Bangladesh - Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand, A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

Director Michael Glawogger has a knack for shadowing pimps and hookers through the city’s armpits. If he could stick his camera into a sulphur pit, a mining crevice, a slaughterhouse, or a city-sewer while knee-deep in slime, he’d do it. The third part of his existential trilogy that began with Megacities and Workingman’s Death culminates in the whorehouses of three metropolises – in the fishtanks of Bangkok’s red-light districts, at Faridpur, the City of Joy – a whore-ghetto in Bangladesh, and in the Camorra-run brothels and crack-joints in Reynosa’s La Zona in Mexico.  Besides the CocoRosie soundtrack what makes Whores’ Glory unique is the girls have separate spins on sin, sex and capitalism through the prisms of their separate faiths, Islam, Buddhism and Catholicism.

One sunny afternoon, we sat at a midtown park chatting about Asian whores, and I recalled the hostile reception I got once when trying to shoot inside Sonagachi, Kolkata’s whorehouses where they were naturally more welcoming of men. “No, women couldn’t go there. It’s the opposite of the world outside. Complete female rule,” stated Glawogger who is Austrian, and shoots with an all-male crew.

Faridpur in Bangladesh, much like Mumbai’s Falkland Road, is an all-female ghetto hundreds of years old, and Glawogger films like a fly on the wall observing some incredibly candid conversations and bitch-fights that makes Zana Briski’s brilliant 2004 doc Born into Brothels appear tame. “When you’re there everyday for so long, they just live their lives. We weren’t sneaky to catch anything – they get angry because they steal customers from each other, and they don’t care about others [watching] – they just want to hit each other,” Glawogger recollected. “Of course, there are limits,” he says, “The mothers are quite brutal, but you don’t see it probably to the extent that it is happening. Also, when the first attraction is over, people get bored of you.”

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

It took Glawogger a bit of negotiating to film in these sin cities, and 2 years to gain permission in Thailand. “The King of Thailand, a very adored figure, said there is no prostitution in Thailand. So you have to apply [to shoot] about something else.” Glawogger returned over and over again, gaining his contacts’ trust, giving them photos, money and gifts.  “Slowly, we became part of it…”

He selected girls that knew each other enough to gossip freely. “I usually give them a task – to have a conversation while they wash, lice each other, do make-up, so it comes naturally.” Sometimes they show-off for the camera: “I caught them often lying to me, telling different stories, but I made a contract to myself, whatever they say is truth, because even if they do come up with funky lies – it’s part of their job to fake it, so why shouldn’t they fake it with me?”

“Thai girls don’t make such a fuss about sex, they are playful,” says Glawogger speaking about their Buddhist take on life. Workers mainly cater to Thais, though there’s a big industry catering to foreigners. “Thais are quite racist about it because they don’t like girls that have been touched by foreigners. The Japanese are even worse about it. Very high-class brothels in Bangkok are exclusively Thai. If you’re a white guy, they’ll politely say you can only take girls with the red numbers, and if you asked why, they’d say the others are students, or that foreigners have too big dicks.”

“From prostitutes you can get a world geography of dick sizes,” says Glawogger laughing.

Bangladesh, Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Now, even Asian girls learn to imitate western ways of being ‘sexy,’ and with Internet chat-rooms and gay apps like Grindr being used in Bangkok and Goa, geo-tagged hookups have gone global. I tell him that in Thailand I get mistakenly approached, as I’m told my breasts are big by Thai standards. “Yes in Thailand you’d be good, but not so good in Bangladesh, because they all want bigger bellies. They really power-feed the girls – with steroids sometimes. They even bleach them.”

I notice that they say penis in English even when speaking in Bangla. “Yes pay-nis, pay-nis…they have no word. No word for fuck, only the word work, doing work,” says Glawogger having gotten to know their girl-talk.

In her on-camera monologue a Bangladeshi girl coyly suggests, Allah did not make her mouth to suck dick. “Oh it’s very tame,” he explains, “she puts up her sari and it takes 5 minutes, there is no undressing. But of course they are lying about this dick-sucking because they do it for special money. Also, it’s interesting in terms of linguistics because they don’t have a word for it in Bangla, and it’s called doing ice-cream,” Glawogger quips.

