The Vandals began with an exchange of stories. Asked to organize a group exhibition together, Gladstone directors Alissa Bennett and Julian Ehrlich each selected a short work of fiction without consulting the other. Bennett chose Edith Wharton's The House of the Dead Hand (1904); Ehrlich selected Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece (1831). To their surprise, the two stories arrived at remarkably similar questions: what becomes activated—or diminished—through the act of looking, and how desire, ownership, and spectatorship shape our relationship to works of art. That unexpected convergence became the conceptual foundation for The Vandals.

ALISSA BENNETT: When Julian and I were approached to do this show, we really had no ideas. We thought an interesting jumping-off point would be to exchange short stories that had been meaningful to us and that were also art world-adjacent. So I selected an Edith Wharton short story.

JULIAN EHRLICH: I chose a Balzac story that I'd recently reread. There's something so special about writers thinking about art in fiction. It feels like a generative place to begin as you plan an exhibition.

BENNETT: The thing that really shocked us was that the stories ended up being conceptually almost about the same thing: what becomes activated or deactivated in a work of art when we look at it with longing.

EHRLICH: That felt really special because we had no idea, until we shared the stories, that they were so similar.

BENNETT: It felt psychic, for sure.

EHRLICH: What's wonderful is that they're from different periods in history, but they feel very relevant to the concerns of contemporary artists. As specific as they are as narratives, they gave us this wonderful vantage point from which to build an exhibition.

If the stories established the exhibition's conceptual framework, Wharton also provided its title.

BENNETT: The title, The Vandals, comes from a line in the Wharton. A man has spent his daughter's dowry on what he believes is the greatest Leonardo painting ever made, and he keeps it hidden in a basement. Very few people are allowed to see it. When a reporter is finally invited in and confirms that it really is this extraordinary painting, he asks to photograph it. The owner responds, "The vandals, the desecraters of beauty—I would burn it before I'd let them get their hands on it."

There's this intuition that allowing other people access to the work will somehow degrade it.

When we think about vandalism, we usually think about something done to the surface of an artwork. But in this case, the vandalism became something very different. It's voyeurism. It's looking. It's not about what the object contains; it's about how we alter the object through our desire for it, our need to understand it, our need to have it, or our need to penetrate the picture plane through vision.

What does vision do to an object when that object is initially innocent of us? How do we alter the psychic trajectory of an artwork simply by wanting it?

EHRLICH: Vandalism is a very open-ended idea. We traditionally think about it in terms of damaging property, but that immediately raises questions of ownership—within the practice of making art, within collecting art, and within the relationship between an artist and a subject. It allowed us to think about artists who worked in obscurity, artists whose work wasn't publicly shown, and artists who question the assumptions we make about ownership. What is the relationship between the artist and their subject? Between the collector and the artwork? Once we started thinking about those questions, there were so many different directions the exhibition could take.

BENNETT: A multivalent way, conceptually.

EHRLICH: Yeah, exactly.

As the exhibition evolved, Bennett and Ehrlich found themselves drawn to artists whose work resists easy access—whether formally, psychologically, or materially.

BENNETT: It was interesting organizing this exhibition because Julian and I have different aesthetic, conceptual, and formal interests. I'm very interested in acts of refusal. I'm interested in artists who refuse to be violated, artists who make work privately, the unknown artist.

In a commercial gallery, the challenge is figuring out how to bring those ideas together with works that also have viability in the market. Left to my own devices, nothing would sell. It would've been all things that weren't for sale or that people didn't want, because that's what I'm attracted to.

Julian's role was to make sure the exhibition didn't become simply a cabinet of curiosities or a collection of things recovered from obscurity.

EHRLICH: I think that's exactly why collaborating was so much fun. The artists are all so different, but the works are extraordinary, and it was exciting to think about the connections we could make between these very disparate practices.

The installation was really the first moment everything became concrete. We had works arriving from collections, new commissions by Gladstone artists, works by artists we don't regularly work with. Once everything was in the room together, the exhibition really crystallized.

BENNETT: The formal structure of the installation actually mirrors the way the exhibition was conceived. We began with two pieces of writing by two different authors, and then the works naturally started pairing off. Objects that are aesthetically or formally very different began communicating with one another in the same way we felt those stories were communicating psychically.

We were both really interested in artists who traffic in refusal. Sometimes that's literal: faces concealed in portraits or photographs, or paintings where the image only gradually reveals itself. There's an ocular experience where the image develops almost photographically on the surface of the canvas if you're willing to spend enough time looking—or if you view it through a lens.

We became fascinated by the ways artists secretly, or sometimes forcefully, subvert what we expect to glean visually, or through ownership or capital. They continually say no to those expectations.

The artists who made new work for the exhibition intuitively understood that. I think most artists do. They're constantly finding subtle ways to transgress what the market requests of them, what collectors request of them—psychically, physically, materially. We wanted to lay some of those strategies bare.

EHRLICH: I also think art has probably never been more accessible to more people. But I'll speak for myself: I often experience art very casually. Exhibitions don't always encourage close looking or sustained attention.

The artists in this exhibition—whether they made new works or whether we're showing earlier works—are all interrogating what it means to look. Looking isn't passive, and it isn't casual. That's ultimately what links all of them for me.

One of the pleasures of organizing The Vandals was discovering relationships between works that neither of us anticipated at the outset.

EHRLICH: One of my favorite collaborative moments was finding the Huguette Clark painting.

BENNETT: Amazing. It's the first time her work has ever been publicly exhibited, and Julian found it.

EHRLICH: But it was really Alissa who had this deep knowledge of her life and work, and the vision to include it. That self-portrait has become one of the central works in the exhibition. You encounter it in the first gallery, and it immediately begins resonating with so many other works—from Graham Little to Aaron Gilbert.

