Lebanese-born singer Yasmine Hamdan has always been with us, if by us you mean Bidoun. A profile of her former band Soapkills appeared in Bidoun #0 (you read that correctly). Soapkills, a collaboration with Zeid Hamdan (no relation), more or less personified the cosmopolitan cool Middle East of the early post-9/11 period. Their songs were a pleasingly mellifluous combination of Arabic, French, and English (“trip hop à l’orientale” was a preferred cliché). Everyone had their albums, Bater and Cheftak; songs like “Coit Me” and “Aranis” were mainstays in trendier Beirut cafes. After Soapkills broke up, Hamdan moved to Paris, where she teamed up with former Madonna producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï to produce Arabology under the moniker Y.A.S. She has appeared in films, too, including a number directed by her partner, Elia Suleiman.

When Hamdan turned up in Nouvelle Vague mastermind Marc Collin’s studio in early 2012, she brought along her collection of classic Arab cassette tapes, some Soapkills mp3s, and a YouTube playlist of eclectic children’s television programming from the Gulf. Out of this harvest, she chose twelve tracks to record. But these twelve would not be performed as covers or tributes or remakes or even “modernly twisted” updates of old standards — the songs on the resulting album, her self-titled solo debut, are her “memories of melodies” as filtered through Collin’s analog synthesizer.

Yasmine Hamdan: So, you do films, right?

Sophia Al-Maria: Yeah, I’m making a feature called Beretta. It’s a thriller about a lingerie salesgirl in Cairo who goes on an all-male killing rampage.

YH: I always wished I could do that, especially in Cairo.

SM: It’s the most traumatic. I went to school there. Actually that’s where I first heard about you. But it was impossible to get that first Soapkills album, Bater. The only people who had managed to get it had picked it up in Beirut.

YH: Yeah. At that time singing in Arabic was not very cool. But I’d wanted to make a rock-and-roll record, have this rock-and-roll experience, because that’s how I lived — and how I thought music should be. Television stations wouldn’t even play our video because what I was saying could be perceived as provocative.

SM: But then you have something like Haifa Wehbe’s “Bus El Wawa” (Kiss the boo-boo), which sets up a total double standard. It’s totally exploitative and it’s all over the TV. You’re not censored because of the sexual content — you’re censored because what you represent, as someone who thinks freely, is dangerous. Whereas somebody like Haifa is a prisoner of her own image, which is constructed by a corporation. Because she’s the corporation’s representative, she can be provocative without worrying.

YH: Haifa is very blunt — the music is not polemical; it is what it is. And, by the way, if I hear “Bus El Wawa” in a nightclub, I will dance to it. But now we have so many songs that are derivative of “Bus El Wawa.” It’s a pity, because so much money is being spent by labels in the region. But when EMI and all these big companies opened in the Middle East, they weren’t interested in alternative Arab bands. I was approached by a few of them. “Don’t you want to sing in English?” One Egyptian guy tried really hard; at the end he was a bit aggressive.

SM: They’re like that.

YH: He really tried to convince me that I had to sing and dance like a kitschy pop singer and, you know, be a big star. He was like, “Do you want a car? What do you want? Do you want fifty thousand dollars? You want the check now?” This became very claustrophobic for me. I needed to be in a more healthy environment. Another reason I moved to Paris was to have access to musicians.

SM: I understand what you mean. Everything is twenty times more difficult in the Middle East, just to do your work.

YH: Some people can adapt. But I was an insider-outsider because my family moved every three years. My dad is an engineer, and he was building bridges and corniches and stuff like that. Beirut was my home, and the city is very inspiring, but at the same time very painful and intense. And I was very sensitive.

SM: We have this fantasy that home means safety. But home can hurt you.

YH: Beirut is a very complex place. You feel you’re always on the edge of losing it. This song “Beirut” embodies my frustration with being far from home, because I have to be if I want happiness and security and opportunities. At the same time, I don’t want to lose Beirut. But I needed to be in a neutral environment. When you belong to a place and a group of people, you are linked to authority. You start to negotiate with yourself, think about what others think you should do. This is especially true of the art scene.

I always did what I wanted, and fought for it, but you get tired of the wars. After a while I just wanted to retreat.

SM: Those wars leave you with battle scars, though, which can be a good thing.

YH: Yeah. And victories, too. I know I’m extremely lucky.

SM: You spent much of your childhood in the Gulf, right? How was that?

YH: Yeah, Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Kuwait. I love the music of these places, but to live there is too heavy for me. When I was a kid in Kuwait, my parents were divorced and I was free in the daytime. I used to go out into the streets and walk around — you cannot walk in the streets normally in Kuwait — and young men would follow me, harass me. That was intense and frustrating. But I also had access to education.

SM: There are many different archetypes of femininity that you embody in your music — and yourself — and each one seems to represent a different possibility for being a woman. You reference the voices of Samira Tawfik, Asmahan… all these sort of nostalgically enshrined and revered female singers. How did you find these characters?

YH: It was back in Beirut. We didn’t have the internet then so I had this dealer in Hamra I would go to and ask, “Do you have this song that goes like this? Do you have that song?” And he would say, “Okay, but I have to make two or three phone calls and call you back.” It was very thrilling because I had this sensation that it was really something very unique. This is just how it started. And I used to buy a lot of cassettes. I have them here — over five hundred of them. Now you can find a lot of these things on the internet and everybody’s very blasé about it, but each time I got a cassette, I felt like I had won the lottery.

During the civil war in Lebanon, music created a secure, magical place. These singers — like Asmahan and Abdel Wahab — were very alive for me. I felt like I belonged with them, and it had nothing to do with politics or social backgrounds or dialect or intellect. I have an intellectual approach to things, but when I work it comes from desire. I had a desire for these people. I didn’t decide to do it; I had no choice. I had to go there.

When I sing these covers, I’m trying to be like a passeur (ferryman). By embodying the songs, I act like a boat, taking them from one side of the river to the other. Part of my work is to research and another part is to fall in love. Some songs I feel were written for me, and I can’t forget the original rendition. When I fall in love with a song, I work on it until I feel like I can appropriate it; I have to do it the way I want, not the way it should be. If I wanted to sing Asmahan way that it should be, I would be singing a very different tune.

SM: Did you always sing in Arabic?

YH: I really discovered Arab music when I started to sing in Soapkills. It was something else. Zaid Hamdan was doing his songs in English — and it was fun for me to sing that way — but at a certain point something in my life triggered a desire to get into Arabic songs. And these Arabic songs opened a new sense of identity for me. I was in Beirut, and I was not really belonging there. I was feeling a bit lonely and a bit alienated because I didn’t feel part of the city or the people or the groups there. In a way, someone like Asmahan started the process in me to reconnect with something that comes from my childhood but comes also from a past, from my culture.

In my childhood we were in the proximity of the old Arab world — very rich and sophisticated music, films, cinema, and so on, and at some time I was completely disconnected, because I was traveling left and right. So when I started to listen to Asmahan, it reconnected me. And by connecting to Asmahan and Mohamed Abdel Wahab and all these legends, I started to build a small narrative of myself: where I come from, where my culture is, what I love from it, what’s the humor in it, how love is felt, why do I feel my femininity this way. Even, why do I live. You know?

SM: The opening of your video for “In Kan Fouadi” with Samira Tawfik swinging on a flowery swing like that Fragonard painting, all pink and peaches. It’s amazing. In a way it reminded me, in the spooky ghostly sense, of Rania Stephan’s The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosny (2011).

YH: Rania’s a friend, and I’m in love with Soad Hosny. I think she kind of inspired so many of us, you know? So many girls. Sherihan, too. She was wearing these kitsch things, jumping around and dancing.

SM: Sherihan’s TV show was nuts!

YH: Her clothes! But I didn’t find anything good online, and it was cut in such a fast way I couldn’t do a coherent video with this. And I was afraid about rights. So I said, Okay, let me just do something else. But yeah, Sherihan and Soad Hosny and Laila Mourad — I’m completely in love with them.

SM: I was just listening to song of Laila Mourad’s recently that I wanted to use in a video. Now she’s a ghost that I would love to reinvigorate. She gives me the chills.

YH: Which song?

SM: “Min b3eed.” (“From Afar.”) She sings it in the movie Lady on the Train (1953).

YH: The thing with Mourad is that her voice is so particular, you really feel her fragility. It makes me a bit anxious sometimes; you don’t know if she’s going to hit the note or if she’s going to be a little bit under it, though it’s very beautiful either way.

SM: She reminds me of some of Serge Gainsbourg’s women — you never know if the voice is going to crack…

YH: Exactly. It’s like when you’re watching the circus and there’s this guy walking the tightrope and you’re afraid that he’ll fall. And you know Mourad had a hard time, because she was Jewish.

SM: Right! After the 1952 revolution people accused her of being an Israeli spy.

YH: Yeah, but I’m sure she wasn’t.

SM: People are paranoid.

YH: And there was this tremendous frustration in Egypt at that time because the government was being so righteous about nationalism, Arab rights, Palestinian rights, etc. At the same time, people were frustrated that Egypt had ties with Israel. There was this ambient sense that anybody could be dangerous.

SM: It’s a bit like “painted bird” syndrome: You send the painted bird into the flock and the other birds attack it, not recognizing it as their own.

YH: Yes, people like Mourad suffered from this. People like Soad Hosny suffered in a different way and ultimately ended up killing herself.

