A Mind/Room of Their/One’s Own

Sarah and I met at a launch party for an issue of the publication Riot of Perfume. At the time, I was taking a course taught by the anthropologist Michael Taussig titled ‘Taboo and Transgression’. Taussig had just asked me to help him plan a lecture for the class specific to transgression of taboos in art. We decided to focus on the transgression of form as seen through the work of Duchamp, versus the transgression of taste , as seen through the paintings of Guston. By chance, Sarah was simultaneously working on a piece about Guston’s 1970s political drawings of Richard Nixon. Because of this — and the fact that it was post-election 2016 — we found ourselves in a winding conversation about art and politics.