Jennifer Dalton
How Do Artists Live? (Will Having Children Hurt My Art Career?)
2006
Jennifer Dalton and
William Powhida
“T
he pictures of the writers have much more gravitas than those portraying the visual artists,” says Jennifer Dalton. We’re in her studio, a garage attached to her two-bedroom house in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, looking at a work titled
What Does an Artist Look Like?
(
Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in
The New Yorker
, 1999–2001
). Dalton went through three years of
The New Yorker
, cutting out every photo of an artist, musician, designer, author, actor, filmmaker, or architect. Then she laminated and arranged the photographs of each creative type along a continuum of credibility, or what she calls “the spectrum from genius to pin-up.” Dalton pulls the thirty images of visual artists out of a gray archival storage box and arranges them in order along the two long tables that line one wall of her garage. The spectrum starts with a somber shot of Alberto Giacometti at work in his studio and ends with one of Tracy Emin wearing black lacy lingerie and sitting with her legs spread apart on a mirrored stool. With few exceptions, the men appear more serious than the women. Many are depicted at mid-range in front of their work, looking directly at the camera without smiling. “Even when the women are not represented as pin-ups, they’re not exactly valorized either,” says Dalton, pointing to a shot of Pipilotti Rist surrounded by one of her installations. The unwritten rule seems to be: never shoot a woman artist from the waist up if she has great legs.
“My work examines my surroundings, which includes the art world,” says Dalton, as she scrapes her white, wrought-iron kitchen chair along the cement floor toward her computer. Dalton is in her mid-forties, married, with a son. She has a BA from UCLA and an MFA from the Pratt Institute of Art. For the past sixteen years, she has had the same day job, inputting appraisal information into the Christie’s database. She has stuck with this “low-level” job because she can work from home and save her mental energy for her art.
Dalton clicks on her old Toshiba laptop, which whirs so loudly that it has been nicknamed “the helicopter” by William Powhida, an artist with whom she sometimes collaborates and who will lunch with us today. Up pops one of her works,
How Do Artists Live?
(2006), which is based on responses from 856 artists, collected mostly via the Internet. The piece exists in two forms: first, as a series of twenty-one drawings that are soft chalk pastel on paper but appear to be made on chalkboards, then as a slideshow that presents the drawings in sequence. “I wanted it to look like a handmade PowerPoint presentation,” explains Dalton, “so I mimicked the program’s compositional tools, putting text in boxes and making statistical charts.”
The work takes a subjective spin on sociological data—what Dalton calls “quasi-science.” The artist clicks past the title page to a drawing headlined, “How much do artists earn?” It contains a colorful pie chart surrounded by Dalton’s handwriting, which reveals that more than half of the artists who responded to the survey earn less than the American median wage. A few slides later, a drawing titled “Artists’ #1 Source of Income” reveals that 60 percent of the artists rely primarily on alternative forms of employment while only 10 percent make a living mainly from sales of their art. A sliver of pie suggests that .8 percent derive most of their income through illegal means. “It’s mostly not real criminal activity,” says Dalton, sweeping her redder-than-red hair off her shoulder. “Most of the money comes from illegal subletting.” Another drawing demonstrates that men are twice as likely as women to derive their income through sales of their work.
Toward the end of the presentation, a handwritten title poses the question, “Will having children hurt my art career?” Beneath it, a chart
with four rising bars demonstrates that women with children are much less likely to have gallery representation than women without children. No surprise there. But the graph also shows that men with children are twice as likely to have representation as men without. The bulging bar that represents the artist-fathers is almost phallic. “I think it sticks out like a middle finger,” says Dalton.
The chalkboard aesthetic of
How Do Artists Live?
implies the persona of a female school teacher. John Baldessari once told me that he only felt confident declaring himself an artist after he quit teaching high school art. While lecturing at Yale or UCLA can act as an endorsement, being a high school educator usually disrupts credibility, so most artists studiously avoid any evocation of teaching teenagers in their work. I suggest that when artists move into pornographic or drug-addled terrain, they are following a rule rather than breaking one, whereas Dalton has truly transgressed art-world norms. “Yeah, ‘bad boy’ transgression is very formulaic,” says Dalton, who relishes the thought that she could subvert the rules by being “a Goody Two-shoes.”
