Cult Artists: 50 Cutting-Edge Creatives You Need to Know
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Cult Artists: 50 Cutting-Edge Creatives You Need to Know
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780711240292 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Lincoln, Frances Limited |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2019 |
| Series: | Cult Figures Series |
| Edition description: | New |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Sales rank: | 1,086,706 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Kristelle Rodeia is a freelance illustrator based in Paris. After studying Plastic Arts and Graphic Design, she is now a full time illustrator working in a mixture of pen, ink and digital drawings. Previous clients include Stylist, Veneta Bottega and Erratum. Kristelle is the illustrator for White Lion Publishing's Cult Artists, Cult Filmmakers, Cult Musicians and Cult Writers.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
DAN ATTOE (1975)
POET OF THE PEOPLE
Dan Attoe's art speaks to and for Americans between Los Angeles and New York. Full of pathos and poetry, his magic realist drawings, paintings and neon sculptures represent rural America's deeper truths. Alongside his own artmaking practice, Attoe heads a group of fellow artists beyond core art-market cities whose bawdy, joyful, shamanistic annual collaborations are cult events in Middle America. Attoe's profound understanding of his natural and cultural environment, and his intricate self-awareness, make him a cult figure among international art-world insiders and outsider artists in America.
Attoe's art explores people's struggles to find meaning and significance with the awareness that their lives are small and fragile. Sexy country girls, burly beasts, bewildered men and other archetypes populate his paintings and neon but America's natural splendour is the main protagonist of his oeuvre. He lives and works in Washington State. His father was a park ranger and he was raised with an intimate connection to nature. His people and their dramas are dwarfed by light-infused landscapes and oceans. In Attoe's majestic and haunting paintings, he adds slender bits of text that deepen, instead of dispel, the mysteries of his characters' lives and psychologies. The writing in his paintings and drawings have the haunting brilliance of Bruce Springsteen or Kris Kristofferson lyrics. These witty, despairing or insightful sentences usually demonstrate his figures' isolation and alienation.
Attoe's paintings and sculptures evolve from his daily 'Accretion drawings', sketches that he produces for his private exploration and inspiration. Mythic and mysterious, these drawings function as visual haikus, flush with humour, sexuality and sinister undercurrents. Like the paintings that some become, Attoe's drawings are compelling for their uncanniness and mystery.
Counter-balancing the isolation depicted in his solo practice is Attoe's role as founder and leader of Paintallica, an artist collective that he started as a student at the University of Iowa – meeting annually to create massive, sprawling installations at the Iowa State Fair, Portland State University, and Chicago's Western Editions gallery. According to the group, which includes artists Jesse Albrecht, David Dunlap and Jeremy Tinder, its 'realm is a mixture of taboo, mundane, clumsy, deft and absurd ... Paintallica's goal is to make ambitious art while remaining honest to our blue-collar flyover state roots and our healthy disdain for New York-centric corporate and academic influences.' In his independent art and work with Paintallica, Attoe has become a leading figure representing America's quiet complexity, overlooked nobility and hidden magic.
CHAPTER 2BALTHUS (1908–2001)
CONTROVERSIAL GENIUS
Balthus famously deplored art criticism or any interpretation of his work. He ardently, and impossibly, insisted that his art be seen independent of him, yet the man who created problematically seductive portraits of prepubescent girls has a captivatingly compelling mythos matching the controversy-laden history of his art. Balthus's paintings, depicting sadism and graphically erotic visions of young girls, have become more controversial and unsettling over time, although he remains a cult figure for his genius. His dream-like images are haunting for their perversion and darkness, as well as their aesthetic beauty.
What is known about Balthus is that he was born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola to Polish expatriates. He appropriated his childhood nickname as his artistic nom de guerre. His father was an admired art historian but his mother's history has several stories. According to some accounts, she was the Russian Jewish daughter of a cantor or a French Protestant or descending from the richest Sephardic Jewish family or, even, a lost Romanov. Regardless, the family became prominent members of Paris's chic intellectual circles and Balthus was raised with Rilke, André Gide and Jean Cocteau visiting his home before his family relocated to Geneva during World War I. When Balthus was a boy, his mother had an affair with Rilke, who encouraged his artistic talents and exploration.
The first artwork Balthus made public was a graphic novel about a boy's lost cat. A fascination with felines was a reigning thread throughout his art during his own boyhood, through his military service in Morocco, and his eventual relocation back in Paris. Once settled in France, his work developed into the psychologically tormented but bewitching imagery comprising his legend. His 1934 painting The Guitar Lesson is among his most famous and infamous. It depicts a young woman holding a prepubescent girl across her lap. A guitar lays at their feet. The woman is pulling the child's hair and her other hand hovers very close to her naked vulva. The girl pulls down the woman's blouse, exposing her pert breast. Both characters' expressions are blank and their bodies are tense. The sadism and horror of molestation is compounded by his figures' nightmarishly transfixed appearance. This sense of mystery and trauma is heightened in his 1939–1946 painting The Victim, which shows a naked girl contorted in crinkled sheets, with the crime unspecified. Like all his work, this image depicts humanity's worst with unnerving beauty and grace.
