Mickalene Thomas

No one walking along West 53^rd Street on the way to MoMA this summer can miss Mickalene Thomas’s remarkable installation Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires in the window of The Modern restaurant. What may come as a surprise to many MoMA visitors though, are the direct links that exist between her installation and the current Matisse show.  She discusses them here and they prove utterly fascinating.

Mickalene Thomas, "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires" (2009)

Since graduating her painting MFA from Yale in 2002 Mickalene Thomas has established herself among the most engaging individuals in contemporary art, at once intelligent and provocative. And her art is among the most complex. Her subject is the black woman, her almost invisible place in the history of art, and the broad range of cultural advantages and disadvantages that she currently faces. Her subjects – who range from her close friends to professional models to media celebrities – are mostly portrayed larger than life in photographs or videos or in garish enamels and glittering rhinestones and emerge as powerful, sexual, somewhat unnerving presences, staring brazenly out of the picture.

Mickalene Thomas, "Naomi Campbell" (from "V" magazine, summer 2010)

Mickalene Thomas has enjoyed solo exhibitions at La Conservera: Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Murcia, Spain and at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Last year she had her first solo showing in New York, “She’s Come UnDone” at Lehmann Maupin, and earlier this summer she exhibited “Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl”, a solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. In the summer 2010 issue of V Magazine she portrays Naomi Campbell in Swarovski crystals, but our long and thoroughly entertaining conversation focused, to begin with at any rate, on that piece on West 53^rd Street.

Mickalene, your MoMA commission Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, has been getting a lot of attention. How did it come about?

It was spearheaded by Klaus Biesenbach, who’s been a great admirer and supporter of my work. I was in the Greater New York 2005 show at P.S.1 and we first met then. He wanted to do a project with me, and so after my first solo show at Lehmann Maupin in 2009 (MoMA had just acquired a video and a painting) Klaus proposed that I do this commission in conjunction with The Modern restaurant. He really pushed me forward.

How did you feel when you heard you’d got the commission?

When I agreed to do it I wasn’t sure where the piece was going to be located until Klaus told me. So I went to have a look and I thought, “Wow! This is really challenging!” It’s a pretty large-scale window, about 12 feet by 28 feet, but I like to challenge myself, and push the boundaries with my work. It came at a time when I was working on the solo show I just had with my gallery in Los Angeles, and I had to put that show on hold just to do this project. It was quite a feat!

How did you arrive at the subject matter?

I wanted to figure out a way where it wouldn’t be just another painting, but a painting about my experience of MoMA, so I asked them if it would be possible to do something a little more site-specific. I really wanted to work from a photographic image that would be my response to MoMA, so instead of photographing the models in my studio, I wanted to photograph them at MoMA. I explored the different floors and when I was walking through the sculpture garden I saw they had the Matisse sculptures out there, and I thought that it would be a great opportunity to photograph these women looking at Matisse because he’s a great inspiration for my work.

Henri Matisse, "The Back I-IV" (1909-31) (MoMA Sculpture Court installation)

So I thought, “This will be really great, to do it right here in the sculpture garden!” So I chose the image of Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (because I use Manet a lot in my work as well) and went from there. It was very site-specific: I brought the models in one Sunday evening, and they were all stylized with make-up and hair and clothing, and we photographed them right out there.

Mickalene Thomas,"Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires" (2009) (Photograph)

It’s ingenious really, because the Matisse takes the place of the fourth figure in the Manet.

Exactly. I was trying to find a way of posing the models so that the Matisse could be in it, and I didn’t have to try that hard because the Matisse sculpture became the woman in the Manet. When I was looking through the lens and trying to compose the image I wanted to have the depth of field that Manet has with the woman in the background, and it created that same environment, without me trying, really. Everything fell into place. Everything felt right. I didn’t have to try reconstructing things or forcing things. I saw it and I responded and it worked. It was like, “Wow! There it is!” It was one of those things where you know that it was meant to be. But it was my decision to recognize it and use it.

Edouard Manet, "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe" (1862-63)

One significant difference from the Manet is that in his version the figure to the right is looking at the other two figures, whereas in your rendition she’s a typically Mickalene Thomas woman in that she’s staring directly at the spectator with that confrontational gaze.

Yes, she is. And I did that for a reason because in the Manet there are two men who are dressed and one woman who is not dressed. That was very controversial at the time. And in my picture there are these two women who are lounging at a picnic and this woman who I wanted to address the viewer. There are very few of my paintings or photographs where the sitters are not looking out at the viewer, and the gazing is about how the sitter addresses the viewer so that the viewer responds by really looking at the sitter. I think that when the eyes meet there’s a recognition and acknowledgement and validation: you see me and I see you. To me that’s a very important quality in my work. The sitters are aware of their empowerment but also of the viewer’s response to it.

Mickalene Thomas, "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires" (2009) (detail)

Their empowerment?

I like my women to be presented as very conscientious, very empowered, very charismatic – strong women who are aware of their environment and their experiences. I’m not making them do anything. It’s a collaborative effort, because I’m taking the image, I’m photographing them, but they’re aware of me doing this with them. It’s not as though the artist is explaining the sitter.

MIckalene Thomas, "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires" (2009) (detail)

That’s crucial, I think, particularly as people have accused you of exploitation.

I get a lot of people asking, “Are you exploiting these woman?” and it’s something I think about: there’s always the concern that the sitter is a kind of harem odalisque, where she has no control over what is happening, and it’s all happening to satisfy the male gaze.

Mickalene Thomas, "I Thought You Said You Were Leaving" (2006)

But what about the woman’s power? Knowing that she’s created this persona, and that it was a collaborative thing. The sitter has control over how they want to be presented, and the gaze is a multiple thing, with the artist, the viewer, and the sitter. It gets very complicated in terms of who is really in control of the gaze: is it the person who is taking the image? Or is it the sitter who is giving you that image? It’s like holding up a mirror. Who has the lens? Is it the sitter or is it the artist? Or is it the viewer? The whole psychological idea of autonomy is brought into question, I think.

Is this affected by who sees your work? How do you feel about having the commission seen by that weird cross-section of people – everyone from tourists to businessmen – who walk along West 53^rd Street every day??

I felt a slight disappointment when Klaus said where the painting was going to be. But then I reconsidered the context and the viewership it offered, and I thought how powerful that is: the opportunity for my work to be in a venue where it reaches a wide audience of people who never see my work and never get a chance to respond to it. When we were installing the work all sorts of people were walking by and responding: “Who’s this woman? What’s this work?” There was a young black family from Minnesota. They were tourists, bringing their kids here. They were saying, “I never saw work like this. I never saw black women in paintings like this before.” So it totally reaches the territories that I would like my work to reach. People have the opportunity to see it, and that’s a great power. Anyone – any businessman, or corporate person, or taxi driver, whoever they are – can experience this painting. For me that’s very exciting. Isn’t that every artist’s dream? It’s like being a rock star without … being a rock star! I think every artist would like to be a rock star. That feeling of being on stage and performing for an audience of thousands of people, that’s an exhilarating experience, and this is what’s happening.

Do you think there’s something specifically New York about your work?

I think there is. I’m a product of the east coast. I grew up in New Jersey and I came to New York many a time as a young person. I use a certain type of woman from New York. There’s this rawness and edge to them and for me that’s very important. That rawness is something that people can identify with, and I prefer that. What I like is that there’s a realness and truth in the work. I like flaws in people, I like scars on people because they show the history of life, of experience, and for me that’s the beauty of images. Beauty is not this pristine thing all the time; there’s beauty in things that are flawed. Photography is a new thing for me and I work with some great printers and photo-retouchers, and every time I go to them with my work they want to take out things that they think are spoiling the image. And I prefer to keep those things in because they show that despite all these props and dress-codes I’m placing on these women, there’s a truth there: these are everyday women coming with their own history and baggage and experiences. I like when that personality is exuded by the image because it allows some kind of familiarity for people: it’s OK to have this scar or this big nose or whatever.

Mickalene Thomas, "Tamika sur un chaise longue" (2008)

Everyone has their own sense of sexuality or what is beautiful. And for me what is beautiful is something that’s a little odd to the eye. A lot of my work is not that pretty – I think that a lot of it is kind of ugly – even though people think that they’re beautiful images. I like that there’s this dichotomy of the yin and the yang and the positive and the negative rubbing up against each other and creating something new. Because that’s our world. That’s our life, and that’s what makes us who we are. One side isn’t better than the other. I’m a woman born and raised in Camden, New Jersey, the piss hole of New Jersey in many ways. It’s very rough and very poor. But I’m also someone who’s had education, went to some really prestigious schools, and who is well-read, and who has traveled and learned, and that is part of me as well. So I can only put that in my work because it’s an extension of who I am. And that’s what these images are – they’re a representation, an extension of myself. If some of these women look a little harsh that’s fine with me, because there are some of them who don’t. They’re all educated women themselves and they love playing these roles with me. Now I’m working with women who are transgendered men – women who were men earlier in their lives  - and I’m interested in those ideas of artifice, and change, and what’s real, and experience, and the frailty of beauty.

