Philip-L diCorc THE ART O F THROW DART

Shore, Robert. "Philip-Lorca diCorcia: The Art of Throwing Darts." Elephant (Winter 2013): 98-111 [ill.]
IV
Abraham, 2010, from the East of Eden series, inkjet print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm
Ph
TH
All
98
Encounters
Philip-Lorca
diCorcia
THE
ART
O
F
THROWING
DARTS
Text by Robert Shore
All images courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London
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Encounters
The photographer tells Robert Shore how the bottom dropped out of a lot of things
(including, in a way, editorial photography) in 2008 and how, despite his seminal role
in the development of photography as art form and cultural weapon in the nineties
(alongside Larry Clark and Nan Goldin), he has ambiguous feelings about the new
wave of art photography and the contemporary art world itself.
few galleries these days that do that, certainly not of the
size that he’s become.’
Why won’t your London show make money?
‘To be honest, I don’t think Great Britain is the most sophisticated photographic market, they’re still a little bit stuck
in the past. Although I think the work that I do has had a lot
of attention paid to the way that it looks, it’s not decorative.’
So the US is a more sophisticated market for photography?
‘It’s a much bigger market. The East Coast, the West
Coast, whatever’s in between.’
What’s the difference between the UK and US?
‘For one thing, there are photography collectors [in the
US], people who concentrate in that field. The economics
of the art world, the speculative aspect, has come increasingly into play. The hysteria about the prices that people
charge for things… is very often based on the idea that
you can resell it for even more. In the photography world,
with very few exceptions – and mostly the exceptions being those photographers who distance themselves from the
word “photography”, like Cindy Sherman or Andreas Gursky or whatever – the speculative aspect of buying a work
is not as prominent. Some art collectors buy work and it
goes straight to a warehouse. That just doesn’t happen in
the photography world.’
DiCorcia is a master both of the faux-candid image (Hustlers, Heads) and of more obviously staged tableaux (his
shoots for W). The pictures in East of Eden feel very deliberate; some of the titling is biblical. Is the machinery around
his work becoming more elaborate?
Head #23, 2001, from the Heads series, Fujicolor Crystal
Archive print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, one of the great image-makers of
the last decades, made a return to the art frontline this autumn when his gallery, David Zwirner, staged two shows
of his work simultaneously on either side of the Atlantic. In
New York, to coincide with the publication of a book by
Steidldangin, diCorcia’s iconic Hustlers (1990–92) series
– the basis of his first solo museum exhibition, held at MoMA
in 1993 – went on display. In London, meanwhile, Zwirner
presented his most recent collection, East of Eden, a series
of large-scale images reflecting on ‘the collapse of everything’ and ‘loss of innocence’ triggered by the financial
meltdown in the US in 2008. Tropes and set-ups familiar
from his earlier work recur – there’s a pole dancer, theatrically heightened tableaux redolent of his celebrated
fashion-based work for W magazine – but also some more
unexpected elements: not least, evocative, widescreen
Californian landscapes.
Sitting with his arms tightly crossed over his chest, diCorcia (known as ‘PL’ around the gallery) is a master of
candid photography and proves a no less candid interviewee. We begin by talking about the London show, his first in
the capital with Zwirner.
‘It was definitely not an economic decision [to mount it],’
he says. ‘I don’t know if they make any money off a show
like mine. One of the virtues of David Zwirner is that he
does carry people for a long time. It may not seem like that
because he’s turned into a bit of a juggernaut and taken on
some very obvious, expensive artists. But from his inception, I guess 15 years ago, he’s had people that make no
money. Eventually, maybe it does pay off. There are very
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Cain and Abel, 2013, from the East of Eden series,
inkjet print, 100.3 x 124.5 cm
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
101
Lacy, 2008, inkjet print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm
Stockton, California, 2009, from the East of Eden series,
inkjet print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm
Encounters
Andrea, 2008, from the East of Eden series,
inkjet print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm
‘Not really. I’ve
presented by othe
be doing some kin
of the fact that I h
couple of example
Cain and Abel – s
falling into a gay
Eve – was genera
for Rizzoli. ‘I didn’
because I knew I h
Though it’s give
work in the past, h
mercial work.