CHAPTER 3JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960–1988)
PERMANENT REBEL
The term 'art star' was coined in the 1980s for Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although he rapidly became the youngest, hottest, most famous and fashionable artist of his era, he retains his 'cult' status because of his influence on New York's underground subcultures. Punk, graffiti, art-house and hip-hop owe as much to Basquiat as the mega-money, gilded, high-art gallery and auction worlds where he still reigns, even decades after his death at age twenty-seven.
Long before Basquiat's 1982 untitled painting sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million at auction, he altered the spirit of Manhattan's ravished streets with his graffiti poetry. Writing poetry on walls using the tag SAMO© (standing for 'Same Old Shit', according to street art lore), Basquiat's provocative spirit became his artistic signature. He kept this raw, vivid and confrontational energy when he moved to massive figurative, oil on canvas, paintings. As SAMO©, Basquiat criticised capitalism, religion, art, racism, social pretention and himself. These themes remained dominant in his intensely powerful paintings.
Lust for a Cinderella story shaped the art world and mainstream media's perception of Basquiat's history and his art. He was championed as a literal rags-to-riches story. However, while Basquiat was homeless and adrift before breaking into the city's rarefied gallery scene, he was not raised in poverty. His father was a successful accountant and sent his son to a school for gifted, artistic children. Half Haitian and half Puerto Rican, he was raised trilingual. Although he never attended art school, Basquiat was highly literate in art history and broadly knowledgeable. His art is infused with sincere and sarcastic references to theological traditions, literature, anatomy and his deep love of jazz.
Although Basquiat was intensely open in his art and interviews about his experiences with racism, he was more guarded about his addictions and mental health struggles. Mental illness brought him from his comfortable childhood context to park benches, then a cardboard box, in New York's infamous Tompkins Square Park when he was fifteen. His mother was institutionalised and his father was abusive. He ran away from home after dropping out of school. On the streets, he found a renegade community. During the seven years when he was scaling the heights of global art-world fame, before his fatal heroin overdose, he collaborated with David Bowie, Blondie and Comme des Garcons but mostly Andy Warhol. He also dated Madonna and appeared on the cover of the New York Times magazine in a paint-splattered Armani suit.
Cynical and critical, but funny and magnetic, Basquiat was known as difficult. His addictions shaped his behaviour and character. The feverish energy evident in canvases like Untitled (Fallen Angel), Red Rabbit or Ernok demonstrated the frenetic power of stimulants or mania, as well as his signature talents and aesthetic. His rages became legend in the art scene and gossip press but his warmth and vulnerability remain precious to people who knew him.
In 1996, his former art-world compatriot, Julian Schnabel, directed a biographical film of his life starring David Bowie, Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman. This beautiful portrait dramatised the ferocious combination of vulnerability and cynicism, openness, manipulation and passion with disdain evident in his art. His art's feral passion is forever shocking.
CHAPTER 4JOSEPH BEUYS (1921–1986)
SPIRITUAL GURU
Joseph Beuys is an artist whose cult status borders on being cult-like. His followers regarded him as a shaman and guru. He is widely regarded as a seminal figure in 20th-century art for his spiritual, humanist, gnomic art. Beuys perceived and promoted art as Richard Wagner's notion of 'Gesamtkunstwerk' or an all-encompassing, total, universal artwork. His performances and sculptures aspired to represent art interwoven with reality.
The core of Beuys's work was wrangling with his history, alongside all his countrymen, in the Hitler Youth and his experiences when his military plane crashed in the Crimea. According to Beuys, his broken body was salvaged by nomadic Tatar tribesmen who wrapped him in animal fat and felt, saving him from death by hypothermia. He regained consciousness when insulated by the fat and his episodic memories of resurrection haunt his art. Fat and felt became his signature mediums alongside everyday objects, like VW vans, sausages and a live coyote.
I like America and America Likes Me, Beuys's 1974 performance piece, involved him living locked in a room with a coyote for three days, in eight-hour shifts. He arrived to the room in a New York gallery, in an ambulance and wrapped in felt. Beuys communicated with his lethal companion and they played tug. For Beuys, the coyote was a symbolic homage to Native America lore, which perceives coyotes as spirits of transformation. He described the work as a 'reckoning' with history that could lift America's trauma. The playful creature seemed to collaborate well with him.
In an early artwork, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1964), Beuys walked through an art gallery while cradling a dead hare in his arms. His face was covered in honey and gold leaf. He mumbled,conspiratorially, to the corpse. When viewers were allowed into the space, he sat on a stool, still cradling the dead creature, and stared blankly at them. He deemed the hare a symbol of incarnation and interpreted his unnerving mask as paganistic symbols of rebirth. By keeping the art's meaning secret between himself and the pre-reincarnated animal, Beuys was privileging mystery over intellectualisation.
