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Playing off Wallace Stevens's poem "13 Ways of Looking," this column aligns with an author's book release by inviting the writer to elaborate on a selection of images that shaped their work.

One of the first artistic acts I remember is cutting things out. As a child, I would draw tiny people and cut them out with scissors, mostly for the purpose of tucking them inside the fold of a paper boat. Anyone familiar with my writing would probably be unsurprised by this love of collection, which showed up again in the fragmented, nonlinear essays I wrote in college and in the collages of cutouts from Google Earth I started making in grad school. I still remember the exhilaration I felt copy-pasting the first parking lot onto a blank Photoshop canvas for 

. Against the black backdrop, the excised shape was now free to enter into a conversation (about parking lots) with other parking lots.

In 2017, not long before I would start writing the talk that became my book 

, I went to an exhibit on Surrealism at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and saw a collage I would never forget. It was the five-foot-wide 

Midday Forfit: Feignting Spell II (Spring)

, made in 1972 by an artist who went by the mononym Jess. This piece felt like something I had been waiting to see, or had been trying to make, for years without success. It had to do with its sheer scale and coherence, marshaling what must have been thousands of pieces—from magazines, engravings, and puzzles—into one epic tapestry that moved me in an immediate way. I find it significant that even though I didn’t see the image again until years later (it’s almost nowhere online), the shape and effect of it remained in my mind: two figures in the color palette of a luxurious Turkish rug, swinging through a profusion of images that spill onto a wooden frame.

 and the pieces that represent the other “seasons” of this series are from the middle of Jess’s career, itself somewhat surreal. Born Burgess Collins in 1923, Jess grew up in a conservative family in Southern California, studied chemistry, and was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (where he also sent away for a copy of 

). In the years following the war, he took adult painting classes while working on plutonium production at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Washington state, now one of the most contaminated nuclear waste sites in the country. In 1949, Jess had a “nightmare premonition” that the world would destroy itself by 1975. He had also come to the conclusion that “the real truth—if there is such a thing—that you can learn from science is how little we know about reality,” and that “art seemed to address this more openly.” Jess redeployed himself to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (the same place where I would later cut up parking lots), dropped his last name, and married the poet Robert Duncan, with whom he’d fallen in love at a poetry reading at UC Berkeley.

Jess eventually moved on from making his own paintings to collaging, assembling found objects, and reworking old paintings that he found in thrift stores. More than one person has used Jess’s training as a chemist to inform a reading of his work as alchemical. (One reviewer in 1993 referred to him as “the supreme alchemist of the junk shop.”) Likewise, even before I knew any of this background, Jess’s work moved me because it so vividly exemplified what I love about collage: it’s not something from nothing, but something from something. The ingredients don’t just hang together in a new way; they truly become something else. Rather than a style of image or gesture, there is a style of 

—you know a Jess collage (or “paste-up,” as he called them) when you see one. Duncan, who frequently collaborated with Jess, understood this alchemy better than anyone, writing: “Absolutely no part here is originally the artist’s. What he has achieved is totally his, but in every detail derivative.” This is perhaps most apparent in pieces that Jess made after he noticed that puzzle companies used the same cutout molds on different images, and subjected this knowledge to his own strange ends.

As someone equally drawn to the visual and the literary—and who experiences this as a conflict only when conventional boundaries are applied—I felt some deep sense of recognition when I found that the two books on Jess in the UC Berkeley library were in completely different sections: one in visual art, the other in poetry. In some of his earlier collages, recalling Dada, Jess used words alone; he also made his own books (a format he already saw as a “collage space”), which contain gleefully impure mixtures of images, quotes, and his own poetry. Many of his collages are covers for the books and journals of poet friends. 

’s fragments may be wordless, but they still pun and rhyme. They frustrate any extractive approach to reading, the idea that content can be detached and refined from its context. In the paste-ups, each piece, each participant, each “word,” takes its meaning from other pieces. It is all selection and placement.

