SPENT Episode Six | Vijay Masharani

Ajay Kurian sits down with artist Vijay Masharani for a conversation that begins with a confession about hating the highway and expands into an exploration of cliché, mortality, and what it means to keep making work from inside an unresolved illness.Masharani, who showed in this year's MoMA PS1 Greater New York, talks about his approach to video and drawing — work that hits hard and fast, straight down the middle, refusing easy resolution — and traces how his practice shifted after being diagnosed with blood cancer twice, including a hospital stay where he was ordering drawing paper from Blick's website on bedrest. He and Kurian dig into cliché as a kind of sedimented truth, Drake's theory of what makes a pop hit work, and why Philip Guston's relationship to mortality and mass has become a constant reference point for him.Throughout the conversation, Masharani resists the idea that his illness is a resolved, past-tense event — describing himself instead as living in a kind of purgatory, mediated by a monthly blood test that's essentially binary — and reflects on impatience, discipline, and why, even at his lowest, he never stopped being an artist.

Timestamps

00:00 — “I hate the highway”02:47 — Cliché and immediacy04:53 — The deer in the green tank10:55 — Greater New York at MoMA PS113:01 — Cancer and recurrence14:25 — Art after cancer21:42 — A game of taste24:16 — Art and politics32:26 — The “stove toucher” tendency36:29 — Making exhibitions41:03 — Exhibitions as albums46:32 — Drake and the imperfect pop hit49:01 — Returning to art after cancer53:23 — Why keep making art?57:32 — Philip Guston and mortality01:00:54 — Soutine, painting, and mass01:03:01 — Living in purgatory01:05:27 — Modernism and illness

Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on the highway.

Ajay Kurian: Damn, I didn’t know this.

Vijay Masharani: I hate driving on there. I hate being in the car when someone else is driving on the highway.

Ajay Kurian: Really?

Vijay Masharani: I hate the highway, dude. I think the highway is wrong. I think it’s American thanatophilia, as an urban spatial form. I hate the highway.

Ajay Kurian: Vijay Masharani is an artist, writer, and educator based in the Bay Area. He makes drawings, videos, and texts that are obsessed with the letter, the glyph, the geometry of meaning. Work that hits you hard and fast and then refuses to let you go. His videos open cold. His drawings span from the highly structured to the loose and associative, and the whole practice is organized around a single conviction: if the problems of language make you uncomfortable, you can’t flee to the body. And if the body makes you uncomfortable, you can’t just retreat above the neck.

He’s currently showing at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, a survey of the New York art scene that happens once every five years, which is the most eyes he’s ever had on his work. I’ve known Vijay since he was in undergrad. My first visit with him was back in 2016 at MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Since then, we’ve gotten closer, collaborated on projects, and even spent a summer together at Skowhegan, where I was faculty and he was a participant. Not long after, he was diagnosed with blood cancer. Then diagnosed again. He’s made three shows since.

We talked about what it means to make art from purgatory — not after a near-death experience, but inside one, where the blood test every month is essentially binary and the book is not yet closed. We talked about cliché as a sedimented truth, about why Drake said there has to be something wrong with a pop hit, about what Philip Guston understood that most painters don’t. And we talked about what changed in the studio after cancer and what stayed the same, and about why, in the end, he couldn’t stop making things even when he had every reason to.

This dude was literally ordering paper from Blick on his hospital bed.

Here is my conversation with Vijay Masharani.

Vijay Masharani: I like clichés. I like so many clichés and I like stuff that’s right down the middle. I think in art there’s a bias toward the oblique, and every now and then it can feel really good to go down the middle. To me, that’s what a cliché can do. I think if people have responded to the work, for example, — especially the video work from early on — it’s because there’s something about the standard for video art, the way it stands apart from, or at one point stood apart from, though maybe still does from the more oblique or highly mediated kind of thing. I think the work for me was, hopefully, pretty visually forward and kind of frontal, but then not immediately digestible. That combination.

Ajay Kurian: So what you’re saying is the video form in early video art may come off as a little esoteric or oblique to people used to watching TV and films, but your work goes more down the middle — there’s something more immediately explosive, something that can just hit and grab. There’s a hook and then there’s something to unravel the hook.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. I like hitting ‘em… I know that sounds stupid, like sports. I actually listen to a lot of NBA podcasts and they’ve definitely changed my syntax a little bit — but I talk about art with it, which is very true. I like to hit them hard and fast, but not in a way where it’s over after that.

Ajay Kurian: Right. It’s not like that provides resolution.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah.

Ajay Kurian: It’s just one method among many.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. It makes you turn your head, but then you kind of stick with it, like, “Oh wait, what?”

Maybe it’d be good to put something concrete to it. In the second video I have on view in this trilogy at PS1 — the green tank with the deer in it —

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it’s very Twin Peaks. On a formal level, looking at a giant rectangle of neon green, and then noticing a deer somewhere in it, and realizing, okay, this is an aquarium. That piece is one of those moments that’s extremely satisfying to look at. It’s mesmerizing. You fall into a place that doesn’t feel resolved, but it also feels like it gives you enough to enjoy it.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it’s the opening shot of the piece — we’re already in it,there’s no ramp-up to that. Now, I’m like, do I do this with water Pokémon now?

