people and be free. And the people outside are the miserable, they want to come to this free thing. So people were escaping to imprisonment, basically. So what was the working process for drawing like this? Sorry? What was the working process for this drawing? When it was orchestrating, he was saying, we want these guys, the prisoners, the voluntary prisoners of architecture, it was called. And we want these voluntary prisoners very happily running in white suits. I don't know why. And then, you know, he said, we have to have this picture in it. And that picture, so I had to cut out all the pictures and stuck it together. So high tech, now you go like this and you've got it all on the computer. That was his Welfare Palace Hotel. And the skills. And he used my painting in the top as well. If you go to the next slide. If you go one slide, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you've made a picture. Because it was a three-dimensional arrangement of your painting, a club for patrons. There were clubs in the top on different clubs. There was also Russian constructivist club and there was a watery club and there was whatever. I don't remember. I'm curious because this painting, if I remember correctly, is quite large. So the scale of the work changes. Was that something that came from OMA or was this already, was there an art market? No, I was painting that in acrylic, yeah. But was the skill changed? But it was his drawing. I only drew, I was in his drawing, drew the hand, free hand things in there. But were they produced, let's say, specifically for OMA or were they also produced with a certain art market in mind, like the protetch gallery shows? No, we were lucky that we could survive on selling some of the paintings because it was... One of the questions was if your work ever financed OMA and I think it did, right? Yeah, some of the paintings were sold by this paper company. What was it? Gorman? No, what were they called? I don't know. Oh, the Gilman collection. The Gilman paper company, they collected some of it. And he gave lectures or had to make a primate, quizzical New York. It was my painting of the dance theater, the first one. You can't see the... No, you can't see the... And this is, in the first version, it was already supposed to have a mural by your red, the sort of black. Yeah, but I just, as a joke, I was so fed up having to always make new marble walls. And I thought, oh, as a joke, make those dances and then they won't see their dances because I make them between the dances more prominent. But then suddenly somebody rang up and said, can you make that mural? And I said, no, that was a joke. It was just marble, another bit of marble. So I was forced to make that mural then for the real... These are all for the Paris house, one of the first things. And here we... Here's the last mural that I changed the color to the original one a bit. Less color, yeah. Because they had to repaint it. I said, no, repaint it then in the original version. Because it was a more pinkish color before. It was more obscure. The obscurity was sort of lost when it was in color. Sorry just to go back one. You mentioned something as well because the building now has been demolished several years ago. Unfortunately, I would say, but the mural, that was a question if you wanted to... They called me. Do you want that mural? I said, no, that belongs to that building. If that building goes, the mural goes. How do you see the process of murals? I'm curious about... Because all your early work up until this point is so much about interiors and sort of... Your own interiors are special. But the murals are always a sort of... It's a very different... You did more murals, which we might get to later. Is it a very different... Since you go... Well, this was just forced upon me. But the other ones, the other murals, they are asking me to do a mural for building a site of where people lived and housing. And that was in Heale. Do you go to the next one? No. We have a slide of it later on. Okay. We'll return to that. We'll hold that question. This was for the Casabella that they used to discover. That was from the voluntary prisoners. They're praying on tiles. Praying for something to grow there. But in a way, your work was doing a huge work for OMA, right? It was allowing to have a circulation of images that were conveying stories of architecture that were much more complex than what was done for competitions. Where many other actors would be included. Architecture was not seen as a happy ending. There were so many things that were happening in the images that you were producing that were circulated as the image of OMA, right? I don't really know the answer to that. Everybody can speculate what the reason is. I made this very joke for a Christmas card and then Charles Jenks said, oh, I'm doing something about the future and the past. Can I use it for my theories? And he put it in one of his books. That was Saint John. What he insisted was the guy with the lion. What was his name? Saint Jerome, I think. We were always fighting. No, it's Saint John. No, it's Saint Jerome, okay. Okay, number four. Cardboard and cartoons. We move on to more contemporary work. Then I started to work on cardboard because I love this gum strip that I discovered in America. I did everything. This gum strip stuck everything together. So you can make anything with gum strip and cardboard. So somebody asked me