We eventually enter a dark space containing five dolls made by Morton Bartlett. Each hand-painted, custom-clothed plaster figure is on its own plinth in a plexiglass box, spotlit from above. The girls are all on the cusp of puberty in provocative poses—lips apart, nipples erect, hips cocked. Bartlett was a lifelong bachelor without art training whose private hobby involved sculpting dolls and taking pictures of them. “This is a real family,” says Cattelan matter-of-factly as he inspects the figures. “He made about a dozen puppets. They are all beyond realistic under the skirt.” I tell Cattelan that Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons own a Bartlett photograph. He admits that he owns two—an intriguing coincidence given that there are only about two hundred prints in existence, all of which were discovered after Bartlett’s death in 1992.
How do you define outsider art? I ask as we exit the room. “Cider art? I would like mine in a glass!” he replies.
“Is there an outside?” says Samuel Keller, once the director of Art Basel and now head of the Beyeler Foundation, who overheard my question. The Palazzo is crowding up with familiar art-world faces. “Everything is really inside,” adds Keller. “Consider Jean Dubuffet.” Dubuffet was a modern French painter who, after reading a 1922 book about the artistry of the mentally ill, coined the phrase
art brut
(the French term for outsider art) and started collecting it. In the early 1950s, Dubuffet said that
art brut
was “more precious than the productions of professionals” because it was “created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses—where the worries of competition, acclaim, and social promotion do not interfere.”
Keller and Cattelan confer about the artist’s upcoming exhibition at the Beyeler. Its exact contents are a secret, which has led to speculation that Cattelan is back to making art. However, I know that he has devised a clever way to show something new without coming out of retirement. His
Untitled
(2007) sculpture of a headless taxidermy horse is in an edition of three with two artist’s proofs. At the Beyeler, all five horses will
be hung close together on one wall, hindquarters out, like an absurd circus cavalcade. Presenting the individual works as part of a group will shift their meaning substantially. “You can recognize a good work but a masterpiece is difficult,” Cattelan told me a few years ago. “The piece has to perform a lot of work to become a masterpiece.” Indeed, Cattelan is keen to make his sculptures perform.
We flow through several rooms, then linger in one showing abstract work suggestive of vaginas. Modernist embroideries by Geta Brătescu, a Romanian artist in her late eighties, are hung alongside anonymously authored tantric paintings made between 1968 and 2004. The latter works on paper all feature a central oval shape—often a black hole—surrounded by auras of pulsating color. They remind me that it’s time to call Carroll Dunham. He answers on the second ring and says, “We are heading to the Arsenale. Where are you?”
I tell Cattelan that I’d like to introduce him to Simmons and Dunham. He has met Simmons and seen her in
Tiny Furniture
, which he thought was “a blast.” He has never met Dunham. He’ll come and say hello but needs to see something first. As we leave the leafy
giardini
, I reflect on an artwork by Francis Alÿs, in which he sent a live peacock to the biennale preview to represent himself and hang out with his peers. It was titled
The Ambassador
(2001).
Cora and I pick up awful white-bread sandwiches and sit for a quick lunch with a curator–art historian couple and their teenage daughter. (The British schools are on their half-term break.) The curator confesses that she is not in the slightest bit interested in outsider art. “It always has the same aesthetic, with all that intuitive, repetitive mark-making and those worlds within worlds. It doesn’t propose anything new,” she says. “You can find kernels of truth in someone’s mutterings, but real artists have an intellectual project. It’s like the difference between ranting and raving, on the one hand, and philosophizing on the other.” Her husband takes a slightly different position, suggesting that curators dislike outsider art almost as much as artists like it. “Artists find it a relief to get away from the over-theorized context of professional art,” he says.
We walk over to the other part of Gioni’s show and, as we pass through the turnstiles that lead into the Arsenale, we see Simmons in
an off-white trench coat and sunglasses. Since we last spoke, she has shot the first scene of
MY ART
. She hasn’t been to the biennale since Dunham was in it in 1988, but she has an old collaborative piece in the Arsenale, in a section curated by Cindy Sherman. How does she feel about the presence of
The Actual Photos
(1985) in the show? “Almost every body of work that I have ever made would fit into this show, so I am a bit befuddled as to why they chose that one,” she says, sounding genuinely dazed. Overall, she laments the presence of so many dead outsiders because she knows so many living artists who could use the exposure. “I would have preferred more regional artists than psychics and inmates,” she says.