We leave the garage, enter the house through the back door, and walk through the kitchen into the living room, where a twenty-year-old cat called Goose is sleeping beneath a large drawing of a bedroom headboard with the names “Jerry” and “Roberta” handwritten on it in white chalk pastel. Titled
He Said, She Said
(2005), the work likens reviewing to sexual conquest by suggesting that artists are just notches on a critic’s bedpost. “The bed in the drawing is the same shape as my headboard,” says Dalton with a broad grin, amused by its perversity. According to the notches, one third of Jerry Saltz’s reviews were of women’s shows, compared to only a quarter of Roberta Smith’s. “There’s no shortage of women artists, they’re just not getting the shows,” says Dalton. “When you look at the stats on who’s graduating from art school, it’s 60 percent female.”
We get into Dalton’s shiny black Honda Fit and immediately pass an art supply store. Dalton suspects Williamsburg is home to fewer artists than it used to be because it has become too expensive. It still has a vibrant music scene, but the residents have shifted toward “affluent arty types.” Artists have been migrating out along the “L train” subway
line for several decades. Williamsburg is just one stop away from Manhattan’s East Village, the old hub of the young art scene. “Bushwick is the new place. It’s a few stops further out on the L,” explains Dalton as we head to the epicenter of the Bushwick art world, to a pizza place called Roberta’s.
“The sacrifices of being an artist are enormous and the rewards are often small and fleeting,” says Dalton as she drives along Morgan Avenue. “So I ask myself, why do we do this? One answer is community. These are my people. We love talking about art, looking at art, hanging out with other artists.” According to Dalton, the people in her small art world are collegial and supportive of one another, even if they are also competitive and status-seeking. “It doesn’t usually feel like a zero sum game . . . except when you look at the list of artists chosen for the Whitney Biennial, then you’re just like,
grrr
.”
Was that a dog sound? I ask. Could you put that into words?
“
Grrr
. . . I guess it means, ‘Why them?’” As Dalton parks the car, she points out the Bogart, a four-story factory with thousands of small windowpanes that now houses 110 artists’ studios and sixteen exhibition spaces. “There are just too many good artists and not enough slots,” she eventually says in answer to her own question.
As we walk toward the restaurant, we see Powhida in jeans and a white T-shirt, locking his cruiser bike to a stop sign. He lives around the corner with his wife and teaches half-time at Brooklyn Preparatory High, a school where more than half the students live at or below the poverty line. Truancy vans keep attendance up and, when anyone enters the building, they go through metal detectors and airport-style x-ray machines under the supervision of a branch of the NYPD. Powhida teaches everything from cave painting to street art. “There’s no cachet in it,” says Powhida, who sometimes experiences culture shock when he goes straight from the school to an event in the white art world. “But it’s honest work and it feels like I’m doing some good.”
From the outside, Roberta’s is hilariously uninviting. The façade consists of a rectangle of cement blocks with rusted metal window grates and a peppering of sloppy aerosol graffiti tags. I assume it satisfies their patrons’ desire to be in-the-know. Inside, two cooks with white chef hats
and a wood-burning oven offer reassurance. We sit on benches at one end of a long, communal, wooden table.
While Dalton and Powhida read the menu, I survey the low-key crowd. Dalton is fascinated by the way people “hang out” on Jerry Saltz’s and Dan Cameron’s Facebook pages. “Jerry sometimes gets over 800 comments on his posts,” she says. Powhida has 60,000 followers on Tumblr. He remarks that “the new metrics of success” consist of quickly clicked “likes.”
Our waiter eventually ambles over. After he has taken our order, I ask, what percentage of your clientele do you think are artists?
“Seriously?” he replies, as if he has never in his entire life encountered such a nerd. I tell him that I’m a writer so I’m allowed to ask intrusive questions.
