When you make a garment for the Geselle you have one week to do it under exam conditions. You can’t ask anyone how to do something. The room is all set up with the equipment, and you go in from 7 to 6, and you work there. But that was one week for one suit at the end of three years of hell, when you can do it all in your sleep. And the cutting has already been done for you, because you learn to make the pattern and cut in the next stage, that is when you start being creative. So even if there are some things that are more mechanical to talk of doing 19 suits in 2 months, single-handed, was mad. But if you would pour cold water on the idea of someone like Adalberto he would not find a way around the problem, or give you another month, he would just lose interest and do something else.
People think it would be easy to walk away.
Artists are lucky to get a gallerist, and you think if you get a gallerist the world is your oyster, and then maybe you are still teaching or working in a call centre. But if Charles Saatchi would walk into the gallery and buy out the show, or walk into the studio and buy out the studio, you would not have to worry any more. There are these collectors who can make a career. And there are these gallerists that people watch, they can make a career. So you know if you tell one to go away because he is interested in something that doesn’t interest you, probably you will never meet someone like that again.
On the weekend of the open studio the administrator was already writing to her for the third time about the rent. But naturally word got round about Adalberto. If you think that the people who run it are dreaming that someone like Adalberto will just come, and that if he would take up an artist they would be over the moon, they are not going to throw out that artist because of the rent. But if they would hear that it is all off they would be hounding you for a cheque.
The paintings on the walls were defenceless. They could not dry faster if it would not be possible to pay the rent on the studio. The paint is completely trusting. You think if nobody else is going to look after it it is up to you.
She had a superstition. If you have made your Gesellenstück, you should not let it go. So she made 20 new suits, instead of 19, and this was a very clever thing to do.
If you watch art auctions maybe you will think there are some very rich artists, because Hockney’s Portrait of Nick Wilder sold for £3 million. But Hockney sold the painting a long time ago. It is the paintings from the 60s and 70s that make that money, and it is the people who own those paintings, and the people who handle the sale, who make the money. So it is too bad for Hockney that he did not keep aside a painting from that time.
Nobody would ask Hockney, at least you think nobody would ask Hockney to go back to that early style. You think he must have enough money so he would not be pressurised, anyway. But what if somebody discovers what you were doing in 1962, and they commission you to do 19 more of what you were doing in 1962? If you can do even one you can do 19, and if you can do 19 you can do 20.
So she did 20, and Adalberto never saw her Gesellenstück again, because it stayed on its padded hanger.
Adalberto gave her a cheque for £45,000, because he had subtracted the cost of the materials. So he had made this really grand gesture of wanting to buy out the shop, but if he would have done it she would have had to pay for all that useless stuff, and she still had bolts and bolts of material.
If you have followed the British art scene at all you will know that there are some things that are secondary. Tracey Emin made a tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With and the point was not the quality of the stitching. Later Emin did some other sewn work, but she got other people to do the sewing, and Hirst’s dot paintings were not executed by Hirst, and this is all in the tradition of Warhol’s Factory.
This would not do for Adalberto. It was the hatefulness of the pockets, the pleats, the buttonholes, the hatefulness of the stitching, that gave the garment its brutality. How is a garment to be brutal if made by someone lucky to get the work?
So Adalberto came back from New York, and he walked up and down in front of the 20 suits. They had been pressed with a proper steam iron. These were the wallflowers.
He said: What is that German word? Schrecklich.
He hung the 20 hideous suits in his showroom in Milan. The show could never be so transgressive outside Milan — if you have no sense of style, if you know nothing of design, you cannot see the stupidity of the ugly pocket which only a trained apprentice could execute correctly. But in Milan they practically fainted. Miuccia Prada bought out the show.
Adalberto still wanted to have a show in New York. Prada said OK.
Adalberto did not like the kind of catalogue that gives a cv of the artist.
Adalberto did not like it when an image of the artist was used as a sign of the artist.
Adalberto came to talk to her. He said: We are doing a show in New York. It’s not Italy, they are not so sophisticated, people need things spelled out.
He said: I need a, what is the word, urine sample.
He had one of those little plastic cups, and you know, maybe you think it is for a visa or something, so she went to the loo.
Adalberto said: That’s great and we will need one of the other, here is a box for it,
and she knew she would have heard of it if the US government made people give a shit sample,
she said: Adalberto, what are you doing?
Adalberto said: We are doing a show in New York. We have to be more explicit. That’s all.
He said: It’s about the body. Hatred of the body. Denial of the body. The hanging requires the body.
He said: I hate the kind of hanging where you have seen it a million times, the lighting is a cliché, the frames are a cliché, and then the buyer wants to know if it comes with the fucking frame and you want to say sure, and just for you we are throwing in a free pack of underwear autographed by the artist, I hate that crap.
Adalberto said Prada said she would maybe show it in the store in Tokyo.
That was because of the purity of the idea of the urine sample. People have this idea of the frame, a piece of wood, a piece of metal contiguous with the piece, we really have to get away from that.
Adalberto said: Now don’t freak out on me.
He said: Are you still menstruating?
If you go to some new country you think you can leave behind the universe of words you grew up with, and even in the new country people are always building that cage of words, that is why it is good that art can be a thing. But people are always thinking they can break through the cage another way. When she was in art school in the 70s it was this very radical experimental time and sometimes people would do art that the teachers did not get, there was this bloke who did an installation in Manchester or it might have been Bradford and he had the examiners come out for it, and they just left. So he didn’t get a degree. And even in those days it was funny that art was supposed to be transgressive but you were supposed to get a degree, but to be an artist and not go to art school would have been the absolute pits. But it was exciting because these famous artists would come to talk to the students, or you could go to London and see the shows and it was all happening right now.
There was this guy, Kerry Trengrove, he died, he smoked and he drank, if you do both it’s bad, he got cancer of the throat and tongue. Most of his stuff ended up in the skip. But he did groundbreaking work. He did a show at Covent Garden, they put on very new things, he dug this deep hole in the ground of the gallery, just big enough to sleep and move around in. And he put a bed in, and a wall of Complan, and he covered it over with thick glass, with just enough of a gap to let air in, and he stayed there a week, he did everything there, he slept and ate and peed, and people could come and look down and see him underground. And that was groundbreaking work. That was back in the 70s. And he did another piece, he got these dogs, that were disturbed, or strays, and he stayed with them in a room for a week, and just by being there with him, for the week, they became tame.