33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 28
Kusama has long been interested in clothes. In the 1960s, she made unwearable sculptures in the form of gold shorts covered in macaroni and white stilettos stuffed with phallic lumps. At that time, she also had a fashion company that made outfits for the sexual revolution, including pieces with strategically placed holes, dresses for two people and orgy robes. “All my creative selves live together harmoniously within me, no matter whether it is art or fashion,” she explains.
“Brother, shall we go downstairs and look at art now?” says Kusama to Takakura, who looks like he could be her son or grandson. We pile into a small elevator with Kusama, who sits in a polka-dot wheelchair, while others, including Matsumoto with her camera, descend the stairs. Kusama tells me that she has trouble with her legs because, for years, she painted on her knees. She can’t bear it when anything gets in the way of making art because it alone stops her from obsessing on suicide. I ask how often she thinks about dying. “Almost every night,” she says. “Particularly these days because I am an insomniac.”
The second floor of this three-story building houses a painting studio with racks for storage at one end and a large sink surrounded by an array of paints and brushes at the other. In the center is the low table where Kusama paints. It is currently empty, but marked with multicolored straight lines that are the phantom edges of many canvases. As two assistants pull paintings out on rolling tracks, Scott Wright tells me that the announcement of the retrospective somehow “flicked a switch in her” and Kusama has made over 140 paintings in eighteen months. “Death is just around the corner and I am not yet sure I am a great artist,” she explains. “That is why I am absorbed in painting.”
Kusama’s new canvases synthesize the history of her art—her preoccupation with infinity and omniscience along with motifs such as dots, nets, snaky “nerves,” and eyes. Painted on the table from all four sides, the series bears witness to a fantastic variety of compositions using a limited range of unmixed colors. Some of the pictures have strong optical effects; others look like primitive topographical maps.
“I’ve been working very hard, devoting all my energies to them. I did it alone without any assistance. It’s all Kusama,” says the artist, as her assistants continue to shuffle paintings in and out of view.
“Yes, I can see that,” says Scott Wright. “They’re great. Very vibrant. Very beautiful. I love their aura. They have tremendous energy.”
“Thank you,” replies Kusama. “Now, we will show you some much better ones.” The artist tells us that many of these paintings made their debut on TV in Matsumoto’s most recently broadcast documentary film. “It’s quite difficult to get airtime and the program was three hours,” she observes.
Women artists often wait a long time for their accolades. The advantage of late recognition is that it can spur them to new heights. Louise Bourgeois did some of her best work in her eighties. At eighty-two, Kusama clearly aspires to do the same. What are your tips for staying creative for so long? I ask.
“My life has always been thoroughly devoted to art. And I’m mesmerized by encounters with remarkable people like Glenn,” she says of the dealer by her side. Kusama is a celibate who has written about her aversion to sex, but she seems to have a schoolgirl crush on Scott Wright, a handsome British Asian gay man.
Why is Glenn so important? I ask.
“I like his willingness to understand my art. He’ll never know how much I’ve been longing to see him,” she says. Scott Wright’s previously scheduled visit was cancelled because the Tōhoku earthquake closed the airport. “In art history, we find many great artists who always had a sponsor or a dealer,” she adds. More than just showing and selling the work, a gallery puts an artist on the map, makes her relevant, gives her a reason to be.
We descend to the ground floor, which is principally a storeroom with rolling racks, full of larger paintings. A table has been set with a Kusama-patterned cloth, cold bottled green tea and individually wrapped cookies. Frances Morris, the curator of Kusama’s retrospective, and a dozen or so people, most of whom are members of the Tate’s Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee, will be arriving any minute. Stacked in a corner of the room are some recent yellow-and-black dotted pumpkin paintings, which I assume were made with stencils, given the firm, fine detailing, which is not characteristic of Kusama’s hand nowadays. In her youth, Kusama experienced hallucinations in which pumpkins spoke to her in a “generous unpretentious” way, and pumpkins were the subject of her first exhibition of paintings, for which she won an award in 1948.
