33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 10
Justine Koons is in the next room. Pregnant with her sixth and his eighth child, she walks past Balloon Venus, another new sculpture, giving it a cursory glance. Although this work looks like a “Celebration” sculpture, Balloon Venus is actually the first work in the artist’s new “Antiquity” series. The work is inspired by one of the earliest known representations of a woman, the Venus of Willendorf, a four-inch-high handheld fertility goddess found in Austria in the early twentieth century but dating from around 25,000 BC. Koons’s sculpture proposes a new kind of idol—a high-tech grande dame whose cool, untouchable surfaces reflect the viewer. The sight of the artist’s expectant spouse between two Venuses evokes one of Koons’s more contentious mantras (which is sexy or sexist, depending on your point of view): “The only true narrative is the biological narrative.”
I meander through the Liebieghaus, noting how Koons and Brinkmann have created entertaining juxtapositions between Koons’s sculptures and the permanent collection. Koons’s gold and white porcelain rendition of Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) sits in front of a row of Egyptian mummies, while a Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), containing one basketball, is positioned in the spiritual center of a chapel-like early medieval room. Gary McCraw, Koons’s studio manager with the long gray beard, is pouring a saltwater mixture into the tank so that the ball floats exactly in the middle.
In a section of the museum devoted to Asian sculpture, I discover Hulk (Friends) (2004–12), which I recognize from a 2-D model that I saw in the studio. The completed work is a six-foot-high painted bronze version of an inflatable toy Hulk with six baby inflatables sitting on his shoulders. The piece looks as light as air and has a finish that resembles plastic. Hulk (Friends) took ten years to realize. It “got trapped” in what Koons describes as a spiral of “reverse engineering, endless scanning and redetailing” because the technology was initially not good enough to do what he wanted it to.
In an early Renaissance room full of painted wooden statues of saints, a stainless steel sculpture of Popeye makes its debut. Presiding over the space like a latter-day messiah, the cartoon character with bulging muscles holds a silver tin of emerald green spinach. It is intriguing that Koons, a slender artist with an aptitude for management, creates artworks that portray brawny characters with absurd amounts of physical power.
The next morning, I head over to the Schirn Kunsthalle, which is showing forty-five Koons paintings. Together the two exhibitions—titled “The Sculptor” and “The Painter”—form the largest showing of Koons’s work to date. Koons is an honorary local. He owns a house in Frankfurt and many of his sculptures are made just out of town at Arnold AG, a top-of-the-line fabricator whose tagline is “Please let us inspire you with our passion for metal!”
The Schirn’s vast white hall is a cacophony of Koonses. With the exception of six “Made in Heaven” canvases that have their own “adult” room, paintings from different series are mixed together such that only connoisseurs are likely to catch the conversations between them. My favorite canvases are the ones that I saw in the studio with the dots and the silver sketches meant to evoke Gustave Courbet’s erotic L’Origine du Monde. I often have a soft spot for works I’ve seen in progress.
At exactly 9:30 A.M., a PR woman waves me into a nondescript side room for my interview with the artist. As we sit down, Koons gives me a warm smile and says, “Let’s do a nice interview.” He pours us glasses of water while I tell him as politely as I can that I am familiar with his favorite adages and anecdotes so it would be great if he could resist his penchant for reiterating them and answer my questions as directly as possible.
After a number of questions about the production process and technology behind the new works, I invite the artist to reflect on his verbal strategies. Multiple meanings drive positive judgment of artworks, so it makes sense for an artist to avoid saying anything that might close down debate. The catalogue for this double retrospective contains a conversation between Koons and Isabelle Graw, a Marxist art historian, which happily departs from the subservient apologetics often found in such books. In it, the artist says, “to keep everything in play is the most stimulating thing you can do.” I urge him to elaborate.
