by John Waters
But I won’t, because Cy Twombly doesn’t suffer fools. I’ve always said true success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks. Cy has definitely reached that level, but he’s not a traditional snob. He’s from and still lives part-time in Lexington, Virginia, when he’s not at his other homes in Italy, and you can tell he’s a Virginia gentleman through and through. He even took arty, hilariously detailed photographs of ugly toys and cheap flower bouquets at the local Wal-Mart and showed them to his publishers. Imagine Cy Twombly in Wal-Mart! Like a space alien. So out of place. So unrecognized. So interested in how earthlings live.
Mr. Twombly doesn’t forget the little people. He told Vanity Fair in 1994 that he had been raised “by an African American nanny to whom he remains fiercely loyal.” He had planned to take her to his big retrospective show at MoMA in New York “though he was afraid she might shock the other guests with her outspokenness.” I know what he meant. I had a housekeeper who worked for me for decades whom I truly love, too. Her name is Rosa and she hates Cy Twombly’s work. Aren’t maids the ultimate art critics? When I hung Cy’s seven prints entitled Five Greek Poets and a Philosopher (1978) in my dining room (can prints ever really be thought of as “roommates”?), Rosa moved in close to study them. Seeing only the names of the poets spelled out in Cy’s shaky handwriting with no other “art” added, she barked her outraged disapproval. She scowled at the A in Plato that appears to be started over by the artist, certain of the spelling but unsure of the order of the letters. Rosa harrumphed at the R in Homer, so crowded, so sloppy, so excluded like an unwanted child in the alphabet. When I tried to show Rosa this new addition to my collection in the pages of one of the eighty-one books I own on Cy Twombly, the same heavy volume she had been moving and dusting under for years, she let her true feelings be known. “They have the nerve to put this in a book?” she howled in disbelief.
Even when Cy is celebrated in a fancy way, there are moments of affluent unease and anarchy. I was lucky enough to be invited in 1994 to a sit-down dinner to unveil Cy’s one new work—Untitled Painting (he loves that U-word!)—at the Larry Gagosian Gallery when it was still located in SoHo. This was the only painting in the show and it took up the whole wall. The guests were seated on both sides of a very long table. Between courses, the entitled and distressedly dressed-in-elegance crowd was asked to switch sides of the table so that those who had been sitting across from them could gaze at the painting as they ate, too. Was I the only one who noticed the delicious detail that the waiters neglected to switch the plates, so you were forced to also contemplate somebody else’s leftovers? Did anybody but me put two and two together that night? The violent burst of Mr. Twombly’s colors compared to the nibbled-on squash that had once been historically fresh? Or the psychotic markings of the furious child, which also might be a Roman fishing boat that caught the very fish whose bones await burial on our overly privileged dinner plates? Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives? Were poetry, garbage, and genius ever such a holy mix as they were that rare night in artful Manhattan?
Cy can be scary, too. I remember walking into one of his last shows in Manhattan at the uptown Gagosian in 2006. There were nine giant untitled paintings so terrifying and inviting, repulsive and overwhelming, that you stopped in your tracks. Here was Cy’s massacre of confidence in all its gory detail. This handwriting exercise of huge, red, dripping, barely clotted loops of pernicious joy brought to mind crazed celluloid messages like Stop Me Before I Kill Again, only this time the author was in a trance of twisted magnificence and private memories of classic carnage. This blood was definitely not safe, yet somehow it was beyond disease. Like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of art history madness or the Saw of reinvented abstract painting, these works didn’t even feel like paintings. They felt like a freeze-frame of the excitement of an idea. Get too close to the detail and you might gag from freedom. Yves Klein may have used the naked bodies of women as paintbrushes, but here Cy appears to have imagined painting with the hacked-off limb of an intruder who interrupted his painting by asking a stupid question about “drips” or how long it actually took to create these works. Like it would matter!
Nobody can overwhelm me like Cy Twombly. He puts me in a rapture of defiance and anger that immediately turns to tranquillity. Even though he lives with me in my Baltimore house only in the form of prints, he once in a while deigns to look at me when I pass his work on my walls, and I’m grateful for the attention. Cy Twombly never disappoints me or makes excuses. He will always be my favorite roommate.