‘I tend to refuse
cause that’s beco
in anything interes
care what their na
have some sort of
at the forefront of
more. The exampl
– that world does
personalities: who
willing to go over b
to some corner of
produce – well, as
a relationship betw
ing to make… I nev
anything except th
somewhere, beca
the world. But oth
want. And if you sa
they’d figure out a
all day in the opera
just go and do one
East of Eden is
ment; it sounds a
sionment persona
‘I was as affecte
about disillusionm
he says. ‘The botto
story I did for W, f
also about the tim
says, a feeling of
done in the past: ‘
ground, sometime
what I’m going to
the series, somet
jumping-off point
though he’s not su
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia
There’s no commercial consideration.
I don’t go: This one’s going
to be a big seller
images. ‘In this case I’m willing to bet that most people
need a press release to work out what that series is about,’
he says.
The prints are large-scale – but of course diCorcia is one
of the seminal figures in the late twentieth-century shift to
Big Photography. ‘When the Düsseldorf School broke out,
everything seemed tiny. They very deliberately tried to disassociate themselves with photography through scale… I
don’t think the size of my prints increased simply for that
purpose. If you think about it, one of the last projects I did
was the Polaroids [Roids, shown at Sprüth Magers in London in 2010] – they’re tiny. There just happens to be a lot
of them. I think this whole size thing came because photographs and paintings were being shown in the same room
and it’s really hard: I think photography suffers a lot when
you put it in the same room with paintings. It loses its attraction, its whatever – it’s almost impossible to suspend
disbelief somehow.’
‘There’s no commercial consideration,’ he says of his
work. ‘I don’t go: This one’s going to be a big seller, or anything like that. And, to be honest, the ones that do actually
wind up being big sellers are rarely my favourite. They always seem a little bit oversimplified. In this show I would say
the two dogs watching pornography is not the photograph
I’m most proud of because it’s an illustration basically, and
illustrations are always by their nature clipped in their possibilities of meaning. I could say that about the Hustlers too.
The most popular one by far is the one where this drag
queen mimics Marilyn Monroe. Everybody loves that one.
It’s so obvious.’
W, September 2000, #6, 2000, archival
pigment print, 81.3 x 106.7 cm
‘Not really. I’ve always taken advantage of opportunities
presented by other opportunities, in the sense that I might
be doing some kind of commercial job and take advantage
of the fact that I have a crew and a location. There are a
couple of examples of that in this exhibition.’ For instance,
Cain and Abel – showing two men, who may or may not be
falling into a gay embrace on a bed, overseen by a naked
Eve – was generated by a shoot for a book about Valentino
for Rizzoli. ‘I didn’t pay to rent that hotel room. I just used it
because I knew I had it.’
Though it’s given him significant opportunities for his own
work in the past, he says that he no longer does much commercial work.
‘I tend to refuse to do editorial assignments any more because that’s become a joke. They’re kind of not interested
in anything interesting. They don’t have any budgets. I don’t
care what their name is, Elephant or Vogue, they generally
have some sort of corporate entity that has the bottom line
at the forefront of the ethos, so I don’t want to do that any
more. The example of having worked for W for those 11 years
– that world does not exist any more. Partly it’s a matter of
personalities: who’s willing to say “OK, do this”, or who’s
willing to go over budget, who’s willing to fly everybody over
to some corner of the world and spend a week in order to
produce – well, as you probably know, in magazines there’s
a relationship between budget and how many pages it’s going to make… I never had anyone during that period tell me
anything except that we gotta get the Armani dress in here
somewhere, because he’s the biggest fashion advertiser in
the world. But other than that they just let you do what you
want. And if you said you wanted to shoot in the opera house,
they’d figure out a way to do it. And you didn’t have to spend
all day in the opera house shooting the entire story, you could
just go and do one picture. That never happens any more.’