to make an exhibition in our gallery in London. I made these people play my mind game that I invented. Can you explain a little bit how the mind game works? The mind game was a sort of a wall that I had in my studio. I had a little cardboard wall with my collection in it. Some objects. Everybody came in and said, no, you must do this object. Take this one. I said, that's so typical. I'm going to ask everybody to make a set. That's how the mind game came to being. I made a set of objects and people had to put it. Then we all had to analyze it. Everybody had to analyze what they did. Once we took it to a dinner party and somebody said, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not playing. Because we were laughing about everybody, what they did, of course. We said, yeah, you're a bit of a, you know, people put it in a row. You're a bit of a control freak or something, you know. And I said, oh. And then we said, you're a control freak. And then the boyfriend said, yes, she is. It was always so blatant, what people do. It's like your handwriting. You cannot do anything that is not due. Typical, you know. Very funny. These were the guys waiting on bicycles outside to be placed in Charlie's little gallery in Rotterdam, where we had to be very obsessed with this crazy program in America, which is called Botched. And there was one guy that was completely blue lips. And he wanted, he said, I want these guys who are doctors, who usually repair people. But this guy wanted galaxy realness. We said, yeah, we're going to have a galaxy realness exhibition. So we put these guys, is that the next thing? Yeah, we put this guy, we said, shamelessly put a thing, make it a sort of galaxy and a galaxy floor. So we had a galaxy realness exhibition. This was for rewards, for architectural review. Yeah, because you at one point, you got the reward. I got the reward and I had a friend with me who said, what a horrible reward, what a horrible reward. Where did you get that? And the woman says, yeah, I had no time. I went to a shop and I have three children. And he said, you should ask the people who get the reward to do the next one. So I said, yeah, thank you very much. I had to do the four rewards the next time for four people who got the reward. We have this dealer receiving the reward. This is one of the rewards. So I made them out of paper again and painted them as if it was copper. And so the photographer, what's her name? French photographer. What's her name? Yeah, Elaine Binet. I made them with eyes because this is one of my latest works, clocks. Also cardboard and clockwork. And that little guy was, I was in St. Petersburg and we were with the AA students. We were going to this cemetery and there was a little boy that was just became sort of communist, had just fallen communism. And there was a little boy with a table with all his toys and I bought some of his toys and we went to the cemetery and late in the afternoon we came back and he was still standing there. This little boy with his toys. So I bought all the toys and he ran home. He was so happy. It was so terrible that time when people had no money and in a way they were sort of better off. A lot of poor people were better off with communism. When did you start making these clocks? Is that really something of the last year? I was a bit of a lockdown syndrome where I started to make lots of swans from milk bottles. I just had some, all my neighbors came with bottles and things to make. So I was just called it plastic surgery. I was just making, cutting all these milk bottles into shapes. And these are all cardboard? That is pure paper and tape. These were for fundraising and they're all lost now. We don't know where they are. But it was just cutting and trying to do a bit of a Picasso thing where he had a sheet and he cuts it and turns it into all cardboard figures, kitchen rolls. Now we move to the cartoons. That's funny. It's completely... Now I've always made cartoons for people. I don't know if I'm not always used but I kept making them anyway. This is also where the icon, sort of the idea of the icon emerges. Iconic, imprisoned, iconic buildings and back to basics. The architect is very happy to go back to basics. When did this whole, this idea of the icon, was that in conversation with Charles Jenks or like how did that come about? Well, he was always talking about iconic buildings. They always had to represent something. It made a lot of drawings for him, for his books. They're not here but he cannot show everything, I don't think. Signifiers. You called them always signifiers. I found it always too literal but he was just on and on. They always said, did you agree with what he said? I said, no, of course not, not always. It was very interesting still. He was sort of a sole proponent of everything had meaning and every shape had another meaning. This was for... I had to make for Frieze, that's where the cartoon started. For Frieze I had to, that's an exhibition in London and they have a blind sale of postcards. So they asked me to make three postcards for Frieze's postcard sale and these are the postcards for it. Next. This is the next one and that's the other one. Contemplating the chair. That was another one. These are all random drawings. Then the eggs. These are eggs that I painted. Trump drowning. I thought I could influence. I could influence. That's a stat cruise drowning. But obviously it didn't work at