33 Artists in 3 Acts (25 page)
For much of her youth, Grace wanted to be an art dealer—a fact that inspired her sister’s first short film, a fake documentary called
Dealing
. “Lena cast me as this ambitious little weirdo in a black turtleneck,” she explains. In the middle of this room stands a trio of dealers all dressed in black. Amanda Wilkinson, a platinum blonde in a long black dress with translucent horizontal stripes, is talking to Jeanne Greenberg, Simmons’s New York dealer, a pixie-ish brunette in see-through black lace trousers, and Barbara Gladstone, Carroll Dunham’s New York dealer, who is meticulously monochrome from her jet-black hair to her shiny Prada platforms. Both New York gallerists attended the preview of the 54th edition of the Venice Biennale last week and will soon head to Switzerland in anticipation of Art Basel.
“I have this horrible memory,” admits Grace. “I was in preschool and met a kid who said that her parents were artists. So I asked, what galleries do your parents show at? I was met with a dumb stare. I was probably four or five. I’m embarrassed that I was such a snobby little bitch.” From a young age, Grace understood that her parents were among a minority of artists who made a living from their work. “I had a sports trivia relationship to art,” she explains. “I could list which artists showed with which dealers and which ones had had major retrospectives.” She also had a visceral understanding of the art-world distinction between “serious” and “unserious” artists. “A serious artist is seen to be part of some art-historical progression and is involved in the particular global art world that my parents are, whereas an unserious artist shows at a gallery in Santa Fe,” she explains dispassionately. “It is a value judgment that may have more to do with context than the act of making of art.”
Grace spent a lot of time making things with her father. “Every night after dinner, we would draw together for two hours. Then, at school, I would draw his characters.” Between 2000 and 2007, Dunham rarely depicted women; he focused instead on a snappily dressed male character with a nose shaped like a cartoony cock and balls. Often pictured
with guns, these masculine creatures inhabited an absurd landscape that was closer to hell than paradise. “I too would doodle men with dick noses and top hats,” says Grace. “It was like a comic book character to me.” About the sexual connotations of her father’s work, she says, “I knew but I didn’t know. In a lot of ways, I still don’t see it.” She recently visited her father’s studio and saw a painting of a pink woman in an idyllic landscape with an unmistakable vagina. “For me, it is beautiful and celebratory. It upsets me if anyone sees it as profane,” she says. “I think my dad is making weird, unique, preposterous paintings about what it means to be a white man. No one ever talks about identity in relation to straight white men’s work.”
Although Grace is suspicious of people who have “bulletproof answers to big questions,” she relishes the query, “What is an artist?” and quickly suggests that we need to distinguish between the public role and the private–creative one. “The artist is just the coolest guy in the room,” she says of the former. “The artist is the one that everyone is obsessed with, the figure who inspires and makes people jealous. It’s a deeply powerful social position.”
Although Grace has never wanted to be an artist, she has always been preoccupied with artistry. “Making things is the organizing principle of my parents’ life,” she explains. “I was shocked when I heard friends say that their parents didn’t love their jobs.” This perspective has been reinforced now that Grace is in the “extremely specific bubble” of Brown University, where people, as she sees it, “are into being an artist way more than they are at Princeton, where they want to be bankers.”
On our way out of the main room, Grace and I encounter her father, looking dapper in a lightweight wool suit. Carroll Dunham affirms that the exhibition spaces are “striking” and Simmons’s work looks “fantastic,” then wonders when we can head over to the Bistrotheque restaurant as he has, as he puts it, “hit the limit of my ability to function at an opening.” As we climb the stairs to see the “Love Doll” pictures, Grace admits, “I see my parents as well respected with solid, long-lasting careers that have never skyrocketed like those of Cindy Sherman or Jeff Koons. It is weird how well-matched they are in that way. I wonder what would have happened if one of them had their prices triple.”
