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March 28, 2013
Sticky Fingers Make the Show
THE
art heist began, as art heists should, with a planning session in a
nearby bar. Though he had already committed more than 60 such thefts,
the perpetrator, Adam Parker Smith,
a 34-year-old Brooklyn artist, was nervous. "Everyone whose work I like
and who I respect, I've been lying to and stealing from," he said,
sipping a beer.
Nonetheless he proceeded to the Bushwick studio of an artist he knew, Aaron Williams.
It was a scheduled but informal visit, with subterfuge its agenda: Mr.
Parker Smith intended to swipe Mr. Williams's work for his own artistic
ends.
Well
practiced, he strategically left his leather satchel, holding
various-size folders he could stash things in, by the studio door, along
with the beer he had brought to relax his mark. Two minutes in, he
offered Mr. Williams one, popping the top with his belt buckle. As Mr.
Williams showed off his canvases, the two delved into the problems of
contemporary artists. "How do you deal with people asking about your
relationship to pop iconography?" Mr. Parker Smith asked, studying a
large poster of James Dean overlaid with purple stripes.
Soon
Mr. Williams was chattily uncovering smaller mock-ups - perfectly sized
for filching. Mr. Parker Smith shuffled through, making piles,
three-card-Monte-style, the better to distract from whatever went
missing. Several beers later Mr. Williams excused himself to go to the
bathroom, and Mr. Parker Smith simply slipped an original artwork into
his bag.
"I
hope he didn't need that," Mr. Parker Smith said later, safely in a
getaway car with his accomplice for the night, a reporter.
Mr. Williams's piece, a landscape collage, appears in "Thanks," a show opening under Mr. Parker Smith's name Friday at the Lu Magnus gallery
on the Lower East Side. The exhibition is made up entirely of works Mr.
Parker Smith meticulously stole from 77 artists: paintings, sculptures,
sketchbooks, video, architectural objects, artmaking devices and more.
Equal parts group show and conceptual installation, prank and
boundary-pusher, it raises messy art world questions about aesthetic
ownership and influence, the division between curator and artist, and
the value of nontraditional and repurposed work. And it reveals
something about how artists generate ideas.
For
Mr. Parker Smith, who trained as a painter and sculptor and holds an
M.F.A. from Temple University, friends and colleagues - the gamut of the
New York art scene - are essential to his conceptual pieces. "The
project has this gimmick, that I'm stealing from everybody, but it's
really about community," he said. "Appropriation and theft are part of
that." Scoff if you like. "I feel like so many of my ideas start out as
jokes," he said, "for better or worse."
Lauren
Scott Miller, a founder and director of Lu Magnus, was one of the
handful of people apprised of Mr. Parker Smith's artistic thievery in
the five months it took. She said she "agreed immediately" to host the
show after he described it. As gallerists "one of our missions is to
bring the creative community together," she said, "and we're very
interested in process - in terms of this show, each artist's individual
practice and how they influence each other." She thought of Mr. Parker
Smith as both curator and conceptual artist: "He's very thoughtful about
each acquisition."
The
artists were notified of the thefts several weeks ago in an e-mail.
"Your work is being held in a secure and climate controlled
environment," Mr. Parker Smith wrote. (It was stored in his apartment in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to which he'd added extra renter's insurance.)
"I chose to acquire your work in this unconventional manner to bring
attention to the community that we all work within and the diverse
methodology in which we share, appropriate and occasionally steal ideas
and materials. I value your practice and work and think of you as an
important member of my creative world." He followed up with a phone
call, expressing contrition.
That
helped, Mr. Williams said. He hadn't noticed that his piece, "Two
Mountains III," was missing. "I felt, like, slightly stupid," he said.
"It was a convincing crime." But he was more tickled than hurt.
Likewise Alfred Steiner,
an artist and lawyer who specializes in intellectual property, whose
glass and silver "Ring Pop" is one of the most expensive pieces in the
show. "Any difficulty I had that he had breached a trust was overwhelmed
by the humor I found in the overall project," he said, adding that he
considered it merely borrowing. All 77 artists gave permission to have
their work displayed.
