Francesco Vezzoli, a poster for ‘Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!’ 2006.
Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk

Italian artist extraordinaire Francesco Vezzoli’s exhibition, which includes the North American premiere of his new 22-minute fake television show Marlene Redux : A True Hollywood Story!, opens at Toronto’s Power Plant on September 7th.

The exhibition also features a series of film posters that the artist has commissioned from long-forgotten, Italian film-poster artists; and a number of his embroideries.

Vezzoli reformulates this classic film as a sensational fake television programme about art, fame and the deconstruction of a public persona.

Francesco Vezzoli, a poster for ‘Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!’ 2006.
Image: thepowerplant.org

VoCA CAUGHT UP WITH VEZZOLI AS HIS WORK WAS BEING INSTALLED AT THE POWER PLANT:

VoCA: I notice Maximilian Schell’s documentary Marlene (1984) is showing in the other room.

Francesco Vezzoli: That film is just part of the media room, I don’t really consider it part of the exhibition.

VoCA: Have you ever shown this film with surrounding exhibition in this way before?

FV: No, this is the first time it will be shown in North America. Right afterwards it will open at PS1 in New York. Also Francois Pinault’s collection of video will open in Lille, outside of Paris. It will be part of that survey of video.

VoCA: That will include historical video pieces, too?

FV: Yes.

VoCA: I was doing some research but couldn’t find out why Anni Albers was included in Schell’s documentary? What was her role?

FV: That was Maximilian Schell’s obsession. He was obsessed by Marlene Dietrich and the Bauhaus.

VoCA: What is the relationship, for you, between Anni Albers and Marlene Dietrich?

FV: I wanted a filmic narrative that would engage both characters that were so different. The study of celebrity culture and art culture could merge and become something together. This merging reflected what I imagined the art world to be.

Art world=celebrity.

The poster for Maximilian Schell’s documentary. Image: wikimedia.org

VoCA: I notice your embroideries. What is the relationship between your embroidery and your film pieces?

FV: It’s the relationship of the oxymoron. An oxymoron takes two words that mean opposite things. Neither work is what I call “intimate painting”. Embroidery is intimate – so one part (of my practice) is intimate, I’m doing it myself and the other part – the films – is about delegation.

The artist is about extroversion and introversion, and the tension between the two. There’s a double path of the work, and I’m trying to describe the dichotomy. For example, the poster projects are completely conceptual, and the embroidery is the opposite.

Vezzoli looks around the main gallery space at the Power Plant.

FV: Do you think we have too many posters?”

VoCA: No, it looks like Times Square with all the big billboards..

FV: Ok, good. That’s a big compliment!

FV: Since art has changes, what role does production value have? Have the production value boundaries shifted?

VoCA: In making a fake television film based on a documentary about a legend wherein the legend herself was protecting her iconic status (by not appearing), this piece seems to try to expose various layers of falsehoods, that make up the notion of constructed identity.

In what ways do you, working as an artist today, relate to this need to hide your identity? It reminds me of Andrea Fraser who uses parody, or Rodney Graham, who is so visible in his films – as characters – while hiding from the audience. Hiding in plain sight.

Rodney Graham, A Reverie Interrupted by the Police, 2003. Image: exporvue.com

FV: I love Rodney Graham’s work…some of his work is…(clasps his chest in admiration). I have to have the courage to expose myself…the art system now has changed. I hate to be in my works, I really hate it. But it comes as a duty – it makes the work more honest.

If the field you belong to is based on mystery – the art world has opened up considerably – the artist has the duty to respond to the nature of the development of the artistic debate.

I react to the fact that artists demand so much visibility…though artists from previous generations might have felt less pressure.

VoCA: In the age of reality television, what is the difference between a fake television programme and a real one?

FV: That’s a very good question! Maybe there is no difference. It’s about exposing the pressures that an artist feels. The art world is ridiculous…there is no difference between art fairs and reality TV shows; they bring peoples fears, greed and ambitions to the fore. Art fairs are the reality shows of the art world.

