33 Artists in 3 Acts (17 page)
“We are mostly art historians . . . who curate,” says Nesbett. “We’re outside the group thing. We’re interested in the ideas behind contemporary art so . . .”
“Unlike a lot of curators,” continues Bancroft, “we don’t fetishize art objects and we don’t see it as our job to apologize for or glorify artists.”
“How do you support yourself?” asks Cattelan.
“We don’t,” replies Nesbett with a self-conscious grin. “We publish
Art on Paper
. It kind of pays the bills.”
“Hmm,” says Cattelan. “Dakis should acquire the show.” Dakis Joannou is a Greek collector upon whom the artist counts for financial and moral support. Above the fireplace in Joannou’s Athens home, in the spot where you would expect to see a dynastic family portrait, hangs an oil painting by George Condo of Joannou as a sailor and Cattelan as a priest.
Out on the street, sirens fill the air as we walk toward Amsterdam Avenue. None of the buildings is over five or six stories high; it is hard to believe we are in Manhattan. Taxis don’t venture this far uptown, so we are at the mercy of unlicensed “gypsy” cabs. “I hate to deal with sharks. I hate to negotiate,” says Cattelan as he scans the oncoming traffic. An ancient town car slows to a standstill and the driver says, “Wanna ride?”
“Maybe,” snaps Cattelan in a weird, high-pitched voice. The driver immediately hits the gas and the car zooms off.
A boxy, battered, black and maroon Lincoln Continental pulls up. Cattelan asks how much to Chelsea and we slide in. A figurine of Jesus is affixed to the dashboard, with his back to the driver, facing the oncoming traffic. “I was raised in the shadow of the Cross,” says Cattelan when
I point it out to him. “I lived in constant fear of being punished. My mother slapped me without mercy.” Cattelan’s mother was an orphan raised by nuns. “She wanted a girl so I used a girl’s voice until I was ten just to be loved,” he says. Shortly after his birth, his mother contracted cancer. She underwent chemotherapy, only to experience a number of other ailments and eventually cancer again. “My mother assumed that I was the cause of her illness. She died finally when I was twenty-three. I took two photos of her dead but didn’t attend the funeral.”
Cattelan has made one work titled
Mother
. At the Venice Biennale in 1999, the artist staged a performance in which a Hindu mystic, a fakir, meditated while buried with only his clasped hands visible above ground. The work is best known through a black-and-white photograph in which a man’s praying hands emerge from the earth. “It was like my private burial ceremony,” admits the artist. “My work pays me back for what I suffered when I was young. It’s a conversation in self-esteem that no one wanted me to have.”
Representations of women are not common in Cattelan’s oeuvre. His best known is a commissioned portrait of Stephanie Seymour, the wife of Peter Brant, a Connecticut-based collector. Nicknamed “Trophy Wife,” the sculpture takes the form of a naked bust mounted on the wall in the style of a moose head. Although a Cattelan commission would usually be unique, the artist created this piece in an edition of three so that other men could own
Stephanie
(2003). Cattelan is quick to declare that it is “a terrible work.”
Cattelan channels Duchamp in a number of ways, including the dead Dadaist’s reputation as a skirt-chaser. A mutual friend at
Artforum
describes Cattelan as “half saint, half yard dog.” Needless to say, he is not interested in marriage. “I am not good at relationships. When my space starts to be endangered, I freak out,” explains Cattelan. “I have a perfect partner in my work. It’s been a twenty-year relationship. We have our ups and downs.” Just as Andy Warhol described his tape recorder as his “wife,” so Cattelan describes his bicycle as his “girlfriend.”
In August, when the galleries are closed, Chelsea is a bit of a ghost town. As we drive through the empty streets to Cattelan’s condominium,
I ask the artist how he feels about his life’s work in the wake of our excursion to what is effectively, albeit eccentrically, his first retrospective. “We are constantly working on a tightrope,” he replies. “The more I go ahead, the higher the tightrope. If you fall from three meters up, you break your legs. But from thirty meters, all your problems are solved at once.”
