For the past two decades photographer Jason Schmidt has pursued an ambitious project, photographing over 500 of the leading international contemporary artists at work in their studios and during the installation of their work. An exhibition at APALAZZOGALLERY, in Brescia, Italy, presents 23 of Jason Schmidt’s artist portraits dating from 2001 to 2017.
The reader could look at this catalogue of contemporary artists as a stockpile of statements. These are the artists that have come to define the art world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here are the important faces and names that infiltrate the whitewalled Chelsea galleries, that are given the expansive museum shows, or that work in the slim, radical peripheries destined to become the next Leipzig. Here are the works that serious collectors from Tokyo to Fort Worth fight to amass in their contemporary art portfolios. Such assertions may or may not be accurate or, more to the point, even relevant. In the case of the artists that Jason Schmidt has photographed over the course of the past six years, it is perhaps more useful to approach this book as a series of open-ended questions. Who are these artists and what connections do they have to one another? Caught somewhere in the process of completing a sculpture or a painting or a sound installation, where do they see their projects taking them and, by extension, us? At what point does abandonment become impossible and the pieces start to gel as a work of art?
Schmidt largely began shooting artists in their studios and at their installation sites in 2000 using a Linhof 4×5 camera. At that time, he could not have predicted how many years of his life this endeavor would ultimately consume, taking him from the Giardini at three separate Venice Biennales to the high desert of California to the nighttime cityscape of Times Square. Two portraits predating 2000 already hint at the range of artists that the photographer would eventually document. One, shot in 1998, depicts Komar and Melamid, a pair of of artists-cumanimal behaviorists, teaching an elephant in Thailand to paint with his trunk; in the other, taken in 1997, the celebrated multimedia artist Rirkrit Tiravanija sups at his favorite noodle joint in downtown New York City. This disconnect would be almost comical, except for the fact that it so perfectly illustrates the extremes of artistic terrain and the varying modes of production for artists working today. No longer is there a unified aesthetic community, or a hierarchy of methodology in the creative practice, or even salient regional divides on matters of interpretation, style, and taste.
The title of the book, Artists, pointedly lacks a definite article. This is not The Artists. This monograph does not presume to posit the global record of who’s who here and now. Rather it is a collection of runins, witnessings, chance interventions, open doors, of darkened fifth-floor studios and uncompleted gallery installations, the impresario squatting on the floor, tired and dazed and a little unsure of how the work will be received. Schmidt encountered all of these artists in pretty much the same way viewers of contemporary art discover what’s out there by bumping into it, tracking it down, hearing about one artist from another, just going to see the stuff. Many of the portraits in this book were first published in the pages of V Magazine under the rubric Work in Progress. This could refer just as easily to the photographer as to his subjects. Schmidt’s practice has no end (in the case of Aleksandra Mir’s Sharpie drawing, the end is the beginning). And it takes little mind work to see that his movement through the land of contemporary art is akin to the method by which many of these artists themselves work. They have some idea in their heads, they are found with their medium in their hands, and they are striving to apply it in a technique that satisfies their aesthetic and conceptual intent. In Artists, product is given the slip, and context is everything. The texts that the artists have written to accompany their images reveal not only “what was I thinking?” but also “how am I going to work my way out of this?” (Questions, you see, are not only for the viewers to ask.)
The studio is the true laboratory of the present, where work gets done and the questions are raised and pretense is dashed and decisions are made in the afternoon light or in the rush hour of a crowded London train station. Essentially, Schmidt supplies a keyhole to the creative process that is denied even to the critic. The lingua franca here is the artists’ own clutter, their own poses, and their own words, unmediated by the press release. Some of these artists have already left an indelible mark on history (one has merely to view Ed Ruscha walking down the Sunset Strip to feel the power of icon). Others are almost unrecognizable by face or name, and they may be forgotten, or celebrated, in the years to come. Schmidt’s gift is not that of a historian but of a documentarian running his camera against the current trend. More than a collection of timeless studio portraits, Schmidt captures moments teetering on the point of crystallization. If you are looking for statements, refer to Janson’s History of Art. Artists is the present. The paint has not yet set.
Alix Browne and Christopher Bollen
Alix Browne is a Features Director at W Magazine. Christopher Bollen is a novelist and magazine editor. Both live and work in New York, USA.
Jason Schmidt, Artists
February 11 to March 18, 2017
Piazza Tebaldo Brusato 35
Brescia 25121
Italy
