Just What Is James Franco Doing in the Art World, Anyway? By Artspace Editors

Just What Is James Franco Doing

 in the Art World, Anyway?

By Artspace Editors

April 25, 2014

WHO IS JAMES FRANCO?

James Franco's life as an actor began with his role as a teenage heartthrob on the cult-favorite television show "Freaks & Geeks" in the early 2000s. He's the actor who played the Green Goblin in Spiderman 2, the Wizard in Oz the Great and Powerful, the guy who cuts off his own arm in 128 Hours, one of the stoner dudes in Pineapple Express, and another stoner dude (who collects art) in This Is the End, among other roles. In recent years, Franco has undergone an improbable and well-documented transformation into a scholar, author, poet, and artist—Franco has taught film production classes at NYU, pursued a PhD at Yale, and, most recently, had multiple gallery shows of his artwork internationally, from Gagosian in Los Angeles to Peres Projects in Berlin to, now, Pace Gallery in New York. Prior to his solo art career, he initially gained art-world attention as part of the performance duo Kalup and Franco, with the artist Kalup Linzy.

WHAT CAN BE SAID OF JAMES FRANCO THE ARTIST?

While he does show a certain commitment to experimenting with different ways of making art—he's evidently learning in public—there's certainly no question that the attention his work has received has largely been of the bemused variety, especially from the art world. His recently-opened show of re-creations of Cindy Sherman's seminally important "Untitled Film Stills" series of the 1970s seems to have resulted in more confusion than anything else, with the Huffington Post going so far as to cruelly ask "Should Franco Give Up Art?" (The art critic Roberta Smith, in a blunt review, provided her own answer to that question.) Meanwhile, Franco certainly has a lot of learning to do in terms of art's "best practices" (yes, they do exist): his 2011 solo show at Terence Koh's Asia Song Society Gallery closed after a few days because of issues regarding "unresolved licensing agreements" (according to the gallery) between Franco and artists whose work he "reinterpreted" in the show.

That said, Franco's incessant experimentation with the slippage between entertainment and art, his toying with sexuality (his Peres Projects show was called "Gay Town") in a way that recalls the biography of his doppelganger James Dean, his reality-show-appropriate confusion of talent and fame, and the sheer implausibility of his project makes it dangerous to dismiss. It's just too weird, and bathetically of-the-moment, to be ignored.

WHOSE ART IS MORE ORIGINAL: JAMES FRANCO OR BOB DYLAN?

Well, both of them have made paintings based on someone else's already-existing artwork. Dylan's 2011 show at the Gagosian gallery in Chelsea consisted of a series of canvases purportedly made during his travels in Asia, which, as was quickly noticed, were actually painted from works by well-known photographers Bruce Gilden, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel, and Léon Busy. Meanwhile, Franco recently posted images on Instagram of his new nude paintings of his fellow-actor buddy Seth Rogen—although the images were actually copied from a satirical book of drawings by the artist Christopher Schulz. There's an irony to be found in the fact that both figures have embraced the same kind of utopian disavowal of personal intellectual property and originality that the corporations responsible their fortunes—Columbia Records and Sony Pictures—have been in a slow death spiral trying to combat.

BUT HOW DOES HE COMPARE TO JEMIMA KIRKE?

We're pretty sure we never would have seen "Girls"-star Kirke's paintings in the first place if it weren't for her priveleged parentage and well-established television career. (Alice Neel, whose work Kirke's has been compared to multiple times in the press in recent weeks, took art classes by night while working full-time as a clerk before enrolling at an all-girls' art school so as not to be distracted from her work by the presence of members of the opposite sex; Kirke is basically the opposite of that.) That said, Kirke can, technically, paint, which helps her case somewhat. And, for what it's worth, she had a cameo appearance in Jay Z's "Picasso Baby" video.

But Franco might win over Kirke for his exploratory use of social media via Twitter and Instagram, where he frequently posts self-consciously cryptic selfies with ironic props and pictures of things splattered with paint. While the end results are often questionable, one has to applaud Franco for trying to push the boundaries of his own creative world. Which might explain his obsession with higher eductaion; artists whose work deals with such abstruse topics as representations of the self via new media and reflexive interrogations of art history's grand narratives tend, usually, to be academically trained artists. There's a reason for that.