SM: It isn’t exactly easy to be in the Arab public’s eye.

YH: Well, it has been difficult for me. I’ve been censored. I’m a very free person in my head, and I acted in a free way, so I was singing in that way — but the fact that I was singing Arabic without knowing how to really sing Arabic… I was singing Arabic outside the classical modes. Soapkills was not even considered Arabic music, so we weren’t aired on Arabic TV or Arabic radio. I was singing these sacred songs a bit like a punk. I was wearing the dresses I wanted to wear, I was singing in improvised venues where we weren’t supposed to play. I lived very aggressively.

SM: In your current work you’re drawing on a range of non-Arabic influences, though. What about the song “Samar”?

YH: When I wrote “Samar” I was listening to a lot of Indian, Chinese, Somali, and Sudanese music; I wanted to have a very Hindu melody. It’s sung from the perspective of a woman who is addressing her lover after they’ve spent the night together. But it’s a very decent, modest, and yet really erotic song. We have this a lot in our culture. We leave certain things unsaid; the rest is fantasy. It’s very important for me to be pudique (modest). Singing is very sexual in a way. My voice sounds different depending on how I’m centered. The first several times I recorded “Samar” I couldn’t produce the sensation I wanted. But then I found the tonality. It’s very weird, because you can change the meaning just by taking a bath beforehand, or having a fight with your mother. I’m a moody singer. And it works because I need to access those emotions in order to get beyond the checkpoints of language. I’m singing in Arabic, which is difficult for some people, so I have to use sensuality to attract them, like a siren. I really try to work on how each word can carry the necessary emotion.

SM: And what about the song “Ya Nass”? Tell me about the original song.

YH: To me, Aisha Al Marta, the original singer, is a blurry souvenir of when Kuwait was a very emancipated place, with rich music and art scenes. I like Al Marta’s voice but also her attitude — she’s so rock and roll. That started to change in the Nineties, I think, after the war with Iraq ended. I lived in the Gulf for more than ten years, and I was a very calm, solitary kid. Sometimes when I was watching the national TV stations the cartoons would be cut and replaced by music. This song comes from that time, though I cannot tell you when or how I first heard it. Years later, when I started to search on the internet for musicians I vaguely remembered from when I was young, I heard “Ya Nass” and I was like, “Oh my God, this is her! I know her! I love her.” The same thing happened with Asmahan. Hearing this music again is like experiencing reincarnation.

Artforum, which recently celebrated its fiftieth year with a 554-page anniversary issue, has a kind of megalithic authority in the art world — imposing, storied, seemingly timeless. Founded in California in 1962, it moved to New York in 1967. Philip Leider, its first editor, was a charismatic and severely opinionated young man who became the anchor for an unlikely assortment of critics who wrote as though their — and all our — lives depended on it, producing dozens of definitive essays in the magazine’s distinctive square-shaped pages. Leider left in 1971; his coterie violently dispersed a few years later, and two of them, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, founded October — a journal with a reputation for even more recondite prose than Artforum.

Since that tempestuous epoch, Artforum has only become more formidable. It acquired a varicolored pop edge in the 1980s, when Ingrid Sischy — later the impresario of Interview magazine — opened its pages to a wide range of forms and contents that many of her predecessors had considered beneath interest; either a breath of fresh air or a noseful of garbage, depending on your taste.

The editor in chief of Artforum in these 2010s is Michelle Kuo, a preternaturally fresh-faced Harvard-trained scholar and writer. (Her PhD dissertation considers the odd amalgam of 1960s artists and engineers that went by the name Experiments in Art and Technology.) Kuo, who is Chinese American, hails from the cornfields of Indiana (or at least, a college town amid the corn) and worked in art-related new media ventures during the first dot-com boom. Her tenure as editor interested us in part because we edit a magazine ourselves, and have spent considerable time of late pondering the question of legacy.

Last November, the senior editorship of Bidoun met Kuo at an eerily deserted Le Pain Quotidien near Artforum’s offices to get her take on anniversaries, antagonism, and the state of contemporary criticism.

Negar Azimi: How old were you when you took over Artforum?

Michael C. Vazquez: I would like to point out that I let the woman ask the other woman her age…

Michelle Kuo: Normally people think I’m twelve. I’m thirty-five now, so in May 2010, when I became the editor, I would have been… I’m born in September. Does that mean I was thirty-two?

MV: We don’t really do math…

NA: We have a math intern. Have you read that Janet Malcolm essay on Ingrid Sischy? Who was like— 

MK: Yes, she was twenty-eight or so.

MV: Anyway, you became chief editor before you hit the Jesus age.

MK: Someone always reminds me that Roman Jakobson was nineteen when he wrote his magnum opus.

MV: I would like to point out that it’s crazy that someone always reminds you that. Anyway — so then how did you prepare for the job? Did you go back and read all the back issues as part of that process? Because that is an intimidating archive.

MK: You know, I had already worked here a few years when I changed positions, so there was a — somewhat false, as it turns out — sense of continuity. But in terms of the archive, it’s been a continuous process of reading as much as I can. There were a lot of things that were canonical that I had already read. And I’ve read more and more since I got here. There are always surprises. But preparing for the anniversary issue was the real crunch.

NA: Did you go to them with an agenda or an idea of what you wanted to do as editor in chief? What was your pitch?

MK: There were a couple of things I wanted to change or amp up… and a few things the magazine has always had to contend with. There’s language and readability — the much-discussed style of Artforum. It’s like Rashomon — depending on who’s talking, we either have a completely arcane, academic house style… or we have an almost slick, commercial style. I guess the writing that I most admire can be read on multiple registers — it will have that richness or polysemy. That’s one of the things I aim for and I would say that’s a long-term battle for any editor at this magazine.

Another goal was to make the most of the fact that I come from an art history background, whereas many of my predecessors were coming from a literary or publishing background. So there were certain things I wanted to privilege — certain forms or genres, texts that paid attention to the formal, to put it bluntly. I felt that too much criticism was inattentive to or simply glib about the material or structural characteristics of art today.

The last goal was to really extend the depth and reach of the magazine’s coverage internationally. That’s something I’ve worked very hard on.

One thing you quickly realize is that this institution is bigger than any one person. And you’re often trying to contend with many speeds at once — the speed of the market and the gallery world and the major institutions, and the kind of… longue durée of historical reflection. Eventually you recognize that you’re much more bound to a timetable. But you don’t want to be in lockstep with this churning cycle of the art world. Establishing your own rhythm in that cycle is all part of the practical and conceptual challenge of doing a monthly art magazine. And you do want to drive the conversation somehow. We just put the work of an eighty-year-old Japanese woman on the cover, and she is going to be new to many people.

NA: Who?

MK: Tsuruko Yamakazi. She’s one of the last living members of Gutai. She’s still painting.

MV: We wanted to talk some about how you went about commemorating Artforum’s extraordinary longevity. This question of how to take stock of a literary life, and how to evaluate it. I liked that Cabinet magazine’s tenth anniversary event took the form of a public trial. They charged themselves with lying, political irrelevance, and aesthetic corruption, and then tried to answer the charges.

NA: We’re thinking about this too, because next year Bidoun will be ten years old.

MV: Inshallah.

MK: It was not even remotely on my mind when I took the job. I guess I started talking about the issue with my colleagues a year in advance, trying out different ways to approach it. The first thing I did was look back at earlier anniversary issues. And they were all pretty different. Jack Bankowsky had done both the thirtieth and the fortieth — the fortieth was a double issue about the Eighties. The thirtieth was more straightforward, interviews with previous staff members and some contributions from regulars.

MV: There’s that book Challenging Art that Amy Newman did, which is an oral history of the first… fifteen years of Artforum? And it’s really fantastic—

MK: She did an amazing job. I don’t know how she was able to get all those different people to say so many things on the record. It’s very hard to do that.

NA: Who is she?

MK: She was an editor at ARTnews, and she’s currently writing the biography of Barnett Newman. I had lunch with her — I was trying to do more research on Phil Leider, the founding editor, and she’d talked to him extensively for the book.

MV: He kind of went off to Israel and disappeared, didn’t he?

MK: Well, no — he first went to UC Irvine, and then taught at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. That’s why I always joke that I’m going to retire to a kibbutz when this is over. He really did seem to wipe his hands clean, though. He refused to be interviewed for decades. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the world that he felt so disappointed by, I guess.

MV: Ah. I mean, he’s such an interesting character. It’s weird to say, but I found that book so gripping, the personalities so Olympian. Not least because they take themselves so seriously. I mean, also, I love a well-done oral history more than almost anything. I love that book Edie to death. But there are so many incredible details in Challenging Art — including the fact that the tenth anniversary issue was basically an attack on the idea of Artforum.

MK: Exactly. They had attacked so many positions, they had to attack themselves as well. [Laughs] Obviously, times and contexts have changed very drastically over… half a century. And fifty years is so much text — I don’t think anyone could read it all and have a life. But there are some obvious things — pieces that are very well known, like Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.”

MV: Perhaps less well known: Fried’s entire PhD dissertation on Manet, which took up an entire issue in 1969.