Cattelan comes through the turnstiles and kisses Simmons respectfully on the cheek. After a few pleasantries, he asks, “When did you discover Morton Bartlett?”
“Before you did!” says Simmons. “At an outsider art fair in 1998 or 1999.” Cattelan admits that he didn’t come across Bartlett’s work until 2002 or 2003. I wonder aloud if they collect any other artists in common.
“Maybe your husband?” says Cattelan playfully. “When did I discover your husband?”
“Do you own him?” says Simmons.
“No, but I wish. Do you own him?” asks Cattelan.
Simmons laughs. “Yes, I own him,” she replies, wincing at the bad joke.
“You have him by the balls!” says Cattelan teasingly. “I saw the last show at Gladstone and there were only pussies!”
Dunham arrives, as if on cue, greeting Cattelan cordially. I inquire about the health of his
Large Bather
(
Quicksand)
. “Completely recovered,” he says happily. “The repair is invisible—so imperceptible that I wonder whether I hallucinated the scratch.” Dunham admits that he had a hard time getting over the show. “It blew me out. I barely did anything all winter,” he says.
I take a photo of the three artists together, then Cattelan goes his own way.
In the center of the first large, white, circular room of this part of the exhibition sits an architectural model of a fanciful 136-story building
called
The Encyclopedic Palace
made in the 1950s by Marino Auriti, an Italian American who ran an auto-body shop and a fine art framing business out of his garage. Lining the surrounding walls are forty-four black-and-white images of African women with elaborate, architectural hairstyles by the Nigerian photographer J. D. Okhai Ojeikere. The juxtaposition is droll.
“It’s the beautiful round room of an open-minded collector,” says Francesco Bonami. “The combination of an Italian American and an African is great for obtaining a grant.” The curator is strolling through the show with Vanessa Riding, his girlfriend, and their baby girl. We gossip about Cattelan’s show at the Beyeler. Bonami gave it the title “Kaputt,” which means “broken” in German and refers to Curzio Malaparte’s 1944 novel of the same name. “Four of the horses are castrated. Only François Pinault’s horse has balls!” he says, referring to the powerful art collector who owns Christie’s. About Cattelan’s retirement, Bonami is characteristically flippant. “Maurizio understood that his golden goose was getting old and not laying many eggs,” he claims. Nodding at the
Encyclopedic Palace
that looms beside us, I ask for his thoughts about outsider art. He looks at me grimly, as if a dear friend had lost his mind. “It’s a dangerous path, a bottomless pit,” he says, shaking his head. “Insider artists know how to frame their compulsions. Outsiders cannot stop. It’s like the difference between a sommelier and a drunk.”
Having lost sight of Simmons and Dunham, we drift swiftly down the cavernous corridor of the Arsenale, eventually finding them in a room that features paintings and photographs made between 1943 and 1961 by Eugene von Bruenchenhein, a Milwaukee baker. Bruenchenhein made small-scale paintings of psychedelic landscapes and skyscapes, as well as photographs of his wife in sexy poses against colorful patterned wallpaper. One of the paintings must be on loan from Cattelan as I remember seeing it in his apartment. “We own a photograph from this shoot,” says Simmons, pointing at a picture of a blonde woman sitting in a gold chair with her legs in the air, eyeing the camera coquettishly. “She’s wearing the same white underwear in our piece and the lighting is similar.”
We’ve all been thirsty for almost an hour, so Cora and I go in search of water, eventually finding a temporary café where Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are standing in line. The artistic duo hasn’t been to Venice since “their year” four years ago. They are attending now because Gioni is an old friend whose first curatorial endeavor entailed commissioning Elmgreen & Dragset to make a work for the Trussardi Foundation.
“We are here but our minds are in Munich,” says Elmgreen. The pair is curating a citywide series of projects that will open in nine days and they still have a lot to do. I repeat one of their lines from our previous encounter: if you don’t behave properly as artists, you’ll be reincarnated as curators.
“I don’t have the taste in my mouth or smell in my nose of being an artist. I’m a cultural producer,” says Elmgreen with a semi-flamboyant wave.
