by Drew Martin, with Bill Wheelock
Bill Wheelock is a Los Angeles based conceptual artist and the author of The Wrong Idea: Maurizio Cattelan in the Economy of Attention. I recently reached out to him to discuss Maurizio Cattelan's media ubiquity.
Drew:
It seems that everywhere I turn, there is an article about Maurizio Cattelan because of his Guggenheim retrospective. So I thought it would be a good time to finally get around to reading your The Wrong Idea: Maurizio Cattelan in the Economy of Attention. You wrote it in 2005. How has it aged?
Bill:
I think the concepts are all very much present, only some of the facts have changed. Immediately after finishing the book, The Wrong Gallery moved from the Chelsea NY streets to the Tate Modern, which drastically altered the context. I had written that the Wrong Gallery was one third an object in and of itself; one third a frame for other objects, and one third an institution. The move to the Tate crystallized its state as an object. The pathos seemed to have left it in the revered halls of the Tate. It is harder to suspend one's disbelief with all that validation.
There has never been a place for a commercial gallery actually within a museum, although there have been some recent strange bedfellows (such as Jeffrey Deitch’s position as director of LA MoCA). My book opens with discussion of a recycled Cattelan piece; he claimed to have buried an old sculpture, Kitakyushu, 2000, under the floor at The Whitney Biennial. It will be interesting to see how, if at all, these two iterations of the same piece could hang in his “All” retrospective.
Drew:
I was not sure how to read your book because I typically fall into the mindset of the writer but here I realized you might want to revise sections so I kept a distance. That being said, I liked it a lot. I started it one evening and finished it the following afternoon. I am a very slow reader but I found it engaging and it seemed very relevant. What prompted you to write it?
Bill:
It was actually my Master’s thesis rewritten to remove most of the boring academic structure. I am drawn to his defiance, and was myself defiant against my thesis committee, who insisted it was a poor career move to focus on a living artist. I suppose to a monograph author, that may be good advice. The artist could openly object to a critic’s opinion or drastically change course. Cattelan has threatened to quit art all together after his retrospective, so they may have been right. I don't consider my book a monograph. I could have chosen any number of Duchamp’s heirs. Cattelan was the last one I proposed whom my thesis committee were willing to accept, three months before graduation.
Drew:
From the title, I thought you were going to write a criticism of Cattelan but you have an affection for him, as you do his influencing predecessors; Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Bueys, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein to name a few. What is the draw for you to this kind of artist?
Bill:
All of the above artists play with more than just craft or concept but also the preconceived notions of what the viewers expect to see in an artwork. Although Zen is a different tradition altogether, there is something of an ego-smashing proposition involved for the viewer of this type of conceptual gamesmanship. The environment has changed from Duchamp, Bueys and Manzoni’s war-influenced Dadaism to a more economic absurdity practiced by the likes of the Madison Avenue artists of the American 80s or the Derilique art from the Un-Monumental 90s. Cattelan’s oeuvre plays a comfortable counterpoint to a post economic meltdown universe (toasted economelt anyone?). The book’s first chapter is in empirical first person because I do feel a physical and emotional reaction to works so in tune and on time, however conceptual their form.
Drew:
What do you think the cynical prankster really thinks about art deep down inside, beyond the clowning around the art world for which he is paid?
Bill:
Budweiser’s best ad just reads “Who cares if they’re real.” If they touch you, they are real enough. All glibness aside, most comedians are also depressive and contemplative offstage. I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Drew:
And how do you think this affects how art is taught to children and is appreciated by people not involved in this game that Duchamp began?
Bill:
The Duchamp game is an adult game. Some educators think all art should be public for all ages. I admire those who step up to the challenge and attempt to teach this liberally, but generally disagree with it. A child CAN drink a fancy red wine, but to appreciate it one needs to know what you have your hands on. Most children have a naive and limited idea of the economic environment. I can’t tell you what to the prerequisites are to get the most out of a work of meta-art, but I can say it is a critic’s responsibility to contextualize unfamiliar work. Absurdity can be most definitely taught to students of any age, so one could approach Cattelan from that direction. Trouble is when you explain humor, you tend to kill the timing.
Drew:
What do you think the near future of art has in store? And more importantly, what role do you think art could have in society that is different from the past and today?
