33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 26
When asked about originality in art, Abramovi says that it is easy to spot, but also nonexistent. “We can’t invent anything in this world which is not there already. It’s about seeing in a different way,” she says. “Anything that is revolutionary is in front of your nose and it is never complicated. But you don’t see it until you have a safe mind. Performance can help people to get into a state of mind to perceive the simplicity.” Abramovi suggests that live performance thrives in tough economic times because it takes us back to basics. “It doesn’t cost anything and it reminds us of the purity and innocence of art.”
Abramovi has never sold her performances. For years, she scraped together a living through teaching and commissions. She didn’t acquire gallery representation until 1995, when she struck a deal with New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery. Nowadays, she also works with Lisson Gallery in London. Her income comes mainly from selling photographs, often in editions of seven, made in collaboration with Marco Anelli, a photographer. These images go beyond mere documentation to attain, in her words, a “static energy and charisma that can really communicate.”
The most popular of these works are portraits of her higher self. In the black-and-white photograph that adorns the cover of the MoMA catalogue, Portrait with Firewood (2010), for example, Abramovi poses heroically in a manner that evokes social realist images of farmworkers. As she sees it, “I wanted an image of the artist as survivor, looking into the future.” The artist generally likes her face to be clean of makeup, “so the ideas come through.” In a photo titled Golden Mask (2009), however, Abramovi’s face is covered in flaky gold leaf and spotlit against a black background. She seems to be making fun of her objectification as a luxury good.
The question that looms large is: what to do next? “I’m not going to do Artist Is Present for the rest of my life even if it was a huge success,” she says. “When you repeat, you really lose respect for yourself.” Abramovi bemoans the snags of success. When artists are celebrated for key works or a “certain language,” many of them get stuck. Sometimes the overheads of space and staff force them into a certain groove. “For me, the studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution,” declares Abramovi. “Nothing new happens. You don’t surprise yourself. Artists are here to risk, to find new territory. Risk, especially when you are a known artist, includes failing. It is an essential part of process. Failure is healthy for your ego.”
Since The Artist Is Present, Abramovi has thought a lot about art audiences and her legacy. She has embarked on creating the Marina Abramovi Institute, whose mission will be to support performance art (and other forms of performance), particularly works of long duration, and to educate the public in its transformative effect. It will be housed in a 33,000-square-foot space not far from here, in Hudson, New York. Visitors to the institute will undergo “mind and body awareness exercises” that introduce them to Abramovi’s craft, which may include slow-motion walks and an “eye-gazing chamber.”
Performance artists notoriously disdain the theater. Initially, Abramovi was no exception. “Performance is about the true reality,” she explains, whereas “theater is artificial, the blood is not blood, the knife is not a knife.” Nevertheless, she asked several directors to “contact” her life and “remix it,” so she could see it anew. Robert Wilson, an avant-garde director, has risen to the challenge with an opera titled The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi, a project that will no doubt enhance her legend. “The only theater I do is my own,” she explains. “My life is the only life that I can play.”
The V-Girls
(Andrea Fraser, Jessica Chalmers, Marianne Weems, Erin Cramer, Martha Baer)
Daughters of the ReVolution
1996
SCENE 6
Andrea Fraser
“An artist is a myth,” says Andrea Fraser resolutely. “Most artists internalize the myth in the process of their development and then strive to embody and perform it.” Fraser is guiding me through the Murphy Sculpture Garden, a collection of modernist works spread over five lush acres of the University of California’s Los Angeles campus. She wears a hiking dress that she normally reserves for mountain walks. The hot, hazy morning sees eager high school students enrolled in summer courses rather than the usual college crowd. Fraser has taught at UCLA for the past five years, first as a visiting professor, now as a tenured one. She dropped out of high school at fifteen and has no university degrees. She was hired because of her status as an artist. It didn’t hurt that she also happens to have read—and even memorized—significant tracts of art history, sociology, and psychoanalysis.
