LUCIAN FREUD | GO SEE - BEIJING

David Dawson, David and Eli in progress, 2004
The relationship between master and apprentice is evident in the works from painter Lucian Freud and his assistant David Dawson now on view at Faurschou Beijing through August 14th. Dawson has worked as Freud’s assistant since 1991 and has been one of the few people allowed to photograph Freud in his studio as he works. The exhibitions pairs Freud’s painting David & Eli, (2003-04) with ten photos taken by Dawson at Freud’s studio between 2004 to 2006.



Installation view of Lucian Freud and David Dawson at Faurschou Beijing
More text and images after the jump…




Lucian Freud, David & Eli, (2003-04), all images via Faurschou Beijing
Freud’s painting David & Eli acts as the working point for the entire exhibition. Dawson posed as the model for the figure, and Freud has rendered him in his usual style—a reclining nude in a minimal setting with few distractions. Freud is meticulous in his handling of features and expressions, and his models have been known to sit for long periods of time as he works. Many of his models are friends and fellow painters with whom he has developed close personal relationships, allowing him move beyond simply painting a portrait of the subject, instead evoking a specific personality.



David Dawson, Falling Over




David Dawson, Working at Night, 2005
Dawson’s photographs of Freud’s studio space and of Freud himself feel like a private survey into a close partnership. In Working at Night (2005), Dawson captures Freud as he works in what could be seen as a vulnerable state—shirtless with his brushes and palette, about to return to a painting— yet the artist is clearly at ease with Dawson’s camera.



David Dawson, Naked Admirer




David Dawson, Lucian with fox cub (2005)
In another photograph, an unfinished version of David & Eli rests in Freud’s studio. We not only see the work, but also the process behind it- we are allowed to witness the mass of paint collected on the walls and recognize the plant and basket that appear in David & Eli. We see the studio as both a working environment and a place of privacy, and how, after having spent 20 years together, Freud and Dawson have developed a professional relationship that allows for reflection on their creative process.
Lucian Freud died recently on Wednesday, July 20th at the age of 88 at his home in London.



Installation view of Lucian Freud and David Dawson at Faurschou Beijing



Installation view of Lucian Freud and David Dawson at Faurschou Beijing
- C. Hughes-Greenberg
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Faurschou Beijing]Life with Lucian [Guardian]






Art_prospect

LEBEWOHL LUCIAN FREUD

Realist painter Lucian Freud dies at 88

Lucian Freud, a British artist who gained fame for his intense and deeply textural nude paintings, has died. He was 88.

Freud, the grandson of the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, died Wednesday at his home in London following an illness, according to a representative for his New York dealer, William Acquavella.

The artist's best-known works feature subjects in anguished, anti-erotic poses, their psychology externalized onto their fleshy bodies. He liked to use impasto, a technique involving the thick application of paint, to create his highly textured portraits.

"I want paint to work as flesh," he once said. "As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person."

During his long career, Freud made portraits of a number of public figures. He once painted supermodel Kate Moss naked and visibly pregnant. He reportedly engaged in animated negotiations with Buckingham Palace to create his 2001 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, who sat fully clothed. The royal painting divided the public, with some criticizing it as glum and depressing.

Freud's paintings are highly prized among museums and collectors who have been willing to pay large sums for them. In 2008, his nude portrait of a heavy-set civil servant reclining on a sofa, "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping," sold for $33.6 million at a Christie's auction, a record figure at the time.

"Unlike many artists, his late works were among his most significant contributions," Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said Thursday. "He got better, more ambitious and youthful. He was a very young elder statesman."

Born in Berlin in 1922, Freud was one of three sons of Austrian architect Ernst Freud and his German wife, Lucie. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in London. Freud became a British citizen in 1939. As a boy, he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting. During World War II, the budding artist served with the British merchant navy.

Freud showed an early interest in a kind of portraiture that could strip away artifice and reveal the essence of his subjects. His first paintings were characterized by a spare, flat and emotionally uninflected style.

He gained attention for a series of paintings of his first wife, Kitty Garman, including a portrait titled "Girl with a White Dog," in which she exposes a breast while a canine dozes on her lap.

Though he is often described as a realist, Freud's work contains elements of other schools, including surrealism. One of his biggest influences was the painter Francis Bacon, another titan of the postwar art world, who became Freud's friend and helped to push his work in a more expressionist direction.

By the late '50s, Freud had embarked on what would become his signature style of textured nude paintings.

