Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley in Dash Snow's bed at Dash's apartment
(Photo: Cass Bird. Courtesy New York Magazine)
Much lauded and feted artists are nothing new to history. But the megawatt VIP "Art Star," whose antics and excesses helped to define the recent pre-recession era's idea of artistic success, is now (until the art market can support fun, folly and rock-star style fantasy) a thing of the past.
Only a few seasons ago, some of the names seen in the specialist art press were also coveted invitees to the most sanctified inner-circles of Hollywood, music and fashion fame. High-end designers, like Marc Jacobs, Muccia Prada and Gareth Pugh, and mass market shops like Top Shop or Liberty, were courting them for collaborations, movies stars such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and even Posh & Becks, were eagerly supporting their lifestyles by buying their work, and models, or Mary Kate Olsen, were dating artists instead of rock stars. Typifying the trend was a photograph on the cover of Manhattan's tastemaker tome, New York Magazine featuring the city's golden bad-boy artist trio: Dan Colen, Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley curled up asleep on a mattress marked with Snow's black ink doodles under the title "Warhol's Children."
In another thoughtful, provocative article during last year's flush market, New York leading art critic Jerry Saltz cast a critical eye on the impact of the art market on artists. Saltz wrote about the pressure the media's focus on art sales and artists' wealth was having on artists' actual conceptual focus and desire to produce market friendly work. "The current market... is so invasive," wrote Saltz, "that it forces artists to regularly consider issues of celebrity, status and money in their studios."
As Saltz explains, many artists during the most recent market boom were creating art about wide notions of celebrity, fandom, mass media obsessions and famous people whom the artists themselves admired. But a few were also acting like celebrities themselves.
In this moment when the art market bubble has burst, bacchanalia seems outdated, and artists are scrambling to redefine success for themselves and their peers, there has been a series of shows in Berlin which put the fraught and fascinating relationship between artists, celebrity culture and celebrity status into perspective.
As a rare and precious European city that provides artists with low overhead opportunities to produce work and to live a genuinely pleasant life-style in a vibrant creative environment, Berlin was not
one of the hubs of overheated hype before the market crash. Instead, the city's affordability has made its art community remarkably accessible and non-hierarchical; allowing Berliners to watch the celebrity phenomenon from a distance. But these shows by international artists addressing the global 'art star' culture offer a timely view into the relationship between art and global mass culture.
As the New York magazine cover asserts, contemporary artists addressing celebrity culture are the descendents of Andy Warhol. "Cult of the Artist: Celebrities, Andy Warhol and the Stars," at Berlin's premier Contemporary art museum, the Hamburger Bahnhof, picks up on that theme. This small, but powerful, exhibition demonstrates the significance of Warhol as a source for today's artists' creative engagement with celebrity culture and their stances as media figures themselves. It also provides a starting point for any understanding of the image of a contemporary "art star."
The works on view span from the 1950s to the 80s; among them are Warhol's boyhood fashion illustrations, paparazzi shots of Warhol with 'beautiful people' such as square-jawed action icon, Sylvester Stallone, supermodel Jerry Hall and socialite/ actress Patti Astor, silk screens adopted from film stills and covers Warhol designed as the editor in chief of Interview Magazine. Warhol's own talent coupled with an omnivorous obsession with fame and anyone famous made him the prototype for the 20th-century art stars.
Despite the blindly bright roster of box-office big names seen throughout the "Cult of the Artist," one of the most captivating and telling works at the Hamburger Bahnhof is a content-less grainy film by Warhol of Edie Sedgwick, the poor-little-rich-girl Warhol adopted into his twinkling orbit and made into an icon of downtown glitterati before her death of a drug overdose in 1971. Her unique beauty, creative style and sad story give her more apparent substance than Paris Hilton or others of today's famous-for-being-famous pop-tarts, but it was Sedgwick's relationship with Warhol that made her an icon the late 60s art-scene. Part of Warhol's lore was the story that his response to hearing of his constant companion's death was a callous 'Edie who?' And it's a question at the core of the film, which shows Sedgwick doing her make-up, smoking, dressing, and incoherently babbling to a man off screen about the tragic or mundane aspects of her underfed, over-extended and directionless party-girl existence. In many ways, the impression the film leaves is that Edie herself, as a vacant but hypnotically compelling figure, was Warhol's most complete Pygmalion-like creation.
