33 Artists in 3 Acts, page 4
“When I started to do my work, to go out of the studio and out of my country,” says Orozco, “one of my aims was to avoid the exoticism of the Mexican artists.” Every country has folk traditions, some of which become national clichés. However, Orozco laments the tendency for people’s identities to be “exoticized” or “defined by others, according to prejudiced or preconceived ideas.”
Orozco suddenly stands up. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks. As we step through some French doors onto a patio that gives way to a well-tended garden, I tell him that when I told a friend this morning that I was going to visit him, she said, “Oh yeah, Gabriel, he’s the real thing.” Why do people think you are an authentic artist? I ask.
“Well, I think. . . . um . . . very nice question. I do like this question!” says Orozco. A discordant mixture of sounds wafts through the cool, damp air from the music school next door. The artist lights his Camel. “Hmm,” he says as he takes a long drag. “I come from a country where a lot of art is labeled surrealist. I grew up with it and I hate that kind of esoteric, dreamlike, evasive, poetic, sexual, easy, cheesy surrealist practice,” he declares. “For example, sculpture that blows up some little thing into a big spectacle. I try to avoid this exoticizing of common things.” It sounds like you’re describing a Koons, I observe. “Exactly, right!” replies Orozco.
I suggest that Koons is not Mr. Authenticity because he works in the Warholian tradition of Pop artifice. Orozco shakes his head. “Warhol was a transvestite. It’s not the same as being a fake,” he declares with some force. “Warhol was trying to produce cheap work with cheap production systems. Koons is exactly the opposite. It’s expensive and very expensive. I would say one is a Pop artist and the other is a capitalist artist.”
Orozco’s ability to think on his feet is heartening. We move on to a discussion about artists’ personas. “Joseph Beuys was the shaman professor,” he says. “Richard Serra was the romantic worker, and Jackson Pollock, the pure existential expressive one,” he says. “If you generate a genealogy from these models, you can probably find many artists that fit into these types. But I didn’t want—and I don’t need—to follow these models.”
“The real thing?” he says, returning to my original question. “I try—it is not easy and I fail constantly—but I try to be a realist in my work. There is humor, but I’m not flirting with the art world or engaging with the frivolity of the market.” Next door, sweeping cinematic strings emerge victoriously out of the cacophony. “Perhaps I’m real because I am not playing games in terms of manipulation or cynicism,” he continues. “Perhaps I’m real because I grow from my work.” He pauses, then speaks slowly. “My work is in between the entertainment industry, big market powers, the spectacularization of politics, and everyday life. But it is not a media thing or a rock concert or a political demonstration. It offers, I hope, some moments of intimacy with reality.” He laughs, then adds, “Oh man. I hope you like that answer!”
Orozco turns around to go back inside and we walk the perimeter of the room. Despite the fact that he is inclined to call himself a sculptor, Orozco’s current preoccupation appears to be painting. Taped to a wall over the fireplace are some red, orange, and pink experiments on paper that evoke boomerangs spinning in the air. Nailed into a wall nearby are many real boomerangs. On two other walls are works on Japanese rice paper that the artist calls “folded drawings that are a little bit like maps.” They are covered in hand-drawn shapes, lines, and Spanish words made in acrylic paint, ink, charcoal, and pencil. Orozco knew that he would be very busy with his retrospective tour, so he found a way to make new work on the road, folding the paper so it would fit in his luggage. He fingers through three piles of drawings stacked on a filing cabinet. “This one has been with me for eighteen months,” he says with affection. “This one, maybe a year.” The concept of folded traveling works reminds me of the “airmail paintings” of Eugenio Dittborn, a Chilean artist. When I mention it, Orozco says, “Ah yes, absolutely!” with genuine surprise.