Members of the Tate committee file into the room, wiping their feet on the mat, as the streets are still wet from a typhoon that hit Tokyo last night. After the artist shakes everyone’s hand, her assistants unveil some of the new paintings that are stored on the ground floor. Morris gives a running commentary, itemizing their “iconographic” and “decorative” elements. She doesn’t ask any questions directly to Kusama, but glances respectfully in her direction with almost every statement. The artist zones out, overwhelmed by the interaction and Morris’s quick, clipped British speech.
The group is ushered upstairs to the painting studio, where a canvas with a base coat of shimmering silver now lies on Kusama’s table. An assistant helps her into a red swivel chair, hands her a paint-splattered smock and then brings her a bowl of acrylic paint that is exactly the same shade of fluorescent vermilion as her wig. With her left palm firmly planted on the canvas, she draws an arc confidently with her right. She then gives it triangular prongs, so it looks like the spine of an iguana. She paints a large spot beside it, then a border of triangles or waves along the edge of the painting. Her audience watches in silence. “It’s almost like automatic drawing. There is no hesitation,” whispers Morris, as if she were a sports commentator describing a tense moment on the eighteenth hole. In the sixties, Kusama made a foray into performance art with “happenings.” Today, the artist delivers a more intimate bit of theater—an oddly moving demonstration of her power over an aesthetic domain.
Damien Hirst
The Kingdom (2008) and Judgement Day (2009)
installed at Tate Modern, 2012
SCENE 9
Damien Hirst
“The last time I saw paintings as deluded as Damien Hirst’s latest works, the artist’s name was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi,” writes Jonathan Jones in the Guardian about the third Hirst show to hit London this year. “The son of Libya’s then still very much alive dictator showed sentimental paintings of desert scenes in an exhibition sponsored by fawning business allies.”
When I saw these handmade Hirsts, depicting shark jaws, parrots, lemons, and fetuses, at White Cube, the gallery’s owner was waxing lyrical about them to Victor Pinchuk, the Ukrainian collector, who Hirst told me was initially “the only buyer, really” of this body of work. Since visiting the artist’s shed in Devon three years ago, I’ve seen Hirst’s do-it-yourself painting several times. It is hard not to agree with Jones when he recommends that the artist should beware of becoming “an absolute ruler . . . utterly surrounded by yes-people” who enable “trivial and pompous slabs” to go public. Indeed, when artists’ fantasies of freedom, omnipotence, and unconditional love go unchecked, they often yield work of uncertain skill.
The year began with a couple of installations of the artist’s spot paintings—part of an imperial spectacle organized by Gagosian Gallery to display 326 paintings in eleven venues in eight cities around the world. Painters working for Hirst have made some 1,400 paintings with multicolored polka dots laid out on mechanical grids. For almost a decade, the artist has promised to quit making the works, but demand for them was such that the artist decided to make them an “endless” series. I spoke to Carroll Dunham shortly after Hirst’s eleven-venue show was announced. “Dot paintings all over the world may be of sociological interest,” he declared, “but the idea that they are meaningful as painting is absurd. These aren’t paintings as much as placeholders for something else.” Indeed, full-time painters were generally appalled. David Hockney, a senior British Pop artist, got into a media spat with Hirst, declaring in an interview with the Radio Times that the younger artist’s dependence on assistants was “insulting to craftsmen.”
When I saw the sixty spot paintings that were hung in Gagosian’s Britannia Street gallery, the flood of painters’ invective was hard to ignore. Hirst may be an innovative sculptor, but he is an opportunistic painter. The decorative canvases, named after pharmaceutical drugs, absorb meaning by association. Writing for The Art Newspaper, Cristina Ruiz traveled the world to view all eleven shows and found that the works “make much more sense in rich cities like Geneva and Beverly Hills.” By contrast, when she saw the paintings in Athens, she felt that the ailing Greek economy would likely lead even high-net-worth individuals to “balk at the frippery.”
