33 Artists in 3 Acts (29 page)

The phone rings. It’s Lena. He asks her to pick up some Vicks Nyquil cough formula. “Yes, red, the color of vampire blood.” He pauses. “No, doll, thanks. I’m all set.” He hangs up. Lena returned from India a few days ago. Simmons is still there, sleeping in a tent on the shores of a beautiful lake with wild monkeys. Grace is in Virginia, driving elderly Democrats to polling booths. “There’s a lot of research on the way human society affects us as an organism. If I was alone all the time, my immune system would be a fucking mess,” he says.

It occurs to me that Dunham is sitting on the swivel chair that was occupied by Simmons’s love doll when I was last in this space. Before I can express the thought, he asks, “Do you feel like the kids understand anything about Laurie’s and my work?” I’m surprised by the question. Both girls were thoughtful, I say. Grace spoke persuasively about the way you underline rather than universalize a straight white male perspective, while Lena drew my attention to the paradox of a superbly articulate artist who works in a silent medium. “One of the reasons I was so drawn to visual art is because my father was overwhelmingly verbal,” explains Dunham. “He was an intermittently failed businessman who had four different careers. He was bright but he talked too much and never delivered the goods.” Dunham dreaded a life without direction, so the idea of focusing on something nonverbal felt right. For whatever reason, he has a strong sense of purpose, so he sees himself as “tailor-made” to be an artist.

“Wanna see my ‘secret’ drawing studio?” says Dunham playfully. The artist takes me back up the stairs past an unusual painting that he made in the late 1990s of a naked, black female character holding a gun, in which both her body and firearm look like puzzle pieces. We exit their loft, wait for the elevator, and then go down a floor. Dunham hasn’t bothered to put on shoes for the journey. We walk along the communal hallway to a white door that, once unlocked, gives way to a wacky two-story walk-in closet that is almost impossible to describe. The room was originally two lavatories (on the third and fourth floors) that Simmons used for storage until Dunham took them over to create what he calls a “man cave situation.” We go through the room whose walls host three rows of drawings, up a slender staircase to a petite white desk and a
window through which we can see slow-floating snowflakes. The cave feels a bit more like an all-white tree house or a portal to an alternative reality. Having such a small space in the city has its frustrations. “I miss having studio visits from my peers.”

Having said that, Dunham is unsure whether he has a peer group. Most of his close painter friends are older or younger than he is. While he is roughly the same age as Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and David Salle, Dunham doesn’t think it makes sense to think of them as a group. The artist stares at a drawing of a nude among bulrushes whose nonspecific partial profile means that her identity will forever elude. “It would be nice to think of David as my painting colleague,” he explains. “Since my work has focused on the female body, I’ve come to see his earlier work on that subject—for which he took a lot of shit—in a much more sympathetic light.” When artists are young, they often feel the presence of a generational cohort whether they belong to it or not. But, as time passes, the sense of equality essential to the definition of a “peer” falls away. Dunham once assumed this “phenomenon” resulted from artists’ desire to be “the only artist in the world or the only patient of their psychiatrist.” Now, he thinks, “It’s just really hard to find people who are on the same page.”

Jason Nocito

Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick

(After General Idea’s
Baby Makes 3
, 1984–89)

2006

SCENE 17

Massimiliano Gioni

“A
n extended invisible family . . . flexible and interchangeable, somewhere between a think tank and a criminal association,” wrote Massimiliano Gioni about Maurizio Cattelan’s studio in an essay titled “No man is an island.” Gioni has, as he puts it, “grown up with Maurizio.” Always precocious, the thirty-nine-year-old curator is now the artistic director of the 55th Venice Biennale, the youngest in its 118-year history.

Gioni’s first extended encounter with Cattelan was peculiar. “Every time I asked a question, Maurizio would go through a file full of quotes and pick somebody else’s words to answer. It was slow and painful,” says Gioni, who is sitting in the center of his East Village dining room-cum-office surrounded by shelves full of well-organized books and carefully curated kitsch. “Maurizio was questioning authorship and the self. Until ‘The Pope,’ the main theme of his work was, ‘Who am I?’” “The Pope” is a life-size wax statue of Pope John Paul II knocked down by a meteorite. Officially titled
The Ninth Hour
(1999), the felled father figure is one of Cattelan’s most celebrated works. On Gioni’s windowsill is a ceramic figurine of a generic pope. Over his praying hands hangs the old key to the Wrong Gallery. Next to it is a battery-operated plastic hand that plays a rinky-dink tune while giving the finger, which might have been
the inspiration for Cattelan’s monumental
L.O.V.E.
The objects were gifts from the artist to Gioni and his wife, Cecilia Alemani.