MK: [Laughs] Oh my God. That was wonderful. I’ve had people propose that format to me again, but I don’t think it’s repeatable. Anyway, there were all kinds of texts that were — are — fascinating in their own right. So I thought: What’s a way to revisit those slightly less canonical texts that were important in their time and are still extremely relevant? Almost like a hidden history of the magazine. But I didn’t want to get lost in hagiography — to just wallow in the past. How to look forward as well? I considered various themes that could do this temporal work, and in the end — and because I am, as you know, very much invested in the relation of art and technology, which was central to the era when Artforum started, and is all the more critical now, albeit very differently. So media and technology became the vessel… And those old chestnuts medium and media, which these days strangely span the lexicon of art historians, on the one hand, and Silicon Valley, on the other. So I thought it might be an interesting lens onto contemporary practice.

MV: As well as a very apt way to evoke many of the pivotal moments or conflicts in the magazine’s past.

MK: Yes. And then it turned out that there’s a letter in the archive of an artist named Chuck Csuri — a letter that Leider wrote to an art historian who was pitching an essay about Csuri.

NA: What year?

MK: In 1967. So that was a perfect artifact, dismissive but still prescient — the line was, “I can’t imagine Artforum ever doing a special issue on electronics or computers in art, but one never knows.” And this provided a fitting introduction to the entire anniversary issue, which was a big deal to us, of course — and drew a lot of attention when it came out. It became a nexus of everyone’s anxieties and desires, from every angle you could think of.

MV: Not just a big deal, but also just… big. Like, nearly insurmountably enormous. Because of all the ads. I actually — and I apologize, this is sacrilegious, I know, but — to prepare for our conversation with you I actually had to tear the thing apart, to make sure I didn’t miss any pages with articles on them. And this seems like a thing about Artforum — it’s almost like Playboy for the art market. Okay, that metaphor doesn’t quite work… But I mean — basically if there’s one magazine a gallery is going to advertise in, it’s going to be Artforum. Which in a sense makes it the paper of record, regardless of what happens at the level of ideas or writing. You know what I mean?

Is that something you think about, or have to deal with? And when did it happen, exactly? Challenging Art doesn’t really talk about it, but it doesn’t seem like the early Artforum had that same kind of… commercial savvy or whatever. It was definitely in the red when Leider left.

MK: Well, it sort of went up and down. The first time there was a considerable chunk of advertising was the Eighties. But then the recession hit in the Nineties, so the issues get very slim again. Throughout, though, it’s always been a small operation, very different from magazines owned by big media conglomerates. As to the function of the advertising — there’s an old cliché, that there are people who just read the ads and others who just read the editorial.

MV: I guess I just confessed which kind of person I am. [Laughs]

MK: “Never the two shall meet.” But I actually think there are many people who enjoy both. In terms of sheer volume, this fiftieth anniversary issue is definitely the biggest one ever. But the next largest one was October 2008 —

MV: On the cusp of the bust.

MK: Right. So this relationship between the editorial and the business side, or the lack thereof, is something that everyone is always conscious of and has been for a long time. And there’s no doubt that they implicate each other in terms of reception. But that implication can be generative, it’s something we have to be reflexive about, and it cuts to the core of anxieties surrounding the production and reception of art itself right now.

MV: There’s a story in Challenging Art — it’s basically the very last thing in the book. It’s a really incredible — in the sense of terrible — moment, when John Coplans, who took over from Leider and kind of presided over the breakup of the old group —

MK: Yes.

MV: — and also published a number of pretty influential pieces in a mode that was much more… social history of art, if you will. Including, like, some of the very first articles to talk critically about the CIA and abstract expressionism, which Serge Guilbaut cites as being very influential on the research that became How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

So one night, Coplans is at some opening at the Met and Leo Castelli walks over to him and smiles and says, “I got you fired.” Presumably for running all of these… somewhat Marxist, material culture–type pieces? And reviewing things negatively? Which then led to advertisers withholding money and stuff. Although it’s somewhat contradictory, because it seemed like it was under Coplans that Artforum stopped losing money. And of course this is all transpiring in the wake of the Scull auction, which kind of inaugurates the art world as we know it.

MK: One thing that I still find remarkable about that period, or a little earlier — I’m going back to the really olden days —

MV: Oldener.

MK: — was the idea that you could have a magazine publish “Art and Objecthood,” [Robert Morris’s] “Notes on Sculpture Part 3,” and [Sol LeWitt’s] “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” all in one issue. Held together, in such tension. Because a) the stakes seem so high, and b) these inquests are so diametrically opposed. That is really interesting to me. I suppose because one fears, you know, being too wedded to one gallery’s program, or being too closely aligned with some coterie of artists — on the one hand, that’s exciting, to be part of a moment or movement, but it’s… that’s not necessarily what I’m interested in. So I always find moments when vastly different discourses are held together in tension, even conflict, the most provocative. And Artforum at various times has done that. By the same token, the Eighties are often maligned, but I find it astonishing — the vast range of things they could write about, even just the things that made it onto the cover — 

NA: Those cats smoking cigarettes. [Laughs]

MK: Yeah! Those cats! Wait, did we talk about that, or did you…?

NA: No, I just love it.

MK: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s amazing. I’d always assumed that that cover was tied to a portfolio of an artist’s work — it’s by a Japanese photographer, so I thought it was his portfolio… but no, it’s actually tied to a portfolio about — cats in art? [Everyone laughs] An eight-page portfolio, very serious. Serious and loose at the same time. There’s a humor there that is coupled with the market boom and some very grave issues. The Reagan Revolution. But there was something really fun that I was not expecting. It was a real pleasure, going over those issues, seeing that in action.

MV: Yeah. I really liked how you had people write new material about old material. A lot of it was really great. The Thomas Crow piece in the anniversary issue on Phil Leider’s epiphanic freak-out. And I mean — I had no idea that Lipstick Traces had started off as one of Greil Marcus’s columns in Artforum. About… cowboy philosophers? Which was his way of talking about the Situationist International and The Return of the Durruti Column and the band Gang of Four.

MK: Yeah, insurrection in every form. I mean, the columns. That was one of the things I was struck by —  that no one had revisited, say, Barbara Kruger’s television column. Which was over the top.

NA: I wanted to ask you about art criticism, because there’s such a — it’s not just Artforum — a global mode of being highly congenial. [Kuo laughs] Like, if one did a structural analysis of the average art review, whether it’s theoretically inclined or not, it tends to be thickly descriptive, then there’s some name-checking, some boilerplate, and then… you know, it’s very rare that someone takes a position of any kind. Unless it’s a museum show, I often find—

MK: Yes.

NA: I wonder what you think about all that. Are we talking about a small community of individuals afraid of hurting their friends? Why are the stakes different now? Are there stakes?

MK: Well, I think those are two separate things. One is that the stakes are not what they were. Maybe it’s — and others have said this too — maybe it’s because, in a way, the stakes are higher? So a young artist today is entering into a much larger art market, and a much larger… art meat grinder [laughs apologetically], for lack of a better term, than they were in the early Sixties. They’re not just laboring away in their loft or whatever, making work, and maybe someone will see it, maybe they won’t. They’re entering a more highly public, a more highly professionalized, monetized platform. And one reaction to that is a tempered, timid, critical response — “social grease.”

But the other thing is that I find that a lot of the reviews or writing you’re talking about — I mean, there isn’t even that much description. They’re very knee-jerk. They’ll name-check some references, maybe, but in the end it’s an impoverished version of social art history. They read the work as a very transparent signifier for some sort of social or economic context, like neoliberalism… or whatever. That is a very reduced state of criticism, and that’s something that I hope to militate against. My secret is that I’m actually a reactionary formalist…

MV: [Laughs]

MK: Not so secret now, I guess! But I’ve always admired the way Yve-Alain Bois looks at very limited bodies of work — for example that of Barnett Newman, who only made, like, 140 paintings in his lifetime, or Mondrian — almost like a closed system. And within that system he can identify generative devices that everyone else was blind to — and how they change over time. It’s a stunning recognition — to be able to see, suddenly, how Mondrian is inventing new pictorial systems, piece by piece. Similarly, it was a revelation to hear him unpack what happened, month by month, between Braque and Picasso in 1912. To me, that type of piercing visual and theoretical acumen is very much missing from art criticism today.

MV: That’s great. But I’m not really sure what that means? I mean, part of what’s confusing to me is that, as I barely understand it, Artforum 1.0 was reactionarily formalist, and then when that consensus broke down it was over the question of pluralism… Or diversity of media? Like if they wanted to do an issue on film or dance or whatever, it was the end of the world.

MK: Well, there are different types of formalism, and the kind I am talking about is as far from mere description as it is from no description at all. Certain parts of the early Artforum were definitely wedded to Greenbergian formalism, which is itself a kind of impoverished way of looking at things (mere description, and often poor description at that). That’s what you’re talking about when you say “Artforum 1.0.” But that early Artforum was just as engaged with the breakdown of Greenbergian formalism, of medium specificity and purity — Smithson, Minimalism, LeWitt, they’re all figureheads of that very move to the heterogeneity and promiscuity of postwar art.

And then Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss turned to this incredibly generative discourse around structuralism and Russian formalism, which at its best is also the very opposite of Greenberg. They opened up the magazine to film, etc. And I guess I feel very indebted to that approach — that it can be reinvigorated today. But that’s not to say that you couldn’t have a lot of other approaches. In fact, I think that any theoretical apparatus is just one of many that you could apply, case by case. Anyway, when I say “reactionary formalism,” that’s a bit of a provocation, but [laughs]… the kind of formalism I’m talking about seems like the least employed but most potent weapon that people are not using right now.

MV: Weapon… in what fight?