“They say that there are three kinds of artist: the perverse, the neurotic, and the psychotic,” says Fraser, waving her arms expansively. The perverse artist is supposed to have an instinctive, primal relationship to making art. “He is endlessly and easily fecund,” she explains with a chuckle. “He prowls brothels and goes on drug trips. He is sensually gratified by his work and merrily transgresses social norms.” This model makes sense of the media representations of Picasso and his mistresses, Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and even Fraser’s rendition of a drunken Damien Hirst in her Official Welcome performance.
“The neurotic artist is the one that struggles with guilt and shame,” she continues, as we take shelter in the shade of a tree. “It’s an age-old type that came into its own with the critical, conceptual art of the 1960s. I’m that kind of artist. There’s no unproblematic pleasure for me in making work or exhibiting myself!” she explains, sipping green tea from a silver thermos brought from home. “My criticality comes from my family background. Someone said, you don’t get your superego from the way your parents raised you, you actually inherit your parents’ superego,” she adds with a peal of laughter.
Fraser grew up in the hippie countercultural milieu of Berkeley, California. Her father is a retired Unitarian minister who, when Fraser told him about her scandalous Untitled work, confessed that he had once written a sermon in verse about the preacher as prostitute. Her mother came out as a lesbian in the early 1970s and has been a painter, poet, novelist, psychotherapist, and shaman, among other things. When Fraser told her about Untitled, she only wondered what her daughter would do next. The artist describes her moral heritage as a strange combination of old-school Western libertarianism, hippie individualism, feminism, and the values of the antiwar and gay pride movements.
What about the psychotic artist? I ask as we cross the grand plaza that leads to the Broad Art Center, which houses UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. “I’ve never focused so much on that,” she replies. Although a handful of well-recognized insider artists are clinically schizophrenic, paranoid, or bipolar, psychosis is, rightly or wrongly, associated primarily with outsider artists.
Stationed in front of the art school is one of Richard Serra’s giant “Torqued Ellipse” sculptures, T.E. UCLA (2006). Made out of 42.5 tons of rusty-looking steel, it is shaped like the bottom of a cone whose top half has been sliced off at an angle. Inside the sculpture, students have chalk-marked its curved walls with peace signs, handprints, footprints, and a crude sketch of what could be a cock and balls or a first-year sculpture assignment. It’s like a blank canvas beckoning aspiring artists to make their mark. Apparently, the university has to clean it weekly. “I’m not sure Serra really fits into any of those psychopathological categories,” says Fraser when I ask about the macho monument-maker. “I think that a lot of minimalism is obsessional,” she adds, “which could put him in the neurotic camp.” Although most artists don’t fit neatly into these mythic types, it is still useful to ruminate on them.
The Broad Art Center spans two buildings renovated with a $23 million donation from Edythe and Eli Broad: an eight-story concrete, stainless steel, and teak structure called the Tower and a two-story, predominantly red brick building nicknamed the Little Broad. We enter the latter. “The art department is one of the top-rated programs in the entire university,” says Fraser proudly, as we walk down a white hallway lined with gray lockers. Before Fraser came to UCLA, her finances were precarious, with little income and a lot of debt. “I had been more or less homeless for over a decade because of the nature of my site-specific work, but also because I couldn’t afford to live in New York, so I would sublet my apartment and travel as much as I could,” she explains. Fraser clears her throat and takes a deep breath to shake off her welling emotion. The artist cries at the drop of a hat; she has even written about it. “My current position could not be more distant from that kind of life. I have a kind of job security that is almost bizarre at this point in time.”
Fraser fumbles with some keys, then swings a door open. The white-walled, windowless cube is full of lights on tripods, some of which have umbrella diffusers. A cement brick sits on a stool in front of a silvery gray roll-down backdrop. “This is the room where I shot Projection,” she says. Based on edited transcripts of her own psychotherapy sessions, Projection (2008) is a two-screen video installation in which the artist plays the roles of both psychotherapist and patient.
