On Thursday, December 5th 2024, Josh Baer joined Adam Lindemann, Founder of Venus over Manhattan, and artist Laurie Simmons, for an in-depth artist talk and panel discussion moderated by Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director of ICA Miami with opening remarks by Carola Jain, presented by DMINTI. The full transcript of their conversation is below, with images courtesy of ICA Miami and DMINTI.
Carola Jain: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this beautiful afternoon at the wonderful ICA museum. I’m Carola Jain. I’m the CEO and one of the co-founders of DMINTI. Before I turn it over to Alex to introduce our wonderful panel and certainly also Laurie Simmons, I wanted to tell you a little bit about how this project came about, and DMINTI. So, we work with artists on art projects that otherwise wouldn’t really take place. So they’re either large scale, or they are participatory, or they involve technology. They’re different from what you might find in a gallery. And certainly, we like to present them with museums. We have an AI configuration that was provided by the self portrait project, and you can take a picture of yourself and you will find your portrait inside one of Laurie’s amazing tableaus that she has created with the help of AI.
I’d like to introduce Alex Gartenfeld, who has been a wonderful partner. This is our third event here, and we absolutely love the ICA. We’re New York based, but love Miami, and thank you for having us again. And please, go ahead.
Alex Gartenfeld: Welcome, everybody. Thank you, Carola. I want to thank DMINTI for presenting this event. They are truly extraordinary partners for us. Carola, Jennifer Stockman, Jacqueline Sischy, Sam, you are amazing partners and you’re so amazing because of the platform that you give to artists of all stripes to experiment. We have with us one such experimenter in Laurie Simmons.
This is indeed our third collaborative effort. One with Ricci Albenda, one with Judy Chicago and Nadya Tolokonnikova. All of those have been ambitious. They’ve started here. Some of them have traveled the world. But this is perhaps our most ambitious to date.
Here at the museum are two of what she calls paintings, and then second, or lastly, a work that is, the form of a dollhouse, the original Kaleidoscope House from 2001, which is a collaboration with Peter Wheelwright. A section of that piece, and I’m sure Laurie will talk about it, became the inspiration for what is now a monumental public site in the Design District. For that, we have the Design District to thank, we have DMINTI to thank, we have the Arison Arts Foundation, and we have Tezos to thank. Tezos is an extraordinary platform as well for the creation of digital artworks and digital communities, and their self portrait project really helps to bring Laurie’s work to life and also helps us to welcome artists, designers and digital creators, including some really fantastic Miami-based practitioners as well.
So, we have a very esteemed panel today as well. And I’m going to introduce them. Laurie, whom you all know. is a fantastic and internationally recognized artist who since the 1970s has created images with an intense and open and generous psychological subtext and nonlinear narratives. She works across photography, painting and sculpture. Her work is part of many, many permanent collections: The Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim, ICA Miami, and many others. In 2018 and 2019, Simmons’ retrospective, Big Camera, Little Camera, was presented at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the MCA Chicago.
In 2006, she produced and directed her first film, The Music of Regret, starring Meryl Streep, Adam Gautel, and the Alvin Ailey II dancers. The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art. Her first feature film, My Art, premiered at the 73rd Venice Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival in 2017. She lives and works in New York and Connecticut.
Adam Lindemann, to her direct right, is a New York based gallerist, art collector, and writer who founded Venus Over Manhattan gallery in 2012. Lindemann is known for setting multiple world records, both at auction privately, including career records for Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Jean Michel Basquiat and Jean Royère. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds extraordinary. His personal collection includes works from Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Urs Fischer. Lindemann wrote for the New York Observer from 2009 to 2017. Has two books, and I believe has a new column as well. And, a little selfish shout out is that we collaborated on the Keiichi Tanaami exhibition on our second floor, which I hope that you have the chance to check out as well.
