Kehinde Wiley's Benediter Brkou (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, oil and gold and silver enamel on canvas. Private Collection. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.

Quick-and-easy snapshots have replaced the grand, gilt-framed portraits of Renaissance masters. Kehinde Wiley explores the rift between mug shots and the lofty style of past portraiture to see how we represent ourselves at any given time. I met the artist to talk about his series, The World Stage, which began with portraits of people from the BRIC nations of China, India and Brazil and led to his portraits recently of Israeli men now being exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Femme Piquee Par Un Serpent, 2008 - From Series: Down - Oil on canvas 102 in x 300 in Copyright Kehinde Wiley, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Pomp and Circumstance

Wiley greeted me at his loft in SoHo with a mob of whippets at his heels in a setting that might have accompanied a Raffles in 1920s Macao. Wiley’s focus on the black man has been to some extent a play on his own self-identity. His Nigerian father had abandoned his mother, a UCLA grad in linguistics before Wiley was born. Being second born amongst twins he was named Kehinde in the Yoruba language. Wiley too, has inherited an academic fluency and gift for articulating his work with perfect lucidity.

While raising her family as a single parent, Wiley’s mom subsidized her income by selling used furniture, faux-classical riffs on French antiques. These and trips to L.A. museums where he’d glimpsed Gainsboroughs and Constables, and a visit to an art camp near St. Petersburg at age eleven that includes a visit to the Hermitage, developed Wiley’s early taste for baroque fantasy. “It was hard-wired in from early on. It was a general sense of the world being tangible, a type of escapism,” he recollects.

After graduating from Yale, he moved to Harlem where the hip-hop street style inspired him to make art that was popular enough to enable him to travel the world for it. “Some of the things that were in the work, I started to see echoed all over the world, in the streets of Mumbai, Beijing, Sao Paolo and Lagos. It was a very black American aesthetic but altered, based on local temperature.”

Kehinde Wiley, Mukat Brhan (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, oil and gold enamel on canvas. Private Collection. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.

Sleep from Series: Down Sleep, 2008 - © Kehinde Wiley Oil on canvas 132\

The Capture of Juliers, 2006 - From series: Rumors of War Oil and enamel on canvas 84in x 96in Copyright Kehinde Wiley Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

Macho Men & Harlem Bling

Wiley’s focus has been the alpha-male with a post-modern twist on the grand hegemony of kings and dukes primped in finery. “It’s letting bare the emperor’s clothes. Generally those paintings are about white men beating their chest and announcing to the world how magnificent they are. These are beautiful paintings, but they’re also ridiculous in many ways. So the project lays that bare.”

Lured by the opulence of early Euro-American styles of portraits, he found it not unlike the men strutting the streets of Harlem whose uber-glitz, bling and vanity were a façade that belied their real lack of power. Wiley was intrigued by fakeness and authenticity when constructing identities. He invited men off the streets to pose and parody the pompous gestures of historical portraits – it was a bit like voguing.

He mimics the power structures in those earlier canonical works where the macho posturing of white men went unquestioned, and though he holds the choice of theatrical décor and accouterments at an ironic distance, they’re something he’s also complicit to. He embraces it, but remains morally ambiguous.

Kehinde Wiley, Kalkidan Mashasha (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, oil and gold enamel on canvas. Private Collection. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

Clubbing in Israel

The street-life in Israel surprised him, “I assumed naturally it would be self–segregating, like a college lunchroom.” There was still political strife under the surface, “When you pull up to the hotel – there’s still bomb-sniffing dogs. There’s tension in the air, but what’s astounding is the graceful way people learn how to deal with it, and get on with it.”

On the streets he met Kalkidan, a hip-hop musician and Ethiopian Jew, who he photographed along with his friends. Kalkidan later came to the opening at the Jewish museum and was awed to see his street buddies enshrined in Wiley’s rococo portraits hanging at this august institution.

Israel was a nation of people escaping social, economic and religious persecution elsewhere, which had evolved its own systems of discrimination, and Kalkidan was vocal on issues faced by black Ethiopian Jews integrating into Israeli society.

Wiley was fascinated to hear Ethiopian Jews, Kalkidan’s friends, speak about what it was like to be a person of colour in modern Israel, and he developed the idea to “do this show of black and brown people who live in the shadows all the time.”

“One of the things I love about my project is that it’s based more on the magic that happens on the ground,” says Wiley, “It really depends on whoever happens to be there that day. Most portraiture in history is very effortful; it’s about people who’ve worked their entire lives to amass extreme amounts of wealth to create a representation of how powerful they are – whereas these are complete moments of chance. We’re taking a moment when someone’s minding their own business, trying to get to the subway, and the next thing you know, they’re in these monumental paintings, hanging in great museums throughout the world.”

The World Stage: India & Sri Lanka - Annoyed Radha with Her Friends, 2010 © Kehinde Wiley Oil on canvas 72in x 96 in Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Portrait of Andries Stilte II, 2006 From Series: Columbus © Kehinde Wiley Oil and enamel on canvas 96in x 72in Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

Curlicues & Arabesques

In his travels across the world he’s filled his canvases with patterns, timeless abstractions that form a decorative weave around his figures – traditional paper-cuts, mizrahs, in the case of the Israeli portraits. I wondered if he’d formed any generalizations about why humans were attracted to patterns – was it order out of chaos?

