How to illuminate a writer’s central themes through a dialog with visual art? The writer and curator Hilton Als does it regularly in his exhibitions. For the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, he’s created an exhibition Joan Didion: What She Means, dedicated to the writer and essayist, who died in 2021, that will travel to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, opening in July.

FM: From seeing your previous shows Toni Morrison’s Black Book and God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin—both done in collaboration with David Zwirner Gallery—there is a precision to how you extend the complexity you find in the work of these cultural figures as a prompt to contemporary artists and audiences, in an effort to create new genealogies of reception and inspiration. But without polemics and ideological framing. Now with Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer, there’s many societal rifts and fractures present but a contemplative register throughout. Maybe it was the impending atmospheric river and dark clouds over Los Angeles when I saw the show at the Hammer Museum, but it seemed like scenes responding to a life, very much like landscapes culled from your reading of Joan Didion to be populated. How did you come to structure the show that way?

ALS: I had curated a number of shows in New York where the idea or frame was that of the subject was under review. If you could tell a story responding to Didion with narrative, why couldn't you tell a story through objects? And a great part of this was finding in her writing what was appropriate, because she's such a visual writer. How would it be to make something out of objects, something that was fractured and cohesive at the same time. Finding objects that are evocative of the word and then the objects they become the language. How and why does something become another language, that’s something super important to me. 

FM: I was immediately struck by these first impressions of landscape in dialog with parts of Didion’s narrative, for instance Maren Hassinger’s River (1972-2011) sculpture snaking across the floor right into Pat Steir’s large-scale July Waterfall (1991) painting, and those arid, iridescent landscape paintings of Suzanne Jackson from the 70s just to the side.

ALS: I was very moved how folks felt about being in that universe. Didion’s family members felt that I knew their family from the creation of that room. And I didn't know her family, but I knew the work. I knew through the specificity of her landscape and how much that means to me. If you're paying attention, you can't make a mistake with the visual because she's telling you so much about how things look. And I am working, riffing off of her. It's her imagination that makes my imagination. I'm working in tandem, in dialogue with that, with her imagination.

FM: Yes, Didion has that way of looking at thing so sharply through specifics and observation that it becomes what she called a kind of peripheral vision, making incidental things into central arguments. You have this great take on that in writing about her ‘pessimism-as-style’: “Unlike her ancestors, Didion was a writer which means she did have second thoughts, did equivocate, and did experience opaque bewilderment when confronted by a story.” This willingness to think through the peripheral and second thoughts, including her signature ‘jump cuts’ between scenes, comes across so strongly in the thematics of the show. 

ALS: Well, she learned so much from cinema. She lived in a world where she took whatever she could learn from that observed form and put it into a fiction or into a screenplay. What she told me and it's on the tape playing in the show of us in conversation, was how she learned to write about ‘cross purposes,’ how folks were speaking at dinner parties across the table and not listening to each other. She was always a student of writing first. That really shows how much of an artist she was from the beginning, that these words were profoundly evocative of so much to her.

FM: The sense of cinematic cuts crosses over directly into the exhibition, including how anchor artworks seem to allow for narrative impulse to move in multiple directions in the show, but also how the inclusion of historic objects and ephemera made its way in to underscore both the fantasy and engineered reality of different Californias, layered on top of each other. How did you choose central works? 

ALS: For me, always there were two things. There was always the footage of John Wayne from Stagecoach (1939) as one center and the still of Tuesday Weld from Play It as It Lays (1972) as another anchor in those two rooms. And once I had those clues or that visual information, I was able to think around it. Maren’s piece River was in the collection and I knew it was perfect, and I also knew I wanted Liz Larner’s sculptures. So, I had certain things in mind going in, including the idea of photos as wallpaper, to make those atmospheres. 

FM: Your curating gravitates to mood-making and atmosphere across recent exhibitions as a way of bringing the iconic figures of writers and thinkers—Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and now Didion—out into the open, insisting upon new ways into their sensibilities. It’s a challenge way to make a portrait that seems to come easy, making these atmospheres. Can you talk about that? 

ALS: The shows come out of a feeling that I'm having in response, almost a series of impressions, of particular artists or works that are evocative of another’s work, of the writing. And so I began really with that feeling, of stepping out into that feeling of, 'What is it about this work that moves me to want to do this project that takes three years? How long can I live with this person and why do I want to live with them? And why is it that this feeling is so important to me? How can I make that feeling exist, distilled in two rooms?' So, it's not about the artist, in a funny way the artist's ego has to take second place to being part of a collective. It's not about the visual artist, which in today's culture is, like, sacrilege, right? It's about the ways in which, collectively, we can respond to these words.

FM:In What She Means, and in your previous shows departing from Baldwin and Morrison, the use of text, yours or Didion’s, is not subordinate or explicating the artworks included. It’s like an inter-title in dialog, prompting, and putting things in motion, and radically turns over the expectation of what language can do in an exhibition space. 

ALS: Well, thank you. Maybe it's a scandal in the art world to believe that, but I do believe that there have been writers and critics who are as important to me as any visual artists have been. One critic of painting and dance, Edwin Denby, for example, is very important to me. I don't think he's any less than de Kooning, they were friends, so how would I imagine an environment that gives equal weight. So, I don’t think Joan is more or less important than Ed Ruscha, thinking about their world from different perspectives. How do we balance the respect toward both. I don’t think Toni Morrison is less important than Kerry James Marshall, and they have a lot to say to each other, and so the subject under review is always working in connection with, always in tandem. 