Not that I think anyone who looks at Jess’s more complex paste-ups would believe they were easy to make, but as someone who works according to a similar logic, I know the unseen periphery of time required of each composition. Some of Jess’s paste-ups took years to make, and his unfinished project 

 took decades. This would have included not just cutting and pasting, but noticing, first of all. In one interview, Jess told the curator Michael Auping that he salvaged most of his imagery from books, magazines, and postcards wasting away in thrift stores, but that images could also be salvaged from “a possible obscurity” if they had “spoken up out of the matrix of images that surround them.” Auping reports that Jess treated his scraps like family heirlooms and would sometimes hold on to a clipping for more than 20 years. While 90 percent of his filed-away scraps never made it into a piece, Jess would “ritualistically continue the process of searching, finding, and filing.”

Searching, finding, and filing—especially in seclusion, as Jess often worked—are what sense-making looks like to me. I grew up in a time of grotesquely proliferating information, easier than ever to access and with a seemingly total lack of structuring narrative. For me, collection and arrangement were a response, a necessary adaptation: you could give up and live in a senseless world, or you could set about building sense from whatever scraps you could find. But this arrangement could be a pleasure in and of itself, full of devotion to each little piece and to the kind of complexity that needs only finding, not making. In a short text collaged into an announcement for Jess’s 1989 show at Dilexi Gallery, Duncan calls Jess’s art “not impression, not expression, but an involvement in 

.” It is this assumption that meaning is to be found among 

In the pandemic years, when I was writing 

, I sometimes returned to the humble art of making collages from whatever magazines were lying around, inevitably with 

in the back of my mind. I did this not as an art practice, but as a writing practice. Collage reminded me that even in nonfiction, there are so many more ways for things to be related than in a linear, causal manner. Likewise, those little collages were how I remembered that my book was not so much a traditional argument as an arrangement, what Jess might’ve called “a matrix for the imagination.” In 

, I mention the closing exhibition for my residency at Recology SF (the city dump), where I had made something like a collage: an archive of two hundred salvaged objects, monomaniacally researched and presented with tags you could scan in order to learn their life stories. “I don’t get it,” a woman had said to me. “Did you actually make something, or did you just put things on shelves?” The truth was that, with utmost care over months of late nights in the studio, I 

 just put these things on shelves. I’d compiled these histories, put them there, for her—to help her see them anew.

Maybe it’s just because I don’t like being told what things mean, but to me, the most generous thing an artist can do—regardless of medium—is to create a distinctive space, a kind of ego-less garden in which a visitor finds her own way. Auping, the curator, once asked Jess if there was some specific personal history behind 

, a drawing-turned-collage-turned-painting that he started in 1954 and was still working on in 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck and he had to reorganize all of his files. Jess responded, “There are many stories. I really would not want to tell you what I see and that often changes anyway—because that would limit your seeing.” The work was, for him, “not a narrative, but more a dialogue of presences.” Likewise, for the curator Ingrid Schaffner, the paste-ups offer “no traditional ground to stand on or conventional narrative paths to follow,” calling upon the viewer to perform “an open mode of exploration across a deliberately slippery terrain.” Slippery, but not traction-less. The explorer is not lost. Schaffner is describing the kind of richness and density that offers trust—and, in my opinion, respect.

This means that each viewer’s experience, provided they accept the invitation, is bound to be especially personal. In a review of that 1989 Dilexi show, toward the end of a generous contextualization of Jess’s work and a defense of collage against claims of postmodern cynicism, Rebecca Solnit (an art critic at the time) included a surprisingly touching detail when describing one of the paste-ups. She wrote, “I liked best the tiny lion bearing a cupid as he bounds over a lotus.” I too have little favorites: the woman’s arm turning into a package of saltines in 

; the bathing man sipping tea spliced into the creek in 

Or Fête Champêtre Up Mnemosyne Creek [Autumn]

; Barbara Streisand’s eye (the only visible remaining remnant of the poster he used) peeking through puzzle pieces in 

; the inviting wooden chair amidst red and white dahlias in 

, suggesting a place to sit and admire the tangled garden of imagery.