Mickalene Thomas, "Milk & Honey, Lavender Too (Whitney Houston)" (2008)

But you’re also interested in a kind of appearance that can actually cloak reality, aren’t you? I remember wonderful pair of portraits of Oprah Winfrey and Condoleezza Rice called When Ends Meet (2007). What attracts you to subjects like that?

That particular portrait series – which I’m still working on, actually – takes highly regarded women as a means of working with pop culture and infusing it with a more art historical sense. They’re usually black women that I’m interested in because of their rags-to-riches story. Or the opposite. I’ve done portraits of Whitney Houston and Marion Jones, who both had acclaim in the world but who were then stripped of so much of their dignity. Whitney Houston was this fantastic singer with a huge fan base but then she became a drug addict and she married Bobby Brown, and now she’s having to reconstruct her whole life and image. Marion Jones was a world class athlete, a three-time Olympic champion and gold medal winner, but then she was stripped of all of her awards and ended up with nothing: being persecuted, put in jail, and bankrupt.

Mickalene Thomas, "America the Beautiful" (2008)

So I was thinking about Oprah Winfrey, and first of all, Condoleezza Rice, and her image as a black woman. She was one of the first black women to hold that kind of high office in America which was very important. But everyone thinks that because you’re the first black person in a situation you have to think and live and believe like a Malcolm X or a Martin Luther King. That’s the hope anyway because of our history here. You are the one who is going to spearhead the change in the divide that’s been so crucial in America. But then you get this woman Condoleezza Rice, who is in the White House, and she’s very strong, and very vocal and opinionated, but she even made a Freudian slip in calling Bush her husband one time!

Mickalene Thomas, "When Ends Meet" (2007)

And then you have Oprah Winfrey, who is regarded as this huge entity, this powerhouse, this conglomerate, this philanthropist. And whatever she says is golden, and everyone flocks to her and believes. So we have these perceived notions based on what they’re doing, and based on their image in politics or social entertainment – in pop culture, whatever that may be. But what if Condoleezza is more like Oprah, and Oprah is more like Condoleezza? When these ends meet, you see. How can we have these bookends come together in our perception? Who is really who? They might be the same kind of person but because of  what they do, we have this perception of who they are. I was thinking of the mirror again, and the gaze, and how we put images on people. I’m really interested in how people are, who they really are when they go home and they’re behind closed doors. I’m interested in the shift between how they might be when they’re in front of an audience, and how they are when they’re not. That was my thinking about that piece, responding to these two powerful women who were coming from two completely different political positions, and shaping America in very different ways.

Mickalene Thomas, "Don't forget about me (Keri)" (2009)

I remember a review that Roberta Smith wrote at the time of your “She’s Come UnDone” exhibition in which she talked rather dismissively about your work, “pushing buttons regarding class, taste, race and gender.” What did you feel about that?

I respect Roberta Smith a lot, and I thought her review was quite fair actually. I prefer a fair review to a glowing response, because it gives me a challenge and something to think about, or something to work against. Just like in art school: the people who are constantly praised about their work don’t really get the room to grow. I think that what she did was to give me room to grow, and in that sense I really appreciate it.

But it’s not the whole story. It’s always easy to pigeon-hole people in a certain category, and not consider what’s really happening. I’m a very history-based artist. My work’s about looking at images of black women and reinserting them into the art historical canon. I don’t really have a choice – that’s where my work has to come from, using taste and class and the idea of femininity, because none of these things appear in art history in relation to black women.  You still don’t see them, because usually when you do see images of black women they’re in a position of servitude. So for me it’s just aligning these women with the other women who were presented in art history.

This is a great territory for me because I haven’t even begun to do the things that I want to do in my work. It’s just the beginning. I’m hoping that people will look beyond me just being a black artist – which some people do – and look beyond the style of my work, and the fact that I paint black women. Would the conversation change if I started painting white women? If I started painting men? What would that be about? Would that shift the conversation? It would create a new conversation, for sure.

[All Mickalene Thomas images courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York]

Marina Abramović performing "Lips of Thomas" (original 1975) as part of "Seven Easy Pieces" (2005)

I really don’t think I have ever met a more inspiring artist than Marina Abramović. She is only a few years older than me and I have followed her work like an awe-struck younger brother since I first became aware of her  work in the late 1970s. At every point in her career, from her early solo works made under the Communist regime of the then Yugoslavia, through the remarkable work that she made with her long term partner Ulay (like Rest Energy, 1980) and then during her years living in Amsterdam and more recently here in New York, she is the artist who, in my experience anyway, has made the most vivid reality of the much-discussed ambition of making art and life the same thing.

Marina Abramović and Ulay, "Rest Energy" (1980)

The most recent – and perhaps most remarkable – manifestation of this identification began on Saturday, March 6, makes its first full public appearance this Sunday, March 14, and endures through May 31. It is her 600-hour performance The Artist is Present, which will be a constant component of her MoMA retrospective of the same name, and which has been organized and curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and MoMA’s Chief Curator at Large. It sees Ms Abramović cease all social interaction with the outside world, and all verbal contact, and dedicate herself instead – as she explains in this conversation – to an unbroken performing presence in the MoMA atrium.

Marina Abramovic, "The Artist is Present" 2010

The MoMA show is a genuine first. Whereas we have seen many museum shows focusing on performance art, this is the first in which performance itself is a vital continuous component. As well as Ms Abramović’s own new piece, visitors will be able to see a whole string of “re-performances” of her earlier pieces by a troupe of thirty-six performers recruited and trained especially for this show. Working in stints of two and a half hours at a time, these performers will mean that key works like Imponderabilia (1977), and Nude with Skeleton (2002-05) will be performed throughout the show. It is an audacious project.

Marina Abramović and Ulay, "Imponderabilia" (1977)

"Imponderabilia" re-performed as part of "Marina Abramovic - The Artist is Present" at MoMA

No wonder then that when I spoke to Ms Abramović last week, just before she went silent, she was more nervous than I have never seen her. No wonder that her conversation returns repeatedly, and without my prompting, to the practical problems that she finds herself facing with her performance, and to anxieties about what might go awry with the exhibition. It is an eloquent reminder that her work is far more than concepts made physical. Rather it is the turning of a human life into the subject, material, and methods of art.

Marina, your forty-year retrospective is about to open at MoMA. How does that make you feel?

It’s driving me crazy. It could go so many ways. It’s a real experiment. We’ll only know at the end whether this model of a retrospective – with long durational pieces – will work. It could all blow up in our faces. Who knows! I have this strange sensation in my stomach and it just won’t stop. It’s pure torture right now, whether I’m asleep or awake. I dream about performance, then I wake up and I perform.

This show has tremendous importance for me – and not just personal importance. It’s important because up until now performance art has always been an alternative form of art; it’s never ever been mainstream. Even though I’ve been doing performance for forty years, I still have people inviting me to group shows and saying, “Can you do a performance for the opening?” This is because they think performance means entertainment, which is not what performance art is about. It’s not entertaining. It’s much more than that. So having this retrospective is the big chance for performance art itself, as an art form, to become mainstream art like photography or video, and that’s really historic.

Marina Abramović, "Nude with Skeleton" (2002-05)

"Nude with Skeleton" re-performed as part of "Marina Abramovic - The Artist is Present" at MoMA

Do you think it’s an entirely good thing for performance art to become mainstream?

Yes and no. Because the nature of performance was that it was a kind of guerilla attack on so many things, and it was meant to be in precise opposition to the mainstream.  But it’s been like that for too long, and what I hate is that there’s no respect for performance. Everybody has taken advantage of performance without giving any respect to the originals. Theatre has appropriated performance’s attitudes in so many ways, everybody from Jan Fabre to Pina Bausch, without giving any credit to performance. So I really think that that situation should be solved and certain historical things have to become mainstream. So that any young artist after me has a place in the museums, and can cross the threshold from alternative to mainstream. But at the same time there will always be parts of performance that are not. There will always be the new young performance artists who will be against the older work. This is how the dynamic works. It’s a kind of evolution.

You believe that there’s a clear distinction between performance art and theatre?

This is what I think: to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It’s a very different concept. It’s about true reality.

For the MoMA show you’ve recruited thirty-six “re-performers” to present versions of your earlier pieces, and you mentioned to me that most of them are dancers rather than performance artists. Why is that?

Yes, most of them are dancers and not performance artists, and there are two reasons for that: First of all the performance artists are not used to re-performing other people’s works. (And if they’re doing it, they’re doing it without giving credit to the original material – they’re doing it as their own work!) Second they don’t have the same sort of stamina in their bodies as dancers. It’s easy to make a very strong performance piece once in a while and then have three months to do nothing, because you derive the energy from willpower and not from exercising your body. The dancers are used to re-performing other people’s works and they have the discipline, the routine, and the physical endurance and stamina to do long durational work. There’s a clear difference between the performance artist’s body and the dancer’s body. There’s no comparison. The performance artist’s body is a bloody disaster! They’re not trained, while the dancers are fantastic.

