33 Artists in 3 Acts (45 page)

Andrea Fraser

Art Must Hang

2001

SCENE 13

Andrea Fraser

L
ooming like a demigod over the entrance to the prestigious Museum Ludwig in Cologne is Andrea Fraser, depicted on a two-story billboard. She has been honored with the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, which is accompanied by a retrospective show and $100,000 for acquisition of a work or works by the artist. Fraser once imagined that such accolades were “narcissistically stabilizing,” but experiencing them brings home the fact that status is always relative and conditional. At the awards ceremony, Fraser quoted aptly from a number of her works—not just from the careful arrangement of acceptance speeches that she performs in
Official Welcome
. Self-fulfilling prophecies are Fraser’s stock-in-trade. Indeed, she once declared, “Art-making is a profession of social fantasy . . . overvaluing and overestimating possibilities, investing in futures that do not really exist are occupational requirements.”

The Museum Ludwig has one of the best collections of modern art in Europe, with particularly strong groupings of Picasso, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. Built in 1986, the awkward building has a jagged roofline with hundreds of skylights that shed a glorious amount of natural light. A grandiose processional staircase leads down to Fraser’s show, which is in a subterranean area often used for exhibitions dominated by video.

An eight-foot-high pile of spectacular readymade costumes, a work by Fraser titled
A Monument to Discarded Fantasies
(2003), sits in the large foyer at the bottom of the stairs. During carnival in Rio de Janeiro, thousands of people parade in extravagant
fantasias
(which means both “costumes” and “fantasies” in Portuguese) that are sometimes discarded in the street when the festivities are over. The symbolism of the custom caught Fraser’s imagination. After repeated visits to Rio and São Paulo—which led the artist to take up samba dancing and, for a time, weightlifting—Fraser’s body came to play a central role in her work. The artist credits Brazil with helping her “make peace” with her exhibitionism.

Fraser finds performing to be “less terrifying” than standing around while people look at her work. She also prefers to internalize and embody ideas than to externalize and distill them into objects. “As artists, we exhibit parts of ourselves, whether it’s our bodies, or things we make, or our inner lives in the course of interviews. We expose ourselves,” Fraser told me when I saw her at UCLA. While a desire to communicate is a key artistic motivator, a fear of being too direct or didactic also prevails. Fraser refers again to her favorite British psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, who wrote an article titled “Communicating and Not Communicating,” which considered the case of artists. It analyzed the inherent dilemma between the desire to express oneself and the anxiety that it provokes, between an urgent yearning to be known and a more urgent need to keep parts of oneself hidden. “That conflict,” explained Fraser, “is central to a lot of what artists do.”

The museum is packed with a professional throng of collectors, curators, and dealers who have come from all over Germany to Cologne for its annual art fair and attendant events. While few people focus on
Discarded Fantasies
, a substantial crowd watches
Art Must Hang
(2001), a video installation in which Fraser impersonates Martin Kippenberger, a cult German artist, delivering a drunken after-dinner speech. Kippenberger died in 1997 at age forty-three of alcohol-related liver cancer. The prolific painter may have doubted the future viability of painting but he had complete conviction in his larger-than-life persona. To this day, the most
sought-after Kippenberger works are self-portraits, particularly a series in which he wears white underwear and flaunts his pot belly.

“Can we have some quiet here, so one can say a few words?” hollers Fraser in German in a masculine voice. “Would one of our top art dealers and teachers, for example, be so kind as to take a seat?” Fraser appears as a ghostly life-size projection on the wall between real canvases; her virtual feet seem to touch the gallery’s wooden floor. Her rendition of Kippenberger is a word-for-word reenactment of a speech that he delivered after the opening of a show by his friend Michel Würthle, an artist better known as the owner of the Paris Bar, an art-world hangout in Berlin. “So today, let’s drink to the artist . . . But let’s not forget what mean, petty bourgeois assholes we are, who can’t even look at this dumb-ass exhibition,” says Fraser gruffly with a slight sway. Kippenberger’s notorious speeches were abusive rituals punctuated with bad jokes about Nazis with speech impediments, “foreigners,” “faggots,” and “squeaky little bunnies” who should “throw their tampons out the window.”

On one of her many trips to Germany, Fraser had heard Kippenberger give such an impromptu monologue. She decided she wanted to perform one of his speeches, eventually discovered a single recording, which she treated as a readymade, transcribing and memorizing it. “Kippenberger was performing ‘the asshole’ in a way that was both self-conscious and self-loathing,” Fraser told me. “He performed his ambivalence towards his peers and patrons with sadomasochistic zeal. I respected that about him.”

The show has become so packed with people that it is hard to move. After several rooms featuring video installations comes a large open space, which includes documentation in vitrines, books central to Fraser’s intellectual formation, and monitors with earphones playing performances such as the mock conference panels that Fraser created with the V-Girls, a feminist troupe, between 1986 and 1996. After that, I enter a room featuring a single round small speaker installed in the middle of a white wall, which is playing an audio-only version of
Untitled
, Fraser’s sexual “exchange” with the collector. In this ambient piece, the
artist includes all her own sounds and edits out his. It feels unnervingly intimate and adds a whole other dimension to the silent video version of the work.

