33 Artists in 3 Acts (26 page)
Cattelan has always been interested in what he calls the “media resonance” or “visual persistence” of his work, so his current fascination with more broadly distributed images comes as no surprise. The name
Toilet Paper
may say it all—the desire to be ubiquitous and disposable. “Everybody needs
Toilet Paper
,” he quips.
The waitress delivers our bill with two fortune cookies. I crack mine open. It says, “Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back.” I hand it to Cattelan. On the day of your retrospective, I say, this one is for you. Cattelan reads it, then the slip of paper he’s pulled out of his own cookie. “Here’s yours,” he says with a smile. It says, “There’s no such thing as an ordinary cat.”
Lena Dunham
Still from
Tiny Furniture
2010
“I
was told that I should go on a date with Maurizio,” says Lena Dunham incredulously about the artist who is twenty-six years her senior. The writer–actress–director–producer has just ordered buttered scones and camomile tea in the quiet lobby of a hotel in the West End of London. The front desk knows her only by a pseudonym. She is wearing earrings in the shape of small bats and a slimming black jacket that she describes as a “pleasure to own,” and looks much more beautiful than she does on her HBO show
Girls
.
“When I was little, I thought the New York art world was everything,” says Lena in her distinctly sweet and scratchy voice. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the mechanics. You go into your studio, you have studio visits, you have openings.” Until the age of eight, she wanted to be an artist. “I thought that was what people’s jobs were and I thought it was cool to be the same thing as your parents.”
During adolescence, Lena decided that being a visual artist was “old-fashioned” and “small.” It felt like “a trap.” In her view, the audience for art is “rich people” and “those who wander into the white box.” In a world of new communications technologies that have the power to reach millions, “it didn’t seem germane.” Being an artist felt stifling in other ways too. “My dad is such a verbal, funny person,” says Lena, “but he does this job where, for the most part, talking doesn’t exist.”
When
Girls
first launched, bloggers attacked Lena for benefiting from nepotism, as if Carroll Dunham ran HBO or Laurie Simmons had sway in Hollywood. “People were complaining before they had figured out who my parents were,” she explains. Shortly afterward, the Internet was flooded with articles about Lena’s “not-so-famous” artist parents. “No one is going to give you a TV show because of your parents,” she declares as she slips off her shoes and swings her legs up onto the velvet couch. “It is just not going to happen.”
Growing up in an artistic household, however, had positive effects. “I was given the tools, the space, and the support to do whatever I wanted,” she explains. “New approaches to old problems were encouraged.” Lena thinks about creativity as “an ineffable bug that takes you over but also something that you can learn.” The idea that you need to be inspired is unhelpful, if not obstructive. “My parents taught me that you can have a creative approach to thinking that is almost scientific,” she explains. “You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you can perform again and again.”
Although Lena abandoned her desire to be an artist in the strict sense, her definition of an artist could be applied to her current role. “As an artist,” she says, “you get the opportunity to write the world—or create the world—that exists in your fantasies. It’s a really beautiful thing to do.”
From afar, Lena’s work in television might look closer to her mother’s collaborations than to her father’s solitary practice of painting, but Lena doesn’t see it that way. “Everything that I do comes out of writing. It’s the genesis point,” she explains. “You go within yourself, wrestle with your demons, scribble some stuff up and come out with a vision of what the world is like. It is closer to being a painter.” By contrast, Lena views being a director as akin to being a photographer because both are “managerial and social.” She shines as she admits, “It rescues you from the lonely life of a writer.” As an extension of her writing and directing roles, Lena is also a producer. Ironically, in television, the term “producer” is used interchangeably to describe either “the creator” or a person with the financial skills to raise and allocate money. It’s hard
to imagine that happening in the art world, where artists who act like dealers are often viewed with suspicion.
When it comes to artists and actors, Lena finds few parallels. “You can’t indulge your private creative brain when you are following a script,” she says. An actor is more like a musician in an orchestra. “When I am acting, I don’t feel like a boss,” she explains. “I feel like I am working in service to myself as a director. And I wish every actor was thinking that way too!”
When Lena cast her mother as a dealer in
Girls
, Simmons behaved on set like the artist she is. In an interview broadcast after the program, Lena said, Simmons is “the biggest diva I’ve worked with in this business. She changed all her lines. She chose her own costumes. She gave direction to other actors as well as the DP.” Lena wavers comically between smiling and frowning when I confront her with her words. “I recognized that I was casting someone who can’t be complaisant. It’s not in her DNA,” she explains. “My mom always said to me, ‘The talent is allowed to act weird.’ She embraces the idea that, as an artist, she can act a little persnickety and say exactly what she wants.”
Your mother told me that she uses embarrassment as a tool in her creative process, I say, leafing through the transcript of an old interview with her parents. “If I am starting to feel like I am alone with my pants down in my studio,” said Simmons, “I think, okay, let’s keep traveling slowly in this direction.”
Girls
is full of humiliating situations. Do you use discomfort as a means of gauging the emotional importance of an idea? I ask.
