Through the looking-glass

A passageway through a nondescript block of flats leads Jonathan Glancey to the artist Anish Kapoor's new home: a quiet oasis filled with sculpture, light and green spaces

Looking for the artist Anish Kapoor's new house in Chelsea, London, I decide he might be having a Turner moment. I was expecting a beautifully crafted modern house, with walls of glass, stone and shimmering stainless steel, designed by the architect Tony Fretton. What I didn't know was that all of this would be secreted behind a bland slab of speculative neo-Georgian design.

The painter JMW Turner set up home in Chelsea more than 150 years ago, when it was a poor and unfashionable suburb - but one where wonderful light was cast every day over the Thames. The Indian-born Kapoor belongs to a very different generation of British artist, one that thrives on celebrity. In moving to Chelsea, he has chosen to make his family home in what is now one of the most expensive and least bohemian parts of London.

Kapoor and his wife Susanna's Notting Hill home was designed by an architect friend, Pip Horne, in the late 1980s, so the idea of building a new house was not in itself a challenge. What was new was the idea of a modern house hidden from the street - "as you might find in Paris or Barcelona," Kapoor explains. A passage below the neo-Geo flats leads you into a world of unexpected courtyards, gardens and trees. There are enormous rooms, sudden stairs, cleverly constructed views and a richness of low-key materials. The narrow entrance gives way to a star-shaped courtyard, open to the sky. The kitchen and dining room are at one end of this courtyard; the other is faced, down a few wide steps, by a long living room. This is as much a private art gallery as a space in which to relax or entertain.

"The idea of the courtyards was a given, really," says Kapoor. "This is a long, narrow site and we wanted to get as much daylight into the rooms as possible. The idea developed so that the house became a way of walking in and out of fresh air and gardens, on the way from one side to the other."

Kapoor has collaborated with a number of architects over the years; a series of striking curved and mirror-finished entrances for subway stations in Naples, which he developed with Future Systems, will open later this year. His most radical work on an architectural, and indeed monumental, scale has been in partnership with the structural engineer Cecil Balmond. Their Marsyas sculpture, installed in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2002, was an extraordinary stretch of voluptuous red fabric. Next year, another Balmond-Kapoor project will transform the Middlesbrough landscape: Tenemos, a kind of voluminous windsock stretched between apparently delicate posts, is the first of a series of five vast public artworks, with sites in Stockton, Redcar, Hartlepool and Darlington next in line. "All these projects," Kapoor says, "are about interrogating form, and making large-scale objects that manage to be as ethereal as they are substantial."

Where Kapoor's sculptures are often richly coloured and sensuously formed, his new home works around a limited palette. At first glance, it is as cool as a cucumber. "I am naturally playful," Kapoor agrees, "while Tony [Fretton], though he has a dry sense of humour, can be almost comically dour." The principal rooms have been designed for books and artworks. These, and family life (the Kapoors have two children), will provide all the colour needed. Fretton has worked with Hopton Wood limestone and Mandale Fossil stone, two materials much loved by British sculptors and architects since the 1930s. Hopton Wood limestone, quarried near Matlock, Derbyshire, is creamy, warm and studded with fossils; Mandale Fossil limestone, from a quarry close by, comes in shades of grey and is immensely hard-wearing.

Kapoor and Fretton have known each other for years, since the artist's work was first shown in the Fretton-designed Lisson Gallery, in London. "We've enjoyed a healthily detached relationship," says Kapoor. "As a client, you need some sense of distance from your architect. I thought of keeping out of the way while he built the house - he's a craftsman by nature and very involved in construction - but I couldn't help myself, and ended up coming down nearly every morning on my way to my studio in Camberwell."

Kapoor doesn't intend to work from home. "The house is a quiet object," he says. "This is a family home, not a place for me to make a mess - I have a studio for that. For me, architecture is about the essentials of light, space, proportion and materials. I don't want to live in a sculpture designed by an architect. I go crazy when I hear people say that the best new sculpture is by architects - meaning overexpressive buildings. I love making sculptures, and collaborating with architects, but I want to live in a house that's a happy home, not an artwork."

Kapoor says that if he could have chosen any architect in recent history to build him a house, he would have chosen Louis Kahn. "No disrespect to Tony. Kahn is long dead, and anyway, I'm not sure I would be able to live up to one of his designs. He made everyday buildings somehow mythic, and my family and I need a healthy dose of reality to make everyday life comfortable. Tony and I also share a huge admiration for the work of [American conceptual artist] Dan Graham, and this house is partly a homage to him. We'll be installing a Graham pavilion in the garden courtyard here, so house and artwork will play off one another."

