33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 1
33 Artists in 3 Acts
SARAH THORNTON
W. W. Norton & Company
NEW YORK • LONDON
FOR OTTO AND CORA
CONTENTS
Introduction
ACT I: POLITICS
ACT II: KINSHIP
ACT III: CRAFT
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Credits
Index
Gabriel Orozco
Horses Running Endlessly
1995
INTRODUCTION
“I don’t believe in art. I believe in the artist.”
—MARCEL DUCHAMP
Artists don’t just make art. They create and preserve myths that give their work clout. While nineteenth-century painters faced credibility issues, Marcel Duchamp, the grandfather of contemporary art, made belief a central artistic concern. In 1917, he declared that an upended urinal was an artwork titled Fountain. In doing so, he claimed a godlike power for all artists to designate anything they chose as art. Maintaining this kind of authority is not easy, but it is now essential for artists who want to succeed. In a sphere where anything can be art, there is no objective measurement of quality, so ambitious artists must establish their own standards of excellence. Generating such standards requires not only immense self-confidence, but the conviction of others. Like competing deities, artists today need to perform in ways that yield a faithful following.
Ironically, being an artist is a craft. When he rejected the handmade in favor of the “readymade,” Duchamp began crafting identities as well as ideas. He played with his persona in a range of works, presenting himself in drag as a character named Rrose Sélavy and as a confidence man or con artist. Like the size and composition of a work, the walk and talk of an artist has to persuade, not just others but the performers themselves. Whether they have colorful, large-scale personas or minimal, low-key selves, believable artists are always protagonists, never secondary characters who inhabit stereotypes. For this reason, I see artists’ studios as private stages for the daily rehearsal of self-belief. It’s one of the reasons that I chose to divide 33 Artists into three “acts.”
This book explores the nature of being a professional artist today. It investigates how artists move through the world and explain themselves. Over the course of four years and several hundred thousand air miles, I interviewed 130 artists. Some famous artists and many thoughtful, interesting ones have been left on the cutting-room floor. My criteria resembled those of both a curator and a casting director. In other words, the artists’ work had to be relevant but their characters also had to engage. Occasionally, an interview felt like an audition. I remember asking an eminent photographer, who has always insisted on being called an artist, the driving question of my research: “What is an artist?” He replied, “An artist makes art.” I felt like shouting “Next!” as if a queue of prospective artist-characters stood waiting in the wings. His circular reasoning implied a fruitless line of inquiry. It demonstrated that, while the art world is ostensibly all for “dialogue,” it will shun awkward questions and cling to bewilderment when that is opportune.
33 Artists in 3 Acts is biased toward artists who are open, articulate, and honest—which is not to say that disingenuousness is completely absent from these pages. On the contrary, I include suspicious statements for contrast and comic relief. Sometimes I question the utterances; other times I let them slide. I want the reader to be the judge. After reading this book in manuscript form, Gabriel Orozco, the only artist who appears in two separate acts, said, “We are all portrayed in our underwear. At least some of us get to keep our socks on.”
The artists in this book hail from fourteen countries on five continents. Most were born in the 1950s and 1960s. In the interest of exploring some of the variation within the expanding field, I consider artists who position themselves at diverse points along the following spectrums: entertainer versus academic, materialist versus idealist, narcissist versus altruist, loner versus collaborator. Although most of the artists have attained high degrees of recognition somewhere in the world, each act contains a scene with an artist who teaches and, like the majority of artists, doesn’t make a living through sales of their work.
The themes that govern the book’s three acts were a key influence on my choices. Politics, kinship, and craft are rubrics that you might find shaping a classic anthropological tome. They are not typical of art criticism or art history, but, through research, I discovered that they demarcate the ideological border that differentiates artists from non-artists, or “real artists” from unimpressive ones. Politics, kinship, and craft also happen to embrace some of the most important things in life: caring about your influence on the world, connecting meaningfully with others, and working hard to create something worthwhile. “Act I: Politics” explores artists’ ethics, their attitudes to power and responsibility, paying particular attention to human rights and freedom of speech. “Act II: Kinship” investigates artists’ relationships with their peers, muses, and supporters with an eye on competition, collaboration, and ultimately love. “Act III: Craft” is about artists’ skills and all aspects of making artworks from conception through execution to market strategies. Needless to say, an artist’s “work” is not the isolated object, but the entire way they play their game.
33 Artists in 3 Acts is also unconventional insofar as it insists on comparing and contrasting artists. Most of the literature on artists focuses on them individually in discrete monographs, or, when several artists are dealt with in one volume, they are segregated into disconnected profiles. Even when group shows throw artists together in interesting ways, the protocol for catalogue essays is to compare the works, not their makers. Indeed, the art world likes nothing better than to isolate a “genius.”