Does that give you cause for concern?

Something that I become more and more aware of is that a certain point you have to give up and believe, and you have to trust other people’s motivations and abilities that they are going to do it fine. I am going to be performing at the same time so I won’t even know how they are doing. I have to give up control, which is so contradictory to my nature: I like to control everything – I would control my own funeral if I could – but I have to give up complete control in order that the re-performances can happen at the same time as my performance.

"The Artist is Present" (2010) with documentary film crew, March 6, 2009

Let’s talk about your performance, The Artist is Present. You’ll be performing every moment the museum is open between now and May 31?

Yes. Every day the museum is open seven hours, and on Friday it’s open ten hours.

And you’re in place before people arrive?

Exactly, and I only finish when the audience leaves when the museum closes. I have a hole in my chair so I can pee, because I can’t go that length of time without peeing. I’ve done performances for seven hours without peeing, but I’ve never done ten, and I don’t want to be bothered by that during the piece. It was a big issue for the museum. They said, ”What’re we going to do with the pee?” and I said “I’ll bring my own pee to the toilet”!

And what happens when you leave the museum?

Then I have a car that takes me home, and I stay home in silence. I will be absolutely shut down from the outside world for the three-month period. I’ve given my mobile phone away, and my computer to my assistant. I have a vegetarian food delivery. (I’ve been completely vegetarian for two months now.) It’s a kind of grain mixed with vegetables that I can eat, digest, and shit, and then not eat again for seven hours. I have a nutritionist who is on standby in case something goes wrong with my food. It’s like another space program! I have to look after my body: I have to become like a Swiss watch. I am training with a physical trainer right now and he’s going to give me a program that I can do by myself.

If something goes wrong I will write to Davide, my assistant, and Klaus Biesenbach, my curator. I have to communicate with them by writing. I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to verbalize anything – that would have to be a real emergency, but I can’t imagine any scenario where it would be necessary.

So you begin for the press preview on March 6 …

… And I finish 31 May at 5.30. And I want to get back to work June 1.

Can you say something about the work’s content?

It’s really the idea of creating a moment of presence. New York is so functional. There’s no concentration on anything. People lose their center. Europe is different. There’s something else. There’s such an incredible feeling of nature. Here it’s very different. So it’s necessary to establish this kind of pace here, because everything is too much, everything is the market, everything is consumption, everything is overwhelming. Just to strip back to the nakedness, that’s why I really wanted to do this.

That’s why I wanted to work with the MoMA atrium, which is enormous. I don’t want to compete with the architecture. I want to do the opposite. I want to minimize my presence in the middle of the atrium. The atrium is like a tornado: MoMA has between 11,000 and 15,000 visitors a day and they’re all moving around, and there are so many activities going on, so there’s this tornado of energy. But I want to create a stillness in the middle of the tornado, with just a tiny little table and two little chairs. And the chair opposite me is always empty, and any member of the audience is welcome to come and engage in the gaze with me. There will not be talking, there will not be anything, just the motionless gaze.

The eyes are the windows of the soul. You can see so much. And it will create an energy, a luminosity around it. The more time goes past with this piece, the more the piece will go where it should go – into that timeless state. It’s about the here and now. It’s not about future or past. It’s just about the present moment. I want to construct many present moments during the 600 hours, and be available and vulnerable for anybody in the audience. This which will create a trust so that the other person looking at me can also be available and vulnerable, and we can create a contact which is very direct and very human.

So anyone can sit opposite you?

Yes, without any limit of time.

It doesn’t concern you that you’re going to get people who will want to sit there all day.

That’s fine. That could very easily happen. I don’t want to restrict it. Other people will have to organize themselves, not me. That’s how it has to be managed. If somebody’s sitting there all day, he’s responsible for his conduct, which is depriving other people of the experience. But he has to have his own social consciousness about it, and in the end it’s his decision. I just want to be there like a rock, so when you come in I’m always there.

It’s ironic that a performance that is clearly going to be grueling to make is going to be so simple in its form.

It started as such a complicated idea! Really, it was insane! But the nearer we got to the show happening, the more simple it became. It’s something to do with age. Now I’m 63 now, and I’m struck by the awareness that we can’t take anything with us. When we die the only thing we can leave is a good idea.  Material goods are such an obsession of American culture especially. But it’s just illusion.

Tehching Hsieh, "One Year Performance, 1978-79".

You’ve often talked to me about Tehching Hsieh. What is his importance to you?

I think that he’s the biggest master of all of us, because he is the one who really understood the transformative force of performance before anyone else. After five years of performances he’s now “doing life”. That’s what it means, being changed by performance. And I have to say that in my case it’s not life that’s changing me, it’s my performance that’s changing me, because I always set myself such difficult tasks and it’s always such hell to do them that when I go through them I really come out different on the other side. I never have the same dedication or energy or willpower to do things in my life, I am always trying to find the easy way, and so life never changes me. But then I put all this stuff into performances and then I really change. And this is what Tehching did. You know which was his most beautiful piece? When he was sitting in his studio in this cage. You remember? Think about it: A whole fucking year! He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t write, he doesn’t read, he doesn’t do anything! He’s just there. It’s mind-blowing! And he told me, “When I sat on the left edge of the bed, I imagined that I was in the bedroom. When I sat in the middle of the bed, I was in the living room. And when I sat on the far right corner of the bed, then I was in the garden.” This blows my mind!

It’s the power of imaginative energy.

Yes, this is what prisons, monasteries, and hospitals have in common. They’re places where the body is seated on a regular basis, but the mind can be free.

So, are you hoping that this performance will change your life?

Yes! Especially after the last year and a half. My husband left me. I got divorced. So this has been such a hard time. I’m really just looking to do this piece and then to come out the other side of my own life, leaving behind my fears and my loneliness and everything else. But it’s funny, somehow you always seem to need these sort of disasters in order to purify yourself. Life is like that. Optimism is not productive!

Clayton Price, "Unheeded Warning" (2001) at Verge

This is the busiest – and many people would say the most important – week in the New York City art calendar. The Armory Show itself, on the west side’s Piers 92 and 94, is one of the world’s most significant art fairs. Every year it attracts well over 50,000 visitors. But in addition to the Armory Show the city hosts a whole string of other fairs (ten of them at last count!) that hope to take advantage of the hordes of collectors, dealers, artists, museum-folk, and journalists who gravitate here during “Armory Arts Week”. There’s the ADAA Art Fair at Park Avenue Armory (now in its twenty-second year), SCOPE at Lincoln Center, PULSE at its new home at West Street, Volta on 34^th Street, and a whole slew of others that I’m going to try to visit between now and next Monday. Rather than formal fair reviews – which my pals over onARTINFO are writing – I thought I’d attempt something a little more intimate: A key part of the art fair experience for me are the conversations that I find myself having with artists, gallerists, collectors, and the whole range of fair-goers that I run into. And that’s what I’m going to give a taste of here. I’ll be updating this day by day – and I’m already aware that these little snippets are broad-ranging and somewhat impressionistic – but here, for your delectation, are some samples of this week’s art fair conversations.

Alex Hay, "Anomaly Blue" (2006) - on reserve at Peter Freeman, Inc. for $135,000

It was great. It was very crowded. Things were happening in a way that they haven’t for some time. We made several sales. And these sales were a big deal for us because it’s Alex Hay’s work, which doesn’t always have a lot of traction. But somehow this time it worked! And we sold at the retail, which is good news, because at Miami everybody wanted to bargain so much more than we were comfortable with. In fact, we were just talking about rehanging the booth. – Rachel Churner of Peter Freeman, Inc. – whose ADAA Art Show booth is a solo show of Alex Hay’s work – talking about Tuesday night’s opening. Of the seven pieces the gallery had for sale, two sold and two were reserved. (Wednesday)

James Brooks, "B" (1952) at Greenberg Van Doren

This fair has been trending more and more to one-person booths for some years and I think it’s given it a real identity. I think that people come expecting that now to some extent. And I’ve heard a lot of people saying what a pleasure it was. And there a one person shows across the board – we’re very happy to have a James Brookes show, L & M has a show of de Koonings, so there are at least two AbEx artists here, but there are a lot of younger artists also, and I think it makes for a very enjoyable, solid, focused viewing experience. – John Van Doren of Greenberg Van Doren on the thinking behind his gallery’s ADAA Art Show booth, which was dedicated to the most under-rated of the abstract expressionists, James Brookes. (Wednesday)