Fretton has designed homes and studios for artists throughout his career. From the Lisson Gallery in Marylebone, through the Camden Arts Centre (in 2004), via modest and beautiful spaces including the Holton Lee Studios on the Dorset coast, Fretton's subtle designs have been handmaidens to modern British art. Each is quietly powerful; none gets in the way. Kapoor describes his own home as "a reflection of a quiet modern vernacular". "It has traditional rooms, even if some are pretty big. And, look, we've even got skirting boards! They're made of strips of stainless steel rather than traditional timber, but which modern architect would put skirting boards in a new house? They hate them."

In a sense, Fretton and Kapoor are following in a tradition of creating just such houses in Chelsea - artists' homes that play a subtle game of balancing new and age-old designs, plans and building materials. In the late 19th century, artists such as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Singer Sargent came to live and work in Chelsea. A generation of radical artists and architects (Richard Norman Shaw, CR Ashbee) teamed up to shape the look of the area. The 1921 census reveals that nine out of every 1,000 people living in Chelsea was an artist. Today, the borough has become so expensive that the Chelsea College of Art and Design has left, moving to Westminster.

Will the artists return here? If they make Hirst-loads of money, perhaps. In the meantime, Kapoor's secret hideaway, a brushstroke or two away from Turner's old house, is a fitting retreat for a contemporary artist quietly in love with the best - but not the noisiest - modern architecture.

• • Jonathan Glancey
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 23 September 2008

Bye bye to bling: out goes the glitter, in comes the classic

The 40th edition of Art Basel sees a return to more understated works

By Georgina Adam, Viv Lawes, Bruce Millar, Cristina Ruiz and Lindsay Pollock | FromArt Basel daily edition,

The era of diamonds and gold as artistic materials is passing, judging by the art on offer at the latest edition of Art Basel which opens to VIP visitors today.

While the ground floor of the fair has always been strong in classic modern works of art, there is a noticeable increase in historically established names such as Donald Judd, Alexander Calder and Arte Povera artists including Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Meanwhile, artists who exploited the boom years with factory-like production systems, such as Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, are much less in evidence this year.

“The bling is really off. A lot of the bling artists are in a free fall,” says Arne Glimcher of PaceWildenstein (2.0/E1) which is showing a 1929 wire sculpture of the US tennis star Helen Wills Moody by Alexander Calder ($3.8m) and an untitled six part sculpture by Richard Tuttle made of humble materials such as wood, paper and wool thread ($400,000).

Buyers are particularly interested in works that demonstrate intense labour on the part of the artist, says Marianne Boesky (2.1/V3). “They like things that look handmade, not as if they’ve been farmed out to a fabricator,” she says.

An example, by one of Boesky’s artists, is Torre de Málaga, 2007, in Art Unlimited—a ramshackle tower house by Yoshitomo Nara. Made of recycled materials, it contains a cramped space modelled after the artist’s own studio ($600,000). A 10-ft sculpture, Le Verso Versa du Vice Recto, 2000-07, by artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, which resembles a woolly mammoth, is displayed in the same section. It is made of paper recycled from computer printouts (€220,000) and is on offer with Galleria Continua of San Gimignano and Beijing (2.1/X1).

The return to simple everyday materials recalls the artists of the Arte Povera movement who are represented this year by more than 25 galleries. “This is a movement where there has never been much speculation,” says Gianfranco Benedetti of Galleria Christian Stein from Milan (2.0/F1) in explanation of the strength of their prices at a time of falling values.

The gallery is offering classic works by Jannis Kounellis dating from 1969 and 1970, as well as contemporary pieces, and works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Uncini and others. Galleria Tega (2.0/W3), another Milan-based specialist in Italian art, is offering three Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale: Attese paintings from the early 1960s for prices up to e1.55m and a rare Piero Manzoni “Achrome” work from 1959 for €1.9m.

Tried and tested

As ever, galleries throughout the fair are relying on the giants of modern art such as US minimalist Donald Judd—but many this year are presenting them in heavily curated booths.

They include the González gallery from Madrid (2.0/R2) which has devoted its entire stand to “Progressions”, a single exhibition of six Judd sculptures made from anodised aluminium, galvanised iron and stainless steel, dating from 1967 to 1976.