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

He gets the johns, who are usually stigmatized, to unload on camera. “Many people go to brothels – and they’re not the kind that rape young girls or are horrible people.  The only huge injustice is it doesn’t work both ways, [except] in Thailand. Young men in the subcontinent want to brag, be manly…either they do some gay stuff or go to brothels. As a young man in Bangladesh you can go nowhere, the house is full of family; the park is full of policeman. You can only have sex when you’re married. They go in and the conquest costs 50 takas. [US 60 cents]

Bangladesh - Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Whorehouses seem to be the most democratic of places. “But there are also many bad things,” says Glawogger, “When a young woman is alone on the street she’s already considered a whore, so they can just grab and sell her. In some social areas, if these girls fall in love, and if the guy finds a way to sleep with her, she’s fucked, then he can sell her as a prostitute because she had sex before marriage.”

In a visceral and poignant scene, a woman wails at her own misery: The desperation makes one question how fate conspires to place them there – trapped and ‘born to die’ as one mused in Workingman’s Death. But Glawogger questions my patronizing view, “I am not so sure about the no-future thing – it’s more about the moment, of how and when we do things.  There is no right life. What’s powerful is how they cope. I’d probably be happier working in a shipbuilding yard than in an office in Manhattan…” he says, looking at the caged midtown skyline around us. “A lot of people say, I could never live like that, but I totally disagree. Everybody can live like that when they have to. Going to an office and swallowing pills and seeing a shrink to make you happy is also not the solution.”

I suggest that in every human culture prostitution is the oldest alternative and by-product of mainstream monogamous culture. “I think it makes men utterly happy when they can just choose, and say No.33 – now! And the second aspect is they can go away afterwards,” says Glawogger frankly. “We are a pseudo-monogamous culture, enjoying the pretense of being monogamous and doing the opposite. The brothel is nothing more than a playground for easy access.”

Glawogger, who has shot in other Islamic countries, says sometimes the industry is ambiguous, “In Iran you can marry a prostitute for 2 hours, or marry her for a week and take her on vacation.” And then you can divorce them: “There are imams sitting in the brothel doing it,” he says.

Still from Whores' Glory - Mexico - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Maya Goded

In Mexico, Glawogger filmed a consensual sex scene between a prostitute and her preferred customer. I asked him what the difference was between pornography and prostitution with issues of privacy.

“In the process [of filming] I got turned down by many women who were otherwise quite frank, but said ‘listen I have an old daddy and he’s going to get a heart attack if he sees me.’”

After completing all three segments he traveled back to preview the film with the prostitutes in each country. “It was amazing, especially with the Mexican women because they were getting so angry about Thailand.” The Mexicans pitied the Thai in their fishtanks not being able to connect to their customers.  “They hated it, saying, thank god I live in Mexico,” he chuckled, “The Bangladeshis were totally uninterested about everyone else and just wanted to watch themselves. From an ethnographical sense they were amazed. For instance Hassina, the mother, saw herself, and pointing to the TV said, ‘what this woman says is true…what she says, the whole world should hear!’” Amused, Glawogger tells me they liked the film so much they gave him ‘permission’ to take them to the market and buy them new saris – he obliged.

What were his next projects, I ask.  “I’m always traveling the world hunting after a theme. Now, I’ll try to make a film about nothing.”

Every ten years a filmmaker comes along and takes the genre to the next level … Watching footage of the slaughterhouses in Nigeria in Workingman is tough on the eye, but remains a devastating depiction of death, showing how close animals and human come in their abjectness. I tell him I would love to seem more from Africa next. “I think Africa really shocks me,” says Glawogger, “and I am not easily shocked. And I haven’t even seen the worst. …Those are happy guys with good jobs [in the slaughterhouses]; it’s a strange beauty; can death be beautiful? It’s something unexplained, and those are the moments I am after.”

Director of Whores' Glory, Michael Glawogger

For more information:
http://www.whoresglory.com/
http://www.glawogger.com/

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.

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.”