East of Eden is about a loss of innocence and disillusionment; it sounds as though he has experienced that disillusionment personally.
‘I was as affected by things that I’m referring to when I talk
about disillusionment as anyone else in the United States,’
he says. ‘The bottom dropped out of a lot of things. The last
story I did for W, for instance, was done in 2008.’ That was
also about the time he joined David Zwirner. There was, he
says, a feeling of ‘what next?’, so he did what he has often
done in the past: ‘I tend to try to develop a conceptual background, sometimes simplistic, as a jumping-off point for
what I’m going to do. Sometimes it retains itself throughout
the series, sometimes it just gets you out the door.’ The
jumping-off point this time was the Book of Genesis, although he’s not sure that that’s apparent in a lot of the final
105
Mike Vincetti, 24 Years Old, New York, New York, $30, 1990–92,
from the Hustlers series, chromogenic print, 60.3 x 91.1 cm
Encounters
106
Mike, 26 Years Old, $40, 1990–92, from the Hustlers series,
chromogenic print, 60.3 x 91.1 cm
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
107
Encounters
maybe. Of course, everyone knows that I went to school
with Nan Goldin and David Armstrong and people who
have a reputation that is based upon what people assume
to be their lifestyle. I’ve never wanted to make work that
people would assume had something to do with me, because I feel like that’s always the case. Artists’ work always
reflects them in some way or another. To have it actually be
about them, as with Larry Clark and Nan, is not interesting
to me.’
Though you sometimes use your own family in your work.
‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t know that they’re members of my
own family. It’s easy to use members of your own family,
they’re available.’
It’s your own son you’re throwing a dart at in the Abraham
shot in East of Eden. How did he feel about that?
‘He’s used to being photographed – not just by me, but
by Nan, for instance. And he didn’t mind at all. I’m not sure
I explained to him exactly what I was doing [laughs], but of
course throwing darts at your own son is…’ He pauses. ‘I
didn’t plan to do that, to be honest. Some of the best photographs are the ones where you’ve sort of got a vague idea
in your mind and head towards it and then get diverted into
something that you didn’t expect and it turns out to be better.’
Hustlers, of course, marked diCorcia’s arrival in the major
league. The project was funded by a National Endowment
for the Arts bursary (along with Guggenheim Foundation
money) and was made against the background of the early
nineties US ‘Culture Wars’, a post-AIDS pitting of conservatives against progressives that shone particular light
on federal funding for the arts: 1989, the year diCorcia
received his grant, marked the controversy over plans to
show Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment at the
Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, with NEA support.
Was Hustlers – a series of staged portraits of male prostitutes in LA, captioned with their names, home town, age
and (most controversially) the amount of money they
charged – a deliberate shot fired in the Culture Wars?
‘I don’t know that it was conscious,’ says diCorcia. ‘I lived
in New York City in a world which was, let’s say, very inclusive… My brother was gay. I would say 50 per cent of the
people I knew were, both men and women.’ Though shot on
the opposite coast, Hustlers grew naturally out of that context. ‘The idea that these guys were commodities and objectified has a direct relationship to paying them, and I was using the government’s money to pay them. I don’t know if that
was a eureka moment or I carefully planned it out, but once
it occurred to me it seemed so kind of perfect I just went
ahead with it.’ He doesn’t recall the right-wing lobby reacting to the images, which managed to enter the artistic mainstream – after all, they were shown at MoMA. Rather: ‘The
questions at that time were: why did you choose just men?
Why don’t we ever see anything of their personal life? How
come there’s no depiction of what they do – which would
have been the normal photojournalistic approach to that.’