all. He was still voted in. I think we have some more also of there is a connection with eggs and the sort of darker... This is an egg of my neighbour, Lindsay Anderson who was a filmmaker and a friend. That was for his 70's birthday. Here are the... I made some eggs and they looked terrible and my daughter said, is that a dictator? And I said, no, it's just a funny guy painted on an egg. She said, why don't you make the eggs of evil? Make all dictators. So that was... I think we have all of them. I had to make Mr. Linney and Stalin and Hitler. Next thing. Putin, Hitler, they're all eggs. Mr. Linney. The more medals they have, the more horrendous dictator they are. They're always full of medals. What about the egg? Maybe we can touch a little bit, because the early OMA logos you designed were of course the sort of egg, the Dalí type of egg opening up OMA coming out of it. And then here we have the egg as the sort of dictators. I don't know. Eggs may be something to do with being a woman. She's always full of eggs. I don't know. But did it sort of continue? I just have a problem with throwing things away. So a beautiful egg. This was for an exhibition on Indian art. I made a big elephant out of cardboard and tape and painted. Thank you. Everybody collect gum strip. You can do anything with gum strip. Book over some murals. Everybody getting bored now, yeah, already. This is a bit of an outlier, but this is the one image you did for the Guggenheim. That was for the Rotunda. I did an idol tower and I thought I'm going to make all the architects I know to make a room of their idols. Nobody did it. Except my one friend of mine, Sylvia, who made a room for the guy with the spiral. What's his name? Because of the spiral. Who made the four formats for a spiral. I can't remember. Fibonacci. She's got it. There's one Italian. Fibonacci. One room for and the rest I had to just make myself. This is for a book cover for a woman who wrote a book about a dinosaur coming from an egg and then she died. Never happened. People who have my covers, they die. I wouldn't ask me to make your cover. That was for architect's cover and there was all iconic buildings. The chess match between the iconic these are all just illustrations or fear of clowns. This was for Inge Niemann. He had this idea that all the people who die all there, you can make bricks out of the ashes. And then you can make a pyramid and the pyramid got bigger so the whole world can be bigger, become a pyramid. Yeah. So I had to make that for this was for an alphabet. Yeah, I really love this one and also maybe the next these are all for the alphabet book, right? That was the D and I didn't want a D to be a word. I just wanted to be a shape. So I was going to alphabet with the letters as shapes the alphabet. It was never finished, right? No, I got not further than the D. A lot of my work stops at the beginning. I was going to ask about unfinished projects. Is there any one particular you would like to finish? No, I once made there was this guy in Holland who made what's his name? He knows this guy. Where are you? The guy who made Holland made from all the buildings he made models O1O he hands all the virus. From the Utopia group? I don't know what group he belongs to but he asked he so there was this the pool and he wanted I don't have a picture of that he wanted the model of the pool as a model the pool who was the pool that was coming from this constructivist to New York and my dad is appointed by the small size anyway they swam towards New York with this pool, this floating pool anyway, he wanted me to make a model and I made I thought it's too boring, too it's just a rectangle he said let's just build that rectangle I said no, let's so I made a wave and put a pool on a tiny little pool you could put it anywhere under the wave on top of the wave and Hans O'Vars was going to come but he was too lazy he won't come to London he was going to come to see and to advise and there was a whole story collected, all things that the swimmers would have pickled mushrooms and things while 40 years of swimming towards New York but that whole project went I still have a box with this wave with the swimming pool there's the mural yeah, I liked I found everything nowadays is a whisper it's Chinese whispers somebody says something and it goes around the world and it comes out completely different and that's the sort of the horror of this time where nobody understands anybody else's words or everything gets distorted so this is Chinese whispers and I wanted this one sort of double but they said no there's too many different colors so I had to make it more simple so that's what it became in the end that's interesting you say the sort of horrors of this world are described by nobody understanding but the horrors of the world of nobody understanding anything that anybody's been saying and now with making people say anything is completely lost all the truth everybody's truth is going to be watered down too it's very interesting this sort of balance between that observation and your early work which also in this sort of surrealism really relies on misinterpretation or chance encounters or also the myth I used to be very interested in mixing because it was so much more interesting often than reality but now it's become sort of like a sort of a tsunami of misinterpretation there's too much of it now it's less interesting when you're on one side of