Each act of this book revolves around recurring characters who function as foils for one another. Act I casts Ai Weiwei in opposition to Jeff Koons, while Act III pitches the performance artist Andrea Fraser against Damien Hirst. In between, the kinship theme gives rise to clusters rather than pairs. Act II features an entire nuclear family: Laurie Simmons (a photographer) and Carroll Dunham (a painter) and their two daughters, Lena (the writer-director-star of the television show Girls) and Grace (an undergraduate at Brown). Their scenes are juxtaposed with those of Maurizio Cattelan, a Duchampian bachelor, and his brothers-in-crime, curators Francesco Bonami and Massimiliano Gioni. These, in turn, are put into perspective by a couple of encounters with Cindy Sherman, who once described Simmons as her “artist soul mate.”
Just as my previous book Seven Days in the Art World chronicled the years 2004–07, so 33 Artists in 3 Acts offers a snapshot of the recent past. All three acts open in summer 2009 and flow chronologically toward the time of writing (2013). The status of artists has changed markedly in the last few decades. No longer typified as impoverished struggling outcasts, artists have become models of unrivaled creativity for fashion designers, pop stars, and even chefs. In their ability to make markets for their work and ideas, they inspire entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders of all kinds. Indeed, being an artist is not just a job but an identity dependent on a broad range of extracurricular intelligences.
33 Artists in 3 Acts aims to give its readers a vivid and textured understanding of a group of professionals who are increasingly positioned by the wider world as ultimate individuals with enviable freedoms. A few art-world friends initially tried to convince me that artists are so unique that it would be misguided—not to mention disrespectful—to define them or write about them as a group. But I’m confident that, by the time readers reach the last page, they will have a strong sense of the many parallels to be found between artists currently perceived as unparalleled.
Act I: Politics
Jeff Koons
Made in Heaven
1989
SCENE 1
Jeff Koons
On a sweltering July evening in 2009, Jeff Koons walks onto the stage of a packed auditorium at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The crowd, which is evenly split between art students in ironic T-shirts and retirees in comfortable shoes, gives him a loud round of applause. Clean-shaven with a gentle tan, the artist is wearing a buttoned-up black Gucci suit with a white shirt and dark tie. Twenty years ago, Koons thwarted the expectations of the New York art world by showing up in tailored suits when jeans and leather jackets were the norm. Artists didn’t have a uniform but there was one rule: don’t look like a businessman.
“It is really an honor to be here,” says Koons into a bulbous microphone. “Last year, I had an exhibition at Versailles and shows at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.” Artists’ talks are often a pitch for recognition; itemizing recent CV highlights is not unusual. “After such a lineup, the Serpentine is the most perfect location. It has been a thrilling experience. I am very grateful,” he proclaims like a rock star who has something nice to say about every stop on a concert tour.*
“I thought I would start by speaking about my history,” says Koons as he begins his slideshow. Dolphin (2002), a sculpture of what appears to be an inflatable pool toy hanging from yellow chains above a rack of stainless steel pots and pans, appears on the large screen. The sea mammal is a meticulous painted-aluminum replica of the plastic original, but the chains and kitchenware are “readymades”—in other words, store-bought mass-manufactured goods that have been integrated into the work. After mentioning his Pennsylvanian birt
Koons has no notes. He tells us that his father, Henry, was an interior decorator who owned a furniture store, so he grew up with “a sense of aesthetics.” He understood from a young age that gold and turquoise “made you feel different” than brown and black. His older sister, Karen, was better at everything. One day, Koons made a drawing that his parents thought revealed some talent. “The praise gave me a sense of self,” he explains. It’s often said that a true artist is good for nothing but making art. Koons’s variation on this chestnut is that art was the only domain in which he could compete.
The artist goes on to identify other formative epiphanies. Shortly after arriving at art school, his class went to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he was unfamiliar with most of the artists on view. “I realized that I knew nothing about art,” he says, “but I survived that moment.” Koons explains that he likes to make art that requires “no prerequisites.” He never wants people to feel small. “I want the viewer to feel that their cultural history is absolutely perfect,” he says, smiling blissfully, then invokes “Banality,” his seventh series, which he started in 1988. These painted wood and porcelain sculptures of teddy bears, stacked farm animals, the Pink Panther and Michael Jackson took Pop art into the sickly sweet waters of suburban decoration. The kitsch figures were made in editions of three, so they could appear in simultaneous, identical shows in New York, Chicago, and Cologne.