Lastly, Josh Baer—who, actually, I didn’t know this, but did an exhibition with Laurie Simmons in 1985, which we’ll talk about later—has probably known Laurie longer than any of us. That’s definitely longer than me. He is an art advisor and the renowned founder of The Baer Faxt, an art world news source. In 1994, seeing a need for an experienced insider to view the art market, he launched The Baer Faxt newsletter. And in 1996, he began tracking auction house transactions, ultimately recording more than 12, 000 data points for what would become The Baer Faxt’s Auction Database. I guess all the interest in data is why you’re here, too. Josh now delivers The Baer Faxt’s news and commentary in a variety of formats, including video podcasts.
So I want to kick off, as we should, with this new work of video, Autofiction, which premiered recently at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth and expands upon a lot of the themes that you’ve been working on in terms of how one works with AI as well as gender, domesticity, our relationship with technology. Could you walk us through some of the four tableaus that we just experienced?
Laurie Simmons: Right. Well, Autofiction, which did premiere about two weeks ago at the Modern in Fort Worth, is an ever evolving film that we can make in chapters. And my producer and collaborator is Danielle Bartholomew. She is my AI brain. She’s always in the front row in case anyone asks me a question that I can’t answer. But what was amazing for us is that when we got on board with AI, started working with AI in 2022, things were moving so quickly we could only dimly imagine a moment when we could make a film.
Enough has happened in the last year that enabled us to take some of the still images and run them through programs so that they could actually have a life of their own. And I wanted to also give a shout out to Luis Felber, my son in law, a British musician, who performs under the name Attawalpa. And, when he made the music, which was right before the premiere in Fort Worth. A pure collaboration is always something that happens when two and two equal infinity. And the music brings so much more to the animation. I have made films, I’m a filmmaker. The most emotional art form for me is when music and image pair together.
That’s what really gets me going, which raises the question of why did I make still photographs for 30 years before I ever made a film? That’s another story.
Alex Gartenfeld: When you say working with artificial intelligence, for a lot of people using their mobile devices, that means having an app that you enter a prompt into. What does that look like for you? I’m imagining, although not taking for granted, that it’s a slightly more customized experience.
Laurie Simmons: Well, there are programs that anyone can access. We started with a program that we actually couldn’t get into. We were waiting and trying to find people who could help us get into DALL-E, too. The way the programs work for people that don’t know is it’s a text to image prompt. You make a sentence, there are so many really goofy sentences out there, like the moon is purple and made of cheese, and there’s a panda looking at it. That’s the kind of thing you see on the internet, but whatever sentence you input, you get four images, and you can keep sort of elaborating on that. And I’ve always loved language. I write, I mostly write about art. So the idea of bringing together my interest in language and my interest in art was very exciting.
What happened was we very quickly started getting results that felt like a continuation of my work. That was the surprise. The first few things we tried, we tried to do some of my more well known work, like an object on legs, a camera on legs, a birthday cake on legs, and those were ridiculous looking. But when I started to kind of daydream about a woman in an interior, a woman in a green dress in a green room waiting for her boyfriend to call or things like that, that’s when I started to have images delivered that seemed like a seamless continuation of what I’ve been working on for 40 years, so rather than be shocked, I felt like I found a new collaborator, but the best part of early AI was that my collaborator was really bad at the job. Could not render faces, could not render hands. The hands came out looking like packages of hot dogs. The faces look like dripping dollies, so that made us in the studio think, well, we love our collaborator, but our collaborator needs help.
So we started painting on the images, sewing on them, erasing them, and suddenly having been a very hands off artist for most of my career, thinking that I needed this kind of conceptual distance in my work, I was behaving a lot like a studio artist. And so this very, very, very new technology that I embraced actually got me back to kind of my artistic roots from, you know, drawing as a child, going to art school.
Alex Gartenfeld: You mentioned that this work is organized into chapters. Is it then fair to assume that there are additional chapters? By which metric are chapters added? Is it a new phase in the technology? Is it a new scene? Is it in the spirit of collaboration prompts from an audience?