He often turned his gaze on himself. In several unflattering self-portraits, Freud painted himself in various states of undress, his aging body exposed. He frequently painted friends and close associates, and even created a nude portrait of his daughter Bella, a noted fashion designer.

"He was an extremely brave painter in the way he confronted his figures. He brought a whole new meaning to figurative painting and was extremely influential on the generations that followed," said Gretchen Berggruen, a co-owner of the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco.

A major exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1987 helped boost Freud's reputation in the United States. In 1993 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held a retrospective of his work.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. held a retrospective in 2003 that was organized by the Tate Britain. The exhibition featured more than 100 paintings, drawings and prints, as well as new pieces.

"Freud is in reality a fine painter with a very narrow repertoire," Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote in his review of the show. Comparing him to artist Stanley Spencer, an earlier practitioner of nude portraiture, Knight wrote that "Freud's art is rarely so complex, but sometimes it does have the capacity to beguile."

Freud's personal life was a subject of much scrutiny and speculation. After his divorce from Garman, Freud was married for several years to Caroline Blackwood before they divorced. He fathered children from a number of relationships. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

By some accounts a prickly personality, Freud reportedly did not get along with his brother Clement, the British TV personality who died in 2009.

"In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty," his art dealer, Acquavella, said in a statement. "He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world."

By DAVID NG

Los Angeles Times

ELGER ESSER | NOCTURNES | GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC

Elger Esser - Nocturnes - Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Paris - 6 - 29 July 2011
Website Elger Esser

GOODBYE CY | CY TWOMBLY

"My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake... to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt."

Cy Twombly in his studio on William Street, New York, 1956 © Cy Twombly Foundation

Cy Twombly with his painting "1994 Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)," at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2005.       Michael Stravato for The New York Times

The American abstract expressionist artist, who died yesterday, inspired impassioned reactions.

The raw, calligraphic art of Cy Twombly, the US abstract expressionist titan who died yesterday in Rome aged 83, brings about the most impassioned of reactions.

On the artist's "Lepanto" show at Gagosian Gallery in New York early 2002, for instance, The Art Newspaper gushed: "The operatic melodrama and pseudo-historical pomposity of old Cy Twombly may induce the occasional comic twitch of the lips but the sheer chutzpah of his painterly chops still awes."

Artist Dexter Dalwood, meanwhile, opines: "I think he was able to acknowledge the decades without losing his subject matter. 'The Treatise of the Veil' series from the late 1960s is such a shift from the early work and totally embraces minimalism, while the 1980s work is so expressionistic and stylish. The recent work also has the 'heft' of' late work' yet it all maintains a rigour and passion."

In an interview with our sister paper, Il Giornale dell'Arte, Twombly's niece, Marion Franchetti, remembers that the artist "shared the elegance and good taste" of his patron and later brother-in-law, Baron Giorgio Franchetti. "My father admired Uncle Cy for just that reason: the sophistication of his style and the breadth of his culture."

A major show of Twombly's work is currently at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London ("Twombly and Poussin; Arcadian Painters", until 25 September). Ian Dejardin, the Sackler Director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, comments: "We hope [Twombly] would have enjoyed seeing his deeply personal paintings, drawings and sculpture in such profound dialogue with the work of Nicolas Poussin, the artist of whom he said: 'I would have liked to have been Poussin, if I’d had a choice, in another time'."

Famous for his gestural paintings and drawings, the Virginia-born Twombly also produced a large body of sculptures.

He is survived by his son, Cyrus Alessandro (with his late wife the Italian painter Tatiana Franchetti), two grandchildren, and by his longtime companion, the writer Nicola Del Roscio.

A memorial to the artist will run in our September print edition

By The Art Newspaper 

Art_prospect

CARL ANDRE | ROSWITHA HAFTMANN PRIZE 2011

Carl Andre
Spill, New York, 1966
Plastic blocks and canvas bag, 800 units (approx.) on floor
1 cm x 2 cm x 3 cm approx. each, dimensions variable
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
© 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

Dr. Philip Ursprung

Laudatio for Carl Andre and Trisha Brown on the occasion of the Award of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2011 on 5 May 2011 at the Kunsthaus Zürich