it and this is Istanbul Istanbul the two culprits there they started it all there Biennale in Istanbul that was about the loss of hands doing things with your hands and I'm always thinking if you do things with your hands your hands sometimes inform your brain so you have to start drawing you have to make things to enrich your thinking and that's people doing things on computers the sort of information from the hands is getting lost that's what I was going to that was part of what you were teaching right at the A.A. for instance yeah I did a lot of workshop where people had to make these things this gum strip and rubbish and had to make things maybe we can speak a bit about your teaching as well you started teaching I don't basically teach I make people do things I say come on do this in the 80s you started basically at the A.A. right and color theory we did color workshops we made people color drawing because there was not much color before so we then color of course took off like nobody's business you taught those with Zoe and Gaelis together yeah we did color workshop together first we did this color for Zaha and then we said these people they don't know how to do any paint how to paint so we said we must get them early so we did the very early color workshop and you taught with Zaha together as well no we didn't teach we just said put color on your drawing okay number seven Charles and Lina that was a book I read it for Charles and I proposed this and he didn't like it so he wanted it to be like the first captive globe paintings I made for Ram and the how did you meet Charles and you how did you meet how did you meet Ram was a student of Charles and Charles was always inviting people who disagreed with Ram and he said you come and have dinner and you start to fight you believe this you believe that fight it out and he was so happy about it to have conversations so that was the introduction and then this was the sketch for the cover and I think then the next is the actual cover which if you go one further are you I was told how to do this but he said don't touch the bottom because it will explode the whole thing it will explode good that you're doing it this was a he had a party a cosmic party so I had to do a a design for his jacket and his hat of course he didn't like the hat obviously so this was what the result of that the jacket he we bought the jacket in a shop for a chef jackets and then I threw that on that's me with being a moon and this I helped him with his project for so I did a lot of his paintings for him for his gardens he did his parks and gardens so this was this was being built it's of course not at all it doesn't look like this at all where was this it's in Scotland everything is in Scotland this is for five in Scotland as well this was another icon the iconic book on icons had to be Marilyn that was a signifier Marilyn Monroe's skirt blowing up this was for the Maggie Center a room it takes too long to explain what the Maggie Center is about but she had cancer and she there was no room for the people to sort of and Maggie was Charles Jung's wife and and she when she heard people come by the nurses and say are you alright and it was so horrible that you just hear that you have cancer and there's no place to be alone or to be with somebody who explains to you what it's all about what you can do so this is the room and I thought I make all these people have cancer but they all have different backgrounds so I made all these the backgrounds different colors and for which Maggie Center because there's many Maggie Centers it's all designed by famous architects all the architects made and for which one was Maggie Center this was Richard Rogers one in London this is me that I made this is part of my of my objects that are shown in the show that is in my my work in the Charles Jung's house which is currently on the show right a lot of plastic surgery is there this is in his library which is a crazy library very funny all the all the bookcases all the cabinets are painted so postmodern very postmodern house and this is a chandelier made out of hands we call it a handalier that is hanging in the hanging in the this is body parts cushions and there's my clock but it's so much blends into the background that nobody knows it's my clock because it has the same colors as the vases for some reason very funny and here's my installation of little chairs in the Lena Bobardi house when did you first learn about Lena Bobardi? I went there in 2006 and discovered her that amazing architect and she did the SESC building she was there for ten years in that building it was a barrel factory and her husband was asked did you know any architect who can remodel this sort of factory into a thing for public lots of different things to do there swimming pool and restaurants just a whole sort of community center and he said yeah my wife she can do it and she had already done his museum his art museum, MASP which is a beautiful building and when I was there you know what this building who did it didn't know who did ever she was sort of not known and said yeah probably Niemeyer she made amazing gallery in it for people to study or didn't have a room in their house to study and she made swimming pool workshops where people could make this was part of some of the chairs that I put in that fireplace in her house and I thought I could that was my miscalculation I thought I could put