As an artist who was at once a celebrity, a celebrity maker and obsessively fascinated with celebrities, Warhol still exemplifies today's trend for artists engaging with the whole gamut of celebrity. Most of the young artists currently addressing these issues have a less complete relationship with celebrity. Of the upper echelon art stars who party with top models, rock stars and other beautiful people, only Ryan McGinley and Terence Koh produce art explicitly addressing fame and famous people's allure. But a wide range of artists further off the general public's radar but straight in the art world's spotlight, are producing sharp, smart and thoughtful art concerned with famous people, their fans and the idea that art has its own stars.
Vibeke Tandberg, 'Untitled (Britney)', 2008
Lightjet print, B/W, black marker, colour pigment print, acrylic glue
112 x 72,4 cm framed, Unique
In "Piece of Me", a show at two cutting-edge commercial galleries - c/o-Atle Gerhardsen and Klosterfelde Gallery, the Norwegian-born and Berlin- and Oslo-based artist Vibeke Tandberg pays homage to one of the world's most captivating and scrupulously stalked celebs. Extrapolating from the chaotic spin surrounding Britney Spears in her darkest days, the shows include several works of the artist posed as the troubled star.
In contrast to Spear's highly stylized media image Tandberg's work revels in a rough and raw aesthetic. Her work has the manic, slightly off-kilter fervor of fan art. Yet because Tandberg is an artist working in Berlin's down-to-earth art scene, her interest in Spears turns the star from trashy tabloid fodder into a credible pop-culture symbol, ripe for critical concern.
Covering the Klosterfelde gallery walls is apparently prosaic floral wallpaper, which close examination reveal itself as a composite of a paparazzo shots of Spears in tears as she left the court-room where she lost custody of her children. The image is one of the endless glossy schadenfreude-stimulating images of Spears which serve as a backdrop to our everyday lives. Unlike the predators stalking her, or the masses consuming the raw meaty mess of her life, Tandberg is sympathetic to the star. In these raw, constructed, images she captures the chaos obscuring Spears and ironically exposes our cruel and aggressive interest in her celebrity.
Vibeke Tandberg, 'Britney's Tears', 2008
lightjet print on blueback wallpaper, dimensions variable, unique
Although Tandberg's work insightfully deconstructs fans' conflicted fascination with Spears, it does not explain why Spears evokes such powerful responses in her audience. Like Edie Sedgwick, Spears often appears as a nominal talent whose extreme fame is an arbitrary artifact tightly bound up with her troubles rather than the outgrowth of transcendent talent.
In contrast, the second half of internationally established Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz's, two-part solo show at Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin offers a captivating illustration of the impact authentic artistry, and not just vapid fame, has on viewers. The largest of three video installations is her unnerving 2006 25-part "Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)." The installation consists of 25 plasma screens lined up in a row which present the face of a single person singing a tuneless a cappella version of an experimental ballad from the Plastic Ono Band. All of the participants were average English people who answered a detailed questionnaire that Breitz used to recruit the most devoted Lennon fans during her residency at the BALTIC art centre. Though the singers differed in age, race and gender, they were all heartbreakingly awkward and clearly desperate to escape from themselves into their devotion to Lennon's greater talent and ability to intimately touch strangers' lives. As these tuneless singers attempt to vicariously live through their hero's talent, and wear the mantle of his celebrity, they visibly loose themselves in their fantasy experience.