Bill:
Well, we are in an economic depression, which is usually good for creative arts. Highly educated people have a lot of time on their hands, as intellectual employment is tough to find. I expect there will be some resurgence of craft and labor intensive work that has been lacking in the last fifty years or so. What is different is that the work of an artist has become a mainstream lifestyle and not freakishly marginal, so we are unlikely to see too many Elvis-famous heroes emerge, instead collective movements and participatory social commentaries like we are seeing in the Occupy movement are arising. People are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore, but they don’t seem really sure where exactly to go yet. Leadership seems scarce. My own crystal ball is still busted.
Drew:
You write about art and you make art. Is there a time and place for each with some kind of loose schedule or is it more of a leap frog in which you exhaust your interests/energy for one before you engage the other?
Bill:
I tend to follow my enthusiasm from project to project, without too much discipline, but once committed to seeing something through, I’d be lost unless some kind of structure or deadline is imposed. Technology permits both writing and photography to be built on the computer. Working on both feel like the same kind of weaving of patterns into the weft of the web. Blogging has been a tremendous help for me. The tools we have today allow no differentiation between the action of writing, film editing or image production. Plus, space and materials are practically free! I rely on Dropbox, iCloud and the blogosphere to sneak a bit of work in whenever I can get away with it. I edited photos recently while in a doctor’s waiting room, and later that day blogged them in line at the DMV with my phone.
Drew:
What have you been up to since our last interview? What projects have you been doing?
Bill:
Along with The Hairy Prone Companion, I have started a blog called HafoSafo identifying local news around my neighborhood. Lately I am engaged in a top secret book project for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that I can’t talk about or I won’t finish (see former comment on structure & discipline...). I am privileged to be working full time digitally photographing The J. Paul Getty Museum’s tremendous collection of over 150,000 - and growing - photographic prints as my day job. I read a lot and try to brag about it on Goodreads and am also hopelessly addicted to audio books. I may try to record and upload a free version of Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" to LibriVox.org. When all else fails, I work on motorcycles- which I find tremendously comforting as there is always and only one right way to do everything.
I also interviewed Bill in the summer of 2010: Always Thinking: An Interview with Bill Wheelock.
Bill Wheelock is a Los Angeles based conceptual artist and the author of The Wrong Idea: Maurizio Cattelan in the Economy of Attention. I recently reached out to him to discuss Maurizio Cattelan's media ubiquity.
Drew:It seems that everywhere I turn, there is an article about Maurizio Cattelan because of his Guggenheim retrospective. So I thought it would be a good time to finally get around to reading your The Wrong Idea: Maurizio Cattelan in the Economy of Attention. You wrote it in 2005. How has it aged?
Bill:
I think the concepts are all very much present, only some of the facts have changed. Immediately after finishing the book, The Wrong Gallery moved from the Chelsea NY streets to the Tate Modern, which drastically altered the context. I had written that the Wrong Gallery was one third an object in and of itself; one third a frame for other objects, and one third an institution. The move to the Tate crystallized its state as an object. The pathos seemed to have left it in the revered halls of the Tate. It is harder to suspend one's disbelief with all that validation.
There has never been a place for a commercial gallery actually within a museum, although there have been some recent strange bedfellows (such as Jeffrey Deitch’s position as director of LA MoCA). My book opens with discussion of a recycled Cattelan piece; he claimed to have buried an old sculpture, Kitakyushu, 2000, under the floor at The Whitney Biennial. It will be interesting to see how, if at all, these two iterations of the same piece could hang in his “All” retrospective.
Drew:
I was not sure how to read your book because I typically fall into the mindset of the writer but here I realized you might want to revise sections so I kept a distance. That being said, I liked it a lot. I started it one evening and finished it the following afternoon. I am a very slow reader but I found it engaging and it seemed very relevant. What prompted you to write it?
Bill:It was actually my Master’s thesis rewritten to remove most of the boring academic structure. I am drawn to his defiance, and was myself defiant against my thesis committee, who insisted it was a poor career move to focus on a living artist. I suppose to a monograph author, that may be good advice. The artist could openly object to a critic’s opinion or drastically change course. Cattelan has threatened to quit art all together after his retrospective, so they may have been right. I don't consider my book a monograph. I could have chosen any number of Duchamp’s heirs. Cattelan was the last one I proposed whom my thesis committee were willing to accept, three months before graduation.
