Saturday, November 25, 2023
The New York Times Book Review has a standard question that they end their brief interviews with: “Name three people you would like to invite to a dinner party.” If I had to mix genres, and I wanted the conversation to be primarily of interest to my guests (even if I myself couldn’t follow the conversation), I would invite Hilma af Klint, Catherine Christer Hennis, and Laura Riding.
After dinner, I would invite them to listen to Michael Hedges’s “Aerial Boundaries” and Wim Martens’s “Maximizing the Audience.”
I admit that I’d never heard of Hennix until she died, but then again I’d never heard of Klint until I saw her work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the mid-1980s. Both Cathay Gleeson and I were deeply moved by her work and felt fortunate to live in a city that was open to exhibiting her work.
Catherine Christer Hennix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Christer_Hennix
The Electric Harpsichord: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXxobmct4xY
ARTFORUM article on Hennix:
https://www.artforum.com/columns/canada-choate-on-the-writings-of-catherine-christer-hennix-241922/
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To acknowledge her passing in a way she might find acceptable, I include a link I believe to be relevant to her life and work:
https://quran.com/24/35?translations=83,84,17,26,101,20,85,18,95,19,22,28
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About Bill Mohr