WRITING IS PAINFUL
EMMA CLINE
INTERVIEW BY LOLA KRAMER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CAROLINE TOMPKINS
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Imagining the interior lives of those maligned, canceled, and spurned, Emma Cline’s work as a writer is free of simplistic moralizing, instead interested in the stories we all tell ourselves and how we create our own personal delusions. With her recently released second novel "The guest", she delivers an already-classic exploration of class neurosis in late capitalist America.
LOLA KRAMER
I thought we could talk about the short story that first turned me onto your work, “White Noise.” It’s told from the perspective of a man named Harvey who’s waiting for the verdict of his trial. Although we’re never told his surname, it’s clearly based on Harvey Weinstein. What lured me in was your ability to make a deviant character feel so relatable, even when problematic, because you animate their inner monologue in a way that feels inseparable from the reader’s. How do you shift from writing these smaller vignettes to a more sustained portrait of a character in novel form? For example, in your novel The Guest, which came out in May.
EMMA CLINE
Every project is a series of questions or a puzzle you’re solving. When returning to the novel form, I think about the same questions you bring up. How do you maintain that feeling of dropping into someone’s head? How do you maintain that tension or texture?
LK
“Erl-King” is different. It’s nonfiction, like a short memoir that occurs during a walk with your sister, who we learn is undergoing medical treatment. You create tension that seems built around what is unspoken yet understood. The way you ended that piece was beautiful. Your sister, H, sends a crying face emoji and then “WTF.”
EC
I’m interested in how the intense moments in our lives, the absolute worst or even the best, live next to the banal. Like in “White Noise,” Harvey can’t be a monster 24 hours a day. Even if you’re going through a life-threatening health crisis, it’s not 24 hours a day. I was trying to see if I could convey some of the feeling of absolute horror next to this feeling that, as a human being, you’re persisting through the days.
LK
These juxtapositions appear throughout your stories, like in “Menlo Park.” Your main character, Ben, has been removed from the board of his magazine for unstated wrongdoing. Because the reader doesn’t know details of what preceded, there’s no way to pass moral judgment. At one moment, he’s rerouting his airport driver to pick up drugs from a dealer, and the next, he thinks, "It can’t all be that bad. There are still people on TV, in competitions, baking cakes and winning money. Maybe I could do that too." It’s human to wonder, “How long will I be stuck in this space? What’s going to change it?” Can you discuss your interest in this kind of salvation narrative?
EC
What’s resonating is the human desire to tell yourself a story about your own experience, or to plug into some external narrative arc that allows you to keep going. I’m interested in moments where, even for a second, you glimpse that it’s a story and that your salvation isn’t coming, or a character starts to get that creeping feeling that they might be deluding themselves. Harvey is a character who clings to this belief that his life story is one of success. He’s always been able to solve a problem, including other people as problems, and he’s gotten to this point where money and fame won’t fix it. I’m interested in writing and reading books where a character toggles in and out of reality, and seeing the constructs we build to protect ourselves from the truth.
LK
I recently found a list of writers you kept in mind while developing your upcoming novel and was happy to find Patricia Highsmith men- tioned. I read a quote where she says, “I choose to live alone because my imagination functions better when I don’t have to speak with people.” And then, of course, if you know about Patricia Highsmith, you know that she kept hundreds of pet snails.
EC
I did not know that.
LK
This writer, Terry Castle, describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom.” Apparently, she took snails to parties “clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her purse.”
EC
That’s chic. And unexpected.
LK
What do you appreciate about Highsmith?
EC
I’m interested in forward momentum and clarity in writing. She’s good at that. I’m interested in writers who are playing with negative space. I think about it with endings—less about negative space, although maybe you could describe it in the way life rarely wraps up satisfyingly. There’s the ultimate ending, death, which has a narrative elegance, but, just as we live day to day, do we get the resolution? I don't think we do.
LK
In the world of their uncensored thought, your characters often have a deadpan humor. I found myself laughing out loud reading Daddy. It concerns shame, which we usually carry internally yet mute outwardly.
EC
Lately, humor is what I want the most in a reading experience. Sam Lipsyte is one of my favorite writers, and he had a short story recently called “My Apology” in the New Yorker. Tears are coming to my eyes thinking about it. Regardless of how terrible life can be, we have these little pressure valve releases of being able to make a joke or turn it into this funny story. Shame is an animating force for the characters in my work. We’re such a shame-based society, and that has become literalized in things like cancel culture. It’s unnatural to be told by millions of people that you are evil. Our brains weren’t developed to comprehend that kind of information. We’re probably meant to know what 30 people think about us, and, suddenly, to have to adjust that ...
It’s overwhelming and basically not our business, but suddenly everyone’s made it your business. I want to see what that does to a character.
LK
Maybe the most human response is surrendering to ambivalence, detachment.
EC
That’s kind of why, in “White Noise,” I wanted Harvey to get a ketamine infusion. It’s dissociative and detaching and removes the character from the sense that this is real.
LK
What does it feel like to be a human against the masses?
EC
For The Girls, which was loosely based on the Manson family, the desire to write it came out of this flattening effect that news articles have on real events. You’re like, "Well, these were people. What did it feel like for the five minutes or months leading up to something terrible?" I’m curious about the human experience that fills in the gaps between the bluntness of facts. Sometimes, I feel compelled by the Daily Mail. It’s a fascinating document of human foibles, as if somebody is trawling for the worst of humanity—the way it’s paired next to "Ten foods that we swear you’ll never get cancer if you eat them,” or this lady showing you how to eat soup. I’m fascinated with how the worst day of these people’s lives has been reduced to a Daily Mail article. People are commenting. And then the stuff with weird folk wisdom that everyone’s so obsessed with now about optimizing everything.
LK
That goes back to your interest in juxtaposing the serious, life-puncturing events with the banality of the everyday.
EC
And how the banal stuff is such an expression of our deep fears. I’m interested in how this health obsession is basically the sense we can control death. Death is frightening, and we will do everything possible to avoid it. It’s both the ordinary and the void underneath. How do you toggle between those things, even just in the span of a day?
LK
Tell me about your project with Gagosian, “Picture Books.”
EC
I feel unabashedly excited and proud of that. I love being able to work with writers that I adore and love that they can experience turning their work into a beautiful sensory object.
LK
The pairing of Ottessa Moshfegh and Issy Wood was great. I appreciate how you noticed they share “a gothic, spiky humor and an attunement to the darker currents of the world, the hidden realms where shame and desire intersect.” How did this project come about?
EC
It came out of writing. "White Noise” is part of a longer novella, and there’s this no man’s land where publishers don’t want to publish a hard copy of a novella. I was thinking about art books like the Hanuman Books, and I thought, “What would it be if that was reversed, and the artist made something based on an existing work by a writer?” The writer does the piece, then we give it to the artist, who responds. We’re doing one with Mary Gaitskill and Elif Batuman, who wrote a “sequel” to The Idiot and Either/Or that we’re publishing this year.
LK
The book and poster are packaged together as editions designed by Peter Mendelsund, the author, designer, and creative director of The Atlantic. He said, “I’m naturally invested in understanding the intersection of these two media (and interested in understanding the limits of each; what can’t words show, and what can’t art say?)” I didn’t know about him, which I’m embarrassed to say, because he’s prolific. He’s a graphic designer, novelist, and—
EC
A classical pianist!
Emma Cline is an American writer and novelist, originally from California. In 2016, she published her first novel, The Girls. This year she published the follow-up, The Guest.
Lola Kramer is a writer, editor, and curator based in New York.
PHOTOGRAPHY: CAROLINE TOMPKINS