SO WHY DO WE KEEP HEARING ABOUT JAMES FRANCO'S ART?

Short answer: he has famous art-world friends. Franco has frequently Instagrammed photos of himself bro-ing out with Klaus Biesenbach of MoMA PS1; Terence Koh, who hosted his solo show in New York last year, is a passed master in the juju of working the art press; and Franco and Marina Abramovic are pals—the pair once did a segment together for the Wall Street Journal, and Abramovic is, reportedly, in the early stages of making a movie based on Franco's life. In this regard, at least, Franco is no different from any other successful artist: schmoozing with the right people is a part of every successful artist's career, like it or not. But you can't ignore the fact that the schmoozing, on this level, comes a little bit easier when you're already a Hollywood star.

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/news_events/james_franco?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Master&utm_campaign=April_27_2014_Editorial_Weekly

The Power of Garcia Marquez by Jon Lee Anderson

The Power of Garcia Marquez

by Jon Lee Anderson

 

Profiles

 

The New Yorker, September 27, 1999

PROFILE of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 72, also telling about Colombia... Describes his armored car and his retinue of bodyguards... They are reassuring in a country where nearly two hundred people are kidnapped every month, and more than two thousand are murdered... Along with coffee, oil, cocaine, and heroin, Colombia is rich in emeralds, and supplies some sixty per cent of the world’s market. The middle class and the wealthy have long since moved out of the center of Bogota and settled in the northern suburbs. Even there they live in fear of being robbed or kidnapped by criminal gangs, and those few who can afford it, like Garcia Marquez, have armored cars, bodyguards, or both. Garcia Marquez and his wife, Mercedes, live in a spacious duplex, two floors of a four-story apartment building with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over a landscaped park. The apartment is all white—carpets, sofas, and walls—and filled with art, including a huge early Botero and a series of exquisite erotic Indian miniatures... He has soft brown eyes set in a comfortable, lined face. His curly hair is gray, and he has a white mustache and bushy black eyebrows. His hands are beautiful, with long slender fingers. He is an attentive and charming conversationalist, and what Colombians call a mamagallista—a joker... Tells about his relationship with Fidel Castro... He and his wife Mercedes have two children: Rodrigo, who lives in Los Angeles and has just written and directed his first feature film; and Gonzalo, who is a graphic designer in Mexico City. Garcia Marquez has several homes, and although he was Colombia’s most famous citizen long before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1982, Bogota has never been his main residence. He and Mercedes have for many years spent most of their time in Mexico City and part of the year at their other homes, in Cuernavaca, Barcelona, Paris, Havana, Cartagena, and Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast. Each of them is furnished in the same way—with white carpets, large glass coffee tables, modern art, a carefully chosen sound system, and an identical Macintosh computer. Garcia Marquez is obsessive about such things. They make it possible for him to work wherever he is. He says that he usually wakes at five o’clock, reads a book until seven, dresses, reads the newspapers, answers his E-mail, and by ten—“no matter what”—is at his desk, writing. He stays there until two-thirty, then joins his family for lunch. After lunch, the writing day is over, and the afternoon and evening are devoted to “appointments, family, and friends.”... 

Politics and journalism have taken up much of Garcia Marquez’s time since early this year, when he became the majority owner of the weekly news magazine Cambio. He bought Cambio with his Nobel Prize money...Cambio kept them in Bogota when they would normally have been in Mexico or Europe. Mentions the chilling Human Rights Watch appraisal of life in Colombia, which ...has been engulfed in a complicated civil war for more than half a century... Tells how the drug cartels and right-wing militias and left-wing guerrillas have blurred... “Narcoguerrillas” have become a big factor in U.S. drug policy... 

