A Lifetime of
Making Things:
Charlie Porter &
Matt Wolf

Writer and Filmmaker Discuss Art, Crisis, History & Hope

Text: Matt Wolf, Charlie Porter
Photography: Mary Manning

What can we learn about hope, crisis, and resilience by examining our own history? As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a pause must be taken at the absolutely pervasive use of the word "unprecedented." Every time this moment is described as being without precedent, we must ask: without precedent for whom, and of where? While every disease follows its own logic, the parallels between a catastrophic government response and a rapidly growing rate of infection are well within living memory. In the past 50 years, HIV/AIDS has taken the lives of over 32 million people worldwide; to understand where we are in the present, we must not allow ourselves to forget such a recent past.

For artists working across eras, what they make is often a collective effort: to remember and honor what was almost forgotten and cannot be. Such remnants, over time, become their own kinds of record. Recently, the writer Charlie Porter sat down with the filmmaker Matt Wolf to discuss this intersection of legacy and memory. As the author of the forthcoming What Artists Wear, Porter has had an impressive career in fashion journalism, having written and edited for Esquire, The Face, The Guardian, GQ, and Fantastic Man, menswear critic at the Financial Times, a position he held until 2018. Matt Wolf is a critically acclaimed, award-winning documentary filmmaker, perhaps best known for his film Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, about the late musician and producer Arthur Russell. Most recently, he released Recorder, a documentary about the activist Marion Stokes, and Another Hayride, about the controversial self-help guru Louise Hay. His work focuses on youth culture, artists, and queer history.

Here, in a conversation between Porter and Wolf, the two contend with the parallels between the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of art in crisis, and the complexities of hope.

Matt Wolf

Charlie Porter

I read your blog long before I met you, and knew you as an alternative art and fashion writer. What was your motivation for starting a blog?

I started the blog in 2010 or 2011, maybe 2009. There was all this stuff that I was interested in that I couldn't write about anywhere. There was a lot happening in London with menswear design and it seemed new, but it actually wasn't. It was bringing back what should have always been there, that I believe was cut away by the AIDS crisis. It felt like a return to fashion, to a whole culture that had been decimated. That's how the blog started.

I like what you're saying about seeing something that was cut off through this generational schism, as a result of AIDS, and then trying to find that continuity through art and fashion.

It was whole ecosystems and cultures that died. Not just designers, but the people who bought and wore the clothes, the people who worked behind the scenes, who worked in the stores. You can never know what would have happened if people lived.

I read Brad Gooch’s memoir about his boyfriend Howard Bruckner [Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s & the 80s], a documentary filmmaker. When he was sick and dying, he was trying to make his first feature film, Bloodhounds of Broadway. He snuck in under the wire to make the film without having to contend with the skepticism or fear of the producers. He died shortly after, before the film was released. Longtime Companion is another example of a film where there was this race to complete the project before the director died, and most of the crew died. It's interesting and it's tragic to imagine people rushing to make work as they were being marginalized by the government and society. A lot of films from that period—such as Poison or Swoon or Looking for Langston, and, of course, Derek Jarman's work—reflect the political intensity and urgency of that time. Most of them reimagined a queer history—the gay murderers, Leopold and Loeb in Swoon, or Jarman’s homoerotic treatments of Caravaggio and the British monarchy.

I'm interested in the idea of artists and writers and filmmakers and activists resisting the erasure of history. As Sarah Schulman wrote in her book Gentrification of the Mind, an entire generation vanished as a result of AIDS, which ushered in gentrification. That's her idea, and it's an idea that has really resonated with a lot of people.

It's so weird when you then combine that thinking with ideas of progress, like technological innovation. Often, people you're engaging with in your films are pushing, pushing, pushing. Like Arthur Russell experimenting with new music technologies, or Marion Stokes and her use of the VCR. Once these technologies were innovations; now they seem obsolete, yet they can be used again, to try to resist the erasure of history.

What's often most meaningful is what doesn't change. That’s how you understand throughlines in culture. Sometimes things don’t change because of forces of patriarchy, racism, classism, or homophobia. Sometimes change doesn’t occur because there’s continuity between generations of artists and thinkers. I'm interested in projects that revolve around reappraising the legacies of unconventional or problematic visionaries and trying to translate what they did, to find meaning for it in the present. My relationship to history is trying to make old things feel new, and trying to understand why the past is informing the present.

It seems the work you're doing also has the intention to look outside of the capitalist model.

Thinking about people who've pursued ambitious projects—like Marion Stokes recording all media, 24 hours a day for 30 years—there becomes a kind of maddening sense of scope, a bigger-is-better trap, when, in fact, as people scale up their ideas they must contend with the limitations of the capitalistic world. I'd be curious what your take on that is as someone who covers fashion, in which that tension between commodity and creativity is keenly felt. In a sense, it's a cliche of creative life.

I’m obsessed with The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz. It's the most incredible book. He talks about the word culture, how it comes from the Latin, for "to cultivate." We cultivate cultures in the fermentation of food, but in the arts, or in fashion, too often we talk about consumers. I love taking action to break out of the infantilizing role of the consumer, and take back dignity and power by becoming producers and creators.

