33 Artists in 3 Acts (19 page)
“A
true
artist”? I repeat.
“It’s an obnoxious thing to say,” he replies. “I’m being facetious.”
What does it mean? I probe. People in the art world are always letting comments slip about “real,” “true,” “authentic,” and “genuine” artists.
“The ‘true artist’? It means that you are in a loop with your work,” says Dunham, looking into his mug, mildly disappointed to note that he has finished his tea. “If I didn’t have a significant need to see these things myself, they would never happen. It’s me, myself, and I. The three of us need to look at this painting.” I counter that, from a sociologist’s point of view, artists don’t look very autonomous; they are surrounded by social worlds filled with expectations. “Okay, maybe it is disingenuous. It’s my version of the avant-garde bullshit,” he admits, then deadpans, “Yeah, man, I’m alone with my work. I’m in this wormhole.”
Maurizio Cattelan
Bidibidobidiboo
1996
T
he door of apartment 9C opens slowly to reveal Maurizio Cattelan, speaking on the phone in Italian. He wears a T-shirt that says, “Who the fuck is Bruce Springsteen? Not the boss of me.” The artist lives and works in a spacious, one-bedroom apartment in a ten-story loft conversion in Chelsea. The entrance hall gives way to an open-plan kitchen and living room with hardwood floors and views of Lower Manhattan. Evidently, Cattelan doesn’t do much entertaining, as the sparse furnishings consist of a large gray couch and a miniature table surrounded by four small metal chairs that couldn’t comfortably accommodate anyone over the age of eight.
While Cattelan sorts out the fabrication of a public sculpture made of Carrara marble on the phone, I inspect the art objects—some in crates and bubble wrap—that are spread around the room. The only pieces that are properly installed are two minimal polystyrene bas-reliefs by Seth Price, a New York artist in his thirties. Six framed vintage photographs by the late Francesca Woodman lean against one wall, while two colorful psychedelic landscapes by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, an American outsider artist whose work only became known after his death in 1983, camp nearby. Cattelan takes a keen interest in the surreal outpourings of the untrained and undiscovered. On the windowsill is a menagerie of kitsch from flea markets—a ceramic lion, a couple of
owls, and a black cat with an angrily raised back. The only book in the room is Roald Dahl’s
James and the Giant Peach
.
“Darling!” exclaims Cattelan once he is off the phone. He has been talking to Lucio Zotti, an old friend who is “always involved in the conversation.” In the late eighties, Cattelan was homeless and ended up living in Zotti’s furniture showroom for almost a year. “Every night I had a different couch. Sometimes I slept in the window,” says the artist. Since then, Zotti has become Cattelan’s most trusted accomplice. He helps oversee the fabrication of the artist’s sculptures in Europe, and his sons, Jacopo and Zeno, manage the artist’s archive, assist with installation, photograph the works, and lend a hand with other logistics.
Cattelan has two other “important allies,” as he calls them, both of whom are Italian curators: Massimiliano Gioni, who is thirteen years the artist’s junior and used to give his interviews and lectures, and Francesco Bonami, who is five years his senior and has titled many of the artist’s most important works. Cattelan met Bonami on his first trip to New York in 1992, when the curator was in the midst of deciding whom to include in his section of the Venice Biennale. “Francesco is the person everyone wants to meet in their life,” says Cattelan. “You need someone to say, ‘You are not a genius; this is shit.’”
Returning my attention to the room, I compliment Cattelan on his art collection. His face contorts. “I prefer to call it an accumulation,” he declares. “I am just a buyer, not a collector.” Cattelan’s impulse to acquire other artists’ work was initially rooted in competitiveness. “I was jealous of colleagues when I should have been happy for them,” he explains. “I decided to save my energy. If you think they are great works, you should buy them.” Nowadays he sees collecting as a way of doing “homework.” Many successful artists collect art; they invest their income in something they understand.
Competition seems to be on the artist’s mind. On the island over by the kitchen is a printout of a small sculpture of a rabbit with stubby ears gazing at a book depicting a rabbit with exceptionally long ears. “It’s looking for a title,” announces Cattelan. “But I don’t think it will have one. It is just a vignette.” The problem of sustaining a career weighs
heavily on the artist. He fears being “a great car stuck in neutral.” Until recently, he was anxious that he’d be forced to return to a life of odd jobs in Padua. “Now my worst fear is feeling that I’ve arrived.”
Cattelan opens the fridge. Its spotless shelves contain only a couple of takeout boxes of chow mein and a shelf of sparkling water. In confidence, Cattelan tells me that he is preparing a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, scheduled for autumn 2011. “I proposed painting the entire outside of the museum pink. It would have been a fantastic communication—a city earthwork—but it was too expensive,” he says as he pours me a glass of water. He has another idea, one that will transform the exhibition into a “meta-work,” but he is still in discussion with Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s chief curator, and remains unsure whether they can make it happen.
Cattelan finished high school at night “just for the sake of showing I was able” but never obtained an art school degree. Inventive artists are, by necessity, autodidacts, but it is rare to find artists under sixty with high degrees of museum recognition who haven’t taken a single college course. “Making shows has been my school,” he says, leaning on the counter, “and eating catalogues.”