Koons tells me that he really enjoys speaking about his work. “The artist is living it, sleeping it . . . there is a commitment you have to this dialogue,” he says. When I press him about refusing to be pinned down, he replies: “I wish I could have better lighting on the Metallic Venus. It is so sexy. I am very pleased about the location of the Balloon Venus, next to a beautiful head of Apollo. Balloon Venus is a symbol of fertility. It is profound to connect through time and imagine what it felt like to be human in the past. Balloon Venus is feminine but, if you look long enough, its breasts become testicles and it can procreate on its own. It is like one person having sex with themselves.” Koons wins this round by countering the accusation of vagueness with over-the-top graphic detail.
I move on to a different topic, that of politics. I skip the preamble and plunge in. Are you an aesthetic radical and a political conservative? I ask. Koons proceeds slowly, explaining that he has always been attracted to the concept of the avant-garde and that he likes “the idea that we can create our own reality.” Just when I am beginning to conclude that he is like a politician who doesn’t want to say anything too specific for fear of losing votes, he offers an uncharacteristically straight answer: “I don’t believe I am a conservative. As an artist, I believe in the sense of communal responsibility.”
I suggest that his advocacy of cultural acceptance could be seen as an incitement to accept the status quo, a conservative stance. “When I am talking about acceptance,” he replies, “it is about the acceptance of everything.” Befuddled, I wonder what he means by “everything.” Does it include Marxist art historians and Nazi skinheads, Occupy Wall Street protesters and Republican anti-evolutionists? “I know you’ve heard this story before,” says Koons, and then he treats me to a childhood anecdote about self-acceptance, then one about accepting others. I try to interrupt but there is no stopping him. The PR pops her head around the door. My half hour is up.
Outside, in the main exhibition hall, the press pack has swelled to 150 people. A herd of burly photographers charge into position to shoot Koons in front of three different paintings. Dressed in a dapper gray suit, the artist goes through a succession of poses—hands in pockets, finger to chin contemplating the work, a series of squats, and then a position with his arms outstretched as if he were a kid pretending to be an airplane. At the back of the press pack, an American curator tells me, “Koons is one of those artists that whatever he thinks he is doing, it is not what makes him great.”
After the photo call and interviews with six TV crews comes the press conference, which is conducted almost entirely in German. Koons and the local culture minister share the middle, flanked by museum directors and curators. This country has more believers in contemporary art than any other. Keen to turn its back on its nationalist past after World War II, Germany embraced international, forward-looking art with fervor. Nowadays, every small town seems to have a Kunstmuseum, Kunsthaus, Kunsthalle, or Kunstverein.
As the conference progresses, the speakers pay increasingly hyperbolic homage to this Künstler. Joachim Pissarro, an art historian and curator who contributed an essay to the catalogue, delivers the final speech and ends up asserting that the “superhuman” precision of Koons’s production ties him to “the divine.” The practice of isolating geniuses, then bestowing them with saintly status, is as old as art history. Nowadays, the maneuver feels more like a marketing strategy than a credible intellectual position.
As I walk out of the Schirn museum, I think about how Koons has created his “own reality,” as he put it in our interview earlier. Curators often argue that artists need to be considered on their own terms. But I don’t think it does Koons any harm to be considered on mine.
Ai Weiwei
Hanging Man: Homage to Duchamp
1983
SCENE 17
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei cannot attend his solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC because Chinese officials have not returned his passport. Having referred to himself as a readymade and his ongoing battle with the Chinese government as a kind of performance art, Ai is clear that the opening will be incomplete without him. When asked about his favorite work of art, Ai replies that he doesn’t have one, announcing, “I am more interested in the artist than in the work.”
A week after the opening of the Hirshhorn show, I am sitting at my desk, waiting to call Ai on Skype. It’s 1 A.M. in London, 8 A.M. in Beijing. On the wall behind me is a poster that quotes Ai. In white lettering on a black background, it states, “Say what you need to say plainly and then take responsibility for it.” I’ve adopted it as one of my mottos. In the center of my computer screen is Ai’s Skype profile picture, a black-and-white photograph of the artist as a two-year-old boy, perched on a wooden stool with one arm in midair as if he were just about to hail the world’s attention. I click on the green “Call” icon and listen to the old-school ring. An assistant answers and fetches the artist who, ten seconds later, looms into frame. He settles into a head-and-shoulders shot with a cropped forehead. His image is pixilated and his voice is occasionally garbled, but Ai seems to be receiving a clear picture and good sound from me. I wonder if his Big Brothers have degraded the outgoing signal.