Ajay Kurian: What?

Vijay Masharani: Because the other one opens with a crab.

Ajay Kurian: Oh, got you. A singing crab, yeah.

Vijay Masharani: A singing crab. A deer that can breathe underwater, whatever. There’s something about starting with water, and to me — I think I’m using the term wrong, but mentally I call it a cold open, because a cold open is when you’re just dropped into something. So you can see how I’m using different terms to describe the same kind of deployment of immediacy. When I say “straight down the middle” or “frontal” or “drop in,” I’m referring to the same kind of move in art with different words.

Ajay Kurian: And it always evolves. In terms of 3D animation and scoring, it seems like you’re a little more resistant to using pop music, or the quintessential rap song of the moment as a quick identifier — like, “oh shit, we’re here.”

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, totally. It’s really tempting. Early on I think that was what felt interesting about video — the infinitely recombinable game of music and visual media. There’s still a fair amount of that in the workflow — for example, while I’m editing in Premiere, whatever’s on is just on.

At least two of the songs in the new video, which is called O-----K — with five em dashes between the letters O and K, I can talk about the reason for that in a second — but two out of the three songs I kept as samples just happened to play while I was listening to NTS. One was a song I already knew, Young Thug’s “Love Me.” The other is by, I think, an indie rocker named Clarence Clarity has a song called “Cancer in the Water.”

That’s another good way to demonstrate the straight-down-the-middle thing. I was trying to figure out what to put over the driving sequence with me and my dad, where I’m wearing the mask with the spinning element. Everything felt like it was trying too hard to evoke some sort of unconvincingly poetic juxtaposition between sound and image. I liked the visual so much, and then this song came on the radio and I was like, “that’s the one.”

I guess it’s like this bedroom indie-pop thing but with a lot of weird producer flourishes — honestly, in a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy kind of way. So much maximalist production fluorishes. It feels super 2010 in that way. It’s not a very tasteful song, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it sounds like pop-baroque.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, a little pop-baroque, but really good. And the lyrics are like, “Fuck it up, put cancer in the water, put cancer in me.”

Ajay Kurian: Jesus.

Vijay Masharani: I was like, right, that’s perfect. Because in a way, it was too cute and metaphorical when there was a lyric with more interpretation that could tie back to what I wanted to talk about — but no, let’s just go for the most obvious, relevant, bluntest thing. Cancer in the water, cancer in me, period. Poison everywhere.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah.

Vijay Masharani: Like, word. You know what I mean? Hopefully that illustrates what I’m talking about.

Ajay Kurian: I really wanted to catch you in this particular moment because, for one, I haven’t seen you in two years. And two, you’ve been included in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, the survey show that happens every five years. This is 2026 — I was in it in 2015. It’s a really fun show to be in, an exciting, super generative moment. I’d say this is easily going to be the most eyes on your work that I could think of, for now.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Zurich was cool. But the nature of the eyes is different.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah — like at a Kunsthalle in Zurich, there’s definitely traffic and definitely plenty of people, it’s not some rinky-dink thing, but it’s just different.

Vijay Masharani: It’s different.

Ajay Kurian: There’s not a massive amount of tourists going through, whereas this is people from all over, just chilling, because MoMA PS1 is a thing to do.

Vijay Masharani: One hundred percent. It’s cool.

Ajay Kurian: You’ve been at this for a minute. We’ve known each other since you were an undergrad.

Vijay Masharani: I think a decade now, ten years now — probably first studio visit in 2016, around this time, honestly probably spring.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, there’s a lot of nice feelings I have about this weather that I was just realizing today.

But in that decade, I’ve seen you change so much — grow as an artist and as a person, come to terms with what making art means for you, what being in this art world means for you — and then having to deal with real-life shit, your whole life taking a turn toward something that could have been catastrophic.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I envy people who had leukemia once.

I go on Reddit, and people are on there with their first leukemia diagnosis, and I’m like, they have it easy.

Ajay Kurian: Jesus Christ.

Vijay Masharani: That’s just how far I am from being a healthy person. I’m like, “You lucky duck, you only had it once.” Because I had it twice. The second one is way crazier.

Ajay Kurian: Really?

Vijay Masharani: A second cancer diagnosis is way crazier than one, because with modern medicine, you get cancer and people are like, “Okay, it’s probably going to be this harrowing experience, but then you’ll be okay.” And then you get it a second time and you’re like, oh, fuck — because everyone knows you can’t just keep getting it.

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: Eventually you have to put it away for good, you know what I’m saying?

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I remember telling my dad you got it again, and the look on his face was not heartening in the slightest. I was like, damn, you didn’t even try to make me feel good about this.

Vijay Masharani: You don’t get to. You can’t just keep getting it. At a certain point you’ve got to kill every single cell.

Ajay Kurian: This is a cliché to ask, but — how did it change your outlook on what it is that you make and how you make it?

Vijay Masharani: I think it’s so total that, in a sense, everything we’re talking about is an answer to that question. It’s your life.