“I’ve seriously considered leaving the art world—and ceasing to be an artist—a number of times,” says Fraser. “Most recently, I was dealing with a lot of emotional conflicts: my discomfort with the market, my trauma about exposure, my need to control things.” Fraser thought about embarking on a PhD in anthropology or training to be a psychoanalyst. Realizing that she would be subject to strictures that weren’t of her own making, she decided against both. “For me, being an artist is about having a relatively free space where I can engage, reflect, and investigate things that I’m really concerned about.”
We skip up the stairs to “New Genres,” Fraser’s department. Created in the 1970s by Chris Burden, a performance artist and sculptor, New Genres seeks to expand the definition of art and experiment with different “mediums” (art-world parlance for “media” of communication such as canvas, bronze, and readymade urinals). At UCLA, however, the departmental divisions between artistic forms are loose. For example, Hirsch Perlman, an artist known principally for his photographs, teaches in the sculpture department. And Mary Kelly, whose materials have included her son’s dirty diapers and the lint that accumulates in dryers, heads up the scholastic stream called “Interdisciplinary Studio.”
“Are you sure you really want to see my office?” asks Fraser. “I have never had a space that represents me. When I first got calls from art dealers who wanted to do a studio visit, I’d say, ‘I don’t have a studio,’ and that would be the end of the conversation!” Fraser unlocks the nondescript door to reveal a small room jammed with cardboard boxes, crates, wrapped-up framed things, and gray metal filing cabinets. Fraser describes the contents of the brown packages. “These are editions that I got in exchange for . . .” She puts her hand on her forehead. “I’m not sure what,” she says. “These are Brazilian carnival costumes. These boxes have art in them, mostly by other people.” Fraser opens up the metal cabinet. “These are my videos. This is my dossier that I had to put together for advancement.” Behind the boxes is a table stacked with dozens of books and some disassembled bookshelves. “It’s just storage,” she says finally.
Down the hall is a lecture room with about seventy seats, a wood veneer lectern and a range of projection equipment for PowerPoint presentations and the like. “This is the classroom where I teach a course called ‘The Field of Art,’” says Fraser, for whom the term “field” refers specifically to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, who saw the art world as a kind of socioeconomic battlefield. “When I was young, I thought that being an artist was an anti-institutional role, then I read Bourdieu and he made it impossible to imagine that artists could be outside of, or against, society.” Fraser walks up to the podium and looks out over the empty classroom. Many of her performances take the form of talks, and the artist occasionally performs parts of her works when she is teaching. She feels that lecturing is one of her most important activities and she values the impact she’s having on how people think.
When Fraser asks her undergraduates why they want to be artists, the main answer is “So we can do what we want!” To which she responds, “Okay, so what do you want? What matters to you? You have this extraordinary privilege. Don’t waste it.” Not long after that, she breaks the news: “When you graduate, loaded up with thousands of dollars of debt, you may not have much freedom!”
Every artist I’ve ever interviewed has valued their extra liberties—even if it is simply the choice to work all night and sleep all day. Fraser is particularly interested in freedom from the myriad restrictions of what Bourdieu calls “social aging”—a process by which people resign themselves to their position in a highly stratified society. “Artists don’t have to settle on a station or status, a clear class position or national identity,” says Fraser as she drops her large black handbag on a chair. “We can be children forever.” Indeed, artists are often seen to indulge in perpetual play, avoiding the world of “real” work and adult commitments. No wonder art-school admission offices are overwhelmed with applications.
“Another fantasy of being an artist is omnipotence,” says Fraser. “Freud talks about the artist as being able to create his own world, and Winnicott believed that infants initially experience the world as their own creation.” The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott is most famous for his theory of transitional objects, which argues that things like security blankets and teddy bears act as a bridge between a child’s imagination and the real world. Heavily invested with meaning, these transitional objects are prototypical art objects or, as Fraser puts it, the “original readymades.” (Fraser has two poodles, one of which is named after the psychoanalyst.) “Winnicott even wrote about this phase of development where babies experience this tremendous narcissistic insult when they are stripped of their fantasy of complete omnipotence,” she adds. The implication is that artists hang onto the empowering fantasy and act out their supremacy in the universe of their work.