To be generative instead of reactive. That’s my point of view as a filmmaker. I've gotten to the point where I don't want to make anything that's not infused with that sense of emotional involvement. I'll watch a film a hundred times in the course of making it, but every time I screen an edit of a film, I try to be emotionally available, enough so that I might cry when watching it, or I might laugh. If I lose my ability to feel those things, how am I going to be able to impart that emotional experience to others? If I don't have a deep fascination and love for the subject, why am I asking people to watch it? I can only really make these personal projects, and I’ve had to develop a process to be generative indefinitely.

I was really inspired by what the speculative fiction writer N.K. Jemisin said when she received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2020. She said, “I will write my books first and sell them as I feel like selling them.” It’s liberating to hear a writer talk about how she's brought freedom by not having to do deals, by writing what she wants. That the self-generative, self-protected and self-nurtured space can actually be the most productive.

How do you come to the people in your films? Is it a long process of research? How much comes down to happenstance?

It's all research. In fact, I think it would serve me well to embrace the unexpected a bit more. I'm always surprised when a new idea strikes. There is a part of me that says, “Will I ever feel this way again about a subject?” Over time, I've developed the confidence to know this isn't the opportunity of a lifetime, that it's actually a lifetime of making things. You have to be attuned to the stuff that turns you on. It's like treasure hunting.

And is that treasure hunting online? Or what does it look like?

Everything I've ever found has been on the internet or through peer networks. When I made the film about Marion Stokes, everybody I knew was sharing a blog post about her. What is it that's intriguing about this woman who recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years? For my first film, Wild Combination, it was more obvious. My friend described this guy who would ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth, listening to cassette mixes of his own tapes. When I heard the music, I remember thinking, “This is what I care about.” When I see something that intrigues me, I'm interested in making that thing not just part of my life in a short-term way, but part of who I am. As I move on from films, it adds to the depth of my life experience.

And the magic of your film is all that it shows, that complexity. Like what it meant to grow up as Arthur Russell, as a young human scarred by all of his burdens, and then his attempts to live beyond those burdens.

And also his inability to finish things and his reluctance to promote what he was doing. The process may have been more meaningful to him than the product, but I don't think that's true. I think anybody who produces work that prolifically wants it to be recognized and seen. But I don't think any artist wants to be discovered after they're dead. So many female artists make work and nobody takes an interest until they're 80 years old, and the culture industry feels like they've discovered it. I don't want to be that person who only values things that are obscure. To me, it's more about understanding why things haven't been recognized. I am interested in what the forces are that have marginalized people. So many of the artists I've profiled are people who died of AIDS. It's important to look at the politics and circumstances of AIDS that, in a sense, silenced these people.

And also the importance of doing it, and doing it, and doing it. It's not the type of thing where you can say, “Okay, it's been done, now we can move on.” It's the constant need to tell that story and make sure that it's understood.

Or to make sure that the history isn't lost, that these things don't just languish and disappear into the trashcan of history. That is an element of consumerism, that things are discarded and forgotten, that there's no long-term memory of cultural material. As somebody who makes films, I hope that there's an afterlife, that they don't fade from collective memory and disappear.

When you come across an idea, is it clear immediately what format it will take?

When I was younger, I always shortchanged ideas, like I thought Wild Combination would be a short film. But now I am able to identify pretty quickly. I really like to make short films in between big feature projects, because I want to be able to work on that small scale.

Your most recent short film, Another Hayride, just came out.

I read the manuscript for Olivia Laing’s new book, and she mentioned Louise Hay, the controversial self-help guru who told gay men that they could be “healed” [of AIDS] if they loved themselves. I realized that Louise Hay is also the basis for Todd Haynes’ film Safe, so I was intrigued. I discovered this VHS documentary that was made about the “hayrides,” these healing circles she held for men with AIDS. I was just obsessed with the material; it felt deeply meaningful in this present moment. So I bought a bunch of Louise Hay VHS tapes off eBay and got them transferred. I played around and I put something together, and it was a film. I am really thinking about this bigger-is-better thing, but it's so important to constantly scale down.

Aside from their length, how do your short films differ from the feature-length films?

Most of the short films that I make have a similar structure—one voice telling a story, and then a subject that they're discussing. For Another Hayride, there’s just one speaker, but it was all about changing little words or shots to calibrate this balance in depicting Louise Hay. A lot of what she said was deeply helpful to people. What she said was also harmful, but it came from a place of not knowing. It's really the place we were in at the beginning of the pandemic—it was easy for me to empathize with a period in which people wanted to manage their fear and to feel hope when there wasn't solid and good information about what to do. It's important to make distinctions between the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic, in the sense that [AIDS] is not globally universal, it's something that afflicts a marginalized community, and within that community, there was further marginalization of people of color and intravenous drug users. And it came with sex panic, and total government neglect. But still, I think there’s this shared sense of collective fear, and finding both harmful and helpful strategies to manage that fear.

I'm all about holding two things at once—a sense of hope and idealism, but also a sense of sorrow, or poignancy for the inevitability of crisis, and the repairable damage that's been done.

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