“In the field of aesthetic theory – humans are pattern seeking creatures,” elaborated Wiley. “That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature. What’s interesting is that in western cultures, patternmaking has been relegated to women’s work. And it’s highly associated with the irrational and hysteria …[from hyster, womb, discussed in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization] whereas in other cultures patternmaking has been a shamanistic process, where religious leaders are in charge, so it is almost in the vanguard of the rationalist way of ordering the world. So, you have two very different ways of looking at patternmaking, even within the same human experience.”

The geometric designs of South America appear in contrast to the hyper-ornate patterns of Islamic art. Wiley had studied Mogul art and miniature portraits in India, and I recalled how the Ottoman Caliph in Orhan Pamuk’s novel, I Am Red, would sneak a peek at his own hidden-away portrait he’d had commissioned by Venetian artists – because in Islamic art it was forbidden to depict the face.

“I’m quite a big fan of Orhan’s. But Islamic patterns are highly mathematically ordered. It’s insane, there’s this hyper-aesthetic calligraphy of flora and fauna which I’ve used as a decorative field in a lot of the work.”

From Series: Rumors of War - The Chancellor Seguier on Horseback, 2005 Copyright Kehinde Wiley Oil and enamel on canvas 108in x 72in Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

The Invisibility of Whiteness

Identity politics in art seemed to have had a good run in the past decades. With Wiley’s exclusive focus on the power structures of black men, was that conversation still relevant today?

“Is identity-politics stale and dated?” grins Wiley. “That’s something I always try to run directly away from.” Then he clarifies, “I do think that fist-waving conversations around liberation ideologies are sort of dated – I’m not creating Barbara Kruger moments of self-actualization – what I’m trying to do is create more moments of chaos where we don’t really know where we are: to destabilize; where all the rules are suspended temporarily.”

Wiley contests that gender, sexuality, nationhood and empire are just one way of looking at his work, “But I would posit that if you look at someone like Jackson Pollock in the 1950s,” he says, “or you look at even Donald Judd, there’s very few people who occupy that space of political neutrality as white men do. Even women are gendered and sexed in a way, whereas white maleness does not exist.  There’s a way of looking at John Curran as outside of… it’s a level of freedom that’s a complete construction, which can be analyzed as a text in and of itself, right?” Right, so while Curran goes scot-free, under-scrutinized, Wiley eloquently chides, “So, you have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because oftentimes there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.”

Maybe we’re moving to a place of more similarities than differences, I say. With governments having less of a role in defining those differences. Do we identify more with what we like than where we belong?

“If you allow people to define their priorities within their consensus building group, well that’s what gives rise to the social movements we see all over North Africa.” We’re at an age Wiley feels, that’s increasingly tribalized. “It has to do with naval-gazing lifestyle narcissism, and you can find that in communities into reggae, hip-hop, skating…but it’s always mediated through localized culture. So, hip-hop heads in India are going to be different than the ones in the Bronx.” And it’s helped gays and lesbians in the third world to find people of good will without being killed or imprisoned…

Acting in Accordance with Chairman Mao's Instructions Means Victory, 2007 From series: The World Stage: China ©Kehinde Wiley Oil on canvas 72in x 60in Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

General Mao’s Soul-food

Wiley went to Beijing as a tourist then stayed on. “It started in baby steps…I was in love with my ex-boyfriend from Beijing – and it was this other love-affair – over time you realize you’ve developed a taste for Chinese cuisine and the language, and you’ve got two dogs, and it’s your second home…” Then he gleefully adds, “Now, I sort of have this territorial mentality about Beijing, because I was there before it was cool,” he laughs, drolly.

He says he can tell the government minders in galleries from their big tacky Commie shoe buckles, though he’s never been hassled or censured himself. He was used to hanging with Ai Weiwei who had a restaurant there. “It seems to be the thing to do for a lot of famous Chinese artists,” giggles Wiley. “I need to open a restaurant, a big soul food restaurant in Beijing!”

The future is the world’s stage for Kehinde Wiley. One’s always shifting between cultures now: it’s about destabilization and Wiley wants to make sure you don’t get too comfortably seated.

Close up detail showing Wiley's use of decorative patterns from the museum's collection. Details (on left): Kehinde Wiley, Alios Itzhak (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, oil and gold enamel on canvas. The Jewish Museum, New York; Purchase: Gift of Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Family Foundation; Gift in honor of Joan Rosenbaum by the Contemporary Judaica, Fine Arts, Photography, and Traditional Judaica Acquisitions Committee Funds, 2011-31. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California. (On Right): Mizrah, Israel Dov Rosenbaum, Podkamen, Ukraine, 1877 (date of inscription), paint, ink, and pencil on cut-out paper. The Jewish Museum, New York; Gift of Helen W. Finkel in memory of Israel Dov Rosenbaum, Bessie Rosenbaum Finkel, and Sidney Finkel, 1987-136.

Artist Not Vital in Agadez, Niger - Mekafoni. Camel, 2003 - Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery New York

Raised on the dizzying slopes of the Engadine region in Switzerland, nomadic artist Not Vital takes delight in alighting on equally liminal perches on the new Pangaea of the 21^st century, peppering the planet with sculptural architecture from Patagonia to Agadez. Vital and I had a conversation about his migratory life while circling the artifacts of his recent peregrinations exhibited at Sperone Westwater gallery. Though his creations arise from emotional encounters and passionate collisions with other cultures, they are often born smooth and shiny in their egg-like perfection. Linked to Vital’s personal journeys, they become vehicles for an idea and transport one - which is the underlying root meaning of the word metaphor.