BENNETT: Vivian Maier was working in secret, toiling in obscurity and never showing the work. What does it mean for someone to have had this entire private practice—one that perhaps, in her own mind, never sought public attention—and then for those works to become anchors of an exhibition?

There's something both spooky and haunted about that. But it's also an extraordinary privilege. What a privilege to have access to these things.

EHRLICH: On a formal level, the Huguette Clark painting is remarkable, too. The painted border sits unevenly, almost at an angle, because she's looking into a mirror as she paints herself. There's something slightly unnatural about her position. She holds this incredibly vibrant palette—the richest, most saturated colors in the painting—and it almost feels as though she's saying that the richness of art, or perhaps of life, resides in the act of painting itself rather than in anything outside it.

That painting unexpectedly connects to Mark Leckey's video in the next gallery. It's a 3D rendering of his studio, containing Jeff Koons's Rabbit—

BENNETT: —The ultimate fetish object.

EHRLICH: Exactly. But as you approach it, nothing is reflected back. The studio is empty. There's no viewer.

Although Huguette Clark and Mark Leckey were working in completely different contexts, they arrive at remarkably similar questions. Discovering those connections between artists who were never consciously in dialogue with one another—but who nevertheless share these enduring concerns—was one of the real joys of organizing the exhibition.

Some of the exhibition's visual language emerged almost immediately.

BENNETT: One of the first things I selected, when we were putting together our dream list, was the Weegee photograph. It's not an artwork—it originally appeared in a newspaper. It's a crime photograph.

A woman has been arrested for murdering a baby. She's in a police station, covering her face with her gloved hands. I remember thinking about the strange energy that crackles through that image. Her hiding her face actually tells you more about the situation than seeing her ever could. I loved that idea of being present while simultaneously refusing to be seen. It's almost childlike—the fantasy that if you cover your face, no one can see you. That logic entered the exhibition very early for me.

EHRLICH: That photograph became one of the roots of the exhibition. Alissa identified it almost immediately after we'd read the stories, and so many of the works relate to it, even when it wasn't a direct reference for the artists.

You see that same gesture in Aaron Gilbert's painting, in the girl's closed eyes. There are these repeated acts of withholding that quietly connect the works throughout the exhibition.

BENNETT: The Gilbert painting is interesting because someone described it to me as an outlier within the exhibition. They said it didn't quite match the pace of the other works. But it's a painting of his child.

As strangers, we're looking at a family's intimacy. Our desire to have access to that intimacy is, I think, very closely related to what binds a collector to a work of art—especially a painting.

Painting creates this fantasy of intimacy. You see the brushstrokes, the hair from the paintbrush caught in the paint. There's this illusion of direct access to another person. That feeling becomes amplified in family paintings.

What exactly do we want from this thing that doesn't belong to us?

Not every relationship between works was planned in advance.

BENNETT: The Pope.L, the Celia Paul, and the Rachel Harrison became an incredible grouping. When we first started installing the exhibition, we struggled with it. Some relationships were obvious before the works even entered the room, but I don't think we anticipated putting those three together.

EHRLICH: That was a really beautiful gesture that Alissa initiated.

BENNETT: No, I thought you did.

EHRLICH: Then we've successfully attributed it to each other.

BENNETT: Actually... it was Jason from Prep.

EHRLICH: Oh!

BENNETT: Trust your prep team. They've hung a million exhibitions.

EHRLICH: They know what they're doing.

Jason saw that juxtaposition, and it's become one of the most profound moments in the exhibition. All three works deal with the body while simultaneously obscuring it.

The Pope.L work was made around the birth of his son. It's a changing table, but it's also this odalisque-like form. The Celia Paul is a reinterpretation of an earlier image of herself, layered with these washes of diaphanous color and this ghostly figure in front of her. Rachel Harrison's work is directly related to the Balzac story. Picasso made a print series after The Unknown Masterpiece, and Harrison takes that image and replaces the muse with this deeply abstract, complicated composition.

Each work frustrates your ability to fully possess or fix the image and between artist and subject.

Ultimately, The Vandals asks viewers to reconsider not only what they are looking at, but how they look.

BENNETT: I think something happens when an artwork becomes divorced from the person who made it, or from the place in which it was made. A kind of alienation occurs.

I'm not saying that looking at an artwork should always be defined by biography, but there are certain details that fundamentally change the way you experience a work. When you look at a Joseph Cornell, for example, it matters that he spent nearly his entire life in his mother's house and left Queens only once. Those details alter your relationship to the work.

I'd like people to think about the barricades we cross when we look, and the barricades artists allow us to cross by letting us look at all. There are theories that vision is ownership, or that vision is theft. Whether or not you believe those theories, I hope people pause to consider what we take from something when we look at it.

EHRLICH: I totally agree with Alissa. If someone leaves the exhibition with a different relationship to how they look at art—if they spend a little more time with a work, or question what it means to really look—then I'll feel very good about what we've done.

Although the exhibition centers on painting, Bennett sees that emphasis as an opportunity to think more critically about the hierarchy of artistic mediums.

BENNETT: We're living through a moment of complete painting tyranny. That's what drives the market. It's what people want. Increasingly, we've begun to neglect other mediums that are absolutely crucial to the experience of art.

You walk into a show and there's no video, no photography, no sculpture—it feels like a kind of theft. You lose something when your experience of art becomes focused on this one medium— no offense, painters.

(Laughs.)

Painting has become the apotheosis of craft fetishism. That's simply the moment we're living in.

Before wrapping up, the conversation turned to books—and whether another exhibition inspired by literature might already be taking shape.

BENNETT: We were talking about it—we thought maybe this should become a trilogy.

So I think we have to do another one.

We just don't know what it is yet.

EHRLICH: Stay tuned...