But sometimes you have to lighten up. Fischli/Weiss sneak into my home all the time and make me laugh. They never have the rent, but what do I care? Not only are they the most droll, elegantly witty, and quietly hilarious artists working today, their deadpan, goofily poetic work asks the question, “Can kidding be art?” And, of course, it can. Especially when it is subtle and cool enough not to depend on dreaded cynicism. Unlike so many other contemporary artists trying to move onto anybody’s walls, they don’t shout for attention at art fairs or translate well to overproduced auction catalogs. This duo of Swiss artists aren’t even angry! They’re the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis of the art world and their work has the charm of desperately wiping your nose on a fine Swiss handkerchief while riding the train to Gstaad in a snowstorm for the Christmas holidays.
My love and respect for Peter Fischli and David Weiss began in Zurich in 1990 in Walter Keller’s Scalo Bookshop. Browsing through the art books, I came to one entitled Airports that had no text but was filled with page after page of Fischli/Weiss’s numbingly beautiful but completely unremarkable glossy color photographs of runways, airplanes, luggage carts, control towers, and airline terminals. There was no reason for these photographs to be. Like rejected third choices from some corporate advertising calendar, these nondescript landscapes were so tedious, so overblown, and so dumb that once you finally looked at them with your “art” eyes, you could only feel total exhilaration.
I was too stupid to have heard of Fischli/Weiss at the time, but I bought the book, became obsessed by these photographers, and, in what I now realize was a rather unsophisticated review, praised Airports in British Vogue. I went on about “purposeful mediocrity” being the only “subtle way to be new” and gushed that I had “glimpsed a fresh kind of 1990s beauty, over and above the banality of pop or the exasperation of minimalism into a shockingly tedious, fair-to-middling, nothing-to-write-home-about kind of masterpiece.” My wild enthusiasm for the “second-rate” that Fischli and Weiss so excelled at celebrating peaked at one of the airport pieces I named “FedEx.” I described it excitedly: “A parked Federal Express plane sits in an airport with portable debarkation steps at its door. No people. Absolutely nothing is happening. ‘Next Day Delivery’ never looked so unrushed. A bus used to take passengers to the gate is heavily featured as it drives by, empty except for the unseen driver. We know it can’t stop. Packages don’t have friends to meet them at customs…How much could it cost to purchase this picture? What could it actually be like to have it beautifully framed in your living room?”
Well, I found out. After learning about Fischli/Weiss’s past work, the inventively low-grade but expertly produced videos, the tiny, unfired clay narrative sculptures that look like movie scenes exhibited at an amateur craft fair, and their synthetic rubber dog dishes and silverware drawer dividers, I felt more secure. I was lucky enough to purchase their rubber 33⅓ record Imitation that my favorite art magazine Parkett editioned and offered its readers in 1988. I still chuckle every time I pass it on the pedestal in the front hall of my Baltimore house, where I have been appalled to see guests at my annual Christmas party actually set drinks on it! But I shouldn’t worry. You can’t really hurt Fischli/Weiss’s “record.” It’s already scratched and scuffed and imperfect. True, it’s an album, or rather “an object that can be played” as the artists warn, but only for “those who are not afraid of ruining their record p
layers. If they take the risk, they will not be rewarded. Their record player or rather the needle will hear something like a cross section of average disco music. Average in this case also means decreased quality of sound reproduction—the hi-fi fetish choking on itself.”
Graduating to their ridiculously sublime photos of “carpet shops” made out of lunch meats or their “Swiss Alps” imagined as an unmade bed with pillows propped up, I started to feel more sophisticated, more Swiss. And when I finally glimpsed their downscale Gursky-on-Prozac photographs of the almost invisible architecture of European suburban garden apartments, which would make any American yearn to go home, I finally got up the nerve to meet these great artists. My dear friend and art mentor Matthias Brunner (whom my mother still wishes I would marry, no matter how many times I tell her we are comrades) knew Peter Fischli and David Weiss. He explained to them my passion for the “FedEx” Airports photo, and even though this particular photo from the book had never been editioned or exhibited in any of their art shows, Fischli/Weiss agreed to make me a unique print. I never wrote a check with such unabashed zeal.
