33 Artists in 3 Acts (10 page)
Tammy Rae Carland
I’m Dying Up Here (Strawberry Shortcake)
2010
I
n the Istanbul Biennial, on the wall where Kutlu
Ataman’s military rejection hangs, are six large color photographs by Tammy Rae Carland. They depict overhead views of recently vacated double beds. The subtle colors of disheveled sheets and pillows create abstract patterns, so that one photo calls to mind the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko while another summons the Minimalist work of Agnes Martin. As a whole, the series evokes a postwar history of painting. Carland’s images of beds also pay homage to a 1991 work by Félix González-Torres, which portrays the cold white sheets and pillows of an empty bed after the death of his boyfriend, Ross. As part of a public art project sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, González-Torres’s image was installed on billboards in twenty-four locations around New York City in May–June 1992. “It was the first work I saw by Félix,” says Carland, who has flown in for the biennial from her home on the border between Berkeley and Oakland in Northern California. “I wasn’t even sure it was art.” Carland’s series, titled “Lesbian Beds” (2002), feels both more intimate and more formal than González-Torres’s casual, documentary-style shot. For Carland, photography resembles theater as much as painting. “Beds are stages for identity,” she says. “They are spaces of ‘performativity’ that contribute to your sense of self.”
While it would have been conspicuous to exclude Ataman, one of
Turkey’s best-known living artists, from a biennial with gay love as a theme, the curators have included the work of many less familiar suspects. Carland didn’t obtain sustained gallery representation until five years ago, when she was forty-two, and she still doesn’t make a living from sales of her art. Like most artists around the world, she has a day job outside her studio. As a professor and chair of photography at the California College of the Arts, however, she is in the fortunate position of being paid to talk about art.
For the Istanbul opening, Carland has abandoned her workaday cardigan and clogs for a batik blouse and high wedges. An assortment of tattoos, including circular texts that say “homesick” and “unbroken,” decorate her arms. Carland is impressed with the biennial on a number of levels: it includes a huge number of women, its definition of politics is admirably broad, and it’s the first time a major international art biennial has privileged gay and lesbian issues. She also likes the González-Torres premise. “I met Félix the year before he died, when I was enrolled in the Whitney Independent Study Program,” explains the artist, as she adjusts the lone clip that tames her frizzy, long hair. “He spent two hours talking to me in my studio. To this day, it’s one of best conversations I’ve ever had about my art.” Carland suggests that González-Torres has become a legend not only because his work is really good, but also because “he had the personality to back it up. People were strongly attracted to him as a thinker.”
One theme that pervades the art of both Carland and González-Torres is love. “When I was a student, love was not considered appropriate content,” explains Carland. “Art was supposed to be anti-beautiful, anti-sentimental, anti-nostalgic. Félix was radical in using all the tropes that were off limits.” Carland has taught a graduate seminar on love as it relates to art-making, which explores the psychological dynamics between models, muses, and artist couples. She knows that love is “more elusive, more complicated, much trickier to discuss than sex.” I mention that I attended a lecture by Jeff Koons in which he systematically analyzed a body of work with reference to sexual organs and sexual activities. I float the idea that perhaps there is something in the platitude that girls seek love whereas boys want sex. Carland moves her
head a fraction of an inch to one side, then the other. “I’d rather not support that dichotomy,” she says.
Although the current art world has all but dismissed the muse as an embarrassing romantic cliché, Carland has had several “creative relationships” that were “energizing.” She recommends that we find another term, however. “‘Muse’ implies that one person is the maker while the other is the subject matter or the inspiration,” she declares. Along with her current and previous girlfriends, she cites as a muse the musician Kathleen Hanna, with whom she became friends while studying photography at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. With a third friend, they set up an independent gallery called Reko Muse (a.k.a. “wreck-o-muse”). Every few months, the local band Nirvana, led by Kurt Cobain, would do a gig to help raise the rent money for their space. When Hanna went on to become the lead singer in the preeminent Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill, Carland provided the artwork for the album covers. The two women were mutual muses or “a sisterhood,” as the artist puts it, whose support for each other’s “practice” was empowering. In the lyrics to the 1993 Bikini Kill song “For Tammy Rae,” the young Hanna expresses how, together, they could cast off critics and gain the self-assurance necessary to be creative:
We can’t hear a word they say
Let’s pretend we own the world today
I know it’s cold outside
But when we’re together I got nothing to hide
Surrogate sisters may be particularly important to Carland, given her family background. While Turkish, Arab, and Persian artists are more likely to come from the secular upper classes, many artists in the West—although still a minority—emerge from the working class. Carland’s circumstances were particularly impoverished. She grew up in rural Maine, the daughter of a single mother who worked as a waitress and had five children from three different men. Tammy Rae was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. “I grew up in the kind of welfare-class neighborhood that art students visited to do
their ‘street photography’ assignments,” she says. During a seminar at the local art school, she was embarrassed to see a slide of her mother sullenly sitting at a bus stop on a cold winter day.