Candice Breitz, "Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)', 2006
Candice Breitz, "Him (1968-2008)"
While these unfortunate fans illustrated the need inspiring lonely people to feel an illusory intimacy with a mass media icon, Breitz's new video installation "Him (1968-2008)" is a portrait of one of the most bewitching actors in film history. For "Him," Breitz interweaves clips of Jack Nicholson in twenty-three of his films over his forty-year career through nine stacked video screens. She isolates a line or two from each film and only shows Jack speaking against a black background. As she did with "Her" (a sister piece staring Meryl Streep which is not included in this show), Breitz collages the clips from the various films together so the characters appear to interact and talk to each other. The overall effect is a hypnotizing homage to Nicholson's unparalleled range and charisma, as well as a fascinating mediation on him as an icon of masculinity. Breitz orchestrates the clips to make it appear that Nicholson is discussing an array of philosophical issues such as sex, death and insanity with "himself." But his own images and his ability to sustain audiences' rapt attention is the most powerful part of the piece. His star-power overrides both the content and the context in the piece. By distilling the work down to his supreme seductiveness, Breitz makes the viewer acutely aware of the difference between the Lennon fans' self-invested yearnings and Nicholson's ability to embody the vast field of human emotion while still keeping his cool.
The power of the artist as a "star," and not only as a fan, star-maker or scholar of "stardom" is the subject of Vik Muniz's excellent exhibition at Arndt & Partner's Berlin branch. In the four separate
series comprising Muniz's first solo show in Berlin, the widely exhibited and respected Brazilian New York-based artist expands his on-going examination into the art historical canon. Muniz is best known for whimsical yet respectful reproductions of masterpieces formed from peanut butter, jelly, chocolate and sugar that he photographs and then demolishes. His ephemeral versions of the Mona Lisa or Leonardo's "The Last Supper" ironically make viewers aware of the long-lasting power of these works, and their impact on all levels of culture. His appropriation juxtaposes the easily digestible, fluffy, fleeting entertainment value of references to these works on throw-away items like cup-cups, tee-shirts or ads, with their historical gravitas.
Vik Muniz, 'Convergence #10, After Pollock', Pictures of Pigments, 2007
edition of 6, chromogenic print, 71 x 119 in
Vik Muniz, 'Spatial Concept, Attese, after Lucio Fontana', Pictures of Pigments, 2008
6 of 6, Chromogenic print, 48 x 40 inch
Similarly, his 2007-2008 series "Pictures of Pigments" consists of ephemeral tributes to significant works from art history. But its mood is more sober and less self-deprecating than his candied
recapitulation of the canon. Here, Muniz utilizes pure powdered pigment to re-create a sample survey of great paintings from the mid-twentieth century such as his careful facsimiles of Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, and Lucio Fontana, along with John Baldessari's text painting "What Is Painting, 1968." Muniz's version of Buddhist sand mandalas makes a powerful statement about the potentially transitory nature of importance within the established art canon.
Muniz himself has a powerful critical following and very impressive resume, and unquestionably resides in the upper levels of the contemporary art world. But he is not a mass media figure. His face is not widely known and his work might not be reviewed or mentioned in mass market magazines or newspapers. But he is an artists' artist and his show thoughtfully addresses the nature of long-lasting influence even within the cottage industry of contemporary art. By borrowing iconic works from others, Muniz's art about art history is great because of its humility. And after the fashionable arrogance and luxurious indulgences of recent art stars, Muniz's humility, intellectual clarity and attention to art for art's sake appear priceless.
Ana Finel Honigman
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a Berlin-based critic and curator. She writes on contemporary art and fashion for publications including Artforum.com, Sleek, V, TANK, Art in America, Artnet.com, Art Journal, Whitewall, The National, Dazed & Confused and British Vogue. As a Senior Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine, Ana contributes exhibition reviews from Berlin, New York and elsewhere, as well as an interview series. To contact her, email anahonigman@hotmail.com
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