those chairs like an egg hunt that people come in and have to find those chairs because Lina had this her room was full of objects and things and chairs so when I came there with my suitcase full of little chairs Hans-Urge Oberst had completely made it into a gallery there was nothing there so I couldn't so I looked at the fireplace and I said yeah let's put it in the fireplace then it was not the plan it's not funny enough it fitted exactly in that fireplace this was for Lina we did was showing all this it was not about her drawings or anything but just about her collections and things I made those issues that were little devils as a condom-blay voodoo type of celebrations he made many of them and I made big ones for the Lina Babade show this was the real one I bought the metal ones everybody was collecting this in the north of Brazil there was a lot of this voodoo but the reference funny was very mixed with Christianity because all those missionaries that came to Africa they saw this these guys with these horns they said those are devils they introduced guilt and all that stuff and it was just people having the horns of animals so it got very mixed with Christianity and voodoo in Brazil it was very much very funny mixture there were this Christian there were guys who were these two were Cosmos and Damien they were deities they were Syrian doctors who healed all the poor people with herbs if you go back they were always having herbs in their hands and this these were usually Christian Cosmos and Damien but they were adopted by the voodoo and they made those eschews they called them and sort of always these two guys they dressed up like eschews for the Candomble ceremonies this was the official thing for the Lina Bobardi she had made this beautiful building with random holes for sports it was an amazing mixture of art and wherever she could she made an amazing art piece so she made a floor that has all the sports things on it different sport she made beautiful paintings on the floors where people sport and art were always mixed such an amazing architect everybody has to study Lina Bobardi many people visited recently that's where the hands were made this is the show where she always drew her hands on her drawings this is the flat version folded and glued this was in the show collection things we collected for the I think we reached the last section your famous show was called The World you can go very fast this was the critical pursuit this home analysis kit everybody can be a Freudian or a Jungian how did it start the show because the show is very unique it was showing the photographs of your apartment in London with all your collections two guys from the AA Schumann and Stefan in what was it 2006 or something and they said we want to make a show of your work I haven't got any work it's all old stuff and they said no, no, no you have to make a big painting for it and you have to showing all your you take your studio so yeah we have some photos of your studio and they started all these little toys that I have they started to wrap it into paper so don't worry they can't throw them all in a box you know I had collecting all these crazy things like a baby a smoking baby and in congress things that one this was all the objects from the thing and they made these for the biennale the extra things the devil's fish and the snake so on that's one of the sets the box with the objects this was in the AA this was the first that Schumann and Stefan did you have to go faster because this is in the AA as well people making sets next, next here I'll do it this is the paper foot the fish here we go my studio tell us a bit more about your studio how it ended up happening how it ended up happening I just happened naturally I was just collecting things and making things and always sort of busy you lived in the same place for 55, was it 50 years? no really, 48 we lived in the same house so that's why it became so is there a system an organization there? no and this was a friend Adolf Nattellini had an exhibition that said life without objects he gave me the poster and he drew I said what happened to you and he drew a little bit in the corner that was first this contains a monument and then he drew his postmodern he became a postmodernist and he said yes sorry and he gave me the poster and later on there was somebody from super studio the guy who did all the collages and things and I told him that Adolf said sorry and he said yes he should then I was pushed out of my studio and this is my living room and that became also completely filled and everybody brought me all the plastic bottles here do something out of it as I am very obedient I did these were boxes for mushrooms and I made bulldog and this was this were my favorite collection smoking baby Father Christmas with wings I still don't know what this is Chinese somebody must ask me why this mask with the hand over it I never understood why that was these are objects these were religion sex and death together I thought this is all day after death figures and there is Marilyn Monroe and I have to always blow her skirt up for people to realize it's her this is in your home or was it in the exhibition this is in my house now I got all these cupboards and filled them with my stuff what I find fascinating about the cupboards is that it's a grit now they have seemed first it was all mixed up but now it grew so much that everybody came here is