When a member of the team at AIR, the consummately curated art festival in Aspen I just attended, dropped a bag of gummy candy in my lap, I understood that I was in trouble. It’s not that I’m allergic to peach Trolli; it’s that I knew I was about to become part of the show.
In general, I’m not a huge fan of audience participation, which happened to be one of several threads connecting the programming over the course of the week. The emcee for Camille Henrot’s riff on commedia dell’arte tried to engage an opera house full of VIPs in a little call and response; Miranda July constructed an onstage tableau vivant with a few members of the audience at her keynote. And Ivan Cheng, whose performance took place at a garbage dump tidier than you could ever imagine, leaned hard into—and at times literally onto—the audience. Onlookers were solicited to carry him after he had sheathed himself snugly in a garbage bag, and place his head to rest in the lap of a presumable patron with whom he was on a first-name basis. Someone was asked to read a brief, poignant text from a sheet of paper Cheng held up to a video camera while standing many yards across the dry earth. And, in the middle of a physically demanding romp back and forth under a withering sun, the artist asked if anyone had candy.
Now it happened that I had an entire bag of peach gummies on my lap. Before responding to his request, I doffed the AIR-branded denim baseball cap that had been handed out to all attendees. I hate how I look in baseball hats. Moreover, despite their being a thoughtful offering given the UV situation on a mountainside in summer, I found it to be a diabolical ploy that most everyone at the well-documented event would be wearing AIR merch as we entered into art history. Frankly, I admired it. When I have a live event for my Substack, everyone will be wearing sashes bearing my name.
With the cap at my feet, I waved the bag of candy in the air and stood for my moment in the sun.
With AIR, the familiar conjunction of enormous resources—enormous wealth—and the highest of high culture feels just a little odder than usual, since with most institutions, there’s more cushion between the pretty skin you press against your cheek and the bruising bone underneath. The closest thing to busing in underprivileged schoolkids to salve the soul was to fly in some journalists from New York. My compliments to the mustachioed night manager at the Mollie hotel’s branch of the Sherman Oaks sensation Le Petit Trois for offering me a long sip of the by-the-glass Puligny-Montrachet, 60-odd dollars a pop. It made the Chablis I had been enjoying taste like ammonia.
The funny thing is that, in its isolation, AIR ends up feeling a lot like it’s for the artists themselves, which is in fact the utopia anyone who loves art would want.
Cheng’s playfully toned performance was actually quite dark, almost stealthily so. Titled 16, its core was a complex, confessional narrative involving his teenage relationship with a music student who was accused of grooming his own students a decade later. While he exhibited moments of upset as he went over it in his fractured way, the artist’s charm and good humor seemed to dissipate the backstory. Or repress it: The show was at a garbage dump, after all, explicitly about the parts of one’s life one wants to banish out of sight. (A riff on poop seemed a shoutout to Barney, who was in attendance, and his fundament.) 16 exposed the artifices of display at every point to create a tension with the highly personal story, which one accepts as true so easily. Did the events described take place? As a viewer, does it matter?
The landfill performance kicked off the most tightly themed day of the festival, which, in events presented at both the Aspen Institute and the museum, focused on the self, self-expression, and self-exposure. The rest of the line-up: Bassichis, July, HUO talking about his memoir (technically his event was a convo with Rachel Rose, but he’s a bit of a self-starter), and Harris’s intense, tearful multimedia presentation On Oracle, which works through the conjunction of the deaths of his ex-partner and his father.
July’s polar-opposite appearance deserves singular mention for being a bigger pile of garbage than the scrap heap at the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center. Her “keynote” (in conversation with choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili) was so inept that describing it in full would make me seem like I’m the one who’s bad at my job. Suffice to say that after a tepidly risqué photo op, the word pussy was iterated some three dozen times in an apparently off-the-cuff attempt to be either provocative or feminist according to the creakiest conceptions of what it might mean to be either. I’m down with deliberate disaster, but Andy Kaufman July is not, and if she wanted to get raunchy, she could have just read from All Fours.
