 That's it. Bienvenue au Moudam. Pour l'avenir ça, c'est l'exposition de Tacitadine et pour l'entretien sur son travail, avec un groupe qui est très intéressant. A very warm welcome to the opening of Tacitadine and this conversation that will follow my very short and quick introduction. Moudam is very honored and proud to introduce this new exhibition by Tacitadine that you will be able to discover after this conversation in the galleries of the first floor of the Moudam. Tacitadine exhibition is articulated around two recent projects. The trilogy of works that were created for the Danza project, a ballet that was premiered at the Royal Opera House in October 2021 and for which we designed the sets and the costumes. When we look at our times of conflict, I think there is nothing better than talking about Dante's Inferno and leave it open for reflection. There is a second part to this show. It's a 16-millimeter film, 150 years of painting. The film is the conversation between artist Julie Meritou Kotado and was taught in the apartment of the letter in the first days of 2000, a few months before she totally passed away. Also this is not only a story between two women, it's also a history, it tells the history and the stories of women artists in the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. That makes it also very, very touching. And in the exhibition and I'm very grateful for that, the film is accompanied by paintings by Julie Meritou and to Cita Kotado bringing the words of the three artists into dialogue for the first time. And as Cita said today, we are pretty sure that this will be the only situation of bringing all these three wonderful female artists together. But maybe there will be another side, but it is a unique situation. And you can also, you really should watch the film in full length in the gallery upstairs. And I also, today now also the, what is this called again? Thank you. It arrives today, we have this, we published this wonderful two public publications, each publication for one part of the show. You can get it here. And it's really extremely well done. You're going to enjoy it. Now, we are very, very proud as well to have a unique conversation between three amazing artists. Tessa Dedeem, Julie Meritou, and Matt Mulliken, who presents his mother, the late Lucita Kotado tonight, moderated by art historian Breone Spear. Before I let you to enjoy this wonderful conversation, I would like to thank the people who conceived and made this exhibition happen. First and foremost, the wonderful artist, Tessa Dedeem. I thank her for her continuous involvement in the curatorial process with the generosity and her outstanding artistic vision. Thank you very much, Tessa Dedeem. I'm also very grateful to Julie Meritou. And to the estate of the Lucita Kotado, represented by Kotado's son, John, and Matt Mulliken, for kindly accepting to be part of this exhibition and also for lending us the beautiful two pieces in the exhibition. Then my special thanks goes to Susan Kottes, director of Moodam Between 218 and 221 for initiating this exhibition in dialogue with the artists, and especially for coming here from Sydney, Australia. Thank you so much for that. Tessa Dedeem has been accompanied by a wonderful team, and especially Clio Walker from his studio, and Ken Graham, who worked on the displace, as well as on the installation of the three projections. And then I would also like to thank the Moodam team, Christophe Delois, who was the curator together with Susan on this exhibition, and Simon Thiem probes the assistant curator. And you're going to see later on the amazing job they both did. The registrar team, and especially Boris Relon, exhibition registrar and Veronique Gérard-Jouer, the head registrar, then the technician team around Cérigration, then the publication team, Deborah Lambole and Clarice Hartmann, the communication team, and especially Magalie Weirich, Laurence Thöhn, Lise Foe, O'Nella Diffen, and Katie Till, the sponsorship and partnership team, especially Anna Vicoe and Marta Lava-Ronen. Tessa Dedeem was also assisted in the development of the exhibition design by François Thierry and Lorenzo Vellicoe as an architect from Luxembourg. And we would like to express our gratitude to the lenders of the works in the exhibition without whom the exhibition would not have been possible. I would like to thank the Sontre Pompidoum Musee Nationale d'Arre Moderne, Sontre d'Écréation en Historielle, the Hoffmann Foundation for its exhibition Gémini Ciel and Hauser & Thierce. And I'm also thanking the galleries representing the artist Chris Street Gallery and Marion Goodman for their real big support. Jane and Rose, thank you for being here tonight. The publication has been beautifully designed by Martin Ritzel, a long-time collaborator of Tessa Dedeem. And yes, we are thanking also the Halak de Buchan-Lungwalter and Franz König who published the book. Last but not least, I'm very grateful to the authors Jennifer King, curator at large at LACMA and Breone Ciel. So, I would like Breone Ciel to be in the mediation tonight and I would like you to introduce her to Breone before I hand over. Breone Ciel, maybe you know her, she also did like a wonderful lecture for the show of Thierry Lennet. She is an art historian, a professor of History of Art at UCI in London and an author of numerous publications, such as on Abstract Art, the Internet Line, a monograph on Itha Hesse and on Dario Roscoe. Breone Ciel wrote a wonderful essay on the Dante Project in the publication. We are very lucky to have her with us today to introduce and moderate this unique conversation. So, I hand over to you, Breone. We have a fantastic evening afterwards after you saw the Soviet meeting outside for also having drinks and a barbeque. I would be really pleased if you stay and have a very good evening here. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Bettina and everybody here at Moudin for making this happen and allowing me to moderate this conversation. I feel honored but mainly tough to be sitting alongside these three extraordinary artists. I did contribute to the catalogue for this show on the Dante Project but I just want to say that Patrick's work has been for decades completely formative. I guess you could say that's words have been really good enough but the kind of work that just informs everything that you do in a sense in not necessarily explicit or direct way so to be here and thinking about the work together is really extraordinary. We decided as you said, Bettina this is a unique event it's a unique to show this work in this way upstairs which I found really remarkable and will be really interesting to think about with you but also kind of this line up on this platform is pretty amazing and I imagine also quite unique. So to have not only Cassette here but also Matt Mulligan and Julie Moretti we decided that rather than talk about all aspects of the show we should really use this time to think about 150 years of painting and just to perhaps expand from that as and when but to really just try to create the conditions for a conversation that I hope that all of you can think about further and continue when you have the chance to look at the work and it seems to me that this this particular work and these are three key protagonists sadly Lucita Herterbe died and is her representative on earth is now on this platform is Matt and I think to think about what that film is in one sense it seems to be a film portrait and an incredible conversation between you and Lucita who is extraordinary force of nature Matt is in the film and also Tasseter you know the film is part of that is the interlocutor so I think it's kind of interesting to think of it not just being of this conversation but how the film is is a part of that but I understand that it happened on one day that perhaps you could start by just take off by what that means to have made that film that in one day it was January the third 2020 and it was Julie's parents wedding as well so it was already a providential day and we were in Santa Monica in this beautiful apartment of Lucita and we scrambled this whole thing together very very quickly I was in LA Julie was coming to LA and Matt was doing a print project in San Francisco and you said you would come via LA remember to be with Lucita because of the the underpinning co-incidence of the whole project is that Julie and Lucita were both born were both born on November 28 and I knew this because I've known Julie for years at a certain point and then I suddenly realized that Julie was going to be 50 and Lucita was going to be 100 in 2020 and it's just the co-incidence of that day that made me make the film because I'm such a stickler for that sort of thing my life is dominated by co-incidence and I just thought suddenly I was with my family in our condominium in LA and I was thinking I have to make a film and I have to call it 150 years of painting and then I asked Julie and she was gay and then I asked Matt and then Lucita and I wrote up for it and it was just because it came out it came about so spontaneously that spontaneity carried into the day a bit didn't it and it was a very very special day and we did film in one day and initially that we but time diurnal time is not important of course there is shift in light but that it was it was always going to be just this time out of time in a way so normally and often with my films I'm very conscious of shift of light liminal light often light fades and then the film inevitably ends because the day ends and I fade to black and and Julie said to do it on the condition that there was no fade to black and I understood that so the challenge was for me to make it a continuous loop that it would just be and the way the whole day turned out was that there was this looping and this continual looping was so prominent anyway within the conversation but that was my labour later was to cut it and honour that spirit Julie you were in that moment and it's kind of incredible to watch you you have a real sense of the conversation being in the making as we're watching this it's that sense of kind of incompleteness I suppose I don't know where it's going you're navigating as you go and I wonder what that felt like but how you look back on it as well as after it come into the world I guess edited and talking and thank god that it's edited I think what makes it work so first I just want to say it was an immense honour it is an immense honour to have been a part of film and to have been a part of that day and to have been able to have the conversation in that way we had visited with her before all together and I know you have many times but I had celebrated Oscars or something Golden Globes with Ethiopian food with her and that was an amazing evening and I was so moved by her whole apartment her whole collection her whole way of being and photographs of her when she was young there were all these elements of her story and it was so inspiring to me and to all of us I think and so moving and so for me to have the opportunity to just be a part of that was but I felt at the beginning there was a certain type of desire to get a certain kind of conversation to happen and in the end it was just really about learning from her and trying to under like she was so profound in her answers and her the way that she seemed to kind of engage with work was not from this place that I had been taught to engage with work or I had engaged with work in many ways or at least talking about making it was really this place of the world and the way the world exists and her existence within that and the sin of a butterfly and these types of that there were forms of her making and how she engaged with making and that