something for your something ugly here you will like it so so I had to then tell people don't ever give me anything bigger than your nail so they gave me this tiny glass insects this was for I had to paint somebody's dogs and I just couldn't make a portrait of a dog so I put them in a random so that I can't make a portrait sorry why ugly people think that these things are ugly what people offer you ugly things right I like ugly things somehow or things that are strange you don't know what people I saw they said what were they thinking making that you call them freaks of culture freaks of culture I remember also that once people who misunderstand another culture but they do appropriate so every culture has Mickey Mouse every country has their own Mickey Mouse I have a Minnie Mouse in Indian dress anyway I have a Mickey Mouse made by Chinese carved from coral I mean but I don't know I remember you once told me that many people come to you and say I found something very ugly that I'm sure you will love it and you will respond like yeah but that's not my ugly right no that's your ugly sorry those are random drawings another random drawing these are this case is the answer I made this for his Rotterdam Biennale as he wanted chess set so we made the old architecture the new iconic architecture fight each other was George Jinx thought it was a good one this was for the Thales going from oops sorry to Paris so I made all the souvenirs I had from these countries on the landscape of the famous paintings that were made in Holland, Belgium and France where are all the objects this was one of the this I threw all the objects together and I thought I can put this on this dustbins but they couldn't bend that plastic around the dustbins so it was never used this was for Victoria and Albert Museum they had a they have all these models architecture models and people were asked to do respond to and I had the Steinhaus Gertrude Steinhaus that he did and I did food on top and I had this food already and he was hated the meter he said that's not a Le Corbusier and so he said the food was the proper measurement so I made this food with a building on top this super model man the four points of the thing and he also grabbed the sky as one of the points of architecture so how Malikomania can you get to take the sky as well this was all the objects that went everywhere these are the cupboards in the way this is the man before he was painted here you see that it's made out of paper tape and cardboard this was the Biennale installation this was the Berlin installation this was in the Biennale as well I don't know where this was maybe it was Basel this was in Basel you see here the juices from America the kids playing that was the funny thing people played do something nice but children had always played this story they all had a reason for putting it was really amazing this was the book this was in the collection before it was all separated into themes that was the AA this was Basel as well this is the workshops where I make people do make things from a painting so they made this funny thing with teas this was a Biennale in Colombo in Sri Lanka we made a long table and I didn't make the children the pagodas for decoration this was in Porto I made them from Miro and we called it Lasses Miro these are all my swans from plastic milk bottles these are my soldiers from Sif bottles I want to be buried with all these soldiers this was the installation in the cosmic house of Charles Chang in his Jacuzzi monster fish from milk bottles this is from 20 milk bottles dragon and this is all your most recent work these are all my milk bottles the latest bulldog I was so happy to find that bottle because it had already arms it was for the toilet cleaner I said wow I only have to make hands and a hat and that's it fantastic quick this is my last talk explaining where babies come from I think that's it thank you well I'm sure there's many questions short ones you can use one word like why why why it's late is there thank you I wanted to ask a why question it's about the cover Delirious New York that I found very interesting the two buildings are curvy probably my understanding is the intrusion of New York building being so straight masculine power but then the two building got caught in bed was in this position it was very intimate something quite feminine to me I guess the question is why the two building was the curved well they were definitely the two competing skyscrapers and one was very masculine and the other one Chrysler was obviously the girly with the hat and make up and all the decoration and the other one was severe straight so it was obviously masculine versus feminine there is also kind of the way I'm reading the image is one was looking at the other but then I don't know it was the kind of one direction of glaze the kind of why question if I'm reading it too much well you know women are a little bit more sort of curly what do you call it so I thought she has to be a bit more more straight it's my prejudice I suppose Hi there thanks for the lecture I saw in the background of the photos of the evil eggs album by Thelonious Monk and I was just wondering specifically him it's a very interesting album Thelonious Monk has a quality of kind of wrongness in his music it almost goes out of tune it plays a minor chord something and I was wondering if you bring that level of improvisation or the quality of