Tells how Garcia Marquez introduced the new Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, to Fidel Castro, who could facilitate talks with the guerrillas... Briefly mentions talks ceding a huge neutral zone to the guerrillas... Mentions the Clinton administration’s new, bellicose stance... Garcia Marquez’s views have enormous weight in Latin America. His prestige is such that he has the trust of both governments and revolutionaries... He recently established the Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism in Cartagena. The town is a so-called safe haven for tourists... Cartagena has also become his large family’s de-facto headquarters. He is the eldest of eleven children, all but one of whom are still alive. His ninety-four-year-old mother and most of his siblings still live along the coast. Tells about his childhood years in the town of Aracataca, which writer visits... Mentions its role in the writing of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”... Describes the murderous activities of the United Fruit Company, which the writer’s driver considered, in the form of the slum of Cienaga, the root of all Colombia’s evil... Discusses his relationship with Castro, which he quietly exploits to secure the freedom of political prisoners... Mentions his friendship with General Omar Torrijos of Panama... He has lymphatic cancer... Tells about fears of increased military aid to the Army by the U.S... Garcia Marquez is described as the one person who could tell both sides to stop fighting...

Jon Lee Anderson, Profiles, “The Power of Garcia Marquez,” The New Yorker, September 27, 1999, p. 56

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/09/27/1999_09_27_056_TNY_LIBRY_000019163

Gabriel García Márquez: An Appreciation, Posted by Edwidge Danticat

Gabriel García Márquez: An Appreciation

Posted by Edwidge Danticat

THE NEW YROKER, April 18, 2014

At the beginning of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Macondo’s patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, wants to move the idyllic yet isolated community he founded to another, more accessible location. And, since no one else wants to go with him, he decides that he and his wife, Úrsula, and their son should leave by themselves.

“We will not leave,” his wife says, reminding him that Macondo was their son’s birthplace.

“We have still not had a death,” he tells her. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” To which his wife replies, “If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die.”

This was the first thing that came to mind when I heard that Gabriel García Márquez had died. I have always loved that scene. For anyone who’s been forced, or has chosen, to start a new life in a new place, these words seem to provide at least two possible markers by which one can begin to belong. By Úrsula’s definition, it is through life. By her husband’s, it is through death.

I remember thinking when my oldest daughter was born that, after nearly a quarter century of living in the United States, I finally had an unbreakable bond with the place. When my father, who had once imagined that he’d be buried in Haiti, was actually buried in Queens, New York, those ties became even stronger. After all, if pushed out, we can always take the living with us. However, unless we happen to be in a Gabriel García Márquez story, the dead can prove less mobile. Nothing seemed truer to me after my father’s death than the fact that he, and all of my other hardworking U.S.-buried immigrant relatives, had sacrificed everything so that the rest of my family could stay here.

In October, 2003, I was invited to participate in a PEN America tribute to García Márquez. The title of the evening was “Gabriel García Márquez: Everyday Magic.” The great man himself wasn’t there. He was already ill, I think. Among the other speakers that evening were the writers Francisco Goldman, Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster, William Kennedy, as well as Bill Clinton, on video.

That night, I was reminded of not just the breadth of García Márquez’s work but also of his personality. The fact that he counted both Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro among his friends astounded and outraged the woman sitting next to me.

The writers, however, focussed on his work.

Francisco Goldman mentioned a study which had found that, aside from the Bible, García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” was the book you were most likely to find in the possession of Latin-American sex workers. Salman Rushdie pointed out the many similarities between García Márquez’s world and the one that he’d grown up in.

“It was a world in which there were colossal differences between the very poor and the very rich, and not much in between; also a world bedevilled by dictators and corruption,” he said.

Rushdie, like many of the other speakers that night, rejected the idea that García Márquez’s fiction was “fantastic.”

And I agreed.

I am often surprised when people talk about the total implausibility of the events in García Márquez’s fiction. Having been born and lived in a deeply spiritual and extraordinarily resourceful part of the Caribbean, a lot of what might seem magical to others often seems quite plausible to me.

Of course a woman can live inside her cat, as the character Eva does, in García Márquez’s 1948 short story “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” Doesn’t everyone have an aunt who’s done that? And remember that neighbor who died but kept growing in his coffin, as in the 1947 story “The Third Resignation”? What seems implausible to me is a lifetime of absolute normalcy, a world in which there are no invasions, occupations, or wars, no poverty or dictators, no earthquakes or cholera.

