33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 2
* The Serpentine Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Koons’s “Popeye” series but, as the gallery has no auditorium, they are using a lecture hall at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Ai Weiwei
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
1995
SCENE 2
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei refuses to accept the status quo. At the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, a few weeks after Koons’s talk, Ai demonstrates his contempt for acceptance. Where Koons is polite, Ai is rude. Where the American focuses resolutely on his artwork and steers clear of politics, the Chinese artist consistently diverts attention away from his work toward its ethical context. Born in 1957, Ai is almost the same age as Koons. Although the two artists share a love of Duchamp and a penchant for exploiting mass media, they have disparate responses to power.
Ai is sitting on an elevated platform behind a desk. A pink T-shirt covers his substantial paunch, while a loose-fitting black jacket and blue cotton trousers frame it. His shaggy graying beard gives him the air of a wise man. Beards are not common in China, where they tend to be associated with either Confucius or Fidel Castro.
“Ai Weiwei has made many art works,” says Ackbar Abbas, a professor at University of California, Irvine, who is convening this session of a conference titled “Designing China.” The audience is about half Chinese. It includes quite a few European academics and a contingent of American graduate students. “Weiwei was a consultant on the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics and has built an artistic compound in Caochangdi, an area near Beijing where he welcomes his friends and sometimes the police,” he adds by way of introduction. Ai takes a few photos of Abbas and the audience assembled before him. “I have no idea what he will talk about today,” says the professor. “But we do hope that he will talk about Ai Weiwei.”
The artist looks to the man seated by his side, Philip Tinari, a curator who will act as his translator. The Harvard-educated hipster with thick-rimmed glasses has his fingers poised on the keyboard of his MacBook Air, where he will note what the artist says then relay it in English. “Good morning everyone,” Ai says in Chinese. “I didn’t prepare a speech because when I saw the topic ‘Designing China,’ I didn’t know what it meant. I thought that you could just as easily call it ‘Fucking China.’” The audience giggles nervously. Ai is well known for his diatribes against the inhumanity of urban planning in China. When Ai finishes his statement, he leans back and crosses his arms, waiting for his message to be relayed in English. “Every time I come to Shanghai, I remember why I hate it so much,” continues the artist who is based in Beijing. The seemingly gratuitous insult hangs in the air. “Shanghai believes itself to be open and international but, in fact, it is still operating with a very feudal mentality.”
Ai cites a local human rights violation about which he has written more than seventy blog posts, then mentions his own mistreatment at the hands of the Sichuan police. A week ago, Ai went to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in an attempt to testify at the trial of activist Tan Zuoren, who was accused of inciting the subversion of state power. At 3 A.M. on the morning of the trial, says Ai, “the cops opened the door to my hotel room. When I asked to see their badges, I was violently attacked.” The officers then took the artist into custody and prevented him from giving evidence at the hearing. “We have a totalitarian government that uses monopolistic means to achieve its goals,” says Ai. “While China might look bright and shining, it is actually wild and dark.”
Ai has a giant welt on the side of his head from the beating, and doesn’t yet realize that it has given him a brain hemorrhage that will require surgery. I wonder if the physical discomfort combined with the police brutality has made him more cantankerous than usual. Tinari, who frequently translates for the artist and knows him well, would later explain to me that being in an official Chinese educational institution is contributing greatly to his foul mood. “The only thing Weiwei dislikes more than officialdom,” he says, “is academia.”
The artist reads something on his Nokia phone, then raises his head. “If we are talking about designing China,” he announces, “I think we need to start with questions of basic fairness, human rights, and freedoms. These are concepts about which China, for all its economic success, still has no basic understanding.” Ai stops short, having spoken for a total of ten minutes, and says, “I think it would be best to open it up and take your questions.” The artist, who relishes interaction, leans over the desk as if daring the crowd to a showdown. A long, stunned silence follows, then a round of cautious applause.
Ai loves to shock. His best-known self-portrait, which announced his transition from antiques dealer to artist, is titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). It consists of three black-and-white photographs in which he holds, releases, and smashes a 2000-year-old antique. For those who value cultural objects, it is impossible not to flinch. While Ai remains blank-faced in the pictures, it would be a mistake to assume, as some have, that the artist disdains the past. On the contrary, Ai has a huge respect for the crafts that were wiped out by the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution and, in the 1990s, he supported himself by buying and selling antiques. Eventually he established a new category of art that Tinari calls the “ancient readymade.” Ai would paint Western trademarks, such as the Coca-Cola logo, on antique vases, and have traditional artisans reassemble old stools and tables into surreal multi-legged sculptures.
The applause dies and Abbas rises to his feet. “Weiwei has put some issues on the table that we have been skirting around. Let’s look at these things directly,” he advises. A seasoned teacher, Abbas gives the impression that he could run a fruitful seminar in his sleep. “Things here are actually neither lawful nor lawless. Everything is quasi-lawful,” he says. Ai drinks some spring water out of a plastic bottle while Tinari explains that the artist is happy to take questions in English. Ai understands English, having lived in New York for twelve years between 1981 and 1993.