MK: In the struggle to understand, or bestow some kind of meaning onto, works of art. And, what’s more, onto the incredible shifts in perception and sensation that we’re undergoing at this moment in time.

NA: Or just to look. People don’t… do people look enough?

MK: People definitely don’t look enough…

MV: I think part of what I’m still unsure about is the stakes? I think this is all impacted by spending time in the stark discursive universe of the early Artforums, which can feel like another planet. There’s something funny and interesting and kind of appealing about the way they talk. And not that many people sound like this. I feel like I encountered this language in the Nineties reading the New Republic — reading Marty Peretz, who is, like, a racist dick who writes with sweeping, almost thrilling moralism —

MK: Right! Yeah.

MV: Or Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor there — those two guys would write things, and I would be like, “There is something just almost intrinsically compelling to this rhetoric.” And Philip Leider totally has that.

MV: Yes.

MV: This somewhat crazy, super moralizing discourse, but it’s literally thought provoking. Like at the end of Challenging Art, Amy Newman gets various people to talk about legacy. And most of them are like, “Oh, I don’t know, blah blah blah.” And then Leider is like, “We need to do a thought experiment about how we cannot even imagine what the world would be like, what world we would be in, if Robert Smithson hadn’t died in 1973.” He’s like, “What if nothing that we know Picasso for had happened? What if Picasso had died in 1908? Because that’s what happened to us.” I love that.

MK: Right. This kind of apodictic —

MV: But then even back then, let alone now, I don’t quite get the stakes. They’re all like, “We’re holding the line.” [Kuo laughs] And I’m like, “I don’t know what you are holding the line against.” And, like, what’s… who’s on the other side of the line?

MK: One of them actually says, “It’s nothing less than the fate of Western civilization that is at stake.” It was a culture war, and they felt as if it could determine the very outcome of society. You know, the other thing — it’s from that book, too — is when Rosalind Krauss says that suddenly they went from that sort of belletristic, wishy-washy language to art criticism, to a language that was hard, that was verifiable, that could generate these kind of empirical statements and judgments. And that this was a revelation. I still feel like that is the font for all of what comes afterward. Even though it’s a very schismatic breakup. And that legacy of legitimation or apodictic pronouncement is still something that people associate with Artforum. But it’s not the same, obviously. There’s no way that we could still do that with the same effect.

One thing that I find interesting is that some of the most strident critics of that time were artists themselves, talking about their fears, criticizing other artists. And that is just — it’s the dodo, I mean, you will never have that happen again. Which I totally understand… But that mood, I find so amazing.

NA: You don’t think it’s possible again?

MK: I don’t know if it’s possible again. Right now, it seems like… it’s not possible.
 But to get back to that question about what the stakes are today — to me it seems like there’s a lot of criticism that essentially functions as glorified press releases. And it may be old-fashioned to think that that’s not all that there is, but…

NA: You mean that sets the tone…

MK: Yeah, or it becomes a very watered-down discourse. People are not really engaging what they see or how they perceive. That, in and of itself, makes a difference. So someone like Fried — even if he came to the “wrong” conclusions about Minimalism, etc. — paying that much attention to an artist’s work would be beneficial in this day and age, when most people go and just read the press release, or look at the Tumblr post, and come away with a very prescribed, one-sentence understanding of what that work was about. There’s no risk. Even Warhol would be way too bored by that, I think.

NA: Can we talk for a second about what might be the most controversial image in the history of Artforum? I’m talking about that centerfold image of Lynda Benglis, where she’s holding a dildo to her crotch.

MV: And she’s naked, and has very prominent tan lines, and sunglasses. It actually looks like an outtake from some lost X-rated Duran Duran video.

NA: As I know you know, Benglis claimed that she was making a point about the “male ethos” of the art world. But the image was denounced as exploitative and brutalizing… by the two female members of Artforum’s inner circle, in fact. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson both cited it when they resigned from the magazine to start October, though of course there were many factors that led to that little apocalypse.

MV: Cindy Sherman supposedly said that that image changed her life.

NA: But I feel like there’s an echo of this in — whether you call it political art or not — a certain body of work that is highly celebrated not for its formal qualities but because of its social mission or ethos or its supposed politics. In these cases it looks like the content — the so-called "good politics" — trumps formal or other considerations, and ends the conversation before it’s begun, really. Which is a shame.

MK: If I can read a description of a work and that’s all that you need to know about the work, it’s probably not a very interesting work. [Laughs] Even the dematerialization of the object, or the advent of institutional critique — they did produce things, like paperwork… or experiences, like seeing rearranged studs on a wall. Or audio guides… those sorts of artifacts, or just ephemeral moments, are themselves crucial! But this is also a false dichotomy; form and content are inseparable. And so to change someone’s perceptual experience might be to change their experience as a political subject as well. This is what the Russian formalists were talking about in terms of defamiliarization, of “estranging” one’s perception in a literally revolutionary way. I think that’s still an interesting model of how to think through subject matter or politics in tandem with apprehensible form. So the first thing I would say is, I think this question, or this answer, is still very much with us today. And I think a lot of what people are describing when they try to reconcile political content and sensuous form — from the “redistribution of the sensible” to the renewed interest in materiality and the “agency of objects” — is still in the mold of defamiliarization.

Now, whether or not defamiliarization is really possible nowadays, in a consumerist era, in which our perceptual capacities are being upgraded all the time by new technologies and products… That’s a very good question, I think, and it’s the dilemma that we confront now.

MV: So then would you, as editor of Artforum, have published that Lynda Benglis image, do you think?

MK: What? [Laughter] I mean, honestly, I wasn’t there, so —

MV: Because that’s somehow related to this question, in a way.

MK: I think the circumstances are very different. And would I, at that historically specific moment in time, would I have found it objectionable? I don’t think I can know, because it was both an extremely political and personal debate. The people involved couch it in different ways. You can talk about it in terms of the division between editorial and advertising.

MV: Right.

MK: Because she actually placed that image in the magazine as an advertisement for her upcoming show. But then there’s the role of feminism and whether hers was an antifeminist stance. But — I would just have to say I don’t know. Because I wasn’t there at the time.

NA: I have a question about writing, because I know from personal experience that you’re an uncommonly writerly editor. Above and beyond Artforum, just in general. So I was wondering what… worries you, or doesn’t worry you, about criticism today? People love to moan that art magazines are unreadable. To what extent does that concern you? And if it does — what are you doing, if anything, to address that?

MK: Well, one thing I’ve tried to do more of is artists’ projects, where you don’t necessarily need a lot of explanation. So you might just be confronted with a very weird or compelling set of images, and that’s it. We’ve also introduced a type of piece that’s just one writer on one work — a close reading. Writerly-wise, I favor clear prose — but necessarily not simplistic prose. There’s a difference. Whether this means using short sentences or specialized terms or an arch or seductive tone, I like language that says something and conveys ideas, an argument. Even a mood. As you know, we have a lot of writers who have their own highly identifiable style, which is something that I really love and enjoy. So long as they are not unnecessarily, self-indulgently obfuscating — you know, contrary to the myth of Artforum, I think everyone here is committed to hacking our way out of that forest of obfuscation. We may not always be successful, but we try. Blood, sweat, and tears.

NA: Who are your favorite critics?

MK: I mean… I can’t go on record and answer that, because I think all of our critics are amazing.

MV: Of course — you love all your children. [Laughs] What about: Who are your favorite critics… who don’t write for you?

MK: Well, somebody whose writing I love, who has written for us, actually, but is just in a different world, is Peter Galison. He’s a historian of science, but he’s also an incredible writer. And he tackles very arcane subjects — I mean, it’s sort of an impossible task to make, say, the history of particle physics labs [laughs] interesting, but he really does. I’m also a vehement devotee of mystery — I do like when there’s suspense to a text. It might be a cheap thrill on my part, I don’t know, but it’s —

MV: No, I believe that just means that you like the essay, a form we’ve had for several hundred years [Kuo laughs], and which works by making you excited about something that’s about to happen.

MK: But not that many essays successfully do that! I’m trying to think of other writers — M. F. K. Fisher. Agatha Christie. Louis Marin. These are just off the top of my head. Writers I take a lot of pleasure in.

MV: Have we talked about how I think a vastly underrated form of prose — even underrated by her publisher, who insists on publishing her works without the prose from the original editions — is to be found in Marcella Hazan’s early cookbooks?

MK: I know, yes!

MV: Those original mass-market paperback versions of her books are some of my favorites. They have some of the finest uses of language to describe sensual objects that I’ve ever read. Speaking of engaging what you see — and feel, and taste.

MK: I actually grew up with her cookbook. My mother had it.

MV: Oh my fucking God.

MK: I know. I know! And you’re right, food writing is really —

MV: We’ve been working on all these interviews and at one point I thought: I just need to interview people that I like. And the person — actually the people — that I like most — who I don’t know at all — are Marcella Hazan and her husband Victor, who is like the secret sharer in all her books.

NA: Is she Lebanese?

MV: No, but her mom grew up in Alexandria. She’s totally Bidoun.

NA: I know who she is. She’s got the right eyebrows.

MV: She’s 110 percent Bidoun.

MK: Can I be Bidoun because of the Silk Road or something?

MV: Obviously.

NA: That’s why you’re here. [Laughter] Mike is Bidoun because of his eyebrows.

MV: The eyebrows are Mexican. It’s actually because I’m from one of the great Middle Eastern cities in the world: Detroit!

MK: Detroit. [Laughs] It’s true! I know.

