33 Artists in 3 Acts (30 page)
in progress
L
ast night, Lena Dunham won two Golden Globe Awards, one for creating the best comedy series on television and one for performing in it. “Did you hear us screaming in Connecticut?” says Laurie Simmons, shortly after answering my phone call from London. The artist tells me she is sitting in the den, working on her computer. “It’s more fun to watch these ceremonies on TV than to attend them,” she declares. “The Golden Globes love a newcomer, but the Best Actress award was a real shocker. We think of Lena as a writer.” Since the first episode of
Girls
, Lena has appeared on several magazine covers and many television talk shows, but a Golden Globe creates news of a higher order. “We’ve always been aware of the difference between art-world fame and Hollywood fame,” says Simmons. “We joke that, within the art world, you can be as awesome as you think you are. No one is truly famous but everyone is semi-famous.”
Simmons recently enjoyed fifteen minutes of semi-fame when Calvin Tomkins profiled her in
The New Yorker
, describing her as an “original and provocative artist” whose work explores “the strange power of human surrogates.” Whenever Simmons is discussed in print, Cindy Sherman is invariably mentioned, often at length. “Coming up next to Cindy has its challenges,” says Simmons. “It’s like being the middle child with two blonde sisters—which I actually am.” The two women
have been friends since they met in the late 1970s. Neither was in the influential 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space that coined the term “Pictures Generation,” but both are part of the movement that brought figuration back into vogue among New York’s art cognoscenti. In the 1980s and 1990s both showed with Metro Pictures, a gallery in which Sherman became the uncontested star. Having experienced “the loudest roaring mid-career silence,” Simmons left Metro in 2000 with the aim of improving her visibility. She now shows with Jeanne Greenberg’s Salon 94.
What have you been up to? I ask. Simmons explains that she is obsessed with her new project, a feature film titled
MY ART
about an artist surrounded by others whose careers glimmer more brightly than hers. “The main character is sixty years old, never got married, and hasn’t had a show in fifteen years,” says Simmons. “She teaches for a living and, at the end of the school year, stays in the country house of a successful artist friend who is always on the road with her travelling solo shows.”
Simmons tells me that the successful artist is “someone like Cindy” while the main character is “me without a family, a ‘me’ in a parallel universe, another ‘me’ that I know really well.” Yet both characters have names that play on Simmons’s initials: the star artist is called Lincoln Schneider, the overshadowed one is Ellie Shine. (Ellie is a riff on “L.”) Moreover, the film will be shot in Simmons’s own Connecticut house, and Shine’s artworks can be summed up as “Cindy Sherman meets Maya Deren.” Deren, who died in 1961, was an avant-garde filmmaker and dancer who often appeared in her own work, which explored the female unconscious.
“Shine’s work recreates scenes from Hollywood movies,” explains Simmons of her main character. She dresses up like Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, and Audrey Hepburn, and then takes pictures of herself. One day, she accidentally has her digital Canon camera on the video setting and has a “real artistic breakthrough.” All Shine wants is an exhibition and a review. “She is a woman of a certain age,” says Simmons. “She wants to get on the train, even at the last stop.”
The only other time that Simmons has acted in a feature and, indeed,
played the role of an artist, is in
Tiny Furniture.
“Nobody gets an artist right, even the child of two artists.
Tiny Furniture
left me feeling that something was missing,” says Simmons. “I will play the lead in
MY ART
, probably against everyone’s better judgment, because it will create comparisons to Lena.”
However germane the comparisons, Simmons’s new film project follows logically from her previous work. Six years ago, Simmons made
The Music of Regret
(2006), a three-act film whose principal theme is intense competition. Act I features two dolls dressed as 1950s’ suburban housewives who quarrel until one of their husbands commits suicide. Act II shows ventriloquist dummies competitively courting Meryl Streep, who is a stand-in for Simmons. Finally, Act III draws on Simmons’s series “Walking and Lying Objects” (1987–91), in which inanimate things, such as a camera and a doll’s house, have sprouted legs. In the film, four objects dance their way through an audition while a pocket watch waits in the wings, failing to get the part because she doesn’t have the opportunity to perform.
