33 Artists in 3 Acts (4 page)
“Artistic conquests and sexual conquests. They parallel each other very well,” says Koons. The artist has an elaborate personal philosophy that revolves around what he calls “the biological narrative” and includes a lot of pep talk. “The only thing you can do is trust in yourself and follow your interests. That is where you find art,” he offers. Sometimes Koons sounds like a life coach or a self-help guru. “My art is not just fun,” he says as we walk away from the paintings. “I want my work to help people expand their parameters. Art is a vehicle for connecting to archetypes that help us survive.”
Koons takes me through several rooms in which sculptures are respectively mocked up, molded, assembled, and painted. The staff wear white suits, masks, and rubber gloves. With its steel beams and harnesses and all sorts of shiny metal equipment, the studio feels both old-world and high-tech. We end up standing in front of a two-dimensional cardboard model of a sculpture called
Hulk (Friends)
, which depicts a blow-up doll of the green comic-strip character with six small inflatable pool toy animals on his shoulders. The Hulk’s facial features somehow resemble the artist’s.
For Koons, there is no downside to fame. “You are only over- or underexposed in relation to your ideas. If you can continue to inform
and enlighten . . .” he trails off. “Any time the platform for your work increases, that’s great,” he says. Koons divides his working life into “creation” and “platform,” or what others might call the production and promotion of their work. “I want to spend time with my ideas so I can make the gesture that I want to make,” he says. “At the same time, I want to help my work have a platform so it’s not just a gesture alone in the woods.”
Back in the mid-eighties, when he was promoting his “Equilibrium” series, best known for its sculptures of basketballs floating in saltwater tanks, Koons said that artists improve their social position through art in the same way that athletes get rich through sports. What is the status of the artist today? I ask.
Koons looks startled, as if my question were a vulgar invasion of his privacy. He turns his head away from me and his body follows. “You asked a question earlier,” he says, by way of changing the subject. I let him air some more well-rehearsed patter, then try again but more forcefully. I mention that
The New Yorker
writer Calvin Tomkins once wrote that Koons was either “amazingly naive” or “slyly performative.” Tomkins wasn’t sure whether he was talking to “the real Jeff Koons or whether there was one.” What do you think he means? I probe.
“Who said that?” replies Koons. He goes on to answer a different question. In the early eighties, he learned not to take it personally when people didn’t understand his work. “I am ambitious,” he adds, going off on another tangent. “I am ambitious for my own potential within this dialogue. I like to feel a connection to Lichtenstein, Picabia, Dalí, Duchamp, Courbet, and Fragonard.”
I tell him that I am fascinated by artists’ personas. The author of an artwork is part of its meaning, is he not? In the past Koons has admitted that he likes to be anyone people want him to be. Part of me admires the versatility of this saintly door-to-door life coach, while the other part is set on eliciting a confession—or, as Koons might put it, something hard and explicit rather than wet and slippery. I’ve asked you about your persona twice, I say, and you have evaded the question twice. Come on, I urge with as much sparkle as I can muster.
“My persona?” Koons takes a long pause. “I can’t say that I’m not
aware of certain things ’cause I don’t want to be naive, but I don’t try to create something. I’ve always tried honestly to make the work and I am always trying to represent the work the way I see it.” A kerfuffle in an adjacent room offers a convenient distraction—something heavy is being moved—then the artist’s attention returns to me. “I am not naive,” he reiterates, and trots out one of his favorite axioms from the late 1980s. “There is a difference between
importance
and
significance
,” he says. “Something repeated by the media can be important; we are conscious of it because of repetition. But significance is a higher realm.” At first, it’s unclear how the distinction relates to my question. Then it occurs to me that maybe Koons thinks his persona is important but not significant.
Ai Weiwei
Sunflower Seeds
2010
W
hile Koons comes across as canned, Ai feels raw. In China, a country where government propaganda rules the airwaves and independent thinking has been crushed for generations, Ai relishes thinking on his feet and refuses invitations to speak off the record. His belief in freedom of speech means that he is willing to go public with everything that comes out of his mouth as a matter of principle. A performer with an aptitude for improvisation, Ai enjoys taking risks.
London’s Turbine Hall is a major test for a living artist. At the heart of Tate Modern, the space is 500 feet long by 75 feet wide and a spectacular five stories high. When the building was a power station, the hall housed the electricity generators that lit up most of central London. Now it is a secular cathedral for commissioned works of contemporary art that aim to enlighten in other ways. Artists need great intelligence and ambition to give meaning to a void this size.
The content of Ai’s commission was a closely guarded secret until last night’s private view. As I approached the installation, I could hear the crunching footfalls of the half dozen people who had entered the museum ahead of me and who were already treading on the work. I walked out into a rectangular ocean of gray gravel—or was it pebbles? Only when I got to the middle did I reach down to grab a handful of what looked like sunflower seeds. They were so realistic that I had to
touch one to my lips to confirm that it was made of porcelain. Titled
Sunflower Seeds
(2010), the work consists of 100 million exquisitely handmade miniature sculptures. The installation represents the most populous nation—one seed for every thirteen Chinese people—in the material (china) that bears the nation’s name.