The reaction against ‘normal photojournalism’ was the
starting point for Hustlers, then: ‘photojournalism is just
telling you what you already know, it’s fulfilling your expectations, and that’s fine if it serves a purpose. But as an art
form it doesn’t really have much depth. As a photographer
with photojournalism as the predominant mode of photography when I started, I was trying to change out. I guess the
point was, you can know a lot about life through photography but you’re probably not learning very much about the
particular subject. So there couldn’t be a better way to do
that than with people who portray themselves as something
that they’re not.’
How would you situate yourself in terms of the photographic tradition? With someone like Larry Clark, for instance…?
‘The usual question is more like: Do you have a fascination with the underbelly? [Laughs.] And I would say: Yes,
Though they may not know quite how the image will turn
out, most of diCorcia’s subjects know they are being photographed. He famously departed from this practice for his
Heads series, shot in Times Square in Manhattan between
1999 and 2001 using strobe lighting. One of the unsuspecting subjects, Erno Nussenzweig, was very displeased that
his image had been used in this way – although most critics
found the works unusually and existentially revealing – and
sued. ‘He had his religious reasons. But, quite frankly, I
think $1.6 million, which is what they sued me for, was also
sort of a motivation,’ reflects diCorcia now. ‘The way that
the litigation system for those things in the United States
works is that it costs so much to defend yourself, you generally make a settlement because you’re going to pay your
lawyer that much anyway. I had a lawyer who worked pro
bono and he did it because it was a constitutional rights
issue… But the actual law that they [Nussenzweig’s team]
invoked was that you cannot use a person’s image in commerce or advertising without their permission. So they were
claiming that an art gallery is commerce and the catalogue
was advertising – and, you know, in a way I don’t disagree
with that. Quite frankly, if somebody did the same thing to
me I wouldn’t be happy. [But] I wouldn’t sue them. How
art, which is very clearly about money these days, slips the
There’s something about having so
many images around… Instead of 150
images, you wind up with 2,000.
It’s ridiculous
108
Ralph Smith, 21 Years Old, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, $25, 1990–92,
from the Hustlers series, chromogenic print, 78.1 x 92.4 cm
Eddie Anderson, 21 Years Old, Houston, Texas, $20, 1990–92, from
the Hustlers series, chromogenic print, 60.3 x 89.9 cm
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
109
Encounters
noose by being “f
this court case w
mendment protec
artists.’
W, November 2003, #12, 2003, archival pigment print, 81.3 x 106.7 cm
New York, 1997, Ektacolor print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm
DiCorcia’s initial a
I got out I didn’t h
grand plan seemin
fessional life. The
opted to go to gra
department found
ular point of view,
when I went for my
ferns with black-a
think I wouldn’t ha
tional period. Wal
were looking for a
And now I teach th
At the walk-thro
someone had sug
teaches there bec
still up in the air? ‘
me,’ he says. ‘Th
But it’s also that,
you’re not just sit
you have to have s
work, and increas
raphy as an art fo
He says that he se
duced, involving
finds it hard to en
started out using
as was in the seve
into it. And now st
tual tool. I was int
now. Having to crit
lightly because th
quite disturbing to
emotional currenc
“I don’t like it”, I ha
and more difficult
ered with that.’
At that walk-thro
clear that he does
been having on h
little 35mm still-an
‘I don’t hate it,
It’s too complicat
ing analogue film.
allows for digital m
bellybutton of the
erated from Adam
cal cord to tie off)
He says he doe
the world. The pr
technology also b
tact sheet made f
something about
‘When people sho
film. Instead of 150
iculous. I might ha
which has an easi
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Head #7, 2001, from the Heads series, Fujicolor Crystal
Archive print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm
noose by being “freedom of expression” was a lot of what
this court case was about.’ As the judge said: ‘[F]irst [A]
mendment protection of art is not limited to only starving
artists.’