Grace doesn’t see examples in art history of artist couples whose relationships resemble that of her parents. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, for instance, she finds particularly inapt and unappealing. “The dynamic of their relationship was so traditional,” she explains, wrinkling her nose. “Diego had grandiose ambitions. He made murals with titles like
Man, Controller of the Universe
. Frida made self-reflective, personal paintings about being a victim.”
The “Love Doll” photographs, which hang in this elegant room crowned by a pitched roof with giant skylights, simmer with anxiety about the potential of female figures to become prey.
Day 29 (Nude with Dog)
(2011) is particularly uneasy. Simmons eventually managed to get over her inhibitions of photographing the doll naked, settling on a shot in which her mother’s poodle has wandered into frame. The presence of a live animal protects the surrogate teen and lessens her vulgarity, distracting us from but not obviating the lewd uses to which her kind are put when undressed.
Simmons is standing, surrounded by well-wishers, in front of
Day
27/Day 1 (New in Box)
(2010), which depicts a second love doll with long, reddish, curly hair amid the packaging in which she arrived. “It is the only picture that explicitly acknowledges what she is,” says Grace, as she checks that her white man’s shirt is buttoned up to the top. Simmons acquired one life-size doll, then another—both of which look remarkably like real young women—at around the same time that her two daughters were leaving home. Grace looks startled when I mention the coincidence, asserting that it had never occurred to her. She pulls her long, dark brown hair back into a makeshift ponytail while she thinks. “The second doll looks a lot like my ex-girlfriend,” she says. “Their faces are so similar that it’s creepy.”
Grace and I drift into the center of the room to take in all six “Love Doll” images. I mention Pygmalion, an ancient Greek sculptor who created such a perfect female form out of ivory that she came to life. Pinocchio is a paternalistic variant on the myth. Grace nods. “That’s why it was difficult to leave the doll naked,” she says. “Dressing her has the effect of humanizing her.”
Maurizio Cattelan
ALL
2011
M
aurizio Cattelan and I are sitting in a frenetic Sichuan restaurant near his Chelsea apartment. With plates clashing and staff yelling in Chinese, it is an abysmal environment for recording an interview. Cattelan’s big retrospective opens at the Guggenheim Museum this evening and, while many artists would see the day as an occasion for celebration, Cattelan sticks to his routine. Although he lunches here regularly, he receives no special treatment. His custom-made gray T-shirt says: “My ego follows me.”
This morning I went to the press preview of his exhibition. Nancy Spector, its curator, referred to the show as a “mass execution,” which treats individual artworks as if they were “salami in a butcher’s shop.” Survey shows tend to offer a respectful chronological look at the best of an artist’s oeuvre, excluding weaker works and giving stronger ones a room to themselves. Selective reverence is a means of inserting the artist into the canon of art history. Few artists resist this elite rite of passage, but Cattelan has refused it and created a landmark show.
Titled “All,” the exhibition is an anti-retrospective. It doesn’t look back as much as throw everything up in the air—or rather hang it, gallows-style, in the vast spiral-shaped atrium of the museum. Important works are deprived of their majesty while minor works are elevated. “It’s unedited and democratic,” says Cattelan, once the waitress has
bullied our orders out of us. “I didn’t enjoy seeing the works I forgot I had fathered. When you don’t like them, you take them out of your mind.”
The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, exemplifies the age-old competition between architects and artists. It is notoriously inhospitable to art, particularly because its atrium offers a more engaging spectacle than the official exhibition spaces that are arranged along a winding ramp. But Cattelan has effectively upstaged the building by placing all his work in the light-filled center. “My strength has been to use the corner. Artists never want to use the corner but I’m always happy to take it.” The Guggenheim rotunda has no corners, so the artist turned his attention to the void. “We’re an even match,” boasts Cattelan with respect to Lloyd Wright.
