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| English: Sarah Thornton (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
When a friend introduced author Sarah Thornton to art-world mischief maker Maurizio Cattelan as an ethnographer, “he seemed to mishear,” Thornton writes, “and exclaimed with great enthusiasm, 'You’re a pornographer!’”
“Not every player in Thornton’s new book “33 Artists in 3 Acts” makes the unforgettable impression that Cattelan does at every turn. He had “recently decided,” Thornton writes, “that designing his own clothes was easier than shopping for them.” The bespoke T-shirt he wore when they met read, “Hung like Einstein, smart as a horse.”
Thornton, 49, who writes about art in a wide cultural frame, is the former chief writer on contemporary art at the Economist, where her career as an author bloomed. Born in Canada, she earned an undergraduate degree in art history at Concordia University in Montreal before a fellowship took her to the United Kingdom, where she earned a doctorate in sociology at theStrathclyde University in Glasgow. She had academic appointments at the University of Sussex and Goldsmith’s College,University of London.
The big question that guided “33 Artists in 3 Acts” was ostensibly simple: What defines an artist in the 21st century? She received a range of answers that will startle even art-world insiders.
“The 'true’ artist?” said painter Carroll Dunham (father of Hollywood darling Lena, who also appears in the book). “It means that you are in a loop with your work. ... If I didn’t have a significant need to see these things, they would never happen. It’s me, myself and I. The three of us need to look at this painting.”
“The artist is just the coolest guy in the room,” Dunham’s daughter Grace told Thornton, “the one that everyone is obsessed with. ... It’s a deeply powerful social position.”
“My work is in between the entertainment industry, big market powers, the spectacularization of politics and everyday life,” said Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. “It offers, I hope, some moments of intimacy with reality.”
“Needless to say,” Thornton writes, “an artist’s 'work’ is not the isolated object, but the entire way they play their game. ... I see artists’ studios as private stages for the daily rehearsal of self-belief.”
Thornton approached each of her subjects — including such reputedly or genuinely hard-to-handle characters as Jeff Koons,Cindy Sherman, Ai Weiwei and Damien Hirst — evenhandedly and with a sharp eye for their mannerisms and the potentially revealing paraphernalia of their working lives.
The sociologist of music Simon Frith, Thornton’s mentor and doctoral thesis adviser at Strathclyde, repeatedly told her that “an ethnographer must have a novelist’s eye for detail,” said Thornton in conversation during a visit to The Chronicle.
Vivid descriptions
Her new book is rich in descriptive passages refracting the character of her interview subjects. Of a visit to feminist performance and video artist Martha Rosler, Thornton writes: “Rosler’s living room looks like a charity shop hit by a bomb. With my back to a Victorian bay window lined with plants, I look out onto a 55-foot stretch of strewn boxes, clunky old television sets, VCRs, paintings acquired at thrift shops, and women’s crafts such as lace doilies, beadwork pieces, handmade dolls, and pottery. Her downstairs workspace looks even more chaotic, with toppled stacks of paper and barricades of unsealed cardboard boxes. … In order to get to the kitchen, visitors are forced to step over a box the artist refers to as 'last year’s taxes.’”
Before the reader dismisses Rosler as a hoarder, Thornton writes, “Most of the stuff is destined for her 'Meta-Monumental Garage Sale,’ which will take place in the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.”
'Participant observer’
Two questions press on the reader’s mind repeatedly throughout Thornton’s account of repeated encounters with artists, in their studios and beyond: How did she win the confidence of so many cultural stars whom she hadn’t met before? And how did she recollect things with such convincing fidelity?
“Another word for what ethnographers do is 'participant observation,’ which is kind of a joke to a lot of people,” she said with a liquid laugh. “I mean, isn’t that what we do all the time? Isn’t that just going to a party? Especially since I did my Ph.D. thesis on dance clubs and raves.” Her first book, “Club Cultures: Music, Media and Sub-Cultural Capital,” grew out of her thesis.
Thornton’s experience writing for the Economist also gave her some traction. “If I hadn’t been writing for the Economist, there were certain people who wouldn’t have seen me repeatedly or maybe wouldn’t have seen me at all,” she said. “But as a participant observer, you position yourself slightly differently from how a journalist would. Journalists will often say, 'I represent the newspaper.’ The ethnographer goes way over more into the tribe, trying to understand it on its own terms.”
After “33 Artists …” and her previous, much-admired book “Seven Days in the Art World,” “I’m no longer an outsider to the art world, and technically an ethnographer should be an outsider,” Thornton said, “but I feel that these artists with high levels of recognition, who end up customizing the role so much for themselves — you go into their studios and it can feel a little bit like a different planet. You do get the buzz of estrangement, which I love. That’s exciting for me. I love the weird cultural details, the odd interactions.”
When not traveling for a book project, Thornton divides her time between San Francisco and London. But “33 Artists in 3 Acts” entailed four years of interviews and research and many thousands of miles of air travel hopscotching four continents. She spoke with 130 artists for the book, but for coherence and readability had to cut their number to 33. (There are 34 characters in the book, including a couple of nonartist professionals.)
“The casting question had to do with how interested they were in my questions, how willing they were to play ball with me, what kind of access they were willing to give me,” she said. “Some artists are pretty rigid in their patter. I remember interviewing someone I thought was one of my favorite artists, who has been slightly demoted since. His discourse has been formulated in the late ’70s and it hadn’t changed since. I’m not even sure he believed in it anymore.”
Lots of photos
As to how she tracks her research, Thornton said, “I’m an obsessive documenter. ... I take loads and loads of pictures, I use two tape recorders, just to be on the safe side, and I take notes at the same time. My notes are my thoughts, things I can’t take a picture of, usually nonverbal things. I don’t want to be disrupting people by taking pictures of them, but I make sure to document my subjects, head to toe. Especially on these foreign trips, I’d interview several artists at a time, then you really have to make sure you’re fastidious because once you’ve gotten over your jet lag and returned home, without a system, who knows what you saw?”
To make the project manageable and the book readable, she ordered her accounts under three categories — the three “acts”: politics, kinship and craft, all subjects that get spun in unexpected ways by her interview subjects.
For all its level-eyed address to its subject, “33 Artists …” will make some readers wonder whether it has a covert hero. My candidate: Los Angeles performance artist Andrea Fraser.
Without simply confirming that, Thornton said, “Andrea and I were born in the same year, 1965. We’re oddly both Pierre Bourdieu scholars, so we both have this sociological background. I’ve always been interested in institutional critique, which is what she does, and my books are my own kind of version of that. So there are a lot of kindred interests. Also, so much of her work is about being an artist, unmasking those behaviors and etiquette and myths. ... I love all the artists in the book, but it’s true that Andrea says things I want someone to say.”
Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic. E-mail: kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kennethbakersf
“33 Artists in 3 Acts” (Norton; 430 pages; $26.95)
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