“I saw Jeff through the years—he’s actually a good example of someone I didn’t know real well, but then I’d see him through the years, and watch his rise and watch his work and see what happened to him,” Dafoe said.
Dafoe spent his early years in New York performing avant-garde theater to fellow artists in SoHo, and when his breakthrough to film finally came, it came via someone who, at that time, was firmly in the art world. In the early 1970s, an abstract painter named Kathryn Bigelow arrived in downtown New York from San Francisco to study at the Whitney Independent Study Program with Brice Marden and Susan Sontag. In 1972—decades before she directed Point Break and won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker—Bigelow had joined the ranks of the collective Art and Language, which at the time included New York members such as Sarah Charlesworth (full disclosure, my wife’s late mother), Joseph Kosuth, and Christine Kozlov. She met Lawrence Weiner at a party at Gordon Matta Clark’s house, and soon appeared in a number of Weiner’s video works, including the cacophonic 1974 film Done To. Bigelow also acted as the secretary in Richard Serra’s video-art-slash-game-theory-play Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the artist locked the dealer Leo Castelli and the actor-monologuist Spalding Gray in the basement of 112 Greene Street, the art space named for its address that would eventually become the long-standing New York nonprofit White Columns. Radical and groundbreaking, 112 Greene Street was founded by Jeffrey Lew, who was Bigelow’s boyfriend at the time, and they lived in the basement. It’s now a Stella McCartney store.
Gray was a part of the Wooster Group, and lived in a walled-off part of the loft with Dafoe and LeCompte—Gray used to live with LeCompte, before she left him for Dafoe in the late ’70s, but he decided not to move, just to build a wall. At the start of 1980, a few years after acting in the Serra film with Gray, Bigelow went to see the play Point Judith at Gray’s company in which Dafoe was playing a street punk. She found his number, called him the next day, and offered him the lead in her first feature film, which was at the time called U.S. 17. He said yes. It was Dafoe’s first screen role. Despite the fact that 112 Greene Street was a few blocks away from the Performing Garage, Dafoe had never met Bigelow.
“The idea is that everybody knew each other, but we were busy touring, we were busy making pieces, because we had a space, and that’s really what kept the group together—we mostly worked hard and ran the place,” Dafoe said. “So I didn’t know people, I wasn’t out and about, and that’s really how you got to be part of that scene.”
But when pressed, he admitted that, over time, more artists came into his orbit.
“But of course, I worked with Kathryn and then she introduces me to Larry Wiener and people like that,” Dafoe recalls. “Joan Jonas, I met her through work. Actually, there’s a lot of people, but they don’t come to mind easily.”
He goes on to name artists like Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović, both contemporary artists who have practices that involve theater. But the most fruitful relationship Dafoe had with an artist is clearly Schnabel, who knew the actor for decades—they met at Keith McNally’s nightclub Nell’s in the late ’80s, when Schnabel was the hottest artist in New York and Dafoe just had a scene-stealing performance in Platoon.
Schnabel gave him a small role in his first film, a biopic of his deceased artist friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. Gary Oldman got the plum role as the Schnabel stand-in, and Dafoe got a smaller part as artist pal of Basquiat’s moonlighting as an electrician.
Decades later, Schnabel asked Dafoe to star as van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate—the director has said that he would not have made the movie if it couldn’t star Dafoe. As the film’s narrative thrust has to do with the creation of a new kind of painting, it’s essential that the action of painting in the film is real. For early takes, Schnabel himself would be directing a scene in which his own hand is doing the painting, but shooting it to look like Dafoe is holding the brush. But Schnabel pushed the actor to be more confident and channel the Dutch icon. Eventually, the master painter-director gave the master actor playing the world’s most famous painter a canvas and trusted him to be able to paint for the screen.
“I think one of my greatest experiences performing—or my most challenging, most harrowing experience—was when he taught me how to paint,” Dafoe said. “And we paint together—in the movie, sometimes pieces would be prepared, and then I’d fill in certain areas. But there’s one scene where I paint from scratch. And I paint without a cut in real time. And that was scary, because no one steps in, I had to do it. And as I’m painting, for a long, long time it looks very bad. And then there was a moment where it all comes together. And that was such a magical thing, just because I think he taught me well.”
His new film is also about art—about making art, to some extent, but mostly about collecting art, and its purpose once it’s collected. The movie opens with a relatively routine heist for some Egon Schiele paintings, but Dafoe’s thief triggers alarms, setting in motion the lockdown protocols, trapping the character into the billionaire’s bunker that its owner has abandoned for, apparently, Kazakhstan. Having been in a few collectors’ homes myself, I tell him that these barely inhabited vaults are all over the city. Being a famous actor gets you in these houses too.
“I’m loath to say names, but I can think of three people whose places, it’s just their collections—it’s maybe less modern art stuff and less contemporary stuff, but they are people that have great wealth,” he said. “And you just think, how do they appreciate these things?”
Key to Inside is the fact that the production team worked with the Florence-based curator Leonardo Bigazzi to assemble the collection. In addition to the Clemente, there are works by Maurizio Cattelan, Jonathan Horowitz, Adrian Paci, John Armleder, and Joanna Piotrowska.
But in the end, the collection’s value all falls away, eclipsed by the sheer desire to stay alive. For Dafoe, that’s the backbone of the movie.
“There’s a big collection, and in New York up high, great view, all that kind of stuff. Pretty cool place. And then in two seconds it becomes this horrible prison,” Dafoe said. “The art—it’s money, it’s power, it’s pleasure in a package. And in two minutes, it’s worthless, because really what he needs is to eat, to drink, and find a place to go to the toilet.”
The Rundown
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Whitney director Adam Weinberg will step down from the museum this year after 20 years at the helm, and he’ll be succeeded by Scott Rothkopf, who first joined the museum in 2009 as the wunderkind curator in his 30s after putting in a stint editing at Artforum. Rothkopf fills the big shoes in November, while Weinberg will stay on during the transition, and as an honorary trustee of the museum.
…Sure, it’s big news that longtime Galerie Perrotin collaborator Pharrell Williams will take the reins from the late Virgil Abloh as the creative director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear. But let’s not let that overshadow the big news about Skateboard P’s longtime coconspirator, the artist Daniel Arsham. This week, watch brand Hublot announced that Arsham will become an ambassador for the Swiss timepiece pushers, inaugurating this grand union by putting a really big sundial on a mountain in Zermatt. “Hublot loves Daniel Arsham!” said the Hublot CEO. I’m sure they do.
…Next month the Dallas Art Fair will once again alight upon the Fashion Industry Gallery in downtown Big D, with participating galleries such as New York’s Broadway, LA’s Various Small Fires, and Berlin’s Tanya Leighton. And it will be joined this year by a new fair that opens over the weekend at the Fairmont Hotel across the street, free to the public. It’s called the Dallas Invitational, and it was started this year by James Cope, the British-born dealer who has run Dallas’s AND NOW gallery for a decade. Participating galleries include New York’s LOMEX, Soft Opening and Emalin from London, and the gallery Édouard Montassut, from Paris. The more fairs the merrier.
…The artist Calvin Marcus has decided to part ways with Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery, which has represented him since 2015. Sources say Marcus simply decided to move on after a productive seven years at the LA art destination.