The Collector of Sad and Beautiful Stories
An
Encounter With T.J. Wilcox in New York
Marie
Antoinette, Marlene Dietrich, Jackie Kennedy-the protagonists in the
collages and films of T.J. Wilcox are famous figures from history and pop
culture. Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the heroine of his works in the
Deutsche Bank Collection, also became an icon-as the unhappy Empress
Sissi. Wilcox' hyperaesthetic homages to the divas of yesteryear oscillate
between historical truth and sheer illusion. Daniel Schreiber met
with the artist in New York.
T.J.
Wilcox, ohne Titel (Sissi back), 2007, © Courtesy Galerie Daniel
Buchholz,Cologne/Berlin,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Thomas
John Wilcox, called T.J. for short, is a dandy. Not in the affected
sense of an Oscar Wilde,
but rather like his post-modern counterpart. One imagines, à la Fitzgerald,
a contemporary Great
Gatsby of the art world. When we met on a sunny Manhattan morning at
the end of August in the Metro
Pictures gallery in Chelsea, he spoke unpretentiously and pleasurably
of his fascinating career and his summer home on the Atlantic coast in
Orient Point, a sleepy town on the northeast tip of Long Island. He's
tanned and sports a smart three-day beard and open shirt in brilliant Ralph
Lauren white.
T.J.
Wilcox,
Photograph of the film
"The Escape (of Marie Antoinette)", 1996
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
The
42-year-old film and collage artist was still in short pants in Seattle
when the gang around Jasper
Johns began exploring the sparsely populated Montauk on the opposite,
southeast tip of the peninsula for the New York bohemia. Today, Wilcox'
adopted summer home is well on its way towards becoming every bit as
legendary. "By now, Orient Point is sort of an artists' colony," he says.
"My friend Elizabeth
Peyton lives there. Jorge
Pardo, Laura Owens,
Kelley
Walker. You see Cindy
Sherman riding her bicycle. All these people that we know and love are
there often in the summer".
T.
J. Wilcox, Escape of Marie Antoinette, 2006
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
Anyone
who has seen a work by Wilcox, for instance The Escape (of Marie
Antoinette) from 1996 or The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich
(1999), has a hard time shaking off a lingering sense of longing, a quiet
sadness. His handmade films and collages are charged with a nostalgic
charm that reveals the structures underlying our fantasy. With their deep
sense of the idiosyncratic, they unite an aesthetic of the handmade with
Hollywood glamour. In his 12-minute film about the French queen who was so
brutally executed by the Jacobins,
Wilcox works over drawings of en.wikipedia.org=""
wiki="" marie_antoinette="">Marie Antoinette's
carriage from the 18th century, historical footage of a procession around
Notre Dame from the turn of the century, short scenes from American
melodramas of the 1950s, and not least images of the catwalk performance
of a Galliano model from the
early 1990s. United through the subtitles in which Wilcox reinvents the
history of the early-day French icon of luxury, these disparate images
suddenly convey meaning: Marie Antoinette lives on, the film seems to
say-in every injured diva, in every one of our weaknesses for haute
couture. This is why the artist chooses to save her life. The queen, whose
flight failed because her horse-drawn carriage was so pompous that she was
immediately spotted by the revolutionary reconnaissance patrols, arrives
in safety in Wilcox' work.
|
T.J. Wilcox
The
Funeral of Marlene Dietrich , 1999
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
T.J.
Wilcox
Photograph of the film
"The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich", 1999
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
Wilcox
performed a similar service for Marlene
Dietrich, the German glamour icon. Once again throwing together film
images of state burials, photographs of Marlene, and city images of Paris,
the artist gives the diva the glorious burial she'd always dreamed of. To
the sound of tolling church bells, a procession of reporters,
photographers, and gay fans follow her casket through the French capital,
where there isn't a single hotel room to be found. The icon is then buried
humbly in "a simple black dress by Balenciaga."
"Characters like Marie Antoinette or Dietrich never die," explains Wilcox
with a grin, "they become part of a collective mythology. They have
consciously transcended the quotidien. That is something we all need to
live our lives. (…) They represent great parallels to art-making. These
women were almost performance artists.“ Objects of Wilcox' earlier
cinematic obsessions with tragic diva figures were Sissi,
the Austrian Empress; Comtesse
de Castiglione, known as the most beautiful Italian woman of the 19th
century; Jacqueline
Kennedy-Onassis; and Mick Jagger's
ex-wife, the model Jerry
Hall.
T.J.
Wilcox, Rapture (Jerry, Cherries in the Snow), 2007
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
Wilcox
developed his passion for European history, grand divas, and realistic
novels early on in his hometown on the rainy west coast of America.
"People speak about Seattle often as the edge of the earth. It was one of
the last places settled by the Europeans. While reading history books and
novels I started thinking about different places. I was treating the
reading of every book as a treasure hunt, to fill the gaps in my world,"
as the artist recalls. This is why it comes as no surprise that he was an
exchange student to France at the age of 14 and then again at 17, to learn
French in Dijon, to satisfy his Europhilia, and to party undisturbed. In
1988 Wilcox moved to New York to study at the School
of Visual Arts. In the East Village, which was run down at the time
and brimming with junkies and homeless people, he shared an apartment with
Elizabeth Peyton, who later became a portrait painter. After finishing
school, he took an assistant job with the French collector family Wildenstein
and bought himself a cheap apartment on Union Square. After three years in
exile at the Arts Center in
Pasadena, California, where he also studied with video artist Mike
Kelly, he moved back to New York, where he produced The Escape (of
Marie Antoinette) and exhibited in the Gavin
Brown Gallery. "Then, everything happened so quickly," he says. The
film was accepted to the New York Whitney
Biennial in 1998 and quickly made him a brand name in the art world.
T.
J. Wilcox Comtesse de Castiglione, 2005
Courtesy
of the Artist and Metro Pictures
[1]
[2]
|