was so incredible it felt like I learned so much that day and so I'm so enormously grateful but also you know I am I mean we have to get past this place I really am so grateful to you that it was really a movie people could pull that off and you know and Matt was so important you were the cement of the day even though you were mostly cutting room floor and I hope you forgive me for that but you had to be you understand that but you were there and that beautiful moment when it triangulated in the film it's really really important when she says you my son and then that's where I mean I was very conscious of editing that in a way that was very very In a way I was the anchor for her seeing how important I was doing this yes you remember that I wasn't expecting to be on the movie at all I was just going to be on the side there I just wanted to watch it all but you were very important I think and especially in that moment about the coincidence you know about how you're both making using the same material same material yeah and that goes back you know 45 years that we do this and back and forth always backing always backing her and she came to all my shows I've had many many shows and my parents were always there and they were always supportive she was wonderful I mean that way I'm always talking about the world in general as it applies to the work you know I was talking to someone a younger artist and she wanted to know how did she do this how did she then at the age of 94 she becomes a phenomenon now how do you do that how do you get there and honestly it didn't matter I think that's part of it because it didn't change her at all she was always who she was I mean my whole life she was always this woman who entered a room and you know everybody was just in awe of her I went with my mother we went to an exhibition at Leo Castelli's and we walked in and she knew Leo in the 40's and then I knew people who worked at the gallery and they told me that after we left Leo Castelli said that she was the most beautiful woman in New York City in 1946 I mean the most beautiful the it's woman and yet at the same time as being having this tremendous charisma people didn't see her as an artist she was you know they looked through her they saw my father he was the artist he was the wife so this allowed her to make her work in a way so she never really was trying to make it you know an important person she was just making the best work she could make and making the work that resonates with her that was the point everything else was like it came with it it's a wonderful she says so many beautiful things in the film and I can't remember the exact quote of course but it's something like I didn't do it to be recognized in one sense that's a statement of fact but it's almost a statement of an assertion that this is more important it's a life of making art being recognized or not being recognized is slightly secondary for that and it struck me that all of you including Lututa what's at stake is a life of making art and how you navigate that and what that means in relation to your everyday life that means in relation to a politics and that comes through the conversation in such a lot of both direct and indirect ways and your life in a way the interweaving of the two narratives the stories of migration in a way your mother from Venezuela you from this sense of coincidence but also the interweaving of these two narratives of a life with a strength quite a lot in common kind of resonances and I was thinking about what you said to you about her her being a woman and painting and no one saw her as a painter and artist and she says that in the film what was the quote exactly she says something like they never see you like none of the husbands or something none of the men they don't see you and I think she became very comfortable with that it felt early and you asked did Lee pay attention he didn't pay attention to all that and then you asked this absolutely brilliant thing but you paid attention to all that within something like that and that was the point but that was the whole it was so wonderful even about the title that was the whole tradition with women artists who were trying to paint and been painting that kind been painting and making for decades and many who were excluded from a conversation in abstraction within certain forms of work and so there was something really potent at that moment where she says that and claims that and the reason I thought about that was that the kind of what you talked about the narrative of the history of migration and the kind of making of who she is how she comes to the United States and her childhood or being a young person and then going back to Mexico she came from that as well she went to Mexico but with what Gary Paul said and she talks about that she talks about that and then coming back and how these various experiences how she has to claim herself over and over and over even in the context of her mother and the kind of power but the power in her knowledge of her life being one of many that this is not her first life this is a form of experience and it would be great if you told the story you mentioned to us earlier about how she said goodbye to you oh this is just typical for her in a sense I mean this must have been she died on August 13th and this must have been on August 5th or 6th or 7th or something like that and we were talking and she said well I've got to go now and I said what do you mean you have to go now and she said I have to go and then we hung up and that was basically the last time I talked to her and she said it half knowing that this was it and really it was just the oddest thing and it wasn't like oh my god I didn't hear her say it but she told me and I in saying it like the title of that show was I will be reborn and that is who she is she has total faith she wasn't going and