We are deeply grateful for what this fair does for New York City. These events not only bring together thousands of people and hundreds of galleries, they really are opportunities to think about art – and especially contemporary art – in the largest context possible. It’s absolutely remarkable. You can feel the vitality that’s taking place in the art world. In addition to all that is happening here at the piers, there is so much else that is happening in this city: if you haven’t had a chance to see the Whitney Biennial, I hope you’ll do that; if you haven’t had a chance to see William Kentridge’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I hope you’ll do that; if you haven’t had a chance to see Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim I hope you’ll do that as well, because all of these exhibitions are part of what makes New York so exciting. – MoMA Director Glenn Lowry reminds people of the city’s museum shows at the Armory Show’s opening press conference. (Wednesday)

My impression is of a very cozy art fair. It’s very small. It’s not too big. You have a chance to see all of the galleries, and the gallery spaces are small. Everybody loves to come here, because you can see it one day, and have another day to see other things. It’s very different to Art Basel and ARCO. – Roberto J. Nieves Robles, President & Director of Circa Puerto Rico (a fair that shows thirty-five galleries) with a surprising take on the scale of the Armory Show. (Wednesday)

David Kramer, "Greatest Moments" (2009)

My first thought is that there is no grand-slam here. But I think the more intimate work resonates: David Kramer’s work at Galerie Laurent Godin made a terrific showing, as well as the Armitage Gone! Exquisite Corpse project. I thought that was brilliant. – Mary-Ann Monforton of BOMB Magazine shares her Armory Show recommendations. (Wednesday)

Thursday’s conversations:

I think that for me personally my decision was based on having a gallery in Chelsea: I get to see a lot of this audience on a regular basis, so I just felt it was less of an imperative this year. I’ve been seeing people from out of town for the last few days, and having dinner with clients and colleagues. It wasn’t so much a financial decision as it was a decision based on time and energy. I’ve just been focusing more on the gallery program getting people into the gallery. In some ways I find just being able to move around more productive for me. – Gallerist Pavel Zoubok – whom I ran into atPULSE – on his reasons for deciding against showing in any of this week’s fairs. (Thursday)

After coming through such a difficult year I think everybody’s stepping it up looking good. I think there is an optimism in the air which is exciting. But my sense of things is that people are making decisions which are more considered. There’s less of that frenzy, which is better for the art, and better for the relationship between galleries and their clients in the long term. I think that – with some tentativeness, obviously –collectors, and even new collectors, are trying to find some stasis on the heels of what has been a very challenging year. – Pavel Zoubok again, with an assessment of the current mood. (Thursday)

Business is shaky! If anybody tells you it’s not shaky, they’re not telling the truth. – Gallerist Magda Sawon ofPostmasters, who was also touring PULSE, with a rather less rosy summing up. (Thursday)

I like this venue: it’s smaller, it’s more intimate, and curatorially the fair is tighter – it’s a little bit more selective. I think that’s a good thing for everybody who’s showing here. We’ve had a really terrific response from collectors. We’ve had people coming in specifically to see Eric Thor Sandberg’s work. We even had people trying to sneak in before the fair opened yesterday to get a preview. – Leigh Conner of Conner Contemporary Art on this year’s PULSEexperience. (Thursday)

This is my first art fair ever! I want to see beautiful things, and creative things that open my mind to new experiences. That’s what I’m here for … I’m really interested in installation art. – Another PULSE visitor, Miss New York 2010 – Davina Reeves (who is actually from Austin, Texas). (Thursday)

It’s a performance installation, and it’s a collaboration between the artist and the spectator. The responses have been pretty amazing. People have been a little confused sometimes, and they laugh a lot, because it’s unusual but it’s a really fun project and people really enjoy it. We’ve done fashion trade shows before, but believe it or not we actually get a better response from the art world than we do from the fashion world. Yesterday we didn’t have one spare moment. We’re doing very well! – Performance artists Karelle Levy (designer) and Daria Shapiro (curator) who are offeringQuickie Couture at SCOPE and who, for between $25 and $300 will work with you to create an individually tailored item of clothing in less than an hour from their stock of handmade fabrics. (Full disclosure: they traded me a handmade tie for a promise that I’d include them here!) (Thursday)

People have told us that it makes them feel like the old days are back, but that actually makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like the sense of a frenzy. We actually tried to slow things down, but once the word was out that big collectors had bought one, it was suddenly like we had the sharks circling. – Gallerist Hamish Morrison on the experience of selling out not only his Volta booth of Paul Pretzer’s paintings, but his entire holdings of the artist’s work – some forty pieces in total. (Friday)

Of course there are advantages to being part of a smaller fair. I went to the Armory Show yesterday, where I have friends showing. I walked around for more than an hour, and I couldn’t even find their booths. – Risa Needleman ofInvisible Exports – where she is showing Mickey Smith – on one of the advantages of being at Volta. (Friday)

Oh, it doesn’t have any information in it. – The young lady on the Volta press desk talks up the importance of the $20 fair catalog. (Friday)

This piece has not sold. I would be shocked if someone were to pick up a piece like this. It’s an absolutely absurd gesture. It’s funny. Some people love this piece, some people hate it. I can’t really control that. That’s cool. – Voltaartist, Todd Pavlisko (showing with Samsøn) on his three-channel video work Centerpiece (2008-10) which shows him nailing his foot to the floor. (Friday)

When I was at the international school in Japan, we had this Australian guy who used to come in to teach us drawing. He used to tell us about his work with technology. A couple of years later when I was at college, I was looking through books in the library and I discovered that our drawing teacher was Stelarc! – Volta artist Nancy Lorenz (showing with PDX Contemporary Art) on her early encounter with a performance art legend. (Friday)

Marina Abramović performing "Lips of Thomas" (original 1975) as part of "Seven Easy Pieces" (2005)

Pushing the envelope! – MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach’s one sentence assessment of the significance of theMarina Abramovic retrospective “The Artist is Present” whose first preview, for press and Armory Show VIPs, took place Saturday. (Saturday)

I think it’s very important for MoMA. – Ms Abramovic’s gallerist Sean Kelly is almost as succinct. (Saturday)

A mason pays 75c per cleaned brick, and dirty bricks are worth however much aesthetic value you place on them. So we’re selling the cleaned bricks at their market price of 75c, or if you want a dirty brick, you can place however much aesthetic value on it above 75c that you decide, and that’s what it costs. I’ve sold no clean bricks today, but I have sold about six dirty bricks. I sold some for $20 each, and somebody gave me $10 for two bricks. There’s been a range. The people who bought the bricks loved them. (I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the bricks I don’t sell.) – Dana Bishop-Root of transformazium.org at Fountain explains that – more than forty years after Carl Andre’sEquivalents – art collectors are still eager to buy industrial bricks. (Saturday)

I walked around and I thought to myself, “Where is the Chinese art?” It’s just gone. I didn’t see any of the market darlings – like Yue Minjun or Zhang Xiaogang – and I was looking. It reflects the fact that the cheapest way to buy Chinese art now is at auction; because it’s gone down so much in price you can just go in there and scoop it all up. – Chinese art consultant Carrie Clyne – whom I ran into at Independent – runs an expert eye over the Armory Show. (Saturday)

We’ve made $3700, but we’re aiming at $5000. – Clayton Price, one of the American Society of Media Photographers New York whose fundraising efforts for Haiti (all photographs offered at $100 and 100% of proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders) was one of the best things about Verge. (Sunday)

We have four artists exhibiting in this space. We have the photographs of Emily Bolivice, we have hand-drawn newspapers by Carissa Carman, we have an installation by Crystal Gregory, and we have the drawings of Eliza Stamps. – The “gallerist’ from the “Chashama Gallery”, who turned out to be performance artist Eliza Stamps, who – along with her three artist-colleagues – was enacting the role of her own dealer at Verge. (Sunday)

Photo Credits: Erik Thor Sandberg, Alterations (2010) copyright Erik Thor Sandberg, courtesy Conner Contemporary Art.

Many readers of A Sky filled with Shooting Stars have asked me about getting behind the scenes of the New York art world in the same way that I am able to.  This year’s Armory Show week offers an ideal first opportunity to make this possible, with a series of exclusive walking tours of the fairs that I shall lead personally, and which will give readers the chance to meet art world insiders and talk to them in detail about the very latest developments.

I shall be leading four separate tours –

The Armory Show for Collectors

The Armory Show for Artists

Pulse and Scope for Collectors

Pulse and Scope for Artists

Each tour group is strictly limited to six members. First come, first served. The fee is $300 with a $100 deduction for every friend you get to sign up with you. (Recruit three friends and you get to enjoy the tour for free!) All fees are payable in advance.

The Armory Show tours will last three hours. The Pulse & Scope tours will last four hours and include private transport between the fair venues. All tours will include complimentary admissions and show catalogues, and meetings with dealers, gallerists and senior art fair representatives. The small group-sizes mean that tours can be geared to individuals’ particular interests.