The artist also takes pride of place at L&M Arts (2.0/E2), which is offering a 1987 Untitled sculpture consisting of ten copper and Plexiglass units for “under $4m”. According to gallery director Dominique Lévy, it is the only single copper stack in the world. “Judd completely reinvented the language of sculpture,” says Lévy, who stresses that the gallery is presenting a “more heavily curated” stand than in previous years.

The prevalence of curated displays this year is catering to the connoisseurs who are returning to the art market now that the speculators have disappeared, says Mathias Rastorfer of Gmurzynska gallery (2.0/V1), which is juxtaposing works by Calder with thematically-linked pieces by Alexander Rodchenko.

Calder “pulls together modernism and contemporary art”, says Nathalie Seroussi (2.0/U5) who is showing an Untitled iron mobile painted in red, white and black from 1961 (€1.25m).

A recurring favourite at Art Basel is Andy Warhol who is represented this year by 31 galleries. They include Bischofberger from Zurich (2.0/J1) whose entire stand is devoted to a single, 11-metre canvas by the artist, Big Retrospective Painting, 1979. Priced at $74m, it could be the most expensive work on offer at the fair and a considerable gamble for the gallery.

Works by Picasso, traditionally one of the most expensive artists at the fair, include a 1965 group portrait, La Famille du Jardinier, at Richard Gray (2.0/S1), priced at $6.5m. The work has been in a private collection and has never been publicly shown.

Most dealers surveyed say they expect far fewer American visitors this year. The speculators and their entourages are also gone, they say. “The under-educated guy with a cell phone who fancies himself as an art advisor has completely disappeared,” says Andrew Fabricant of Richard Gray. “This is a return to dealing like it was before. There’s no more impulse buying and the amateurs are gone,” he says.

“There’s much more to art than expensive materials,” says London dealer Maureen Paley (2.1/P3) who is showing work by Wolfgang Tillmans and Seb Patane among others. “All that glitters is not gold—sayings like this have real meaning.”

£30,000 for a £70 grocery receipt? It doesn't add up but it's art, darling...

In the real world, paying £30,000 for a till receipt for goods worth £70.32 simply wouldn't add up.

But even in the world of modern art, the decision by one of Britain's most prestigious galleries to buy the supermarket receipt - a 'conceptual' piece by little known artist Ceal Floyer - has attracted ridicule.

The artwork, entitled Monochrome Till Receipt (White), is part of a new exhibition at London's Tate Britain, which receives government and lottery funding.

Pakistani-born Miss Floyer, 41, who graduated from Goldsmith's art college in London in 1994, describes the work as a modern still life where objects are imagined rather than shown.

The receipt lists 36 items, all of which are white, including boil-in-the-bag rice, (£1.77) and Andrex toilet roll (£1.25).

Despite the estimated £30,000 price-tag, the piece comes with a list of instructions from the artist, stating that a new receipt must be used every time it is shown.

Because she is now based in Germany, the latest shopping trip was left to exhibition curator Andrew Wilson, who was simply told to base it on the original list, now archived by the Tate.

He explained: 'Till receipts are light-sensitive and fall apart so they have to be replaced. 

'Also it is fixed to the wall, so each time it is taken down, it is ruined.'

He called the piece 'an imaginative leap of faith from the daily drudge of going to the supermarket to the idea of the domestic still life painting, but also with the supposed purity of Modernist monochrome abstract painting'.

However, some critics have not been so kind. 

David Lee, editor of art newsletter The Jackdaw, said: 'Anyone who is interested in a supermarket receipt is probably either certifiably insane or just doesn't get out enough.

'The Tate have bought an incredibly limited piece of work here which has no stamina as a work of art.'

-SIMON CABLE

Small pleasures

I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve fallen in love with this little thing.