Airport—Federal Express (1999), the giant photograph that has no right to be this large, hogs one whole wall in my New York apartment and makes me feel so satisfied. This majestically ordinary panorama greets me proudly every time I come home from some airport—never air-raged to have been delayed, never frustrated by onboard mechanical problems, never crabby because of canceled flights. How could I be unhappy with air travel when every time I look out the window of an airplane, no matter where I am in the world, I think of Fischli/Weiss’s glorious views? The ritual, the control, the freedom, and the agony of the airport now give me back the complete joy of being an art collector.
Then there’s the rubble. The one piece of sculpture in my New York apartment the maid has never seen. Every time I arrive or depart from home, I go into my bedroom closet, get out my little white art-handler gloves, put them on, and take out the amazing gift I received from Matthias Brunner and Fischli/Weiss for my fiftieth birthday in 1996. Every second I’m in Manhattan, I fear someone who isn’t obsessed over art will throw out Fischli/Weiss’s tiny piles of painted, hand-carved polyurethane trompe l’oeil scraps of wood that I place lovingly on the floor right outside my kitchen door.
And who could blame them? I remember entering Sonnabend Gallery in 1994, seeing that the new Fischli/Weiss show was still being installed, and, like many other gallery-goers, almost leaving. But suddenly I realized the lumber on the floor, the paint cans, the cleaning supplies, the hammers and other tools, were all Fischli/Weiss sculpture. The leftover nails still hanging on the walls from the last show and the vaguely unfresh paint on the gallery walls were all part of the installation. The fast-food trash on the floor, seemingly left by the installers, was also actually hand-carved by these great tricksters. It was only when you tried to focus on the lettering of any of the commercial products scattered around that you realized they were quickly done, not focused. Being “not ready” for your show, the ultimate nightmare of both gallery owner and artist, was suddenly art.
I love art on the floor. Dennis Dermody hates it, though, and always bitches when he comes in my front door in New York and trips over the thirteen aluminum Carl Andre tiles. “Watch it, ox,” I yell, but I’m not mad because you can’t really hurt a Carl Andre sculpture. But look out for my Fischli/Weiss! Those eight little pieces of faux scrap wood are so delicate, so quiet, that just looking at them could break your heart and theirs if you’re not careful.
“You have the worst lighting for your art,” a collector grumbled when I was giving a tour of my Baltimore house, but that’s the way I like it. “Your art should just be in your house the way everything else is,” Brenda Richardson once told me, and I agree. I love going to Brice and Helen Marden’s New York townhouse, where you see pictures, drawings, or rare photographs casually leaning on top of one another on the floor, right out in the daylight. Now, that is elegance.
And besides, some artists don’t want you to really see their work. Fischli/Weiss’s Fotografias (2004/05) are a perfect example. One hundred and eight black-and-white photographs snapped on slide film, “underexposed by 2 or 3 aperture points,” and printed on color paper defy you to actually look at them. Only available in a series of six photographs (and you don’t get to pick which six, only which series), the four-by-six snapshots of paintings on the front slats of Swiss fairgrounds, carnival rides, children’s theme parks, and other locations of promised happy genre “fun” that are always a letdown are the artworks I look at the most every day in my Baltimore living room. But I’ve noticed that guests who are at all interested in my collection comment on these darkly printed photos of witches, dragons, and spiders the least. You can’t really see the photographs from a distance. And if you move in to inspect, you are almost always disappointed. You can see the reflection of their flashbulb. You don’t get it and you don’t care. You move on quickly, never asking a question about the work or the artists. Fischli/Weiss’s Fotografias seem to speak to no one. Perfect.
“Originally,” these photographs were “just scraping the bottom of the barrel of our archive,” the artists explain. “Pictures that hadn’t been previously used.” Now there is a weak artist’s “statement” if I ever heard one! Are these pictures the worst of Fischli/Weiss? I’ve always thought there will eventually be a show entitled “The Worst of Warhol,” but I’m not sure it would work with Fischli/Weiss. Can there really be a “worse” if there isn’t a “better”?
I am so happy to be the only Baltimore friend of Fischli/Weiss’s Fotografias. Are they homesick for Switzerland, the only country where the rich know how to act? The land I love that makes me feel so inferior for not having been born there. These pictures are better than any amusement park ride. They’re an expensive cheap thrill that mocks photography as fine art at every level but at the same time winks at me to let me know I’m in on the art. Sometimes right before I fall asleep in my second-floor bedroom overhead, I think I hear them downstairs on the wall giggling together. And then I sleep very, very peacefully.