For further information or to sign up, please contact me direct: robertayers@mac.com

Katelijne de Backer

This Wednesday, March 3, sees the opening of the twelfth edition of the Armory Show, the biggest yet, with almost 300 galleries exhibiting. Of course the Armory Show’s arrival in New York City each spring is not simply about one of the world’s most important art fairs. There is the palpable sense of the art world’s annual cycle getting underway again, and this year in particular people are beginning to think ahead to how the making, exhibiting, buying, and selling of art is going to evolve over the next twelve months. Though she claims here that she doesn’t have a crystal ball, there is probably no one with a clearer feel for these things than the Armory Show’s globetrotting Executive Director, Katelijne de Backer. I spoke to her on Friday afternoon and was once again struck by her unflappability: we’re embarking on the busiest and probably the most important week in the New York art calendar, and Ms de Backer is at the center of the whole thing. And she still manages to maintain a clear-headed perception of what’s going on around her.

Katelijne, in simple terms, what’s so special about the Armory Show?  Why should people bother to come this week?

To find out what’s happening in the art world today, and what’s going on in the heads of artists. I think the Armory Show gives the clearest sense of what’s happening in the global art world. Taking the Armory Show Modern and the Armory Show Contemporary together, we have 289 galleries from 31 countries (plus five non-profits, and publications, and a bookstore) over the two piers.

You started Armory Show Modern last year. Do you feel it succeeded?

Yes, this is the second year, and last year the responses were very positive. The collectors and artists especially loved it because they found that being able to put the art that had just come out of artists’ studios next to more historical works provided a nice reference point for the contemporary art.

But we’re still establishing the idea of the Armory Show Modern, to be honest. We keep seeing people continuing to refer to us as the “Armory Show International Fair of New Art” and we feel we still have to hammer home the point that we’ve expanded to include the twentieth century as well as the twenty-first.

This year’s innovation is the focus on Berlin galleries. What’s the thinking behind that?

The whole idea of connecting New York with Berlin started because we felt that in Berlin today there is a very similar energy to what existed in New York when the Armory Show was founded at the beginning of the nineties: very ambitious, organic, and with a love for art. There are many artists living there, and lots of small galleries and not-for-profit spaces opening, and we thought it was perfect to bring Berlin to New York.  Berlin can benefit from the collectors who live in New York and the institutions that are here, and we can benefit from Berlin’s energy. That is why we did it. As you know, I traveled to Berlin and met with many of the galleries there and in the end we have twenty-two Berlin galleries. Some of them are galleries that would usually have a huge space in a fair, while others are small galleries that have just opened up, but they all agreed to go for a small same-sized booth to show that it’s really about Berlin rather than any particular gallery. They’ve come to the fair together with a united front and to show what’s really happening in Berlin at the moment. That’s exactly what we wanted to do, so I’m very happy with that.

Is all that an elaborate way of saying that New York has had its day?

Of course not! We had a really great application to the fair from galleries in New York’s Lower East Side. Our selection committee gladly accepted them. We haven’t grouped them together, but it’s really great to have these galleries in the fair, and it really makes sense, especially now that we’re doing the Berlin section because these galleries have that similar kind of energy and organic way of working: they’re very ambitious, they’re in small spaces, and they just go for it! It provides a nice contrast to what I’d call the more business-like approach of the Chelsea galleries, where they are very established, and they all have beautiful big spaces. In the Lower East Side they really have the feeling that existed in New York in the nineties, and that the Berlin galleries bring as well. There’s a very strong feeling of community among them, and a very solid sense of camaraderie. They actually work together, and I don’t think we see much of that in Chelsea.

The question that everyones’s going to want me to ask you is about the financial mood. Are we going to see a lot of money changing hands this week?

Well, I wish I knew! I have no idea. That is one of the things that everybody is asking themselves. From walking around Chelsea and the Lower East Side and talking to galleries and collectors, I can tell you that everybody is very excited, and there is a real positive feeling about. One indicator is that we had an amazing response from our VIPs to the events that we organize. Everything was full within three or four hours, which means that people are coming to New York and they’re all looking forward to it. Remember that we have more galleries this year than we’ve ever had before. I think that came about because when people were at Art Basel Miami Beach in December all of a sudden everyone started feeling much more optimistic about the market, and then with the results of the more recent auctions where records are being broken again, I think that there’s been a big shift in the mood. You can also see it in the number of ancillary fairs that are happening this year. There are a couple of new ones: there’s the Dutch art fair, and there’s the Korean art show. They’re relatively small, I know, but the fact that people are starting new fairs shows a very strong confidence in the market. Also, another interesting thing is that there is an inordinate number of solo shows happening this year – on both piers. That’s a gutsy move on the part of the exhibitors, because it’s risky to give over your booth to just one person. You have to be feeling pretty optimistic.

Richard Smith, 2001 (Photo: Rose Smith)

Had I not stumbled upon performance art in the early 1970s, it is very possible that I would have dedicated my artistic efforts to abstract painting after the particular example of my compatriot Richard Smith (born 1931). When I was a young British art student there were very few artists for whom I had more respect. His paintings are characterized by a visual intelligence, economy, and elegance that excited me as much forty years ago as they do now, and by a lusciousness of color and a willingness to question the whole basis of picture making. As he describes here, in the early 1960s he introduced literal three-dimensionality into his abstract pictures in a way that was entirely new, and which even now has never really been explored by anyone else.

Richard Smith is an artist whose sensibilities unite the traditions of English and American abstraction. This is hardly surprising given the transatlantic lifestyle that he has maintained since he first traveled to this country in 1959, but it is a fact that adds another strand of uniqueness to his art, and another that fascinates a fellow immigrant like myself.

Richard Smith, "Notes" (2009)

Richard Smith’s latest show opens on Thursday evening, February 25 at Matt Flowers’ beautiful new space at 529 West 20th Street, and runs through April 3. I spoke to him at the gallery last week as the paintings were being delivered, and we enjoyed a fascinating conversation that spanned the whole of his career.

Richard, your pictures are entirely abstract, so when you start work on a picture, what do you bring to it? What have you been looking at? What have you been thinking about?

Well, a lot of it is self-referential – things I’ve done in the past. But if you’ve gone on painting as many years as I have (next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of my first one-man show in New York!) that’s a lot of painting, either to return to or to depart from. With these ones the scale is not a usual scale for me, and a lot of my paintings have been on canvases that were not rectangular. So these new ones are more regular in a certain way, and I think of them as having a simplicity or directness to them. They have an “outsider art” feel to them.

Richard Smith, "Surface III" (2009)

Do you say that because there’s not much else going on in the art world that you feel kinship with?

Oh, no. There’s plenty of stuff going on. It’s surprising how you value your contemporaries, and there are young painters that I admire. I just meant that these paintings felt quite personal to me and I was very content working on them.

I’m amazed that it’s fifty years since your first show here. Tell me how that came about.

About two years after I left [London’s] Royal College [of Art] I got a fellowship called the Harkness Fellowship, and I came over on that. Harold Cohen was on it at the same time. I got the fellowship in ’58, and then I came late in ’59, and I worked through ’60. (I delayed my trip to New York because Robyn Denny, Ralph Rumney and myself had a show at the ICA called “Place”, with freestanding paintings throughout the ICA’s building on Dover Street.)

It was a wonderful time to come to New York. I met a lot of people, and I was helped by lots of people. I had this classic New York loft on Howard Street: 100 feet by 25 feet, that I shared with another painter. Our rent was $50 a month, which we shared.

I met Henry Geldzahler on the street and he said, “Oh, I’ll come to your studio.” So he came up and I had a big group of paintings there, and he really reacted very well to them. He was on the phone straight away and he called Ivan Karp and Alan Solomon (who was then Director of the Jewish Museum) and Richard Bellamy, who was about to open the Green Gallery. They used to do these studio visits together, and they came over and I showed them the paintings and I remember it was a very jolly occasion. I had a phone call from Bellamy and he said, “I’d really like to show you. Can I meet you again?” So the show was in his first season in April ’61. I showed big rectangular paintings. The Tate has one of them now, called Panatella.

Richard Smith, "Panatella (1961)

And what was it that attracted you to New York in the first place?

I was enamored of the paintings. And I was enamored of the idea of Manhattan. I did a painting whilst I was in college: there was a photograph of Manhattan – the whole island – taken from a plane, and I did a painting of it. I don’t know whether it still exists, but it was a rather terrible painting on masonite that one used to do.

And what happened after that first show?

Well I had that show, and then I went back to England because my visa ran out. I was there for two years, and then I got my visa to come back to Manhattan. We were back and forward a bit, but I had two or three shows at Green, and then Bellamy closed the gallery. Back in London, I couldn’t get anyone to show my work so I had a show in my loft over a long weekend, and Kasmin was interested (even before I had the show, actually) and so then I showed with Kasmin, and that was when I did those big three-dimensional paintings.

Richard Smith, "Piano" (1963)

I remember being very impressed by the one called Piano, and a rather later one called Riverfall.

Yes. The Tate have both of them, I’m delighted to say. They’re a terrible responsibility, paintings.

Richard Smith, "Riverfall" (1969)

Looking back at those paintings make me realize that although I always associate your work with the tradition of English abstraction, back then you were also rubbing shoulders with Pop art.