The way I’m speaking, even about being direct, being straight down the middle — if there’s one thing being discussed in an encoded way, it’s an answer to that question, because pretty much all the language I use to describe my work is post-cancer. It’s stuff I’ve written and thought through.

But to say something new and still try to answer it — I’d say, and people have asked me this, and I’ll quote my own interview: art problems aren’t problems. I don’t know, I’ve got real problems now so art became a lot of other things.

I used to be the kind of person who’d be in my studio and things felt really impossible. You’ve been a witness to things feeling really impossible for me. We did a studio visit in 2022 when I was in the studio in Fidi, and there was nothing.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, you had a desk, some paper on it, and your laptop.

Vijay Masharani: And horrible vibes like depression.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, the vibes were bad. The vibes were very bad.

Vijay Masharani: Dude, I got a drawing board delivered in a piece of cardboard from Amazon, and it was in the corner of the studio. After you left, I didn’t take out the recycling — I just left it there, and it became like my pad, that I would lie down on, because I just would not do anything.

I’d just lie down on a piece of cardboard on the floor. *Laughs* I’m serious.

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs* No, I believe it.

Vijay Masharani: That’s where I was at, dude. There was no art happening. There was just cardboard lying around.

Ajay Kurian: That’s sometimes, I guess, part of the process.

Vijay Masharani: It was so bad. I’m not saying that to dramatize it. Even though it is a mentally-ill orientation to melodrama, I’m not saying it to be dramatic. That’s descriptively what I was doing.

Ajay Kurian: And that’s pre-cancer.

Vijay Masharani: That’s pre-cancer, dude.

Ajay Kurian: But in retrospect, could you even imagine a moment now where your studio would bring you to the place where you would be curled up on a piece of cardboard?

Vijay Masharani: That’s why it’s so annoying. I look back on that time, when I was healthy, and I’m just like — honestly, sacko-pussy. *Laughs* Honestly, you know? I have real sympathy for… I don’t know, maybe I don’t have real sympathy for depressed people —

Ajay Kurian: I catch that as depressed in the studio, with the work you are making.

Vijay Masharani: In a way that it’s very self-produced. It was a “stop hitting yourself” kind of thing — you know the meme, where someone has a boot on their face, and then it pans out and the boot is on their own hand.

Now I don’t do that. And it’s super easy not to now. It’s super easy to make the decision not to do that. In my opinion.

Ajay Kurian: Mhm.

Vijay Masharani: I don’t think you have to get cancer to make that decision.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I don’t think so either.

Vijay Masharani: But I did choose to make that decision after getting cancer, for whatever reason.

Ajay Kurian: Right. I think a lot of times people are in a room of their own making, and it takes a set of things, different for each person, to realize where the door is.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. It’s made me impatient, in that way — like, it is actually a decision, so can you hurry up and make it, because if you’re a drain, that’s a problem for the people around you. You know what I mean? We don’t have infinite time, you know?

Ajay Kurian: I totally —

Vijay Masharani: Get that.

Ajay Kurian: But there are two sides of me when it comes to something like that, because there’s the pedagogue in me —

Vijay Masharani: Me too.

Ajay Kurian: — and I know you have that too, there’s never going to be a student who comes to you where you’re just like, “hurry the fuck up.”

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, like, get over yourself.

Ajay Kurian: There are nice, even critical, ways to say that so a person can actually hear it. I think we’ve both said some version of it more than once.

There are people who are building with me, and I don’t like when they waste my time. And then there are people I’m trying to help build — I’ve created that situation myself, so that’s on me, and I’ll put the energy in and I’m not going to rush them towards whatever they need.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it normally doesn’t work also, if you rush people — they dig their heels in. It’s tough. I think the whole inquiry into the charisma of forms, and what you described as a mesmerizing quality in the work, might be part of that — you can’t just push someone.

If there is a utility to what artists are good at: can we get people to rush toward that decision, through geometry, considered in the expanded sense?

Ajay Kurian: I did this with Whitney Mallett — we played a game, it was part of one of the Whitney reviews with K8 Hardy and Sianne Ngai.

Vijay Masharani: Oh yeah, I think I saw that.

Ajay Kurian: A game of taste.

Vijay Masharani: I don’t want to say I get embarrassed, but for taste stuff… I can try.

Ajay Kurian: In that particular moment — the embarrassed ones are harder. For classes I used to bring in something that inspired me that also embarrassed me, and it used to be anime, because I grew up getting made fun of all day long for liking anime.

Vijay Masharani: It’s in that category. There are things I’m embarrassed to do — every now and then I’ll pop open an incognito tab and play Pokémon Showdown.

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

You know what that is? You can doPokémon battles on the internet.

Ajay Kurian: No, I mean, I understand it, but I haven’t done it.

Vijay Masharani: I’m not really embarrassed about it, because I don’t do it very often. I’m just like, doesn’t everyone have some shit like that? It’s pretty mild — people are like jerking off to monkeys getting tortured.

Ajay Kurian: Jesus Christ. *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: I mean the president is a pedophile, you know what I mean? Like I don’t give a shit.