MV: People don’t know.

Last August, Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo showcased its newly renovated facilities with a suite of high-profile international exhibitions that colonized every inch of the expanded space (and even some of the surrounding park). Dueling group shows commandeered the more traditional galleries, while solo projects by professional enigmas like Pierre Huyghe and Ryan Gander took the atrium and staff entrance. Amid the Hiroshima mobiles and the Sol LeWitt repurposed as a kitty gym, it was easy to overlook the swinging doors tucked away in a small, dark gallery just under the stairs off the atrium. In the context of the recent renovation, these doors almost read like relics of the museum’s past, each marked with telltale institutional traces — classroom numbers or no-smoking signs. The five doors were mounted in freestanding metal frames and lined up in a gauntlet that led to a smaller, darker room, where a film was playing. Viewers had to pass through at least one door in order to access the film; along the way, they were conscripted, willingly or not, as the artist’s accomplices. Their mission was simple: using borrowed math, the artist and his viewer would prove nothing less than the existence of the Devil.

Artist Michael Stevenson derives this "New Math" — and the name of his exhibition — from a calculus of vandalized paintings, stuffed peacocks, silver balloons, false eyelashes, deposed Shahs, unshaved barbers, planes that never take off, planes that never land, and an ace of clubs that never shows its face. The film in the inner chamber — Stevenson’s twenty-five-minute Introducción a la Teoría de la Probabilidad, 2008 — never reveals the exact equation. Instead it lays out the various elements like a hand of solitaire; to make sense of any of it, one has no choice but to uncover the cards in the order in which the artist has dealt them. In the process, the viewer is enlisted as Stevenson’s co-conspirator, a double for an artist whose practice draws from a constantly expanding catalog of coincidences and conflations, doppelgangers and dead ringers.

The film opens with found footage culled from a black-and-white slide show of an introductory textbook on statistics. It begins with a slow scroll though the opening pages: place and time (Panama, 1979); title (Introducción a la Teoría de la Probabilidad, the same as Stevenson’s film); an author’s name (José de Jesús Martínez). In an oddly intimate gesture for a visual aid, the fourth slide is a dedication, a list of the author’s loved ones. What follows is an assortment of illustrations that explain the key concepts of continuity through varying configurations of playing cards. An unseen narrator glides her smooth, accented Spanish over a soft soundtrack that simulates the clicking of a projector: In mathematics, there are things that are true, there are things that are false. There are things that are true that can never be proved. There are things that are false that can never be disproved.

Stevenson cuts these found slides into his own color footage of pale, male hands peeling rubber bands off decks of playing cards, then dealing them out against a deep blue background. In the first stack, several cards are out of place — the queen of spades before her jack, a six after a seven, the ace of clubs missing all together. As the hand reshuffles the deck, the soothing voice reminds viewers that probability means something because it is something; coincidence can only have the meaning it is arbitrarily assigned. In other words, the likelihood of the ace of clubs being drawn three times in a row remains 1:52 for each draw (that is, if the card is even in the deck).

Stevenson has spent more than two decades investigating the coincidences and interconnected histories underpinning the global economy. The narratives that the artist assembles from this research rarely resemble those in textbooks, eschewing clarity and focus in favor of a broader understanding of “cause” and “effect.” For example, the artist’s 2006 project, Answers to Some Questions about Bananas, embarked from New Zealand’s quixotic attempt in the late 1960s to produce a national automobile (using Czechoslovakian parts, no less) and arrived at the Phillips Machine, an analog computer that modeled an economy as a hydraulic system. Stevenson’s subsequent investigation into the American manufacture of this machine (thoughtfully rebranded “The MONIAC”) leads the artist — and, subsequently, his viewer — to the Central Bank of Guatemala and its biggest customer, the United Fruit Company. Although this endeavor would ultimately prove (in a word) fruitless, Stevenson’s artistic practice privileges the quest over its objective. For this and other exhibition projects, he inscribes traces of his unanswered questions into what he calls “objects of intrigue,” surrogate stagings that reenact or recall findings from the artist’s research, perhaps hoping that the viewer will be prompted to conduct his or her own. Should the viewer comply, however, often it is to discover Stevenson’s findings may be as much speculation as revelation. The deck may have been stacked.

Another example. For the 2005 installation The Smiles Are Not Smiles, Stevenson fashioned fake gold-leaf bricks to stand in for those that constituted Armenian artist Zadik Zadikian’s 1978 solo show Gold Bricks. The inaugural exhibition for soon-to-be-super-dealer Tony Shafrazi’s debut gallery in Tehran, Gold Bricks also would be its last. Founded with the blessing of the Shah of Iran (or more precisely, of his wife, the Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, a dedicated advocate for the arts), Shafrazi’s space opened during an early wave of uprisings, a harbinger of the revolution that would eventually oust the Shah from his empire. Gilded bricks made easy bait for looters, and the installation was destroyed before it could even be documented. Almost thirty years later, Stevenson conjured this lost exhibition space via a deliberately fragmentary stage set at Vilma Gold in London. A gold-rimmed glass door marks the entrance to this gallery-within-a-gallery, where Stevenson presented a riff on Zadikian’s wall of gilded “bricks” in an intentionally “semi-looted state.” A dramatic reenactment of a historical destruction, the piece is perpetually suspended between theater and history, presence and absence. The self-negation extends even to Stevenson’s title, which quotes one of Shafrazi’s colleagues, architect Kamran Diba — director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, another of the Shahbanou’s pet projects — as he describes the rising tensions in the last days of the empire: “It was like a storm. The smiles were not smiles. The sun does not have a glow.”

Stevenson’s fascination with Shafrazi preceded this work, and it would resurface in a series of projects to come, with each detail revealed always leading to another card underneath. Shafrazi himself was a wild card, a little-known conceptual artist, born in Iran but working mainly in New York. On February 28, 1974, Shafrazi would gain notoriety for walking into the Museum of Modern Art and scrawling “KILL LIES ALL” across the surface of Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece Guernica. The act was explicitly premeditated, down to the choice of a red paint that could be — and was — easily removed. In the December 1980 issue of Art in America, Shafrazi gave a rousing defense of his actions:

I wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life. Maybe that’s why the Guernica action remains so difficult to deal with. I tried to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; I wanted to dwell within the act of the painting’s creation, get involved with the making of the work, put my hand within it and by that act encourage the individual viewer to challenge it, deal with it, and thus see it in its dynamic raw state as it was being made, not as a piece of history.

This oft-quoted statement betrays a remarkable affinity with Stevenson’s own strategy. His “objects of intrigue” act at a similar remove, staging tableaus of a given historical event or exchange as a way of returning that history to its “raw state,” thus freeing it to embark on a new autonomous life. Not insignificantly, this tactic also forces the viewer to “deal with it.”

In a 2009 interview with curator Nav Haq, the artist cites his own hyperrealistic drawing of a photograph of Guernica in the process of restoration (once again preferring the aftermath of destruction to the moment of creation). Stevenson’s copy, which appeared in a newspaper and then online, was so faithfully rendered that it could have been — and perhaps was? — mistaken for the original photo. As Haq points out, there’s no way to be certain whether what was printed was the archival image or its pretender.

There are things that are false that can never be disproved.

After “the Guernica action,” Shafrazi retreated to Italy for several months, before returning to Iran in 1976. There he would be taken under the wing of Kamran Diba, who would introduce him to his cousin the empress (née Farah Diba). Her favor would allow Shafrazi to rise from one of the art world’s most notorious vandals into one of its preeminent power brokers. The Shahbanou was one of the leading art patrons of the early seventies, purchasing art for her new Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and bringing international artists to perform at her Shiraz Arts Festival. Founded in 1967, the annual event was set in a city a stone’s throw from Persepolis, the ancient ceremonial capital of Persia. Built in the fifth century BCE by the ruler Darius the Great, the city is deeply tied to the mythology surrounding his predecessor, Cyrus the Great, the ravenous conqueror who would famously crown himself “King of the Four Corners of the Earth.”

Two and half millennia later, the Shah would make a similarly outrageous claim, declaring himself Emperor and inscribing his “Peacock Throne” in Cyrus’s lineage at what was arguably the biggest party of the twentieth century — an elaborate three-day feast at Persepolis. The roster of witnesses made for an impressive census, a mismatched deck of too many face cards: “Nine kings, three ruling princes, two crown princes, thirteen presidents, ten sheiks, and two sultans,” according to a tally by writer Michael Clark. These esteemed visitors were housed in more than fifty guest tents, arranged in a star formation around the Shah’s quarters in the Tent of Honor. Each tent was lushly outfitted by the French firm Maison Jensen and included thoughtful touches like air conditioning and servant’s quarters. In the banquet hall, peacocks were taxidermic and used as table decorations, or grilled and stuffed with foie gras, only to be followed with a sorbet of Möet 1911. The desire to impress had the opposite effect; while the spectacle of wealth did bring a people together, it mostly served to unite them against their leader. As for Persepolis? Clark reported:

… Little remains aside from the skeletal steel frames and the scraps of bleached and tattered fabrics, flapping in the wind. There are vague plans to turn the site into a holiday camp. For now, the only subsequent addition is a hand-painted sign, erected by the current regime. A quote from the Qur’an, it warns the curious visitor: “examine what your predecessors did and learn a lesson.”