House to Protect Against the Wind, Agadez, Niger - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

© Not Vital, Tongue, 2008 stainless steel 310 1/4 x 65 3/8 x 65 3/8 inches; Edition 1/3 - Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Cow Tongues

Vital has had an obsession with these after finding the severed organs in an Italian butcher shop. Since then, he has cast them in various sizes in bronze or steel, a signature element of his shows. The tallest to date at nearly 8 meters is a totemic and virile looking specimen of hand-beaten, smooth steel. Tongues are tools for tasting what’s tangible, but underappreciated as prehensile appendages. A cow’s tongue maybe an edible delicacy for some, but my own experience of being licked by a cow, a quick exploratory flick, was shock. Its unforeseen alien and erotic invisibility, hidden length and roughness in a creature of otherwise harmless bovine temperament, was an epiphany.

Presque vu, sequentially related to déjà vu, is to almost grasp, like something on the tip of the tongue – could be an attempt to describe Vital’s ever-probing steel antennae: a tongue that desires to taste that which can never be completely known.

© Not Vital, Installation view of Hanging and Weighting, 2010, Plaster and Stainless Steel- Photo: Eric Gregory Powell, Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Hangings and Weightings

White plaster sculptures hang slug-like on tenterhooks and seem to capture a state of uncertainty; all hang from a similar height. Vital tells me that his upbringing in the Engadine, with its backdrop of snowcapped mountains, had fixed his contemplative gaze at a certain height.

“When the sun goes up, the people in the Engadine are looking up,” explains Vital, gesturing above eye-level. “If you look at old people in Italy they look down. Growing up there – and we are formed very early – vision is always fixed up there. When I was in New York, my first apartment didn’t have much light, but it was the tallest I could get because if I had to concentrate on something, it would be up there… at 3m 30cm,” Vital recalls, his gaze fixed at the exact height of his reverie.

Marbled Landscapes

Growing up in lands bleached of colour, Vital’s work is largely monochromatic and sensitive to the nuances of white; he argues with assistants who cannot see the subtleties of something incompletely white. “Half the year, it’s 2 meters of snow – your eyes become sensitive to light. If I was in Brazil and India, my work would be much more colourful.”

Excavated from Dali, in Yunnan district of China, Dali marble, which might as well be named after the Surrealist, is sliced to reveal hidden landscapes that mysteriously mirror both the terrain from which they are taken and the landscape of Vital’s birthplace. Finding the right rock and cutting the marble is an intuitive task and tensed with unpredictability; one must sense when to stop, or the stone crumbles. One takes a gamble and may find there is nothing inside.

A Cave Dweller in Patagonia

Vital tells me that four years ago he came across an island in a remote part of Patagonia in Chile, which he purchased. “The entire island is white marble. It is beautiful but you could not build anything on top… so I had to come up with something else, by going inside it. What I did was to tunnel inside 50m, with an opening in the west; the whole floor is one piece of marble.”

He named the island NotOna after himself and the naked natives that once lived there. It recalls the simplest, ‘primitive’ dwellings of the troglodytes who were masterful cave architects.

Rendering of island in Patagonia 'NotOna' with excavated entrance and exit, 2011 - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Makaranta School, Agadez, Niger - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Architecture for Sky-Watchers

On a whim, the artist went to the desert city of Agadez in Niger and built a house there to watch the sunset. The sky is an endlessly fascinating substitute for TV in the desert where stars are used to orient one self. “The concept was to build a house to watch the sunset in the poorest country in the world; at four storeys high, it is the biggest building in adobe in the whole region; it was a big challenge.”

Then he built a school: “The Tuaregs – the nomadic people of the region, were very much against the school because they believed if children learned to read and do mathematics, they would not be able to read the stars anymore.”

The Tuaregs now have towns and are only semi nomadic, but I was curious as to how they got around national borders when roaming the desert. “They go over them…but the borders are completely wrong,” said Vital with frustration. “They are [vertical], so insensitive. The Tuaregs move East-West, and the borders are cut North-South. So you have to go from Niger to Burkina Faso to Mali to Senegal, instead of in a flow.”

Death and the Tuaregs

Sensing his wanderings cultivated a detachment for material things, I asked Vital whether he had any philosophies guiding his understanding of death.

“I have experienced how a mother can lose a child, and two hours later it is buried and forgotten. Not forgotten, but she has moved on. You show a photograph of the daughter and she laughs, she smiles, and that is something that shows strength, that you can really learn from. Of course I am not a Tuareg…If you have nothing you have nothing to lose. With these accumulations that we have in the west, it is never enough, and much more difficult to leave; It makes the prospect of dying much more difficult.”

Bedroom, Agadez, Niger residence - Mekafoni © Not Vital. Courtesy of artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Luggage for the Nomad

Though his family had been in the Engadine for many generations, Vital grew up close to the earth, valuing commonsense, with farmers as neighbours, and animals in the cellars to heat up the house. Hunting and forestry were the natural way of life.

