33 Artists in 3 Acts (16 page)
“Michael wouldn’t be this amazing person without his neurosis,” says Dragset sweetly.
“You are not very neurotic,” replies Elmgreen matter-of-factly. Some people look up when they think, others look down, but Elmgreen and Dragset tend to lock into eye contact with each other.
“Have you seen Bergman’s
Scenes from a Marriage
?” says Dragset, returning his gaze to me. “Bergman’s work is about the struggle of being together. In the cultural landscape of Scandinavia, Bergman is an intellectual father but, in his personal life, he was a terrible father—an egotistical womanizer.”
Elmgreen and Dragset have divergent childhood experiences. Dragset’s upbringing was happy and he still has a good relationship with his mother and father, who have been married for more than forty years. “What makes a great family are the bad times,” says Dragset. “A strong family accepts. It accepts a person’s negative traits and it accepts conflict.” Elmgreen, by contrast, declares that his parents are “nonexistent.” He moved away from home when he was sixteen and never saw them again. His father died of natural causes, while his mother
committed suicide. “When I was seven years old, I didn’t like who they were,” says Elmgreen. “I loved the story of Moses. I fantasized that I had been found in a basket.” By contrast, Elmgreen appreciates “the complex family tree” of his former boyfriends. Elmgreen and Dragset have made about a thousand photographs of gay men from all over the world as part of their “Incidental Self” series. “We chose the title ‘Incidental Self,’” says Dragset, “because we see the international gay community as a kind of extended family.”
Elmgreen, Dragset, and I walk out the back of the Danish pavilion into the leafy
giardini
. It has clouded over and workers are swarming over the neighboring American pavilion, which is showing the work of Bruce Nauman. The Nordic pavilion, by contrast, is completely empty of people. Built in 1962, it is a refined rectangular box with two glass outer walls and a roof with alternating skylights and concrete beams. Three grand old trees grow right through the middle of the building. “It’s a very exhibitionistic, transparent space,” says Elmgreen.
The art on display in this second home is wide-ranging but rigorously homoerotic. Terence Koh, a Chinese Canadian artist, has created a white plaster tabletop version of Michelangelo’s
David
in which the anatomical proportions of the nude original are faithfully rendered in all areas but one, which is significantly enlarged. (I Google the original on my phone and am shocked to see the diminutive scale of the Renaissance ideal.) Other works in the room include Simon Fujiwara’s
Desk Job
(2009) and a vitrine of drawings of naked macho beefcakes made by Tom of Finland between 1965 and 1981. Playing on a vintage 1970s’ television set in a kind of sunken bed area is a video by William E. Jones titled
The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography
(2009).
Elmgreen and Dragset have staged the phallocentric art among vintage sixties’ chairs and lamps by a pantheon of acclaimed Scandinavian designers. The sophisticated modernist milieu offers clever ballast to the bawdy artworks, elevating what some might find coarse or distasteful. When the exhibition is officially open, three men who appear to be hustlers will populate the pavilion. “A rent boy in jeans and a white T-shirt will sit there,” says Dragset, gesturing towards a red seat in a globe
known as an Aarnio ball chair. “And we’ll have a naked guy listening to an iPod in the Wegner ox chair,” he says with a wave in the opposite direction. “They’ll actually be working as security guards.”
In the middle of the Nordic pavilion, around the three live trees, Elmgreen & Dragset have created a “bathroom” with glass walls to display
Marriage
(2004), a sculpture comprising two white porcelain sinks whose stainless steel drain pipes are tied in a knot. It was one of the first sculptures Elmgreen and Dragset made after they broke up. The sinks are the same shape and size, suggesting an egalitarian relationship, but they are tainted by the bondage below. The artists are considering making
Gay Marriage
, which would feature two urinals with entangled pipes.
“There is a lot of love in our work,” admits Dragset.
“It’s about love not labeled as love,” qualifies Elmgreen. “Don’t patronize me with your love. Don’t show me compassion in a dominating way.”
The sinks are one of many works that Elmgreen and Dragset have made that involves domestic doubling. They have also made sculptures of bunk beds (in which the top bunk faces down) and pairs of doors (linked together by a chain lock). “Every time we put something in singular form, it feels a bit funny,” says Dragset. “I believe in the idea of soul mates. Relationships need to be mutually inspiring to last.”
Maurizio Cattelan
Super Us
1996
O
n a blisteringly hot day in early August, Maurizio Cattelan is looking out of the open window of a New York City taxi, one arm resting in the wind. The artist is tanned and impeccably fit due to his weekday regimen of 100-length swims. He wears a T-shirt that says “Hung like Einstein, smart as a horse.” Cattelan recently decided that designing his own clothes was easier than shopping for them. So far he’s made thirty or so unique T-shirts, which feature jokes and slogans that effectively customize his appearance.
I first met Cattelan at a dinner honoring Elmgreen & Dragset in Venice a couple of months ago. Cattelan had allowed one of his artworks to appear on the cover of nine editions of my previous book,
Seven Days in the Art World
. The work featured a taxidermy horse mounted backward, headless, with its rump sticking out of the wall. We’d had email exchanges but never met face to face. When a mutual friend introduced me to him as an ethnographer, he seemed to mishear and exclaimed with great enthusiasm, “You’re a pornographer!” That night, he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Make awkward advances to women, not war.”
On our way through the gallery district of Chelsea, we pass Jeff Koons’s studio on West 29th Street. I identify the building and then
remark that I saw the artist give a talk about his “Popeye” series in London a few weeks ago. Cattelan grimaces and sticks out his tongue. He has never given a public lecture and finds the thought of doing so mortifying. “I speak through images because I can’t talk. It’s my handicap,” he says in a dark baritone with a murky Italian accent. “I forbid myself to appear on radio or television.” For many years, the artist hired a friend, the curator Massimiliano Gioni, to give museum talks as “Cattelan.” For the first few years, people didn’t realize that they were being presented with an impostor. As Cattelan’s face became better known through his many self-portraits and as Gioni’s curating career took off, they abandoned the ploy.