Laurie Simmons: It’s much like the way I made photo series, the next thing and the next thing and they need to be tailored to a situation. Our next appearance will be at Midnight Moments at Times Square. So it will be on 60 screens in Times Square. Times Square has rules and regulations. There can’t be any images of iPhones. There can’t be anything, God forbid, sexual, because there are so many sponsors in that project. So, we made for Times Square a chapter called Looking Up, which is a number of women in what feels like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It’s called Looking Up. Looking up, really slowly looking up. So it’s often tailored to the situation.
Alex Gartenfeld: Josh, in seeing this work of Laurie’s, what is your kind of reaction or connection to some of the work that you knew from that period or as you’ve followed her work since?
Josh Baer: Thank you. Yes. So, Laurie, I’m kind of fascinated because I think of you coming from this great movement, the Pictures Generation. And back then, there was a sense that, well, every image had already been done. So why make new images? So now you have this thing like, we have this thing making images, but somebody else has sort of already made them. So it’s a great continuation in my mind of like subjects that you’ve been dealing with consistently.
And it’s very rare for an artist—I think there’s maybe 10 I can think of—who’ve ever had more than a single moment of their career, when they had something to say and look at, there’s this little window of time, and you’ve uniquely moved through with consistency about issues about women and this and that conceptually and kept expanding. What a metaphor for artists to keep doing that. So I think of this as being totally in line, yet it’s completely something else.
Alex Gartenfeld: I’m going to take it as an art historical polemic that you’re throwing out there, which is that the pictures generation was a result of Laurie relying on the opposite position, which is that you can say anything you want all the time. Do any of you see that as kind of a historical or, or ethical distinction? Or, Laurie, is that something that you sort of thought about as you’re working with such a, let’s say, endlessly willing collaborator?
Laurie Simmons: Well, I was happy to be part of the pictures generation. No, I actually wasn’t, but I never felt like I was doing what other people were doing. I felt like Cindy Sherman and I were making new pictures somehow, but we were inventing things. We weren’t appropriating, we were creating, we were making fiction, and somehow, I mean, I guess it’s great to be lumped into a group. What I wanted more than anything was to continue making art and to continue to be relevant. So what you said to me is really one of the nicest things I could ever hear. And I think one of the reasons that I’ve been lucky enough to have people remain interested in what I do is because I never had one moment as we see a “moment” now, which is sort of like this crashing success where everybody wants to be around your work or own your work. It’s been this sort of like, slow burn all the way through, which is what I wanted. And I think that a lot of people, a lot of artists suffer from having this one really high moment—and then that’s it. That was my big fear. I never wanted that to happen. I’m revealing so much.
Alex Gartenfeld: Adam, we were hoping that you could reveal so much and tell us a little bit about your kind of engagement with digital art to date. I believe you’ve had some engagement with tokenized works as well. That’s a different thing from AI, but perhaps you could share a little bit of your experience and perspective on Laurie’s work.
Adam Lindemann: I think what Laurie said is amazing—and now I’m struggling to be as complimentary as Josh, because I can’t say anything nicer than what Josh said—but I love what you’re doing, Laurie, and it’s always interesting to me when an artist tries to move the art world forward, and accept technology, and interact with technology.
I remember when I did this conference on art and technology in 2018 here in Miami, a lot of people showed up, but a lot of people were very negative on it. So I would say most artists are unlike you. Not willing to experiment, not willing to take chances. And it’s fascinating that you’ve taken something from your past and made it new again, completely changed it using AI. Which, let’s not forget that a lot of people think AI is a bad thing. And, there’s a lot of sort of moral questions about what the future with AI will be. And for an artist to use AI. Now, David Salle recently did an amazing group of paintings, where he took his entire career, and he sort of put them into an AI machine, projected them, and then painted over it again. So, to make the old new through AI, I think is fascinating. And I would ask you, Lori, what brought you to this conclusion? Like, how did you get here?