Oh, Yes. Whilst I was at college – and also after college – I shared an apartment with Peter Blake, and those three-dimensional paintings were quite explicitly Pop. My first show at Green, the paintings had titles like Chase Manhattan.

You went back to Britain towards the end of the sixties, didn’t you?

I won the grand prize in Sao Paolo in ’68. It was an award of $10,000, which was a lot of money, so we decided to go back to England to buy a house, and I had a wonderful time in that house. I was doing the biennales and whatever, and I had a good life in England. And then we came back here for a year – I had a touring exhibition and whatever, and we got back here and rented this wonderful loft on Lafayette Street, and I was totally enamored of the city again, so we ended up staying, and I’ve been here ever since really.

When you compare your work from the sixties to what you are doing now, what would you say are the constant threads in your work?

I think it’s color, really, that keeps me interested.

And what about the tension in the drawing? That’s something that I always associate with your work.

Richard Smith, "Double Box" (2010)

All of these paintings have stripes that go right through to the edge of the paint. I think that one of the reasons why I framed them, to stop them disappearing. (It’s a departure for me to frame a painting, but it seemed kind of possible with these paintings.)

They’re odd, these paintings. This one [Double Box] is familiar. It’s an area that I’ve visited before – the box – but this one [Under Attack] is much more scattered, and part of it looks like a Korean flag.

Richard Smith, "Under Attack" (2010)

This [Empty Lot] is a strange painting – I had it underway, and I was going back home to Long Island from the city. I was looking out of the window of the train at the parking lots by the stations, and it had been snowing, and when a car moves these rectangular shapes inside the green semicircles look like the space a car leaves when it’s driven away.

Richard Smith, "Empty Lot" (2010)

Richard, you’ve lived between England and the U.S. for many years. Do you see your work as belonging to the British tradition or the American?

I don’t know whether I really did myself a favor by returning to New York and not waiting for my knighthood! But I’m happy with my choice. I don’t have regrets because I have a complete life here. But I’m still British. I’m still a British painter. It’s difficult to make a transition.

Kiki Smith, 2009

Many readers of A Sky filled with Shooting Stars will know that Kiki Smith is an artist for whom I have enormous regard. Back in 2006 I named her Whitney retrospective “A Gathering” as ARTINFO’s joint-best New York museum show of the year (tying it with Sean Scully at the Met) and a few months later, when I had the honor of conducting the one hundredth ARTINFO interview, I chose to do it with her. Her latest show, “Sojourn”, opened at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at Brooklyn Museum on Friday (it’s there through September 12) and it is a genuine treat. Ms Smith’s very particular vision focuses on what she regards as timeless aspects of the human condition – our relationship with our own bodies, with the natural world, with the universe at large, and with our fears, myths, and belief structures; and she crafts out of them works in a whole range of media that manage to reinforce the importance and mystery of those relationships to us living in the supposedly sophisticated early twenty-first century. As we discuss briefly here, her work has been claimed for feminism, for politics, for religion, and for a whole range of other issues, but its real intoxicating power lies in the complex ambiguities of its multiple readings.

Kiki Smith, "Annunciation" (2008).

Kiki, the people at the Brooklyn Museum are very straightforward about it: “Kiki Smith is a feminist artist,” they say. Are you?

Yes, I would say that generationally I am, and I would say that without the feminist movement I wouldn’t exist; and an enormous amount of the artwork that we take for granted wouldn’t exist; and a lot of the subject matter that we assume can be encompassed by art wouldn’t exist.  The feminist movement exponentially expanded what art is, and how we look at art, and who is considered to be included in the discourse of art-making. I think that it caused a tremendous, radical change. You don’t want to have a cultural notion that one specific gender embodies creativity. All humanity – and all aspects of gender and sexuality and how people define themselves – are  inherently creative. It’s against the interests of the culture at large not to embrace feminism as a model, just like many other models of liberation, because they don’t only liberate women, they liberate everybody.

My point is that I’ve always found your work so complex that I would hesitate to categorize you as a “feminist artist” any more than a “political artist” or a “religious artist”.

Well, I think that one wants one’s work to be as holistic and to have as much space in it as it can. You want it to go in every direction it can.

Kiki Smith, "Coming Forth" (2008).

That’s what I mean. For example, there’s a picture here called Coming Forth (2008) and despite knowing your work extremely well, I really wonder what’s going on in it. A young, sexy woman seems to be emerging out of the body of an older woman …

I hadn’t thought about her being sexy! She’s just supposed to be a young woman, or a young girl, about eighteen years old. I didn’t really sexualize her. That must be in your mind! I meant this as a kind of birth image. People might take it some other way, but in my mind it’s a birth image: the younger coming out of the older.

They’re not intended to be two versions of the same person?

You know, it could be that too. It could be both. Most of the things I do have an openness to them. I’m not trying to make didactic work that has literal interpretations. I’m not interested in that. I go on my own intuition. I just do what occurs to me, and mostly it’s afterwards – sometimes years afterwards – that I realize, “Oh, that’s what you were up to!”

You don’t see artists having a didactic role at all?

I try to be as vague as possible! I want things to be open. I don’t want to tell people how to think. That’s not interesting to me. I have my own convoluted ways of thinking about things, but I don’t need to pass them along to other people.

I thought you’d be sympathetic to the idea of the artist as a kind of teacher.

Well, it’s also like teaching things. I’m very attracted to the image of John the Baptist, though there aren’t really any models like that for women as teachers. I think that that’s what you do, you try to empower from one generation to the next. John the Baptist tried to bless and empower the next generation, and as a teacher your great gift is if you can empower younger people to find their own vision.

And you think of that as passing on a power, rather than trying to encourage people to think in a particular way?

Oh I think that’s deadly when you try to tell people how to think. You just want to empower them to take the chance on themselves. That’s what you do when you’re older, or when you reach maturity, you try to give what you can to the next generation.

You mention John the Baptist, and it seems to me that there’s a very broad Christian streak running through the work here. I’m intrigued by the piece called Annunciation (2008).

Frida Kahlo, "Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair" (1940).

I had this idea of a woman I know sitting in a suit. At first I thought of that image of Frida Kahlo sitting in a suit with short hair and her shorn hair all around her. I liked the idea of making her a woman but very androgynous (because I think that when women cut their hair they seem androgynous). Then I had the idea of making her as an annunciation, but I thought that that was a really weird idea, making a sixty-year-old woman into the Virgin Mary. Then I realized afterwards that what it was really about was being an artist: the Holy Ghost coming to you is just how creativity comes to you – it comes freely into your consciousness.

There’s another piece in the show called The Messenger III (2008) and I have to say that that dove reminded me of representations of the Holy Ghost.

Kiki Smith, "Messenger III" (2008)

Yes. I thought that the bird coming in you and making an announcement is a very similar thing to being an artist and experiencing these pronouncements in your being that you should move in a particular way.

Is that how you regard inspiration? Something that you receive passively?

I think that the whole show is a celebration of passivity! Just sitting and listening and being spaced-out and just being is often when you’re given information. I think it just comes in you. You wake up, or you’re sitting there on the train, and you think “Oh! I better do this!” And you show up for it. There are a bunch of things in this show that afterwards I thought, “Oh, that’s about being an artist.” I think that as you get older, it becomes apparent how important listening is. Rather than voraciously consuming the universe when you’re younger, you can have a quieter version of it, a slower consumption.

Kiki Smith, Annunciation (2008) (detail).

I’m also fascinated by that very particular hand gesture of the woman in Annunciation – the raised hand with the open palm. You’ve used that a lot in your work. Is it taken from art historical representations of the annunciation?

Philippe de Champaigne, "The Annunciation" (c. 1644).

I like it because it has a slight ambiguity to it. It has both a “Hail!” and a “Halt!” in it. As though she’s going “Stop it!” or “Stay away from me!” I always laugh at the idea of the Virgin Mary going “Stop! Don’t light here!” But it’s also like putting your hand up in wonderment, or being open to the universe. I would think that if you open your hand up like that, you’d really feel the energy of the world in front of you.

You’ve called the show “Sojourn” and I understand that’s partly as a homage to Sojourner Truth, one of the lesser known guests at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-79) [which is permanently installed at the Sackler Center].

Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party" (1974-79).

Yes. She’s such a radical person. And I like her because she’s complex. She’s a complex historical character. I suppose there have been other women who have done it, but I don’t know of any other early American women, or men for that matter, who took it upon themselves to make their own name. Supposedly people coming from Europe did it all the time, as part of their new start, but she made her own name.

Sojourner Truth

Does it derive from the Christian idea of our lives being a temporary sojourn on earth?

Yes, so she gave herself such an incredibly great name, because that’s essentially what we are – sojourners – and to be a sojourner for truth, that’s profound! She was not afraid to take a lot on. It’s my favorite word! I just love it, because it’s very open.

And can I just ask you finally about the puppets that you’ve put in the Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms?