For the 2007 edition of Art Basel Unlimited, Stevenson modeled a tent on the remains Clark described — the ruins of the party at the ruins. In lieu of the original steel structure, the artist draped cardboard with artificially distressed cloth, which he embellished with pine needles, bones, and false eyelashes. Symbolically speaking, his Persepolis 2530 served as both a reckoning and a wager, infiltrating the commercial space of the art fair right at the market’s most lurid; in that moment, its impending crash seemed as likely as a 2,500-year-old empire dying over a dinner party.

The artist accompanied this object with the palm-size volume Celebration at Persepolis (Christoph Keller Editions, 2008). The book shuffles through the major players of the story, picking them out like cards from the deck: HIM, Her, Her architect, Monarchists, Revolutionaries, and so on. Each character is distilled to a sum of distinct impressions and momentary images: Warhol’s silver balloons being discovered amid the guns in the armory, or those same balloons being brought to the lips of the Shah’s granddaughter, mistaken for a toy.

There are things that are true that can never be proved. There are things that are false that can never be disproved.

Stevenson might have imagined he would be leaving the Persian Empire behind when he accepted a commission for the fifth Panama Biennial in 2008. It turned out that he was only following the story to its illogical conclusion. Forced to flee Iran in 1979, the Shah, his wife, and their family had embarked on a fourteen-month trek. One of the stops on this tour of exile was Isla Contadora, a leisure destination off the coast of Panama where conquering Spaniards used to go to count (contar) their pearls. Celebrated as the “Jewel of the Pearl Islands,” the resort had just enough casinos to keep the Pahlavis entertained, if not amused.

History teaches that cards can come in handy during an island exile; at least two types of solitaire have been attributed to Napoleon, purportedly invented during his sojourn on St. Helena. The Shah’s time on Contadora — from roughly December 1979 until March 1980 — was passed in similar pursuits. Indeed, witnesses wondered if it would not have been more dignified for him to have died in a battle for his country than to waste away at a tropical resort, posing for pictures with Panamanian tourists. The Shah maintained that his first duty was to preserve his bloodline, to spite the damnable math that had reduced a 2,538-year dynasty to “one household suite and two dogs” (“introverted” poodles, at that, we are told). That number was to be even further reduced, as the Shah himself was quietly entering the final stages of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was reputedly the fourth richest man in the world. (When the British journalist David Frost speculatively offered to buy him out for $1 billion dollars, the Shah replied that he must refuse to comment on such matters until he saw anything on paper. “And besides, you don’t have a billion dollars… do you?”) Even the King of Kings understood that he could not purchase his way out of death. And so he played cards on Contadora.

That the Shah found himself in Panama at all — “a passage rather than a destination” — was the outcome of another high-stakes gamble, one that involved then–U.S. President Jimmy Carter handing over the much-disputed Canal Zone to General Omar Torrijos Herrera, “Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution.” This is the story told over the cards in Introducción a la Teoría de la Probabilidad. As the textbook slide show gives way to footage of the pale forearm counting out the decks, Stevenson’s narrator shifts from outlining the principles of probability and continuity into speculation on the Shah’s stay in Panama. The script recasts the Canal Zone negotiations as a type of flexible algorithm, in which the probability of Ronald Reagan entering the next hand might affect the value of the King of Kings in the cards currently on the table.

Stevenson draws his narrative from the memoirs of another wild card by the name of José de Jesús Martínez, revered by all as “Chuchú.” “Panamanian by choice,” Chuchú was a native Nicaraguan who became deeply involved in the political histories of both his countries. Having studied at the Sorbonne — he would later converse with the Shah in an easy French — Chuchú began his career as a professor of Marxism. Changing political tides soon swept him to mathematics, a field in which he would publish many a text (including the source material for the slide show in Stevenson’s film). In the professor’s spare time, he made a name for himself as a pilot, poet, and playwright, an occasional philosopher and perennial philanderer, and an outspoken advocate for (and known harborer of) refugees from neighboring dictatorships. Chuchú was the type of man who ordered his wine by the political regime, rather than the vintage; it was said that he never imbibed any Argentine wines produced during Pinochet’s reign. A chance encounter with an elite Panamanian guerrilla warfare unit — the Wild Pigs — led to his close bond with General Torrijos, who recognized the professor as a kindred spirit, eventually promoting him to a place of honor as his personal bodyguard. After the general’s death in a 1981 plane crash, Chuchú recorded his experience in Mi General Torrijos (1987), the memoir that would serve as one of Stevenson’s primary sources.

Three years prior to Mi General Torrijos, the British author Graham Greene would publish a memoir of his own, genially titled Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement. Greene crafts his account as a collection of coincidences, starting with the author’s first day in Panama. He leaves the hotel with the wrong bodyguard, sent to pick up another Senõr Greene. From there, the story plays out like a poker game, a continual re-combination of facts, figures, and face cards. (One example? On Contadora, the Shah of Iran dined with Patty Hearst, who was there on a honeymoon with Bernard Shaw — the son of a San Francisco fireman, not the Irish playwright — her former bodyguard.) The book itself is haunted by its abortive twin, the novel Greene had originally planned to write about the general and his bodyguard. That novel, tentatively titled On the Way Back — Chuchú’s constant refrain during their adventures — was never written, but it is described at length within Getting to Know the General. At one point, Greene humorously depicts his reluctance to inform Chuchú that his fictional doppelganger was doomed to die in a plane crash, mere hours before the mutually assured seduction of a sultry European journalist. Chuchú was thrilled, immediately quoting a line from Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”: I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above. But in a sick twist, fate would assign Chuchú’s fictional ending to his beloved general, whose very real demise no bodyguard could have foreseen.

In both of these accounts, facts are always flexible and reckoning shaky at best, events just as likely to have occurred as to have never happened. This may make sense for the novelist, but for a professor of mathematics, Chuchú was remarkably casual in his practice. When asked how many children he had, he shrugged: “About twelve, I think.” Greene relates another instance of his disarmingly flexible understanding of the discipline:

He showed me a short book he had published with the title, The Theory of Insinity.

“What on earth is insinity?” I asked.

“Oh, well, you see, I had lost a front tooth and when I was lecturing I found I was saying ‘insinity.’”

Just as Stevenson seems determined to emancipate his subjects from their own status as “a piece of history,” so Chuchú sought to return mathematics to its “dynamic, raw state.”

In mathematics, there are things that are true, there are things that are false.

But what of the things which are neither?

The narrator of Introducción a la Teoría de la Probabilidad calculates that the number of possible permutations of a deck of cards yields a figure sixty-eight digits long — “a tribute to the typographic beauty of the factorial function.” In this instance, the probability of a deck ever being shuffled the same way is infinitesimally small. The probability for a close approximation, while still very small, is naturally slightly higher. These unfathomable figures aside, one must remember that all instances of probability can still be contained in the space between the one and the zero, the yes and the no, the true and the false.

On this kind of scale, the bodyguard is always somewhere in the middle, neither fully present nor fully absent. This quintessential conundrum likens him to another figure of fascination for Stevenson, the barber in Bertrand Russell’s parable about set theory. The question is simple, but its ramifications are immense: If the only barber in town shaves every man who does not shave himself, who shaves the barber?

If a village barber can nick a foundational assumption about how things are counted, it stands to reason that a demon could disrupt our understanding of entropy. In 1871, Scottish physicist James Maxwell published the proposal that the second law of thermodynamics could be overturned by the act of a single demon — heretofore known as “Maxwell’s devil” — opening a secret door (The probability of this happening did not factor in. The emphasis is on that there is likeliness at all.) According to Greene, Chuchú advocated a similar belief, although he scrambled the variables, concluding that a single door could attest to the presence of the devil. “‘Haven’t you noticed,” he said, ‘when you try to open a swing door, you always begin by pushing it the wrong way? That’s the Devil.’”

It is a rare Marxist who does not believe in God but swears that the existence of the devil can be proven by the swing of a door. To understand more about this man and his liberal application of the laws of physics, Stevenson returned to Panama in 2011, when he interviewed the professor’s friends and former colleagues, hoping to glean more information or anecdotes that might help the artist piece together the specifics of Chuchú’s proof. This research would constitute the basis of the “New Math” calculated by the swinging doors at the Museo Tamayo.

As an addendum to the exhibition, Stevenson republished one of Chuchú’s more theological tracts, a slender volume called Theory of Flight, which the artist had printed on airmail paper as a feather-light leaflet. The essay inside addresses the specific considerations of piloting a plane, before giving way to a meditation on life, death, and the pursuit of certainty. “The things one needs to know in order to fly a plane are few and quite straightforward,” Chuchú writes. “But they all share that unique quality that places them, in terms of dignity, far above any other kind of knowledge: we stake our lives on them — not in a theoretical or abstract manner, but in a very real way, here, now, bathed in oil, burnt, lying in a heap of red-hot metal and tin.” It would seem that, for the bodyguard, true value lies in accountability for one’s own life: “What could all the wisdom of a theologian or a metaphysicist who never has to pay for his mistakes or profit from his successes possibly be worth next to a pilot’s knowledge of the relationship between temperature and oil pressure, on which life itself depends from departure to arrival?”

“A pilot may not be a man of learning,” Chuchú concludes, “but he is wise, because the little he knows is as valuable as human life, and that little knowledge he possesses is a treasure that he continually examines, mends and polishes.” While this may come as consolation to Chuchú the pilot, the mathematics professor is still left with doubt: “This is how I’d like to know whether or not God exists. This is how I’d like to know that two plus two equals four. This is how I’d like to know everything, so that everything might be a risk and every piece of knowledge a reward.”

