Conversation with Adam Lindemann—Part 2

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The web exclusive that follows is an extension
of Conversation With Adam Lindemann, an article originally published in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction.

NEW YORK—That's a very nice Jonathan Meese sculpture you have in your office.

I'm a huge fan of Jonathan's. He's a megastar. People say, “He's a great sculptor but not a great painter.” It's just not true! We’ve collected both. This is the only bust, though. But I think that, of the busts, Stalinnietzsche is the killer. It's an A plus. I was in the foundry when he made it. At the time, he was also working on his huge sculpture Mamma Johnny. I bought that. I loved that piece. It’s really the complete vision, because it’s covered in writing and fingers, and he stuck his thumb in it, and it's got this huge phallus and a devil's head. It's insane. I was so excited about it. I saw this, in clay, and I was like, Wow! Last year at Miami Basel, I went back to his dealers and said, “Whatever happened to . . . ?” Because sometimes these things get away from you. It's not all about display. You need to really keep your ear to the ground and remember and see and look. And they did me the great favor of allowing me to have this piece, because it's a masterpiece.

He seems to have created a sort of cult of personality.

Well, I consider myself part of the cult. He's just one of those artists who create chaos around them. Jeff Koons saw a piece of Meese's in our place in Woodstock and was drawn to it. He said, “What is this?” I love Jonathan Meese's work. It can be somewhat uneven, but so what?  

The unevenness is part of his charm.

Yes.

Is there a relationship between Meese and the African tribal work you collected before you turned to contemporary art? You've placed a tribal figure next to a Meese on the windowsill there.

That piece is from Brussels. I'm not going to buy it, because it's not good enough. But I put it there next to the Meese for exactly that reason. Same with those daggers over there, which are from Papua New Guinea. Two of them are made from human bones. With the Meese, they create a sort of altar to chaos.  

His performances seem like ceremonies of some kind.

Yes. They’re like an exorcism. These are the sculptures, remnants, photographs, paintings based on some exorcism, and it's an exorcism of Germany's past, its history, as it comes through him—some superweird rock star, androgynous poet of a person. It's really interesting. Whenever I see him, to me there's like an aura around him. 

You’ve mentioned another artist you are collecting at the moment: Urs Fischer. With your dislike for art fairs, you must have appreciated Fischer’s rebellious gesture at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2006, when he displayed, as the sole artwork in Gavin Brown’s large booth, a crumpled cigarette pack that was suspended from a length of transparent wire and danced around as though it had become animate.

I had to buy that. That was a masterpiece.

You bought it?

That’s right. It was in an edition of three. Francois Pinault also owns one. When I discovered the cigarette pack, I thought, “This is the ultimate piece of handicraft.” Because you felt that the guy had just smoked a cigarette, crumpled up the pack and thrown it on the ground, which was a rude act. And it dances around the room, carried by the wind or having taken on its own life. That was better than any Picasso in the fair! It was a conceptual tour de force, and his dealer had the confidence to make that his whole booth. A master move! So much depends on how a work is installed.

What is the first thing you ever bought?

The first picture I bought was a Julian Schnabel. I was brought to it by Peter Brant, who got me going. He’s a dynamo who gets people into what he likes. He got me into horses and polo in 1983, and I kind of partially got into art collecting then. He sent me to see his friend Julian. It was a great experience, because I immediately began to do research. I got all the books. I went back to Julian’s studio four times. That was about 10 or so years ago. I was collecting African art because Bernard de Grunne was one of my close friends at Yale. He later became a tribal art specialist at Sotheby’s. And it seemed like it was an underappreciated market, because you could get an unquestioned masterpiece, which was very exotic, very Heart of Darkness, for modest sums. Now you have to pay crazy money for the best. I decided I wanted to buy some paintings, and I started with Julian’s work. In the end I decided not to be very ambitious with it, but I did have a nice beautiful painting, which I enjoyed. And then Jane Holzer took me to the Warhol estate—at that time, eight or nine years ago, they were selling directly from the estate, which was in Chelsea—and I started buying some of those pictures, because how could a 1964 Jackie screen print cost $65,000? It didn’t make any sense. So I couldn’t help myself.