The day I spent hunched over the two Jess books in the Berkeley library (before they would be re-shelved to their separate homes in art and poetry), I emerged from the building only to find myself in a different collage. The paved walkway was straight, but the campus was made out of fractal paths of noticing, each with its own surprising details: the perfectly constructed beehive outside the library, the man in a skeleton costume posing for a photo in front of the science building, the peregrine falcon shrieking overhead while he did. Every oak leaf, edges backlit by the afternoon sun; every tired shoe crossing Oxford Street; every menu item outside the Persian restaurant; every metal pipe along the ceiling of the BART station; every plastic curve of the AC Transit bus; every scratch on the window through which I saw every stucco wall and peeling billboard. In the visual frame left to me by Jess, the meaning was to be found not in the things themselves, but in the dialogue of their presences. It’s a language I’m still learning how to see and write in. ♦

Jenny Odell is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, California. Her most recent book, 

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

13 Ways of Looking: Jenny Odell

One of my first mystical encounters with art was returning to visit the Joseph Cornell rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, when I came of age in that city. Often I would take the train just to see Cornell’s boxes, which at the time were in a darkened series of rooms, a nesting atmosphere like the artist’s cellar. In the backroom, you could push a button for the blue light to go on, in one of the 

. Everything felt so bright and glassy and different once they were moved to the new Modern Wing years later. Thinking of Cornell’s poetics of organization helped me think about form as I became a writer—the page as a room or a box, inhabited by objects—and allowed me to think about tone, which had something to do with light. How could a passage of text somehow glow with its inner memory? How could writing be somehow about the mystery and magic of collection?

Often, the letters and diaries of Joseph Cornell have illuminated my work—they appear in my book 

, which is about thinking through writing as correspondence, and the (small) life of the interior. And I return to Cornell as a patron saint of 

, a project that attempts to document the beauty and exhaustion of two years spent mostly indoors with small children, with excursions to parks and other public spaces. The book takes the form of a series of meditations whose energy and shape are informed by Cornell’s own ways of looking, his own life of thinking and artmaking. Even the idea of a series, or working within variations, is inspired by Cornell—one of the main movements of the book, “Medici Slot Machines,” thinks through childhood toys and collectibles; it’s named after his assemblages that herald children as nobility, as well as his soap bubble sets, that also gesture to the beauty and ephemera of childhood. But the inspiration of Cornell, and his idea of “illuminations”—observations of the outside world, often gleaned from daily walks—is everywhere throughout 

’s first movement, “Lightboxes.” It’s set in a domestic interior—sometimes cozy, other times claustrophobic—but marked by muddy and solitary walks in the park, amidst brightness and shadow. Perhaps the atmosphere I was looking for in this winter notebook was the feeling of looking through a series of lighted windows.

Whenever I write a book, I search for ways to categorize its forms—for 

I turned to forms of light, notebook pieces that felt to me like translucencies. A friend who read it suggested that the book reads like a calendar, which I really liked. Visual calendars were an inspiration for 

, as well as what I am actively looking at in its pages. The paintings of Etel Adnan, who died when I was writing the book, and whose poetics linger throughout, were key, as was her belief in finding energy in the seasons. In the book, I write about the first time I see art again in the outside world during the pandemic—it’s the 

 at Galerie Lelong, in the winter of 2020. I recall holding the hand of my oldest, while wearing my newborn, regarding both Adnan’s small vertical planet paintings—the simple beautifully colored circles that look like calendars for children—as well as the quartet of her seasons, the blots of paint around the black lines of trees.

Etel Adnan’s paintings are so wonderful to look at with children. The title of the show, “Seasons,” is a quote from Adnan’s 2017 book-length poem 

, which I love and teach—“Why do seasons regularly follow their appointed time, deny their kind of energy to us?” I think in 

, beginning with the winter notebook, I am asking whether a narrative can emerge out of the seasons.