Eventually an older American man in the front row asks, “What should Westerners be doing in China?” Ai emits a low growl of a “hmmm” then says, “I maintain no illusions about Western democracy . . . so my advice is: walk around, take some pictures, eat some nice Chinese food, and tell your friends that you had a really great time.” Ai loathes pretension and loves joking; he is also a philosophical liberal. In response to the next question, he says, “We have no democracy at the level of voting, no freedom of speech or media. If you ignore these issues, you might as well be farting.”
A woman with a faint Germanic accent says, “You have a negative critical attitude, a controversial, shocking fuck-off attitude, but you are an artist. Could you talk about your creative, productive ways?”
Ai winces, then has a quick conversation in Chinese with Tinari. “Criticism and finding trouble is, in the Chinese context, a positive, creative act,” declares Tinari for him. “One can risk one’s own life in the process.” He cites three activists—Chen Guangcheng, Tan Zuoren, and Liu Xiaobo—who have been detained or imprisoned, then adds, “Anyone who thinks that my political interventions are negative or simply ‘fuck you’ is wrong . . . I’ve done many architectural and museum projects, including one just last month at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and one coming up in October at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. I am involved in a massive productive output; it’s just not what we are talking about today.”
A woman with short hair and glasses follows with an interminable, gushy, jargon-ridden comment that ultimately asks Ai how his “artistic interventions” promote social justice and human rights. The artist has been sitting with his hands in his trouser pockets. He leaves them there. “I am not one to explain my artworks,” he says. “If you are interested, you can look at them. Every single work that I make has a basic connection to my most fundamental beliefs and if the work can’t express that belief then it’s not worth making.”
Ai could easily have invoked any number of artworks with democratic or freedom-loving themes in response to her question. In 2007, for example, he created a performance titled Fairytale in which 1,001 Chinese people who had never been to Europe went to the small town of Kassel, Germany, during Documenta, an influential art exhibition. One of the dominant definitions of contemporary art is that it makes you look at the world differently. Having spent more than a decade in the United States, Ai understood that time spent abroad expands the mind. The Fairytale performance was accompanied by a compelling installation of 1,001 wooden Qing Dynasty chairs—one for each Chinese traveler. When Documenta was over, the human participants went their own ways and the chairs were dispersed. Fairytale was the first work that Ai made with the use of the Internet, recruiting volunteer travelers through his blog. When asked to look back at the stages of his career, Ai says simply that there is the art he made before he discovered the Internet and the work he created afterward.
The audience seems evenly divided between those who find Ai exasperating and those who sit in awe. An Asian American student suggests that contemporary art in China is “an alibi for freedom” and asks Ai to comment on the “dark nature” of the art world. In the past ten years, says the artist, it is more accurate to say that the art market—not art—has prospered in China. “That is what has attracted the Western attention,” he affirms. “The art market is like the stock market except that it is smaller, so it can be controlled by an even smaller group of people.”
Finally, an Australian who introduces himself as one of the co-organizers of the conference asks the closing question. “I applaud you for your unstinting commitment to principle,” he says, then wonders whether Ai is “perversely useful to China?” Over the past year, particularly since Ai has become more belligerently political in his blog, people have been wondering how he can get away with being so outspoken. Theories have abounded. First, people thought he was American. So he posted a copy of his Chinese passport. Then they said that he must have strong family connections that give him the protection of a high-ranking party official. However, the artist claims that if he has a friend at the top, he does not know who it is.
Ai concludes by declaring that, if he were once useful, it appears that he is no longer. A few months ago, Chinese officials closed down his blog. They have since completely erased his existence from the Internet. If you put the three characters that spell the name “Ai Weiwei” into Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, nothing comes up. It’s the same for other words, he affirms: “freedom,” “human rights,” “democracy,” and “fuck” are also unsearchable in China.
Jeff Koons
Landscape (Cherry Tree)
2009
SCENE 3
Jeff Koons
Most artists in New York City worry less about censorship than reputation management. If you are in the public eye for long enough, laments Jeff Koons, your “inevitable fate” is to be “burned at the stake.” Although the analogy between artists and saints, executed for treason or heresy, appears casual, it is one that he makes regularly.
Since 2001, Koons’s studio has been located in Chelsea, a few blocks away from Gagosian Gallery, one of the artist’s dealers. From the outside, the studio has the air of an art gallery. Its brick exterior is painted white and punctuated by four large grids of frosted glass windows. Inside, one finds a warren of offices for design and administration and workshops for painting and sculpture.
The first stop on a Koons studio visit is a spacious open-plan room full of young people sitting in swivel chairs, staring at large Apple monitors. Gary McCraw, the artist’s longtime studio manager, has a station here. A quiet man with long straight hair and a long beard, McCraw manages Koons’s growing staff of more than 120 full-time employees. He has the same polite but oddly impervious manner as his master, who he expects will be with us in a minute. While I wait, I catch a glimpse of a new work on one of the screens, a shiny sculpture of a partially naked woman accompanied by a planter of flowers.