“The kind of shame I deal with in my work is about returning to the scene of the crime with all my senses operating,” replies Lena. “I agree with Woody Allen’s theory that tragedy plus distance equals comedy.” The writer–director–actress describes herself as “insanely close” to her family so it is difficult for her to get perspective on their influence. “My dad is a little more consistent and unwavering in his work process and he’s more apt to display it to those around him,” she says, “whereas my mom goes away, hands flying, comes back, and something has been made.”
Lena sips her tea delicately, with the porcelain cup in one hand and its saucer in the other. She is calmer and more refined than her onscreen persona in the comedy series, whose tagline is “almost getting it kind of together.” Indeed, Lena sits a few rungs higher up the class ladder than her Hannah character.
Lena’s comfort with her public persona is one area where she and her father, despite their affinities, drastically diverge. When Dunham pere refused to be in
Tiny Furniture
, Lena wrote him out of existence. As he told me, “Father, what father? The kid was created by parthenogenesis or something.” Lena is adamant that the film’s “complete avoidance” of a father figure was “not in any way a ‘fuck you’ to him.” Rather, she felt that no one else could embody him and has “yet to figure out how to write him.”
Despite her intimacy with artists, Lena acknowledges that she has trouble depicting them. Among the quirky, complex male characters on
Girls
is an artist named Booth Jonathan, who is portrayed two-dimensionally as an arrogant egotist. One of the leading female characters compares him to Damien Hirst and then has funny-gruesome bad sex with him. “Artists are hard for me to write,” admits Lena. She imagines her “father’s disapproval when something doesn’t feel real” and she doesn’t want to contribute to the comic cliché that contemporary art is a con that dupes through pretension. “Booth Jonathan,” she admits, “was based on douche-y college boys more than any of the cool, smart artists I’ve met through my parents.”
Cindy Sherman
Untitled
2010
A
ttached to 250 lampposts in San Francisco are banners that declare “CINDY SHERMAN” in letters taller than the Museum of Modern Art’s logo. Next to the text is a head shot of Sherman in one of her many guises. Three versions of the artist’s face are also being used in an advertisement appearing on the sides of 160 buses. If Sherman is not already a star in the city known for its drag queens and dot-com billionaires, the museum’s marketing team will make her one. A retrospective at a major museum is not just an endorsement, but a blast of exposure.
Sherman’s retrospective is in the midst of its second installation. On the fourth floor of San Francisco’s MoMA is an assortment of deep blue shipping crates from New York’s MoMA. Most of the photographs are already hung, but a few rest on white Styrofoam strips on the floor. One man is atop an installation crane or “genie” adjusting the direction of the lights, while another is vacuuming the floor around a hip-high mound of wallpaper that has been ripped off the dramatic curved wall that both introduces and concludes the exhibition. Somehow, the wrong file was printed and Sherman’s larger-than-life wallpaper work suffered from unsightly pixilation. The 15-foot-high mural has been reprinted and is scheduled to arrive within the hour.
Sherman is directing a crew of black-gloved installers on the
appropriate height of a 1993 photograph in the third of the ten rooms that make up the exhibition. In
Untitled #276
, a brazen blonde wears a crown and a see-through dress, which reveals her nipples and generous pubic bush. Looking dejected on the floor to the right of this self-appointed queen is the picture of the clown whose jacket is embroidered with the name “Cindy.” Indeed, the sad character has just been cut out of the show. The San Francisco version of Sherman’s retrospective has fifteen fewer photographs than the New York edition. A productive artist with some five hundred different images to her name, Sherman admits that the edit has not been easy. “If a wall label or the audio guide referred to a piece, it had to stay,” she explains. And, as the museum café will be serving a raspberry and vanilla ice cream float inspired by a photo of a clown holding a bottle of pink pop near his groin,
Untitled #415
(2004) can’t be cut from the show either.
When I saw Sherman in the studio, she had long, straight, dirty blonde hair. Now she sports a wavy platinum bob. She’s also swapped her generic gray T-shirt for a distinctive black jacket, striped shorts, and sparkling blue sandals. Sherman loves fashion. The artist will no doubt blend in well with the collectors who attend her opening wearing Versace and Chanel.
Sherman walks into the next room, and the room after that, eyeing the relationships between the works. She doesn’t like it when the installation is “too even.” Among the salon-hang of her old master pictures is Sherman’s incarnation of Caravaggio’s self-portrait as the god of wine. “We had to replace a couple of the frames,” says Sherman. When they were installing this series in New York, she noticed that a few had been reframed with plain black wood. “It looks so less interesting,” she declares. “I don’t know why they did that.” When I remark casually that the collector-lenders may have removed the ornate gold frames because they didn’t match their slickly contemporary living rooms, Sherman looks aghast.
In the sixth room, we encounter Erin O’Toole, the museum’s assistant curator of photography. “We feel pretty good about the show,” she says cheerily. “We’re almost there. Just need to clean up and do the labels.” Sherman is looking over O’Toole’s shoulder at
Untitled #155
(1985), a
photograph in which Sherman appears to be a naked corpse lying in the brush and wears a fake bottom with a red crack. The artist walks backward away from the work, leans her torso to the left and then the right. “The butt needs to come down an inch,” she says firmly. O’Toole nods at her respectfully, then turns to a couple of installers and half-hollers, “How do you guys feel about moving the butt?”
