LA Review Of Books - Thursday, June 4, 2026

Follows the audio · click any line to jump

1. pfk.org
2. Hello and welcome to the LARP Radio Hour,
3. brought to you by reader-supported LA Review of Books. I'm your host, Kate Wolfe, and I'm joined
4. by my co-host, Eric Newman. Hey, Kate. We're speaking to the writer and editor, Andrew Durbin
5. today. He's the editor-in-chief of the art magazine, Freeze, and the author of two novels,
6. MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland, as well as a
7. collection of poetry, Mature Themes. His work has appeared in publications including the London
8. Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The Believer, and here at LARB. For a number of years,
9. he was also co-editor at the independent Wonder Press. He's with us today to speak about his first
10. biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was. A portrait of two exceedingly influential and
11. undersung American artists, the book follows the lives of Paul Tech and Peter Hujar, whose romantic
12. relationship and deep friendship paralleled their artistic formation. Both natives of New York,
13. the two men met in the 1950s, became lovers in the early 60s, and sustained a complicated
14. relationship until they died within a year of each other from AIDS in the late 1980s.
15. Both were uncompromising about their work, and since their deaths, each has found renown.
16. Hujar for his photographs of downtown artists and intellectuals, and Teck for his sculptures
17. and installations. The core of Durbin's book, however, traces a shaky period where each suffered
18. from doubt and uncertainty about how to move forward as an artist, while also experiencing
19. the exaltation and excitement of aesthetic discovery, travel, and sexual liberation.
20. Thank you so much, Andrew, for being here. Thank you for having me.
21. So, Andrew, I'm wondering if we could just start at the beginning of this project. Not only how
22. you became interested in Paul Tech and Peter Hujar, but also how you became interested in
23. telling their biographies braided together. There's a long version of becoming essentially
24. obsessed with Peter Hujar and Paul Tech, but the short version is I saw Peter's work first on
25. Anoni's album, I Am a Bird Now, in high school. And that was just one of those records that
26. reverberated around my queer circle in South Carolina, where artifacts of that quality and
27. caliber were just rare to come by. And at the time, it was still early enough where you could
28. Google Peter and you'd find a few things here or there, but not much. And he stuck with me. I
29. couldn't get that image of Candy Darling in our hospital bed out of my mind. And as I grew up and
30. became more interested in art, both Peter and Paul would show up in different ways.
31. And what was interesting for me is they didn't ever quite fit into the histories of art that
32. I was learning. I didn't study art in school, but I took art history classes and they would just
33. crop up. And Mike Kelly became very important to me. And of course, Mike wrote a really famous
34. essay about Paul Tech, which I read at some point in my early twenties. And again, I thought,
35. who is this guy?
36. And the Whitney had its exhibition Diver and that helped broaden the picture of Paul for me And then in 2018 I was living a bit in Berlin and I thought that I would finally write something about them I knew that they
37. knew each other. I didn't quite know what the relationship was. And I thought maybe I'd write
38. a play. And for me, when I'm writing, I only start writing when I know nothing, essentially.
39. And so as I started working on this play, I realized how little I knew about them and how much I would need to do to actually make this work.
40. So I ended up setting it aside.
41. But I guess to the second point of your question, it just seemed obvious that they had to be told together on some level.
42. Because I knew from the photographs that Peter had taken that Paul was a figure who was very important to him very early on in his life.
43. some of his earliest portraits are of Paul Tech. And so it seemed to me that I would have to
44. begin in some way with that relationship. For listeners who've never seen the work of
45. either artist, could you describe their work just a bit, give it some context maybe? And
46. I think one attribute of the book is I would never have placed their work together. Maybe
47. because Peter Hujar is a photographer and Paul Tech is kind of like a sculptor, conceptual artist,
48. more tactile. I wouldn't have thought that they shared that much. But then through reading the
49. book, I feel like they really do. So also, if you want to compare and contrast their work and talk
50. about the similarities, I would be really interested to hear that as well. Yeah. So Paul
51. had the more, you could say, traditional upbringing as an artist. He went to art school. He studied at
52. the Cooper Union. He wanted to be a painter. He ended up moving to Miami and working in hotels,
53. sort of odd jobs, but he had the trajectory of an artist in some ways. And that eventually carried
54. him to New York, back to New York, where he started exhibiting at the Stable Gallery, which
55. was the kind of hot gallery of the 1960s. And his first big show was this total shock for people. It
56. It was this wax meat in cages, essentially in glass boxes.
57. And no one had seen anything like that before.
58. And that sort of is the beginning of Paul Tech's career and when he emerges in people's consciousness.
59. Peter is a bit different.
60. Peter studied photography in high school.
61. He didn't go to university for it.
62. He didn't have more than a high school education, in fact.
63. And as a young man, he struck out on his own in New York.
64. He had a troubled background and he worked for different commercial photography studios.
65. You know, at the time he was starting out in the early 1950s, mid 1950s, the idea of
66. an artist photographer just didn't really exist.