In the final space of the retrospective are two texts including “L’1%, C’est Moi” (2011), which Fraser wrote as a means of tackling her discomfort with the booming art market’s reliance on the gap between the rich and the poor.
*
Fraser started out by investigating the involvement of museum trustees in the financial crisis. When
Artforum
declined to publish the unsolicited piece, the artist then wrote a slightly different article for the German quarterly
Texte der Kunst
, in which she used an alphabetical listing of the top 200 collectors published by
ARTnews
. For example, “A” includes Bernard Arnault, whose $41 billion make him the fourth richest man in the world. The mega-collector is the owner of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, which, “despite the debt crisis, reported sales growth of 13 percent.” “B” is for Eli Broad, the principal benefactor of UCLA’s art school. He is a major shareholder of AIG, the recipient of the largest government bailout in American corporate history. And so the list goes on. Few artists focus on the sources of the art market’s liquidity, let alone point out that “what has been good for the art world,” as she puts it, “has been disastrous for the rest of the world.” Fraser adopted the 1 percent nomenclature after reading an article in
Vanity Fair
by Joseph E. Stiglitz, which described how the top 1 percent control 40 percent of America’s wealth. When the Occupy movement hit the news, Fraser’s article went viral.

On its own wooden lectern opposite “L’1%, C’est Moi” is the catalogue of the Whitney Biennial 2012, in which Fraser published “There’s no place like home,” an essay that addresses similar themes. Fraser was initially invited to contribute to the biennial’s catalogue, but did so on the condition that she was a participating artist. In assuming the double
role, Fraser moved from being a servile scribe to featured talent and her text was put on display on a pedestal in the exhibition. Although essays are an important part of Fraser’s output, she doesn’t call them “works.” In her opinion, the category of an artwork is a “ghetto or prison” and she is keen to resist the “avant-garde impulse to pull more things into the prison.”

Isaac Julien

Still from
PLAYTIME

2013

SCENE 14

Isaac Julien

“S
tand by,” bellows the first AD or assistant director. Like the other twenty crew on set, he is dressed entirely in black and wears shoes that don’t squeak so he can move around quietly. They are working on the empty thirtieth floor of Heron Tower in the heart of the City of London. Advertised as an “advanced business life environment,” the new skyscraper has floor-to-ceiling windows that offer commanding views of the metropolis. Landmarks such as the “Gherkin” and the “Shard,” the tallest building in the European Union, which is co-owned by the Qatari ruling family, stand out against a cloudy, windswept sky. Changing light conditions have been one of the day’s biggest battles for the DOP (director of photography), her gaffer (chief lighting technician), and his three sparks (electricians).

“Quiet on the set,” hollers the first AD with firm affability. He acts as an extension of the director’s will, a proxy who whips everyone into position so the director can focus on the big picture. “Cameras running!” he shouts. A young man wearing a T-shirt sporting a picture of a stack of old VHS tapes swings an iPad in front of the lens of the state-of-the-art high-definition Steadicam. It says that we are on the set of
PLAYTIME
directed by Isaac Julien, and tells the exact time down to the hundredth of a second. The iPad or “smart slate” has replaced the old-fashioned chalkboard clapperboard once used to identify the take.

“Okay, ready and . . . action!” Colin Salmon, a dashing black English actor best known for his appearances in James Bond films, walks into frame; Craig Daniel Adams, a young white Scottish actor, is sitting on a leather swivel chair. Dressed head to toe in Prada, they are playing hedge fund managers who are considering the office space for the headquarters of a company called G.E.T. Capital. Adams’s character tells an anecdote in which he describes how he defined hedge funds at a party. “You see that guy over there, the one in that group with the short dark hair who keeps looking at me?” says Adams’s gay character to Salmon’s straight one. “Well, let’s say I’m convinced he’s wearing briefs, not boxers. I’m so sure of that one sartorial fact that I bet $20 million on it. The trouble is that if I’m wrong, I’m wiped out. So I also bet he is wearing boxers. Let’s say, I put $19 million on that possibility. That’s the hedge! Now, if I’m right, I make a million, but if I’m wrong, I’m only going to lose a million, because I’m almost fully hedged.” The cameraman steps soundlessly around them with a boom operator hugging his side. “And what if he’s commando?” asks Salmon. “You’d need to take out another option.” The actors and their shadows come to a standstill. “He wasn’t,” retorts Adams coyly.

“Okay, cameras cut!” says Isaac Julien from behind a black draped enclosure where two monitors relay the live feeds—the area the film industry calls a “video assist” or “video village.” It reminds me of
The Wizard of Oz
when the mysterious, supreme wizard is revealed as just a man behind a curtain. “Thanks, guys! That’s good. That’s exxxxcellllent!” says Julien as he emerges. The artist, the eldest of five children, took care of his siblings while his parents worked nights; his warm, patient tone suggests that mothering was his introduction to management. “I thought it was quite nice when Colin [Salmon] happened to walk out of frame and back,” says Julien to Nina Kellgren, the DOP with whom he has worked for over twenty years. Among other films, Kellgren shot
Looking for Langston
(1989), Julien’s celebrated meditation on gay desire, which is considered one of the founding pictures of “queer cinema.”