The second time Gioni and Cattelan met, the artist was scheduled to do an interview on Italian public radio. He persuaded Gioni to do it for him. It was the first of many “Cattelan” interviews and museum talks that the curator did between 1998 and 2006. Notoriously, Gioni even spoke as the maker of “The Pope” on Vatican radio. “It was clear I was overstepping the bounds of a critic. You are meant to be objective and maintain a distance from your subject,” admits Gioni. “Plus there was an element of corruption because I was getting paid.” The ruse is not without precedent. In 1967, Andy Warhol agreed to a cross-country college lecture tour but sent one of his acolytes from the Factory, an actor called Allen Midgette. Given that Gioni is not an actor working from someone else’s script but one who has written extensively about Cattelan’s work and contributed to the shape of his persona, the curator prefers to think about the scam in terms of a longer art history. He’s always been interested in those critics who became the spokesmen for artistic movements, such as Tristan Tzara, who spoke for the Dadaists, André Breton, who wrote manifestos for the surrealists, and Clement Greenberg, who defined the Abstract Expressionist project. “They were the mouthpieces for artists,” he explains. “In my case, I was becoming the artist. We took it a step further.”

Gioni wasn’t impersonating Cattelan so much as lending the artist his own, more articulate way with words. “In the beginning, we thought that Maurizio’s voice should feel weird and detached, more Brechtian. We would drop hints, so, if you listened carefully, you knew it was a construction,” says Gioni, who chuckles self-consciously when he uses academic jargon. “Then, in about 2001, we decided to go for sincerity, making everything sound heartfelt and confessional, even if it was still completely synthetic.” Gioni knows Francesco Bonami well, having worked for him on the 2003 Venice Biennale, and has read his unauthorized autobiography of Cattelan. “I think his ‘Cattelan’ falls on the sincere side,” says Gioni with a big grin. “I told Francesco that it’s such a good book that I suspect he was dependent on a ghost writer!”

Gioni zips up his black sweater and glances at his phone. He apologizes that, in the run up to the Biennale, he is so “crazy-busy” that he will have to take a call in twenty minutes. When he resumes focus, Gioni says, “Henri-Pierre Roché said about Duchamp that his greatest masterpiece was his use of time. I have always envied that about Maurizio. He is one of the hardest-working people I know but he has managed to shape his life in a way that allows plenty of free time, or something that resembles free time.” With regard to Cattelan’s retirement, the curator–critic says it is looking increasingly like “a model” and jokes that he himself should probably retire after Venice. Right now, however, what he really needs is “another me.”

When he worked with Cattelan and Ali Subotnick on the Wrong Gallery, and even more so when they curated the Berlin Biennial together in 2006, Gioni came to understand what an artist can bring to the curatorial process. Cattelan basically abandoned his own art for two years to work on the Berlin exhibition and, according to Gioni, did a lot of things that an artist wouldn’t normally do, such as sitting in meetings. “Maurizio gave us the legitimacy to try things,” he explains. “He gave the whole team an authority and liberty. As Warhol says, art is what you can get away with.”

One reason it is difficult to define artists is because there are so many romantic myths about them—some of which steer close to the truth. “I’m just talking about a few friends: Maurizio, Urs Fischer, Tino Sehgal,” says Gioni, widening his black-brown eyes. “They are incredibly hardworking professional people but they have a very unusual relationship to authority and rules. They have invented structures to support themselves and, somehow, they are problematizing productivity and efficiency.” Gioni leans back in his swivel chair and brightens. “You know how you can recognize an artist?” he says. “An artist is the one who misses planes! How many planes have you missed in your life? I have missed one. The artists I know miss planes all the time. Did they want to avoid the meeting or were they trying to finish a piece? Were they afraid of flying? You never know.”

How would you characterize your relationships with artists? I ask.

“I am a polygamist,” he says without skipping a beat. “Many curators are loyal to their generation. Francesco Bonami, Germano Gelant, Bonito Oliva—they have been good at that. Maybe my tastes are too diverse or maybe it’s just a different time. For whatever reason, I am more of a polygamist than them.”

A marriage model, then? I ask.

“It’s much more like a divorce,” he replies. “Doing a show, you go through a whole relationship in a year—from courting, through the wedding, to trial separation and divorce. But mostly it’s about divorce. A lot of the conversations are about money. How can we find more? Could it cost less? Or, oh my God, you didn’t tell me you spent that.”

Cattelan told me that you haven’t put him in your Biennale, I say.

“No? Really?” he replies, a flash of concern crossing his face. “I told him from the beginning he could not be in it. Is he hurt?”

I’m sure he understands, I say, but Venice is Venice and Maurizio is Italian.

“I put very few friends in Venice,” he replies. “I made a big effort not to put artists with whom I had worked before.”

How would you describe your relationship with Maurizio? I ask.

Gioni looks flummoxed. He covers his mouth with his hand and looks over my shoulder into the distance. “There is a funny story from the sixties,” he says finally. “Henry Geldzahler was an early supporter of Andy Warhol, but when he did his comprehensive show of New York painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, Geldzahler didn’t include him. At the opening, someone saw Warhol and stopped him on the stairs. They said, ‘Andy, why aren’t you in the show?’ and Warhol said, ‘Because I am Henry’s first wife.’”
*

Gioni’s phone vibrates. “Sorry, I have to take this. Do you want to wait until I am finished?” he asks. Before I can answer, he says into the phone, “Hello. Yeah. I’m in the middle of something but I’m here and we can do this now.” I turn off my digital recorder and put it in my bag. I mouth the words “Thank you” and “See you in Venice,” then let myself out.

Laurie Simmons

Still from
MY ART