33 Artists in 3 Acts (18 page)
The phone rings. It’s Grace, Simmons’s younger daughter, who has recently come out as gay. “Grace is a debating star,” says Simmons as she hangs up the phone after a quick chat. “She ran for president at the Princeton Model Congress, but lost to a Republican.” On a recent trip to Tokyo, Grace helped Simmons discover the subject of her latest photographic series when she spotted an ad for the lifelike sex dolls that the Japanese call “love dolls” and others call “Dutch wives.” Mother and daughter went to the showroom and surveyed the models, many of which were wearing school uniforms.
Simmons rises and takes a few steps toward something draped in a white sheet. She removes the sheet and revolves the swivel chair to reveal what looks like an eighteen-year-old Japanese girl with long black hair in a cheap white slip. The silicone figure comes across as both perfectly innocent and utterly creepy. Her creamy skin is clammy to the touch. “She looks petite but she’s really heavy because it is all dead weight. It takes two assistants to move her around,” says Simmons. The artist is using their home in Connecticut as a giant doll’s house. “A life-size doll required a life-size set,” she says. Simmons has been lugging the figure back and forth between Tribeca and Cornwall because she is “still getting to know her.”
Simmons tells me that the love doll arrived in a box about six weeks ago with a separately packaged vagina and lubricant. These accessories have been hidden away in the Cornwall house because Simmons feels
the need, as she puts it, “to turn a blind eye to her sexual uses.” The doll also came with an engagement ring, which Simmons has used as a prop. “Here’s a picture that I took on my first day of shooting,” she says, as a black-and-white photograph appears on the screen. The doll seems to be gazing absent-mindedly at the ring on her hand. Shot in a tight closeup, her body is excluded from the frame. The lighting is raked and moody, with a
film noir
feel. Simmons clicks through some photos shot on subsequent days. She is not sure which ones will become works and which will remain outtakes. “What do you think?” she asks.
While there is no avoiding the knowledge that men acquire sex dolls in order to fuck them, Simmons gives her figure another life. I say that the images still feel ineffably sexual in a way that echoes the perverse desires associated with “outsider artists,” such as Henry Darger and Morton Bartlett. But Simmons’s photographs reposition the “girl” within a protected maternal realm. Simmons nods and tells me that she wrote an article for
Artforum
about Bartlett a few years ago. “We both want to animate the inanimate,” she says. “We’re alchemists who want to turn common metals into gold.”
Carroll Dunham
Study for Bathers
2010
“I
’ve doubled down on solitude,” says Carroll Dunham, as he stares at a 9 × 10-foot unstretched canvas on the wooden floor of a huge room with cathedral-like windows. “I was kind of flipped out by being alone when I was young. It took me a long time to get comfortable enough with myself to obtain the momentum to do what I wanted to do.” Nine months ago, the artist broke his lease on his workspace in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and moved his studio to northwestern Connecticut, where he and Laurie Simmons have acquired a red brick house and a two-story stucco barn. Dunham makes large paintings in the barn and works on small paintings and drawings in a maze of garrets on the third floor of the house. The buildings were constructed in 1912 for a prominent local family who owned horses, says the artist, but in the 1950s they became part of a school for boys who had “not yet discovered how to make the most of themselves.”
Dunham has light brown eyes framed by funky dark-rimmed glasses and an oversized, floppy, black wool hat. He’s slim and, even though he is almost sixty, he passes as a Williamsburg hipster. The artist is more isolated than usual because his wife has been in Manhattan, working on Lena’s
Tiny Furniture
shoot. Dunham appeared in a few of his daughter’s videos but then came
Dealing
(2006), a short movie in which he was supposed to be the artist-father of an art dealer played by his younger
daughter, Grace, who was then fourteen. Initially Dunham refused, so Lena asked Jeff Koons to perform the part. When that fell through due to scheduling problems, Lena “conned” her father into doing it. “When I saw myself in
Dealing
, I was embarrassed,” explains Dunham, who looks awkward even when posing for snapshots. “I can’t stand evaluating myself in that way. I don’t want to be the guy in my kid’s movies. I’m not comfortable with having a ‘persona.’”