Koons appears, wearing an old golf shirt, jeans, and sneakers. “That Venus—she’ll be eight feet high,” says the artist, who has noticed the direction of my gaze. “We’re putting a lot of care into her. See the way her dress is gathered up in her hands like vagina folds.” Wasting no time, Koons ushers me through the office to a painting studio. “I enjoy the sense of community. I don’t want to be in a room by myself all day. That’s why I created a studio like this,” he says, his blue eyes twinkling through wire-rimmed glasses. “I enjoy being able to provide. When I was younger, I was always the guy who paid for the beers.”
Koons conducts studio tours for collectors, curators, critics, writers, and TV crews with some frequency, and so he follows a script of sorts. He mentions how he was brought up to be “self-reliant” and tells a story from his childhood about going door to door, selling chocolates and gift wrapping paper. “I enjoyed not knowing who was going to open that door. I never knew what they would look like,” he says. “I was always someone who wanted to be engaged. It’s the same with being an artist.” I’ve read and seen a lot of interviews with Koons; he rarely gives one without airing this thought about the artist as door-to-door salesman.
We walk into a space that contains six large canvases in different states of completion, hanging on windowless walls. Under the high ceilings and rows of fluorescent lights are many two-tier wooden scaffolds on wheels. It’s lunch break, and only one woman persists in painting. She sits cross-legged on the upper deck of a scaffold, listening to her iPod, her nose a few inches from the canvas, a thin paintbrush that leaves no visible strokes in her left hand. Koons composes his paintings on computer, and his assistants execute them through an elaborate system of paint-by-number maps. A single painting is said to take three people sixteen to eighteen months to complete.
The Koons studio is quiet and industrious—nothing like Warhol’s “factory,” where people acted out wildly on drugs and became stars in his underground films. Koons does not see himself as greatly influenced by Warhol, even though he appreciates that “Andy’s work is very much about acceptance.” He also admires Warhol’s use of repeated images and his large-volume series, which he links to the quaint view that creativity—and fecundity—result from the same life force. “For a gay man,” he says, “Warhol’s relationship to reproduction is very interesting.”
From the beginning of his career, Koons hasn’t just made art; he has made shows. He is adept at creating fully realized bodies of work that are more than the sum of their parts. He is also careful about producing enough work, but never too much. His series are confined to editions of three to five sculptures, a number that renders his work appealingly collectible. One of the most consistently coveted series in Warhol’s oeuvre are his 1964 40 × 40-inch portraits of Marilyn Monroe, which come in five distinct colors: red, blue, orange, turquoise, and sage-blue. As it happens, Koons’s “Celebration” sculptures, which have commanded his highest auction prices, also come in five “unique” color versions.
Koons doesn’t like to talk about his market because he feels that he is misunderstood as “commercial” or motivated by profit. “I don’t mind success,” he says, “but I’m really interested in desire.” When I suggest that commercial motives are attributed almost automatically to artists who command high prices at auction, he replies swiftly, “They don’t say it about Lucian Freud or Cy Twombly or Richter.” To any question related to money, Koons opts for safe answers. He defines his market, for example, as “a group of people who realize that I am very serious about my work.”
The artist’s diligent avoidance of market talk is second only to his aversion to discussing politics. In a segment for Japanese television, Roland Hagenberg caught the artist off-guard. “You don’t seem to be a man who cares about politics in art?” inquired the documentary filmmaker. “I try to do things that are not harmful to my work,” replied Koons. Indeed, overt political content could likely put a damper on his success in stimulating “desire.”
While many of the works in progress here spring from older series, three paintings announce the beginning of a new, as yet unnamed body of work. Conceived as a feminine counterpoint to the “high-testosterone” works grouped under the “Hulk Elvis” banner, these paintings are inspired by Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866). Courbet’s highly realistic painting of a naked woman, lying on white sheets with her legs spread, depicted only from her nipples to her upper thighs, is one of the most notorious works of the nineteenth century. On the surface of Koons’s new canvases are sketches in silver paint of female labia, which remind me less of Courbet than the plates in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party and myriad feminist “central core” images. Under the sexy line drawings are collections of dots in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The dot patterns initially appear abstract, but form figurative images when viewed from a distance. Koons pulls me back to the other side of the room, but we are still not far enough away to see the figure, so he brandishes his iPhone and has me look at the works through its camera. A waterfall appears in one painting, a tree in another, a naked couple doing something intimate—I’m not sure what—in a third. Many of his paintings are derivative of his sculptures—sometimes they even look like ads for his three-dimensional pieces—but these Origine canvases feel like stand-alone works. I find myself liking them a lot.
“Artistic conquests and sexual conquests. They parallel each other very well,” says Koons. The artist has an elaborate personal philosophy that revolves around what he calls “the biological narrative” and includes a lot of pep talk. “The only thing you can do is trust in yourself and follow your interests. That is where you find art,” he offers. Sometimes Koons sounds like a life coach or a self-help guru. “My art is not just fun,” he says as we walk away from the paintings. “I want my work to help people expand their parameters. Art is a vehicle for connecting to archetypes that help us survive.”
