Andrew Durbin

A few places. I was born in Florida, but we moved early on to Maryland, then back to Florida. We also lived in North Carolina and South Carolina. My family was always moving around, both my immediate family and my larger family. The window that I remember most is an obscured one. For a few years, when I was living in Florida for the second time, I had a parakeet whose cage sat in front of one of my bedroom windows. So, whenever I would look out at my backyard, my view was partly obstructed by this little bird. I remember it so well because my sleep schedule was completely determined by this bird’s hours; she was constantly singing and chirping and reacting to whatever was outside the window at all hours. She’s probably the reason I don’t sleep much. But that's the window I remember the most—for what I didn't see.

The one that comes to mind is, again, in Florida. When I was a kid, we sometimes went kayaking in the natural springs not far from Orlando. I remember seeing the alligator gar lingering at the surface—they look pretty vicious, but they’re mostly harmless. I also remember the manatees bumping along beside our boats, one of the most enchanting experiences of my life. I was fortunate to see them often, and I suppose they suggested very early the threat human beings pose to the environment, because their backs are often scraped, scarred, and wounded from speedboats crossing over them. Seeing those scarred backs floating in the beautiful clear water was such a defining moment for me.

It's hard for me to pick a specific moment in time. But perhaps it was Hurricane Sandy, which I wrote about in my book of poems, Mature Themes, and my first novel, MacArthur Park. Of course, I grew up with hurricanes, and though it wasn’t uncommon for them to knock out the power for a few hours, I had never experienced something on that scale, particularly in a place like New York City. To see Manhattan shut down, to cross the bridges at night into the darkened city—that was the moment when my intellectual understanding of climate change collided with experience.

Nick is a typical young transplant New Yorker in the early 2010s. For him, catastrophe is highly mediated; it's always happening far away—until it's not. I suppose it was easier 15 or so years ago for Westerners to pretend climate change was something that happened “over there,” that it was a terrible consequence of an unstoppable modernity which we needed to contend with, of course, to atone for, but which ultimately meant more platitudes about reducing carbon footprints or giving money. That seems to have shifted in recent years, as the consequences of climate change have widened to include previously “safe” places. So, in 2014, I was interested in writing about this sudden encounter with the climate catastrophe, and how it might disrupt a narrator’s psyche.

A book that was very important to me at the time was Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence. Nixon writes about how the violence of the climate catastrophe occurs at different speeds and scales, creating all sorts of representational problems for artists and writers. Slow Violence really informed MacArthur Park, but also Skyland, where I was thinking about what it means for a narrator to brush up against a different kind of crisis and to discover he is powerless to do anything about it. How do we learn to see these vast concatenating events, which happen before our very eyes and yet we still somehow manage to miss them? What does it mean to be blinded to them? That’s one of the strangest things about today, how often catastrophe unfolds before us without us noticing until it’s too late. So, I think that's one of the chief concerns of art today: How do we make sense of the crisis that’s either punching you in the face or slipping away just as you make eye contact?

Definitely. No one can escape the catastrophe. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Apocalypse transcends time. The apocalypse has already happened on this planet so often, from the end-Permian extinction to recent genocides, that you might think it’s the norm. Three thousand years ago, you could have been sitting on the island of Filicudi, for instance, off the coast of Sicily, in a very small settlement which we know virtually nothing about, watching the Bronze Age collapse, thinking, “Well, this is it. This is the end of life on Earth as we know it, and it will never come back.” And in some ways, it didn't: Languages were lost, cultures were lost. That settlement was buried underground. I was there this summer. It’s just rocks in a circle, an obliterated world.

So, I don't think about the apocalypse as being something that will occur in the future. It's something that is almost always happening. It depends on where you stand and who you are. There are people experiencing an apocalypse as you and I speak, yet you're in New York and I'm in London and, for us, it's a beautiful day. For someone else, the world is ending. Apocalypse is an eternal condition of the human experience. It shrinks and grows. The question is: Will it grow large enough to encompass everything?

A London fox survives for about 18 months before it’s usually hit by a car—a fraction of its actual lifespan. At the time, the early spring of 2020, I was reflecting on this rare moment when a fox could walk around with a little more confidence, because there were no cars those days. Suddenly, its life, and the life of other foxes, had been given a stay of execution, as it were. Moving to London, I was really shocked by how cruel people can be to foxes. They scream at them, they shoo them off. Which means foxes are often cagey, they’re afraid, they don’t want to be seen by you, they’re always hiding. What I was writing about was this beautiful moment when I encountered a fox who was so completely at home in the city—she walked beside me without a care in the world. It was very moving. I don't see a distinction between humanity and nature. We're part of it, we're part of the animal world.