“Even though we had very little information and no TV from being too high in the mountains,” Vital tells me, “we had 5 months of vacation: From April to the beginning of October we didn’t have school. During this time, as children, we had to do something with our time – so that we weren’t bored.  At six years of age we were on our own and wanted to be on our own. We would go into the woods and survive in this harsh environment – and it was done with enormous passion. Afterwards, I read Italo Calvino’s Baron on the trees, and felt, I had done that.”

I said to Vital, that I recalled that the desert traveler, Wilfred Thesiger used to say that possessions made one weak.

“Yes, love him. He is a great wonderful writer and photographer. I wanted to go to Oman just because of him. I never met him, he just died; Of course I wanted to. Some time back I got another book of his from Richard Long’s girlfriend.”

© Not Vital, House to Watch the Sunset in Agadez, Niger - Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

© Not Vital Installation view of Piz Nair, 2011 Stainless steel, coal - Photo: Eric Gregory Powell, Courtesy of Sperone Westwater Gallery

Meditations on Black Mountains of Coal

Vital had selected whole chunks of coal from batches shipped in from Mongolia that are slices of Chinese landscapes like Shen Shui paintings.  Vital described them as riddles… from carved rock. These inflammable rocks seemed to inspire something similar to the Daoist contemplation of landscape, intended not for the eye, which is concerned with appearances but for the viewer’s mind, a physical bridge that transcends one to a metaphysical place.

“That’s good,” Vital says to me, “I wanted to put two chairs here…Last week I went to see the Rothko Chapel. I was there for 3 hours…”

I told him about Alain de Botton’s plan for a Temple to Aetheism, and he said that incidentally, de Botton’s father had lived in the Engadine, and been a collector of his artworks.

Though a polyglot and master of seven European languages, including his mother tongue of Romansh, Vital still chooses to live around people who do not speak them…Now that he has settled into his studio in Beijing’s 798 Zone, he has bought another house to renovate in Rio. But it’s not always about being a wanderer he claims, sometimes it’s about engaging people. In Beijing he has even started painting, “I have much more time, I see all these people…and with all these assistants, you can just live, and not go out.”

I asked if he felt attached to his homes. “I am asked why I have so many houses? These areas are just places I visit and like to stay in even for a night. I would have a house to watch the sunset even if I could only spend one night there. Next day it could have crumbled, and it would have been fine, because I had this one night of an experience….”

© Not Vital, Makaranta School in Agadez, Niger - Courtesy of artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery

Artist Not Vital standing in front of his Cow Tongue sculpture at Sperone Westwater, 2012 photo: Kisa Lala

The show entitled 十 五 – fifteen – written in Chinese characters – refers to the number of works in the current show.
Not Vital: 十 五 3-31 March 2012, Sperone Westwater Gallery 257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

Artist Ai WeiWei with what looks like a nasty cut on his head - Courtesy AFP-Getty

The recent detention of Ai Weiwei has brought a lot of scrutiny from Western countries on the lack of tolerance for artistic expression in China, yet it has engendered very little domestic debate there from fellow Chinese artists who prefer to remain under the radar of the censorial authorities themselves.

China’s approach to the arts has vacillated from endorsements of Western artists exhibiting in China – given that this promotes positive media attention – to brutal repression of those that have spoken out critically against the government. (Read my recent interview with Wim Delvoye on exhibiting in China)

At the opening ceremony for the unveiling of the Zodiac statues at Grand Army Plaza near Central Park, Bloomberg said that he found it disturbing that no one yet knew of the artist’s whereabouts. He said, “Artists risk everything to create; they risk failure, rejection and public criticism, but artists like Ai Weiwei, who come from places that do not value and protect free speech, risk more than that. His willingness to take the risks and face the consequences speaks not only to his courage but to the indomitable desire for freedom that is inside every human being.”

Opening ceremony with the Mayor Bloomberg (fifth from right), and artists Julian Schnabel (second from left), Shirin Neshat (third from left)

I thought it was a testament of the dedication of those weathering the cold morning rain, who stood under umbrellas and awnings, to advocate free speech and show their support of the detained artist.

Amongst the twelve that spoke at the opening were Julian Schnabel, Shirin Neshat, who has also spoken up for Jafar Panahi, the arrested Iranian filmmaker, the painter Brice Marden, dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones and President Emerita of MoMA, Agnes Gund.

They read from quotations by the artist. Gund read, “Because it’s animals heads, I think it’s something that every body can have some understanding about, especially children and people not in the art world.”

Julian Schnabel read the following statement, “I think all the aesthetic judgments and all aesthetic choices we are making are moral choices. It cannot escape the moral dimension in the broader sense, it has to relate to the philosophical statements of who we are, and how art and culture function in today’s world.”

Shirin Neshat quoted the artist, “My work is always dealing with real or fake authenticity and what’s the value. It could be cultural, political or social, and also, it could be art; to put it in the circumstance to make people re-look at what we have done. It’s an original position to create new possibilities.”

Alexander Munro, curator at the Guggenheim read, “Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one.”

“Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” will be up in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza through July 15. The work will then go on a world tour.

