33 Artists in 3 Acts (20 page)
Simmons raises her eyebrows. “Can I give a more nuanced answer?” she asks. “We are both very ambitious for our work. Ambitious people feel competition. But even if I feel jealous, I never wish him the worse or want to tear him down. We do feel competitive with each other but we do not begrudge each other’s success.” Dunham nods in agreement then adds, “I could kill you with nuance.”
Dunham and Simmons have both just turned sixty. “We’re not blasé about this house. Art did this,” she says with relief. “Sixty is a significant number. We are healthy and our children are reasonably sane human beings.” Grace, their younger daughter, is in Paris and will be starting at Brown University in September. Lena, their older daughter, is asleep upstairs. She has just signed a contract with HBO to write and star in her own TV series. Her film,
Tiny Furniture
, won best narrative feature at South by Southwest, an annual festival held in Austin, Texas, and is scheduled to have a theatrical release.
“The most fun time to be an artist is when you are young and when you are old,” says Dunham between swigs of lemonade. “Getting through the weird middle period with a sense that you’ve kept growing is a challenge.” Mid-career is often characterized by the doldrums. Curators, collectors, and dealers tend to gravitate to “emerging” or “established” artists, ignoring the vast swathe of people working in between. As John Baldessari, a senior L.A. artist, once told me, this results in a lot of “submerging artists.”
At first glance, the work of Dunham and Simmons doesn’t have much in common. His paintings appear obsessed with formal structures, while her photographs seem driven to explore social codes. When asked why he became a painter, Dunham says, “I’m innately conservative and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits. I get a lot of freedom from that.” Simmons, by contrast, “latched onto photography” in part to avoid the burdensome
history of painting. “I could never be a painter,” she says with tangible dread. “I couldn’t get on that train.”
Dunham and Simmons relish their differences. “We are a classic extrovert–introvert couple,” she says. “The real definition of an extrovert is someone who gains energy from other people. An introvert is someone whose energy is drained by others.” Dunham looks at me ruefully. “We don’t think the same way,” he says. “That’s why this whole thing works.”
Over the years, however, the two artists have circled around similar subject matter, most recently focusing on sexually charged images of lone women. “When we first got together, Tip was very much an abstract painter,” says Simmons. “I always thought that he moved toward figurative imagery because he wanted me to be more interested in him.”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “I see it in a more amorphous way.”
“You mean that it wasn’t for me?” she says with a mock pout.
“You absorb energy by osmosis from the person you spend time with,” explains Dunham. “I never would have expected gender to become so central to what I do. It’s about confronting myself as I get older.”
When Simmons was young, she daydreamed about being both an artist and a muse. “Being a muse seemed far more viable,” she explains. “I barely knew of any women artists and a lot of great paintings were depictions of women. The whole thing was very confusing.” Last year, Simmons made a picture about an artist–muse relationship based on two found photographs. On the left side of the work is a black-and-white shot of the Abstract Expressionist painter William Baziotes dabbing a canvas with a thick paintbrush. On the right is a color photo of a woman in a fetishistic black bodice, kneeling spreadeagled on the floor and looking up and out of the frame. The first image came from a gallery invitation; the second was culled from a porn site. Simmons liked the idea that “the abstract painter was engaged in this lofty, reductive practice even though he saw his muse in a world of glowing color.”
Dunham was so fond of the work that Simmons gave it to him. He found “something perceptive, hiding within all its disconnects,” as he puts it. “The artist in the picture is performing a clichéd act of manly representation. It is how one might imagine that Baziotes went about
his paintings—or how I go about mine—but it bears no resemblance to the way he made his work, or how I make mine.”
The phone rings and Simmons steps out of the room to answer it. I ask Dunham how his fecund superwoman is coming along. He tells me that the painting hasn’t progressed very much but he has a new idea for it. He recently trimmed about a foot off the bottom so the “black hole is dead center” and has moved the canvas from the floor to the wall. He invites me to the barn to see it before dinner.
“That was Roberta,” says Simmons upon her return. “She wanted to know what time we want them for dinner.” Roberta Smith, the chief art critic for the
New York Times
, and Jerry Saltz, the main critic for
New York
magazine, rent a house near here during the summer. In addition to being old friends of the artists, they are the godparents of Lena and Grace. Although Smith and Saltz have, on one occasion each and with disclaimers, written about Dunham’s and Simmons’s work, they have not otherwise reviewed their shows due to the conflict of interest. “Being friends with critics doesn’t get you reviews—quite the opposite,” says Dunham. “The rewards of our friendship are private and we are happy with the tradeoff.”
I ask the artists about the experience of being reviewed. “When you’re younger and get a bad review,” says Simmons, “you think they hate you.”
Dunham shakes his head and says, “I didn’t. I thought, they’re stupid!”
“Anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to be impervious to negative reaction,” says Simmons with an affectionate eye-roll. “It’s the recovery time that changes. You have to know how to pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and get back to work. That’s the key to maturity. It’s what divides the artists that do what they do from those who are not up to it.”
Dunham likes to convert knock-backs into momentum for his work. “Negative commentary makes you feel misunderstood,” he explains. “So I often say to myself, ‘Apparently, I haven’t been clear enough with you people!’” Occasionally, a critic will comprehend the work but detest it. “Someone wrote a review about all the reasons why my work was trivial and I could see, from a certain perspective, what he was talking about.
But I invariably disagree with this critic’s taste,” he says. “His worldview is skewed away from mine.”
“Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible,” says Simmons, as she adjusts some orange daisies with conspicuously bulbous centers, a type of flower that appears regularly in her husband’s paintings. “When a critic hits you, sometimes it’s for something that you’ve already gone over in your own mind a hundred times.”
“Interesting artworks are always hypotheses about what an artwork could be,” says Dunham. He rises from his chair and pulls a dark red apple out of the fridge. “Why would anyone think that new art should resemble what art already looks like?” he asks, offering the apple around. No takers; he crunches his teeth into its side.
The caprices of the art world foster all sorts of insecurities, anxieties, and paranoia. “When you are younger, you think about eradicating self-doubt,” explains Simmons. “But, as you age, you understand that it is part of the rhythm of being an artist. As I get older, I have developed my ability to examine self-doubt in private, to play around with it, rather than push it away.”
Dunham, by contrast, experiences his uncertainty as a strange mixture of self-loathing and megalomania. “Humans set up hierarchies and we are constantly judging,” says Dunham. “In the morning, you tell yourself that you’re a horrible artist. By the afternoon, you might feel like a god. By dinner, you’re a lesser angel.”
Confidence is certainly an issue. Many artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Maurizio Cattelan, have presented themselves as con artists. “The general public doesn’t understand art so they think that a con has been perpetrated on them,” explains Dunham. “That idea goes back to the
avant-garde in the nineteenth century. It was always the layperson’s reaction to more speculative approaches to painting.”
Artists with an appetite for trickery also seem to have a taste for shock. “Shock is just another move in the entertainment complex,” says Dunham. “It’s bullshit. Who are you supposed to shock? Rich hedge fund managers? All these ideas about transgression—
épater les bourgeois
, as they used to say—are historically specific to the period of the avant-garde. They were not relevant to artists in the Italian Renaissance and they are not meaningful now.” Simmons has placed a half-dozen beefsteak tomatoes next to a chopping board. She seems to tune out while she thinks about dinner. Meanwhile, Dunham suggests a different approach to the question. “Do you find the fact that you’re going to die shocking?” he asks. “I do. Art can bracket those human conditions. It can cause you to have a moment of insight.”
I suggest that shock is a momentary condition that is easily forgotten, whereas great art offers long-term engagement. The two are neither mutually exclusive nor inclusive. Edouard Manet’s
Olympia
, for example, a reclining nude portrait of a French prostitute with her black maid, may have been shocking in 1863, but it endures because of the complexity of the social and sexual relations it depicts and its impeccable execution. Dunham doesn’t disagree. “Do you get massages?” he asks. “You know the difference between a soothing back rub and truly deep bodywork. The latter is not pleasant while it’s happening but afterward you feel quite changed from it. Shock, awe, whatever. I’m not looking for a back rub from art. I’m looking for something that feels like it matters.”
Wondering about what matters, I inquire about political art. “I think it is a bunch of crap,” says Dunham, now fully loosened up. The artist quit drinking in 1992, but such are the effects of lemonade in the comfort of one’s own home. “Political art is always preaching to the converted.” Simmons frowns in obvious disagreement. As a feminist, she takes a broad view of politics. “Speak for yourself,” she says, pointing at him playfully with her knife. Dunham enjoys adopting multiple points of view, so he starts arguing the other side. “I think a lot about art’s usefulness. Art is valuable to artists in a very different way than it is to bankers, socialites, and politicians. There is no absolute scale of relevance. It’s about what you can use. The artists in your book are of use to you. They help you advance your own thinking.”
On that note, Dunham stands, says, “Ladies,” and excuses himself to bathe before the guests arrive. Simmons returns to the issue of shock and artists as symbolic criminals, a tradition that she sees as a “bad boy” thing. “It’s not my romance,” she explains. “Maybe male artists
need it more.” Women artists face enough challenges to their credibility without adopting the pose of a con artist.
Yet Simmons’s large-scale color images of a lifelike sex doll have incipient shock value. The thought prompts me to ask about the love doll’s current whereabouts. “You know this house is my open canvas,” admits the artist, putting down her knife, wiping her hands, and leading me into the hallway. “When I was convincing Tip to buy it, I told him, what if I shot a photograph in every room. If those photos did well, we could pay for the house.” Simmons’s hand hesitates on a doorknob as she says, “I can’t bring myself to shoot her naked yet.” Opening the closet, she reveals what looks like the corpse of a Japanese teenager thrown in an unceremonious heap on a pile of clothes. “People anthropomorphize their dolls and stuffed animals,” says Simmons. “But she is a prop. In all my years of working with dolls, they have never become members of my family.”
Francis Alÿs
Paradox of the Praxis I (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing)
1997
“I
became an artist here,” says Francis Alÿs as he walks me through the Centro Historico of Mexico City toward his studio. “That has a lot to do with my dependence on this place. I don’t have a past in the art field in Europe.” After some twenty years of expatriate living, the Belgian-born artist has become a Mexican citizen. “The decision was sentimental,” says Alÿs, whose tall, pale, skinny physique is a caricature of a gringo. “My son was born here and I have made my whole life project here.” Artists often displace themselves, usually to cities like New York and Berlin. Emigration helps them escape the burdens of their cultural heritage and embrace identities that they might otherwise feel inhibited to assume. We turn into Plaza Loreto, an urban square with a church that suffers from subsidence, much like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a fountain that hasn’t seen water in a while. It is in the border zone between the city’s renovated center and a lawless urban sprawl of drugs, prostitution, and pirated goods. Artists are often vanguard gentrifiers but few have studios around here, opting instead for less edgy neighborhoods. Alÿs, however, finds this “epicenter of parallel economies,” as he calls it, conducive to making his art.