It isn’t engaging with the environment enough. Organizations, galleries, museums—most of them are thinking about “sustainability,” of course, though perhaps not as much as before the second Trump administration. You get this feeling that many people, not just in the art world, let out a sigh of relief after he was elected: "Finally, now we don't have to give a shit about anything anymore." I don't think that's true of artists. But the approach to making work about the climate has shifted; many are trying to link the climate catastrophe to other disasters, and to show how our destruction of the environment is directly related to what is happening to people in Gaza and elsewhere.

This summer was devastating. In August, I was in Edinburgh with two friends who are also writers—both live in Paris—and at dinner we talked about how it was the first time we'd ever physically understood that you could die from heat, that your organs could simply shut down if your body fails to cool itself. It’s so basic—of course the heat can kill you, it kills people all the time!—but I'd never experienced such high temperatures while having no access to air-conditioning or to nearby bodies of water that aren’t polluted by sewage. And during our sixth or seventh severe heat wave, the new prime minister’s primary concern was whether to expand drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea… I felt like I was losing my mind. At the same time, I think this summer will have a long tail in terms of its political consequences. One of the key points the student protesters are currently making in France is that their classrooms are no longer bearable in summer. They aren’t buying this Boomer magical thinking. And they’d rather see those classrooms burn to the ground than spend another summer in them.

This was the first summer in which I thought about this idea of a climate madness. When you're constantly overheated and you can’t sleep for weeks, you lose touch with reality. Whether you're a writer or an artist or an office worker or a bus driver, you cannot function anymore, and this disturbing feeling sinks in. Everything feels wrong. This was new for me, this idea that we could all go crazy because our bodies simply aren’t equipped for this. Life went on, but we'd all lost our minds.

In the UK, you have politicians on both the right and soft left—that is, those in power—speaking as if this summer were an aberration, a fluke. But right now, it’s October, and most of the reservoirs in England are at critical levels. You wouldn’t know that from reading the Guardian or the BBC. We’re not going back. Yet our entire political system is captured by people who are convinced we can—or who don’t care.

I suppose this leads me back to your question about first knowing that the world was changing. Parts of my family have lived in New Orleans for a long time, and I lived there the first two summers of my college years, in 2009 and 2010. That was four years after Hurricane Katrina, but the streetcars still barely worked, and every day, the power would still go out at some point. I lived just below Broadmoor, and if you visited Broadmoor then, you could still find abandoned houses marked with body counts. Four years later. I hate the pernicious narratives of “recovery,” because once a catastrophe like Katrina happens, everything changes. Nothing comes back the same way. Yet so few people take seriously what we are doing to the environment and what is coming—what is never coming back.

Probably not. Art is so often dictated by the market, and the market is seldom interested in art that addresses the climate crisis. That said, there are artists who are making work about it. Pierre Huyghe, for instance—one of the most interesting living artists. His work depicts both the actual and symbolic transformations currently underway during this phase of the crisis. But he isn’t propagandistic. He’s more generous; there are many ways to read his work, and that’s what makes him so effective. Of course, there’s a place for dogmatic art. But I don’t think the protest art we saw during the 2010s will return in the same way.

I agree. As I've gotten older, I've become more Rauschenbergian in my view of art. It's probably why I like Huyghe—his exhibitions and environments are so poetic and open-ended. Paul Thek did something similar, creating large-scale environments filled with objects that invited you to contemplate your place in the world. All these questions and motifs would ultimately provoke self-reflection in an intelligent, thoughtful person. I think that's the most effective way to change minds: to encourage self-reflection. Hitting someone over the head—I wish it worked, because life would be easier. We could just kill the bad guys. But that doesn’t work.

To make room for the alternative. That, to me, is what an artist should do right now. I don't think you have to be prescriptive, but great art can imagine worlds and experiences outside conventional thinking. Modern life has hugely compressed the imagination; the daily demands placed upon all of us by modern capitalism, by our phones, are so intense and draining. Art should give us a little bit of room for something else.

It taught me how vulnerable archives are. Paul Thek was a traveling artist during a crucial period in his life, and by necessity he had an ambiguous relationship to his own stuff, so a lot of his important works and many of his letters have been lost. That loss is one of the central themes of his work, and it's how most people experience his work—as a form of loss. Most of his important works can only survive in documentation.