she's always been and she's still in me that's very clear people ask her how did your mother influence you well of course she did influence me as a role model and I got it I got that and we have crossed back and forth in our work my whole life and so that is really a big part of that and so it's just like look gotta go when you watch the film did you learn anything about your mother that you hadn't known was there something maybe a story but no this woman is a force and I got that I got that it just was happening and that's what I got from it I mean just go like upstairs when I arrived here and just not even going assisting the painting and then hearing her voice in the next room this is creepy okay I'm going to see I'm going to see a beautiful show of happiness beautiful show and then I go and I see my mother's painting a beautiful great painting that has to somehow convince the power to be to get here for this show which is a genius thing to do and then all of a sudden I hear oh my god my mom and then I go in there and it's the voice it's the voice as much as anything that voice I will never ever ever ever forget ever because within that voice is my world my entire world is there in that voice I mean and this is when she died it was not tragic for me I mean how could it be she died at the age of 99 and she had at the end of her life this miracle happened I mean for us because these kind of things count but for her it really didn't that's why it could happen to her she didn't really it didn't mean that much to her she loved the you know go it can you imagine you're invited to she worked she worked with Tauser and worked you know tamed me I mean in terms of like gallery you know my whole life I was going from gallery to gallery and then she just you know at the age of she goes to the most one of the most powerful galleries in the world and so she goes there you know just to have one and as far as she understood so she's going into into this gallery and it was a huge banquet she had no idea and when she walked in everybody stood up and started applauding and she said oh what's what's she supposed to do well she just you know she became the queen she just walked in exactly when everybody ran up to her and you were the greatest but she was like that the whole life I suppose she didn't have the crowd but that she was already there when I remember I had stories from when I was five and you had the same quality she had that and part of it was she had this big picture of life and the world and that's what came back that really comes at the end of her life with the fact that we are in and that was the biggest thing that was the only thing on her was the ecology that was it the earth just became primal primal primal primal you couldn't see her without her going into some kind of big thing about it and that was that land her at the end that's all she wanted was to get that message across that kept her going that is really powerful in that sense of the planet that sense of and there's something about friendship I mean there's a lot of friendship on this panel here but also that sense of love and friendship you know love rather than only friendship means to be so present including although it might sound a bit treated this sense of a life it's something that that is affirmative and that sense of her perspective from that point in her life that she's able to say these quite extraordinary things that resonate so profoundly but also I wondered about I mean it's so much your film type of cover her hand because I think we all know exactly what our mother turns look at and you recognise it in your own don't you get older these things and your hands is well in the film so there's something so very spiritual there's a real sense of spirituality and a journey through life but it's so about a tangible world that we cut and that's so much better see what the film you do that I wonder if you could say a little about that well on a practical level I mean I've always been very very you know I've always filmed the details a bit I mean I'm attracted to details on a practical level for a film like one hundred and fifty years of painting you know if you film the hands you don't have to worry about the things so I guess you know in a way that it's quite useful to film that and you know and I could always go there in order to get to another place you know and also we you know there are all these practical things you know we had two cameras on this but one of the cameras went down which made it much more difficult to make it continuous because of course it is filmed and film runs out and every ten minutes the film has run out you carry on talking we have to change the film I come back totally different thing going on and we carry on filming but when it comes to editing I'm thinking okay there there and then I've got this and there's a whole bit in the middle which I don't have so I have to do and I you know I feel really artisanal when I cut my film I you know I use my hand I'm cutting I'm literally cutting really white I mean it's really physical and my job and I really see it is the most this is when I'm an artist the most actually is when I'm alone cutting this film and I have to get from there to there and how do I do it and it's not easy and I you know and you know cut away because I call hand or but also little you know tiny little surgical cuts and the length taken to say something might get me enough to get to there and then get to I mean it is it is so labored but that's when I'm an artisan actually you know that's when I feel like I'm really an artist so um you don't feel that labored at all no but isn't that the point isn't it best to you know I always say this quite often but I interviewed Leo Steinberg the art historian I went to photograph his hand and again as it happened um and obviously got a hand thing but um and I just read