Our taxi hits the West Side Highway and speeds uptown toward our destination in Harlem, an area with few art galleries. We’re going to see an exhibition titled “Maurizio Cattelan is Dead” at a nonprofit space called Triple Candie. Cattelan discovered the show online about a month ago. He hadn’t planned to see the exhibition until I goaded him into attending with me.
What is it like to be declared dead? I ask. “It makes your life longer,” replies Cattelan. “This is the third time.” About ten years ago, an Italian newspaper reported his death. “It was a prank. Someone called the paper.” Then there was the documentary about him called
È morto Cattelan!
“I guess it was a gimmick to get attention,” he says.
Death is a dominant theme in Cattelan’s work. One of his most celebrated pieces consists of a squirrel that has just committed suicide in a miniature 1960s’ kitchen. Next to a tiny sink full of dirty dishes, the squirrel slumps with his taxidermy head on a little yellow Formica table and his paw outstretched toward the gun that has fallen by his feet. Made in 1996, the mini-installation is more absurd and vain than tragic. A squirrel who takes things so seriously that he has to take his own life?
Our taxi finally pulls up alongside the gallery on West 148th Street. Triple Candie puts together exhibitions about artists without their permission—a rogue curatorial tactic in an art world that defers to the power of successful living artists, giving them a great deal of control over their solo shows. Upon entering the ground-floor space, we are
confronted with a life-size coffin above which is a sepia tinted photograph of the artist, looking wackily astonished with his eyes bulging and his eyebrows raised. In large lettering on the wall above are the artist’s dates: 1960–2009. To the right of the display, a man and a woman sitting at a wooden table glance up from their laptops, noting the arrival of visitors.
Beyond this reception area is a large, oddly shaped room with exposed red-brick walls that are partially covered with white boards; across them at chest height runs a two-inch-thick, black time line, surrounded by wall texts and computer printouts of images of the artist and his artworks. Cattelan places his black-rimmed reading glasses on his extravagant Roman nose and moves in close. The first wall text starts with the statement, “Maurizio Cattelan was a con-artist and a populist philosopher whose art embraced what might be called comic existentialism.” The artist emits an amused grumble. The exhibition has been exhaustively researched. The wall texts are better written than those in most museum shows and, with the exception of the posthumous premise, they reveal a meticulous concern for factual accuracy. “I wish there were more mistakes,” says Cattelan. “A legend grows through confusion.”
Along the wall, past a display of photos, maps, and writings that refer to the artist’s strict Catholic childhood in Padua, is a reproduction of an early self-portrait titled
Super Us
(1992). The work features a series of drawings on transparent acetate sheets rendered by a couple of police sketch artists who drew Cattelan’s likeness based on the verbal reports of friends and acquaintances. Not only does the piece posit identity as a network of other people’s perceptions, it depicts the artist as a criminal suspect. Cattelan may have stolen the idea for this work from the Californian conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose 1971 video,
Police Drawing
, features a police sketch artist making a portrait of Baldessari from students’ descriptions. Or, the similarity of the works might stem from the fact that both Baldessari and Cattelan are intellectual descendants of Marcel Duchamp, who championed transgression and sometimes positioned himself as a symbolic outlaw.
A few feet further along the time line, the text declares, “Maurizio was a thief,” then goes on to describe an artwork in which Cattelan, “unable to come up with an idea for an exhibition,” broke into a gallery and transported its entire contents to a neighboring art space where he was expected to have a show. “Art really did save me from a life of crime,” volunteers Cattelan as he points at the text. “I don’t know what art does for the people who look at it, but it saves the people who make it.”
Around a corner, represented by a photograph of windswept palm trees, is a work that the time line narrative describes as the “greatest hoax of Cattelan’s career.”
The 6th Caribbean Biennial
(2000) was an event in St. Kitts organized by Cattelan and curator Jens Hoffmann. Promoted with full-page advertisements in art magazines, the event had institutional sponsorship, a director, and a press office. But when a handful of journalists arrived for the opening, they found that there was no exhibition—indeed, no art whatsoever—simply a collection of “name artists,” including Pipilotti Rist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Gabriel Orozco. The artists did not give seminars or symposia; they simply swam, ate, and took afternoon naps, as they would on any other beach vacation. One critic was irate. “In the absence of art,” she scoffed, “the artists themselves became objects of contemplation.”
The couple who were sitting in reception when we entered the gallery make their way over to us. She wears paint-splattered shorts and a ponytail that extends down to her butt. His head hasn’t seen a haircut in sometime either. “Are you Maurizio?” says the woman, who introduces herself as Shelly Bancroft and her colleague as Peter Nesbett, her husband.
“Why did you kill me?” whines Cattelan in a mock-wounded tone.
“We like a story with resolution,” quips Bancroft.
“We did the show because we identify with the act of not seeking consent,” says Nesbett, “and doing things on the sly.” He gestures toward some tabletop vitrines displaying photocopies of
Permanent Food
, a “cannibal magazine” that refused to observe copyright which Cattelan and his collaborators put together from a wide range of sources.
“As an organization, we feel akin to you,” volunteers Bancroft.
“We also relate to the way you think about your sculptures as images that have another life through reproductions,” explains Nesbett. “It allows art objects that are owned by the elite to circulate in a broader, more generous way.”
Cattelan peers curiously at Bancroft and Nesbett, his reading glasses propped on his forehead. “Are you artists?” he asks.