But I’m attracted to serious roommates, too. Ones that are so smart I usually have no idea what they are talking about when they first move into my house. I don’t want someone living with me whose work I can understand. I want an artist who can make me see something amazing from almost nothing—the exact opposite of moviemaking. Richard Tuttle is the perfect choice.
I knew about Richard Tuttle’s minimalist troublemaking and respected his early hostile establishment reviews, such as “Less has never been less than this.” His bare plywood slat pieces nailed flat to the wall with just one thin side of the depth of the wood painted white were so beautiful, so simple, so plain, that I felt exhausted just imagining how complete the artist must have felt when he decided the work was finished. I had been incredibly moved and shocked at Mary Boone’s 1992 show of Tuttle’s tiny collages/paintings/sculptures hung at floor level with a single barely visible pencil line drawn down to each from the ceiling. These Fiction Fish I artworks are almost invisible when you walk in the gallery. Is this a show for the mice? I excitedly wondered, realizing, yes, to us these assemblages are minute, but to an ant they’d be as colossal as a Richard Serra sculpture is to us. Was Tuttle Tinker Bell’s brother? Here, at last, was art made by someone obviously outside the human condition. As Richard Serra once said to me about Donald Judd’s pieces, “It was never a question of liking his work,” it was “that you could never get over it!” I know what Serra meant. I still have not gotten over this Richard Tuttle show.
I decided to get up my nerve and ask Tuttle to move in with me, not that you’d really know if he was there or not. I hung in my New York apartment his amazing nothing-to-it black crayon drawing Summer 1973 (the same year Pink Flamingos really came out), which must have enraged viewers at the time in its very lack of craft, heft, or humor. I look at this hastily drawn “loop” mark with a lot of plain white paper space around it, which must
have taken a second to draw, and remember how angry and insane I must have been in 1973, and realize from Richard’s example you don’t need to get that worked up to cause a stink.
I go back to Baltimore, where I always return for inspiration, and stroll by my other Richard Tuttle crayon drawing, Center Point (1973). I guess this is maximalist for Richard Tuttle because there are four lines and two colors: the exact rectangle of a 35 mm 1:85 ratio movie screen. Did Richard know he was bringing in a calming effect to counterattack the anxiety of the movie business inside my house? Could any job really be as simple, effortless, uncrowded with equipment, and perfect as this drawing?
By now, Richard knows how much I worship Peace and Time (1993), his unevenly hacksawed wood sculpture I bought from Mary Boone. The clumsy but strong piece hangs passively in my Baltimore house, looking like the That Girl logo or a failed woodwork project left unclaimed from summer camp. This work has enraged people in my home for years, but it makes me feel better about my life because it certainly doesn’t ask to be explained. I know Richard has talked about “a threshold beyond which a self-respecting viewer won’t look,” but I’m way too selfish to offer up this quote to someone who is too cowardly to see the perfect awkwardness right before their eyes.
Richard hears things from his work and I try to listen, too. I remember going to see him give a little artist’s “talk” for collectors at the inaugural opening of Dwight Hackett Projects in Santa Fe. The whole event was like a transplanted New Yorker cartoon. The gallery space was almost completely empty except for a few six-inch bronzed black teepees done by the artist and placed around the perimeter of the large room. “He is working with the horizon line,” the gallery owner explained as the fashionably-dressed-in-black art mob glanced around nervously, relieved to see something at least but queasy from the heat and Richard’s reputation for being long-winded and impenetrable. By then, I knew Richard a little, so I went up to him and shook his hand right before he went on and whispered, “Make it long!” He smiled, took center stage, and immediately announced with a straight face, “John Waters told me to make my remarks long.” The crowd tittered nervously, gave me dagger looks, and resigned itself to art talk from another reality. “See that piece over there? It knows about its shadow! It knows about its space,” he enthused to the art mavens who strained to see what he did. “Tell me!” he demanded of his work with complete seriousness. “TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW!” I was in heaven. Richard Tuttle is never funny to me. He’s the only artist I respect who’s moved way beyond humor. When asked by the curator Marcia Tucker why he made his works, Richard answered with obvious clarity, “So I won’t have to do them again.”