Shortly after the spot painting shows closed, Tate Modern unveiled Hirst’s first major retrospective. Seventy-three works made over a twenty-four-year period are arranged in a chronological circuit. The general trajectory is from gritty to glitzy, from punk assemblages, such as cabinets filled with medicine boxes and cigarette butts, to art that looks like bespoke luxury goods.
Funnily enough, even The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), the first of Hirst’s landmark sharks in formaldehyde, has also been upgraded. Some art historians have interpreted this sculpture as a portrait of Charles Saatchi, the collector who commissioned it. However, Saatchi sold the work in 2004 to Steven Cohen, a Connecticut-based hedge fund manager. When the younger, richer Cohen discovered that the original cold-blooded carnivore was shriveling up, he commissioned Hirst to remake the work with a fresh shark.
The survey show has met mostly with praise and is enjoying high visitor numbers. Like all retrospectives, it tells a convincing story partly through judicious exclusions (i.e., no figurative paintings). It also omits The Golden Calf, the bull in a gold-plated tank that was the poster child of Hirst’s 2008 Sotheby’s sale, and keeps For the Love of God, Hirst’s notorious diamond skull, at arm’s length, displaying it downstairs in the Turbine Hall. In contrast to Tate’s usual aesthetic, the skull is spotlit in a dark room, much like jewelry at an auction preview. Hirst would seem to be marketing the unsold piece, but the museum insists that the installation is simply commenting on the “belief system” of capitalism.
Many collectors are hoping that the Tate show will pull the artist’s secondary market out of the doldrums. In 2011, Hirst’s highest price at auction was a tenth of what it was at its peak in 2008. And the total turnover in Hirst works was less than $30 million, putting the artist well behind Gerhard Richter, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince. With other artists, this market decline might be irrelevant to their reputations, but Hirst’s financial acumen is an integral part of his artistic persona. He has made money a main theme of his art and auctions part of his oeuvre. Such are the hazards of being a “business artist.”
SCENE 10
Cady Noland*
Cady Noland loved Damien Hirst’s Sotheby’s sale. She wishes that more artists had such power over the circulation of their work. Noland had her last solo show of newly made work in 1996, when she was forty years old. Since then, she has become a cult figure whose work is hugely admired by younger artists and a growing coterie of collectors. Last November, one of her sculptures, Oozewald (1989), was consigned to Christie’s. The six-foot-high silkscreen depicts Lee Harvey Oswald at the moment he is being shot by a vigilante avenging the death of John F. Kennedy. It is displayed on a cutout, made of aluminum rather than cardboard, that nevertheless gestures toward the format used for film stars in cinema lobbies. A golf ball-sized “bullet” hole near his mouth is stuffed with an American flag. The violent piece, which many would see as quintessentially uncommercial, sold for $6.6 million, making Noland the world’s most expensive living woman artist.
Wearing a black hat and sunglasses, Noland looks like a movie star who is keen to stay incognito. She is petite with long blonde hair and red lipstick. We are sitting at a table for two at a Pain Quotidien café on Seventh Avenue in New York. It’s a quiet summer afternoon and the place is nearly empty.
Noland is the daughter of the late Color Field painter Kenneth Noland. At first, the two artists seem to have little in common. While he had a long, lucrative career, making abstract paintings in the shape of bull’s eyes, she enjoyed a fifteen-year stint, creating sculptures and installations using silkscreens and very precise arrangements of found objects such as handcuffs, chain-link fences, barbecues, and Budweiser beer cans. Whereas he was integrated into high society through several wives and appeared to live the American dream, she has studied its seamy underside. “He had his own problems with the auctions,” she says, suggesting their kindred dislike of that part of the art world. Exposure to his life as an artist no doubt oriented her own. “Dealers were already demystified for me,” she adds.
Noland has long been fascinated with conspiracy theories, criminality, and psychopaths. In an article titled “Paranoia Americana,” the late artist Steven Parrino argued that Noland’s subjects are “not social anthropology, but clues to herself.” Noland made several works using the image of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then joined their cause. According to Parrino, the Hearst story played into Noland’s deep-seated fears.
