33 Artists in 3 Acts (11 page)
The patron of the art fair is His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy
supreme commander of the United Arab Emirates armed forces. Art and arms might seem like an unusual combination of responsibilities until one remembers the ambassadorial potential of art, which can be used as a bridge to the West and a hedge against religious fundamentalism. Squeezed between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the UAE is often seen as an oasis of
relative
liberalism. Unfortunately, Sheikh Mohammed and his brother Khalifa, President of the UAE and emir of Abu Dhabi, sent Emirati troops into Bahrain to help crush their “Arab Spring” demonstrations earlier this year. The move has not done wonders for the atmosphere at the fair.
On my way into the auditorium, I bumped into two Iranian artists, Ramin Haerizadeh and his brother Rokni, who fled their homeland in spring 2009 and now share a studio in Al Quoz, an industrial area on the outskirts of Dubai a couple of hours’ drive from here. The Iranian secret police started looking for Ramin when they discovered partially naked self-portraits from his “Men of Allah” series in a Saatchi Gallery exhibition catalogue. After the intervention of a sympathetic sheikh in Abu Dhabi’s Department of Higher Education, the Haerizadehs were granted three-year visas for the UAE. In Iran, the brothers tell me, the general perception of contemporary artists is that they are insane, or atheists, or “insane atheists.” Among Islamic fundamentalist regimes, it is considered better to repeat the wisdom of the past than to display originality. As the Haerizadehs explain it, “Creation is for God.”
The Koons–Gagosian session is not about the perception of artists in the Middle East. Indeed, I am charged with the task of interviewing the two men about their working relationship. They met in 1981 at a Soho gallery that no longer exists. A decade later, Gagosian “wangled an invitation” to Koons’s studio whereupon he bought
Poodle
(1991), one of the few works in the artist’s “Made in Heaven” series that is not pornographic.
Do you still own it? I ask.
“I wish,” says Gagosian.
The dealer has overseen many lucrative Koons deals. A favorite transaction involved Koons’s iconic 1986
Rabbit,
a small-scale, stainless steel sculpture that was the precursor to his “Celebration” series. Back in the
1980s, Terry Winters, an American artist, bought
Rabbit
for the “modest sum” of $40,000. In the late 1990s, Gagosian sold it to S. I. Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, for $1 million, a “startling” price at the time. For Gagosian, it is a “bittersweet story.” If he had had “a million dollars sloshing around,” he would have kept it.
Koons declares that he has always admired Gagosian’s gallery—particularly a memorable show of Warhol’s “Most Wanted Men”—and appreciated the dealer’s support of his secondary market. It wasn’t until 2001, twenty years after their initial encounter, that Koons first gave the dealer work straight out of the studio, a selection of paintings from his “Easyfun Ethereal” series, which were exhibited in Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space. What Koons remembers best about this show is a massive truck pulling up to his studio with an image of King Tutankhamun in gold and red on the side. He felt “honored” that Gagosian would ship his work across the country in a climate-controlled vehicle fit for an ancient Egyptian king.
The conversation moves on and Koons reveals that the first time he acquired “anything substantial” for his personal collection, a sculpture by Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein titled
Surrealistic Head #2
(1988), Gagosian was involved. When I ask the artist whether he has bought much from Larry over the years, Gagosian interjects, “Not enough!” Koons chortles and then explains that he mostly collects early-twentieth-century modernists and old masters. When I was in his studio in New York, Koons went on a long digression about his collection, which includes paintings by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí. The works that are “most dear” to him are hung salon style, one above the other, in his bedroom. “The rest of my home is boring compared to the bedroom,” he told me. “I always feel empowered by an acquisition. It’s energy. It’s meaning . . . I don’t think about the cost. If you really like a work, you should be prepared to pay even more than it’s worth. Things that are really great add value to society.” He reiterates some of these thoughts on stage. His language is not as stilted as usual and he is palpably relaxed. Koons appears to feel more at ease speaking as a collector than as an artist.
We show a slide of a work from Koons’s new “Antiquity” series, which
will premiere in Frankfurt in seven months’ time, then I open up the session to questions from the audience. A Dubai-based Indian woman kicks off what will be a key theme. “Skilled people help with your work. How can you claim to be the exclusive creator of it?” she asks. This issue is a bee in the bonnet of many art-world outsiders, who imagine that “real artists” work alone in their studios. Curious to see how he will respond to this common thought, I turn to Koons.
“I started drawing at three years of age,” he says methodically, as if he were speaking to a child. “I started private lessons at seven. When your mind tells your fingers to hold the brush in a certain way, they are just performing the gesture you want to make. It is the same with people. The first time I worked with others was when I was casting at a foundry. I create systems for the people that work with me so I can be responsible for every mark. Everything is performing just like a fingertip, so I am responsible for it all.”
It is important not to confuse art with craft, I add. Contemporary artists’ identities have shifted. There has been a kind of industrial revolution in art. Artists have become ideas people liberated from manual labor; they can delegate without compromising their authorship.
“It’s a question that I get asked a lot as Jeff’s dealer,” interjects Gagosian. “I don’t know any artist who works as hard as Jeff Koons. He is there, every day, hands on. The notion that this is somehow a bogus way of making art is poppycock. You cannot control anything more than Jeff does—from the idea to the computer through the assistants to the fabricator. It is an incredibly focused, demanding process. The backstory that he doesn’t ‘do it’ is just malarkey.”
I point out that the romantic notion of the lone artist making art by his own hand obscures the longer history of artists’ ateliers crowded with assistants, which goes back to the Renaissance with artists such as Michelangelo and reaches a height in the Baroque period with artists like Peter Paul Rubens.