With “Banality,” Koons departed from art-world norms in another way. He put himself in advertisements promoting the exhibitions, which effectively launched his public persona, initiating a subcultural notoriety that would eventually turn into widespread fame. Koons devised four separate ads tailored to the most important art magazines of the time. For Artforum, the most academic of the publications, he depicted himself as a primary-school teacher with slogans like “Exploit the masses” and “Banality as savior” on the chalkboard behind him. For Art in America, he posed as a slightly effete sexual stud, standing next to two voluptuous bikini-clad girls, while for ARTnews he was a triumphant playboy in a bathrobe surrounded by floral wreaths. Finally, for the European magazine Flash Art, he appeared in a self-debasing closeup with a gargantuan sow and piglet. Koons’s foray into advertising was audacious but not unprecedented. The ads were reminiscent of a campaign made by General Idea, a gay conceptual art trio, who depicted themselves as fresh-faced babes in bed together and as black-eyed poodles. Both General Idea and Koons were playing on the expectation that artists are exemplars of honesty while advertising is a bastion of dodgy spin. They were questioning the art world’s official position that the work is more important than the artist and flirting with the potential for blatant self-promotion to kill credibility.
The auditorium is so hot that people are fanning themselves with newspapers, notebooks, even flip-flops. Koons, who hasn’t loosened his tie and glistens rather than sweats, clicks to another slide, a picture of himself lying naked with Ilona Staller, a.k.a. La Cicciolina, a porn actress to whom he was briefly married. Koons made the work for a show called “Image World: Art and Media Culture” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989. Originally installed as a billboard on Madison Avenue, the work is an ad for a fictional movie called Made in Heaven starring Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina. It was the first in a series of the same name, which includes sculptures such as Dirty—Jeff on Top (1991) and paintings like Ilona’s Asshole (1991). While artists’ mistresses have long appeared as reclining nudes, Koons’s representation of himself on top of his wife was novel. “The easiest way to become a movie star is to make a porn film,” Koons would later tell me. “It was my idea of how to participate in American popular culture.”
As Koons clicks through slides of a number of “Made in Heaven” works, he doesn’t discuss their exhibitionism or speculate about their impact on his career. Instead, he returns to one of his favorite themes—acceptance. “My ex-wife Ilona had a background in pornography but everything about her was absolutely perfect. It was a wonderful platform for transcendence,” he says, running his index finger over his lips. “I wanted to try to communicate how important it is to embrace your own sexuality and to remove guilt and shame.”
Koons goes on to address the “Popeye” series, on which he has been working since 2002 and whose Serpentine outing is the occasion for this talk. He sees the “Popeye” works as domestic—“something a little more intimate” for the home. They often feature forms that look like blow-up toys. When Koons was a child, his parents gave him a Styrofoam float that enabled him to swim independently. He loved its “liberating effect” and admires inflatables as lifesaving devices that bring “a sense of equilibrium.” For Koons, they are also anthropomorphic. “We are inflatables,” he says with an evangelical gleam. “We take a breath and it’s a symbol of optimism. We exhale and it’s a symbol of death.” He also suggests an erotic angle on engorgement that makes the audience titter. “There is a huge sexual fetish thing on the Web for pool toys.” It is always a bit of a tragedy, he jokes, if they go “soft due to a leak.”
For each work in the series, Koons itemizes the things that entertain him. The amusements fall into two main categories: art-historical references to major modern artists and sexual allusions to a variety of private parts and positions. With the modest caveat that he doesn’t expect the “viewer to get lost in all my personal references,” Koons identifies connections between his works and those of Salvador Dalí, Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. Koons also makes special mention of Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke, with whom he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Ed would take me to tattoo parlors and stripper bars,” he says, “exposing me to his source materials.”
Running parallel to this chronicle of artistic affiliations is a recital of Freudian interpretations. The artist’s favorite adjectives are “feminine” and “masculine,” “erect” and “soft,” “wet” and “dry.” When he makes a work in two versions, he says it comes in “two positions.” The forms of his sculptures and paintings remind him of “vaginal lips,” “intercourse,” “spread legs,” “castration,” “a hole,” “a womb,” and “the pelvic area.” Needless to say, a lot of the inflatables are “penetrated.” Miraculously, the artist says all this so matter-of-factly and with such a wide-eyed, apple-pie virtuousness that he doesn’t seem lewd.
Koons’s discourse is so pat that you feel you are in the presence of an actor playing the role of the artist. The artist’s lack of spontaneity comes across as synthetic and earnest rather than natural and honest. Andy Warhol was famed for his artifice. He cultivated a vacuous public image, talked in cool sound bites and liked to give the impression that there was no “real” Andy. “I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing,” he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?” Few artists have mastered the Warholian paradox of persona as convincingly as Koons.
Stabbing his remote control toward the screen, Koons presents his final slides, which include Sling Hook (2007–09), an aluminum sculpture of an inflatable dolphin and lobster strung upside down together by a chain—either slaughtered or having some bondage fun. “I always imagine that in that last moment of life, all becomes clear,” says Koons in an extremely even-toned, almost soothing voice. “Anxiety is removed and replaced with vision and mission.” The artist often invokes performance anxiety. Sometimes he seems to be referring to artistic achievement, other times to sexual function. “Acceptance is what removes anxiety and brings everything into play,” says Koons. “My complete understanding of art is about acceptance.”
