Calvin Tomkins has been writing about art for over three decades. Lives of the Artists, published with Henry Holt and Company, collects ten profiles he wrote for The New Yorker between 1999 and 2008. Arranged chronologically, the close-up portraits are a window onto an art world that seems to be rapidly vanishing in the current social and economic climates.
The Artists and The Art World
Like miniature biographies, Tomkins's profiles give details about the artists' personal backgrounds, processes, and influences. But the artists' relationship to the art world itself is also given weight. Cindy Sherman "went through a period of feeling quite negative about the overheated 1980s art world," according to close friend Robert Longo. This served as an impetus for her "Disaster" series of the late '80s, an ambitious group of gory photographs which led the way to her success.
Painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel made his own entrée onto the New York art scene in the 1970s, when video, performance, and installation were ascendant. Well known for his abundant confidence, the fact that his work didn't fit in "never worried Schnabel." He instead found inspiration in the Mexican muralists, as well as Expressionists Rothko and Pollock, and in Joseph Beuys, with his spectactular use of materials.
James Turrell's enormous, epic, and as-yet-unfinished Roden Crater never could have happened without the artist's persistence – and support from the Dia Foundation. Dia has funded various land art projects, such as Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. The money for Roden Crater vanished in the early '80s, however, and Turrell had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of loans. He pulled through, thanks to a MacArthur Foundation grant and several shows that sold extremely well. A restructured Dia returned in the late '90s, and Turrell once again was receiving funding from them for his project.
Artistic Processes
Although Tomkins emphasizes the biographical in his profiles – the title of the book is borrowed from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors of Italy, he explains in his introduction – the artists' processes invariably come up. Pop Art precursor Jasper Johns, for example, often makes drawings and lithographs based on his paintings, in what could be construed as reverse order. Tomkins interprets this rather as an illustration of Johns's interest in "shifting focus."
Maurizio Cattelan, on the other hand, is "post-studio." His work as an artist is entirely conceptual, and the manufacturing, or hands-on making, is done by hired professionals. Tomkins joins Cattelan on a studio visit to see how a sculpture of John F. Kennedy is progressing. Daniel Druet, who often makes wax figures for Musée Grevin in Paris, is creating the life-size likeness.
Art Post-2008
Of the ten artists featured in Lives of the Artists, Cattelan is one of two who aren't American (the other is British Damien Hirst). Coincidentally or not, his approach and work seem the most relevant in an art world that has abruptly landed in the 21st century. His brand of social criticism and his sense of humor, which skates between lighthearted and barbed, don't come off as dated, like some of the other artists' approaches in this book.
Nevertheless, Calvin Tomkins is not attempting to predict the future in his essays. Rather, he means to give detailed accounts of the lives of contemporary artists; hence the adapted title. In the introduction, he states: "In my experience, the lives of contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation." And the essays in Lives of the Artists are engaging profiles of ten living creative giants.
Calvin Tomkins, Lives of the Artists. Published by Henry Holt and Company, 2008. ISBN: 0-8050-8872-5
Read more about Calvin Tomkins at the Art Books blog.
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