I recently read a biography of Muhammad Ali. My favorite part of the book is about how Ali once gave the commencement speech at Harvard. After the speech was over, everybody applauded and someone shouted: “Give us a poem!” The story goes that the entire audience fell quiet and Ali uttered what I understand is now officially the shortest poem in the English language. It went: “Me, We.” Ali gave his speech in 1975 and when people talk about that poem today, they say that it has something to do with politics. That is true, of course, and whenever I repeat Ali’s poem to anyone because I find it beautiful in an annoying, CompLit-student way, I think of that. But I also always think of Hadley and Maxwell. I don’t know anybody else who manages to somehow unite being-one and being-two quite as well as Hadley and Maxwell do. If anybody were to ask me about them, the first thing I would stress is that they’re too very different people. For example: If Hadley finds something funny, it makes her giggle silently. Max either laughs out loud or not at all. With Max, I can have an incredibly silly conversation about the most serious, brainwreckingly philosophical idea. Hadley, on the other hand, has sent me the most thoughtful and, sorry, deep emails about some funny, mindless Unterhaltungsliteratur I recommended to her. And yet, I have never met any two people who I think of more as a unit. I have never met any two people who naturally show up anywhere only as a pair. I have never met any other pair of people who is so connected that both rarely have to use their last name, because it is usually replaced by either “and Hadley” or “and Maxwell.” If I know anybody for whom “me” always rhymes with “we,” it’s Hadley. And it’s Maxwell. The way Hadley and Maxwell work as people, I think, is very much the way they work as artists. If you see their art often enough and talk to them about it, you can begin to make out the parts that somehow feel Max-like or more Hadley-esque. But in the end, when they are done casting a whole mess of sculptures in blackened tinfoil and re-assembling them into ethereal, ghostly bric-a-bracs, you can see that what they did could only have been done together. The reason why these artworks end up balancing so elegantly between polar opposites (between sculpture and collage, between politics and abstraction) is because Hadley and Maxwell spent hours or days or months pushing them back and forth between each other. And the reason why that balance works and never falls over to one side or the other is that they always push their work back and forth until the only way out for it is right in the middle.