67. There were photographers who were attempting to treat photography as seriously as one might
68. treat painting, but the results were sort of corny for the most part.
69. Peter talks about how the best photography at the time of the 40s and 50s was fashion photography, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
70. But Peter, as he entered that commercial world, never sat easily in that space.
71. There are probably a lot of reasons for that.
72. But he was really thinking about himself as an artist.
73. And he was approaching photography with a kind of seriousness, a kind of painterliness that meant he was never going to be fully compatible with a commercial world where it's so collaborative.
74. There are so many compromises that are being asked of an artist.
75. And that lack of a desire to compromise on some level is what kind of unites them as artists because both of them totally refused on some level to be assimilated into the broader art world They didn really play
76. that game and were quite bothered by it. And so I would say temperamentally, they're very,
77. very similar in that regard. And then beyond that, on a kind of thematic level,
78. they're so interested in death as a subject. They're so interested in landscape. They are
79. interested in portraiture, of course. And I think they're interested in this interplay between
80. urban life and I wouldn't exactly say the countryside, but they're very much interested
81. in the world outside of the city because the city is the place they know best. It's the place they
82. grew up. And so they're endlessly fascinated by what is outside the city. Totally. Yeah. And,
83. you know, something that, again, I thought was so powerful in the book is that we see that when they
84. were, I guess, a couple, although I'm really confused about the relationship and I want to
85. talk about that later. But when they're first together, they travel to the catacombs in
86. Palermo and they see this assemblage of many, many thousands of bodies. And it seems like it's such a
87. lightning rod for both of them. And to see that that experience happened for them together and
88. then reverberates through their entire careers. I thought that was amazing.
89. Totally. That moment in the catacombs in 1963 is foundational for both of them, as you said,
90. and it really is the place where, I mean, they had been working by that point for quite a while. I
91. mean, they both started practicing as artists in the mid-1950s, so this is about almost 10 years
92. into their working lives. But it's just that moment where you can imagine it was a total
93. accident because the catacombs are on the outskirts of Palermo. They probably had a vague
94. idea about them and just walked in there one day and it opened a door for them.
95. Could you articulate what the art world of the 1950s and 1960s was? Because there's a strange
96. way in which both of these guys are children of the Great Depression. They're literally like born
97. during the Depression, but they emerge as very young artists. Paul Tech goes to Cooper Union,
98. which at the time and still is like one of the most prestigious art schools and incredibly
99. difficult to get into. But they're emerging into a post-war boom era in which there are lots of new,
100. both opportunities for commercial art, you know, that's obvious. It's the kind of rise of like the
101. Madison Avenue artist. But at the same time, there's also a change in the kind of non-commercial
102. art world, right? So like the more establishment or like scholarly art world, we might say. And
103. both of them seem pretty well connected and yet also not quite able to find, like they know the
104. right people. It's not that, but they don't seem to gel with a commercial art world or even an art
105. world establishment, let's say, that's not purely commercial. So can you explain what that art world
106. was and why they didn't seem to fit into it? I mean, the art world of the 1950s and 60s is so
107. small. I think it's hard for us now when we look at the international art world with art fairs and
108. the like, it's really hard to imagine how tiny it was. One of the figures in my book,
109. the artist Ann Wilson, talks about how in the 1950s you could fit the entire art world of New
110. York in a single loft. And you just knew, you just knew everyone there. And it was a
111. transitional moment in this post-war period where you, you do have these galleries, which
112. are are new They trying new things They interested in exhibiting artists who are experimenting artists like Paul Tech obviously but there still an underlying conservatism in the art world
113. because experimental art then, like today, didn't make any money. I mean, when the Stable Gallery
114. mounted exhibitions by Paul and they did four in total, I don't believe they sold pretty much
115. anything. I think there was one or two pieces that were sold. It was so difficult to move,
116. to move art like that. And at the same time, the alternative spaces that would, would emerge in
117. the 1970s weren't really there yet. These are the kinds of spaces where you could really imagine a
118. Peter and a Paul fitting in quite well, that just, that hadn't, that kind of art world had not yet
119. manifested. So they were trapped in this odd space. And so they certainly, they knew this art world,
120. And they knew they went to the same cocktail parties. They went to the factory. They hung out with these people. But I think there were still a significant number of restrictions that were placed on what could be exhibited in those spaces.