Eugenio Dittborn
To Hang (Airmail Painting No. 05)
1984
SCENE 6
Eugenio Dittborn
Eugenio Dittborn has a cult following among South American cognoscenti. After countless hours on two planes, I arrive in the dry, sunny city of Santiago, which sits in a valley beneath the snowcapped Andes. The economy of Chile is on the rise due to a wealth of natural resources and a positive trading relationship with China; the country has seen a concomitant surge of interest in contemporary art.
More than a decade older than Ai Weiwei, Jeff Koons, and Gabriel Orozco, Dittborn is small and wiry with a beaky nose and crow’s feet that attest to a good sense of humor. Partial to tweed jackets and corduroys, he looks like a Freudian psychoanalyst. In the 1980s, when the dictator Augusto Pinochet was in power, Dittborn started making collages on long strips of lightweight linen. Each panel was folded up and placed in a specially made envelope emblazoned with the label “AIRMAIL PAINTINGS BY DITTBORN,” then posted out of the country to museums for exhibition. The experimental works addressed a range of political and anthropological themes at a time of censorship and cultural conservatism enforced by a police state. “I invented these folded paintings to get out from this place, to be in the world,” says the artist unhurriedly, with an amused professorial tone. “They are like messages in a bottle.”
Since 1990, through Chile’s subsequent democratic governments, Dittborn has continued to make airmail paintings—over 180 so far—some of which have crisscrossed the hemispheres several times. La Cuisine et la Guerre (1994) is a vast work made up of twenty-four panels that display black-on-white images of anonymous faces, open fires, dismembered body parts, and instruments of torture. The panels flew in twenty-four envelopes first to the Reina Sofia in Madrid, then to art institutions in New York, Houston, and Glasgow, and will soon travel to Brazil, where they will enjoy pride of place at the center of the prestigious Mercosul Biennial. “The superstructural meaning is the travel,” explains Dittborn. “You can see it in the folds.” The work has a double identity; it is a letter when it “sleeps” in its envelope, but it becomes a painting when it is “awake” and pinned on the wall.
In the beginning, Dittborn used regular mail, but now he never strays from private couriers. (He is loyal to FedEx because a rival service lost a panel a few years ago.) When a museum commissions the artist, he makes the painting with the specific destination in mind, then sends it in a number of envelopes. However, institutions occasionally miss the point and return the work after a show in expensive wooden crates.
Santiago has a small art scene in which the vast majority of artists work as teachers. According to Dittborn, there is no artists’ community. “It is the contrary of a community,” he says in an accent that sounds more French than Spanish. “It’s a sort of small and ridiculous battlefield.” Consistent in his metaphors, the artist describes his studio as a bunker. Indeed, once in the basement space, you would never know you were in La Reina, a good-looking suburb full of well-kept bungalows and bougainvillea. The L-shaped, windowless room has four cement walls and two gray painted wood ones for pinning up works in progress. Drearily utilitarian, the space is the antithesis of the romantic image of an artist’s studio. “When students come here, they are very disappointed,” he says with amusement. “I’m a little bit agoraphobic,” he adds, as his hands dive into the pockets of his jacket. “I’d like to be in an envelope but I can’t fold myself.”
Like Warhol, Dittborn works with found images, and like Ai and Koons, he rarely leaves a trace of his own hand, relying on a team of others to do the physical work. One might think that the handwritten addresses on the envelopes reveal the artist’s signature. However, Dittborn employs a man who works at the local gas station—an amateur calligrapher—and asks him to write the destinations in the style of “a nun or a polite, well-educated, Catholic woman,” as the artist puts it. What better way for his work to look like an innocent package and evade scrutiny? As it happens, the artist’s family history features its fair share of religious persecution. His Huguenot ancestors picked up the name Dittborn while on the run in Germany, and his mother’s very Catholic maiden name, which translates as “Holy Cross,” was adopted in lieu of a Jewish one during the Spanish Inquisition. “When people escape or exile themselves, they change their identity,” says the artist.