I cannot even begin to tell you how darn cute this sculpture/ installation looks. Or how funny it must have looked when I got down on my haunches to take this picture. If someone had taken a picture of me, then we could have had a line that Colonel Hathi from Jungle Book would have been proud of. The bucket, by the way, was brought in by the artist. Apparently, the gallery had offered to get a bucket but Baliga sternly forbade them and brought his own bucket down from wherever it is that he lives. I’m so glad he did. Not that I would have minded a shiny, red bucket but it’s rather cool how the grooved circle pattern on the bucket reflects the rows of kids being photographed. The class dangling from the wall is made of carved wood and the teacher, seated in the centre of the bottom row, is intentionally smaller than her students who tower over her. I love the different woody colours that he’s got going in the bit with the class and the shadows that piece casts is fantastic. The airborne and hovering class also reminded me of the old mythological serials in which gods would appear in an obviously painted sky and have clouds under their feet to communicate their levitating powers (a sure sign of divinity). Except of course when you look closely at Baliga’s sculpture, it’s quite obviously school kids. They’re all pretty cute but no one can hold a candle to Mr. Photographer. If you go round the front, he’s holding a camera. Utterly and completely adorable. I was so tempted to just pocket him and tiptoe out (the gallery was empty as usual) but I restrained my criminal urges. This is particularly admirable because while surfing around aimlessly, I did find at least two things that would have matched his size perfectly and sort of fitted the mood of Baliga’s tongue-in-cheek show

by Anonandon

Tastes of Paradise

The Smoking Lamp is an object that amplifies the personal choice of smoking or not smoking in a public environment. The lamp is deliberately paradoxical, at once inviting the public to smoke whilst at the same time signalling their transgression. Designed as a funnel that terminates with a ring of light, the lamp changes from a bright white to a warm pink if it detects nicotine smoke beneath it. The light emitted corresponds with the new situation, illuminating the particles being exhaled by the smoker, and placing the smoker within a theatrical scene. The light situation calls to mind the dramatic interrogation rooms from celluloid history, spotlighting the smoker, exposing them and their activity. The red hand and face gestures of the smokers become the focus of attention while the non smoking public, cast as the spectator, watches the extraordinary phenomenon that was first described by 17th century Europeans - before the word was verbalised - as “drinking smoke”.

Official prohibition of smoking in public spaces has a history as long as tobacco usage itself. The most recent case in Europe was under the Nazi regime in Germany campaigned against smoking with slogans such as ‘Die Deutsche Frau raucht nicht’ (The German woman does not smoke), cigarettes were rationed and banned from all public places as part of a wider programme to attain a more ‘organic’,‘natural’ and ‘biological’ way of life. Restricting individual freedom was justified for the greater good of society: to ensure the future of the German genotype (1). As a consequence of such prohibitive measures, smoking has been repeatedly used a symbolic protest against political oppression and to express liberation: In revolutionary Prussia, every smoker seen on the street was suspected of being a “dangerous democrat”(2) whilst in nineteenth century France, smoking acquired new symbolic significance for the female emancipation movement, when rebels like George Sand and Lola Montez shocked the social mores of their time by smoking deliberately in public. Gender bias in smoking lingers on today in the adoption of cigars, the ultimate symbol of power and masculinity. The cigar was famously used as a substitute phallus in the Clinton–Lewinsky affair and Marcel Duchamp anticipates such a situation in his 1967 poster design for "Ready-Mades et Editions de et sur Duchamp" (3) where a photomontage shows a male hand holding a cigar below a rising cloud of smoke in the form of female genitalia. Duchamp’s image was the departure point for the invitation to INTOXICATION (4) at the Galerie Vanessa Quang in 2006. But this time the gender relations were inversed; a woman's hand holds a cigarette that is superimposed with an industrial smoke emission. Today, as intolerance of smoking in public increases, the smoking lamp is designed for tobacco’s new ambiguous status: at a moment when smoking is not quite yet a sign of social rebellion but the space for a few puffs are (or are about to be) greatly reduced. If the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch observed that “smoking creates both a feeling of activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity”, then the Smoking Lamp serves as a device to augment smoking activity to the point of absurdity. Neither for, nor against, the lamp simply magnifies the language and culture of smoking, amplifying the personal choice that each individual makes.

The smoking Lamp is part of a larger artistic research into the question is how to generate real-time consciousness of air pollution. The effects of contemporary pollution are slow and imperceptible: a single cigarette will not kill, but a continuous use might - we consume now and we pay later. Like all the projects from Pollstream series (see hehe.org/pollstream), it reduces the time delay between our actions and their effects, cause and effect are scaled into the real-time decision making process, posing the question: to pollute or not to pollute? Smoking Lamp brings alive the ugly stuff that goes into our lungs - the cigarette smoke itself. And as vapour particles are translated into red light and noisy oscillations one becomes aware of those little clouds we inhale and exhale. As a design, a product, an installation, a work of art, it does neither offer humiliation nor affirmation for the smoker - it turns the beast into the beauty and amplifies our choice - here and now.