Although
The Music of Regret
premiered at MoMA New York and then later played at the Whitney, the Met, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and the American Academy in Rome, Simmons feels that it never found its place in the world. “It’s forty minutes long—too long for a short and too short for a feature.” Simmons admits that she is possessed by regret. “I’m always hyper-conscious of the road not taken.”
As it happens, that road was taken by Lena, who had been a keen observer of the production and distribution of
The Music of Regret
. “When I was going through issues with the narrative,” says Simmons, “she was in college and I’d send her plot stuff. She helped me a lot.” Not long after, Lena started creating her own little videos and wrote a screenplay to fulfill a course requirement. She would make sure that her short films and then her feature fit festival programming categories. “She never wanted to make art films,” says Simmons.
Simmons is thrilled that Lena is doing the kind of work she really wants to do and is being widely recognized for it. Nevertheless, having a famous daughter can affect one’s sense of self. “It’s only been a year that I’ve been known to the world as Lena Dunham’s mother. I have to
figure out how to navigate my life with this new information attached to me . . . Tip just casts it off.” Indeed, when I last saw Tip Dunham, he told me that he regards celebrity culture as “a fucked-up pile of ridiculous crap” with nominal interest as an “anthropological event.” Reflecting on Lena’s success, he marveled at the differences between the “platform size” of a television show and a painting, but reaffirmed his interest in making works that “punch harder, go deeper, and do what paintings can do that other things can’t.” In his mind, he didn’t have a choice because “anything else would be undignified.”
Simmons, by contrast, embraces indignity. In order to avoid repeating herself, she forces herself out of her comfort zones. It’s a means to the end of making fresh works. For Simmons, the agony of embarrassment pales in comparison to the “terror” of feeling invisible. “It is excruciating not to be seen,” she explains. Simmons breaks off to talk to Grace, who has just entered the room. She’s been in Connecticut for the weekend and is going back to Brown after lunch. “Where were we?” says Simmons when she returns her attention to our call. Your new feature film, Cindy, Lena, embarrassment, invisibility, I say. “Oh yeah,” she sighs. “Invisibility taps into something from my childhood. Other artists may have different neuroses, but the feeling of not being seen tips me over the edge.”
Maurizio Cattelan
Mother
1999
I
t’s the last Tuesday in May 2013, a cool, sunny morning with a forecast of rain. My teenage daughter, Cora, and I are attending the “artists’ opening” of the Venice Biennale, which takes place the day before the VIP preview. We walk into the
giardini
just after 10
A.M
., swing by the Danish and Nordic pavilions where Elmgreen & Dragset staged their dysfunctional domestic scenes four years ago, past the American pavilion, which already flaunts a queue of people keen to see the work of Sarah Sze, then head for the Palazzo dell’Esposizione. Massimiliano Gioni, the curator of the biennale, is standing on the steps of the white building like the father of the bride outside a church, kissing people on the cheek, shaking hands, and patting backs. Titled “The Encyclopedic Palace,” his exhibition is displayed here as well as in the Arsenale, a long, sprawling space that was once a naval shipyard ten minutes’ walk away. The double-venue show contains works by 160 people, not all of whom are professional artists. Many are the untrained, insane, or inmate image-makers that go by the label “outsider artists.”
Gioni receives us warmly and signs Cora’s notebook. She is collecting artists’ autographs but makes an exception for him as the show’s curator. He writes a perfect mirror image of his name in capital letters, an allusion to the artist Alighiero e Boetti. Boetti’s alter ego loomed so large in his life that the artist inserted an “and” (
e
in Italian) between his first and last names. He wrote forward and backward with his left and right hands and made many works that involved mirroring. We leave Gioni as he greets Tino Sehgal, an artist who has contributed a performance, or “constructed situation” (as he brands it), to the show.