“About 30 percent,” he says, changing his tone. “I went to art school and 80 percent of the staff have degrees in film studies, art history, or studio art.” Clearly, the staff, if not the clientele, are in that awkward no man’s land between having studied something and being someone (that you might call an artist).
In spring 2010, Dalton and Powhida organized an exhibition called “#class,” which became a gathering place for many artists. The pair transformed Chelsea’s Winkleman Gallery into a classroom lined with green chalkboards. Then they held sixty lectures, performances, and discussions (three a day, five days a week, for four weeks) on a number of topics, including “Success,” “Failure and Anonymity,” “The Ivory Tower,” “Bad Curating,” and “Painters against the World.” Over the course of the month, the chalkboards were repeatedly filled and erased with illustrations from the conversations. Sometimes you could see the bullet points of logical arguments; other times it looked like a bathroom wall of random irreverence.
“A community grew around ‘#class,’” says Powhida. “It was an instance of ‘relational aesthetics.’ The social interactions were the art.”
“I imagine that it was a bit like the feminist conscious-raising sessions of 1970s,” adds Dalton.
“The title of the show was a pun on class,” says Powhida as our beers arrive. “An educational group but also ‘class’ in the economic sense of a
social class.” In pursuit of this theme, they decided that the chalkboards should not be a standard green but the elusive color of money. They found a recipe on the Martha Stewart website involving powdered tile grout that allowed them to customize the hue.
One of the most talked about sessions of “#class” was Ben Davis’s “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” a riff on Martin Luther’s famous “95 Theses” about the failings of the Catholic Church. One of Davis’s contentions is that class antagonism manifests itself in critiques of the art market. He sees the visual arts as having an essentially “middle-class character” that is “dominated by ruling-class values” and laments their “weak relations with the working class.” Davis is writing a book based on the ten-page document that he circulated at “#class.”
Powhida suggests that working collaboratively to create events might be more politically responsible to our times than making objects that display individuality, but he loves “entertaining” himself in the studio by sketching and drawing on his own. Indeed, the artist is best known for his satirical drawings. In a work titled
Post-Boom Odds
(2008), he refers to himself as a “genius trading in specificity and desperation . . . making fun of shit.” His most notorious drawing was published on the cover of the
Brooklyn Rail
in November 2009. Titled
How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality
, it featured caricatures of Jeff Koons (described as “the guest curator”) and Massimiliano Gioni (“the free agent”) who are censured for their part in filling the public space of the New Museum with a private collection, that of Dakis Joannou (labeled “the trustee”).
Dalton and Powhida started working together in 2008, when their respective dealers (Edward Winkleman and Schroeder Romero) suggested they collaborate on something. “Our galleries noticed that we both did work that was text-based and obnoxious,” says Dalton. “Critical and humorous!” corrects Powhida. So the pair made a set of condolence cards for artists and other art-world insiders to send to one another. On one was written, “I am so sorry for your loss of representation,” next to a drawing of a tombstone engraved with the words, “Your career, 2001–2008, R.I.P.”
The two artists have never tried to create a unified identity or joint
brand. Yet Powhida admits to being attracted to what he describes as “radical cooperatives” like the Bruce High Quality Foundation. This Brooklyn-based artist collective has shown its work in various exhibitions, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial. It has also raised the funding to run free seminars as part of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University. While Vito Schnabel, son of artist Julian Schnabel and a high school classmate of Lena Dunham, is known to be the collective’s agent, the artist-members of the group choose to remain anonymous. Sometimes a spokesperson for the group will suggest that they are resisting the “star-making machinery of the art market.” Other times one will admit that anonymity is “a marketing gimmick.” Indeed, the Bruce High Quality Foundation has become a celebrated brand. “It’s hard to gauge their motivations,” says Powhida, “but they can’t be all bad.”
What are your motivations in sustaining your collaboration? I ask the artists.
“For me it is about letting go of individual authorship,” says Powhida.
“I am—the expression ‘control freak’ comes to mind—but it can be fun to give up full control,” says Dalton.
“It’s a good way to get out of your comfort zone so you can do something new,” says Powhida. “Collaboration is also a form of support. It’s harder to dismiss two artists than one.”