From object to process

In March this year at the Barbican Art Gallery in London I saw a restaging of Trisha Brown’s legendary 1971 performance Walking on the Wall. The performers seemed to float right above my head. Horizontal, secured by ropes and harnesses, they moved back and forth along the wall. Initially their movements were hesitant; as time went on they grew in confidence. Whenever they reached the corner of the room they had to take a slight run-up, and for a moment they hung free in space. As a spectator, I was in some ways relieved not to be in their precarious position. On the other hand, I would have liked to experience this unfamiliar sensation myself, and envied the performers their opportunity to take part. To me, the figures moving along the wall seemed like a picture of life on the street, characterized by chance encounters and varying rhythms. At the same time I myself, like the other spectators in the room, became part of the picture. We could sense the performers’ concentration as they sought to control their movements. We smiled when, getting in each other’s way or overtaking one another, they began to laugh. Through a minor shift from horizontal to vertical, Trisha Brown had succeeded in radically transforming their – and our – perception of the everyday act of walking.

During the same trip I also visited Tate Modern. In the collection, I came upon Carl Andre’s floor sculpture Steel Zinc Plain (1969). As I always do when I see one of his floor sculptures, I hesitated for a moment. I know that his works are intended to be walked on. But do the gallery attendants know too? Are the works now so valuable that the restorers no longer allow them to be touched? I gathered myself together and stepped onto the surface. No-one stopped me. It seemed to me I sensed a slight movement, as if the plate were not lying quite flat on its base. Unlike the cement floor, the metal surface was smooth. I took a few paces, taking care not to exert too much pressure and cause the plates to shift. My steps on the metal sounded different from those on the floor. How does the sound of a footstep on concrete differ from one on steel or zinc? Isn’t zinc the softer material, the one formerly used for bar counters and sinks? Can you feel that through the soles of your shoes? Although the metal was undoubtedly robust and the chessboard arrangement could not be simpler, I experienced the work of art as something fragile, something that could come apart at any moment. Like Trisha Brown’s performance Walking on the Wall, Andre’s floor sculpture calls into question the way in which we take walking and standing for granted.

Carl Andre
Steel Peneplain, Kassel, 1982
Cold-rolled steel (300-unit rectangle), each 0.5 x 100 x 100 cm;
overall 0.5 x 300 x 1000 cm
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
© 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

How can it be that an encounter with the works of Trisha Brown and Carl Andre isn’t in some way old-fashioned? Where do their topicality, their contemporaneity come from? Why do we experience them today as something of the present, although we know they were created forty years ago? One reason for the continuing impact of Andre’s and Brown’s oeuvre is that their works concern elemental, human movement processes. They deal with things that affect all of us. They revolve around everyday activities such as standing, walking, throwing, laying, stacking, pulling – actions by means of which we create space for ourselves and define ourselves within our environment and among our fellow human beings. Such actions have been so familiar to us ever since our childhood that we scarcely heed them any more, noticing them only when they are interrupted. Brown and Andre belong to the generation of artists that, at the start of the 1960s, sought to redefine the locus of the subject. We may describe it as a sweeping away of the conventions of painting, a merging of art with life, or a break with the values of modernism. What all these artists had in common was that they used their own bodies to create an art that was designed not to be absolute and self-referential but rather anchored directly in the here and now. They conceived their works not as detached end products but rather as actions, as processes. In so doing, they reflected a general shift of value judgement that still holds true today, namely the idea that the production is worth more than the product. “Only the changing is really enduring”, as Allan Kaprow put it. Today we ask each other “what are you working on right now”, and not “what have you done?”

This is not to say that the artists of that time rejected the reality of the industrialized society in favour of a retreat into their own bodies. On the contrary: the idea of continuous movement is inconceivable without industrialization. When Andy Warhol announced “I want to be a machine,” he was speaking for his contemporaries. The art of Andre and Brown is thoroughly urban. It is inseparably bound up with New York, the capital of the 20th century, the “fever curve of capitalism,” as Rem Koolhaas once put it. Their oeuvre is shaped by the segmentation of time and space as a consequence of the modern division of labour and alienation. As we view Carl Andre’s 10 x 10 Altstadt Rectangle we seem to hear the hammering of the machines and the rattling of the conveyor belts. His poems and language games evoke the pace of the factory, the rawness of heavy industry; and at the same time they bring to mind the binary code, the perfunctory “yes/no” of the computer. The spatial works are seen to their best advantage against the backdrop of an empty factory. The loft, the factory floor, from which the machines and workers have disappeared, is the ideal setting for an art that stages the drama of the post-industrial. For “post-industrial” means not only that the machines and division of labour have vanished from our field of view, but also that we are no longer able adequately to represent production, or indeed labour of any kind. The reason we find the experience of processes so fascinating is that they have disappeared, and been dematerialized, beneath the cover of processors.