Drew:
From the title, I thought you were going to write a criticism of Cattelan but you have an affection for him, as you do his influencing predecessors; Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Bueys, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein to name a few. What is the draw for you to this kind of artist?
Bill:
All of the above artists play with more than just craft or concept but also the preconceived notions of what the viewers expect to see in an artwork. Although Zen is a different tradition altogether, there is something of an ego-smashing proposition involved for the viewer of this type of conceptual gamesmanship. The environment has changed from Duchamp, Bueys and Manzoni’s war-influenced Dadaism to a more economic absurdity practiced by the likes of the Madison Avenue artists of the American 80s or the Derilique art from the Un-Monumental 90s. Cattelan’s oeuvre plays a comfortable counterpoint to a post economic meltdown universe (toasted economelt anyone?). The book’s first chapter is in empirical first person because I do feel a physical and emotional reaction to works so in tune and on time, however conceptual their form.
Drew:What do you think the cynical prankster really thinks about art deep down inside, beyond the clowning around the art world for which he is paid?
Bill:
Budweiser’s best ad just reads “Who cares if they’re real.” If they touch you, they are real enough. All glibness aside, most comedians are also depressive and contemplative offstage. I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Drew:
And how do you think this affects how art is taught to children and is appreciated by people not involved in this game that Duchamp began?
Bill:
The Duchamp game is an adult game. Some educators think all art should be public for all ages. I admire those who step up to the challenge and attempt to teach this liberally, but generally disagree with it. A child CAN drink a fancy red wine, but to appreciate it one needs to know what you have your hands on. Most children have a naive and limited idea of the economic environment. I can’t tell you what to the prerequisites are to get the most out of a work of meta-art, but I can say it is a critic’s responsibility to contextualize unfamiliar work. Absurdity can be most definitely taught to students of any age, so one could approach Cattelan from that direction. Trouble is when you explain humor, you tend to kill the timing.
Drew:What do you think the near future of art has in store? And more importantly, what role do you think art could have in society that is different from the past and today?
Bill:
Well, we are in an economic depression, which is usually good for creative arts. Highly educated people have a lot of time on their hands, as intellectual employment is tough to find. I expect there will be some resurgence of craft and labor intensive work that has been lacking in the last fifty years or so. What is different is that the work of an artist has become a mainstream lifestyle and not freakishly marginal, so we are unlikely to see too many Elvis-famous heroes emerge, instead collective movements and participatory social commentaries like we are seeing in the Occupy movement are arising. People are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore, but they don’t seem really sure where exactly to go yet. Leadership seems scarce. My own crystal ball is still busted.
Drew:
You write about art and you make art. Is there a time and place for each with some kind of loose schedule or is it more of a leap frog in which you exhaust your interests/energy for one before you engage the other?
Bill:
I tend to follow my enthusiasm from project to project, without too much discipline, but once committed to seeing something through, I’d be lost unless some kind of structure or deadline is imposed. Technology permits both writing and photography to be built on the computer. Working on both feel like the same kind of weaving of patterns into the weft of the web. Blogging has been a tremendous help for me. The tools we have today allow no differentiation between the action of writing, film editing or image production. Plus, space and materials are practically free! I rely on Dropbox, iCloud and the blogosphere to sneak a bit of work in whenever I can get away with it. I edited photos recently while in a doctor’s waiting room, and later that day blogged them in line at the DMV with my phone.
Drew:
What have you been up to since our last interview? What projects have you been doing?
Bill:
Along with The Hairy Prone Companion, I have started a blog called HafoSafo identifying local news around my neighborhood. Lately I am engaged in a top secret book project for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that I can’t talk about or I won’t finish (see former comment on structure & discipline...). I am privileged to be working full time digitally photographing The J. Paul Getty Museum’s tremendous collection of over 150,000 - and growing - photographic prints as my day job. I read a lot and try to brag about it on Goodreads and am also hopelessly addicted to audio books. I may try to record and upload a free version of Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" to LibriVox.org. When all else fails, I work on motorcycles- which I find tremendously comforting as there is always and only one right way to do everything.
I also interviewed Bill in the summer of 2010: Always Thinking: An Interview with Bill Wheelock.