Unsurprisingly, Carland was not drawn to the documentary tradition. “I’ve never been a capturer of the ‘decisive moment,’” she says, referring to a phrase associated with Henri Cartier-Bresson, the founding father of photo-reportage. “You can
take
photographs or you can
make
photographs,” she says. “I like to stage, to set up, to interrupt reality. I’m a maker.” Still, Carland sometimes deploys documentary aesthetic conventions. In “On Becoming: Billy and Katie 1964” (1998), Carland poses as her parents or “becomes” them in black-and-white photographs that mimic the candid, ethnographic style of Depression-era photographers like Dorothea Lange and August Sander. In one picture,
On Becoming Mom #2
, Carland wears curlers and holds a laundry basket in front of a clothesline in an unkempt backyard. She pauses for the camera but can’t seem to muster a smile, fulfilling the mission of the genre to depict a hard woman in the midst of a grim life. Although Carland creates fictions, she tends to derive them from careful study of her immediate social world.
Self-portraits often betray or even analyze the expectations that surround artists. Some artists hide in plain sight, much like stand-up comedians. In a color photograph titled
I’m Dying Up Here (Strawberry Shortcake)
(2010)
,
Carland sits on a stool under a harsh spotlight in the middle of a stage with a pink towel over her head. The scene evokes many of the ancillary expectations that befall artists—the pressure to speak, to be seen, to perform, to convince, to entertain. Much like an anxiety dream and more degrading than being naked, the image enacts a kind of ritual humiliation. The pink shroud depicts a kid’s cartoon character whose juvenile femininity is at odds with the seriousness of the stark stage; it questions Carland’s authority, cuts into her coolness, and acts as a damp rag to her credibility. But it also transforms her head and torso into one big phallic shape and, by these absurd means, somehow thrusts the artist back into the game.
As a teacher, Carland meets many people who aspire to be artists and keeps an eye on the ones who stay the course. She believes that artists
have varying degrees of “repetition compulsion or a drive to repeat a singular impulse over and over again, trying to get it right, or righter.” She distinguishes this from some “unstoppable urge to create,” because being an artist is mostly about hard work. “It’s rooted in discipline more than desire,” she says.
For Carland, the worst thing about teaching is having to stop doing her own work when she is “on a roll” and then “get back up to speed” when she resumes. Sometimes the process feels almost “assignment-driven,” as she puts it, “given the limited time frames.” However, Carland thinks it’s healthy to stay engaged with other people’s “art practices.” “It pulls me away from myself,” she explains as she leans back on one of the cement pillars that line the exhibition space.
Carland speaks of her “practice” more often than her work, so I inquire about this instance of art-school jargon. Although the term has a defensive ring, she likes its twofold connotations. On the one hand, “it’s like a rehearsal,” she says, plunging her hands into the pockets of her white jeans. “You practice until you get it right. It’s about what we do rather than a perfect endgame or linear achievement.” On the other hand, the term echoes other professional worlds insofar as “doctors practice medicine and lawyers have law practices.” If the first nuance “minimizes” the artist’s job, the second “legitimizes” it. Either way, Carland advises her students to view their careers as a checkerboard rather than a ladder. “Being an artist is one of the most misunderstood roles,” she says. “It is so different from a mainstream career.”
Carland’s girlfriend, Terry Berlier, an artist who teaches at Stanford, arrives at the biennial. It’s late lunchtime. As the day progresses, the warehouses fill with artists, curators, dealers, critics, and collectors from all over the world. On the other side of the room, I see Ingar Dragset, the Norwegian half of the artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset, standing in front of “
Spring Break”
(1997), a suite of photographs by Collier Schorr depicting two amorous androgynous girls in white bras. Seeing Schorr’s work reminds me of something she said to me a few years ago. When I asked for her thoughts about artists with larger-than-life personas, she suggested that “they usually have larger-than-life bank accounts!”
I put the same question to Carland. “Larger-than-life?” she repeats as she thinks. “Kurt Cobain and I were part of the same punk music community in Olympia. He was the guy next door,” says Carland, who followed the success of Nirvana and the suicide of its leader with uneasy interest. “Being famous can really fuck with your identity,” she offers. “Everyone feels that they own you.”
Jeff Koons
Rabbit
1986
I
n the United Arab Emirates, women wear black
abayas
while men don white, flowing
dishdashas
. This fact darts through my head as I walk on stage in white trousers and a black jacket to chair a panel discussion. Larry Gagosian and Jeff Koons, my interviewees, follow me up the steps. Koons wears yet another impeccable suit with a bright white shirt and dark silk tie. Over the past few years, I’ve bumped into him in Moscow and Kiev and observed his aptitude for making friends in emerging markets. As he takes his seat, he beams at the multinational audience that has gathered for the Abu Dhabi Art Fair, which takes place on Saadiyat Island near the vast construction sites of the new Louvre and Guggenheim museums. The local Guggenheim’s acquisition policy has not been announced, but one insider tells me that it will include “nudes but no Mapplethorpes,” referring to the late gay photographer. Gagosian almost never participates in public talks. The dealer is no doubt subjecting himself to this interview in order to ensure that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi embraces his wares. That said, he doesn’t look dressed for business as much as for lunch in Monaco. The middleman slumps in his chair in a beige check jacket, no tie. Some might assume that he was the artist.