Carl Andre
Tin Ribbon, 1969
Tin, overall 0.1 x 8.89 x 188 cm; unrolled 20 m
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
© 2010 ProLitteris, Zürich

An important structural element of Andre’s art is that the artefacts consist of individual modules that can be freely interchanged. There is no hierarchy among them. The principle of composition – the arrangement of internal elements within a frame, the creation of tension by the juxtaposition of individual parts – is replaced by an addition of modules, all of them identical, that could – in theory at least – be added ad infinitum. The individual bricks of Equivalent VIII (1966) do not have a prescribed position within the work of art. The wooden sections of Post, Lintel and Threshold (1971) can be rearranged at any time in accordance with the predefined pattern. As with his contemporaries Donald Judd and Frank Stella, the so-called “relational” – structuring as a series of many individual relationships between the internal elements – is replaced by the “non-relational.” Andre lifts the sculpture from its pedestal, while Stella takes the painting out of its frame. The spatiality of the work of art is the same as that of its environment and those viewing it. That is why images showing this art together with other works and observers, as in the exhibition Amerikanische Raumkunst at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1969, are more convincing than those which display them removed from their context. In contrast with Max Bill, for example, whose sculptures have an autonomous spatiality and can be reduced or enlarged in scale as often as one might want, Andre’s sculptures always retain their relationship to real space and human scale. Unlike, for instance, Bill’s Pavilion Sculpture (1983) on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, they are anthropomorphic. Bill’s piece follows laws of its own; essentially, it could stand anywhere. Andre’s sculptures, by contrast, articulate the spatiality that surrounds them. They show up every weakness of the architecture, the arrangement, just like a magnifying glass. That makes curating – placing the works for an exhibition – a particular challenge.

The motif of human labour runs through the oeuvre of both Andre and Brown. The gestures of the performers and the actions of the sculptor are not random, but rather wholly deliberate. It is all about stacking, ordering, layering. Trisha Brown’s Leaning Duets (1971, 1972) operate like a sketch for a sculpture. They are a spontaneous, ludic experiment, each involving two performers on a street. Joined by their bare hands or a loop of rope, they attempt to walk a short distance together, leaning against each other. The duet suggests partnership, trust, the attempt to maintain one’s balance. Yet at the same time it evokes the competitive pressure, the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure and the ill-defined frontier between the realms of the private, the public and the common. One false step, one moment of inattention, and the image of balance collapses. A moment’s pause, and the party is over. Trisha Brown’s Primary Accumulation (1972) in which four performers lie supine in the urban space, can be read as an attempt spontaneously to claim new space and briefly halt the flow of urban life. Simultaneously it paraphrases the concept, drawing on Karl Marx, of “primitive accumulation”, the “process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” and thus the driving force of capitalism par excellence.

Neither Andre nor Brown veils the process of separation, the Marxian alienation. In contrast to some of their European contemporaries, they do not seek to turn back the wheel of time. They do not preach reconciliation – unlike some theorists, who look to art to confer meaning upon a present perceived as discontinuous and thereby to present it as coherent. The human body, and what it is capable of, may be their material of choice, but they do not shy away from technical reproduction. Trisha Brown dances with a film projector mounted on her back – a machine projecting a film of her dance – in her performance Homemade (1966). And Carl Andre is conscious at all times of the presence of the camera, since it is only the camera that can capture the action, indeed render it visible as such. The ephemeral process depends upon technical reproduction; the performative is unimaginable without representation.

Carl Andre
War & Rumours of War, 2002
90 australian hardwood timbers, each 90.2 x 29.2 x 29.2 cm,
overall 90.2 x 378.5 x 350.5 cm
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
© 2010 ProLitteris, Zurich