As I was researching for the book and interviewing people who knew Thek and Peter Hujar, I would often have this moment where I'd be speaking to someone and they would say, "Oh, if only you could have interviewed so-and-so." But so-and-so had died of AIDS. Or I would realize there was a gap in my research that was unfillable because something had been lost or destroyed. A great example of this is Paul Thek's most famous work, The Tomb, a wax replica of himself that he laid to rest in a pink pyramid. To have seen that work in person would have changed the way I wrote about it, but it doesn’t exist anymore. As I was writing, I was so aware of the contradictions and difficulties of trying to deal with an artist who could constantly evade me because his archive is so incomplete. Now I’m always telling my friends to save everything and write a good will, no matter how young they are.

The reason I write history is to correct the record. Queer history is filled with all these gaps, omissions, and destructions; so much violence, real and archival, has been committed against us. As queer people, we deserve these stories, and to know more about our past, because they illuminate the future.

Being an artist or a writer is hard. Every day is hard. You finish one thing, and when you start the next, you almost always find you have no idea how to do it. You must start over, almost from zero. Sometimes it's helpful to read stories of people who lived before you, who experienced similar crises of confidence and who found unconventional ways of making art. The world demands a creative conventionality that is very hard for most queer people—convention is not only anathema to them but impossible for them to live up to. They’re definitionally excluded. Still, it can be hard to refuse convention. And in art, the market demands of artists, especially young artists, a repetition, a formula, which many creative people find intolerable—it’s another form of convention. Find the “style” of painting or sculpture that works for you and do it again and again and again. Most good artists aren’t like that, and they shouldn’t be. But we ask them to be, we ask them to be recognizable, “a brand.” So, for me, writing this book was my small way of pointing to another path, because Hujar and Thek, though they lived in very different economic times, found ways to resist convention, to resist the formula. Who the hell knows what an artist is supposed to do? Artists should be weird. They should make us uncomfortable and fill our heads with strange ideas, and the only way you can do that is if you're constantly refusing to do what you're told to do.

When I was writing this book, I thought a lot about Peter Hujar and Paul Thek's near contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and their different trajectories: Hujar and Thek struggled for recognition, Rauschenberg and Johns did not—they became official art history. There’s a reason for that, and it has a lot to do with the market, with the game of art. And I hoped to challenge that history by highlighting the lives and work of two artists who have been difficult to categorize, who refused the game, and whose difficulty meant they were largely neglected by historians for a long time.

I don’t know what my book’s relationship to the future is. I would say it makes a good case for paying closer attention to a group of brilliant people whose lives were destroyed by poverty and a failing U.S. healthcare system and AIDS. There’s that famous clip of Fran Lebowitz explaining that the AIDS crisis not only wiped out artists; it also wiped out audiences. Artists have returned, but sometimes I wonder if the kind of highly educated audiences we had in the 20th century are gone forever. And I don’t just mean highly educated in books; I mean highly educated in passion.

Right now, people are so fucking terrified of passion. That’s partly the result of the two poles of social media, sincerity and irony—neither leaves much room for passion. But it’s also partly driven by the sociodynamics of advanced capitalism, which would like to see passion controlled and monetized. That is, killed off. I wish the book could do something about that, but I don’t think it can, because books don’t matter like they used to. I hope the people who read my book are somehow changed by it, that it gives them permission to say no. Saying no is so important to passion. It’s a demonstration of discernment. In some ways, Hujar and Thek were refuseniks, and I think that’s the greatest thing you can be right now: a refusenik—to say no to the bullshit. If you say no to someone, they're stunned. We think we're saying no, but we very rarely are. When you really say no, people go crazy. They can’t believe it. Hujar and Thek were so good at saying no, and that's why people are still shocked and entranced by them. Saying no doesn’t always work out, but learning to say no is the most important thing you can do.

I don’t want to imagine the end of the world, because imagining it is the first step in allowing it. And in my small way, I'm not going to do it.

That’s a hard question. I'd probably buy a bottle of wine and go mudlarking on the Thames with my partner. I love the river, how the tides throw up all these wonderful trinkets from the past—Roman coins, medicine bottles, swords, old rusty industrial parts. I think that would be a beautiful end.

Cremate my body and scatter the ashes in the Tiber River from the Isola Tiberina. Rome is my favorite city, and it is where I hope to die.