Obama signs Recovery and Reinvestment Act with reinstated support for the arts

Bailout benefits NEA and Smithsonian

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Smithsonian Institution have secured a small allotment of federal funding as part of the $787bn American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by President Obama on 17 February, following fears that arts groups would be completely excluded from the stimulus package. A committee comprising members of both houses of Congress reached an agreement on the final spending bill, which was notably smaller than the versions passed by either the House or the Senate, with a number of cuts made to education and health programmes to secure the sliver of Republican support needed (three votes) to pass the bill. The NEA will receive $50m to distribute to non-profit arts organisations while the Smithsonian gets $25m to repair its facilities.

Although the original bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives, contained $50m for the National Endowment of the Arts, the version that went through the Senate had completely removed such funding. It also included an amendment by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn that would prevent museums, theatres and art centres from receiving any stimulus money by grouping them with other projects considered “wasteful and non-stimulative” such as casinos and highway beautification. Senator Coburn’s amendment was passed by the Senate and is still in the final bill, but the mention of museums, theatres and art centres was removed and now only excludes “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool”.

When the House voted on the final bill, Democratic Congressman David Obey, who sponsored the bill, explained why he thought it was important to retain NEA funding in the stimulus package: “There are five million people who work in the arts industry. And right now they have 12.5% unemployment—or are you suggesting that somehow if you work in that field, it isn’t real when you lose your job, your mortgage or your health insurance? We’re trying to treat people who work in the arts the same way as anybody else.” 

Following the House’s passing of the final bill, the NEA released a statement describing its plans for the stimulus money. According to this, the agency “will make awards that result in job retention… For example, by awarding grants to arts education programmes, the NEA can help grantees employ teaching artists and administrators. Through grants to art festivals, the NEA can help the festival employ staff to manage the event and artists to perform or exhibit there. By funding new productions, the NEA can help an arts organisation provide work for carpenters, electricians, caterers, ushers, custodians, lighting designers, seamstresses, parking attendants and others as well as artists.” 

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian’s funding was cut down from $150m in the House’s original version of the bill to $25m in the final package. A spokeswoman for the Institution said: “We’re delighted that the museum has received this funding. The Smithsonian certainly has infrastructural needs that we have every year and this will help in addressing those. We have a list of projects that need funding and we’re going to figure out which ones need the most urgent attention. We’re also going to look at which will help to create new jobs as that is the point of the whole stimulus package.”

Some of the most vocal critics of the arts receiving stimulus funds came from senior Republicans such as Arizona Senator John McCain, who singled out funds allotted to the NEA and the Smithsonian Institution as among the “hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary spending that will not do anything to stimulate the economy”. He went on to ask “how giving tens of millions of dollars to the National Endowment of the Arts or the Smithsonian Museum will reverse the devastating effects of the economic crisis?” 

In response to the threat to arts funding, advocacy groups such as Americans for the Arts and the American Association of Museums lobbied senators to oppose the bill, citing the economic benefits of supporting cultural organisations.


Jeff Koons’s $25 million sculpture for Lacma

Jeff Koons is working on the largest and most ambitious project of his career: a towering sculpture consisting of a life-size motorised replica of a locomotive dangling from a crane. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) is funding the awesome work that will rise above the entrance plaza like a memorial to the Industrial Age technology that fuelled America’s westward expansion. The project, in development for two years, is about to move into the fabrication stage. The price tag? “We’re talking about a $25m work,” said the artist, speaking to The Art Newspaper at The National Arts Club in New York, which recently awarded him the organisation’s Gold Medal of Honour. “That’s a number we used going into the project,” confirms Lacma director Michael Govan in a telephone interview, adding that he will not begin raising the money until fabrication costs are calculated. The projected cost would make Train the most expensive artwork ever commissioned by a museum, surpassing Richard Serra’s $20m sculptural array, The matter of time, 2005, in the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Lacma has already spent about $1.75m of $2m pledged by trustee Wallis Annenberg for preliminary studies. “It’s chugging along,” Mr Govan quips of the complex and demanding process of realisation, which must adhere to Koons’s exacting production standards. 

