This Artist’s House Is Not a Home

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/t-magazine/marc-camille-chaimowicz.html

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“I CAN’T QUITE deal with it,” says Marc Camille Chaimowicz, in considerable understatement, on moving from the London apartment he has spent the past 38 years living and making his art in. The flat is on the top floor of Hayes Court, a 19th-century red brick building in Camberwell, South London, an area long known for having successive waves of artists such as Frank Auerbach and Griselda Pollock. We are sitting in the kitchen, which is filled with appliances from when he first moved in: the 1970s. That was also the era in which Chaimowicz, who is about to have his first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., at the Jewish Museum in New York, began creating his distinct body of cross-disciplinary work, which explores ideas of domestic life through fully realized life-size room installations that he fills with furniture, ceramics, collages, wallpaper, textiles and sculptures, many of which are his own design.

The influence of Chaimowicz’s work is hard to pinpoint, but everyone familiar with his art agrees that it is substantial. Is it his imagined rooms, so evocatively furnished as to suggest a story? Or his classic drawings, suggestive of abstracted body parts or fractured parentheses that appear on everything from wallpaper to murals to fabric? His persistently joyous sense of color? Most likely, it’s Chaimowicz’s anarchic lack of distinction between public art and private life that makes him a pioneer and also an enigma. “It’s not that he’s being directly copied by other artists,” says the British contemporary-art writer Louisa Buck. “But more that Chaimowicz has made a broad swath of practice permissible.” In the post-Pop world of his early career, the idea of calling a lampshade a work of art was sacrilegious; colors such as pastel pink or eau de nil — signature Chaimowicz hues — were anathema. Now, the hierarchies between art and ornament have dissolved, and Chaimowicz has emerged, in Buck’s estimation, “as a presiding force over a growing group of artists who are unashamedly playing with décor and environments,” Karen Kilimnik and Lucy McKenzie among them. His 2016 show at the Serpentine Gallery in London encapsulated both the singularity of the artist’s aesthetic and the diversity of his vision: three rooms, each appointed with his colorful retro-futuristic furniture, dreamlike illustrated wallpapers and abstract sculptures made from repurposed items such as vases or jugs or chairs. “Chaimowicz has suddenly become an urgent artist in the age of the internet, as boundaries become more porous,” says the Serpentine’s artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist. Kelly Taxter, curator of the Jewish Museum show, suggests he’s particularly interesting now “because the work is in one sense very esoteric and abstract, but it’s also totally approachable. Everyone recognizes a chair and understands wallpaper. So there’s an immediate understanding of his art, coupled with the layers of poetry behind it.”

All of these layers — the everyday and the intellectual, the romantic and the rigorous, the domestic and the dramatic — are present in both the home he is leaving behind and his new one, located just over a mile away in Vauxhall, in a 12-sided free-standing brick-and-concrete building commissioned by Cabinet, the London gallery that represents Chaimowicz as well as Ed Atkins and Lucie Stahl. Designed by the British firm Trevor Horne Architects in collaboration with Cabinet’s artists, the structure’s three lowermost floors serve as the gallery’s showspace; above are two floors of residential apartments, including Chaimowicz’s. He’s contributed to the building’s facade, designing its large, jaggedly geometric windows, set in natural oak frames, an indication of Chaimowicz’s innate inclination to live among his art pieces. Unsurprisingly, the interiors of both the Hayes Court and Cabinet flats keenly resemble his work. Each is constructed almost entirely from his imagination, from the lamps to the drapes to the wallpaper. As more than one curator who has worked with Chaimowicz has pointed out, his installations are Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” and in Taxter’s view they align the interior of the home with “the psychological and interior life of the artist.”

Spry and dressed in a corduroy jacket, a chevron scarf and a beige trilby, Chaimowicz gives me a tour of his Hayes Court flat, which consists of three humble rooms. The question of what the space will become is on his mind. It must live on in some way, he feels. As a museum dedicated to his work? A short-lived art installation? Its future is still uncertain, reliant perhaps on a benefactor. “Is that a real Warhol?” I ask, trying to stand back in the narrow corridor, papered with a whimsical white-and-gray Chaimowicz-designed pattern, to get a better view of a purple screen print of an electric chair hanging on the wall. “Yes,” he replies, with a sidelong smile. “Don’t tell anyone, will you? It’s quite discreet.” Then he considers the question again, and adds another layer of mischief. “What is real?” he asks, rhetorically. He shrugs. “But it’s a signed edition.” In the room nearest the front door is Chaimowicz’s archive: documentation of his work organized into file boxes, a collection of decorated plates and another of ordinary, bourgeois-colored glass bowls and vases. In the room opposite this one is where he draws, a sunny space with a drafting table and bookshelves dotted with small-scale models and color charts. (When Taxter visited, she discovered there were nearly 100 maquettes of furniture designs — they were, she says, “intimate and beautiful,” and around half of them are on view at the Jewish Museum.)