Laurie Simmons: Well, Danielle, my studio manager brought it to me and it’s like another tool in my toolbox. You know, I’m not an AI artist, but it was like that new box of 48 Crayola crayons. That’s like the most exciting thing a kid can get, you know, when they’re brand new before you break them. And so, you know, we as artists have to be open to technology and it is a new tool. I’ve been places where I’m really challenged about, “We don’t know the future of AI”, “We don’t know what’s gonna happen”, there are philosophers and scientists on both sides of the argument who say it will be the end of the world, or it absolutely won’t.
And I think that embracing these technologies—I mean, Rauschenberg, his career was based on discovering and embracing new technology. And Warhol was interested too.
Adam Lindemann: Absolutely. But you know, we all sort of saw Yuval Harari, he’s out there saying that AI will be the end of humanity. And I would ask you, and I want to ask Alex, because I’m a big fan of Alex and the ICA and everything he’s doing, but the two of you. I feel that art and technology are a very odd pairing. They have a very hard time going together, because the art world is so traditional, and is by definition steeped in renaissance painting and cave painting going all the way back. And so, it has a very hard time getting into the world of technology. And will that ever change? Will we make that bridge? Well, I certainly don’t have an answer for you, but I would pivot and turn the question, certainly there’s philosophers speaking about the singularity, or a moment at which artificial intelligence eclipses human intelligence, and I guess I could stay up at night every once in a while thinking about that.
Alex Gartenfeld: More present are certain concerns around, I mean, certainly around labor, but also more, I’d say, closely in this project to originality, authenticity, authorship. A lot of artists and writers and creative people have taken a position that AI, first of all, ought not to sample their work. I wonder to what extent, and by the way, that’s a big field of contestation, and it’s a very complex one and there’s a lot of details that’s not just sort of good or bad in there. Issues with which, you know, a company shouldn’t take someone’s artwork and train their technology on it. And then there are other facets of AI. Laurie, I just wonder to what extent you’re thinking about that.
Laurie Simmons: Well, I think about it all the time, and to your comment about the singularity, Terrence McKenna said, we don’t know enough, I’m paraphrasing, we don’t know enough to be afraid. And that’s how I feel about AI, and that’s how I feel about the future. But, one of the aspects of the generation that I was part of was that sense that we were running out of images.
And, I always knew I was an artist. I walked into, this is family mythology, but it’s true, I walked into kindergarten, and, you know, everyone had to say their name and I said, I’m Laurie Simmons. I am an artist. Did my parents tell me I was an artist? I never listened to them, so why that stuck, I don’t know, but I never had that, you know, I went to art school, I never stopped having that identity, but I never had that sense. So I was constantly sneaking, tracing paper and copying things and trying to be an artist and borrowing things so that when I came of age and a number of artists, many of them women, were dipping into the past and culture and recycling, it felt really right to me.
So, I totally agree with you that AI is sort of like the next iteration of regurgitation of images and culture. That said, one of the most interesting things, and there are a number of artists making art about this, are the data sets. The data sets that AI draws from are just billions of pieces of information. And they are as awful and biased as the world we live in. So we’ve done a lot of experiments in the studio where we ask, we give prompts about gender, prompts about race, and the results are as amazing and horrific as you can imagine. So, the data sets themselves are flawed, which, I’m sure you know a lot about.
Josh Baer: I studied AI in grad school in the 70s, by the way. That’s true. And it did nothing for about 70 years. It flatlined. It was just a language thing. And then it’s gone exponentially straight up in the last few years. What you said before, though, which is really essential, is you use it as a tool. The same way you use the camera, film, paintbrush, right? That’s misunderstood by the world all the time. That’s critical for artists. That’s a tool.
But the other thing that you talked about that’s interesting to me is where an AI is flawed. It doesn’t like mistakes. And what artists learn and grow from is by trying stuff and failing. And AI discourages failure. That’s the critical distinction between you using it as a tool, rather than just letting it take over and give the solution. Because we’ve all seen that all the time.
Alex Gartenfeld: And to that extent, just to revert to the technical matters of your work, how have you seen these data set changes? Data sets changed over time. You mentioned, Laurie, that at the outset they were unskilled and you were getting fingers in weird directions. I imagine that that’s everything we’ve all seen, but those technologies have advanced rapidly. And how is that?