In subsequent hours and days, however, at a buffet lunch or at the rooftop bar of the W Hotel where bigwigs, ordinary museum members, artists, and hangers-on mingled amiably, I heard a couple of people say they liked July’s talk. Moments like this reoccurred throughout the week. Maybe July’s pussyification of the august Aspen Institute was good and important for a swath of the crowd. Was this the program’s educational outreach? More than once, I found myself calling something “not for me.” I heard others use this phrase as well. Were we being polite, or responsive to the arbitrary nature of who likes what? There was a moment during the week when a ski gondola I was riding in froze, mid-transit, and for 10 minutes I hung suspended, farther from the earth than the sky.
Lucy Raven screened her 2025 film Murderers Bar under a full moon in a meadow surrounded by woods. The drive-in-scale vertical projection landed on a towering, bowed screen as Deantoni Parks live-performed his score with a strings, percussion, and woodwind ensemble. Before it started—and after a couple glasses of CA chardonnay that was, for once, good—the couple busloads of audience members were given blankets, non-branded and to be returned. We spread them, one touching the next, like towels at Brighton Beach.
Murderers Bar is fluid and monumental, abstract and documentary, nature film and horror flick. Raven’s exceptional eye and sophisticated photography yield mesmerizing images, in this case depicting the downstream torrent released by the demolition of a dam in Northern California. The onrushing water becomes a grimy yet handsome protagonist for 40 minutes as we pursue the flood leaving the site of detonation and flowing toward the sea. Eventually we reverse course and head back upstream, the POV diving in and out of river in a way that feels both celebratory and like being drowned. Raven’s cinematography cites Kubrick’s opening of The Shining, including its helicopter shadow, as Parks’s score hums, crackles, and occasionally explodes.
Like Cheng’s 16, Raven’s Murderers Bar takes up the subject of infrastructure. So too, in a way, did another talk at the Aspen Institute, which braided together that concern and the subject of the self—a conversation between writer and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir and neuroscientist Patrick House. The two broke down the notion of the coherent identity through a discussion of laughter. You and I know the self is a fiction, but there are whole industries dedicated to making people believe they live inside their own heads-up display and can pilot their lives like they’re piloting a drone. Coming from seemingly opposite perspectives, Alsadir and House agreed that motivation is murky and self-knowledge is a fabrication. Between the shrink’s explications of Winnicott et al. and the scientist’s citation of studies of people sans cerebellums, it was the most dazzling intellectual display of the week.
The most transcendent moment, meanwhile, came two days earlier, with a 9 a.m. performance by the sibling duo Los Thuthanaka. The band’s output is unique; the best I can do is describe it as psychedelic electronic prog with layered Andean polyrhythms and occasional disruptive drops like those on a gas-station CD mix. The music metamorphoses a bit like Raven’s Klamath River, and the musicians (Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton) performed it in cowboy hats and vivid green mutations of caporales suits on a cliff edge of Aspen Mountain, elevation 11,212 feet. Introducing the show was a talk by Roland McCook, an elder of the Uncompahgre band of the Ute tribe, whose people used to call home the mountains that loomed behind as a backdrop. It’s not too Room 327 to note that, in The Shining, Jack goes mad thanks to America’s original sin, a truth we’ve tried to bury in a landfill.
It was after my descent from Los Thuthanaka, from the mountain known locally as Ajax, after the sore-loser Greek hero who killed himself when he lost a contest with Odysseus, that I visited the Aspen Art Museum itself. There, two artists were, you might say, pitted against one another, and wiles once again emerged victorious over brute force.
Adrián Villar Rojas: Not for me, bronze triceratops skull on a giant lightbox. Meanwhile the exhibition of Arch Connelly, who died of AIDS in New York in 1993, presented intricate wall works and sculptures in simple, evocative forms encrusted with tessellating materials like beads and eggshells. If hyperbole befits an epic clash, then the Villar Rojas stood for spectacle, bombast, fabrication, formal armoring. The Connelly, meanwhile, stood for the domestic, the human, the queer, the ironical, the emergence of something to an exterior from within. Villar Rojas’s symbol of choice was the cave, a hollow surface for interior projection. Connelly’s was the pearl, the jewel formed by a tiny irritant that makes its way inside a tough shell to produce something exquisite.
One of Connelly’s works, a glass-topped coffee table dispatched straight from an old friend’s New York apartment, stood on shiny black stalactite legs that came across like camp versions of those in Villar Rojas’s Lascaux-Chauvet. There was something potent about the echo, and the two shows’ pairing, that I saw more as choice than dialectic. Which is to say: Great job, AIR. Exquisite. Stay as close to the demos as you can.
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