In
90 studio visits Mr. Parker Smith did not always leave with purloined
treasure, but he was caught just once, he said, by an artist's
5-year-old daughter, who ratted him out to daddy. That artist's work is
not in the show. A collector who is a lawyer also offered legal counsel,
advising him not to amass more than $80,000 worth of pilfered stuff.
But his kleptomania was boundless. From Naama Tsabar,
whose studio space he rents, he took a piece akin to a Molotov
cocktail, but made with an open liquor bottle - a hard thing to sneak
out with. From his art dealer in San Francisco he nabbed a stash of
pricey marijuana, going through a reality-show's worth of high jinks to
avoid physically transporting it across the country. And from his
pregnant girlfriend, Carolyn Salas, a sculptor who teaches moldmaking at Yale, he stole something entirely personal and unexpected: her mouth guard.
"This
is a mold of the inside of her body," he said, delighted. Ms. Salas:
"Really, you picked that, of all things? Couldn't you have taken
something better? I think it's pretty disgusting." She knew about the
project from the start, and it made her uneasy. "Mostly I was worried
that people would hate him," she said, "and, in turn, not like me."
(They live together so she knew she was an easy target, but she really
thought the mouth guard was lost.)
"Thanks"
follows a period in which Mr. Parker Smith was audacious in collecting
ideas. He visited psychics, asking them what he would make next, but
found them insufficiently creative minded. "They all wanted to tell me
about my cholesterol," he said. About a year ago he simply bought an
idea, paying the artist Brent Birnbaum $200 for the suggestion to make a pair of Kanye West's slitted sunglasses out of Venetian blinds. (They've been on view at the
Ever Gold Gallery in
San Francisco, priced around $10,000.) He also let other contacts know
he was in the market for inspiration. "This one guy wrote me," he
recalled, "and said, 'Buying ideas is for suckers, why not just steal
them like everybody else?' "
So
even the idea for "Thanks" is appropriated, in its fashion. "I give
him credit for coming up with new ways of working," said Mr. Birnbaum, a
close friend who doesn't mind their dynamic. "He's always short of
ideas, and I always have too many."
A
$100 limited-edition "Gagosian" baseball hat Mr. Birnbaum made was
lifted for the show. Many artists decided to consign their work for
"Thanks"; should it sell, Mr. Parker Smith will get a cut, but out of
the gallery's fee, not the artist's. (At $36, the mouth guard is the
cheapest item; the gallery owner called it her favorite.)
For
Mr. Parker Smith the project has been surprisingly discomfiting, and
rewarding. "Ideas, and our creativity - that's the most valuable thing I
have, as an artist," he said. "For me to give that up was actually very
powerful." He paused, considering his bravura display of stolen
ambition. "What the hell am I going to do next?"
Printed article appears on the cover of today's Weekend Arts section, pg. C21.
Join us for tonight's opening, 6 -9 pm.
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55 Hester Street
New York, NY 10002
between Ludlow + Essex
Everything Flows, Nothing Stands Still (For Enrico Pedrini)
by Daniel Rothbart and Joachim Gerich
Friday, March 29, 2013 | 7:00pmFilm Premiere with remarks by Wolfgang Becker, Former Founding Director, Ludwig Forum for International Art (Aachen, Germany)
Everything Flows, Nothing Stays The Same (For Enrico Pedrini)
is a performance work with sculptural objects and mineral water by
American artist Daniel Rothbart. In homage to Italian art theorist,
curator and collector Enrico Pedrini, the work explores indeterminacy,
mysteries of existence and the subterranean waters and currents that
flow beneath Aachen, Germany. It is part of curator Wolfgang Becker's
ongoing Aachen Water Project, a series of site-specific artworks
conceived for the wells and waters of Aachen. Filmed by Joachim Gerich and his camera team and edited by Daniel Rothbart, the film has a running time of 23 minutes.
A Work by Daniel Rothbart
Curated by Wolfgang Becker
With Ahmed Kreusch, Laura Moreno Bruna, Daniel Rothbart and Annette Schmidt
Cinematography by Joachim Gerich
Edited by Daniel Rothbart
Photography by Laura Dovern, Joachim Gerich and Jan-Peter Trogerlic
Sponsored by Detlef Hambuecker, Schwertbad Clinic, Aachen, Christoph Koesters, Itertal Clinic, Aachen
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James Rieck "On Location" Opens March 29th, 6-8pm
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