Laurie Simmons: Well, the data sets aren’t changing. It’s the technology that’s changing. So the flaws, we figured out ways to stay in the early technology. Just like the pictures generation picked up a camera and made photographs that had dust and fingerprints all over them and thought they were great and were rejected and repudiated by the photo department at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s.
Early AI is like, full of mistakes. The data sets are the data sets, and all the information from the world keeps going into them. But the technology has gotten way too good for us, and when we make a prompt about a woman in a yellow dress, sitting in a yellow room, waiting for someone to call, we don’t want a perfect Hollywood looking still. We want those early, messed up, early AI style images. Early AI for me is 2022. That’s what we’re looking for. So we’ve figured out a way to stay there. And when I’m no longer comfortable there, I’ll find another tool. But the only point I want to make is that AI, in terms of what it can deliver for me for being an artist, is getting way too good right now.
Alex Gartenfeld: Now, we’re here with a purpose today, which is to talk about the Kaleidoscope House, it’s, as I mentioned, in our gallery. Let’s call it a dollhouse for lack of a better word. It’s deeply steeped in modernism and other design references. It’s also a structure that’s populated by the work of your peers. It certainly makes a lot of sense in terms of, I mean, it fits beautifully into your body of work, but it’s unique at the same time.
The question though is, why did you at this moment decide to revisit this work? What brought it out of the archive for you and inspired you today?
Laurie Simmons: I think this is where I have to say a big thank you to DMINTI, because Jennifer Stockman approached me when she first started working with DMINTI to do some sort of an NFT project, and it was wide open, and I couldn’t make a decision about what I wanted to do, and then she re-approached me, probably less than a year ago with Carola and Jacqueline and Sam.
I keep the dollhouse in my studio. The dollhouse was made as a toy. It’s not an editioned artwork. It’s a toy that could be purchased. It was sold at museum shops. It was meant to be a children’s toy. Truly, I designed it because I wanted a prop to shoot. And I knew I needed an architect. So I called on my dear friend, Peter Wheelwright, who I’d known forever, my husband’s college roommate.
The next iteration of the first Kaleidoscope House was to do a project with Anne Pasternak, who was then at Creative Time. We were going to do it in Union Square. We were going to do a structure in New York, and anyone who knows how New York works knows that getting permits and doing anything in New York is, I mean… Honestly, in hindsight, it would have ended up being a very stylish bathroom. But it never happened. We were very disappointed. And when Carola, Jennifer, and Jacqueline heard about that, somehow we came to that. They just thought, let’s do it. And it was one of those things that they did. It was a herculean task to do it in the amount of time we had, and to do it well. It’s so beautifully made, and years ago in Union Square, we would never have had the AI augmented reality component. So that part’s really exciting as well.
Alex Gartenfeld: And, a super kind of simple procedural question, but how are people meant to use it? When we all—if you haven’t been there, walk two blocks over to 39th and Northeast 2nd—how are we meant to interact with it? And, you know, what are we meant to take home from this project?
Laurie Simmons: Well it’s funny you ask, there is a souvenir—You set me up for that, right? I mean, first you’re supposed to appreciate Peter’s beautiful architecture. I wish he could be here. He was a practicing architect, the chair of the Architecture Department at Parsons, and he’s since become a novelist and written two award winning and very complex novels. So all our lives have morphed. When you go to the Kaleidoscope House, take out your phone, scan the QR code, your phone will turn into a camera. Go into the plain white space, capture your image, and then you’ll receive on your phone an image of yourself in one of the kaleidoscope house rooms. And that’s yours forever.
Alex Gartenfeld: Now, in the back of the installation, there’s a monitor with a Tezos placard, and, on it is playing or presenting a number of artists’ works, many of which are kind of almost using your work as an AI prompt. Like, there’s a wonderful artist who’s put the house inside of a brain. So, you sort of re entered your work into that feedback loop. Have you seen those or experienced those?