the line of fate his text on this beautiful essay on the plane and and I'm you know I don't read a lot of theory um so I but I read this and it was so easy to read and I understand this is just so easy to read and he says well there's an enormous amount of labor in trying to make something appear easy and I think that's I think that's one of the you know most important things is to appear something that like even the Gemini prints I mean they're so labored yet they look so simple and I you know yes I need to persuade you that it's just happening in time um you know and that's my job you know that's what you know that's the power of editing and that's the importance of editing and artists that come from editing and the absolutely fundamental difference between film and digital because film makes you make you do that whereas digital we could just I mean that camera is just watching us you know they don't edit at all they just watch you know there's no you know and therefore you know with the labor comes the miracle you know what I mean with the change you know so but Matt do you remember when I asked you um is there anything you learnt from the film for the first time do you remember what you told me you said it was and it was with Val and the kids you know and we were in New York and you said it was mascara when she said you know it's from the grave and you said that and I don't think I think that's now I think that's in the last you know she made that picture for almost 50 years ago so lots have happened because and looking at mascara this painting you have a the edge of the painting there are four mountains and of course being in the ground you would be surrounded by soil but it's the condition of life because wherever you are looking up there is a whole lot around you but there's something I think she might have really meant it actually because there's something about that painting where you said that and you but you feel it and don't forget Pablo's death and all this is going on you know so it's not like and if you think this the whole time there's a lot about death and she says you know I always say I'm not afraid of death but of course I'm afraid of death I can smell I'm afraid of death I smell it on me and there's a lot about the upper sense thing you know when you ask about that beautiful question about why did you become an artist and she said because of the smell of butterflies do you know that it's just like whoa yeah I can smell a butterfly and then she told us about how she would pin them yeah but it's just that's the answer that was just that's just the most amazing answer I mean there were so many amazing answers that she gave and there were lines answers for me in that room as well as all of us in the room and and also another one is about you know you said does it get better you know about you being exactly half her age and then saying you know how is it oh it gets better and you know you're saying oh that was great and as she goes on about fear you know as mothers you live always with the fear that something will happen to your children but because she had been through that she said I am not fearful I am not and she talked a lot about the death of her some Pablo to polio and I mean at the time you know I remember when I was cutting it it was the height of the pandemic and people were refusing to be vaccinated and you thought listen to I mean that story alone you know the polio vaccination you have saved so many people like why you know what and I was you know it was just such a beautiful thing listen to the film just watch the film and understand why science has prevented many people from going through what the future went I remember that was always what I was editing that during the pandemic you know when after Pablo died she went blind for I think a couple of weeks a week or two literally she could not see the trauma was so great and it was just a huge I remember her mentioning that but did she mention that? yeah in that white area in the middle so it was between changes but it was also amazing that she continued to paint through everything and continued that this was a lifeline in a way that making was so much a way of understanding and kind of finding something out but to me that was also something that came across during the family while we were there I mean the whole I wondered if you might have any reflections on the way that film maybe relates or touches on other works and so because it maybe forced itself on me but this sense of spiritual journey or navigating a life as an artist or a poet who stands to divine comedy what else is that except the navigation of heaven and hell and that sense of and this 150 years of painting in some way through this relationship the painting that both of you say powerful with your pouring over those images in the film that are there and we can see them in this answer room there is this sense of what it means to navigate a life and I just I'm now kind of slightly overwhelmed by the correlations or in a way to incidental correspondence which I keep finding in the two sides of the exhibition maybe exaggerated in my imagination because when they first hit you but Matt you have some you have something beautiful to me earlier today well just the three film works and the two sides because the the paradise film I was in there and that for me was about the feeling of the mind you know the feeling of consciousness not consciousness but the feeling of it so and this in the relationship to paradise and to heaven which is how I see it in my own work and then from there we go to my mother which is the artist and the artist with all of the ups and the downs and the fact that we have bodies of blood and bones and we cannot deny that you know the butterfly and the whole thing and then the last film that I saw was the Giotto circuit which is a series of details which