The rest is a faded mise-en-scène, an “art scene,” as a crime scene bears the traces of a crime. Everything feels like evidence of a life lived, as if the flat has already become a tribute, wonderfully trapped in time. This is in part because the furnishings not created by Chaimowicz are either design classics (by Otto Wagner and Eileen Gray) or simple, almost suburban, midcentury pieces (a ’50s-era gas stove, red glossy chairs, ’70s-era beige and salmon carpet). In the bathroom with a forever-dripping tap, the walls above the tub have been painted by Chaimowicz in Matisse-like patterns in his signature sun-faded, candy-colored palette. They are faint, repeated, reminiscent of something — colors inspired by Bonnard, perhaps, or Marie Laurencin, or textile sketches by Vanessa Bell. In the living room, which is papered in those same shades, a photograph of his previous apartment, a subsidized studio in the East End, where he lived briefly in the mid-70s, hangs on the wall, creating the effect that each of his homes relates to the next like a Russian nesting doll.

THE FOLLOWING DAY we meet in the new flat, where he is already sleeping, liberated, he says. “It’s the purest pleasure, partly because I’m able to break free from my past.” The walls already bear the mark of his arrival — he’s left most of them bare and freshly plastered, “what the Romans called patina,” he says. At the entrance to the kitchen, he’s covered a door in a purple, pink and orange bamboo stalk-print laminate of his own design. Inside the kitchen, similar patterns are collaged on the wall with many others — overlaid, clashing, apparently as random as strips of papier mâché, yet oddly classical in their prettiness. A curtain in his bedroom — echoing the graphic he recently designed for the cover of the London Underground pocket map — was made from fabric he designed with a pink, white and yellow chainlike motif. “I’ve declared this flat a white-free space,” he says with a smile, revealing what appears to be a long-held yearning to live and create his art somewhere shiny and new.

If Chaimowicz’s work is hard to classify, that’s partly because its impact is sensory and indirect, like a mist. Memory, home, reverie, nostalgia, longing: These are all evoked. In a recent exhibition called “Tears Shared” at the South London gallery Flat Time House, Chaimowicz showed a collection of jewel-toned glassware. He arranged the pieces against a conservatory wall. When the light caught them, it scattered multicolored rays around the room. In a film, such a sequence of rainbow refractions might be used to summon a childhood memory, or trigger a sunlit meditation. Here, one is meant to simply bask in the cast light and form a story of one’s own. Taxter compares the experience to reading a book: “You’re reading a story but you and the person next to you have a completely different projection of what the characters sound and look like.” In the installation that launched his career in 1972, “Celebration? Realife,” he filled a former ballroom at Gallery House in London with cheap lights, everyday detritus and found objects — a scene that looked like the aftermath of an explosion in a dime store or a flea market or a disco. Then he invited viewers into another room to discuss the work over coffee. Also as part of the artwork, Chaimowicz slept in the building at night throughout the period of the exhibition.

The work that anchors the Jewish Museum show, which opens March 16, is called “Here and There,” and was first installed in 1978 across two rooms at the Hayward Gallery in London. One room evoked a domestic interior (“here”) and the other recreated a more formal gallery-type space (“there”), with the intent of transferring art from the lived life into the exhibited one. That room contained collages of black-and-white photographs on movable panels. Because Chaimowicz works in a way that is site-specific, each of his shows has its own set of considerations. The iteration of “Here and There” for the Jewish Museum has been conceived because the building was once a home: Its history as a 1908 mansion belonging to the wealthy Warburg family and its ornate interior have become part of the story Chaimowicz has chosen to tell.

His own story is one he reveals with less ease, and explains, perhaps, why he works in refractions. He was born in postwar Paris, to a Polish father and a French mother. They never spoke about the war. “We don’t talk about that. We never did,” he says, as if his parents were alive and all the family rules still in place. His father, who had a degree in mathematics, got a job at Institut Curie in Paris and later became involved in early electronics. When Chaimowicz, who has two younger sisters, was about 8, the family moved to the U.K. “You see, my parents were very naïve,” he explains with his sly smile. “They’d heard that the English education system was very good. They hadn’t heard about the class system.”