Laurie Simmons: Yeah, I love stuff like that. [Laughs.]
Alex Gartenfeld: Have you had any conversations with any of those artists as a result of this project?
Laurie Simmons: No, I haven’t. I’ve just been there when it’s been really quiet. I haven’t seen people interact with it, except for the one night that we opened. I’m looking forward to it.
Alex Gartenfeld: Now, Adam, since you have structured a number of dialogues, including as previously mentioned around digital art, has that engagement continued? And to what extent have you remained kind of immersed in this field?
Adam Lindemann: I’m continuing to follow it and be close to it. But I wanted to go back to Laurie’s house and say that the way DMINTI has installed it, and the fact that you get that image of yourself inside the work—I mean, that’s the ultimate democratization. That’s the ultimate sort of horizontal way of exploring the very vertical art world. So instead of owning the piece and having the piece, everyone gets to share in it. So there are very few artists who have achieved that, you know, Félix Gonzalez Torres, one of my favorites, with his candies, but like the idea that anyone can walk into your work. And take home themselves interacting with your work. It’s kind of a magical thing that technology gives you, which the art world doesn’t.
Laurie Simmons: Yeah, and somehow DMINTI helped me make that happen. I’ve always loved the idea of the giveaway, the souvenir, the token. Get a cookie at a show or whatever, you know, I love that. I love that stuff.
Alex Gartenfeld: Now, Laurie, you just debuted this new video, which is recent, so you don’t have to have anything on your plate, but what is in the studio now and how are, what are your plans in terms of your continuing use of this tool?
Laurie Simmons: Well, the work that’s installed by the kaleidoscope house at the ICA is the way that I’m working now. It’s kind of a sculptural-AI-painting mashup. So those images of the Kaleidoscope House that are here in the museum were AI generated. I gave the description of the Kaleidoscope House without saying THE Kaleidoscope House. And one thing I want to add is that when I’m making the images, I never input “in the style of Laurie Simmons.” And I think what Adam brought up about David is fascinating because David Salle trained a model with David’s work. I think he might have input his writing. He’s an incredible writer, David Salle. So he trained a model with all his work, and I believe his writing. So, his model is truly like a David Salle model that regurgitates, you know, aspects of him, right?
Adam Lindemann: That’s what he said to me. And it’s very interesting that it’s a way to refresh yourself, to press the refresh button on yourself. But I do still think that this interaction of AI with art is both wonderful, but is like a huge question mark going forward. And some people are against it. I bumped into Richard Prince in the street, and he was against it.
Laurie Simmons: So is my friend Marilyn Minter. “No, no, no. I don’t like AI.”
Adam Lindemann: I don’t think he has a doctrine of it, but most people in the art world are fairly conservative. I mean, we have paintings, we have sculpture, we have a little video, and that’s about it. So the idea that you would really open your work into a technological realm is kind of controversial.
Josh Baer: But it goes back to, like, Kubrick and that computer. We’ve been looking at AI for a long time, worrying about it. Could it replace us? Could it be sentient? Could it be human? It’s like, 2001: A Space Odyssey, that’s like the ultimate creative moment for this. And it was what, 50 years ago? The last thing I have to say about AI, everybody uses it every day, all day. It’s called Google. It’s called Amazon. Those are AI apps. So, the idea that it’s new is kind of odd. It’s certainly new to artists.
Laurie Simmons: Yeah, well, I think the simple answer for me, why do I use it? Because it looks like my work. The results look like my work. They look like where I would go or what I would make, and if they didn’t, I doubt I would use it.
Alex Gartenfeld: Well, thank you everybody. Again, I want to profoundly thank Laurie Simmons for sharing her vision with us, and Adam and Josh, thank you for being with us and adding your perspective. Many thanks to DMINTI, and I implore you all to go to 39th Street and Northeast 2nd, behind Cote, and enter the kaleidoscope house. Thanks, everybody. Happy Art Week.