is amazing I mean this is an extraordinary picture because that's the circuit that's the picture and so you have the mind, you have the artist the arm and you have the material and it's these three things which is really as an artist these are big issues and they communicate and they go beyond any kind of particular issues it's really about just life the way my mother would talk about it and then you have the other ones as well but just those three kind of designate the zone and it was really just to be in that Giotto which is amazing especially because the two ends are abstract in the middle you have my mom as we see faces as we see people we experience the world through others and we identify with others I think that's really beautiful about the film having the mind and consciousness the experience of that one thing that's so interesting just so feels like it's all about painting like every aspect of it the film itself in terms of its abstraction and color and the light and how it works with their masks or whatever the measures we did they won't describe but the way that that film comes together it feels like it's painting to me and then the Giotto as well but also I just want to say majority of this work was made during the pandemic correct? it was made during this period of time where Tass said I'm not doing anything I'm not doing anything I'm not doing anything at all so much like this entire most of the work except for the Giotto piece and it feels like some of the Gemini stuff you had done before but a lot of that was being the colors were being printed so anyway the other thing is so much is made by your hand in this film and while photography and film are a big background or backbone to all of that it's really made by hand the film is made by hand and the abstraction and the kind of ways of thinking through and all of that but to me the veracity and the kind of intensity and tenacity which Tass had to make is again talking about a life I don't know anyone who worked and tenacity is making and pushing new forms of who you are so that to me is an amazing kind of thread that you see in this Giotto and every time you go to see one of these exhibitions I have felt always amazed by the kind of breath of the show and the kind of whether you go to Little Clover to the enormous blackboards to these trees that are just a miracle to these films which are really takes so much I know you talk about it as being serendipitous or kind of around coincident intent but there's usually this other conceptual branch that is the bridge into that and I was looking at the Ducaranda trees today and just the reversal of that and the painting that they're painted right, they're painted or drawn drawing big drawings small little trees painting drawings I just wanted to bring that up as another form, another line and it's this insistence on a form of being here but of making and being an artist and this kind of like you know, that to me is really moving every time and I think that that's something that's in that film as well that you should have insistence on making it's like going to the see the concert the dance performance in London I went with my daughter who actually worked with one of the trees and so we all went that tree and we go there and okay and then we enter this world that is unbelievable that opera house or whatever what was the royal opera house the royal opera house here we're going into the royal opera house I mean it's just outrageous the context that you kind of wrote the year right there in the middle of it that's so far away from you know you really put yourself out there and I remember when you did that piece with that actor what's it called? Steven DeLane no but the event for stage what is it when an actor doesn't remember their lines? what was it called? a drawing a drawing is it a drawing or a drawing and the way you talked about that with me because you are putting yourself at risk when you're doing that you will put your own self at risk as drawing by putting yourself into an uncomfortable far away situation and this is something you do this is how you you're fearless you're fearless to do all that I'm not sure no you are because you might be scared but you're very strong at the same time you can handle it of course you can what is it for you to put the work in this play together and would it surprise you when it came into being in these kind of conjunctions of work? well I mean I do see the connectives read and things that surprise me sometimes as well sometimes they're conscious like there's a little slate drawing that's called something your skin coat smoke your skin coat and I just I was literally thinking of Lucita so I looked up smoke in my concordance and a face and that little drawing I was really thinking about her that's why it's got after L8 written on it so that's a very obvious thing but then the April the 26th was is my father's birthday and also the birthday of a friend's father and they're both judges so I wrote the judges on it but of course there's this moment in the film that goes that's the judges pointing to this painting and you say is that and I've never worked with you and I think it might be a banana I'm not sure a manina and a banana the two the two old women who looked after her the maid and aunt she goes manina and banana and then you say that but you say it in a way that I don't know what you're saying but she was saying it's the judges but then I looked at it and it's called Untitled in the book because I needed to check and I was like okay it's Untitled dark characters that's sort of like in sitting in judgment you don't know anything about that painting but then I'd only really yesterday I was looking at the judges and I thought oh my god the judges so it was just a I know that's a small thing but it's not like judgment I've lived without judgment in my life absolutely