*Laughs*

It’s really fucked up, but I’m not that embarrassed compared to deviant activities going on in this great country.

Ajay Kurian: Okay, so the one category I think I might still get something out of you on is: proud to dislike.

Vijay Masharani: Ooh, proud to dislike. Okay. There’s so many —

*Laughs*

Ajay Kurian: I mean this is catnip for you.

Vijay Masharani: I need to be a little more secure in certain aspects of my life before I start being completely honest about what I think about things.

Ajay Kurian: Honestly, this feels really specific to the art world, and not so much other industries. Where, other industries, talking shit actually gets you something — you can monetize it.

Vijay Masharani: It is actually like that in the art world too.

I owe my career to talking shit about the Zabludowicz’s on Instagram. That was how I landed my first group show.

Ajay Kurian: No shit!

Vijay Masharani: So maybe that’s what I’ll still remain proud to dislike: the state of Israel.

But in a real way, which I mean — that was 2017, when I was starting to write about the Zabludowicz boycott. Tiffany Zabludowicz had that Times Square space, and I’d just learned about the boycott through Twitter, because they were in the UK but they had a presence on Twitter.

I was like, that last name sounds familiar. I’d just turned twenty-two. Clark Filio, a friend, had commented on it—he wasn’t describing it as a genocide in 2017— but he said, “this reminds me of the oppression of Palestine.” Something like that.

I was like, hey man, your comment was the only one that acknowledged the boycott in the context of this exhibition. That was the first piece of writing I sent you, which a few years later turned into “The Status of BDS in Contemporary Art.”

Ajay Kurian: Which is a really good piece.

Vijay Masharani: It was an essay I published in Extra magazine. And then, Clark ended up putting me in my first group show because of it.

Ajay Kurian: We should also say that piece wasn’t able to run in a few other magazines.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, ARTnews was the main one that pulled the plug at the last second, because the change of ownership to Penske happened during the editorial process.

The new guy came in and was like, “why the fuck are we publishing stuff like this?” I think the quote Andrew Russeth relayed to me — I was working with Andrew when he was there — was something like, “we’re going for the Kaws-and-Banksy crowd.” *Laughs* Like the bridge and tunnel crowd.

Ajay Kurian: That is a very different crowd.

Vijay Masharani: I don’t actually know, what is the bridge-and-tunnel crowd?

Ajay Kurian: It’s the people coming in from New Jersey.

Vijay Masharani: Right.

Ajay Kurian: Into the city to get fucked up.

Vijay Masharani: You don’t think there’s overlap?

Ajay Kurian: I think there is overlap, I just mean it’s a different crowd than who your essay was for.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, yeah. I was happy to have more time to work on it, and ended up working with Travis Steele, who was freelancing for Extra at the time, to write something much shorter and digest it a little more because it ended up being more lean and mean in the final version.

After it got cut, I ended up presenting it as a lecture, and rewriting it. Through that process it got distilled. The piece still has legs — it still gets cited, got translated into French, and even now, in this wave of activity in the Palestine solidarity movement globally, I’ll occasionally get a Google Alert about it. Which is cool, the circumstances are horrible, but it is cool in terms of being a contribution to an inquiry about aesthetics and politics that began in 2017 — right when I moved here.

It was a response to the Zabludowicz thing and this is a very roundabout way of saying Clark put me in my first show from that.

Ajay Kurian: So this all goes back to…

Vijay Masharani: Me and my art.

Ajay Kurian: You being able to talk shit.

Vijay Masharani: You can talk a little shit and be okay. You can not be super-duper mealy-mouthed, as is the norm in art discourse. And you can be okay.

Do some doors close? I mean, probably. *Laughs*

No one’s going to listen to this, so it’s fine, but I applied to an art fair once, and Kern was on the jury, and I had to tell them about our thing, and they were like, whatever, we already submitted the application, it doesn’t matter.

So I was like, is that door permanently closed?

Ajay Kurian: For instance — Marcus Jahmal just invited me to run a panel at Kern for a show he’d put together, and initially I told him, just so you know, I did this thing with Vijay Masharani. It was a performance there, and I don’t think Anton Kern was super happy about all that, so I don’t know if he’ll be into this.

They did have to check, and their response was basically just, “you’re just going to do a straightforward panel, right? You’re not going to fuck with us?”

Vijay Masharani: That’s funny as hell. Yeah, exactly. I mean— it’s a panel, and it’s a good thing you’re able to do that.

Ajay Kurian: All I’m saying is it’s not always that deep with every single thing.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. I guess my point is I think it’s fine.

And I think — on a much different scale — this is what Hannah, Chiara, and Toby were talking about: the whole point is for it to have some stakes. If a door closes, well, that was part of it having stakes.

Ajay Kurian: Exactly.

Vijay Masharani: That just is what it is. But also, most of the time the door doesn’t close, because no one will care in a few years anyway.

And even if it does, so what? You’ll have the benefit of having said your piece or being able to sleep at night or having some principles.

“Taking a stand” sounds really stupid, but, you know, you went for something.