I had always felt that García Márquez’s short stories often took a back seat to his longer works, and that his deadpan dark humor was not discussed often enough, so that night I read an excerpt from one of my favorite of his short stories, “One of These Days.”

In the story, the town mayor, a military torturer, shows up in absolute agony at the office of Aurelio Escovar, “a dentist without a degree.” The mayor is in so much pain from an abscess in his mouth that he’s unable to shave half his beard. Yet he still announces that he will shoot the dentist if he refuses to help him. The dentist, seeing an opportunity to avenge the recent death of twenty of his neighbors, tricks the mayor into letting him pull the diseased tooth out without anesthesia. But the dentist does not quite get the revenge he seeks. When he asks the mayor whether he should send the bill to him personally or to the town, the mayor exclaims, “It’s the same damn thing.”

This story, like so many others, shows how García Márquez’s famously unbridled imagination was also used to depict somewhat common yet unbearable realities.

Still, I can’t help but to keep returning to José Arcadio Buendía and his desire to leave. José Arcadio had hoped to guide his people toward the “invisible north,” only to discover that Macondo was completely surrounded by water. But he would not despair forever. There was still more work to do. And he had not yet experienced death, and the light rain of tiny yellow flowers that would fall to mark his passing. He had not yet seen that silent storm, and the cushion of petals that had to be cleared with rakes and shovels as his funeral procession went by. And neither had Gabo. Until now.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent book is “Claire of the Sea Light,” a novel.

Photograph by Alan Riding/The New York Times/Redux.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/gabriel-garcia-marquez-an-appreciation.html?intcid=obinsite

Joking with Gabo, Posted by Jon Lee Anderson

Joking with Gabo

Posted by Jon Lee Anderson

THE NEW YORKER, April 24, 2014

Gabriel García Márquez, who died, at the age of eighty-seven, at his home in Mexico City last week, has left an immense literary legacy behind. Few authors have been as widely translated and as widely read by so many people of different cultures. “He showed us a new way of seeing,” said Ian McEwan, last Friday.

Less well known to García Márquez’s legion of readers was his quick-witted sense of humor, a quality known in his native Colombia as mamar gallo (literally, “to suck rooster,” but meaning, in essence, to joke around). Gabo, as he was known to his friends and his fans in Latin America, was a master mamador de gallo. I was reminded of this on the day he died, when Ariel Palacios, a Brazilian friend who lives in Buenos Aires, sent out a string of Gaboisms, including my favorite: “The day when shit becomes worth something, the poor will be born without asses.” There are many more where that came from. Some are simple funning nonsensicalisms, like, “I’ve conspired for peace in Colombia since before I was born”; others are folksy, Twainish one-liners, like, “Life is the best invention of them all.”

Exaggeration was a key element in Gabo’s imaginative approach to life, both in his writing and in person. He claimed, for instance, that his novella “Of Love and Other Demons” was inspired by a real-life event that he had covered as a reporter in Cartagena, Colombia, in 1949: the discovery, by workers, of the skull of a dead girl with a seventy-foot-long trail of blond hair in the crypt of the Santa Clara convent. He liked to tell the story of how Fidel Castro had once eaten twenty-six scoops of ice cream in his presence. The first time I made contact with him, by telephone, hoping to interview him for a Profile for The New Yorker, in 1999, he answered the telephone himself. When I said my name, the Nobel laureate exclaimed, warmly, “Anderson! Damn it, I’ve been looking all over for you for ages; where have you been hiding yourself?”

That was classic Gabo. We hadn’t yet met, and he’d already turned our encounter into a great story. And, once he had uttered or written one of these gothic pronouncements, however true it was, it was how he remembered it ever after.

When we met a few days later, in the Barcelona office of his literary agent, Carmen Balcells, he eyed me up and down and asked, “How old are you?” I told him, “Forty-two.” Hearing this, he spun around and called out to Balcells’s bevy of middle-aged female assistants, “Do you hear that? Forty-two! Can you imagine being that age again?” Turning back to me, he said, “How wonderful. What I would give to be forty-two again.” That, too, was classic Gabo: warm, embracingly matey, always seeking to shed his celebrity status in order to be at one with you.

In Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos decreed three official days of mourning for Gabo, and declared him “the best Colombian to have ever lived.” I doubt there are many Colombians who would disgree. Gabo was truly beloved. For a country best known for its violence and drug trafficking, his contribution was cherished, and he was adored by people of every social class, race, and age group. Ever since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1982, many Colombians have referred to Gabo simply as El Nobel. Everyone knows who they are talking about.

Gabo loved to conspirar, as they say in Spanish, which means “to conspire,” but which carries a less malevolent connotation than its English counterpart. One of the main reasons for his affection and long friendship with Fidel Castro had to do with the fact that Fidel, of course, is one of the greatest conspiradores of the modern age. With great relish, Gabo told of his time as a personal intermediary between the Cuban leader and Bill Clinton, in talks aimed at improving relations between the two countries. He was proud to have been so entrusted, but he loved, more than anything else, the whispered confidences, the behind-the-scenes statecraft—the conspiracy of it all.

Once Gabo had decided to share his trust, he did so without filters. We began a series of long conversations for the Profile I eventually wrote, and I questioned him, over and over again, about his lifelong fascination with power and powerful men such as Fidel, both in his life and in his literature. He would draw himself closer in his chair, touch my knee, and say, “Look, O.K., but you have to leave me something for my memoirs, O.K.?” And in this way, of course, he drew me in, as he did with so many others who became his adorers, by making me his co-conspirator.

For all of his achievements, Gabo, who described himself as “the telegraphist’s son from Aracataca,” a poor, backwoods town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, could never quite believe his good fortune. He was always happy to share it with others. In 2007, I was invited to his eightieth birthday party, in Cartagena. One day, in a private room at a restaurant he liked, Gabo was noticed by a large group of young women who had come in for lunch. They became visibly giddy with excitement, pointing and smiling and waving, and soon, the maître d’ was sent in to ask on their behalf if Gabo would oblige them with a photograph. Gabo immediately agreed and went out, and for about ten minutes he was lost to us as he posed for picture after picture. The women hugged and kissed him, and Gabo preened and beamed like a lad who had won Most Handsome at the county fair.

We had several such meals, together with his wife, Mercedes, who survives him, and several local friends. One evening, we ended up back at his house for a drink. Built next to the old Santa Clara convent, it overlooks the city’s stone ramparts and out to the Caribbean Sea. Soon after we arrived, Gabo beckoned me away from the rest of the group, wearing a conspirator’s smile, as if he wanted to impart a secret. He motioned me out onto the terrace. We looked out together; it was a misty night, and a little sand swirled off the beach across the avenue. A lone youth walked. The night air was warm. Gabo nodded toward the youth and said, “I used to walk along there when I was young, and dream about one day owning a house here.” He clapped his hand on my shoulder and, with a delighted expression, said, “And now I do. Can you believe it? I still can’t!”

Ever a peacock, Gabo liked to dress up, and to Mercedes’s affectionate despair he insisted on choosing his own outfits. She called him Trapoloco (Crazy Rags). His evening attire in Cartagena on that visit was a yellow-and-green-checked blazer that, at a guess, had last seen its fashionable days in the mid-seventies; it was the kind of thing one might have seen on a dance floor when “Kung Fu Fighting” was topping the charts. But Gabo loved that jacket, and he felt good in it.

The last time I saw Gabo was last year, at his home in Mexico City. He and Mercedes and I and a friend of hers had lunch together. Typically, Gabo had dressed up for the occasion, in a sober but elegantly tailored three-piece grey suit and his usual ankle boots with Cuban heels. (Gabo was not a tall man.)

We ate and chatted and took a picture together, and then, when it was time for me to go, Gabo insisted on walking me outside to where my taxi was waiting. The driver smiled in awe when he realized whom he was looking at. A gardener working across the street stood up and waved. Gabo smiled and waved at everyone. I embraced him to say goodbye. “Cuando vuelves? When are you coming back?” he asked. I demurred. “May it be soon,” he smiled. It was what Gabo always said.

Photograph courtesy Camera Press/Sally Soames/Redux.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/joking-with-gabo.html