DiCorcia’s initial art education happened in Boston. ‘When
I got out I didn’t have a grand plan,’ he says – the lack of a
grand plan seemingly being something of a motif in his professional life. There was a recession on at the time, so he
opted to go to graduate school and ended up at Yale, in the
department founded by Walker Evans. ‘It had a very particular point of view,’ he says. ‘Half the people that were there
when I went for my first interview took pictures of rocks and
ferns with black-and-white large-format cameras. I actually
think I wouldn’t have got in two years later. It was in a transitional period. Walker Evans had just died [in 1975] and they
were looking for a replacement, so that was the way it went.
And now I teach there, and it’s a completely different place.’
At the walk-through at the gallery a couple of days earlier,
someone had suggested that, actually, diCorcia no longer
teaches there because he’s quit. Is that true, or is the matter
still up in the air? ‘No, I did [quit]. I’m not sure they believed
me,’ he says. ‘There were probably some petty reasons.
But it’s also that, in order to be good at that, to feel like
you’re not just sitting up there bullshitting [your students],
you have to have some relationship or enthusiasm about the
work, and increasingly the work that comes out of photography as an art form has no relationship to any actualities.’
He says that he sees a significant shift in the art being produced, involving a level of abstraction that he seemingly
finds it hard to engage with. ‘The work is very different… I
started out using photography as a kind of conceptual tool,
as was in the seventies common usage, and that’s how I got
into it. And now strangely it’s come full circle, it’s a conceptual tool. I was interested in it then, I’m not interested in it
now. Having to critique people’s work is not something I take
lightly because they don’t take it lightly. Your words can be
quite disturbing to somebody who’s spent a lot of effort and
emotional currency in doing something… I don’t just say
“I don’t like it”, I have to explain why, and it’s become more
and more difficult to come up with the energy to be bothered with that.’
At that walk-through a few days before he’d also made it
clear that he doesn’t care for the impact the Canon 5D has
been having on his students’ work. Why does he hate the
little 35mm still-and-moving-image marvel so much?
‘I don’t hate it, it’s just so prominent. Everyone has one.
It’s too complicated for me,’ he shrugs. He still shoots using analogue film. The negatives are then scanned, which
allows for digital manipulations such as the removal of the
bellybutton of the Eve figure in Cain and Abel (Eve was generated from Adam’s rib so there would have been no umbilical cord to tie off).
He says he doesn’t like the way digital cameras render
the world. The profusion of images that goes with filmless
technology also bothers him. ‘Although you can get a contact sheet made from what you do – I don’t know, there’s
something about having so many images around,’ he says.
‘When people shoot digitally, you never have to change the
film. Instead of 150 images, you wind up with 2,000. It’s ridiculous. I might have considered using large-format digital,
which has an easier capacity to control the things I like to
control – what’s in focus, what’s not in focus. That’s almost
impossible with 35mm digital. It’s boring to even explain
why but it’s true. And the larger ones are incredibly expensive and outmoded in two years.’
DiCorcia has started attending art fairs – not many, perhaps (‘I’ve been to half a dozen in my entire career’), but
all since he moved to his new gallery. ‘Almost all of it was
intentionally in support of David Zwirner. I never went to art
fairs before. Art fairs in their prominence and their commercial impact basically have come to dominate and I just
wanted to help these people because they’re trying to help
me: by showing up, by going to the dinner, by doing all of
that stuff, like being a player and not trying to seem as if
I’m above the fray. But I don’t find art fairs interesting… It’s
such a blatant display of commerce. And also you get to
see all the customers and that’s a kind of rude awakening
as well.’
Has the kind of person who buys art changed so very
much?
‘I didn’t have to see it [before],’ he deadpans.
Art education is becoming ever more popular, and the art
world ever more globalized. ‘I went to graduate school at a
time when going to graduate school as a pathway to an art
career was a waste of time,’ says diCorcia. ‘Now, in every
corner of the world, there are artists that are no different
in terms of their training and their knowledge than anyone
in New York or LA. And once certain trends within art get
established, they get played out all over the world, not just
in the centres, the traditional five cities or wherever.’
Is that an interesting phenomenon? Are the variations interesting?
‘Well, it makes it harder to remember anybody’s name.’
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