Ajay Kurian: It articulates what is actually being censored, and if there is censorship happening. When there are actual stakes, when you say what you mean and mean what you say, certain things come to light that are much better than things hiding out because everyone is talking quietly, which is very different from talking shit.

You can talk shit about a show you just saw, saying “that show sucked.” But that’s no indictment of a person or institution. Whereas there’s a higher-level thing of, like — I don’t see anybody talking about the aftermath of the Whitney shutting down the ISP program.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve always had — shout out to my student Karwaan, he’s helped me think about this — it’s a certain kind of artist’s temperament, I call it the stove-toucher tendency.

There are some people who just want to touch the stove. I think my student’s a little like that. We had a great session where I told him I feel like I have a bit of a stove-toucher tendency, but you feel controlled by it more when you’re a young person— now I just notice it, like, “oh, there it is again,” from a bit of a distance. And he was like, “dude, that’s crazy, because when I was a kid I literally kept trying to touch the stove.”

Ajay Kurian: It is a thing, I did it as a kid too.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, it’s a cliché.

That does reflect the immaturity in me as a writer, when I was doing that BDS project — I still stand by that writing but there’s a way where it was too many problems of relevance and scale to myself, combined into a few things.

There’s a thing about transgression in art, and then a related question about understanding contemporary art as a set of codes and discourses around indeterminacy or obeyance, and the ways the exalted categories within art are correlative with what Suhail described as a tepid ideological liberalism — and then there’s also the concrete situation of the bleeding edge of global imperialism, all folded into one.

Now I prefer to completely disentangle those. If I’m going to talk about one of them, it’ll be on its own terms. That’s maybe why I don’t do much art-activism writing anymore — I don’t think it’s a particularly useful analytic soup to blend vastly different concerns with vastly different stakes. There are ways to suture them together in the social whole, but is it always analytically useful to take them on concurrently, in essay format?

I don’t know. I tried it, and it went how it went — I still like the writing, but that smoothie of concerns in essay form was personally as far as I wanted to take it. It was that piece and then I also did one on Strike MoMA for Artforum

Ajay Kurian: Right, I almost feel like there’s a correlation here.

I’ve seen a lot of students get their first solo exhibition and want to show everything they can do, everything they know how to do, everything on their mind. They put everything into the show. This happens with thesis shows, with first solo shows, and I’m always like — this isn’t the last time you’re going to show. It feels like they’re treating it like their last time but it’s their first.

Vijay Masharani: It might be generational — that feeling of, okay, I’m going to do this, and then, more void after.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah. As opposed to building one step at a time.

Vijay Masharani: I relate to that, honestly — I feel like I did exactly what you’re describing. Even with my first show at Klima, to be honest, I felt like it was demonstrating breadth, betting that would lead to being able to do more exhibitions. Whether that was good or bad judgment, I ended up doing more shows despite that is really difficult for me to assess. The question of the good, focused presentation versus the everything presentation is still something I don’t feel I have fully found satisfactory answers for.

Ajay Kurian: I think it’s also just practice. It’s not that different from writing and realizing, okay, this analytic framework isn’t that helpful for me — and there’ll still be a writer out there who’s like, I like that soup, I think that soup is interesting.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And it can go really well — like Peter Osborne, or something like that.

Ajay Kurian: You’d say he performs in that soup —

Vijay Masharani: At a much higher level, because it still feels pretty rigorous. Marina Vishmidt.

Ajay Kurian: I don’t know if you know her writing.

Vijay Masharani: Rest in peace, she died of cancer — she did more infrastructural critique, but much more elevated than what I was doing, because she was a real scholar.

Ajay Kurian: Right.

Vijay Masharani: Speculation as a mode of production, that stuff — I haven’t looked super closely at it.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, artists come to terms with how they want to make things, and it’s never final or set in stone. I remember feeling a certain way about an exhibition, getting advice, I followed that advice, and it wasn’t an unlock — it was more like, oh, I should actually just listen to myself, because at least I’d know I stood by what I really wanted to do.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, definitely.

Ajay Kurian: And you get better analytics for it.

Vijay Masharani: That part is really cool. Think for yourself — think for yourself is good advice.

Ajay Kurian: There’s a good cliché.

Vijay Masharani: “Think for yourself” is what Zhou Enlai — I don’t know, this should be substantiated — Samir Amin, a third-worldist political economist, gave these lectures on an alternate history of Bandung.

Normally when people talk about the Bandung Conference, they talk about the statesmen who led it — Nehru and Sukarno, maybe Nasser. But he was saying there’s a hidden history, that it was actually a group of — it’s been a long time since I looked at this — communists who reached out to Zhou Enlai for advice on how to organize Global South political feeling in the post-war moment, at a time when those statesmen weren’t particularly kind to communists in their own countries. So there’s a counter-narrative to how Bandung actually happened. And Zhou Enlai just responded, “Think for yourself.” And I was like —

Beautiful. Think for yourself

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: On the exhibition thing — I say this about you to other people too — I think you’re really good at the exhibition form, in a way I’m still trying to figure out. I connect it to some Ajay wisdom, which is: while you’re working on a show, you can think about an album that evokes what you’re trying to do. I think that’s very Ajay, because being an exhibition artist is kind of the correlation to being an album listener.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, for sure.