The artist envisions hanging a full-scale 70-foot-long steel-and-aluminium replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive from a 160-foot-tall Liebherr LR 1750 lattice-boom crane. The train’s wheels will spin, its funnel belch smoke and the whistle blow at appointed times. “A real train was not meant to hang vertically and would have all sorts of environmental problems,” explains Mr Govan, adding that preliminary design and engineering studies were completed by Los Angeles-based fabricator Carlson & Co. “The next stage is 3D scanning of the parts to get the data necessary to recreate the train,” he says. Scanning began late last month at the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society—the Albuquerque museum that owns the original train serving as the model. “No manufacture can analyse it until we have all the data,” he says, adding that the scanning will be finished in May. “We have to get a crane,” he continues. “They were tough to come by in the old economy—you used to have to get on a waiting list—but it’s getting easier,” he notes. “It’s really architecture, like building a campanile or bell tower,” he says, “and that’s almost exactly how it functions in the urban environment. It’s the architecture around which the museum campus will function, and the campus is a town square for LA.” When will the landmark be completed? A date will not be set until manufacturer begins, but Mr Govan says he and the artist anticipate it will take about four years. 

Lacma has another daunting commission on the more immediate horizon: a sculpture by land artist Michael Heizer that incorporates a granite boulder weighing hundreds of tonnes. The 22-foot-high pyramidal rock will rest on reinforced concrete rails above a ramp that cuts into the ground to allow visitors to walk ominously beneath. Levitated/slot mass will be installed at the north edge of the campus near the parking garage entrance at 6th Street, says Mr Govan, adding that the cost of the work will be determined in coming months, and prospective sponsors have expressed interest. He would like to unveil it in a year, but a truck must be specially designed to transport the colossus from a quarry in Riverside, California, about 70 miles away. “Its arrival in LA will be quite a ceremony,” says Mr Govan. He wants Lacma’s new large-scale sculptures to “define the architectonics of the campus. They hover between sculpture and architecture and become the focal points”, he says, “so the defining experience outside is not of giant buildings but of artworks.”

THE JOKER

Richard Prince at the Guggenheim.

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture. (Koons tried, but his attempt was too weird for comprehension, let alone assent.) Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted. But his is a shallow, brittle, ultimately desolating conceit—seizing on things that are a-twitch with a little vitality, and chloroforming them. Prince’s nearest approach to identifiable emotion is the exiguous zeal of obsessive collecting. (He’s a bibliophile, with letches for authors, including Nabokov and Kerouac.)

Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, and grew up in a suburb of Boston. He has said that his parents were spies for the Office of Strategic Services, and that his father served in Vietnam. Caution is in order, however, regarding Prince’s autobiographical accounts. In 1985, an art magazine, ZG, published an interview with him, conducted in 1967 by J. G. Ballard, the English writer of dire fantasy, when Prince was eighteen years old and under detention in London for want of a valid passport. The interview, in which Prince describes his father as a diabolical manipulator of minds, was a lively hoax. Also in the eighties, Prince collaborated with the late Colin de Land, an eccentric dealer, to make the work and shepherd the career of one John Dogg, a fashionable and, it later turned out, nonexistent sculptor. Prince’s devotion to the put-on is among his bona fides in a generation—that of punk, deconstruction, and David Letterman—addicted to vertiginous irony: in-jokes with nothing in them. An appropriate bonus of the catalogue is a series of interviews about Prince, by the hipster’s hipster Glenn O’Brien, with leading technicians of waggery: ad and magazine people, cartoon editors (including Robert Mankoff, of The New Yorker), a car designer, the Hells Angel Sonny Barger, John Waters, and Phyllis Diller.

Prince attended college in Maine and arrived in New York in 1973, where for ten years he worked various low-end jobs (notably, assembling magazine tear sheets) in the Time & Life Building. He started to show in 1975—small, gnomic paintings, prints, and photo-and-text works. His emergence on the scene is commonly, and lazily, associated with “Pictures,” an epochal 1977 show at the non-profit downtown gallery Artists Space. He happened not to be in it. (Neither was Cindy Sherman, the first artist who comes to mind in the same connection.) Curated by the critical theorist Douglas Crimp, “Pictures” announced a movement of menacingly cold-eyed appropriation, as in the work of Sherrie Levine, who became known for her no-comment photographs of classic modern photographs. Prince had taken to photographing magazine ads, enjoying the strangeness of, in his words, a “reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” He refused an invitation to appear in “Pictures,” he has said, because he was put off by what he deemed to be Crimp’s dogmatism. (Crimp has denied inviting Prince.) An admirably bristly independence is apparent in his move, eleven years ago, from Manhattan to rural Rensselaerville, New York. There he filled a tacky house with some of his works and collections of this and that to such striking effect that, in 2005, the Guggenheim bought it as an in-situ work of art, titled “Second House.” (In June of this year, lightning set it afire; what to do with the intact but charred remnant is undecided.) Flirting with self-forgetful realism in the nineties, Prince took elegiac photographs of woebegone back-road sights, such as a basketball hoop in an overgrown meadow. That mood passed.

