Wednesday Edition: Simon Fujiwara
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In-the-thick-of-it greetings, collector friends. We're at the mid-point of what's come to be the busiest week of the year for us—the peak of 20x200's holiday season collides head-on with the madness of art fair week in Miami. Jen Bekman Gallery director Jeffrey Teuton has been down south all week getting our booth ready at the PULSE fair. I'm making my way there (just as soon as I'm done introducing today's new edition to all of you) to meet up with JT and Melissa Bent, the newest member of 20x200's curatorial team. Melissa has been working with us for a few months now, but I've known her since the earliest days of the gallery, she being one of the pioneering co-founders of Rivington Arms, the innovative and acclaimed Lower East Side gallery that introduced the art world to emerging talents like Dan Colen, Hanna Liden and Dash Snow. She's been upping the ante and expanding our horizons since joining us early last summer. We have Melissa to thank for bringing artists like William Pope.L and Jessica Craig-Martin into our fold, as well as Simon Fujiwara, the creator of today's edition, People Who Eat White Bread Have No Dreams.
Simon is, quite literally, an international art star, with numerous honors, accolades and high-profile exhibitions under his belt: the Cartier award for Frozen, his Frieze art fair installation; rave reviews for his performance at Performa; the Baloise Prize at Basel; and his upcoming Tate exhibition. He's also no stranger to controversy. His interdisciplinary practice combines performance, installation, video, musical composition and good old-fashioned writing, creating work that is a complex mix of autobiography, identity and invention.
Simon often references the tendency for viewers to see art as biography and finds ample opportunity to keep such waters decidedly muddled, playing upon what one critic describes as "his audience's relentless yearning for a sense of truth." By inserting his autobiography into incongruous contexts, he susses out universal truths about society, history and, most centrally, how we all relate to ourselves within them.
Given Simon's proclivity for mixing autobiography and invention, it's easy to see People Who Eat White Bread Have No Dreams as a self-portrait of sorts. With such a constrained frame that gives us little hint about what lies beyond it, we're left with a sparse array of elements from which to construct his identity. The scene, in many ways, is utterly prosaic: It's easy enough to intuit that it's someone's breakfast and his/her attendant reading, seen from their own point of view. It's in the incarnation of each of these elements that a narrative emerges: The reading is highbrow/literary and its reader—Simon—is something of a renegade. (He still smokes cigarettes, after all.)
When it comes to the white toast, however, nothing is left to be conjured or imagined. Simon has burned into this signifier its meaning and, in doing so, has spelled out what it might (or might not) say about him as plain as day. The phrase itself, first uttered by style icon Diana Vreeland, is lodged in Simon's memory as a saying bandied about in his house when he was growing up. While I tend to see it as self-reproach, rather than signal—perhaps a bit of tough self-love, galvanizing Simon's brave pursuit of finding (and if he doesn't find it, inserting) the fantastical into the mundane—he could also be making a joke (I see a lot of humor in his work!). Either interpretation is utterly plausible, but I have a feeling that conjuring this kind of ambiguity is exactly what Simon intends.
— Jen
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