Laurie Simmons
Talking Glove
1988
A
s a child, Laurie Simmons’s memory for color was so impeccable that she could name lipstick and nail polish shades on demand. To this day, she is still, as she puts it, “curiously conversant in pinks and reds.” As Simmons ushers me into the Tribeca loft that is both her home and her studio, I note her auburn hair, burgundy pashmina, and oxblood slippers.
“This is day sixteen of an eighteen-day film shoot,” she says, swinging her arm in the direction of the living room. Ladders, spotlights, tripods, and wires of all kinds have invaded a sitting area, rendering it unusable. Simmons’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Lena Dunham, has taken over the loft to make a feature film, titled
Tiny Furniture
, in which Simmons stars.
The living room gives way to a dining area where a large-scale Simmons work,
Talking Glove
(1988), is hung on a white brick wall. In the color photograph, a handcrafted puppet, made from a white glove with black buttons for eyes and red silk tassels for hair, is illuminated against a kid’s quilt featuring embroidered horses and houses. The tightly focused spotlight, along with the wide gap between the glove’s index finger and thumb, suggests that the puppet is midway through telling a joke. Lena would have been two when Simmons made this picture, a time when Simmons was perhaps struggling with the often antagonistic roles of artist and mother.
At the end of the L-shaped room, we take a left into a kitchen with white cabinets and mint green walls. The artist offers me an organic gluten-free muffin, then, swinging open the stainless steel door of the fridge, she asks, “Are you hungry? What about some homemade chicken soup?” I settle on decaf Darjeeling, one of an enormous selection of teas. Simmons has mixed feelings about the conclusion of Lena’s film shoot. She’ll be glad to return to her own work without needing to “find somewhere to hide” but she’ll miss the experience of performing, which she discovered was “a blast.”
Before filming
Tiny Furniture
, giving an artist’s talk was the closest Simmons had come to acting. “Some artists invent themselves. That’s something I would never do,” explains Simmons. “But you’re always cancelling certain facts in those talks. You tell people about the hardships and include frank tidbits, but you leave out the self-doubt and the disappointments that still feel excruciating. It’s a super well-edited narrative.”
In the film, Simmons plays the part of an artist called Siri with two fictional daughters whose roles are performed by her real ones. Aura, like Lena, has just graduated from university, while Nadine, like Lena’s younger sister, Grace, is in her last year of high school and applying to colleges. The fictional artist makes photographic still lives of dolls and dolls’ houses not unlike Simmons’s own. “There is even a fight in the movie where Lena’s character asks me, ‘Did you ever have a job that wasn’t about taking pictures of stupid tiny crap?’” says the artist with a hearty laugh. “Fact is I’ve never had a real job, apart from a stint as a museum-desk girl.”
Siri’s personality, however, is not Simmons’s. “I’m not an actor, so it was probably easier for me to play a colder, more withdrawn person than a warmer, more engaged one,” she explains. “But every time I was too emotive, compassionate, or friendly, Lena, as a director, would slap me down.”
Many people assume that artists are self-absorbed, self-centered types, so I float the thought that Lena pulled the character away from its source so that Siri would satisfy popular preconceptions. Simmons frowns and thinks. “I think Siri’s character fulfills the expectations of a
single, struggling mother,” she says finally. “The absence of a father is so
not
true to our real life.” Carroll Dunham, Simmons’s husband, who is nicknamed Tip, has always been an active parent. He will not appear in the film and has avoided the mayhem brought on by the shoot by holing up in his studio at their other home in the small town of Cornwall, Connecticut. “Once Lena realized that Tip refused to be in the movie,” explains Simmons, “she crafted the persona of Siri accordingly.”