121. If you think about someone like Peter Hujar, it was so difficult to exhibit photographs like that. There were so few galleries in the 20th century that would exhibit a photographer as they might exhibit an artist. And the idea that you would sell that work, it was more or less unthinkable. It didn't make sense to them.
122. I mean but it also seems to get at their personalities and I think that maybe you could
123. sketch out a little bit what they were both like because they both seem to be very complicated
124. people wary of others and not necessarily joiners and and not part of the scene and I was the
125. freneticness of their social lives and their sexual lives was amazing to read about but also
126. it doesn't seem like they were wanting to go to cocktail parties and kiss the butts of collectors.
127. Yeah. No, not at all. Peter was very shy. He had a very difficult upbringing. It obviously
128. affected him very deeply. He struggled to find a place for himself in the world. And almost
129. everyone who knew him would remember, if you got to know Peter, he could be incredibly sweet. He
130. could be very, very funny. He was very playful with language. But for most people who wouldn't
131. know him very well. He would be the dark brooding figure, extremely handsome, the side of the party,
132. maybe hanging out with Susan Sontag, which added to the mystery around him. But you wouldn't quite
133. know where you stood with him, even if you maybe knew him. This is particularly true of the Peter
134. of the 50s and 60s. He blossomed more in the 70s and 80s and found more of a community as a community
135. found him. Paul Tech was much more gregarious, understood the system that he was supposed to
136. be operating in, and therefore knew how to sort of refuse its terms and to opt in and opt out.
137. And he had a kind of flair, I would say, a kind of fun that maybe Peter didn't always possess.
138. socializing just came a lot easier to Paul and that carried him a lot further for a long time
139. until it didn't if that makes sense because it's also important to remember that in the 1960s as
140. much as he's an outsider he's also showing at two of the hottest galleries in New York the Stable
141. and Pace and then by the late 60s and early 70s he's exhibiting pretty massive shows at the best
142. museums in Europe. And it's funny that all of that could happen and he's still not well known,
143. actually. And I think that is something to do with the work he was making, but I also think
144. it was something.
145. to do with his temperament. He just wasn't willing to do what you'd need to do to make
146. sure that you were part of the scene and in New York.
147. You're listening to the LARP Radio Hour on KPFK 90.7. We've been speaking with Andrew Durbin,
148. author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was.
149. It sounds like both of them suffered from negligence, alcoholism within their families,
150. that they were both very cagey about sustaining relationships, romantic relationships.
151. Peter's background is especially dark.
152. And, right, can we talk a little bit more about what they experienced as children?
153. Yeah.
154. I mean, I'll paraphrase Fran Lebowitz, but she said the only worst childhood she'd ever heard of besides Peter Hujars was David Wojnarowicz.
155. I mean, it was almost Dickensian what they experienced.
156. Peter was, his father abandoned him.
157. He never knew his father.
158. His mother left him at his grandparents' farm in New Jersey for most of his youth and early teenage years.
159. It was an unhappy period for him.
160. when he moved back. He was essentially kicked out of his grandparents' home,
161. sent to his mother's one bedroom in New York. And both his mother and her new partner were
162. alcoholics. They didn't want Peter there. They were very cruel. They threw bottles at his head
163. and eventually he left. Paul had a more complicated background. He had a very loving
164. family that had a lot of problems, alcoholism, a lot of bitterness between his mother and father,
165. obviously a lot of disappointments and broken hearts. And his brother, his older brother was
166. quite abusive toward him, but his younger siblings loved Paul and really relied on him.
167. And Paul maintained a relationship with his parents until his mother died in the early 80s
168. And until his own death, his father died after him. But even then it was complicated because Paul, I don't think he ever quite knew what to do with the family he had in some ways. He didn't tell them except his younger brother that he had AIDS. So they all learned of his diagnosis when they learned that he had passed away, which is, I think, devastating for any family, but that family in particular took it very hard.