While the work is worthy of the term “monumental,” the artist prefers to refer to it less pretentiously as a “mass production.” It took 1,600 people over two and a half years to make. Indeed, Ai saved a pottery-producing village from unemployment, paid his workers above average wages, and made a video about the process. Self-conscious about exploitation, the artist drew attention to the toil, making it an explicit theme in the work.
Ai appears with Danish and American documentary filmmakers in tow; they have been following him for months. We head to the café where he orders English Breakfast tea and the film people take over a neighboring table. The artist seems to be wearing exactly the same baggy black jacket that he wore in Shanghai. After a few effusive remarks about
Sunflower Seeds
and the assertion that I am keen to see him in his Beijing studio, I dive straight into the principal question that drives my research, the one into which I usually coax and cajole my interviewees. What is an artist?
Ai takes a deep breath and then clears his throat. He is a prolific writer and talker. He has posted thousands of blog posts and Twitter messages since 2005. (In Chinese, 140 characters is a novella, he says.) The artist also gives an average of three interviews a day and has probably done at least a dozen Q&A sessions to promote his Turbine Hall show. However, Ai doesn’t have a quick answer for this one. “My father was an artist who studied in Paris,” he says eventually in English with a heavy Chinese accent. “Then he became a poet in jail.” Ai Qing, Weiwei’s father, went to Hangzhou art academy, then studied art, literature, and philosophy in France. Upon his return to China, he was imprisoned for three years by Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government because he openly supported Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution. During his incarceration, he didn’t have the materials to paint and ended up writing “Da Yan River—My Wet-Nurse,” one of his most
famous poems. Then, less than a decade after Mao came into power, he was deemed a “rightist” and sentenced to hard labor. “He was exiled in the same year that I was born,” explains Ai. “So I grew up seeing him as an enemy of the state.”
Ai’s father’s “crime” was the loss of his ability to write passionately. “They questioned why he was not embracing the people’s revolution,” explains the artist. “He wrote poetry about gardens with only one type of flower. He thought that the garden should have variety—all kinds of ideas and expressions—rather than just a single beauty.” During the anti-rightist campaign, which was a precursor to the Cultural Revolution, 500,000 intellectuals disappeared. Anyone with an opinion that diverged even slightly from Communist Party policy was punished.
Ai Qing ended up cleaning the public toilets in a village in the remote province of Xinjiang. He gave up writing, and burned his own works as well as his book collection because he feared the Red Guards would come in the middle of the night, find something incriminating, and penalize his family further. “Only in the movies or in the Nazi time could you see things like that. It was very frustrating because this man was not a criminal. But people threw stones at him; the children used sticks to beat him; they poured ink on his head—all kinds of strange things in the name of justice and reeducation,” says Ai. “The village people didn’t even know what he had done wrong. They just knew he was the enemy.”
For a good part of Ai’s childhood, the family lived in an earthen pit without electricity or running water. “In political circumstances like those, living underground can provide an incredible feeling of security,” Ai once wrote in his blog. “In the winter it was warm, in the summer it was cool. Its walls were linked with America.” Ai’s father raised the ceilings of this home by burrowing down another foot, and he dug out a shelf that eight-year-old Weiwei considered the apogee of domestic architecture.
Amid these extraordinary circumstances, Ai suffered from malnutrition and ill health. “I understood mortality,” explains the artist. “I could feel the wind shake me. I would wake up in the midnight to go to the toilet and see the sky with stars so bright. I felt like I could disappear in
a blink. But, shamelessly, I’m still here, a very fat man, every day eating a lot, talking a lot.”
Ai’s father was adamant that he did not want his son to be an artist. “He always said forget about literature or art. Be an honest worker.” But Ai saw something else in the hardship. “I became an artist because, under such pressure, my father still had somewhere nobody could touch. Even when the whole world was dark, there was something warm in his heart.” When his father made a simple pencil drawing or composed a poetic sentence aloud, the young Ai noticed, “He was lifted from reality.”
After Mao’s death, Ai Qing was rehabilitated and the family returned to Beijing. He became vice chairman of the Chinese Writers Association and eventually one of the nation’s literary heroes. Throughout the 1990s, Ai Qing’s poetry was on the Chinese junior high school curriculum.
When Ai finishes recounting this story, I return to the question that prompted it. So, is an artist, or at least a significant one, an enemy of the state?
Ai lifts his eyebrows. “The artist is an enemy of . . . ah . . . general sensibilities,” he says.
Gabriel Orozco
Black Kites
1997
A
couple of weeks later, in Manhattan, I spy a handful of Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds cradled in a blue handkerchief on the desk of Gabriel Orozco, one of Mexico’s best-known artists. He had been at Tate Modern, to inspect the space of his upcoming retrospective several floors up from Ai’s Turbine Hall installation. “I grabbed some to see what they were and decided they were interesting. I didn’t know I was not allowed,” he says sheepishly. With a beard and dark eyes, Orozco looks like a cross between Karl Marx and Antonio Banderas. I tell him that I too took a handful. I thought that
Sunflower Seeds
might be like one of Félix González-Torres’s candy pieces, in which the public is invited to help themselves.