Kiki Smith, "Walking Puppet" 2008 (Installation, Major Henry Trippe House, Chamber Staircase, Brooklyn Museum.)

In my youth I used to make puppet theatres and I was extremely influenced by Bread and Puppet Theater, so it’s part of a big passion of mine, but the puppets here are just like a dessert.  Or a folly. They’re just to make something that has nothing to do with the rest of the show whatsoever. I made some films walking around in nature in upstate New York, and of gardens at different times of the year, and of historical houses that I know.  They’re projected on the puppets, though you can’t really see them, and they’re very nice. But it’s just like an entertainment in the middle of the rest of it; like eating petits-fours.

Photo Credits: “Kiki Smith, 2009″ – photo by Diana Ketchum/Arion Press, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York; “Annunciation”, 2008 – cast aluminum, 61-1/2″ x 32″ x 19″ (156.2 cm x 81.3 cm x 48.3 cm), photo by Joerg Lohse/ Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York, © Kiki Smith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York; “Coming Forth”, 2008 – collage and ink on Nepal paper, 8′ 2-1/2″ x 6′ 9-1/2″ (250.2 cm x 207 cm), photo by: Kerry Ryan McFate/ Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York , © Kiki Smith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York; “Messenger III”, 2008 – cast aluminum, white gold and gold leaf, 31-1/2″ x 42-1/2″ x 42″ (80 cm x 108 cm x 106.7 cm), photo by Joerg Lohse/ Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York, © Kiki Smith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York; ”Annunciation” (detail), 2008 – cast aluminum, 61-1/2″ x 32″ x 19″ (156.2 cm x 81.3 cm x 48.3 cm), photo by Volker Dohne/ Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York © Kiki Smith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York; “Walking Puppet”, 2008 – papier-mâché with muslin, 80″ x 30″ x 40″ (203.2 cm x 76.2 cm x 101.6 cm), overall, © Kiki Smith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York, photo courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.

Man Ray, "Self-Portrait" (1924)

When I predicted the top museum shows of 2009 for ARTINFO back in January, I remember being particularly excited about this one, Alias Man Ray: The Art of ReInvention that opens at the Jewish Museum on Sunday (and runs through next March). Now that I have had a chance to preview the show, I am delighted to say that it is even better than I hoped. As well as providing a full-scale retrospective of this most interdisciplinary of artists – the first here since 1974, apparently – the show focuses on Man Ray’s tortured discomfort with his own identity and on the complex ways in which it affected his work.

Formal portrait of the Radnitzky family, 1896

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish parents in Philadelphia in 1890, the child who would become Man Ray moved with his family to Williamsburg in 1907. This show explores how for the whole of his artistic career – as a New York Dada, a Parisian surrealist, an international portrait and fashion photographer, and as a painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, writer, activist, and inventor of the cameraless Rayograph – he suppressed knowledge of those beginnings, and ironically created an artistic persona whose mystery and rootlessness was basic to its success.

Man Ray, "Rayograph" (1926)

The man behind the show, and behind its utterly persuasive argument, is Jewish Museum Curator Mason Klein. (Mr Klein has also edited the excellent and entertaining catalog of the show which is published in collaboration with Yale University Press and which I heartily recommend.)Yesterday I sat down with him over a cup of coffee and he outlined the five principal reasons why his show is worth the trip up to East 92nd Street:

This show addresses Man Ray’s otherness. He has remained a mysterious character and we try to provide a whole new perspective on understanding him. Man Ray sought both notoriety and oblivion; he had to remain an outsider. It’s only now, after twenty years of identity politics that we can ask, “How did being Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century matter in Man Ray’s work? What does it mean?” I don’t think he was expecting to encounter the anti-Semitism that he did. As much as artists tried to fight xenophobic tendencies, and believed that Dada could be a trans-national movement with a global language, there was such an order to the art world back then.

Man Ray, "Indestructible Object" (1923/1965)

Man Ray may well have been the first Jewish member of the European avant-garde. He was certainly the first to have been embraced by the European avant-garde. And for him to become a member of the avant-garde, he felt that he had to be seen in a different way from having Brooklyn, Russian, Jewish immigrant parents with sweatshop experience. I think that for his generation of artists, who came at the time of the waves of immigration in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, there was a need to demand some neutrality, so that you’d be allowed equal terms with other artists, and not relegated to some cultural niche. That’s why everyone changed their names.

Man Ray, "Marcel Duchamp, Solarized Portrait" (1930)

I try to play down Marcel Duchamp here. Duchamp’s influence was so pervasive that there isn’t an artist who hasn’t been influenced by him, but because he and Man Ray were such close collaborators, Man Ray has really suffered. He has been subsumed within the radiant aura of Marcel Duchamp.

Man Ray, "Gift" (c. 1958; replica of 1921 original)

Man Ray felt that his historical place had not been acknowledged. He felt that abstract expressionism – particularly as it was being commandeered critically by Clement Greenberg – was facile, if not entirely empty of subject matter. So he began to do these “natural paintings” just to show that anybody could do that kind of abstract painting automatically. He felt that he had spent decades dredging himself psychoanalytically in a way that the abstract expressionist artists had not, and that they were too market-driven and decorative.

Man Ray, "Lingerie" (1931)

The Rayographs purport to penetrate to the core, like an X-Ray. But what they really present is a flat contour of a form. They never really get to that impenetrable core. It’s a perfect procedure for Man Ray to be working in.

Paul McCarthy, "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009)

If there’s a less polite exhibit than Paul McCarthy’s White Snow in New York presently, I certainly haven’t seen it.

Pretty much throughout his entire artistic career – certainly since I first saw him perform in England in 1983 – Mr McCarthy has trained his artistic focus on the more disgusting aspects of the human condition: not just the sweating and the bleeding, and the pissing and the shitting, and the wanking and the fucking, but on the ways in which our thoughts about those activities insinuate themselves into how we consider everything else, despite the efforts that some of us might make to suppress them. His domain is the frontier between the proper and the improper, between the acknowledged and the hidden, and he is also interested in how these things inform the making of art.

His focus this time around – or perhaps “target” is a better word – is Snow White, her Seven Dwarves, and – to a lesser extent, her handsome prince. The results are inevitable.

Let’s just list a few of the elements in the wall-sized drawing Shit Pie (White Snow) which McCarthy made earlier this year, and which – like pretty much everything else in this show (and despite his broken leg) – he was still working on as it hung in Hauser & Wirth’s East 69th Street gallery before this evening’s opening.

In the top left hand corner there’s a squiggle that, given its context in this picture, I have to conclude is a drawing of a vagina, possibly crossed out. Next there’s the first of two crudely drawn Snow White heads – this one has eyes like pieces of coal in the snow, a blonde porn-star’s portrait stuck to her forehead, and a simplistic four line drawing of a vagina in place of her mouth. This has been smeared over in black oil-stick.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

Immediately below this is the second head, slightly bigger. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is once again a vagina, but this time a blacked-in penis shape has been drawn across it, giving the impression that she is fellating it. The same blonde porn-star has a slightly different portrait stuck to her hair. To the right of the two heads, and slightly below it, there is a drawing of a crouching body that might belong to either of them. We see it from the side and rear, and witness a scribbled piece of feces fall from an anus that has been partially erased on to a plate of more feces. Above this is another drawing of the same body, this time seen from a slightly different angle, and concentrating upon a distended anus that appears to disgorge semi-liquid feces. Immediately beneath this there is one of a number of drawings of a penis entering a vagina, and immediately beneath that, in an apparent last minute addition, are the words “SHIT PIE”.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

Beneath that are four pieces of collage – a torn page from a porn magazine featuring a naked young woman surrounded by a group of older men, also naked; the front cover of a Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary catalog featuring a particularly sloppy De Kooning; a section of a page from a fetish porn magazine showing four pictures of women in the act of defecation; and an ad for a transsexual phone sex line headed “TS SLUTS” and featuring a photograph of someone wearing women’s shoes and holding their engorged penis.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

Elsewhere there are a couple Disney-esque deer, one with a human vagina, the other with an erect human penis; there’s a smiling dwarf thrusting a broom handle into another dwarf’s anus; there’s a collaged photograph of a penis sticking through a hole in a wall; there are scribbled words – “Pussy” followed by a series of variants, or a list what appear to be actions from Disney’s Snow White movie, “going home … Disscovering [sic] the unknown … Going up stairs … Finding Snow White … S.W. wakes up …”.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

The whole upper left quadrant of the picture is filled with black and yellow scrawling, and seems to refer again to the similarity between untutored scribbling and the appearances of abstract expressionist painting that was hinted at by the inclusion of the de Kooning catalog cover. And by extension between all mark-making, no matter how unguarded, and all art. There’s an illustration of a Rothko glued there, and a Cindy Sherman, and a list of artists’ names from Artschwager to Yuskavage. Elsewhere there’s the rather unkind inclusion of a picture of the artist who looks more like a Disney dwarf than any other, John Baldessari.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

It is actually rather dispiriting to even describe a picture like this, but having looked at it, and the rest of this show, in detail, I found myself coming to a number of conclusions about Mr McCarthy’s work, some of which rather surprised me.