169. So both of them had immensely complicated family stories that I think really shaped who they became and the art they made.
170. Because so much of their work is about this tension between isolation and community and wanting to be part of something and also wanting to step away.
171. And I think you see that all the way back to their childhoods.
172. Mm hmm.
173. one another, even when they very much were at loggerheads, which we'll talk about a little
174. bit probably in the 1970s and certainly by the 80s But could you talk a little bit about what you think drew them together And my question is like were they ever together Because that something I couldn quite tell from the book I mean it didn seem like they were quite a couple Certainly they were lovers
175. and brothers as they called each other, but that was not necessarily a completely requited love.
176. Yeah. So there's a lot in there. This was the challenge of the book. And what I loved,
177. why I loved writing the book was because how do you write about a relationship? Because a
178. relationship happens between two people in a closed room and all the important, all the important
179. aspects of anyone's relationship with someone else is probably going to be unrecorded. So I could
180. guess around at what they found attractive in one another. I say that Paul's openness and his
181. childishness and his fun was such a contrast with Peter. And I think in some ways that loving Paul
182. gave him back something of his own childhood. And I think Paul really needed the stability
183. and the seriousness and the commitment Peter could bring, the kind of gravity in some ways.
184. I think there is this ambiguity about their relationship. If you talk to a lot of the
185. people who knew them, well, not everyone, but a lot of the people who knew them,
186. they were totally impressed by these two guys. And when you would say, well, what was it like?
187. Like, what was it about them?
188. What was it like to see them together?
189. And it would sort of flicker in front of their eyes.
190. And they would say, oh, they were so beautiful.
191. But of course, they couldn't quite remember what the dynamic was.
192. Or they would have intimations of it.
193. But the actual qualities of it, because again, it was something that happened between two
194. people who were in a room.
195. And I think the interesting challenge for my book, there's a period in their relationship,
196. which I, in my own mind, I consider sort of the hot period, when it's the most active, and it's 1960 to 1962.
197. And it only receives really a chapter in my book because, of course, at that moment, they're living together, not living together, but they're living in the same neighborhood.
198. So there's no reason to write letters to one another. And they're sort of too young.
199. The art historical record isn't really paying attention to them. Peter isn't taking many photographs. And Paul isn't yet, we don't think, keeping the kind of diaries he would keep only a few years later. So there's this sort of void, actually, which is the relationship in some ways in the book.
200. And I would say that's what I most enjoyed about the writing process was how to take this central absence and build around it and kind of acknowledge it, but also move in and out of it in some ways.
201. I feel like every book has what is the structural problem that you have, that the whole book is about overcoming.
202. And that is the book in some ways.
203. Yeah, I certainly did notice that it was a lacuna in the book.
204. And that it seemed something that you had to actually structure around, like this emptiness.
205. The book is about the two of them and their long relationship, but some of the most intimate aspects of the relationship are just unknowable for various reasons.
206. So they are hot and heavy in the 60s in New York, and then they move to Italy together?
207. Yeah.
208. So Peter receives a Fulbright in 1962 to study film in Rome, and Paul decides to follow him.
209. they travel separately. Peter goes straight to Rome. It's pretty obvious to him right
210. away that he's made a mistake. So this dream of becoming a filmmaker began in the late
211. 50s when he accompanied his first serious boyfriend Joseph Raphael on his Fulbright And they lived in both Florence and Rome And Italy enchanted Peter then and throughout his life And so he was plotting ways to come back And
212. eventually, the way that he did go back was through this Fulbright. And Paul, it's not always
213. clear why he went. He had been working for about four years at a textile studio in Midtown called
214. the Jack Prince Studio, and he had saved up some money. He was one of the few employees who worked
215. full time and was salaried at the studio. And so he had some money. And during that period,
216. he had not been making much art. So one speculation that I mentioned in the book,
217. and that some of his friends think is that he had finally decided, okay, I'm going to make art. And
218. the only way to do it was essentially to burn the ships and leave New York and go to Europe with
219. Peter. And he began in the Netherlands and then went to Norway and then eventually joined Peter
220. in Rome and had a very similar experience to Peter in the sense that he was completely enchanted by
221. Italy and would spend the next 15 or so years living there or traveling in and out of Italy.
222. And it became in many ways the home base for the most important periods of his artistic life.
223. And when does their relationship transition away from intimacy or romance into friendship?
224. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, who sort of really knows?