Cloaca Professional: Media: Mixed Media Dimensions: L 710 x B 176 x H 285 cm Date: 2010 View: Monasism (22. 01.2011 – 19.07.2011) at MONA ,Tasmania, © Wim Delvoye

By Kiša Lala
Interview Wim Delvoye Part 2 ( Read Part 1)
The Shitting Machine: The Cloaca Project

Recently David Walsh had purchased one of his pooing machines for his MONA space in Tasmania where Delvoye is due to have a solo show this Fall. The subject brings out Delvoye’s science-nerd-enthusiasm: “I always wanted to do a shit machine…you know I saw the film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a little boy. It was like thinking about what it was like being a boy. Tracey Emin in every work from A to Z says she is a girl – there’s not much else in her work. I think it’s great, but what you read is, I’m a girl, I’m a bad girl, a funny girl… In the nineties [my] work was more about being a boy, now it is much more eclectic. The debates were coloured by identity, what subgroup you belonged to. It was about separation. The New Museum [exhibition of 2001], had been the temple for all these discussions; the debate about the Other.”

© Wim Delvoye

© Wim Delvoye Tour Paris 2010 700x700x 1200Laser-cut corten steel exhibition-at-Musee Rodin Paris France

So did these separate identities have the same shit in common?

“It stopped all the quarrels. Between male, female, class/gender issues, ethnic groups, the self-definition of people. Staring at the shit machine they were all relieved – communally relieved. It was wonderful.”

Delvoye received a different response to the work wherever he showed. In France they removed the shit immediately. In Germany they scolded him for betraying the starving people of Africa; some asked why it did not produce anything of practical value like vitamins, or energy. Delvoye chuckled at all the didactic consternation, “I am not taking myself that seriously. It is a Calvinist taboo – wasting food,” he continued, “Somehow in Germany it’s about never wasting a little potato. If you can’t eat it, you put it back in the fridge. Everyday is about suffering for the people who are hungry in the world.”

So does it actually smell like shit?

“Yes. And the consistency depends on the absorption of water. I am surprised Walsh [at MONA] is still feeding the machine…he may one day get tired of it. It goes through reactors and it is fully automatic like a fish tank. The bacteria in the colons take their time, I cannot tell the machine to do it faster, but it can make more shit than a human body; more timely…it’s like saying I need to shit everyday at 1:30pm – because museums have to be open…”

Car Tyres, Untitled (Car Tyre # 4) 2009, handcarved car tyre, Ø77 x 27 cm © Wim Delvoye

Delvoye had found Chinese galleries largely tolerant in exhibiting his works, and because we spoke before Ai Weiwei’s recent detention, our conversation was lighthearted about his friendship with the artist. “He is a dear friend of mine. I regard him as one of my best friends out of all the artists on this planet. Yes we disagree gently about China. I have a much more positive regard for it than him. He thinks I am a naïve little boy and I should shut up about my praise for his country.” Now, in light of recent events Delvoye’s next show on May 7th should add some heat to the discussions at Urs Meile Beijing, the same gallery as Ai WeiWei’s.

I say that just as he has his love-hate relationship with Belgium, Ai WeiWei has strongly split sentiments about his own country. “Yes he probably likes my country as a revenge. His first show was in Belgium,” says Delvoye impishly.

The two artists were filmed in a documentary, Into the Night, walking around Kassel together, in which Delvoye spends a good deal of time peeing off-camera, still microphoned, while the camera observes Ai Weiwei looking on mostly embarrassed – recounted Delvoye with glee. “When I see WeiWei I always kiss him, and on a certain day he said, oh I thought you were gay! The Chinese are not into kissing each other.”

Cement Truck - KVS Brussels: Media: Laser-cut corten steel Dimensions: H 408.5 x B 213.2 x L 980.3 cm (scale 1:1) Date: 2010 Weight: 5744.5 k, © Wim Delvoyeg

Delvoye is not impressed with sexuality. When he was in school he says, “there were lots of penises in the art world, lots of sexual organs – it was so fashionable. But sex was not so interesting in proportion to religion, shit, the market, the economy – these are actually much more taboo.”

He is wary of the traps and biases of art-world critiques. “If some journalist is coming – I am supposed to check that the table doesn’t have a Financial Times on it…if it was Playboy, that would be considered fine for an artist…” Looking inside the guts of the economy has, in fact, been a focus. Economics is more fundamental to our culture than the aspiration towards art as many ancient, ten thousand-year-old clay tablets tell us: They are usually invoices – love poems are a recent development. Charles Darwin borrowed the idea of Evolution as an analogy – a term mostly used in economics at his time, explained Delvoye.

To make light of art world economics, he created an art piece in which the buyer was given a money back guarantee: The bond is valid for fifteen years during which the artist was obligated to pay anyone back who regretted their purchase. With mock gloom, he tells me he can’t leave Belgium anytime soon for fear someone might want to collect.

Tour - Brussels: Media: Laser-cut corten steel Dimensions: H 1700 x 260 x 260 cm Date: 2010 View: Knockin’ on heaven’s door (20.10.2010 – 23.01.2011) at Bozar, Brussels, © Wim Delvoye

Delvoye’s Disneyland

Delvoye is dreaming up even larger projects. He would like to be commissioned to build museums. “I want to build castles, towers, staircases.” I am not cheap but I am less expensive than maybe other things – I mean we are not talking more than one Picasso to do a huge project!

His work his using more craftsmanship. The gothic trucks are beautifully ornate, and it doesn’t take art history to appreciate the intricacy of the filigreed work.

“Yes that’s so eternal. How do you judge archeological stuff. How do you judge sculpture…why does culture for thousands of years focus on craftsmanship and then all of a sudden in the 20th century it stops?! Of a sudden there is an expectation that we are completely other beings, like feminists, Communists, Socialists. The expectation is, if you are literate, you like abstract art, monochromes, conceptual art – the reasoning is that working class people are too stupid to understand modern art.”