For so long I have been trying to think about how to write the poetry of Yuji Agematsu, his gleanings from his daily walks around New York City. He collects bits of detritus off the streets—pieces of gum, feathers, wisps of hair, candy wrappers, assemblages—which he gathers together in the cellophane wrappers of daily cigarette packs—what he calls “zips”—which are then arranged in calendar-like monthly rows in Plexiglas cases, miniature ecosystems that continue to decay over time. Throughout

, I think about Agematsu’s “zips” when watching the accumulation of things in my apartment, the charge of the juxtaposition of things, both inside and outside, as Jane Bennett writes in 

, and my thinking through domestic time, comes from meditating on artists who made conceptual work out of time, out of the ritual of gathering and organizing, which reminds me of the play of children. 

I began to think of this as a box practice—mine, Cornell’s, Agematsu’s. David Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box, the collection he kept under his bed of 59 small objects, stored in a wooden citrus pine box. I first saw it in a show curated by Julie Ault at Galerie Bucholz, on the Upper East Side, in 2016. In 

 I think about how Joseph Cornell and David Wojnarowicz collected what children often collect, or how the Magic Box was possibly an actual collection kept from childhood, or recollected, like Cornell, after being an adult.

What did it mean, I wondered, that Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box contained objects like my five-year-old child’s own box practice: the toy horses, the plastic bugs, the beaded necklaces, the foreign coins, the stones, glass and crystals arrange by color, sometimes housed in tiny embroidered purses and even tinier boxes; items that took on a magical, almost totemic, function in Wojnarowicz’s videos and paintings. There is a magic, also, to the list of objects, as recorded in the finding aid at the Fales Library at NYU, to the actual fragments on the page, that I repeat in 

 is also enthralled by the weirdness of the natural history diorama, its play of reality and unreality. The second movement in the book, “The Hall of Ocean Life,” thinks through ecological grief and planetary despair, finding solace in David Wojnarowicz’s grief journal, which reveals a deep love of the natural world, the land of forest and swamps, of reptiles and dogs, clouds and trees, filtered through the black and white photographs of Wojnarowicz’s mourned love and mentor, Peter Hujar. I document trying to write about the grief journal, and also Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film of the beluga whales at the Coney Island Aquarium, which he and Hujar would visit as Hujar was dying, a spectacle they found beautiful and devastating. I write through visiting the Natural History Museum and the polar bear diorama I knew first from the photograph of Hiroshi Sugimoto, which most likely prefigures Wojnarowicz’s own famous photograph of a buffalo diorama in Washington DC. 

While walking through the Hall of Ocean Life at the Natural History Museum, I also think about Etel Adnan’s love of the horizon in her paintings, and Sugimoto’s own 

, and how Wojnarowicz wrote about clouds, the play of darkness of light, the utter abyss. 

 I’m searching for artists who document the ongoingness of domestic time. “The Hall of Ocean Life” is layered over several winters, going from early pregnancy before the pandemic to breastfeeding a growing baby. In this movement I think about that Peter Hujar photograph of the baby breastfeeding against the planet of his mother’s breast, the utter absorption of time passing. Mierle Laderman Ukeles considered breastfeeding part of maintenance art: the often invisible, often arduous domestic labor documented in her 

 as well as in artworks like her piece “Dressing to Go Out/Undressing to Go In.” I reference this work in “Lightboxes”: the artist putting on and off the outside winter coats and boots of her two children, with white dust cloth and a chain as a three-dimensional object, care work as endless repetition.

The last movement of the book, “Translucencies,” is a notebook of seasons, holidays, and exhaustions. It’s dedicated to the sisters Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer, inspired by their ways of looking, and their conceptual projects documenting time and the ephemeral. When looking at foil birthday balloons stranded in bare park trees, or watching children build melting snowmen, I think of Rosemary Mayer’s outdoor installations, which she called temporary monuments, her balloons or snowpeople, transient festivities.

Throughout the reoccurring winters, which appear at the beginning and end of the book, I thought of the texture of Howardena Pindell’s glittery paintings, made out of hole-punched paper and foam, which have the feeling and memory of New York City blizzards.

All of these artists and artworks I actually write about in the book. For me writing is about looking and thinking and feeling.