Chaimowicz, who spoke no English, arrived in the postwar period when the two-tier British education system left pupils that were less academic out in the cold. Armed, at 16, with very few qualifications, he went to Ealing Art College, then to the bohemian Camberwell School of Art, and did a postgraduate degree in painting at the famous Slade School of Fine Art. By the time he arrived, he had burned all of his paintings. He respected theorists and conceptual artists such as Victor Burgin and Gustav Metzger, yet he couldn’t identify with any of them. Sympathetic to emerging currents in feminism, he found that intellectual art world very male. “My mind was drawn to left-wing ideology,” he recalls. “But the left-wing practice produced art that I could not enjoy. It was lacking in pleasure, color and sensuality. All the things that matter to me.”

At Slade, the classical premise that you must suffer for your art was pervasive, but Chaimowicz was having none of it. “The people I was looking at didn’t seem to have suffered to that extent. Fragonard seemed to have a great time. I thought: I want to be like Fragonard!” After graduation, Chaimowicz was awarded a studio space in East London by Acme, a nonprofit program that partners with London art schools to grant budding artists a subsidized place to create, and he volunteered in a fabric design studio in Lyon. As his interest in the applied arts evolved, his sense of work as an evolution of his life emerged too. Bonnard and Vuillard were a guiding light. “It was a very rich period in terms of my practice. I’d think: I want some wallpaper but there’s nothing I like and I can’t really afford it anyway. Maybe I could make my own wallpaper,” he says. “I was prioritizing my lifestyle, to the extent that there were complaints about me to the head office. Other artists were walking down the road seeing me on the ground floor of my studio with floral curtains, drinking tea with friends and socializing, and they’d say: ‘This guy’s not working! He’s fraudulent, he’s wasting precious space!’ ” Out of that very transgression, Chaimowicz built a career.

WHEN CHAIMOWICZ GLOSSED over his parents’ part in the war, I thought we’d have to return to that subject somehow. Earlier, he’d told me, apropos of the New York venue, “I have no connection with the Jewish faith whatsoever,” and although I understood the point about his upbringing and his mother’s Catholicism, it seemed to leave part of the story untold. He suggested that we do some of the interview in French, and his childhood seemed a good topic to cover that way. We switched languages. The era and timbre of Chaimowicz’s French is magnificent: rounded, classical, an accent that barely exists in contemporary France. It added a layer of intrigue: His native voice belongs not to a place but to the past.

“I grew up in Montparnasse,” he began. He spoke of envying his sisters’ dolls, and weekends spent in the suburbs with his maternal grandmother, who had warehouses she lent to people who ran flea markets. “I spent every weekend chatting to the stallholders,” Chaimowicz remembered. “It was wonderful for a boy of 6, 7, 8 years old.” The nostalgia for such things is clearly embedded in his work, which incorporates found domestic objects (like the colored glass). And just when the Proustian reverie seemed about to take off, Chaimowicz said, by way of sudden punctuation: “So, that’s childhood.”

“Wait,” I said. “You haven’t spoken about your father.”

“I haven’t spoken about …?”

“Your father.”

“My father?”

“Yes.”

The equivocation felt, at the time, oddly prolonged.

Most of what Chaimowicz told me about his father he preferred not to make public. We spoke about the reasons why — since an exhibition at the Jewish Museum would seem to precipitate some discussion of a Jewish link. Chaimowicz felt his father had suffered enough; his past had been taboo in his lifetime, and it was only right that it should remain so. Yet in respecting his need to preserve his father’s privacy a point is made sideways: a point about history and identity, about how one can be excluded from groups to which one might be expected to belong; about fear, about memory, about gray areas of belief. And all of this offers some purchase on Chaimowicz’s slippery lifelong subjects: home and remembrance, above all.

Chaimowicz’s father was born Jewish but was not religious. His father’s father was one of the founders of the Socialist party in Poland, and anti-Zionist. Chaimowicz père escaped to France and married Chaimowicz’s mother; they brought up their children in the Catholic faith. Once they moved to Britain, the children had French and English culture to manage: They couldn’t cope with a third. The link to Poland was, essentially, erased. Meanwhile, his father’s family disappeared.

Chaimowicz suggests that, like many fathers of that era, his was not very present. But there was a moment of rapprochement between them. Chaimowicz was asked to have a show in Warsaw in 1993. He accepted as his father was dying in the hospital. The Warsaw curators wanted to publish one of his sketchbooks in facsimile, and he drew, as a frontispiece, a picture of his father. He’d been to see him in the hospital, and he drew him from memory. He’d never done anything like that before. The resulting resemblance was uncanny. We pause over this. The story makes a much broader sort of sense. His father might once have known him as a boy who could draw, yet memory and intimacy are what Chaimowicz has made his materials. In his hands, even a complicated reminiscence can become something lightly and mysteriously rendered, with the restorative force of a fleeting resurrection.