His current project involves buying a castle to convert into an architectural project, a kind of museum. His recent Cor-Ten towers could be construed as pure architectural elements –and here again he is challenging the compartmentalizing of art in areas traditionally “off-limits.” His ironic art, and gothic dumptrucks are popular, but he feels the need to move on. “The market would want me to continue this work. But I see the conservative forces in the market.”

“For the 60s generation – Lichtenstein, for instance, was making variations of the same theme his whole life…an artist cannot be like that anymore, because now you need to react to what you see and hear in the media all the time… I cannot think of the earth without evolution”

“You need to be constantly flexible. What is art today? You can make an animation and put it on YouTube and it can be more important than a museum show! One can become an antiquarian very quickly believes Delvoye, it being impossible to predict what might be relevant three months from today. “I was thinking when I was a child if a genie came out of a bottle and offered a crystal ball into my future and said, you are going to have shows in China, and you will sell to people in Yemen or India…I wouldn’t believe it.”

One thing is certain, whatever the future, Delvoye will be poking at its frontiers and making the news.

Wim Delvoye will be showing in Galerie Urs Meile , Beijing, China – May 7 – July 31, 2011 Opening: May 7, 2011; 4 p.m. – 7 p.m

Tour - Brussels: Media: Laser-cut corten steel Dimensions: H 1700 x 260 x 260 cm Date: 2010 View: Knockin’ on heaven’s door (20.10.2010 – 23.01.2011) at Bozar, Brussels, © Wim Delvoye

Self described architect, prankster, farmer, megalomaniac: Wim Delvoye is an extreme artist, willing to chase an idea to its unsettling conclusion. To make his point Delvoye has mastered not only the skills of the traditional artisan – from weaving, tattooing, ceramics, stained glass and steel – he has also engineered the most perfect shit.

Delvoye often triggers controversy but he is a stealth artist, astutely exposing all the finger-wagging snobbism about his art. He was in New York recently during Armory week, noting the changes in the Meat Packing District where he once lived in the late 90s. In 2001 he showed his Cloaca machine at the New Museum. “I thought it was going to be a disaster during the anthrax scare. It was a bio-machine making shit,” says Delvoye, in a thick accent with a hint of mischief. During our conversation he frequently had me in titters over his escapades – he knows the common notions people have about his art and will happily play up his schoolboy antics. Settling down to chat, (with a coffee, after toilet and squeezing blackheads – he volunteers to add) he takes me on a journey into his cosmicomical universe – being on the run from the Louis Vuitton police, his plans for a Gothic wonderland and his friendship with Ai WeiWei. I listen, as though back at school again, squeamish and awed by the nerve of the schoolyard’s most notorious prankster.

Tattooed Pigskins, Untitled (Art Farm China), 2005, tattooed pigskin on oval stretcher, handcarved gilded frame, H 58 x 50 cm, © Wim Delvoye

Dump truck - Catanzaro: Media: Laser-cut corten steel Dimensions: B 270 x H 295 x L 820 cm (scale 1:1) Date: 2006 Weight: 3720 kg © Wim Delvoye

Tattooed Pigs and the Louis Vuitton Police

He sold his NY place soon after 9/11, and with an instinct for the next wave, moved to where it was more happening: he bought a pig farm in China. At his art farm Delvoye tattooed live pigs. Galleries were reluctant to show art that snorted and oinked, but Delvoye says, “I prefer showing them that way as a dead pig skin is a big compromise.” The few art-pigs he has left will be kept until they die of old age before being parted from their precious hides, which purchasing collectors have to wait for. More contentious though, was the piece of pork with the Louis Vuitton logo branded on its back. The corporation is very particular about the usage of its brand and hounded Delvoye all the way to Shanghai in an attempt to confiscate the hides.

“The museum was quite primitive – and meanwhile I had these expensive suits visiting, trying to get me, which was quite ridiculous,” he recalls. “For a while they had big folders with my name on them and they were trying to sue me. It was scary. So, we were once archenemies!”

I said I was surprised they didn’t appreciate the irony – and wasn’t Arnault a collector of art himself?

“The owner of LV is much more of a perfectionist, and a good manager, defending his products at all costs, than he is an art-lover – I mean loving art is just one of the many rings he has on his fingers” said Delvoye, candidly adding, “He is a mogul, and he has art to outsmart other moguls.”

Tour - Brussels: Media: Laser-cut corten steel Dimensions: H 1700 x 260 x 260 cm Date: 2010 View: Knockin’ on heaven’s door (20.10.2010 – 23.01.2011) at Bozar, Brussels, © Wim Delvoye

The brand’s value was based on a psychological notion of opulence, and they were sensitive to protecting this as they deemed fit. Still, an artist should have the right to comment on cultural icons, and Delvoye has used many other brands over the last 15 years, including signing his name with Disney letters, and playing off such ubiquitous cultural entities as Coca Cola and Procter & Gamble’s Mr. Clean.

Delvoye believes that our imagination has been co-opted by powerful images: You cannot read the original Pinnochio without visualizing it in colours tainted by Disney. Recently, an American company had even filed for the rights of the word Om, in use for thousands of years in India. “There should be a counter-attack,” he says, “for visual pollution. Big companies are paying taxes to the government: the rights to blow dirty air into the atmosphere. People on the way to work see all these brands, bags, shoes. Brands attacking their collective memory.”