but yes Paradise is the first time it's ever shown here the autonomous work of art which Thomas Addis let me use what's called a midi is a computer generated soundtrack and I go in there I find that immense even though it's the music obviously I made the visuals but it's just that film just partly because of the memory of the Royal Opera House and then Alex I don't know if he's here but he projected it every night and the tension of showing 35mm in the Royal Opera House I can't tell you I was in a sort of people ball of agony because you know if that film went down then I mean there's no worse place to fail and Alex you here where are you he was practically in box shorts because it was so hot in there and every night you pulled it off and even when I wasn't there I'd be texting saying and then the last the last night I was in Rome and they sent us a live link and Cleo and I we went and watched it in the hotel room and still I mean it was just like the tension that I had in Paradise and so it was so nice to just go there and just think but it all came back because you know live art I'm not used I mean although I make films and people are used to them breaking down and the amount of times I've gone in to see my exhibitions and it just goes out of order but there's something much worse about an entire ballet you know seeing all that and then the film goes I lived in fear of that moment and now it's so popular I'm going to have to go to it all again because it's going to be in Paris next year in May and then it's going back to London and then it's going to Copenhagen and now they're talking about an understanding my whole life is ruined I'm going to have to let go of this one because everyone else can just walk away from productions I mean they're all a bit I don't know if anyone works to steer the people but they're always like okay next one yeah like next one but I mean for me I can't the rest of his life I hope you realize that and then the other thing is like you know the soul the sprayed in chalk which is the same material that I use to play it's also the same way I made the lithograph it's become obsolete you know they've just continued it it's just like I lived my whole life with of the lessons could ever have told you that you could stay away from certain the kids of Patrick the media no paper black just keep away next time you really want to keep using material but tentatively do you think we've got time for any questions very briefly if any of the audience want to address I think in a way perhaps that's rather that anticipates too much to use to go and see the exhibition and also be able to see the ballet in fact the Dante project as it's performed in all these different places so you think that's absolutely fantastic Paris not so far from Luxembourg but the thing that was so remarkable in going to the see the royal big opera house thing was that at the end we were all crying we were everybody in the audience was just crying and about these this ball thing that's going that we have here they're all crying just looking at this totally abstract thing so we're obviously connecting to something but it's not literal it's abstract but it connected so thoroughly with us which is really the part of art that is a mystery something actually hits you hard you have no idea why but you accept it and you go through it because that was all we wanted to do was to find Pasadam we knew she was in the building and we had gone to London from Berlin and we wanted to hug here we wanted to hug Pasadam because it was just brilliant and my daughter was there Valerie was my wife and it was just a cathartic kind of incredible you know one of the last photos that I have of Lutite is taken by Lutite with the tree they went to find the tree in LA the purgatory tree and there's a photo of Lutite and Lutite getting oxygen at that point so it was quite late on on a pilgrimage to find the tree and it was in Jacaranda time because it was Jacaranda time so it would have been May-June so that was one of the last pictures I think that probably was the last picture but they went so it is connected and actually there's another connection quickly which feels Lutite and Nugusti were really really old friends and Yandere has got Nugusti installation here and so they were absolutely close friends weren't they and you said you you should talk a bit about him Nugusti was like a godfather I mean whenever he was in Los Angeles he would come to us he was the most elegant man oh my god he was this guy Isimiraki did all his church I mean that's for him he made this church for them and he was extraordinary I mean he was around my life since I was little I could remember and so that was part of being in mom's world was that Henry Miller, Anais means you had Christopher Isipwood live next door you had there was somebody who was moving to Los Angeles to have me and because he was this is difficult for him my mom was desperate to have a child she lost her second child Pablo and she wanted to have me and she was married to an Austrian surrealist named Wolfgang Pauli and he was a count and so his brother committed suicide he eventually did commit suicide and so and he just didn't want to have kids no way would he be going to have kids so my father my mother and Paulin all lived in the same house in Mill Valley above San Francisco and so my father and my mother fell in love and they had me and he had to leave of course at this point and he moved to Los Angeles and so the guy said friend of ours, Giles Healy who was actually the person who discovered those giant heads in the jungle in Mexico he was the discoverer of those heads and he was a remarkable Giles Healy incredible guy and he says I can introduce you to anybody in LA you want to be introduced to so she said James Hagey and so when Mia Hagey, James Hagey's wife became, they became best friends and in fact