FM: A nice way of describing curating, attempting to be in tandem with. 

ALS: In your description before, I was thinking ‘Well, that's not so unusual,' but actually, it is because a lot of curators don't have a visual sensibility. They have a museum sensibility. When I would go to things, I remember seeing this wall text at the Guggenheim that drove me nuts because it said, 'This Black artist,' and I was like, 'We know she's Black.' Why are we trapped in this weird thing of identifying people down to their most banal essence. Why are we trapped, and by journalism, basically. There's so much that I don't understand in terms of the literal-mindedness of making shows. I'm using the exhibition space as a pictorial space as opposed to just informational, or just these artists in space.

FM: You’ve talked about the slithery form of your essays, about how the essay form stays unfinished, creating a circle that isn’t closed. This gets at both your writing and Didion’s of course, but also a kind of aeration that takes place in your curating, a letting language evoke and then step back. Do you think of your essays and exhibitions as sibling forms? 

ALS: Step back, support, but step back, right. You know, I never did until you said that. I can see that they're related and that what I feel as a writer towards these subjects is not dissimilar from what I feel as a curator. You're taking all this information, having read them for years, and you're relocating them in a gallery space in an act of distillation. You're making a coherent space but where people can wander through the way that people wander through an essay. You want them to wander. You want their mind and their eye to wander through an exhibition in the way, when people read an essay, they don't read it straight through. They stop. They think. They absorb. They forget where they put the book, like instances of real life I would like to bring to the museum and gallery structure.

FM: That reminds me of the Jack Pierson installation in the show, Diamond Life (1990), the everyday table, the ashtray, the books, record player, a postcard. It’s a kind of fragment of a room. It really had atmosphere. 

ALS: That was one of the central pieces for me too. I had remembered seeing it in 1990, that structure, it was one of the pieces that I had to have in order to center the 70s decade in the show, but also in terms of gay sensibility. I met a number of gay artists and writers that responded very strongly to Didion’s writing, and it was a way of talking about that in the show. A way of describing a nostalgia about that time in New York when Didion’s novel A Book of Common Prayer was being passed around by gay people who identified with her women, who were often alone or disenfranchised in some way. I was really moved to discover that we could get it for the show, and it was just as I remembered it, an amazing feeling. 

FM: The show plays off different eras, different decades, and Didion’s shifting politics. In the essay for the show’s catalog, ‘Would It Have Been Better to Turn Away? Joan Didion and the Art of Observation,’ you focus on her willingness to look at the details of why we hurt and alienate one another, and find America in exactly that not turning away.

ALS:  One of the things that was super important for me to show was her development. That this person was from a relatively small town, and made her way out into the world in this way that was so touching to me. Like all great American stories, it was about the ‘arrivalness.’ It was about going, getting from one place to another. She didn't wait for life to happen to her. As an artist, you have to go out there and claim it, and I felt that she claimed her right to observe and to be an artist. She had this belief in the power of her observation. It's hard to do. 

She went out into a world where you're not supposed to. Well-brought-up young ladies are not supposed to go to wars or try to understand why the world that she was introduced to was actually a fiction of wholeness. She was incredibly brave and I think her activism was in the writing. Going out there and reporting on what the world was like around us that we, as Americans, didn’t pay attention to, whether traveling to El Salvador or giving voice to Cuban exiles. She was really interested in why this country failed, including why this dream of California was just a dream. She was writing about anti-Asian sentiment in Hawaii in 1966, for example. The fantasy of the whole family, the fantasy of a whole nation, was deceptive and we owe her a debt of gratitude because she gets us out of ourselves, and willingness to stay complacent in our safety. 

FM: You’re looking to bring out what you called in relation to the exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin “the myriad self” of complicated figures that have been perhaps narrowed overmuch into cultural icons. I was thinking also of the emphasis on Toni Morrison’s being such an important editor, and the phrase in her introduction to the amazing project, The Black Book, “I am all the ways I survived.” So powerful. But these exhibition frames aren’t just complex they’re also highly personal for you. 

ALS: I always tell this story, but it was when I went to MoMA as a kid the first thing I saw at a Robert Rauschenberg retrospective was his piece Monogram (1955-59). How is that going to make any sense to a fifteen-year-old, but it made emotional sense and I wanted to know what the language was around it. They had docents in those days and they would take time with young people. I always wanted to recreate that feeling a docent gave me of allowing me the object but also giving me enough language for my imagination to go somewhere with it. That's a feeling that I want to recapture, of a teenage boy who really wanted to know more. And who didn't want to be limited. What I'm trying to do with my shows is to help you interpret, your interpretation is vital to the life of the thing. I think it's a real hindrance that it becomes more academic than visceral, and I hope we can re-learn how to feel something and know the rightness of the feeling. I think that one of the things that gets lost for me certainly in a lot of projects is how is this show earning its space? Why is this show important to put on even? You know, why is this conversation worth having? An exhibition requires a lot of attention. And how doe we earn the right to do that? We have to earn our time with each other as human beings I think.