“If it came to a litigation I would have intellectually found it enjoyable,” says Delvoye. “It would be in everybody’s interest whether I won or lost: it would make a case for all artists. The work I was doing never resulted in confusion between the two products. My second argument was that after a while, [a logo] becomes a part of collective [memory]. If you are so omnipresent in the city streets, then you have to take a joke,” says Delvoye. He was amused by all the fuss, but understood that pigs were not very respected animals in the world. It is a paradox that LV have hired artist Scott Campbell to create tattoo designs on their leather bags this season, and that their models prance around with branded necks.

LV pursued Delvoye to Art Basel where under Swiss law the pigs would have been taken into custody, so he had to leave the country, “It was such a nice pig, and I wanted to keep it…”

Craftier the Better

Delvoye has always been playing on ideas of luxury and poverty. Delvoye grew up with the stuff his father would bring home from trips to the Congo. Via low-culture he came to understand high-culture. He knew more about kitschy, crafty things before he ever saw a 17th century table. In arts school he quickly learned that showing skillful work was a taboo, and demoted you to the stature of a craftsman.

His early works with carpet weaving and tapestry shocked people because it overstepped convention and encroached the realm of the traditional arts, of folklore and artisanship. It was anti-modernist. It was high art vs. popular culture.

I suggested that the only legitimate use of traditional crafts these days was restricted to the domain of tourism. “It is the forces of democratization,” said Delvoye. “Everybody should have curtains in the house… machinery makes mass production possible; taste and quality get devalued.”

More on Wim Delvoye’s poo machine in part2 of this post.

Page 24 of "Empty Bottles" by WassinkLundgren

Dutch artists WassinkLundgren bring their “Empty Bottles” solo exhibit to the United Kingdom. The show compromises of 33 award winning contemporary photo books framed. Each book has been opened at a page that runs in numerical order, starting with the front cover and ending with the back. The works vary from, 24 full color documents of bottle collectors to the remaining images that are purely textual, including a ‘special thanks’ and the publishing information. Each frame walks through the artist’s journey, compiling together to form a fascinating contemporary look at a part of life in China.

Page 1 of "Empty Bottles" by WassinkLundgren

The series is comprised of the portraits of 24 scavengers who are attracted to the bottles which WassinkLundgren have put in front of their camera. Each time a bottle is picked up, the duo snaps a picture, letting the empty bottle act as a cable release and turning the work into a performance piece of every day life. The project captures and documents the real-life acts of recycling, which usually goes largely unnoticed but is an integral part of contemporary life in china.

Hans Moleman describes “Empty Bottles” as, “This is work in its most basic sense: a means of survival. China offers only a rudimentary package of social services; millions have to devise their own way of keeping their head above water, even in China’s economic miracle. But it’s not really about the deprivation. Many of the scavengers are far from pathetic. These are people with an aim, an objective in perfect harmony with the highly affluent society in which they scavenge for a living.”

For more information, visit DMBMedia.

Phillips de Pury's new location at 450 Park Avenue, Manhattan

Phillips de Pury & Company, the world’s third largest auction house, has been expanding their ventures worldwide – and this may not come as a surprise in view of recent auctions such as at Sotheby’s, which announced record sales, an indication that the art market isn’t softening in this recession, and that investors are willing to bypass the stagnant stock market for the safety of old masters and blue-chip moderns.

Apart from their recent Contemporary Art sale with record auctions of $50 million worth of art sold, Phillips de Pury had also begun a series of innovative and profitable “theme” sales titled BRIC, MUSIC and AFRICA. The highly successful BRIC auction in April in London focused on the so-called BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Repackaging art around themes has had lucrative pay-offs, and now with the economic rise of Asian countries, Phillips de Pury and other auction houses are creating a new buying frenzy among these nations’ patriotic elite.

Phillips’ move uptown to the new 25,559 square feet space, at 450 Park Ave will attract buyers who may find their other Meatpacking District location a bit out of reach – and put them in closer proximity to midtown rivals Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Phillips de Pury at 450 Park Avenue

The space will premiere in November with their show, “Carte Blanche,” directed by Philippe Segalot, the former international head of Christie’s Contemporary Art department, and be curated by other art world figures. Evening sales along with single-owner and jewelry sales will take place over three floors with skyboxes on offer for premium clients.

The Meatpacking District location will continue to showcase design and photography, and Chairman, Simon de Pury says, “Finally with 450 Park Avenue and 450 West 15th Street, Phillips de Pury will have the ultimate contemporary art spaces both uptown and downtown.” He added in the WSJ, “While downtown is a space where contemporary-art lovers frequent, there are still a lot of clients based uptown, so this will be a small convenience for them to have more access to us.”

The Brothers Gao with a Headless Chairman Mao

It’s not the kind of sculpture of Chairman Mao you typically see in China. He’s on his knees as a supplicant, confessing; his body language and facial expression indicate deep remorse. What’s more, the head of this life-size bronze statue, titled “Mao’s Guilt” and created by the artist brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, separates from the body—by design.