Prince has dubbed his retrospective “Spiritual America,” keying it to his 1983 photograph of an infamous Garry Gross photograph, published by Playboy Books, in 1976, of a naked Brooke Shields, aged ten, her prepubescent body oiled and her face given womanly makeup. Prince applied the title—which comes from Alfred Stieglitz, who coined it for his 1923 photograph of a gelded workhorse’s rear end—to the work, to a show consisting of nothing else, and to the one-off gallery, in a Lower East Side storefront, that first hosted it. His unbounded enthusiasm for the awful image offers queasy-making testimony to his character as an artist. He sees in the photograph, he has said, “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.” And he enjoyed the spectacle of Shields’s failed later effort, in a lawsuit, to quash Gross’s picture, which her mother had authorized for four hundred and fifty dollars. It gave him a “patriotic” feeling, he has declared—“that is to say if I was to have heard that this type of activity over a photograph was happening in another country I would have considered moving there.” (Note the piled-up subjunctives: Princean grammar.) The Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector—who, working closely with the artist, has installed the show with excellent rhythm and clarity—hastens, in an essay in the catalogue, to defend the work as social criticism, “a portrait of desperation” exposing the American pursuit of fame at any cost. But she thereby fails to credit (if that’s the word) Prince’s omnivorous connoisseurship of kink, as in paintings (which have been selling for millions at auction) from covers of semi-smutty romance novels featuring nurses. He doesn’t diagnose decadence. He swims in it.

by Peter Schjeldahl

Artist: Richard Prince

In the early eighties, Richard Prince started to re-photograph magazine ads featuring the Marlboro Man; since then, he’s given biker chicks, Borscht Belt jokes, celebrity autographs, and pulp-fiction nurses the legitimizing stamp of “appropriation art.” Karen Rosenberg spoke to the 55-year-old artist and obsessive book collector.

You started working with ads when you worked at Time-Life?


I was in the tear-sheets department. At the end of the day, all I was left with was the advertising images, and it became my subject. Pens, watches, models—it wasn’t your typical subject matter for art. Then, in 1980, I started taking pictures of the cowboys. You don’t see them out in public anymore—you can’t ride down a highway and see them on a billboard. But at Time-Life, I was working with seven or eight magazines, and Marlboro had ads in almost all of them. Every week, I’d see one and be like, “Oh, that’s mine. Thank you.” It’s sort of like beach combing.

Is there a current-day equivalent to the Marlboro Man?


I would have to say probably certain designers—Ralph Lauren, who shows up week after week in the same section of the Times Magazine. Abercrombie & Fitch—their catalogues have an art look. I could actually see Man Ray or George Platt Lynes or Robert Mapplethorpe photographing them. I kind of like Marc Jacobs’s campaign; it almost doesn’t look like advertising. Actually, I’ve started to look at a new cigarette ad, for Camel. It’s an illustration of a woman, and the mouth is the focus. I think back to what de Kooning would have thought of it; he used to cut out the “T” smiles from the Camels and paste them on his women.

What got you from there to painting?


I found the subject matter, which was the jokes. Before that, I wanted to paint but I didn’t know what to paint. The subject comes first, the medium second. In this show, there are some new paintings done on canceled checks. I collect other people’s canceled checks—celebrity checks. I remember buying a canceled Jack Kerouac check once.

What do you think of younger artists under your influence, people like Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton?


It would be strange for me to think I’m being ripped off, because that’s what I do! In those days, it was called “pirating.” Now they call it “sampling.” There’s a guy on the street who paints copies of my “Nurse” paintings, along with Elizabeth Peytons and Eric Fischls. I think it’s funny. I actually bought one; I thought it was pretty close.

What’s the difference between Richard Prince the artist and Richard Prince the collector?