We walk back through the living room, past a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that acts as a room divider, and then down some stairs. “I disappear into my studio the way my father used to disappear into his office,” she says. Simmons’s father was an orthodontist whose workplace was attached to their suburban house in Great Neck, Long Island. His rooms were off-limits but full of visual stimuli, such as a dental x-ray darkroom and Polaroid cameras for taking closeups of clients’ smiles. “I try never to use the word ‘practice’ about my art-making because my father was a dentist who actually had a ‘practice,’” she adds.
Simmons’s studio is an oddly shaped room with an open-shelf archive of small props and catalogues on its longest wall. At one end is an area with windows that can be used for shooting set-up photographs; at the other is a conventional office with built-in desks and swivel chairs. “As the shoot has progressed, I’ve got more and more into understanding this artist-character who is not me,” says Simmons as we settle down next to her computer with our mugs of tea. She asks whether I’d like to see a scene, shot two days ago, in which she and her daughter are having a conversation in bed. “This is the thirteenth take,” says Simmons, fluttering her crimson nails in the direction of the monitor. “We just kept doing it. I was practically falling asleep. I don’t know how Lena will choose which take to use.” On the screen, Simmons is lying in bed with her back to her daughter, who is experiencing some youthful existential angst.
“I don’t want to be a makeup artist or a massage therapist or a day hostess. I want to be as successful as you are,” says Aura, the daughter.
“You will be more successful than I am, believe me,” says Siri, the artist-mother.
Simmons pauses the film and turns away from the computer to look
at me. “These lines weren’t hard to say at all,” she says, then presses “Play” again. The scene continues with the daughter’s confession that she has been reading her mother’s diaries. Simmons explains that the diaries discussed—and actually read aloud in other parts of the film—are her real diaries from 1974. “There was no stopping Lena ever,” she explains. “I thought, let her understand how much of a struggle it was.” Simmons had Lena when she was thirty-six, and Grace at forty-two. “Their father and I were adults. We’d worked out a lot of stuff. The only battles that Lena witnessed were the profound disappointments that I suffered at the hands of my own work.”
Precociousness seems to be a family trait. Simmons began introducing herself as an artist in kindergarten. She liked to draw but she was also distractible and disorganized. Her mother labeled her “an artist” as a way to explain away her poor grades and messy room. “My mother thought I’d get married and exhibit my work in the local synagogue’s art show,” explains Simmons. “It never occurred to her that I could really be an artist.” Whatever the circumstances, the “artist” label stuck. “I never listened to my mother,” says Simmons, “but I’ve never considered being anything else.”
Simmons’s “Early Black and White” and “Early Color Interiors” series from the late 1970s feature tiny plastic figures of lone housewives amidst dollhouse furniture. Airless and claustrophobic, these small-scale scenes of women imprisoned in their role seem to represent a mother from the point of view of an alienated daughter. A few years later, Simmons made her “Tourism” photos, which staged plastic dolls with idealized, slim, young-adult body types in clusters of two or three against commercial slides of European tourist sights. These “sisters” may have been liberated from the home but they were nonetheless trapped in the role of appreciators, rather than makers, of culture.
As it happens, Simmons was the middle child of three girls whose parents expected them to be well rounded. Their ideal, explains the artist, was that “we’d play an amazing game of tennis while speaking fluent French then perform show tunes on the piano and sketch someone on a napkin, dazzling them with our ability to render.” However,
Simmons feels that “the best artists are lopsided.” They do “one thing incredibly well and other things not at all.”
Simmons sees herself as “a multitasker in an ADD kind of way.” She makes photographs, but she also conceived and directed a forty-minute musical art film titled
The Music of Regret
(2006). She has collaborated with fashion designers and occasionally takes commissions to illustrate articles in the
New York Times
. Now she has acted in her daughter’s movie. “I’m self-conscious about doing all these different things because I admire people who focus,” says Simmons, who describes her husband as a resolute painter. “I’m a natural collaborator,” she says. “My favorite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, ‘Do that for me.’”