Dragset flicks his eyes to the sky, then looks to me for support. “I’m an artist. I wouldn’t call myself anything else. Just as I’m gay and wouldn’t call myself ‘queer,’” he says. “I remember very well making the decision to accept myself as an artist. I had my thirtieth birthday in New York City, where we had a residency. Up until that point I had felt embarrassed, then I thought, fuck it. I can be an artist just as much as anyone else.”
“These identity groups are
so
last century. You were a gay artist in the twentieth century,” says Elmgreen with a mischievous glint at Dragset. “I would also say that we are far too busy to be artists. We make artworks, do a theatrical performance, publish a book, design a T-shirt, curate a show—so many things.” He stares at his creative partner while he thinks, then says, “We are like small mice, avoiding being trapped or cornered. Our work is not about universal truths. All we do is tell small lies.”
Cora and I return to the show with four bottles of water, discovering Simmons and Dunham in an intimate room with gray walls in the section designated as Cindy Sherman’s. Thirty-two color photographs that Simmons made with Allan McCollum line one wall. They are ultra-extreme closeups of minuscule plastic figures photographed with the
help of an electron microscope. On the opposite side of the room is a vitrine of vintage photo albums owned by Sherman, including several from the 1960s that depict drag queens enacting low-key moments as the “lady of the house.”
Dunham is talking to RoseLee Goldberg, the director of Performa, a nonprofit organization that supports performance art, while Simmons is exchanging notes with Sherman herself. We ease our way into the latter conversation. “The curatorial work was fifty-fifty, but Massimiliano is giving me all of the credit. He really shouldn’t say that I did all this myself,” says Sherman sweetly. These rooms are remarkably in keeping with the Gioni show in the Palazzo dell’Esposizione. Earlier in the day, a freelance curator told me that enlisting Sherman as a curator was “a gimmick, a celebrity endorsement, a licensing job.” One of the many pleasures of the biennale is its provision of a seemingly guilt-free occasion to bitch.
Sherman leaves the room with her dealers, Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, while Simmons, Dunham, Cora, and I trudge on. “Since you started questioning us,” says Simmons, as we circumnavigate a Charles Ray sculpture of an eight-foot-tall, blonde businesswoman in a purple suit, “I have been thinking more about the depth and breadth of the construct that we create to transform ourselves into ‘believable artists.’ It is a much bigger undertaking than just clicking a camera shutter.” Dunham chugs his water, then affirms, “There is this reverb. You have to make art to
be
an artist, but you have to
be
an artist to make art. It’s about getting your self-representation and your actual activities into alignment. I’ve gone through moments where I thought ‘I hate this, I don’t want to do it anymore,’ but I always come back to the fact there isn’t anything else that would better suit my sense of who I am.”
Neither Simmons nor Dunham entertain the idea of retiring. “I haven’t ever really gotten what I need,” explains Simmons. “It’s like being a child. My frustration of not being heard and not being seen drives me.” Dunham is even more headstrong. “I am sixty-three and I’m not going to stop. They haven’t taken the keys to the car away from me. I know how to do this shit and I have even crazier stuff in my mind. What could be more amusing than powering forward?”
We linger among a compilation of works by Rosemary Trockel, including
Living Means to Appreciate Your Mother Nude
(2001). Another few steps and we encounter
The Hidden Mother
(2006–13), a 30-foot-long vitrine containing 997 photographs of babies taken between 1840 and 1920. Amassed by the Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler, the images show children posed, propped up, and held still for the camera by women who are covered in blankets, hiding behind chairs or lurking just out of frame.
I am surprised to see Gioni standing by himself on the threshold of the next room. He has just finished giving a tour to a select group of Christie’s clients. Knowing that he’ll be able to spare no more than a minute or two, I saunter over and cut to the chase: why do so many works in the biennale relate to family? “Art stands in for the people you love,” he replies without hesitation, despite his evident fatigue. “Pliny the Elder illustrates the origins of man-made images with the story of the maid of Corinth. The maid’s lover is going on a long, hazardous journey so, before he leaves, she traces the outline of his shadow on the wall.” He pauses, scanning the crowd who is perusing his show. “That’s how painting was born,” he adds. “Humans make images to hold onto what they love and what they are about to lose.”