VoCA: You spoke of Warhol’s later commissioned portraits as exemplifying a kind of “glamour democracy”. I love that idea – that the ‘stardom’ of the individual is what gives the work extra meaning, or dimension.

Andy Warhol, Tina Chow, 1985. Image: edu.warhol.org

FV: We have so much knowledge of (Warhol’s) famous portraits, but the obscure people..imagine how they live..in the German countryside or wherever…THAT is art.

The art system has become celebrity obsessed.

VoCA: What do you think Warhol would have made of the over-inflated art market right now – quite undemocratic – and the power of the commercial gallery? Has the power been taken away from the artist?

FV: Andy would go crazy! I don’t know enough about that to say too much, but I’m sure he would love it. Either he would shy away from it or…he would have the last laugh. He invented reality TV, celebrity portraits. He paid the price, though…at a certain stage…some critics accused him of…selling out. He’s having the last laugh, for sure.

VoCA: I noticed in the current issue of ELLE magazine they did an interview with Lindsay Lohan, who struck me as having the same sense of tragedy as a young Elizabeth Taylor.

FV: You start knowing someone’s idea of beauty so early…we knew Elizabeth Taylor at age 15, remember. And I think Ingrid Sischy (editor of Interview magazine) picked up on that when she presented Lindsay Lohan as Liz as Maggie the Cat in Interview.

Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat. Image: l-lohan.com

VoCA: We’ve become so obsessed with celebrity culture.

FV: It’s about introversion and extroversion. Some art…is about that.

Francesco Vezzoli, Trailer for a remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, 2005. Film Production Still.
Photo by Matthias Vriens. Image: sekcja.org

VoCA: I saw your piece Caligula at the Venice Biennale in 2005 – I must admit I didn’t know what to make of it – and I cherish that first experience of that work. I didn’t know much about Caligula, then. I saw it again at the Whitney Museum in New York but – since I knew what to expect – it was a quite different experience. How important is it to you that viewers ‘get’ your work?

FV: My work is entirely about the audience – you say ‘viewer’, I prefer to say ‘audience’. Some artists might find this appalling, but the story you tell me is fascinating to me. I’m surprised by people’s reaction to the work.

Artists must reinvent themselves if the art system…it becomes like the pop music system. The art world goes at such a pace that the attention will disappear unless artists put themselves under pressure…who reviews a painting? No one. You review a painter.

VoCA: So you become the director of your career?

FV: I become the producer. I see myself as a producer. It’s a provocation that I’m trying out.

VoCA: Like Damien Hirst – he’s very much the producer of his career.

FV: I have a great deal of respect for Damien Hirst. I respect people who behave in a way that is considered bad, but then everyone goes and copies them. Hirst has been attacked by people who then behaved worse than he did.

If I were to encounter something more philosophically engaging…I’d be happy to shift.

VoCA: What do you think about the trend towards blending reality and fiction in art? I’m thinking of the environments of Christof Buchel and Gregor Schneider, or even the pranks of Elmgreen and Dragset.

FV: Which works by Elmgreen and Dragset?

VoCA: Well for instance the very real looking but fake baby that they put in a car on the street and left for days…

FV: The audience has shifted from being art-trained to being a blended one. It’s about…the audience will compare you to other things…like performance, or film, or theatre, or whatever and…will make sure they see something that they haven’t seen before.

Elgreen & Dragset, installation at the Bohen Foundation, The Wrong Gallery, NYC, 2005. Image: greg.org

I am preparing a piece for the Guggenheim called Right You Are If You Think You Are. It’s a Broadway premiere of a play that will never run. A one-time performance piece for the opening of Performa, the Performance Art festival in NYC.

(More on Vezzoli’s commission for Performa 2007 HERE)

The audience would be interested in the mirroring of the play to reality – but if I can put together a cast that is the hyper-real (equivalent) of a real Broadway cast, it would put a hole in (the audience’s) hearts. If I have the balls to do that, I will have succeeded.

On that depressing note, (laughs) I must leave you.

VoCA: Thanks so much Francesco.