There are things that are true that can never be proved.

Statistics insists that past events have no bearing on the event at hand, and the desire that they should only leads to what textbooks call “subjective probability.” After all, every one knows that after the same card has been drawn twice, the probability of it being drawn a third time remains 1:52.

At the end of Stevenson’s film, the narrator poses the question: How many winning hands are still possible when the first player has already the Ace of Clubs? But this question is no longer relevant, as we already know from earlier that the ace of clubs has gone missing from this deck. For his part, Stevenson never seems too interested in who is holding the ace, anyway; like Chuchú, it’s only the devil he’s out to prove.

There is, however, one last card that Stevenson has yet to play, and what probability could explain it? It is an image of Chuchú, pulled up by the algorithm of an internet search engine. The portrait is cropped close in the manner of a book jacket author photo. The bodyguard’s head is cocked at a confessional angle, his eyes locked on the viewer. He could be entirely naked, although that’s not likely; it is likely, however, that he is mostly naked. He appears to be on his hammock, but his eyes burn with napless intensity. He is using two hands to hold one card. It is printed with an image of Guernica.

The deck is always stacked, the voice concludes at the end of the slide show. Mathematics is infinite.

By Stevenson’s calculations, it is also insinite.

New York

Slavs and Tatars: Beyonsense

Museum of Modern Art

August 15–December 10, 2012

Legend has it that during his tenure as curator of the Museum of Natural History in New York, the anthropologist Franz Boas liked to chain hefty catalogs to the displays. There was no other labeling — if you wanted to find out what you were looking at, you had to find the relevant entry in the book and read up on it. Imperiously academic, perhaps, but it did offer the viewer a clear choice between a primarily visual experience and one based on reading and looking in equal measures. The Museum of Modern Art, however, has never demanded much reading of its audience, hewing close to a history of modernism that privileges looking over reading even when the work’s medium is text. But several recent MoMA shows have smuggled language out of the library and into the gallery, through projects that demand understanding of their textual basis if one is to grasp their contours. Beyonsense, the Slavs and Tatars’ first solo show at a US institution, attempts just such a balancing act.

Form is still an important lure, and the objects that make up Beyonsense have a punchy appeal of their own. The installation is divided into two areas by a curtain of rugs, with a museum-style display outside and a darkened reading room within. The three glass cases outside hold bizarre juxtapositions that could easily hold their own in the Surrealist galleries: a wooden cucumber on an bookstand draped with embroidery (A Dear for the Dear), a turban made of wheat placed next to a brick (Wheat Mollah), and a row of neatly skewered books (Kitab Kebab, all 2012). The book titles (on mystical Islam and Russian folklore) give clues as to the collective’s interests, while a striped branch hanging near the ceiling, covered like a shrine relic with cloth ties, adds another: Long Live the Syncretics refers to the history of religious melding that informs the research at the heart of the show. The exhibition’s name, Beyonsense, is a playful translation of the Russian Futurist concept of zaum, or the transrational. And so, Slavs and Tatars offer up a poetic approach that aims to reveal the sensory, incommensurable aspects of language.

Beyond the wall of carpets is the dark room they have elsewhere referred to as a “psychedelic Muslim library.” The subject here is a single letter, or more accurately, a phoneme (which also forms the title of their 2012 book): Khhhhhh, that throat-constricting sound common to a number of languages, among them Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic. The letters are cartoonishly drawn hands on a white-tiled platform (Kha-Kha-Kha) with a fountain spurting murky red liquid (Reverse Joy) surrounded by carpeted benches where the artist books are chained, Boas-style, to the seats. Two large mirrors decorate the space, one announcing “MOTHER TONGUES & FATHER THROATS” (Kha Giveth), the other featuring a diagram of a mouth inscribed with letters based on their pronunciation (Kha Taketh Away, all 2012).

The effect of the dim room is relaxing, disarming even. But once you squint through the lurid light and begin to read the books, a more strident argument takes shape. The disparate objects create a visual constellation of ideas, a mise-en-scène for an alternative history of modernity that drew its inspiration from mysticism rather than rational utopianism. The green neon light that suffuses the space, for example, is an installation inspired by a minimalist installation by Dan Flavin created for the Masjid al-Farah (known as “the Dia mosque”; see Bidoun #23), one of the many “mystical episodes” within canonical modernity that footnotes these objects.

It is tempting to give in to the circuitous byways offered by Slavs and Tatars’ texts — to understand their work through the funhouse of hidden histories, etymological coincidences, and sociopolitical texts and subtexts that dot their somewhat attention-deficit narratives. Stories form the body of the work and its many manifestations: books, multiples, lecture-performances, guest presentations, and even, in this case, a children’s drawing session organized by the art space Forever & Today, which featured a tiny installation of melon-shaped lamps (Never Give Up the Fruit) in their downtown storefront, a point of departure for another story involving fruits, kidnapped princesses, and even political Islam.

It is also tempting to fault their work for failing to be either research or art proper — for raising serious sociopolitical questions without doing the academic spadework needed to support them. (This charge is frequently made upon the “research-based” art of the past decade.) But neither definition can truly fit Slavs and Tatars’ multi-tentacled approach: ultimately, the goal of Beyonsense is neither argument nor commentary nor interpretation. Strewn like so many exhibits in a modernist-Oriental murder mystery (say, Alain Robbe-Grillet meets Orhan Pamuk), the quasi-coherent juxtapositions of historic fact and chatty trivia are organized not for clarity but for a perverse poetic truth. Research is less driven by a hypothesis than by curiosity, and that voracious curiosity is what lingers after the details have been forgotten.

There are dangers, of course, to open-ended curiosity. The wooden cucumber of A Dear for the Dea may aspire to invoke Eastern hospitality and fructiferous myth (explained extensively and hilariously in one of their books), but it also looks like a dildo on a Quran stand. The risk is less blasphemy than easy access: the work could be dismissed as another exotic sound bite, the artists’ insistence on the dark and subversive side of their strategically lowbrow means notwithstanding. Misunderstanding is clearly a strategy they have embraced in its productive as well as perilous possibilities. You might say what they lose in clarity they gain in agility, a nimble scrambling through histories that might not be reconcilable through conventional means.

Taken as an experiential whole, the knowledge offered by Beyonsense is less a linear study of causes and effects than a proposition for a more intuitive understanding of the world: an invitation to learning that winks from a place just beyond the limits of our comprehension, all the more seductive for its combination of enthusiasm and inaccessibility. Texts, images, and objects entice the viewer toward an unforeseen, if not entirely unlikely, place where minimalism and mysticism just might make sense together, where a guttural khhhhh connects disparate histories of art, faith, and politics. The most hospitable home for these oblique statements may well be an art gallery, where the emphasis on seeing over reading means that they can be taken together or independently, as visual or verbal poetry. It’s a delicate balancing act, but one that Beyonsense pulls off, not through the persuasiveness of its arguments, but through its faith in the intuition and interest of its audience.

Memoirs of an Al-Ahram Journalist

By Sabah Hamamou

Self-published, 2012

Arabic

On the afternoon of February 11, 2011, I watched a presenter from Egyptian state television extend his microphone carefully through the barbed wire barricade that had been erected around the iconic Radio and TV Building on the banks of the Nile in central Cairo. Hundreds of protesters had been gathered outside since the previous evening — following Hosni Mubarak’s announcement that he would not, as everyone anticipated, be stepping down — and the presenter, with affable condescension, asked them what “mistakes” they might like their publicly financed broadcasters to correct.

Egyptian state television had spent the last eighteen days spreading incendiary, highly exaggerated, and at times even staged reports about the by-then vast protests. (One such report featured a “protester,” her features obscured, confessing to having received training from sundry nefarious foreign organizations. She turned out to be a journalist at a state newspaper.) The message of the gathered citizens to the government’s mouthpiece was straightforward: stop lying. The strange exchange — state television suddenly allowing for live discussion of its own shortcomings — strongly indicated that the end might just be near.

It also should have been a warning as to how superficial and speedy a volte-face Egypt’s state media was about to take. The next day, the flagship national newspaper, Al-Ahram (which on the first day of protests ran a front-page story about political unrest in… Lebanon), splashed a huge picture of rejoicing protesters across its top fold, accompanied by the misty headline: “The People Brought Down the Regime.”

In the nearly two years since the Egyptian uprising set off on January 25, 2011, Egypt’s publicly subsidized media has shed a few compromised top editors, offered a few lukewarm mea culpas, and rushed to declare itself “reformed.” There is certainly more real news published in the pages of Al-Ahram today than there has been in decades, at least in part because so much more is happening; because some journalists there have taken advantage of new energy and openings; and because public criticism and competition from private news outlets has curbed the state media’s worst tendencies.

And yet, amid the chaos, political power plays, and continuing protests that have followed Mubarak’s ouster, state media has struggled to find its editorial line, not unlike a shaky sailboat looking to settle into the prevailing wind. Employees stormed the offices of editors-in-chief. For months, at the state TV building itself, protesters made the lobby ring with songs and chants and papered the hallways with revolutionary fliers and indictments of higher-ups. And yet, these groups calling for change tended to be a miserable minority, and the army generals who took over after Mubarak were not at all interested in media reform. Today, it is clear that the fundamental ethos of outlets like Al-Ahram remains identification with the state and with whoever might be in power. The national media, for example, never criticized the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or reported with any honesty on the breathtaking army abuses against protesters. They never printed or broadcast the images that swept the internet and defined, for many, military rule: the bodies of protesters being dragged to the curb like so much trash, the “girl in the blue bra,” half stripped and dragged on the ground as a soldier delivered a formidable series of kicks to her solar plexus.