Dunham drags a wooden chair alongside one that already sits at the foot of this vast unfinished work and invites me to stand on it to obtain a sense of the big picture. The painting features the largest vagina I have ever seen. The black oval hole, which is about 18 inches long, lies beneath two mountainous buttocks that are outlined in black and infilled with bubble-gum pink. A blue sea peaks out from behind the figure’s monumental left side, while dry land emerges from her right. It’s the only work in the room. The rest were shipped out for an exhibition, which is still on view at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. As he steps up on a chair, joining me two feet above the floor, Dunham says, “The subject matter is self-explanatory, isn’t it? There is a surprising amount of it!”
Dunham started out as an abstract painter who was ideologically resistant to figuration. “I’ve been drawing these abstract double mounds for years,” he says, referring to the shape that forms her bottom. “This is an icon of fecundity, my ‘ur’ image, my Venus of Willendorf . . . But I’m still trying to figure out what painting naked women means to me.” Unlike pornographic depictions of women, this epic Amazonian is unconquerable. Any attempt to penetrate her would likely result in self-annihilation. In the top right hand corner of the painting, in the artist’s left-handed scrawl, are the words “mother black hole,” which Dunham dismisses as “just notes to myself” that will “get covered up.”
The artist steps down off the chair and walks around to the top left corner of the linen canvas lying on the floor, so that the erect nipple of the figure’s one breast seems to point at him. “I’ve said to students many times, as a criticism, ‘This looks like it could have been made any time in the last hundred years.’ I am less sure that that is a problem now,” he says, as he studies the picture along a diagonal axis.
The painting’s treatment of the female body contrasts markedly
with the horizontal odalisques, vertical muses, and Picassoesque mangles common to nineteenth-and twentieth-century representations of women. The scale certainly ups the ante on Courbet’s
L’Origine du Monde
, and the rear view feels very, for lack of a better word, contemporary. The nude also happens to have jet-black dreadlocks and a voluptuous butt. “It is not racially specific for me. I am making formalist decisions about color and shape.” When I look at him skeptically, he stares back at me then admits, “I find it impossible not to think about someone else’s art without reference to its social implications, but with my own work, I would err on the side of denial, so as not to lock readings in.”
Dunham drifts to the middle of the top of the painting, so that he is looking at it upside down. “The world is made of stories,” he says. “Do you know Terence McKenna? He was a psychedelic-mushroomist philosopher. He said that life is much more like a novel than a documentary film. So, even at my most abstract, I’m still telling myself stories.” Dunham admits the “formalist story” is one of his favorites. Formalists consider the purely visual aspects of a work of art—its line, space, color, and texture—to the exclusion of its social, political, and historical content.
I get down from the chair and take a few steps over to the bottom right corner of the painting, which hosts a stack of dates: Sept–Nov 2006, June 2008, June 2009. “I have been working on this painting on and off for over three years,” he explains, scratching his head through his hat. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. I have to allow a sort of rhythm.” Dunham gesticulates as he talks. His left hand is incredibly expressive; his right occasionally joins in but never leads. “I have to get the feeling that the overall drawing structure works. Then I’ll start to inhabit it.”
On a side table next to a brand new easel, I notice a pamphlet titled
Was Life Created?
“It was the weirdest thing,” says Dunham, picking it up and leafing through it. “I was on a walk, thinking about my next group of paintings, and a cute little lady jumped out of a car and said, ‘Sorry to bother you but have you thought about the origin of life on earth?’” Taken aback, Dunham replied, “As a matter of fact, yes! Why do you ask?” It turned out that she was a missionary—a Jehovah’s Witness
with a philosophical rather than a pushy approach. “The garden of Eden is my real subject,” admits Dunham, “minus Adam for the moment.”