wrongness into the illustration that you're doing I thought the conversation about ugliness was maybe a little ugliness is not the term I would use it would be more wrongness but in a kind of correct way it goes back to a kind of maybe a mannerist tradition even which of course influenced the postmodernist then but I don't know jazz just seems like a very American art form you're drawing on American iconography maybe you're drawing on American music as well that's a very good question because I'm very limited in my musical taste I only like Monk and Bach and they both have this thing of incredible intricate kind of switching subtly tones and rhythms and half tones and Monk is incredibly inventive and was very misjudged you know it's not let's say hotel blobby music you know it's very it was so new and it was just such a genius and no I've always tried to play Monk, it was very difficult but I had a boyfriend who now sent me all the Monk every Thursday he sent me he learns a new Monk piece which is really difficult and he's a composer himself and last birthday I had which was seemed not 80 and he played all my favorite Monk pieces and my grandson who is very musical he was so intrigued by so I'm hoping he's going to be a Monk fan as well he's only 10 or 11 now you listen to music while you work do you listen to music while you're working? I have to listen to music otherwise I can't work that's my ADHD you have to some of your brain has to be distracted because you have several levels of attention and I had an amazing teacher in Montessori school who made me who I could draw while he was talking and he realized I had to do something with my hands to be able to listen to the lecture so I still have this I have to draw, I have to even people talking I have to listen to radio or music I think that's a common practice at GSAP as well I wanted to follow up I was wondering if you have a branch into other improvisational free jazz artists as well like Ornette Coleman for example yeah I love Ornette Coleman too outside of piano specifically thank you all the people of that age Charlie Parker Sony Romans all those thank you for the lecture ever since the first time I see your photos of your object I had this question so I feel like I have to ask do you collect dust and do you cling them and what do you do with cardboard and materials that doesn't do well with water and the last question would be do you feel like when they enter into the museum or Viannale and gets into the clear container glass box does that change the status of them as objects yeah they all have different spaces so you have to make sort of room in the basil they had an enormous thing with shelves so it could put everything but in smaller spaces you have to make a smaller selection and what about the dust it's very difficult to choose so are they like in your apartment for example do you have people cling them do you cling them yourself do you cling the objects yourself I have a Brazilian cleaner fantastic yeah do you wipe them hard work at a poor thing yeah okay I just collect things too and I find dust very annoying but I don't know what to do well I had a cleaner before who looked at my thing and I said I'm not cleaning that it's okay alright maybe one more right maybe there's one more question last question for you so thank you for your work incredible I've always been curious about your relationship with surrealism well of course I mean is it a real love or something that just happened and stays there well it's also a thing of putting incongruous things together that's you know it's the same as Thelonious Monk Jazz you know you put all the notes in a sort of mixed up and different rhythm on purposely he did funny rhythm that people couldn't instead of a 7th one he did sort of an 8th and suddenly people couldn't follow he was always trying to subvert the music and that Dali subverting and in a way I'm subverting you know and also that's why I don't have a gallery because I feel like that becomes a commercial enterprise you know the galleries you start to work for a gallery and I think that's quite you have to work for yourself you know you have to work for for you know so I find double interesting that I mean Ramkulas in the book talks about Dali but at the beginning you were not part of the book it happened because somebody else yeah it just happened it's funny no it's of course incredibly arrogant stance because people have to live from their work you know and they have to have a gallery you know they have to make money to live but I was always lucky that I had there was always other things that I could do and work with Ram and sell the paintings that I did for him so I was sort of and I didn't need so much you know I didn't need a Ferrari so I never sort of I always lived quite frugally you know amazing lecture and you seem so amazingly free as a person why do you think freedom is so under underestimated among people like why do you think other things are considered more important than freedom like like money or like um pain no I'm not saying I don't like money I love it no it's just that I don't want to have to do work that can be sold I mean who wants to buy a plastic milk bottle conversion nobody you can't sell it to the streets I sort of give it to people you know and make exhibitions museums I know it's super arrogant to do that anyway but that's my my reasons well thank you so much thank you thank you