The layers of natural symbolism, bringing death and danger intimately close to rebirth and hope, captivated Beuys's accolades. Alongside his art, Beuys was a tireless teacher and lecturer. He claimed that teaching was his 'greatest work of art', while his art was fundamentally a form of teaching.
In many ways, Beuys's greatest contribution to history is a warning. He was a German who didn't directly benefit from, but never actively resisted, the Holocaust and it haunted him throughout his life and work. His art can be reduced to a construct struggle to reconcile himself with history and a seasoned reminder that we, as people, have a duty to stand up to evil or suffer the moral weight.
CHAPTER 5CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI (1944)
HISTORY'S WITNESS
Christian Boltanski's art is haunted by the horrors of his early childhood, when France was liberated from Nazi occupation. Throughout his life, he has become a leading barer of memory, carrying the weight of history into the present and eloquently compelling his audiences to constantly view historic and contemporary atrocities with fresh eyes. His work often centres on the everlasting pain of the Holocaust while also becoming universal. As he describes, 'my work is about the fact of death, it is not about the Holocaust itself'.
Boltanski's art is founded upon his awareness of identity and history. His father was a Ukrainian Jew but his mother was Corsican, meaning he is not technically Jewish by strict biblical law but would have been a victim of Nazi murder during the Holocaust. The fortune of his survival and tensions within his personal ethnic identity are constant undercurrents in his work. Boltanski's art speaks with the depth and power of someone who does not take his existence for granted.
According to his lore, Boltanski left school at thirteen and started to create massive expressionistic paintings in the mid-1950s. His paintings received modest attention but films and notebooks examining his childhood, in harrowing imagery, garnered him significant critical attention. In the 1980s, he created vast installations illuminating photographs of Jewish schoolchildren in Vienna from the 1930s. This brutal memorial, infusing the victims' faces with light, is a defining image of Holocaust remembrance. He revisited these themes of overwhelming loss with a 10-ton pile of discarded clothes, symbolising their 6,000 lost or dead former owners.
In the late 1990s, Boltanski invited children at the Lycée Français de Chicago to bring him their favourite toys. He then created classic black-and-white portraits of each cherished possession for his celebrated Favorite Objects series. These noble images of Transformer toys and ratty stuffed bears turn today's mundane objects into historical artefacts, assuming a premature nostalgia, and demonstrate Boltanski's life-long fixation with lost childhood. The series also proves his famous sweetness and warmth. For an artist who has won countless awards, and is considered one of France's most significant artists with a cult following among scholars, other artists and Europeans wrangling with the responsibilities of being ethical in a contemporary global context, Boltanski is also known for his humility and kindness. His art promotes remembrance in the hope that humanity will become humane.
CHAPTER 6LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911–2010)
FEMINIST INNOVATOR
A photograph taken in 1982 of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe might be the best description of the 20th-century's most influential, innovative and everlasting female sculptor. In the black-and-white portrait, Bourgeois is seventy-one and proudly looks her age. She wears a black monkey fur coat and no apparent make-up. She smiles with evident glee and wisdom. Tucked under her arm is Fillete ('little girl'), a black latex-covered plaster sculpture of a massive penis and testicles. Bourgeois's expression is cheeky and victorious. This image, which quickly became iconic, is proof of how and why she retains cult status among feminists, artists, late bloomers, Lacanians and anyone looking for inspiration on turning trauma into triumph. Dark and dirty, her work gives voice to women's sexuality in all its complexity.
Mapplethorpe's portrait was taken the year Bourgeois had a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art and revealed in an interview that all her work was autobiographical. Before contextualising her art with the statement 'everything I do is inspired by my early childhood', her work was dismissed for its strangeness. The specific event Bourgeois endlessly replays was her tyrannical father's affair with her English tutor, when she was eleven, evoking her everlasting Electra complex.
Bourgeois openly addressed how her constant, violent, almost obsessive, phallic imagery was a fruitless attempt to explore her fixation with her father's sexuality and her parents' marriage. Spiders, like her 9-metre one titled Maman, from the 1990s, were her symbol for mothers, while the penises belonged to her father. Alongside these two principal symbols, female nudes and disembodied hands were regular features in her disarming oeuvre. Bourgeois's repetition of imagery evoked her love of maths, which she studied at the Sorbonne. 'I got peace,' she said, 'only in the study of rules nobody could change.' In her art, she created a similar sense of consistency and structure, despite the apparent horrors and sadism she depicted.
Although Bourgeois's work, full of severed members and room-sized spiders, was frightening, the impish smile she showed Mapplethorpe represented her personality. She was widely beloved by her fellow artists for her wit and open spirit. She held feminist salons in her home called 'Sunday, bloody Sunday' and formed activist groups fighting against censorship and for LGBTQ rights. Although she endlessly worked through her specific history in her art, her rebelliousness and relentless self-searching resonates with generations of admirers.
(Continues…)
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