33 Artists in 3 Acts (3 page)
Ai loves to shock. His best-known self-portrait, which announced his transition from antiques dealer to artist, is titled
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
(1995). It consists of three black-and-white photographs in which he holds, releases, and smashes a 2000-year-old antique. For those who value cultural objects, it is impossible not to flinch. While Ai remains blank-faced in the pictures, it would be a mistake to assume, as some have, that the artist disdains the past. On the contrary, Ai has a huge respect for the crafts that were wiped out by the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution and, in the 1990s, he supported himself by buying and selling antiques. Eventually he established a new category of art that Tinari calls the “ancient readymade.” Ai would paint Western trademarks, such as the Coca-Cola logo, on antique vases, and have traditional artisans reassemble old stools and tables into surreal multi-legged sculptures.
The applause dies and Abbas rises to his feet. “Weiwei has put some issues on the table that we have been skirting around. Let’s look at these things directly,” he advises. A seasoned teacher, Abbas gives the impression that he could run a fruitful seminar in his sleep. “Things here are actually neither lawful nor lawless. Everything is quasi-lawful,” he says. Ai drinks some spring water out of a plastic bottle while Tinari explains that the artist is happy to take questions in English. Ai understands English, having lived in New York for twelve years between 1981 and 1993.
Eventually an older American man in the front row asks, “What should Westerners be doing in China?” Ai emits a low growl of a
“hmmm” then says, “I maintain no illusions about Western democracy . . . so my advice is: walk around, take some pictures, eat some nice Chinese food, and tell your friends that you had a really great time.” Ai loathes pretension and loves joking; he is also a philosophical liberal. In response to the next question, he says, “We have no democracy at the level of voting, no freedom of speech or media. If you ignore these issues, you might as well be farting.”
A woman with a faint Germanic accent says, “You have a negative critical attitude, a controversial, shocking fuck-off attitude, but you are an artist. Could you talk about your creative, productive ways?”
Ai winces, then has a quick conversation in Chinese with Tinari. “Criticism and finding trouble is, in the Chinese context, a positive, creative act,” declares Tinari for him. “One can risk one’s own life in the process.” He cites three activists—Chen Guangcheng, Tan Zuoren, and Liu Xiaobo—who have been detained or imprisoned, then adds, “Anyone who thinks that my political interventions are negative or simply ‘fuck you’ is wrong . . . I’ve done many architectural and museum projects, including one just last month at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and one coming up in October at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. I am involved in a massive productive output; it’s just not what we are talking about today.”
A woman with short hair and glasses follows with an interminable, gushy, jargon-ridden comment that ultimately asks Ai how his “artistic interventions” promote social justice and human rights. The artist has been sitting with his hands in his trouser pockets. He leaves them there. “I am not one to explain my artworks,” he says. “If you are interested, you can look at them. Every single work that I make has a basic connection to my most fundamental beliefs and if the work can’t express that belief then it’s not worth making.”
Ai could easily have invoked any number of artworks with democratic or freedom-loving themes in response to her question. In 2007, for example, he created a performance titled
Fairytale
in which 1,001 Chinese people who had never been to Europe went to the small town of Kassel, Germany, during Documenta, an influential art exhibition. One of the dominant definitions of contemporary art is that it makes you look at the world differently. Having spent more than a decade in
the United States, Ai understood that time spent abroad expands the mind. The
Fairytale
performance was accompanied by a compelling installation of 1,001 wooden Qing Dynasty chairs—one for each Chinese traveler. When Documenta was over, the human participants went their own ways and the chairs were dispersed.
Fairytale
was the first work that Ai made with the use of the Internet, recruiting volunteer travelers through his blog. When asked to look back at the stages of his career, Ai says simply that there is the art he made before he discovered the Internet and the work he created afterward.
The audience seems evenly divided between those who find Ai exasperating and those who sit in awe. An Asian American student suggests that contemporary art in China is “an alibi for freedom” and asks Ai to comment on the “dark nature” of the art world. In the past ten years, says the artist, it is more accurate to say that the art market—not art—has prospered in China. “That is what has attracted the Western attention,” he affirms. “The art market is like the stock market except that it is smaller, so it can be controlled by an even smaller group of people.”
Finally, an Australian who introduces himself as one of the co-organizers of the conference asks the closing question. “I applaud you for your unstinting commitment to principle,” he says, then wonders whether Ai is “perversely useful to China?” Over the past year, particularly since Ai has become more belligerently political in his blog, people have been wondering how he can get away with being so outspoken. Theories have abounded. First, people thought he was American. So he posted a copy of his Chinese passport. Then they said that he must have strong family connections that give him the protection of a high-ranking party official. However, the artist claims that if he has a friend at the top, he does not know who it is.
Ai concludes by declaring that, if he were once useful, it appears that he is no longer. A few months ago, Chinese officials closed down his blog. They have since completely erased his existence from the Internet. If you put the three characters that spell the name “Ai Weiwei” into Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, nothing comes up. It’s the same for other words, he affirms: “freedom,” “human rights,” “democracy,” and “fuck” are also unsearchable in China.
Jeff Koons
Landscape (Cherry Tree)
2009
M
ost artists in New York City worry less about censorship than reputation management. If you are in the public eye for long enough, laments Jeff Koons, your “inevitable fate” is to be “burned at the stake.” Although the analogy between artists and saints, executed for treason or heresy, appears casual, it is one that he makes regularly.