Vijay Masharani: And where I think we’re slightly different as artists — I get really fixated on certain couplets and verses, and I almost stop caring about the rest of the song. The rest of the album is even more…

Ajay Kurian: In the periphery.

Vijay Masharani: Far outside my purview, because I get so stuck on the couplet. When I made the Zurich show, I was listening to the verse in “No More Parties in LA” where he talks about how paranoid he is that he’s going to crash his car — because I have that same paranoia. I hate driving. It got worse after cancer.

Ajay Kurian: Oh God.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, I really try to avoid it. I’ll take a train ride that increases my commute three or four times rather than jump on the highway. I hate driving on the highway.

Ajay Kurian: Damn, I didn’t know this.

Vijay Masharani: I hate being in the car when someone else is driving on the highway. I hate the highway, dude, I think the highway is wrong, it’s American thanatophilia as an urban spatial form. I really can’t do it.

So he’s just saying, you know the verse, “that’s why I take the 405 — I’d be worried about my daughter” — and it’s like, over and over, such palpable fear of death in that verse.

Ajay Kurian: It made me think of Alex Da Corte. He’ll sometimes just play the same song obsessively, over and over, while working on a show.

Vijay Masharani: I’m one of those — one song, and even a short song, and even on the level of the line, the couplet.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, very different.

Vijay Masharani: And you’re an album artist, an exhibition artist. I think that’s something you have that I want to have. I think I can learn it, but right now, on this, you’re the sensei.

Ajay Kurian: It’s funny, because I think you learning about the album is much more doable than me changing my mindset to focus obsessively on the couplet or the line.

Vijay Masharani: Or the detail. Super detail, in everything, honestly.

Ajay Kurian: That’s never going to be me. That’s also — it’s a good George Saunders interview, where he talks about accepting that he’s going to fail at being everybody else besides himself.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.

Ajay Kurian: And make all the — literally, we’re just vomiting clichés at this point.

Really turning those negatives into positives, too. There’s a great James Blake interview with Rick Rubin, where he talks about being so shitty at melody —

Vijay Masharani: James Blake thinks he’s shitty at melody?

Ajay Kurian: Yeah. And his workaround was to put a ton of his own recorded voice and start layering it. That’s when he found something that felt like him.

But, like, can I do a Billie Eilish melody that just breaks your brain? No — not in my life will I be able to do that.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, dude, I really love that, actually. It’s funny, we both listen to pop-artist interviews for studio wisdom.

Ajay Kurian: I love them.

Vijay Masharani: I like Popcast — I hate the New York Times, but I listen to their Popcast, because I think Caramanica is an awesome critic.

Ajay Kurian: I think he’s all right — sometimes I think he’s great, other times I’m like —

Vijay Masharani: *Laughs* I wanted to say “awesome,” but I was like, is that an overstatement?

Ajay Kurian: In terms of majors, he’s legit.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, he’s legit. Too enthusiastic sometimes, but I also like Joe Coscarelli. I like both of them.

There was one bit of studio wisdom from Drake, on some random podcast, that I think is so good I almost don’t want to give it away. Drake said, to make a pop hit — which he definitely knows how to do —

Ajay Kurian: Over and over and over.

Vijay Masharani: — there has to be something wrong with it. I think that’s so good, dude. It explains him so well, and it’s so true.

Ajay Kurian: It is so true. It makes me like him a little more, honestly, that he’s conscious of that.

Vijay Masharani: Oh yeah, he’s too savvy.

Ajay Kurian: He’s a savvy fucking dude, for sure.

Vijay Masharani: The Tom Brady of rap music. The line I immediately thought of as illustrative of that, that is problematic, is “shout out to Asian girls, let the lights dim sum”

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: It’s in the first song of Take Care, it’s really early in the first song of his best album.

Ajay Kurian: That’s debatable.

Vijay Masharani: What’s the best Drake album?

Ajay Kurian: Nothing Was the Same.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. Nothing Was the Same. Whatever.

Ajay Kurian: For me it’s Nothing Was the Same, honestly, though What a Time to Be Alive — the Drake and Future collab — is probably right behind it, or maybe before.

Vijay Masharani: I did listen to that one, but not very much.

Ajay Kurian: I like it when they team up. What a Time to Be Alive.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. And I love that Future always uses those ready-made stock-photo album covers.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Dirty Stock 2’s cover is a stock photo.

Vijay Masharani: The ink in water. *Laughs* It looks so bad.

Ajay Kurian: It’s so bad. It’s fucking brilliant. There’s a contemporary artist out there who would do exactly that and try to write a thesis about it.

Outside of all that — checking in… more than checking in on you at this moment. We went to the opening at Greater New York and got to watch your new piece with you, which really meant a lot to me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

Vijay Masharani: Same.

Ajay Kurian: It feels like a bookend, in such a crazy way — I was faculty at Skowhegan in 2023 and Vijay were a participant, and it was after that that you were diagnosed with cancer.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I started showing symptoms probably two and a half months after.