“
All
is an experiment, a new work, a meta-work,” he explains so morosely that I assume he is bracing himself to be misunderstood. With the exception of a disturbing sculpture portraying three boys with nooses around their necks (
Untitled
, 2004), individual Cattelan works have looked better elsewhere. One piece that is particularly disadvantaged by the hang is
Him
(2001), a spookily realistic portrait of Hitler kneeling in prayer. The work is smaller than life-size and usually installed facing a wall. Viewers approach it from behind, expecting to see a good or, at least, penitent boy. When they are within inches of the work, they realize who “he” is and recoil in horror. Among other things,
Him
poses the question: if the Führer asked for absolution, would God forgive him? But when the figure dangles in the middle of the atrium, its impact is dulled. It even looks like the evil dictator could be ascending. Indeed, Francesco Bonami, whom I saw at the press preview, joked that the works appear to be “souls on Judgment Day, rising to heaven.”
The Guggenheim opening has coincided with the announcement of Cattelan’s retirement. Artists drift away from making work but rarely make a highly publicized withdrawal. The declaration has led to comparisons with Marcel Duchamp who, in the 1920s, abandoned making art in favor of playing chess. When Cattelan was working on “All,” he was, in his words, “not sad but completely detached.” He felt like he “couldn’t care less” and concluded that he needed a break. Significantly,
the only Cattelan piece to escape being strung up is a small Pinocchio figure, which lies face down in a pool at the base of the rotunda, titled
Daddy Daddy
(2008). The character appears to have drowned or fallen to his death from the ramps above.
“Being an artist is a role game. You can play whatever role you want,” says Cattelan between mouthfuls of numbingly spicy chicken. “Retirement opens the game again. It is an opportunity to reinvent yourself.”
Cattelan lives in New York less than half the year; he has an apartment in Milan and a “shack,” as he calls it, on Filicudi, an Italian island northeast of Sicily. Evidently, he can afford to retire. “I am happy to have escaped my origins but I don’t belong to my new class,” he says. “My luxury is traveling and being here with you without the stress of making it to the end of the month.” He prides himself on the absence of televisions, cars, and cleaning ladies from all of his homes. “My bed is on the floor here, in Milan, everywhere,” says Cattelan. “I manage my life like a student with no certain tomorrow.”
Retiring from art doesn’t mean complete withdrawal from the art world. Cattelan plans to open a nonprofit space called Family Business with curator Massimiliano Gioni. In 2002, Cattelan and Gioni, along with Ali Subotnick, started up a nonprofit space called the Wrong Gallery. Following Cattelan’s penchant for miniaturization, it was located in a doorway on West 20th Street, measuring all of three square feet. It mostly showed single works by up-and-coming artists but, once a year, as a result of the group’s rental agreement, the gallery would host an exhibition titled “The Landlord’s Wife’s Show.” Occasionally, the exhibitions would spill into the street. Elmgreen & Dragset’s
Forgotten Baby
(2005), for example, featured a Mini Cooper containing a lifelike wax baby abandoned in his car seat.
One sideline that is becoming a core Cattelan activity is
Toilet Paper
. Inaugurated in June 2010, the magazine is the latest in the artist’s series of collaborative print media projects.
Toilet Paper
contains absurd, surreal, and sometimes sadistic images that Cattelan makes with Pierpaolo Ferrari, a photographer. The first issue had two covers: a black-and-white photograph of a woman looking at a glass eye in a man’s mouth, and a color picture of a nun shooting up heroin. With
Toilet Paper
,
Cattelan feels liberated from the expectation of producing great works of art. “I like the idea that it is just a magazine,” he says. “It gives me the freedom to do what I couldn’t do with my own work, the freedom to make mistakes.”
Cattelan started collaborating with Ferrari six years ago on publicity shots in which the artist appeared as a socially awkward prankster with a big nose. “That joker is my front man. I use my face as a device to support my projects,” admits Cattelan. The art world—particularly its academic regions—derides the cult of personality. “I need the art world, but it is not the world I want to reach.” Then, in summer 2009, Cattelan worked with Ferrari on eleven double-page spreads for
W
magazine, featuring supermodel Linda Evangelista. During the three-day shoot, Cattelan had his first taste of being a “creative director”—a role that he relished. “It was an anomaly, an experiment on the side,” says Cattelan, “which may now become my field.”