Since 2001, Koons’s studio has been located in Chelsea, a few blocks away from Gagosian Gallery, one of the artist’s dealers. From the outside, the studio has the air of an art gallery. Its brick exterior is painted white and punctuated by four large grids of frosted glass windows. Inside, one finds a warren of offices for design and administration and workshops for painting and sculpture.
The first stop on a Koons studio visit is a spacious open-plan room full of young people sitting in swivel chairs, staring at large Apple monitors. Gary McCraw, the artist’s longtime studio manager, has a station here. A quiet man with long straight hair and a long beard, McCraw manages Koons’s growing staff of more than 120 full-time employees. He has the same polite but oddly impervious manner as his master, who he expects will be with us in a minute. While I wait, I catch a glimpse of a new work on one of the screens, a shiny sculpture of a partially naked woman accompanied by a planter of flowers.
Koons appears, wearing an old golf shirt, jeans, and sneakers. “That
Venus—she’ll be eight feet high,” says the artist, who has noticed the direction of my gaze. “We’re putting a lot of care into her. See the way her dress is gathered up in her hands like vagina folds.” Wasting no time, Koons ushers me through the office to a painting studio. “I enjoy the sense of community. I don’t want to be in a room by myself all day. That’s why I created a studio like this,” he says, his blue eyes twinkling through wire-rimmed glasses. “I enjoy being able to provide. When I was younger, I was always the guy who paid for the beers.”
Koons conducts studio tours for collectors, curators, critics, writers, and TV crews with some frequency, and so he follows a script of sorts. He mentions how he was brought up to be “self-reliant” and tells a story from his childhood about going door to door, selling chocolates and gift wrapping paper. “I enjoyed not knowing who was going to open that door. I never knew what they would look like,” he says. “I was always someone who wanted to be engaged. It’s the same with being an artist.” I’ve read and seen a lot of interviews with Koons; he rarely gives one without airing this thought about the artist as door-to-door salesman.
We walk into a space that contains six large canvases in different states of completion, hanging on windowless walls. Under the high ceilings and rows of fluorescent lights are many two-tier wooden scaffolds on wheels. It’s lunch break, and only one woman persists in painting. She sits cross-legged on the upper deck of a scaffold, listening to her iPod, her nose a few inches from the canvas, a thin paintbrush that leaves no visible strokes in her left hand. Koons composes his paintings on computer, and his assistants execute them through an elaborate system of paint-by-number maps. A single painting is said to take three people sixteen to eighteen months to complete.
The Koons studio is quiet and industrious—nothing like Warhol’s “factory,” where people acted out wildly on drugs and became stars in his underground films. Koons does not see himself as greatly influenced by Warhol, even though he appreciates that “Andy’s work is very much about acceptance.” He also admires Warhol’s use of repeated images and his large-volume series, which he links to the quaint view that creativity—and fecundity—result from the same life force. “For
a gay man,” he says, “Warhol’s relationship to reproduction is very interesting.”
From the beginning of his career, Koons hasn’t just made art; he has made shows. He is adept at creating fully realized bodies of work that are more than the sum of their parts. He is also careful about producing enough work, but never too much. His series are confined to editions of three to five sculptures, a number that renders his work appealingly collectible. One of the most consistently coveted series in Warhol’s oeuvre are his 1964 40 × 40-inch portraits of Marilyn Monroe, which come in five distinct colors: red, blue, orange, turquoise, and sage-blue. As it happens, Koons’s “Celebration” sculptures, which have commanded his highest auction prices, also come in five “unique” color versions.
Koons doesn’t like to talk about his market because he feels that he is misunderstood as “commercial” or motivated by profit. “I don’t mind success,” he says, “but I’m really interested in desire.” When I suggest that commercial motives are attributed almost automatically to artists who command high prices at auction, he replies swiftly, “They don’t say it about Lucian Freud or Cy Twombly or Richter.” To any question related to money, Koons opts for safe answers. He defines his market, for example, as “a group of people who realize that I am very serious about my work.”
The artist’s diligent avoidance of market talk is second only to his aversion to discussing politics. In a segment for Japanese television, Roland Hagenberg caught the artist off-guard. “You don’t seem to be a man who cares about politics in art?” inquired the documentary filmmaker. “I try to do things that are not harmful to my work,” replied Koons. Indeed, overt political content could likely put a damper on his success in stimulating “desire.”
While many of the works in progress here spring from older series, three paintings announce the beginning of a new, as yet unnamed body of work. Conceived as a feminine counterpoint to the “high-testosterone” works grouped under the “Hulk Elvis” banner, these paintings are inspired by Gustave Courbet’s
L’Origine du Monde
(1866). Courbet’s highly realistic painting of a naked woman, lying on white
sheets with her legs spread, depicted only from her nipples to her upper thighs, is one of the most notorious works of the nineteenth century. On the surface of Koons’s new canvases are sketches in silver paint of female labia, which remind me less of Courbet than the plates in Judy Chicago’s
Dinner Party
and myriad feminist “central core” images. Under the sexy line drawings are collections of dots in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The dot patterns initially appear abstract, but form figurative images when viewed from a distance. Koons pulls me back to the other side of the room, but we are still not far enough away to see the figure, so he brandishes his iPhone and has me look at the works through its camera. A waterfall appears in one painting, a tree in another, a naked couple doing something intimate—I’m not sure what—in a third. Many of his paintings are derivative of his sculptures—sometimes they even look like ads for his three-dimensional pieces—but these
Origine
canvases feel like stand-alone works. I find myself liking them a lot.
