Walking with Baudelaire – Chicago Reader

Editor’s note: Coco Picard spoke with artist Zachary Cahill about his latest book, Unicorn Death Moon: Paris Guidebook. Edited text from the comic is transcribed here to ease readability.

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Interdisciplinary artist Zachary Cahill’s fourth book Unicorn Death Moon: Paris Guidebook (Red Ogre Press) continues the artist’s long-standing inquiry into social contracts that gird imagination. Inspired by the iconic French unicorn tapestries from the 16th century, Cahill combines Charles Baudelaire’s poetry with his own drawings and poems about the city, death, the unicorn, and the moon. By guiding readers through the Paris his texts describe, Cahill conjures a portal into an alternate reality. In the following interview, Cahill discusses this work. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Zachary Cahill: “For good or bad, mourning has saturated my work for many years now—deaths of friends and loved ones, and the state of the world. . . .

“The unicorn and the figure of death haunt [my work]. They are friends, tied together in this existence. Fellow travelers. The unicorn [in the book] is very specific and maybe differs from other unis in that it has pentagram eyes—a slightly Baudelairean unicorn, I guess.

“I believe reality is a mutually agreed upon fantasy. I want to push on that reality and ask, why not a reality with unicorns, moonlight, and magic? Instead of . . . I don’t know . . . alarm clock fantasies, Wall Street fantasies, keeping up with Joneses fantasies—fantasies that might be nice for some but are absolute misery for the rest of us.

“The Paris I visit (when I’m more or less on vacation) is not the Paris of someone working the daily grind but it’s still real. [In the book,] it was important to have Baudelaire’s voice as the real guide of Paris. Les Fleurs du mal is pretty excellent for that!

“The marble [unicorn] carving that I am working on outside at my studio here in Chicago is definitely the same as the [unicorn in the] guidebook. In many ways carving a unicorn or drawing or painting or writing poetry about unicorns is exactly the same . . . the mental space is the same, it is trancelike: being outside while slowly carving stone connects me to a deep mysticism of the flow of the day and the changing seasons.

“When it comes to the connection between reality and fantasy, I think I am mourning the fact that unicorns are real and no one believes that they exist. . . . maybe people don’t even believe unicorns exist anymore but they do, I know they do. I think Paris is a good place to discover that truth.”

Unicorn Death Moon: Paris Guidebook by Zachary Cahill
Red Ogre Press, paperback, 114 pp., $14.99, ogre.red/press/books/2024-chapbook-cahill-zachary