At one end of Dittborn’s studio is an archive that includes neatly stacked envelopes containing folded works, cylinders holding silkscreens, and gray metal drawers full of fabrics. Everything is carefully numbered and alphabetized. “The order is not compulsive. I’m lost without an assistant,” says the artist, who likes to hire people with a “classifying mind” but finds that they are all too often “arty.”
Dittborn moves stiffly over to a metal cupboard. He opens it and reveals a row of vintage books, many of which are falling apart. He pulls out picture dictionaries in various languages and secondhand bookstore oddities such as Manos Arriba, a true crime compendium depicting murderers and victims. One of the artist’s favorite books, from which he has appropriated many images, is Andrew Loomis’s Anyone Can Draw, a popular how-to book from the 1950s. Dittborn, who is obsessed with rudimentary sketching styles, sees Loomis’s very conventional, prescriptive methods as “the last bus stop of Renaissance drawing.”
Some of Dittborn’s imagery is commissioned rather than appropriated. The artist asked the director of a Chilean psychiatric hospital to invite patients to make drawings of faces and received about 500 in return—all done by one schizophrenic who signed them “Allan 26A.” On another occasion, the artist commissioned heroin addicts at a rehab center in Rotterdam to draw their childhood homes as well as the home of their dreams. Dittborn even got his daughter, Margarita, to participate, drawing faces in exchange for pesos when she was seven years old. (She is now an adult and an artist in her own right.)
Dittborn never makes self-portraits. With hands that shake slightly, he pulls out a drawer full of swatches of fabric upon which different drawn and photographed faces have been silkscreened. “You have to be somebody to make your self-portrait,” he declares disdainfully. However, the artist has created a strong but faceless entity called “Dittborn,” about which he writes in the third person. “Dittborn is not me,” he explains. “It is a market affair like Buick, Cadillac, Ford . . . Bacon or Picasso. It’s a brand in an ironic way, a joke that everybody knows the famous Dittborn.” The artist stops and troubles over his English. “Famous or infamous,” he wonders aloud. “Is the same thing?” I explain the difference. I’m intrigued by an abstract persona represented by an eight-letter word. Dittborn nods. He relishes what he calls “the self-absence of the artist.”
The artist nevertheless admits the influence of his biography. Although he delegates almost every aspect of the physical making of his work—the silkscreening, sewing, folding, envelope-making, and writing—he personally applies the liquid tincture that gives the works their color and their emotional tone. In recent years, Dittborn’s airmail paintings have become more multichromatic. The artist had several long bouts of working in black and white, which he attributes to unresolved mourning. He lost many friends during the dictatorship, in particular his psychoanalyst, whose disappearance influenced his work. “I didn’t understand it at the time,” he explains, “but unconsciously I was trying to find that body.”
Death and disappearance are key themes in Dittborn’s work. Over the years, the artist has made some twenty-eight paintings in a series titled “The History of the Human Face.” Reminiscent of Warhol’s “Most Wanted Men” paintings, the works catalogue the faces of assorted social types (such as “criminals,” “natives,” “madmen”) in diverse styles, including medieval woodcuts, police sketches, and childish drawings. “Disappearing is a problem much larger than Pinochet,” explains Dittborn as he points to an aboriginal face silkscreened on a scrap of white cotton. “Political disappearance is present throughout Chilean history. The tribes of Tierra del Fuego were almost completely wiped out. And what about North American natives? And people in psychiatric hospitals. Many of them are ‘the disappeared.’”
Dittborn puts the fabric pieces back in the drawer and pushes them out of view. “I don’t want to be seen as a hero who resisted oppression, because it was much more complex than that,” he says. The seventeen-year Pinochet dictatorship was brutal, but the regime was shorter-lived and less thorough than the Communist “dictatorships of the people.” While the Chinese and the Soviets systematically erased generation upon generation of independent thinkers, many of the South American dictatorships overlooked enclaves of artists and writers. “Pinochet took control of theater and music but largely ignored the visual arts because it didn’t have a large enough audience,” explains Dittborn as he locks the cupboard doors that hide his books. “The most interesting artwork was incomprehensible to the army anyway.”