In the dog days following Mubarak’s ouster, hundreds of journalists at Al-Ahram signed a petition apologizing for the manner in which the newspaper covered the eighteen days of protest; the paper’s senior management refused to publish it. The petition’s fate is just one of the many incidents covered in a new book by Sabah Hamamou, an Al-Ahram business reporter who started out nearly twenty years ago as an idealistic teenage intern but has emerged, post-revolution, as an impassioned critic and would-be reformer (full disclosure: Hamamou is also an old friend of this writer). The self-published Yawmeyat suhafeya fil Ahram (Memoirs of an Al-Ahram Journalist) is a rare glimpse into the dizzying dysfunction of Egypt’s historic national newspaper, but also the government’s hulking and recalcitrant institutions generally.

Before the revolution, state media’s most endearing quality may have been its ability to inspire a joke. (An old one went: “Eh el akhbar?” — meaning “What’s the news?” but also riffing on the name of state daily Al Akhbar. “Zey el ahram,” was the answer — “Like Al-Ahram” — government papers’ propaganda being indistinguishable). During the uprising, it was a scandal; the abolition of the Ministry of Information quickly became a top item on the protesters’ list of demands. Now it is a widely recognized problem, but one that no one has the guts, vision, or principle to tackle.

To be fair, the task is daunting. The Al-Ahram headquarters sit on the apocalyptically busy Galaa Street in downtown Cairo, two massive office towers connected by a suspended walkway, with their warehouses and printing presses extending in the alleys behind them — “a state within a state,” as Hamamou calls them. With their maze of seemingly endless corridors and offices, their own fleet of cars, subsidized cafeteria and pharmacy, they are bastions of nepotism and sluggish self-interest.

Judging from Hamamou’s book, the biggest problem with Al-Ahram today (and one suspects, with most public institutions in Egypt) is the people who staff it. The newspaper reportedly has about nine-hundred journalists and, as Hamamou helpfully points out, the vast majority of them have been hired due to family connections or political loyalties. The children of Al-Ahram journalists are more or less guaranteed jobs at the paper: jobs in foreign-language supplements, although they don’t speak the languages in question; jobs to which they show up five hours a week; jobs that come with measly official salaries but sizable monthly bonuses. The once venerable newspaper is calcified by decades of nepotistic accretion and squatted by various familial, regional, and political tribes who view it as their own personal preserve.

It is a small wonder that Hamamou’s escalating public criticism has been met with indignation and anger by many of her colleagues who accuse her of betraying and embarrassing the paper. “You’re taking the food from people’s mouths,” and “Does anyone respectable take their home’s problems outside?” are some of the remarks she faced — even before her book’s appearance — for exposing corrupt practices at the paper and pushing for reform. (This is to say nothing of a scurrilous campaign featuring anonymous notes accusing her of illicit financial gains under Mubarak.) Memoirs of an Al-Ahram Journalist was given a small, studiously neutral mention in Al-Ahram itself. Hamamou considers her career at the newspaper more or less over; she says she is on an unsolicited “sabbatical” at the moment.

Meanwhile, through anecdote-rich chapters that move both chronologically (through her career) and geographically (through the offices of the newspaper), Hamamou vividly conveys just how inefficient and devastatingly out-of-touch the overstaffed paper is, so much so that she compares entering its main editorial room to time-traveling, albeit always to the same point in time.

“I’ve been absent from the editorial room at wide intervals,” she writes, “because of travel or illness or other reasons, but the nice thing about the editorial room is that no matter how long you leave it when you return you find the fragrance of history and the old, eternal, continuing problems” — television screens “hanging on the right side in darkness and silence, for I have never seen one of them on since the day I set foot in the room in 2004,” and “the piles of dust settled on the keyboards as they were, or a little increased.”

When this reviewer visited the room described above in the months after Mubarak’s ouster, she saw brand-new Apple desktop computers (some still in their wrapping) but was shocked to realize that the aging errand boys carrying sheets of paper to ancient dumbwaiters were delivering copy to the main editorial desk. The paper is still laid out — and most of its articles are still written — by hand.

As recently as 2008, Hamamou writes, there were two computers for the forty journalists in her department. Most of them brought their own laptops to work, which raised another set of challenges, since the offices weren’t set up to allow journalists to connect to the Internet or to print their work. (This, while senior editors and managers made millions of pounds, particularly care of the paper’s extensive advertising department).

Hamamou dedicates an entire chapter to a fruitless attempt to print a one-page article. When she finally is able to obtain a printer cable from one office and the permission to use the printer in another, she is unable to find a blank sheet of paper. Her odyssey is strikingly reminiscent of a scene in Sonallah Ibrahim’s masterful skewering of the moral collapse of Egyptian society, Zaat, in which a simple bureaucratic errand also devolves into nightmarish existential farce. In fact there are quite a few figures in Hamamou’s exposé who would make great minor characters in a literary satire, such as the politically connected advertising executive who gets transferred to an editorial position, crafts his own title (“assistant to the editor of Al-Ahram”) and spends his days perusing the obituaries while on the phone with his wife, discussing to whom it might be useful to send a telegram of condolences.

It’s the details that help us understand the at-once bland and dizzying complexity of bureaucracies. According to Hamamou, at Egypt’s premier state newspaper there is no internal phone registry and many still do not use email regularly. Reporters work for years, sometimes decades, for a pittance before finally achieving their much-sought-after “appointment,” a lifelong perch in the public bureaucracy. Meanwhile, employees are trained not to rock the boat. There are no clear editorial guidelines (just a mission statement that lists as the paper’s first goal protecting “national security”). Conflicts of interest are ignored; plum assignments are handed out to favorites; articles are suppressed and bylines dropped according to opaque and unchallengeable codes. One imagines that years of these carrot-and-stick routines must inculcate a craven hive mentality into all but the most stubborn reporters.

Penned in a confidential, colloquial style, Hamamou’s book is part of a wave of recent writing by new voices, often those of younger women, on subjects that are personal and traditionally circumscribed (such as Ghada Abdel Aal’s hit I Want to Get Married, about the indignities of the marriage market). It is also reminiscent of bureaucratic exposés such as Tawfiq Al Hakim’s Diary of a Country Prosecutor or renegade feminist Nawwal El-Saadawy’s early work. But the fact that Hamamou couldn’t secure a publisher, and that her book hasn’t received the attention one might expect given its topicality, may point to a discomfort, which extends well beyond the state media, with real muckraking.

While there is much comedy in Memoirs of an Al-Ahram Journalist, it is generally dark. The genuine frustration and disgust of an ambitious reporter, who knows that something is awry and that her chance at a meaningful career is slipping by her, is never far from the surface. In a climactic scene late in the book, Hamamou describes a violent argument that breaks out between younger journalists and their senior editors on February 12. Hamamou found herself yelling at the paper’s well-known columnists and senior managers, who were coolly running an editorial meeting, that they should make room for those who participated in the revolution. She writes that she felt “as if I was delivering the revolt of a whole generation against an old generation that silenced us for long years and occupied all the spots and podiums and words and stuck us in the deep freezer, just as they stuck articles not fit to print in the drawer.”

At Al-Ahram and elsewhere, gerontocracy rules. But that hasn’t always been the case. Hamamou points out that the paper was founded, in 1857, by two Lebanese brothers in their twenties. The famous Nasser-era journalist Mohammed Hassanein Heikal was only thirty-four when he became an editor there. This is inconceivable today, when reporters in their forties are still classified as shabaab (”kids”) and told they’ll get their own columns only “when they get some white hairs.”

Hamamou’s own story — her frustration, her “disloyalty,” the blog she set up a month before the January 25 revolution, her tell-all book — are all part of a new cultural and media landscape in which some younger journalists refuse to play by the Mubarak-era rules and where online news and the many new private newspapers and satellite channels threaten to render the old state media obsolete.

Many journalists there know this, yet attempts to propose and implement reforms have foundered. In the heady days of February 2011, Hamamou attended a meeting of dissatisfied journalists. The meeting, she writes, was “charged, full of years of silence about many incorrect practices, full of accusations and attempts to push in many directions. It ended with few results, in a general atmosphere of frustration, because the attendees couldn’t agree on a clear mechanism to organize their activity. Everyone wanted to talk, everyone wanted to complain and propose ideas, or draw attention to an issue he or she considered important, while absolutely no one suggested a mechanism for work, maybe because the whole country was looking for a way. So they unburdened themselves, threw their frustration at the room’s ceiling and left.”

The cycle of patronage and sycophancy can be broken only by undoing the existing system — creating an independent board to oversee state media, setting clear standards for appointments and hires, crafting editorial policies that guarantee papers’ independence, and passing new laws that protect journalists’ freedom of speech. None of that looks likely to happen anytime soon. Despite railing against the official media for decades, the Muslim Brotherhood has made its own appointments to the state newspapers. Papers that were distinctly anti-Brotherhood during the presidential elections have already changed their tune. The pandering, state-owned magazine October, known for its lurid covers, led the charge with a memorable cover featuring President Mohamed Morsi as a jockey riding a leaping horse and the title “The Revolution Takes Off.”