The barn is chilly and extraordinarily quiet. The twittering of a flock of small birds filters in. I shiver, so Dunham suggests we continue the conversation in his drawing studio. The short walk between the barn and the house offers a view of a frosted green valley and tree-covered hills. We enter via the back door, past a classy dining room with a long vintage table surrounded by armchairs, and walk through a wide hallway adorned with works that the couple have bought or traded with friends. A photograph by Morton Bartlett of a prepubescent girl doll catches my eye. We divert into the kitchen, which, like the one in Tribeca, is stocked with a generous selection of teas.
While we wait for the kettle to boil, I half-exclaim, half-inquire: Lena asked Jeff Koons to play the artist-father in
Dealing
? Dunham nods, while I raise my eyebrows incredulously. He smiles, then cracks into a laugh. “I’ve known Jeff since the early eighties,” he says. “I bought a vacuum cleaner sculpture back then but unfortunately had to sell it a few years later because I needed the money. Jeff’s early stuff—everything up through the basketball tanks—was extraordinary. Then, as I say to my kids, we only become more of what we already were.”
“Jeff was one of the first from our generation who understood that the avant-garde paradigm was shot,” continues Dunham, after some cajoling. “He was crystal clear from the beginning that he wanted to reach an extremely wide audience. That could not be more different from my aspirations. I still see the audience for what I do as vanishingly small—two hundred people.” Dunham hands me my mug. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Jeff. The world has turned him into a topic that doesn’t interest me. Money just fucks the whole conversation.”
Money? I probe, as we head for the stairs. “The monetization of everything—I mean everything—no one could have imagined the general foulness of it,” he replies. “Because of headline prices, art interests people in a way that is not relevant to what it really is.” We pause on the second floor, where another wide hallway gives way to four bedrooms. “We live in a cockeyed system,” he says more dispassionately. “Basketball players make a hundred times more than teachers. Artists are the
least of it. I suppose we should be happy to live in a world where artists can succeed like that, but it’s not what motivates us.”
The top floor consists of a labyrinth of attic rooms that have been joined to create an interconnected circuit with multiple doorways. “My sense of composition dictates a lot of my environmental design decisions, which is a nice way of saying that I have a light touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” jokes Dunham. After wandering through small, well organized rooms with loads of natural light that are devoted respectively to small paintings, watercolors, and reading, we enter an area that looks a bit like an architect’s office. It’s arranged on two levels and features a large L-shaped counter at which Dunham likes to draw standing up. The counter is covered with clean brown paper and punctuated by three Anglepoise lamps. Dunham makes a hundred or so drawings a year, usually in the afternoon while listening to talk shows on NPR or CBC satellite radio. Although museums have exhibited and collected them, Dunham refers to them as “a sort of personal garbage dump that helps me think.”
In a small, windowless space off this room is a white metal cabinet with flat-file drawers, one of several where Dunham archives his works on paper. He rifles through a drawer of recent works, then drops down to one containing older pieces. Lying on top is an 8 × 11-inch graphite drawing dated March 21, 2005. It depicts a man with firm buttocks and skinny legs from the waist to the knees. He has been caught with his trousers down. In his left hand is a gun that is so schematic that it could be a boomerang or a perpendicular ruler. I find it impossible not to empathize with this droll, chastened figure and I wonder if it is a self-portrait. “No,” he replies amusedly, closing the drawer. Dunham doesn’t make anything he would call a self-portrait but believes in the truism that all artists’ work is invariably self-portraiture. “I am never not in the painting,” he explains.
Dunham received a degree in studio art from a liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut. Nowadays, he teaches one course a year in the MFA program at Yale. He understands how some artists see teaching as anathema to art-making. “A true artist can’t formulate rigid concepts about what he or she is doing without freezing the stream,” he explains
as we return to the adjacent room. “And teaching requires a certain ability to formulate concepts.”