Where do you sit when you work? I ask. Cattelan looks at me as if I were asking for tiramisu during a ritual fast. He wags his finger at me silently, then takes me into his bedroom. It’s a grand corner room with large windows, divided evenly into two areas demarcated by rugs. On a cream-colored shag carpet lies a king-size mattress without pillows that looks like a plinth as much as a bed. On two colorful Chinese rugs from the 1930s stands a round rosewood table, which hosts a large monitor, wireless keyboard, and three piles of paper. Cattelan’s bedroom-studio is about communication—phone, email, Skype, and Google. “When the Internet goes down,” he says, “I lose my legs. You can have a 2,000-square-meter house but if you are not connected, you are powerless.”
I examine the neat piles of paper on Cattelan’s desk. Two of them are thicker than the third and seem to be paired. “It’s a filtering system,” says Cattelan. “I’m processing material that comes from many sources.”
I wonder whether it’s for an issue of
Permanent Food
. No, he says, it’s for a new magazine called
Toilet Paper
. He plants a hand on each pile and says with a smile, “A great artist copies without showing his sources!”
Collectors and dealers often invoke an opposition between originality and derivativeness. Artists see it as a false dichotomy. “Originality doesn’t exist by itself. It is an evolution of what is produced,” explains Cattelan. “It’s like the Darwinian evolution of walking. Nobody did it first.” The artist puts these two stacks of paper into crisp cardboard folders, then places them in a closet next to a faux fireplace behind his desk. “Originality is about your capacity to add,” he says. “I take a little new step by adding salt and oil. Someone else adds vinegar.”
On top of the remaining pile of paper is a picture of a recent Cattelan work: a blank white canvas with many sagging folds that are being propped up by the long handle of a broom. The work makes reference to the
Achrome
paintings of Piero Manzoni, an Italian artist who died at age thirty in 1963. When Cattelan is asked for his autograph, he rarely signs his own name and often writes “Manzoni,” a gesture that insinuates kinship. Manzoni is famous for
Merda d’Artista
(1961), an edition of ninety cans of the artist’s shit. Weighing 30 grams each, the cans were meant to be sold at the same rate as 18-carat gold, whose fluctuating price was to be determined on the day of sale. “
Merda
was an upgrade of Duchamp’s urinal, a kind of
Fountain
2.0,” says Cattelan. The work spoofs the assumption that artists are alchemists and draws attention to the power of artists’ personalities in creating value.
Persona is a major theme in Cattelan’s oeuvre, which includes a dizzying array of self-portraits. “In the beginning, I was just pointing out the culprit for all the heinous work,” says Cattelan.
Super Us
(1992), the salon-style hang of police sketches, certainly suggests an offender, as does
Untitled
(2001), in which a smaller-than-life-size waxwork replica of the artist pokes its head through the floor as if he were breaking into the exhibition via a tunnel. On one occasion, the Cattelan character was installed so that he peered up at a Koons sculpture, an arrangement that suggested the Italian was intent on pocketing some kudos or museum validation.
Procreation and cloning are leitmotifs in Cattelan’s self-portraits.
Spermini
(1997) is made up of hundreds of little latex masks of the artist hung on the wall in random clusters.
Mini Me
(1999) is an edition of ten small facsimiles of the artist, individuated by different clothing. They sit up on bookshelves and look down at their collector-owners like pets or mascots. Most recently,
We
(2010) puts “Cattelan” in bed with himself. In this double self-portrait, the three-foot-long figures look like identical twin corpses in dark, funereal suits.
Narcissus was clearly unwell when he fell in love with his own reflection but, with artists, I find it hard to distinguish between healthy self-love and morbid egotism. Cattelan’s self-portraits are invariably miniaturized, a form of self-deprecation, a literal belittling. When I ask the artist what he thinks about narcissism, he is typically self-critical. “Perhaps my work is a platform for my lowest desires,” he ventures with a laugh. “But my works are not me. They are my surrogate family.” Indeed, if ever an oeuvre felt like a clan, it is Cattelan’s. “When they are conceived, I cuddle them, but the moment the works are released, they become orphans,” he admits. “I am happy as long as they don’t live near me. Mostly . . . I hate them.”
Carroll Dunham
Shoot the Messenger
1998–99
Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons
“A
long career in the art world is hard on the ego. Laurie deals with it by diversifying, whereas I handle it by drilling deeper,” says Carroll Dunham, with a nod at his wife. “When you have made art for so long side by side and raised children,” adds Laurie Simmons, “sometimes you just can’t believe that you didn’t give up.” The couple sit next to each other at the long, white, skinny table that bisects their country kitchen. Bowls of bananas, onions, and green tomatoes are scattered on the surface along with a candelabra, a tape measure, three vases containing flowers picked from the garden, and yesterday’s
New York Times,
dated July 4, 2010.
“We joke about being soldiers, marching forward regardless of how much flak we’re taking,” says Dunham, his left fist moving in a midair trudge. “You need strategies to overcome resistance and negativity. You enter troughs where you don’t feel motivated. These are battles.”
“We also like the artist-as-farmer metaphor,” says Simmons, as she sweeps some pale blue delphinium petals off the table into her hand. “We get up early, work hard all day, and grow our stuff.”
“The Roman citizen farmer-soldier!” declares Dunham, clearly enjoying the flow of the conversation. “We will fight if needed but generally we’d like to tend our fields.”
When artists marry, rarely do husband and wife enjoy equal stature.
Many such couples are governed by an unspoken agreement that one partner’s career is more important than the other’s. When asked how their respective triumphs affect each other’s self-esteem, Dunham asserts forcefully, “A rising tide lifts all boats. End of discussion! If it’s good for her, it’s good for me. There is no competition!”