After a few pleasantries, I comment that the right to travel is less talked about than the right to free speech. “Limiting an individual’s movement through time and space is a crime but, for me, it is also a joke,” declares Ai with a half-smile. “The Internet lets me travel. Technology is beautiful in the most impossible conditions. Technology allows freedom.” Ai’s love of new communication technologies runs deep. Not only does he use Twitter and Instagram throughout the day, he believes they are part of an existential revolution. “The technology allows us to be a new kind of human being,” he says. “With the Internet, a person can be an individual for the first time because he can solely construct his knowledge.” Certainly, the Internet has allowed for a new type of artist, for whom making art involves social media as much as a brush.
I wonder if an exhibition is the best reflection of Ai’s activities. The artist thinks not. “An exhibition is a classic way to show some product,” he says. With regard to the Hirshhorn show, he admits that a “better aesthetic” would represent a broader range of his activities. “My art is fragments. Giving interviews is part of my practice. You have to gather a lot of fragments to capture the reality.” Ai tells me that he had no direct communication from the museum’s staff and that the process was plagued by internal problems, including a shortage of funds. Even if one takes a conservative view of an artwork, the Hirshhorn show could not be called a survey because it excludes many major works.
The reviews of Ai’s Hirshhorn exhibition are fascinating because they have tripped over a question that critics usually ignore: what is an artist? Most reviewers got locked into a binary way of thinking: artist or activist? Or as The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl finessed it in his opening sentence, “Is Ai Weiwei a political artist or an artful politician?” Adding to the confusion, the New York Times’s influential Roberta Smith argued that Ai “doesn’t make great art as much as great use of the role of the artist.”
Ai experiences “no conscious difference” between being an artist and an activist. “In activism, you can discover art,” he says, “but the purpose of activism goes beyond having a show.” He wonders why writers, poets, and academics can be politically active without compromising their primary social identity, whereas artists cannot. “Artists who are humanists living in inhuman conditions want to reflect their reality,” he says. “They use art for other purposes, never just as a witness.” Ai takes a deep breath. “For me, being an artist is a total activity. I introduce many things, like political argument and writing, that were not considered art activities.” When confronted with the distinction between “great art” and “great use of the role of the artist,” Ai rolls his eyes. “Art always has uses,” he declares. “It is as if art were supposed to be irresponsible.” Indeed, even art that is supposed to be for “art’s sake” is invariably deployed for something other than pure aesthetic pleasure.
In addition to attending his Hirshhorn opening, Ai had been scheduled to speak at Princeton University. When the artist was unable to honor his commitment, his hosts held a panel discussion about his legacy instead. A member of the audience asked what kind of public figure in the past or present is comparable to Ai. Thomas Keenan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College, suggested that a martyr was the closest match. “The fact of his martyrdom, his imprisonment, his suffering, is now integrated into the everyday meaning of his name,” said Keenan, according to the Daily Princetonian. I relay the observation and ask Ai to respond.
“I don’t know,” he replies, genuinely perplexed. “What are martyrs?”
It’s a Christian thing, I explain. The term is associated primarily with saints who died for their faith. Joan of Arc, for example, claimed to have divine guidance; she was considered a heretic and burned at the stake. Twenty-five years after her death, the Roman Catholic Church declared her a martyr. Almost four hundred years after that, it canonized her as a saint.
Ai chuckles and grapples for something to say, then points into my office space. One of my three black cats has walked into frame. I’m so used to his impertinence that I hadn’t noticed. I shoo him away and take a sip of tea.
Ever since Ai told me about how about his interrogators insisted that he was only an “art worker,” I have been wondering if being an artist has allowed Ai more political leeway than if he were a straightforward activist without any other identity. When I put the thought to Ai, he agrees wholeheartedly. “It has given me a lot of liberty,” he says. “As an artist, you can be weird. They say, don’t worry about him. He is a crazy artist.”