Even though the lady who voiced the query appears unconvinced, we move on to a series of questions about Koons’s
Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)
(1994–2006), which sold at Sotheby’s in November 2007 for $23.6 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.
The consignor, Adam Lindemann, had bought the work for $1.65 million only a couple of years before flipping it at auction. Several members of the audience appear irate. They think it is immoral to resell a work so quickly for seven times the purchase price. However, both artist and dealer resolutely defend Lindemann’s right to sell. “If you are going to have a market, you need liquidity,” explains Koons. “You can’t take liquidity away.” The artist’s proficiency with financial jargon reminds me that, for a moment in the 1980s, he worked as a commodities broker. It is also a sign of the times. Nowadays rich artists have portfolios to manage, and those who fraternize with collectors spend time talking shop about markets of all kinds.
Eventually, I announce that we will take one last question. A woman says to Koons, “You have achieved art superstardom. I want to know: is it lonely at the top?” I redirect the question to both artist and dealer. Of course, Koons does not answer her directly. “I always just wanted to participate,” he says. “I just wanted to be part of the dialogue.” He relays a favorite anecdote about meeting Salvador Dalí when he was seventeen. “I wanted to be part of a continuation of the avant-garde,” he says. “In New York, if you want to participate, the ball is thrown to you,” he adds implausibly, before turning to face his dealer. “I started by selling posters on the sidewalk,” says Gagosian, “and I have never been lonely.”
Ai Weiwei
Study of Perspective
—
The White House
1995
“I
f you have never felt lonely, you should become an activist,” says Ai Weiwei. “Loneliness is a valuable feeling. Artists need to know how to walk alone.” Ai is ensconced in the same Ming Dynasty-style chair at the head of the long wooden table where his wife, Lu Qing, sat when I was here last year. The room is tidier than last time, suggesting that the captain is back and he runs a tight ship. Still, their memorably assertive, sooty-white cat struts the length of the table. Ai pulls his iPhone out of the breast pocket of his thick cotton shirt and takes a couple of photos of my thirteen-year-old daughter, Cora, and me. Ai uploads dozens, sometimes hundreds, of photos every day. Cora, in turn, takes a few shots of the artist and one of the cat, which she will no doubt post on Instagram.
Ai is recovering from his eighty-one-day imprisonment. This morning, he gave himself a buzz cut but left an oblong outcrop of hair on the left side. The powerhouse of a man whom I met in London eighteen months ago is a little out of sorts. According to the terms of his release, he is forbidden to talk about his detention. When he was first set free, he refrained from speaking to the press, but he has slowly become more vocal as he recovers from the ordeal that he tells me was “the highest form of torture . . . two-thirds brainwashing, one-third harassment.” The artist is in the process of writing a day-by-day account of
his incarceration, which he thinks could one day become a tragicomic opera or play.
At the airport on the fateful day that he was arrested, Ai was stopped by undercover police who told him that his departure was “a danger to the state.” They covered his head with a black hood, put him in a vehicle, then drove for about two hours. When his hood was removed, Ai found himself in a room in a “very standard countryside hotel” with a rug, wallpaper, and covered windows. The artist spent two weeks there before being moved to a less homey location—a high-security military compound. In both places, he was accompanied at all times by two guards, who watched him even as he slept, showered, and shat.
During his detention, he endured some fifty interrogations in which he was handcuffed to a chair. The highly repetitive process often began with the question: what is your occupation? If he replied that he was an artist, his interrogator would pound his fist on the table and yell, “Artist? Anyone can call himself an artist!”
Initially, Ai replied, “Most of us call ourselves artists.”
But his interrogator wouldn’t have it, declaring, “I think you are at most an art worker!”
“Okay, I can call myself an art worker,” replied Ai, who knew this was one battle too farcical to fight.
Ai’s captors were keen to eliminate ambiguity from the artist’s output. The artwork that most obsessed them was
Study of Perspective
—
Tiananmen
, a photograph from a 1995 series in which the artist raises his middle finger in front of different landmarks around the world. Again and again, they demanded to know “what does it mean?” says Ai. “So I would talk about the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, and classic examinations of perspective.” When his interrogators countered that “everybody in the world” knows that this finger is an insult, Ai would reply that the Italians, among others, use a different gesture. When they asked him about the connotations of Tiananmen, the artist would say, “Feudalism.” Indeed, the gate at the north end of the square was not built by the Communists but by a Qing Dynasty emperor. Several times they told Ai that, during the Cultural Revolution, he could have been killed for this photograph alone.
Another artwork that captured the imagination of Ai’s inquisitors was
Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals
(2010), which explores the dynamics between originals and fakes. Ai’s piece is a recreation of twelve bronze animal heads originally designed by European Jesuit missionaries for the emperor’s summer palace in the 1700s. The palace was looted by French and British troops during the Second Opium War in 1860 and the zodiac heads removed. When two of the originals (the rat and the rabbit) were put up for auction at Christie’s Yves Saint Laurent sale in February 2009, it aroused the ire of Chinese nationalists. Ai thought the outcry was misplaced because the heads are not actually Chinese and, in his opinion, have “no artistic value.” The controversy inspired him to make his own version in an edition of six.
On what Ai describes as his “most absurd day” of imprisonment, the animal heads were the topic of conversation. First, the police insinuated fraud. “The zodiac you made is not originally designed by you,” they said. Then they proposed a conspiracy theory in which they implied that Ai had been recruited by the CIA when he lived in New York and that his art was merely a front through which foreign operatives could pay him for his “anti-China” activities. “They named people, offices, and foreign governmental agencies that I have never heard of,” explains Ai. “And they said, Weiwei, we have very solid information on that, so you have to think about it and give us a better answer next time.”