His is a bleak artistic world, undoubtedly, in which everything is a reminder of something else, and that reminder and that something else are things we might want to pretend hadn’t occured to us – a mouth is a vagina; a vagina is an anus: a fairy-tale heroine is a fellating or defecating porn-star: a nose is a penis; a broom handle is a penis; eating is defecation; making marks – and thus painting – and thus all art – is defecation. Yes, it is bleak indeed, and made more unpleasant by the fact that the sort of language that I am persevering with here is actually inappropriate. The ways in which Mr McCarthy approaches these subjects, with pages ripped from porn magazines, and cartoonish simplifications, and the angry distortions of bathroom-wall graffiti invites a far less polite vocabulary, the one that he himself uses, and which I used for emphasis at the top of this post: for vagina read “cunt”, for feces read “shit”, for fellating read “cock-sucking”. It is as unpleasant as it is obvious.

Paul McCarthy "Shit Pie (White Snow)" (2009) (detail)

On the other hand, I do not – or I don’t any longer – find any of this actually shocking. Perhaps a few years ago, and before pretty much every color and size of pornography became available to anyone with a computer and their Google “safe search” switched off, I might have been unsettled by some of the porn that is all over this show. Perhaps before I had seen as much of Mr McCarthy’s previous work I might have found some of his imaginings about what Snow White and the dwarves got up to upsetting, but now I can simply acknowledge that this is his chosen artistic realm, and one which he inhabits comfortably. His connections, his observations on how we might see the world are interesting, thought-provoking, even – I am willing to admit it – entertaining. But shocking? Well, for me at any rate, certainly not. No more than the surrealists are shocking. Or Freud.

This leads me to a number of other conclusions about him that might read a little more positively. He is not sick, he is not a pornographer, he is not a misogynist, nor a would-be rapist or murderer. But herein lies what I think is the most fascinating thing about this show, and about Mr McCarthy himself: because for this work to succeed, we need to believe – even if just a little bit – that at some level he is these things.

The downstairs gallery at Hauser & Wirth is actually filled with a recorded soundtrack of him at work on these pictures – huffing and puffing, banging things or dragging them around, and often conducting a grunting, mumbling, stream-of-consciousness commentary on what he’s picturing. The gallery informs us that this “a performative process” in which he speaks aloud “in a sort of trance”. Paul McCarthy, we are asked to believe, is more than an artist. He is a shamanistic everyman dredging particularly dark areas of the contemporary collective unconscious for the edification of the rest of us. He is thus either one of the most important artists working presently or an utter charlatan. And this is why this show is unmissable. Because nobody can decide for you which of these is true – you must see the work and decide for yourself.

Thomas Allen, "Shooting Stars" (1996)

Thomas Allen has been a favorite photographer of mine since I first saw his work at the Foley Gallery in 2004. He describes his work quite simply: “I work with vintage paperbacks, mainly 1950s pulp novels. I cut them with an Exacto knife and make pop-up books. Then I light them for very dramatic effect and I photograph them,” and though his work is instantly recognizable, it seems always rich in new possibilities. Indeed, given his unpromising materials, the range and sophistication of the human subject-matter that he is able to tackle with them is at once surprising and impressive. And the exquisite illusions that he is able to conjure with simple cuts, folds, and juxtapositions are quite remarkable. Clearly I am not alone in thinking this: in 2007, Aperture published UNCOVERED: Photographs by Thomas Allen, with a forward by Chip Kidd. In addition he has shown at galleries throughout the United States and has already had solo museum exhibitions, at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin. He has also worked extensively in the commercial field, for Harper’s, The New Yorker, New York magazine and O magazine among many others.

When I discovered that Mr Allen’s current show – aptly titled Epilogue (at Foley until this Saturday, October 10) – was to be his last using his current techniques, materials, and subject matter, I decided it was time to talk to him about his work, and it turned out to be a fascinating conversation.

Thomas Allen

Tom, can you tell me what got you started with this sort of photography?

Well, very early on I was interested in making constructed photographs – photographs that were staged specifically for the camera. I found it was more challenging to make pictures than to try and find pictures. In fact, half the fun is actually making things before I photograph them. If not more fun.

Thomas Allen, "Deception" (1996)

I went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota. I called my thesis show Science: Fact or Fiction. (I’d always been fascinated with science as a kid, not from the technical point of view, but from the physical point of view.) By then I’d realized that I could cut little things out of books and layer them over other books – usually science books – and change the meaning and actually tell a different story. For example, in Deception, the book was a sort of science encyclopedia, and the snake came from a picture book of animals, and suddenly you have the snake next to Adam’s apple in the Garden of Eden. But sometimes the pieces I wanted to use weren’t big enough or small enough, like in Shooting Stars, so I started scanning them into Photoshop and then I’d print them on paper, glue them on card stock, and put them in place.

The current work’s a bit more complicated than that though, isn’t it?

When I first started doing pulp novels, I was cutting a guy out of a front cover and I realized that if you pulled him up and looked at him from one precise point, it looked as though he was in three dimensions coming out of the book. But if you switch the viewpoint, one way or another, the trick is blown: you see through the cuts. (One thing I’ve never done is alter what I see through the view camera.) Anyway, I knew I was on to something, so I bought more of these pulp novels.

Thomas Allen, "Stress" (2004)

What’s so attractive about photographing pulp novels?

It’s a great away for me to relive my fantasies! It allows me to become part of their world. Especially if I get up really close. I play off what’s going in the faces. There’s such drama in the facial expressions, and by photographing them in such a small space you can determine the interpretation. If I was just to cut the books up and display them as objects, you wouldn’t have quite the same feeling, because the viewer’s not contained. But in this show, and in the show previous to this, my focus has been on setting up small environments that are more like film stills, so that a narrative takes place in the single frame. I always try to find some kind of narrative. Like in Finale: Did she do it? Or did it happen by accident? And is she happy it’s happening?

Thomas Allen, "Finale" (2009)

Talking of narratives, there’s a picture in this show called Epilogue. Is it a kind of self-portrait?

Thomas Allen, Epilogue (2009)

If I look at a lot of these images, they seem somewhat autobiographical, but I think that Floored is more of a self-portrait, in the sense that I have finally met my match, and the game is over.

Thomas Allen, "Floored" (2009)

Thinking more broadly, would it be fair to say that you are commenting on contemporary cultural interests?

Yes, that’s the impetus: I’m using items from the past to tell stories from the present. I’ve taken these objects from the pop culture of the fifties and altered them in such a way that they reflect today’s sensibilities, with things such as homoerotic imagery, or the whole idea that women are oftentimes the victims. In most of the images that I make the woman ends up coming out on top.

Like in one of my favorite pieces of your commercial work, the Eliot Spitzer portrait. How did that come about?

Thomas Allen, "Eliot Spitzer" from New York magazine (2008)

I received a call from New York magazine telling me that the whole Spitzer thing had just erupted, and they were changing the entire format of the magazine so that they could run a piece on Spitzer. They were inviting ten artists to visually interpret what was going on, and we had eighteen hours to get it to them! So I jumped at it – I’m always up for a challenge. They provided me with hi-res headshots, and I immediately thought of this idea. Sometimes I have these books that I’ve looked at over and over again, so I have like a visual catalog in my head, and I thought, “OK, I can use that one and that one.” It came together quite quickly.

Thomas Allen, "Polecats" (2009)

Is morality generally an issue in your work?

It certainly could be. My background – on my father’s side of the family anyway – is that they are all racists, for want of a better word. And they’re all womanizers. So I suppose I’m making a comment about my distaste for their behavior. It’s about what I choose to distance myself from.

But you deal with things in a humorous way. How important is that?

Thomas Allen, "Fever" (2009)

It’s really important. I’ve always thought they should be funny, and why can’t they be funny? A lot of the covers are downright funny, and I don’t think I’d get the point across if I made them too serious. They have to be somewhat light. In the past people have asked me if they are supposed to be funny, and I’ve said, “I certainly hope so!” But I also think they all have some underlying darkness.

So these are the last of the pulp fiction pieces?

Yes. It’s been about ten years. While I’m sure I could keep going, to be honest I’m starting to lose fascination with it, and it’s just becoming more and more difficult.

Thomas Allen, "Outbreak" (2009)

And what can we expect next?

Who knows? I’ve been looking at eBay for inspiration, and at playing cards. And I have a collection of books from the Real Book series – The Real Book of Cowboys, and The Real Book of Dogs. I have them here right now. On the other hand, I recently applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and if the stars align and I get it, I will be using these pulp novels again. I wrote them a statement about Robert Frank making very telling pictures from the 1950s, and me photographing people from the 1950s as well, but making a social statement about our current climate. We’ll see what happens.