225. I mean, when they are in Rome in 1962, they share an apartment.
226. They are clearly still sleeping together, but they're sleeping with other people.
227. And Paul later writes in a diary that at one moment he felt Peter pulling away and he knew he had essentially lost him.
228. By the time they come back to New York in 1964, they're clearly not an item in the way that they were before.
229. But they're definitely still sleeping together.
230. They're inseparable.
231. They're everywhere together.
232. People who would have met them in the mid-60s would have thought they were a couple.
233. And for all intents and purposes, they were.
234. I mean, they were together, but they had other lovers. And I think they considered each other a kind of primary partner. But you could say that maybe sex was not the most important part of that relationship by then. It had certainly transformed into that deeper brother-like bond.
235. What was Paul and Peter's orientation towards fame or towards something, if not fame exactly, which feels too much like contemporary social media influence, but like the idea of legacy, a sense that their art or their work or their name and some kind of artistic capacity would live on?
236. Because obviously, as you open the book and you have a number of different theories as to why they're kind of lost as artists to us in the present. But how did they think about or what did they desire in terms of legacy?
237. So yeah, Peter had a star thing. He obviously never did what he needed to do to become famous. He did not pursue with vigor an Avedon style career by any means. And he obviously didn't do the sort of work you would have to do socially to ensure that you were beloved by Harper's Bazaar and so on. And the few curators that did work with photography, he had complicated relationships with.
238. So there this tension in him as always I mean a lot of his closest friends will talk often about how he was you know a plain old self saboteur in some ways That said by the end of his life he knew he would be famous posthumously There was no doubt in his mind He made that clear to his friends and he planned his legacy accordingly He sat down with the photographer Len Davis They organized the negatives and the contact sheets and the prints
239. He threw hundreds and hundreds of prints out that were defective. He made very sure that what
240. he knew, he knew exactly what he wanted people to see. And he was very thoughtful. And as a result,
241. if you go to the Morgan Library today,
242. Peter Hujar's entire life is quite neatly organized.
243. Paul Tech was in many ways the opposite.
244. He was ambivalent about stardom.
245. He didn't avoid it.
246. At one point he tells Peter,
247. I'm trying to get in, not out.
248. But again, he didn't do the work you would need to do
249. to get in and stay in.
250. It's funny that they were both friends with Cy Twombly,
251. who's sort of the consummate art insider artist.
252. in some ways, but they would have done nothing that you would have needed to do to be a kind
253. of Cy Twombly. And overall, Paul was just ambivalent about legacy. He made work that
254. decayed. He made ephemeral art. He made installations that lasted for 30 days and
255. then disappeared. He just was never someone. At one point in the book I mentioned, Robert Wilson
256. said to me, he was a shooting star. That's all that really mattered. It was meant to be seen
257. and then to fade.
258. Obviously, there's plenty of work that has survived,
259. but all of the largest and most famous works
260. are essentially gone.
261. And a lot of the sculpture is in different states.
262. And accordingly, his archive is totally disorganized.
263. A lot of it's at the watermill
264. and they've done an amazing job
265. trying to put together what they can,
266. but so much of it is spread around the world
267. and so much of it is lost.
268. Anyways, thank you, Andrew, very much.
269. speaking with us. Yeah, thank you both. This was really fun. That was Andrew Durbin. His new book
270. is called The Wonderful World That Almost Was.
271. Thanks for listening to the LARP Radio Hour. Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
272. SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. The producers of the LARP Radio Hour
273. are Medea Ocher, Kate Wolfe, Eric Newman, and Mary Knopf and Jonathan Shiflett, who also mixed
274. and edited our show. Our founding executive producer is Alan Minsky. Our intro music was
275. written and performed by Imogen Teasley-Vaughan.
276. I'd like to thank all of our listeners for tuning in and especially thank those of you who pledged your support or renewed your membership to KPFK during this past fund drive.
277. The support of generous listeners like you is what allows this listener-sponsored station to operate and to maintain its fierce independence.
278. It's a very special relationship, so thank you once again for being a part of it.
279. This is Donna Walker, host of Pacifica Performance Showcase,
280. airing on Friday afternoons from 2.30 to 3 p.m. right here on KPFK,
281. covering film, theater, music, and literature, its arts and culture,
282. to enlighten, enliven, and educate, right here on KPFK 90.7 FM
283. and streaming on the web at kpfk.org.
284. .