when I moved to New York I stayed at Mia's house the first year I was there and the second person was Charlie Pappers so she got to know Charlie Pappers and he offered to help paint her house when she moved into this little house you know in the canyon and then the third person was Iris Tree who had an apartment in the Santa Monica merry-go-round in Santa Monica Pier and who she is known and who she wanted to meet again so and then you know someone like Man Ray took her picture when they were married so we have this beautiful photograph of my mom by Man Ray and it's just a charmed life and it's never I mean it was extraordinary I would use to have so many interviews and I would just ask no, he met everyone from Greta Garbo to Droginski to it was a small world back then this was in Los Angeles in the 40s it was in Spain and he has that in her and he did he just has that in her do you remember her painting? yes, he used to paint on our porch in the 40s in the 50s he painted on our porch those crayon resist pieces and that ended up being my one I ended up being in that room it was a tiny little house and then she got she started painting when we were in sea land we lived in South America for a year and she started doing the self work just painting the ground with her body she would paint her feet she would paint the ground she stood on so you see her feet, you see her breath you see her stomach and you see the top of her leg and you do not see and her stomach I think was the most important part and the breath of course the stomach and the breath were very very important and so that's what she did and so you have two people in the painting and you are both of them you as the viewer are in the head of both people you are the head of all the people because the head is missing your head becomes their head so you become all of them and then the next theory she did was looking up was looking up and you have the mountains around you so you are looking up at the sky and then what do you see in the sky you see the feathers you see that whole thing happening so from looking at yourself on the ground she took photographs of her shadow so many photographs of her shadow again and again and again all about her physical body and her form she was fascinated by the fact that she was alive and that she had a body and that she lives in this world and that's what she gave me because that's all about my work is all about that about living in this world and how weird it is but that comes across so partly in the work I think of all of you in fact is getting kind of scrambled so the way she seems to span the whole of the 20th century culture I know I've heard that she's totally in that moment in your film she's totally there she wants to be here that sense of being in this life now you know it's kind of completely vital you know the funny sports and at the very end two or three years of her life it just became so outrageous what was happening that she became time magazine 100 most influential people on the planet I mean that was time magazine so there were only two artists in the magazine David Haughty and my mom how do you get there how does he say how does that happen what do you think about Disney's hat here I've already met with a garba so I'm not so far away but also when you mention the feathers and then she has different elements of different kinds of cloth different blankets and most of this is kind of their signs of indigeneity in this particular way and very powerful like I've learned since that those I think are eagle feathers and maybe hawk feathers but the hawk feather has a kind of conversation with a lot right now I see that there's this real kind of potency to those feathers particularly and so there are these signs that Remy might even be a little illegible too you know and he has this there's this power of there's something else that she's kind of tapping into and you mentioned that there's kind of spiritual kind of dynamic happening in the film but I really feel like there's this constant kind of place of inspiration for her that is coming from these other senses and she says like I smell the butterfly and those signs are in those paintings, in the clouds in the states of the clouds, in the stadium in the mountains that we were talking about earlier and the kind of layering of these the feathers, the feathers becoming a cross and the directionality of the feathers in each one except for the one going across and the one that staples up on that hill but they're hills all the way around so why would the shadow be there and not up above but it's really kind of a curious up-down-left-right kind of thing and then also I think I remember with the blanket with those kind of Navajo blankets there's also this play about space and directionality and not just in terms of the geometry but in terms of how that operates and the body and the land so there's all these they're pretty complex in those ways as well Katherine would you like the last word? I don't need the last word I think Lucita has the last word in a way because in the film it's just so beautiful I think I found out about who she was so beautiful I think something like that is very very beautiful and I think that's the really and that digsubance about being I like it here and you say I like it here too and I'm thinking well I like it here too you know so you know so yes yes to life yes to life that's exactly what she says and we all have to we have to really say yes to life okay well I am under strict instructions we've already pushed it our prime limit so I guess I just want to thank you so much that was really wonderful to hear you speaking but also I feel that everybody all of us can go into the show with such a kind of suggestive setup like amazing set of references and things to think about as we go look at the work so thank you and thanks to all of you thank you