As Noland sees it, psychopaths are just an extreme example of Americans’ tendency to treat each other like objects. In a manifesto titled Towards a Metalanguage of Evil (1987), she expresses the belief that the psychopath has a lot in common with “the entrepreneurial male.” While she was once preoccupied with characters like Charles Manson, she is now obsessed with the people that move the art market, whose lack of regulation attracts insider traders, manipulators, tax evaders, and money launderers. “The art market is a maze and it’s intentional,” she says. “Every situation that comes up is its own Rubik’s Cube.”
Noland laments the way auction houses “throw artworks together pell-mell.” Lately, her work from the 1980s and 1990s has been appearing regularly at auction. “I have had to plead with them to present it correctly,” she says, tugging at a red plastic teddy bear pendant, one of several necklaces that are part of a carefully curated ensemble. “It’s terrible when the element of chance is introduced,” she explains. “An auction is like throwing the dice. It’s like cutting up a writer’s words and throwing them up in the air. If I had known that everything would be flipping at auction, I would have made works that were impervious. I know it sounds paranoid and crazy, but . . .” She stops talking when a woman in dark glasses sits down at a neighboring table. Noland’s vibe is so intense that the woman gets up and moves to a table further away.
Last week,† the artist was in court, being sued for her “tortious interference” in Sotheby’s sale of Cowboys Milking (1990), which depicts two men forcibly milking a cow. The corners of the silkscreen-on-aluminum work were “bent and slightly deformed,” according to contemporary art conservator Christian Scheidemann, and Noland felt obliged to renounce her authorship of the work. The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 grants artists the right to prevent the use of their name in association with “distorted, mutilated, or modified” work that could prejudice their “honor or reputation.” When Noland disowned the work, Sotheby’s withdrew it from the sale, despite having previously given it an estimate of $200,000 to $300,000. The Swiss dealer who consigned the work was enraged and decided to litigate. Noland brings up the case, but tells me that her lawyers have advised her not to talk about it. She has even refrained from speaking about it with friends because she is certain her phone is tapped. She recommends that I read Eamon Javers’s Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.‡
Like many artists, Noland finds it distressing when her sculptures are incorrectly installed and combined with works that engender the wrong kind of dialogue. Many of her works, she claims, are missing parts. This tends to happen when dealers, keen for the commission on a resale, “yank the works out of happy homes,” as she puts it. We discuss Oozewald, which was bought at auction by Philippe Ségalot, an art consultant who many assume was bidding on behalf of the Qatari royal family. She thinks it will be impossible for them to install the work properly and worries that they will combine the “cutouts” with other works. “Only certain works look good together,” she declares.
Few curators have any hope of being as meticulous as Noland. When she was installing her last brand-new work to be included in a public exhibition in 2001, she spent many hours shifting the objects by millimeters and their angles by single degrees. When the show was over, she instructed the staff of Team Gallery to take it apart and dispose of the pieces in separate trash bins around the city. In the past, she has admitted to a “pathological tendency” in her own work—a type of “throwaway inventiveness” that she likens to the behavior found in horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Many galleries have tried to host Noland solo shows. Not so long ago, Gagosian Gallery hired Francesco Bonami to put together an exhibition. When Bonami, a longtime Noland fan, contacted the artist, she told the curator that she did not want to be “saved from obscurity” and would shoot Larry Gagosian if he dared to do a show of her work. In her opinion, “Artists go to Gagosian to die. It’s like an elephant graveyard.”
Only Triple Candie, the Harlem gallery that held Maurizio Cattelan’s “posthumous” retrospective, has managed to host a “survey” of Noland’s work. In 2006, with the help of three artist friends, the owners recreated some of Noland’s most celebrated installations as best they could, given limited finances and sketchy information about exact scales and materials. Titled “Cady Noland Approximately,” the show outraged many New York critics. Jerry Saltz, who sees Noland as a fierce poet, called it “an aesthetic act of karaoke, identity theft, [and] body snatching.”