Exhibitions by the Gao brothers, whose work the authorities find politically challenging, have been shut down in the past, and their studio has been raided. So they keep the head of Mao hidden in a separate location, reuniting it with its body only on special occasions to show friends and colleagues. Normally, the body of the statue remains headless, unidentifiable and nonthreatening. ”It’s something I hope all Chinese people will one day be able to accept and understand,” Gao Zhen, 53, said of the work. “We wanted to portray him as a human being, a regular person confessing for the wrongs he’s committed.”

Removable heads and underground exhibitions are just two of the guerrilla tactics the Gao brothers have employed, often with the help of Melanie Ouyang, their broker, to enable fans and friends to view their work. The Gaos are part of a generation of avant-garde Chinese artists who are pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. In the increasingly open Chinese art world, nudity is commonplace where it used to be forbidden, and art parodying the Cultural Revolution has become so ubiquitous that it is passé. Still, the Gaos are a reminder that, especially as China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution, limits to expression remain: although artists are increasingly free to deal with social and political topics, works that explicitly criticize Chinese leaders or symbols of China are still out of bounds.

Mao like you've never seen him

“Ash Red,” a 2006 exhibition the Gao brothers openly advertised and held in their studio, was suppressed by authorities. Posters and catalogs for the show were banned, and interviews the brothers had lined up with local news media were canceled. For several weeks after “Ash Red” was shut down, two guards stood outside the doors of the Gao brothers’ home studio, discouraging people from coming inside.

For the Gao brothers, Mao holds a more personal meaning. During the Cultural Revolution their father was labeled a class enemy and dragged off to a place that was “not a prison, not a police station, but something else,” Gao Zhen said. After twenty-five days had passed, the family members were told he had committed suicide.

They think otherwise: “If someone didn’t like you at that time, they arbitrarily labeled you a class enemy,” Mr. Gao added. “We came to Beijing to petition our father’s death.” Eventually the family was given the equivalent of about $290 in compensation. “That was a very painful period of our life,” Mr. Gao continued. “We were six brothers and a single mother; we didn’t have a penny.”

Still, many Chinese who are critical of the Gaos’ work say it lacks subtlety. “I understand what they’re trying to say, but I think their pieces are sensationalist—they’re too direct and gaudy,” says Feng Ling, 23, an art student who recently came to the Gao brothers’ home studio and saw “The Execution of Christ,” in which a firing squad of Chairman Maos take aim at Jesus.

The Execution of Christ

“The Gao brothers’ work on Mao is provocative for many mainland Chinese,” said Kai Heinze, 33, director of the Faurschou Gallery. “Their work sets off a trigger, challenging people here to understand and tolerate a view of modern Chinese history that admits shortcoming,”

China Prophecy: Shanghai explores 21st-century skyscraper city of Shanghai and is the third in a cycle of three related exhibitions entitled FUTURE CITY: 20 | 21 that juxtaposes a retrospective of American visions of the skyscraper city of the future from the early 20th century with an exploration of Chinese cities today, pursuing the parallel conditions of rapid modernization and urbanization. The second exhibition of the cycle, Vertical Cities, focused on Hong Kong and New York.

From left: Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Tomorrow Square, Jin Mao, and SWFC (under construction); Jin Mao; SWFC

The second exhibition in the three part series, FUTURE CITY: 20|21, Vertical Cities, examined the parallels during two major development booms and defining moments in the vertical identity of New York in the 1920s and 1960s and Hong Kong in the mid-1980s-1990s and today. Today, as high-rises proliferate everywhere, Hong Kong holds the title with 7,200. Still ascending, though, Shanghai is surely China’s prophecy of the urban future.

China Prophecy documents this stupendous urban transformation through film and photographs of old and new Shanghai, including a 20–minute video odyssey traveling the city’s streets and highways filmed by resident photographer Jakob Montrasio. Evoking the speed and ambition of the city’s futuristic focus are projected computer animations by the Chinese company Crystal CG that create spectacular flyovers of the city before circling the major skyscrapers that are their subjects.

The installation features large models of the major towers that now define—or will soon enhance—the Shanghai skyline. These include an architectural and wind-tunnel testing model of Jin Mao (88 stories; 1999); a presentation model of Tomorrow Square (55 stories; 2003); a massing model and structural engineering model of the Shanghai World Financial Center (101 stories; 2008); and an architectural model and structural computer models of Shanghai Tower (128 stories; 2014), now in development. Other renderings, sections, and construction photographs illustrate a range of technical issues that distinguish these towers, which are all designs of American-and mostly New York based-architectural and engineering firms. Other major high-rise projects included in the exhibition are KPF’s Jing An complex and SOM’s White Magnolia Plaza, both in development. The issue of global design practice is explored in the exhibition and a related lecture series in fall 2009.

Sustainable skyscraper design seems an oxymoron to some, but as the exhibition argues, high-rises and high density-in conjunction with mass transit-is a logical strategy for greener cities. The city’s most advanced high-performance design planned to date is the double-glass curtain wall of the Shanghai Tower, which will encircle eight stacked 15-story segments with atrium spaces and sky gardens soaring the full height of the 128-story structure. “Better City, Better Life,” calls out Shanghai’s emphasis on sustainable design as the slogan for the 2010 Expo, which will open May 1, 2010. The exhibition illustrates the Expo in plans, photographs, and a Crystal CG animation of the site and pavilions that emphasizes Shanghai’s self-image as the city of the future.

Source: Skyscraper Museum of New York

The exhibition will be at the museum through March 2010