The idea that an artist is some sort of ultimate individual is gaining traction internationally. It may not be prevalent in Iran, but it has made inroads into China. “As an artist, you have to find your own way. In most professions, you don’t need to be as much of an individual. For artists, it is most important to be independent,” he says. From his position in a Communist country, Ai doesn’t see a downside to individualism, except when it generates secret codes that no one understands. “Individualism has to have a relationship to mainstream thinking. If the individual lacks sensitivity, then there is a danger that they will not be understood by the general public. As long as someone can still communicate, individualism is useful.”
In an interview some time ago, Ai referred to an artist as a “somebody.” The desire to be somebody is a key motivation in a society that values individualism. Indeed, the aspiration may be particularly pronounced in artists. It’s my final question, I tell Ai. How do you feel about the whole notion of being “somebody” versus “nobody”?
“Being somebody is being yourself,” he replies earnestly. “An artist’s success is part of the downside. You can lose yourself. Being yourself is a very difficult game.” Ai’s fingers disappear into his beard, which looks longer and grayer than it was when I saw him in Beijing. “How can you, at the same time, be yourself and refuse the easy categories that come to you with popularity?” he says. “Most artists struggle to be recognized but fame misrecognizes. The moment you touch success, your sense of being somebody disappears.”
Act II: Kinship
Elmgreen & Dragset
Marriage
2004
SCENE 1
Elmgreen & Dragset
Three days before the VIP opening of the Venice Biennale in early June 2009, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are standing and smoking in the sun next to a fake real estate sign that says “FOR SALE.” Both men are tall and slim. Elmgreen is a fair-haired forty-eight-year-old Dane, while Dragset, a Norwegian with brown hair and a well-trimmed beard, has just turned forty. Having shared a career since 1995, they are, in their own words, “each half an artist” or a “two-headed monster.” Their combined nationalities have led to an unprecedented situation wherein “one artist” has been awarded two pavilions at this premier international exhibition.
The hub of the sprawling Venice Biennale is the giardini, a park full of pavilions in a broad range of architectural styles. When Elmgreen and Dragset visited the giardini out of season, they fancied the location as an upscale neighborhood, then asked themselves: who might live here? They decided to transform the Danish pavilion into the home of a family in the midst of a divorce and the Nordic pavilion (jointly owned by Norway, Sweden, and Finland) into a gay bachelor pad. Then they imagined that both homeowners were avid collectors, which gave them license to fill the pavilions with works by twenty-four artists, including themselves.
“I always thought that if I didn’t behave myself as an artist, I’d be reborn as a curator or an interior decorator!” says Elmgreen with a husky laugh in between puffs on a Danish brand of cigarettes called Prince. “As artists, we could be more dictatorial than normal curators, creating an integrated group show that tells a story,” he adds. Elmgreen loves confrontation; Dragset prefers diplomacy. “We explained the concept carefully,” says Dragset. “We warned the artists that their work might take on other meanings. So far, no one has flipped out.” Venice is a notoriously difficult city in which to produce exhibitions. “Everything—everything—has to arrive by boat,” says Elmgreen with a deep sigh.
The artists are both wearing shirts with fine checks that are the same color as their trainers. Elmgreen’s ensemble is red and black, Dragset’s is royal blue and white, as if they were twin boys color-coded by a doting mother. When the pair are due to make an important public appearance, they confer on wardrobe to make sure that they don’t match. “We don’t want to look like Gilbert and George!” says Dragset. Gilbert and George, an older gay artistic duo who always dress in matching tweed suits and use only their first names, declared themselves “living sculptures” in the late 1960s. Before Gilbert and George, artists did performances and cultivated spectacular public images, but few had put themselves forth as art itself. “Gilbert and George were early in doing a sustainable collaboration,” says Dragset, admitting the ancestry. “We don’t see ourselves as artworks but we do take our humor very seriously,” adds Elmgreen.