It is a characteristic of the art of the 1960s and early 1970s that it opens up spaces which have not yet been invested with meaning, and which are not being exploited economically. Some of Andre’s sculptures from that period are almost indistinguishable from the objects one might find on the street, such as a stack of paving stones. Building blocks scattered on the ground look like garbage, the accidental leftovers of an experiment. Trisha Brown uses the roof landscapes of SoHo for Roof Piece (1971), in which the dancers, standing atop a series of apartment blocks, mimic each other’s improvised gestures and in so doing focus attention on a terrain that had been invisible, even suppressed, for decades. The city is now read not as a system of signs – in the manner of Andy Warhol’s eight-hour cinematographic homage to New York in his film Empire (1964) – but rather as the setting for concrete happenings. Now the artists are interested not in the emblems and symbols, but rather in what lies underneath or alongside and has been forgotten. The gaze moves away from the sublime images of the skyline to the ground, the battered surface of the street. The perspective shifts from the abstract sign to the specific place. As the American dream begins to crumble in the recession of the early 1970s, Trisha Brown creates the performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970). Secured to a rope, a performer moves slowly, vertically, earthward, followed by the fearful gaze of a small group of spectators. Andre, Brown and many others, including Gordon Matta-Clark, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Laurie Anderson, sharpen our awareness of the decay of the metropolis – and at the same time demonstrate how the new can emerge among the ruins.

The art of Andre and Brown is entirely pragmatic, in keeping with the American tradition. “No ideas but in things” wrote the American poet William Carlos Williams in his epic Paterson (1963). The arrangement of Carl Andre’s Redan (1964) is explained by the fact that the floor of the gallery would have been unable to bear the weight of the wooden sections in a compact configuration. Andre therefore decided to spread the weight over as wide a surface as possible. Brown’s Leaning Duets appear as if a group of performers had spontaneously resolved to do something together without first spending much time thinking what it might be. There is no disjuncture between plan and execution, idea and reality. The work does not refer to something that will come later; it does not require deferment. It is precisely this that makes these works so relevant even today. They bear witness to the fact that we are subject to the forces of social and economic change and that we cannot free ourselves either from our skins or from our times. Yet they also demonstrate that all of us, everywhere, here and now, act, and that we can shape the course of things.

Roswitha Haftmann web

JAMES FRANCO | TOO MUCH

"Feast of Stephen" (still), 2009

“I wanted to create a feeling of ‘too much’”

James Franco on stepping outside of Hollywood fame and why collaboration feels so natural

By William Oliver 

James Franco’s Hollywood career already includes credits as director, producer, screenwriter and leading actor. He won a Golden Globe in 2002, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor at this year’s ceremony, where he was also co-host.

As a visual artist, however, his career is still in its early stages. Franco completed a year-long programme of independent study at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2009, is due to begin his MFA in digital and media art at Rhode Island School of Design this year and has had just two solo exhibitions to date, including “The Dangerous Book Four Boys”, currently at Peres Projects, Berlin (until 23 April).

Despite his limited artistic output, Franco has nevertheless already worked with artists Marina Abramovic and Paul McCarthy, and with film director Gus Van Sant (with whom he has a joint exhibition on show at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, until 9 April). Such high-profile collaborations, in the early days of his career, have been greeted with scepticism by some art world insiders, and with not a little confusion. An April fool’s day joke last year by a prominent New York dealer—that Franco had been chosen to represent the US at the Venice Biennale this year—was rapidly reblogged as genuine news, to a combination of both interest and cynicism. Franco may not be the official US representative (the slot is being filled by Puerto Rican duo Allora and Calzadilla) but in fact he is, he says, planning a Venice project with artists including Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy and Douglas Gordon.

Franco’s exhibition at Peres Projects’ galleries in Kreuzberg and Mitte, Berlin, features poignant and personal videos, installations, photography and drawings with themes including identity, adolescence, masculinity, his family and his childhood. Although in his early video work Franco chose to cast actors as the central figure, in these later pieces he plays the role himself. The films, and a series of photographs, depict Franco as characters from his own memories of adolescence.

Despite his familiarity with intense public scrutiny born from his Hollywood success, he is aware that his entry into the art world has attracted a diversity of opinions and readily admits that he has a way to go if he is to be regarded as a fully formed artist of serious intent.

The Art Newspaper: The works in the Peres Projects exhibition span around four years. How long were you working on those pieces?

James Franco: I was working pretty solidly for those four years. Other than a few I included that were from my childhood, the earliest works are from the beginning of my time at UCLA, created with their chair of the department of art, Russell Ferguson. That work consists of videos made about five years ago. There are then other pieces made during time between my other commitments.

There are themes throughout the exhibition that focus on identity and masculinity through adolescence. What is it about that period of your life that inspired you?

Part of the show is autobiographical. When you are dealing with youth one often uses memories from your own experience, consciously and subconsciously. The real kernel of inspiration that led me to use childhood images, structures and motifs was the realisation I wanted to create a feeling of “too much” and of “overflowing”. I wanted some of the works to feel immature and underdeveloped, so that I would be able to infuse them with larger ideas. I wanted to feel like the themes were almost too big for the structures and the forms.