I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work. There’s an Elizabeth Peyton piece in the show, one of her canceled checks with a Sid Vicious drawing. And a Sonic Youth check with a signed drumhead.

How about your own collectors—do you agree with their taste in your work?


I’m surprised at the reaction to the “Nurse” paintings. I’ve never felt that I had to put out work that I actually liked—just because it’s out there doesn’t mean that I have to stand behind it. A lot of it’s experimental, spontaneous. It’s about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.

The joke paintings are especially popular—one sold last year for more than $700,000.
When they first came out, you couldn’t give them away. They’ve become pretty serious to people, which is funny. During an auction last year, behind the podium, they had a monochromatic joke painting next to a Rothko next to a Barnett Newman. They’re just paint, stretchers, and canvas; it’s the subject that’s radical.

By - Karen Rosenberg

“Modernists are pushing Russia into infernal darkness”

Alexey Beliayev-Guintovt, the 2008 winner of Russia’s Kandinsky Prize, on the struggle for the future of Russian art.

On 8 December, Beliayev-Guintovt was known only to the small community of people who closely follow the Russian contemporary art scene. But overnight he became one of the most talked-about Russian artists in the past two decades. “Before the prize, my website had only a few hundred hits a day,” he says. “Now it has several thousand a day.”

The Art Newspaper is the first publication invited to visit his modest three-room apartment/art studio, in a working-class neighbourhood in his native city, Moscow. The walls of one room are decorated with a 19th-century print featuring Napoleon at Waterloo in 1814, and a Soviet banner emblazoned with the words “Workers of the World Unite”. There is a bust of Lenin on the shelf. The furniture is late 19th century, except for an ornate chair that Beliayev-Guintovt says is probably 18th-century Persian. “I call it my Eurasian throne,” he says.

The television is playing a 1937 Soviet propaganda film showing Stalin inspecting a parade of robust athletes on Red Square. “This was basically a parade of Eurasian athletes; just look at the faces,” he says. The screen shows the youthful features of Slavs, Central Asians and people from the Caucasus region. “My next project will be based on this parade,” he adds. “I want to do a Eurasian parade of the future, depicted in about 15 large paintings. I want to give a futuristic view to the Soviet-Stalinist aesthetic.”

Beliayev-Guintovt doesn't hide his fondness for the Stalinist-era aesthetic, and he is uncomfortable when it comes to passing judgment on the Soviet dictator. “I had family members on both sides during the Stalin era. Some worked for the NKVD (secret police), while others ended up in the Gulag.”

“My style unites space and time, and Eurasian ideals are very prominent,” he says. “Art in Russia has always had a very strong social component. I am at the epicentre of a conservative revolutionary movement that includes many nationalities, from Islamic mystics to Russian Orthodox old believers.”

Beliayev-Guintovt says that contemporary art in Russia, as it ascribes to current international art trends, is run by a “totalitarian sect” and that “modernists are pushing Russia into infernal darkness”.

“The controversy over my art is a classic battle between icon painters and iconoclasts,” he says. “They want to destroy the sacredness of images, and I want to exalt it. This is a very serious struggle over the future of Russian art, and with me getting the Kandinsky Prize, they’ve lost a major battle.”

During Perestroika in the late 1980s, Beliayev-Guintovt, born in 1965, dabbled in a variety of western youth counter-cultures. “I was a hippie, a punk, a new waver,” he says. He began his artistic career in 1985, but his big break came in 1994 when gallerist and artist Alexander Yakut took him under his wing.

His painting technique involves covering the canvas with gold leaf and creating an image with a stencil. He then dabs his palms in paint and presses them onto the canvas, his hands working as his brush. “I don't sign my work because my handprint can’t be faked,” he says. “My images might look traditional, but the texture and technique is certainly contemporary. My method combines the traditions of icon painting with the technology of Soviet avant-garde poster-making.”

Today, promoting his Eurasian ideas is Beliayev-Guintovt’s paramount concern. In essence, these ideas call for Russia to turn away from the west and towards the east, and strive for a rebirth of the Russian empire in its tsarist-era borders. Regarding art, he supports “the righteousness of classicism” and “the power of beauty”. Yet he admits his art manifestos are also intended to poke fun at and provoke his detractors on the artistic Left. This of course leaves one wondering whether all his talk about ideology is serious or just an artistic ruse.

John Varoli | 28.1.09 |