THE NEXT MISTAKE SHOULD BE NEW

I have always been suspicious of successful biographies. Everything seems to happen for a reason. Mistakes become experiments, accidents become discoveries, and even lucky breaks begin to look dubiously well planned.

I wish I remembered my own life that way.

TRUST YOUR DOUBTS

In the 1990s, I was spending more and more time in New York, making work and trying to find a gallery that I actually wanted to work with. Some galleries were interested; the ones I wanted weren’t. This went on for about ten years.

Ten years is a long time to convince yourself you’re ahead of your time. It’s a flattering possibility. Another is that the work is mediocre. I had no reliable way of telling the difference. Some months I had to give myself a kick just to keep going. Perseverance looks admirable once you know how the story ends. While you’re doing it, it can look remarkably similar to an inability to take a hint.

And ten years is a lot of time to waste. Not everyone can afford it, financially or otherwise. I imagine plenty of people who never made it felt exactly the same way that I did. Nobody asks them how they did it.

NO REFUNDS

I once made a Pope who was supposed to be standing. He’d already been produced when, two weeks before the exhibition, I realized I didn’t like what I’d made. Not an ideal moment to discover this. There wasn’t time to make another Pope. Eventually, he ended up on the floor, struck by a meteorite.

People have found plenty of meaning in that image, but at the time, I was trying to fix something that wasn’t working. It could just as easily have become a much bigger mistake.

I’ve also made an exhibition that I still think was bad. I was fascinated by certain events and the images surrounding them. They were so powerful in my imagination that I thought I could bring that force directly into an exhibition. I couldn’t. The subjects were strong but the works weren’t. I had fallen in love with the images in my head and paid too little attention to what was actually in front of me.

FIVE STARS

Failure is unpleasant, although at least people eventually leave you alone.

Success is much more demanding. It wants another success, preferably identical to the last one. The audience wants to recognize you. Your gallery wants something it knows how to sell. And you already know how to make it. Nobody has to force you.

You can spend years repeating yourself and call it consistency. With enough success, repetition becomes a signature, predictability becomes maturity, and laziness becomes a recognizable style. The worst part is that nobody is necessarily lying. They really do like what you’re making. You might even like it yourself.

Failure can destroy your confidence. Success can destroy your curiosity. Curiosity is harder to get back.

EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE

In 2011, I announced I was retiring. My career wasn’t in trouble – quite the opposite. There was plenty of work, plenty of interest, and every reason to expect more of both. But I’d stopped enjoying it. Some people suspected it was a performance. Apparently, when an artist announces his retirement, there must be a concept behind it, he can’t just be tired.

Almost everyone thought stopping was a mistake. They had good reasons. Walking away when things are going badly can be a relief; walking away when they’re going well means giving up opportunities that haven’t even arrived yet.

I didn’t have a plan B. I wanted to have time for things I’d never done, without knowing what they might lead to. One of them was making photographs with Pierpaolo Ferrari for TOILETPAPER. There were images I’d always wanted to make that didn’t quite belong in my work as an artist. Brighter, louder, more colorful: TOILETPAPER gave them a place. I didn’t have to find a way to turn everything into an artwork.

Eventually, I wanted to make art again. Coming back wasn’t easy. Five years had passed, and I couldn’t simply pick up where I’d left off. But some of those ideas that had once competed for space in my work had found another home: I could leave them there.

Only then did I realize that my retirement had been a five-year break. Leaving looked like the mistake. Staying would have looked like success. I might have been wrong about both.