So, do you dream of being a god? I ask. Fraser hmms and leans lightly on one of four empty white pedestals that are scattered around the room. “Maybe the way babies do when they are worshiped by their parents,” she says amusedly. “One of the core fantasies of artists is unconditional love and the associated unconditional value attributed to anything that we produce. It is not, first of all, about money. It’s about love, attention, recognition, regard . . . and freedom from shame.”
Grayson Perry
The Rosetta Vase
2011
SCENE 7
Grayson Perry
Grayson Perry has long wanted to create an exhibition of a fictional civilization in which his childhood teddy bear is worshipped as a god. A few years ago, the artist pitched the idea to the British Museum—a “multi-faith cathedral,” as Perry puts it, to which five million people make pilgrimage every year.* The result of his request is “The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman,” an exhibition in which Perry displays thirty of his own works alongside 170 artifacts from the museum’s collection.
Perry is celebrated as a “potter,” but he makes conceptually sophisticated art in a range of media associated with the crafts, such as ceramics, tapestries, prints, etchings, and clothing. His teddy is a mangled bear with a heart-shaped head called Alan Measles. The “transitional object” helped the artist survive a harrowing upbringing and, as such, is a relic that Perry imbues with almost mystical clout. “When I was a child, I parked my power—my male qualities of leadership and rebellion—onto Alan Measles for safekeeping because I lived in a threatened environment.” Alan Measles has adorned the glazed surfaces of Perry’s ceramic vases for many years, but, in this show, he stars in a range of media as a pope, warrior-missionary, wandering holy man, spiritual apparition in the pupil of a giant eye, and Japanese “dogu” goddess.
Does the show reflect displaced fantasies of omnipotence? I ask. Perry looks at me like I’ve just delivered shocking news. “The show is about the veneration of the transitional object,” he replies after some pondering. “All gods are like cuddly toys insofar as people project their ideas onto them. It’s a form of survival, a way of dealing with fear.” Perry cites his experience of psychotherapy as a huge influence and suggests that it has been essential to his success in three ways: it has helped him with his emotional health, given him methods to access difficult truths, and led him to some of his most important subject matter. We slip under a cordon to enter the exhibition, which is still in the midst of installation. Surrounding Perry’s distinctive vases are ethnographic oddities such as tabletop temples (an Egyptian “soul house” and a Tibetan shrine) and “power figures” including a Malian one that resembles a bison and a Congolese character suggestive of a witch doctor.
One work that Perry made especially for the show is The Rosetta Vase (2011), a two-and-a-half-foot-high pot depicting a landscape-cum-map drawn in blue glaze with a fine brush on glossy yellow and white backgrounds. It stands chest-height on a pedestal under a heavy-duty vitrine typical of anthropology museums. Alan Measles appears on the pot in several places, at one point riding a crusading horse as part of a heraldic sign that says, “ICONIC BRAND.” Perry peers at the pot with me. He has a blonde bob, a ruddy complexion, and British teeth. “From mud to masterpiece, the pots are totally me,” he says. “My assistant doesn’t even order the clay; she just does email.” Perry enjoys the slow, physical process of making pots and relishes the thinking time afforded by the “boring bits,” such as drawing the many small lines that form the ocean at the base of the pot. He is “slightly suspicious” of artists who never get dirty.
The Rosetta Vase is displayed against the wall but, from the side, one can see a painting of a baby labeled “THE ARTIST.” The infant has oversized Buddha-like ears and his body parts are covered with phrases like “interior quest,” “risk-taking,” “unconscious enactment,” “class mobility,” and “power,” which appear to list Perry’s artistic drivers. According to Perry, craft can be taught whereas art is about self-realization. “I can teach someone to make my last artwork but not my next one,” he explains. Mutual antagonism tends to characterize the two domains. “A lot of artists are really bad craftsmen and most craftsmen are really bad artists,” he explains. The craftsmen grumble that the artists “can’t even draw,” while the artists criticize the craftsmen’s work as conventional and kitsch. “I try to have the best of both worlds,” he says, “making things as well as I can and developing ideas that are chunky.”