The first room of the exhibition features an illuminated manuscript of spiritual fantasies by Carl Jung. The psychoanalyst worked on his
Red Book
in secret between 1914 and 1930. On a reverential podium under a glass dome, the book is open to a page where the tongue of a snake in hell branches out into a slender tree in heaven. As art, it is conservative—what you might call surreal–medieval—but it has fervor. The inclusion of Jung complicates the definition of outsiders. Outsider artists are seen to make art as a form of catharsis or therapy, so they are invariably positioned as patients—not doctors. Also, outsiders are usually “illustrious nobodies,” as Gioni has put it, rather than famous intellectuals who make art on the side.
I receive a text message from Maurizio Cattelan telling me that he has entered the
giardini
, so we head back to the entrance, finding Gioni where we left him, encircled by two cameramen and a dozen journalists with notepads. “Our media understanding of an artist as a successful professional who makes entertaining objects that sell for a lot of money is very restrictive,” he says, his hands waving imploringly. “Artists are people who do things with images in order to understand the world. They have a fierce desire to know themselves through . . .” Gioni stops mid-sentence. “I have to say hi to a friend,” he says. Cattelan walks into view. The two men hug for a split-second and Gioni mumbles something in Italian. The artist heads into the show and the curator returns to his spiel. “All interesting artists are autodidacts,” he says. “Even those with university degrees need to be independent and self-teaching. By including outsider artists and non-artists in my show, I am not suggesting that everyone is a professional, but that everyone is a dilettante.”
Cattelan shoots me with his fingers like a kid playing cops and robbers. He wears black skinny jeans and a black suede jacket; a statuesque woman wearing a black dress and carrying a tote bag advertising his magazine
Toilet Paper
accompanies him. “I need to go medium to fast,” says Cattelan as we set out. “I am looking for Dakis.” The Greek collector often teams up with Cattelan to look at art. He sometimes acquires works at the artist’s recommendation and did, in the end, buy Triple Candie’s “posthumous” Cattelan retrospective.
Cattelan has shown at the Venice Biennale seven times. The first time, in 1993, was like “committing hara-kiri,” he says. “I had this opportunity of my career and I flushed it down the drain. It came naturally.” Francesco Bonami had given him a space in the Arsenale, which he, in turn, rented to an advertising company who installed a billboard promoting a perfume. In 1997, he exhibited hundreds of taxidermy pigeons as
I Touristi
. In 1999, he showed
Mother,
the work that featured the buried fakir, and a felled father, “The Pope.” But his great coup came in 2001 when he did an off-site project, a Pop earthwork titled
Hollywood
. First, he erected a giant replica of the famous “HOLLYWOOD” sign on top of a centuries-old, mountainous garbage dump overlooking the city of Palermo in Sicily. Then, in a feat of biennial festivalism, he convinced one of his patrons
*
to charter a plane to take an elite group of collectors and curators (including Harald Szeemann, the director of the biennale that year) from Venice to Palermo, where they were treated to a champagne reception in the dump with waiters in white jackets holding silver trays. Participants say that the stench was overwhelming.
Cattelan finds Joannou without too much effort. He then chats with at least a dozen art-world people and has his photo taken with most of them. “I am already exhausted, without having seen anything,” he says, swinging his reading glasses as if they were bikini briefs in a striptease. In highly public situations, Cattelan can’t seem to help himself from becoming a clowning mime. Eventually, he manages to look at some art, taking snapshots of the wall labels with his phone. He walks into an installation by Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes, an abject sculptural
family of small figures without arms, wearing tatty cotton clothes, surrounded by Victorian pottery shards and old lager bottles. “We showed her in the Berlin Biennial,” he says. When I ask for his interpretation of the work, he replies, “Isn’t it too early to ask that?”