How long have you been making work?

I started in my early teenage years. I was a painter then, as most young artists are; it was just what was accessible.

What was the impetus behind you starting to create work again?

I have been interested in contemporary art for a very long time, even before I started painting as a teenager. I wanted to go to art school but my parents wouldn’t pay for it. That seemed a strange decision as they met on the art programme at Stanford University, California, but they didn’t want me to go down that route. I originally went to UCLA as an English literature major but then later I returned. I had been collecting contemporary art, was introduced to Russell and we ended up doing one year’s worth of independent study together.

What were those first works like?

That collaboration resulted in my first video works, some of which are in the Peres show. It was a way to work with film that was not dependant on narrative, as I had been as an actor. Those early pieces were attempts to get away from classic story telling and to start working with the medium in different ways.

In your later video works you often include yourself as the main character but in earlier films you used actors as that central figure. Why was that?

Because of my need to get away from what I had been doing as an actor. Because of that history and connection I didn’t want to put myself in them at first. They often showed destruction of house-like structures: there is one where the character chops up a structure with an axe. If I made the piece now I would do it myself, but at the time I was afraid it would feel like a performance. Also I was worried that people would see it as a character they already had a preconception of, that they wouldn’t consider it as an essential act.

Was that around the time you made the film Erased James Franco?

Yes, I made that film with the young New York artist Carter—it was not titled by me. The work was based on Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning [a filmed performance piece where Rauschenberg erased a De Kooning drawing] given to him by the artist. Originally it was to be a similar erased performance, but it developed into something more than that. Making that film showed me I could use myself in work of this kind. It opened up that possibility for me. I started working with my persona as an actor in my art to different ends. Not necessarily using my skills in a way that would allow the audience to be drawn into a performance and forget that it was me, but in fact to do it in a way that made sure people wouldn’t forget it was me.

You have noted Kenneth Anger and Paul McCarthy as influences on your work.

They are both huge inspirations. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos had a big influence. I find the aesthetic and irony in those pieces incredibly interesting. As far as I know Scorpio Rising features a real motorcycle gang. I find it fascinating that Anger convinced the group to let him film them. I imagine they thought they were coming off as tough and masculine, but the way Anger shoots them it becomes something sexualised and homoerotic. I was inspired by the way in which he transformed them and made us see that culture in a different way.

Why Paul McCarthy?

I am drawn to his relationship with film and my understanding of that, having worked in LA for so long…the way he takes classic film and Hollywood film, and then, in his words, “just fucks it up”. I have been working in that world for so long…but he has shown me a way of being able to step outside and examine it. I am honoured to be currently collaborating with him.

What are you working on together?

Paul and his son, Damon, and I are working on a piece which will be shown at the Venice Biennale. It is to be a large-scale collaboration, hopefully with Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon, Aaron Young, Terry Richardson and Harmony Korine. Basically all my favourite artists.

Do you have a network of artists you are in conversation with?

Yes, recently a lot of my work has been about collaboration. Because I come from the film world, which is largely dependant on collaboration, it is natural for me to continue working in that way. Of course the results are different, the way that the collaborations are geared is slightly different, but ultimately it is a similar creative process.

The exhibition at Peres Projects was previously shown at the not-for-profit New York space, Clocktower. Has this version of the show changed?

It is almost the same show. Javier Peres saw the exhibition at Clocktower and offered to take it to Berlin. We have reworked it slightly as it is across the two galleries that he has there.

How do you feel about your reception into, and how you are seen within, the art world?

Generally I have been happy but of course there is going to be a lot of scepticism in the beginning. As far as being taken seriously, all I can do is look to my own activity and say, honestly, this is where I have been spending the majority of my time. I am in school to learn more about this side of my work. I am doing everything that “legitimate artists” have done. Okay, yes, the response has been mixed but to be honest, I almost want that. As an artist there is usually a period where you pay your dues. I have certainly done that as an actor, I did that for years, but with my art I am now in a strange position. I am going to get a lot of attention, whether it is good or bad, from the get-go. I am happy though, because however sceptical the critics are, I am able to show with respectable people—Peres and Gagosian for example. We’re going to the Venice Biennale. For me, I don’t know how much better it could get right now. I am taking this as seriously as I can and in some circles I am getting a good response. That is all I can do.

theartnewspaper