Ai Weiwei
June 1994
1994
SCENE 7
Lu Qing
Ai Weiwei has disappeared. On April 3, 2011, the artist was at Beijing airport en route to Taipei for a meeting. At border control, Chinese officials stopped him and took him away. That was seven weeks ago and he hasn’t been heard from since. No one knows where he is.
As I arrive in Beijing, I wonder: in which terminal did his arrest take place? Terminal three, which was designed by the British architect Norman Foster and built for the 2008 Olympics, has a soaring glass dome. It appears to be a national monument to openness and transparency—and to architecture’s gift for fiction.
Ai’s home/studio is located in the “international art village” of Caochangdi, near the fifth ring road on the outskirts of Beijing, not far from the airport. Until recently, the area was mostly grassland and it still feels a bit like the country. A warm, dry wind whistles through the sapling-lined streets under an overcast sky. Ai’s first architectural work was his own studio, which was built out of brick in six months in 1999. People admired its low-cost modernism so much that they commissioned him to design their houses, studios, and art galleries. In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai said that building with bricks was “like using words to write something.” The village, which is dotted with Ai’s buildings, is inflected with the artist’s voice.
My cab pulls up alongside a plaque on a brick wall that says “FAKE,” the name of Ai’s design company, which when pronounced in Chinese comes out as something close to “fuck.” The double entendre captures Ai’s desire to mess with authenticity and authority.
A young Chinese American woman opens a door cut into the turquoise metal gate. She looks both ways down the street, glances up at one of the three surveillance cameras focused on Ai’s door, then lets me in along with Emma Cheung, a friend of a friend who will translate for me today. The courtyard is spacious, with a bamboo grove, carved stone antiquities, and some large green and blue ceramic vases.
On the left side of the courtyard is Ai’s elegant brick box of a home. On the right side is the office, which I peek into as we walk past. The room is empty of life except for a calico cat sleeping on a chair. Within a few hours of abducting Ai, the police raided the whole compound. They confiscated all the computers and hard drives, accounting books, and financial files related to Fake. In the following week, four members of Ai’s retinue went missing: Wen Tao (an ex-journalist involved with Ai’s online presence), Hu Mingfen (Fake’s accountant), Liu Zhengang (a Fake director), and Zhang Jinsong (a.k.a. “Little Fatty,” a relative of Ai’s who acts as his driver). The families of these men have no idea where they are, what they have done wrong, or when they will see them again.
Now, a dozen new computers sit on three rows of tables. Lining the right side of the room, like wallpaper, is a list of 5,196 young people killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai’s Internet campaign to compile a list of the students who were killed in the disaster, due to the shoddy “tofu” construction of school buildings, appears to be the issue that has most embarrassed the Chinese government. On the back wall is a large photo of the façade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich when it was covered by an Ai installation that commemorated the Sichuan tragedy. Titled Remembering (2009), the work featured hundreds of colored school bags that spelled out in Chinese characters a quote from the mother of one of the deceased: “She had been living happily in this world for seven years.”
Lu Qing, Ai’s wife, meets us at the door of their home in a dress that looks like it was painted with watercolors. I recognize her face from an Ai photograph in which she lifts her dress, revealing white bikini underwear, in front of the Tiananmen Gate. Titled June 1994, the work shows its disrespect for the Chinese government on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen protests.
As we are introduced, she warns us that the house is probably bugged. “The police went through the building thoroughly,” she says. “They may have planted microphones as small as sesame seeds.” The main room is a double-height dining hall-cum-conference room with exposed brick walls and a cement floor that feels a bit like a Soho loft. We sit at a long wooden table surrounded by nineteenth-century chairs made in the Ming Dynasty style, much like the 1,001 chairs that were featured in Fairytale. Sitting in the sun on the ledge of a tall window are four large mangoes covered in black marker. Three of them bear Chinese characters; the fourth says “Free Ai Weiwei.”
