About A Girl, 2005, oil on canvas, diptych, 19×25”. All images courtesy of Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm; David Zwirner, New York; and the artist.

Is there an art to memory? According to Cicero, the Greek lyric poet Simonides was the first to invent it. The story is well known: after the poet stepped away from a banquet hall during a large dinner, the roof collapsed and killed everyone inside. The guests were maimed beyond recognition. Simonides, in a kind of classical CSI forensics maneuver, was able to identify the bodies by remembering each of their seating places around the banquet table. From the start, then, the art of memory is linked to architecture—an interior space, a hall, a room, guests positioned around a table.

I thought of the relationship between memory and architecture while viewing slides of Karin Mamma Andersson’s first U.S. solo show, Rooms Under the Influence (David Zwirner Gallery, 2006). The new work marks a shift toward interior spaces—rooms, stage sets, classrooms, living rooms—and yet the depicted interiors, like memory, are always misleading, indeterminate. Distinctions between memory and hallucination, interior and exterior, are blurred. The repetition of mirrored space provides the ghost of a narrative, but one that is open, open-ended, incomplete. It strikes me that a stage set is an appropriate architectural analogy to Andersson’s new paintings. It is a space cut in half, a half-space, one that opens outward toward the viewer, invites the viewer into an awareness that they are positioned (as art is positioned, as poetry is positioned) in a between-space, a space between here and there—a theater.

The following correspondence took place via email from December 2006 through March 2007. We use the space to locate shared obsessions and to reveal (and then interrogate) aspects of our artistic practice. Like all correspondences, it is closer to a series of exchanged monologues than a dialogue; the epistolary form generates lacunae, gaps, dropped lines of thought. An additional gap occurs due to the fact that our letters were moving between languages, were being translated back and forth between English and Swedish. And yet connective nodes surface. A dialogue forms, however provisional. Our daily lives begin to intersect—me, writing in a room in Brooklyn with my cat on my lap, and Andersson writing in a room in Stockholm, while her son does his homework and her husband, the Swedish painter Jockum Nordström, falls asleep after returning from a Bob Dylan concert.

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Issue 100 Summer 2007