Ajay Kurian: It’s just been wild, the whole thing. You’ve produced a handful of shows now.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, it was okay. It was my transplant anniversary yesterday — one year post-transplant.

Ajay Kurian: Congratulations, man.

Vijay Masharani: They say that’s normally when you start working. I’ve done three shows.

Ajay Kurian: Big shows.

Vijay Masharani: Veronica, which was a project space; a solo at Klima; and the PS1 work, which was the most labor, not in terms of quantity of pieces, but the twenty-minute short film and two big drawings. I spent longer on those drawings than on anything previous — the one with a lot of geometry in it took about two and a half months, that much compass-and-straightedge level all the time really slows you down.

I got to the point I just started making other drawings too, because I don’t always have it in me to be doing something that deliberate. People have responded to the fact that the two PS1 drawings — one so loose and freeform, one highly structured — which is really reductive, there’s a way that, actually, they’re kind of the opposite of what people assume.

I get what people are saying, descriptively that’s kind of true too. But part of the reason the loose one exists is that doing that much geometry gets so keyed-up.

Ajay Kurian: It’s not like you flagged at all, or lagged — it was as if you weren’t in recovery, like you were working like you didn’t care if you died.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, I did have to take a month off — about five weeks after transplant you’re really, really weak. I was in the hospital for thirty-three days.

The first drawing I made after was the blue drawing in the Klima show, it’s called Ocean of Despair — that was late May, I got out of the hospital around May 6th. I got back to drawing pretty quick. I live with my parents, in the basement — all I had to do was go downstairs. I mean, I wanted to get back to it.

I was in the hospital ordering paper from Blick’s website.

Ajay Kurian: What is the urgency around making artwork after recovering from cancer? Why? Why do you care?

Vijay Masharani: I’m still working on my answer to that. I am, and have always been, an artist.

Ajay Kurian: Did it certify that compulsion?

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. It’s so cheesy, but that’s just what I do.

Ajay Kurian: I’m here for that.

Vijay Masharani: There’re some people who are so obviously meant to do what they do — it sounds really cocky, but it’s just the truth. I just do this. The kind of work I make does change depending on who’s watching and what it’s for — it has that relationship with external structures — but I’m always doing it.

I got the Zurich show, before my second-to-last cycle of chemo in my first round of cancer, and before that, the creative thing I wanted to spend more time on…

My attitude toward making art was basically, fuck all this art stuff, I’m just going to keep making music. I was hitting up Coco, trying to convince her to sing again, and she didn’t want to, which is completely her decision.

Ajay Kurian: Coco Klöckner, who’s also in Greater New York right now.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, we had a music project together. I was like, can I use cancer to guilt-trip my friend into singing over my tracks was my master plan.

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: Because I was too tired to chase down studio visits to try to get a show, and had no desire to, in that state. I was in California, thinking, I’m just going to make beats and music is pure fun, I’ll be doing it for myself. And then Otto reached out, and — so I guess that’s the other thing, it’s not all about enjoyment.

Maybe, it’s changed. I do get a lot of pleasure out of making visual art, and talking about visual art, whereas before I had a little-brother complex toward music. It was the thing that was most fun and also the thing I’m probably the least good at — of the four things I do, drawing, video, writing, and music, music is probably the most fun and the one I’m least distinguished at.

But going back to your question — why invest in art after cancer — I don’t know, dude, it’s just what I do. I don’t really feel a need to defend or justify it, because I’ve always done it. I’m just going to keep doing it.

Ajay Kurian: If anything, an answer like that needs no defense. This is just what living is.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah — living is a good term as a coordinate to start thinking about that. I’m obsessed with Guston now. He comes up basically every time I talk about art.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, he’s one of the greats.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. The title of the Michael Blackwood documentary is A Life Lived, and his monograph is called A Life Spent Painting. There’s a clip of him, standing in his own show, saying something like, you’re trying to stay alive and not die.

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: There’s an established discourse around Guston’s relationship with mortality — I didn’t realize this, but Ross Feld, who had lymphoma, writes about being more sympathetic to Guston after his heresy against — the church — he describes it as the Protestant church of Abstract Expressionism, in his book.

Feld’s friendship with Guston was struck up because Feld liked the Marlborough show that got panned, where Guston debuted his return to figuration — panned as “a Mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum,” which I always loved that headline —

Ajay Kurian: Who the fuck would have a headline like that.

Vijay Masharani: I know it’s just so good.

Feld responded to the work, and — he doesn’t go so far as to say it’s because of this, but he basically says he understood the work and was able to strike up the friendship because he’d just gotten out of the hospital after being treated for lymphoma.

Ajay Kurian: Shit.

Vijay Masharani: I don’t want to say that’s the thesis of the book, but it’s a very important moment. And then there’s Guston’s own relationship with mortality — right after he gets out of the hospital for a heart attack, he goes with Feld to a deli and orders a sandwich with the fattiest cut of beef.

And Feld’s watching him like, dude, you just got out of the hospital for a heart attack because of how you eat — are you really going to do that? And Guston’s like, yeah, I’m going to eat the fucking fatty sandwich.

Ajay Kurian: I don’t know how I feel about that.

Vijay Masharani: It’s intense. I’ve been trying to figure out, like, why did Guston ate the sandwich — for him the relationship between painting and eating is super palpable, it comes up multiple times.

Ajay Kurian: Many times.

Vijay Masharani: He describes a Soutine painting he loves at the Yale Art Gallery as “engorged” — it’s like Soutine ate the whole house. And when Guston talked about the Klan paintings, he said he wanted them doing regular things, eating burgers, drinking beer. There’s this constant recourse to eating in Guston. And then Feld, as someone who likely wasn’t able to eat much, describes himself as quite emaciated after cancer.

So there are these poles — Guston, the big guy who’d talk about what he gets out of painting that he can’t get out of drawing, which is mass, obviously, which is just true, and interesting to think about with him specifically because he’s basically the best at mass. There are these poles to becoming attenuated to becoming almost a shell, or almost a shadow… Being bloated, and having mass, and eating paint that are really active in the Feld-Guston relationship.

Ajay Kurian: Like a yin-yang pairing.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah. I love that book, it really resonated with me.

Ajay Kurian: Is there any artist or body of work whose meaning shifted for you the way Feld re-identified with Guston after his own near-death experience? Did your near death give you “oh my God, now I finally get this?”

Vijay Masharani: The first correction I’d make is I wouldn’t call it a near-death experience — even though that might technically be what it is — because, unfortunately, that puts it too far in the past.

I won’t be cured for another four years. I’m actually in a kind of latency, or purgatory, because of how high my relapse risk is. It’s not like I went through this thing hat’s over.

Ajay Kurian: Right, right.

Vijay Masharani: So I’m looking at work currently from the vista of purgatory — of getting a blood test every month. It’s essentially a binary cancer test. If it’s zero, you’re chill. If it’s anything above zero, you’re basically fucked.

So, that is a constant lens mediating all of experience definitely , including every artwork, especially my own. So with something that prismatic, it’s tough to give a really specific answer. Which is unsatisfying but I’d say it comes back to impatience in the studio practice.

In terms of artwork I was drawn to after being in this interval, I wasn’t super into painting before, and now I can’t get enough of it — especially modernism.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, that’s wild to me.

Vijay Masharani: I think there’s a way I agree with T.J. Clark’s hypothesis that modernism, being more temporally proximate to the present, is actually extremely unrecognizable to us — there’s an argument “we understand the ancients better than we understand modernism, even though we have video clips, prints, all of that.”

For Clark it’s really about a relationship to socialism that’s difficult for us to recognize now. I’d offer that a relationship to illness, it’s not something that’s a headline when you teach undergrads modernism, though it has this relationship to perception, mediated by a sense of individual, but also, social convalescence.

Once you start seeing it a little bit— like de Chirico, for example, finding metaphysical painting right after getting out of the hospital, sitting in a city plaza with everything feeling liquid — there are a lot more comments like that in the tradition. I’m like, is there a way that this just is modernism?

Ajay Kurian: Has anybody written a book about that?

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, here’s stuff, I wouldn’t say there’s one book — I’m not the first to notice a pattern like this. There’s scholarship, though I feel it could be pushed further. Andrew Stock sent me a paper on late style as proto-disability studies. There are comments like that scattered around.

Ajay Kurian: It’s interesting to think about modernism’s relationship to illness and that being maybe constitutive of how we see it, in a purer way.

Vijay Masharani: Yeah, exactly.

A lot of times when people talk about that relationship, they mean psychological illness — there’s a lot “madness and modernity” as a book. John MacGregor’s The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, the relationship between the asylum and surrealism, all of that.

I’m more interested in the fact that it was an intestinal illness for de Chirico. Nietzsche is the classic guy who had both — and de Chirico famously said something like, “I’m the only one who ever understood Nietzsche.”

Ajay Kurian: *Laughs*

Vijay Masharani: Even the monograph I learned that from doesn’t really dwell on the fact that they shared being ailing — it’s treated as a biographical resonance and then it stops there. There’s a lot of writing about it in relation to Nietzsche and in relation to Proust. So through the study of those figures it’s definitely an active discourse. There is a way I think it can be pushed more, and updated. I don’t know.

Ajay Kurian: Maybe clarified into a sharper distillation. But yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully imagine what it feels like to live in that kind of binary purgatory, checking a blood test every month.

Vijay Masharani: It sucks, dude. I wouldn’t choose it.

Ajay Kurian: I’m glad you’re here. I’m really glad to see your work, glad to see it at PS1, I hope I see it in a lot more places. Even when we first met I was like, Jesus Christ, this kid is bright.

Vijay Masharani:*Laughs* Thanks man.

Ajay Kurian: It’s always awesome to talk to you, and I want to thank you for doing this, for spending the time.

Vijay Masharani: Thanks, bro. It was fun — my first podcast appearance.

Ajay Kurian: Ayo!

Vijay Masharani: All right, are we wrapped?

Ajay Kurian: That’s it, man.

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