December 26, 2011 |
Maureen Paley is an East End pioneer. The American gallerist, with her chic, sharp, always-black wardrobe and never-less-than-immaculately-coiffed hair, seems as essential to its landscape as the warehouse conversions and artists’ studios. Long before organic veg scented Broadway Market, empty windows were filled with concept cupcakes and the design crowd moved in, this trailblazing lady set up her first gallery in a dilapidated Hackney house with little to recommend it except that Genesis P-Orridge was her neighbour. Today, her indie ethos has made her one of the art world’s most indomitable forces, working with everyone from Wolfgang Tillmans to Gillian Wearing. She and Skye got together to discuss Warhol, women who influenced her and why she chose collecting art over creating it.
SKYE SHERWIN: “How did you go from training to be an artist to become a gallerist? People think of artists as the creators, but it’s your name above the door and you’re out front.”
MAUREEN PALEY: “I see it as I was to shy to be an artist – I didn’t have the ego-matrix to withstand the pressure of what it takes. But it did mean that I had sensitivity to it. I had a very influential art teacher at high school. He introduced a small group of us to museums in New York. His wife was a furniture designer. She worked with KnollStudio and they were very hip and aware. By the time I’d gotten into Sarah Lawrence and Brown, I was combining my interest in art practice with art history. I had a very influential Marxist art historian, called Carol Duncan. So this was setting the stage for interests broader than just art practice.
“When I graduated from London’s Royal College, where I’d taken my MA, what became very apparent was that I was more interested in the works of others than myself. In 1984 the art world was so different to what it is now. It wouldn’t have necessarily occurred to me to work for another gallerist. My creativity came from being art trained and the first form of the gallery was very much a project space.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “It really takes a special kind of ego to be an artist; it’s a hard thing to put yourself out there. But at the same time, to be a good gallerist, you also need to put your identity forward. Is that something you’ve grown into?”
MAUREEN PALEY: “This is the thing. What I discovered very early on was that I was delighted to do it for others, just not for myself. I would still say that I’m quite shy, although I may not look it. My persona is often associated with my appearance, which can be imposing, but the reality is, it’s a delicate balance between this distinct appearance and inwardly being very shy. But also, the belief I have in my artists allows me the confidence to promote them very strongly.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “You have a very elegant, classic but also distinctive style. Who have your style icons been?”
MAUREEN PALEY: “Well, growing up in the States, it was not the easiest thing not to be extraordinarily tall, blonde and blue eyed. It meant I was searching for other role models. Very early on I came across [Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor and later Vogue editor-in-chief] Diana Vreeland. I was given her book Allure and thought it was just extraordinary. She had a very lateral way of looking at the world. Coco Chanel interested me because of her determination and the way she evolved and her look. Also, I trained as a ballet dancer from age seven to 16 and I was very interested in [the choreographer] Martha Graham. She was an extreme person, forging ahead with her vision. Later, when I came to England, the thing that made me feel at home here was the fusing of punk with an art-school phenomenon that also foraged from the gothic. Let’s say the dark goddess of the gothic somehow worked into my look. I had to find a way of accepting myself.“
SKYE SHERWIN: “What do you think makes good style?”
MAUREEN PALEY: “Andy Warhol said, it’s more important to be a classic than in fashion. Classics go in and out of fashion but they are always a classic. I think I was drawn to developing a look that would weather the storm of fashion. There were people I would see, like Vivienne Westwood and, later on, Pina Bausch, when she danced at Sadler’s Wells, women with a very unique vision who set up their own parameters, who didn’t conform to the status quo. They existed in their own parallel worlds, in relation to what you would say was the established order.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “Absolutely. London in the 1980s tends to mean Lisson Gallery, artists like Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon. But you went to the East End, before anyone else.”
MAUREEN PALEY: “What had happened was I came to England and had married my childhood sweetheart, who I met when I was 14. At the point when I would have had children with him, I bolted and said I had to think for a year. I went down a different path. Coming here, I maybe didn’t think I was going to stay, but I found this little Victorian house through the Acme Housing Association. It was a derelict property. It was meant to be a studio and I was able to turn it into a place of experimentation. The East End didn’t have the cachet it does now.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “It seems really hard to imagine a scene flourishing in that way now. Maybe because of the financial situation and the arts cuts. But the East End has retained that kind of energy, even as it’s evolved. It also has Tube lines.”
MAUREEN PALEY: “And ley lines. There’s an extraordinary energy here.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “You recently started working with David Salle, one of the big stars of 1980s New York. How engaged were you with what was happening in New York at that time?”
MAUREEN PALEY: “I was, let’s say, quite below the radar. I went to Studio 54, to The Pyramid Club, I saw Keith Haring doing his first spray paintings in the subways there and we didn’t know who he was; it was all a mystery. I was always aware of David Salle’s work, what he painted and where he situated himself. If you’d said to me in 1984 I’d be working with him, it wouldn’t have seemed logical. I like how life can present you with these things.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “In the next few months you’ll be showing the photographer Peter Hujar, the British sculptor Rebecca Warren and the Tobias brothers – a mixture of older, iconic names and younger contemporary artists.”
MAUREEN PALEY: “The Peter Hujar images are of Paul Thek’s studio in 1967 and we’ll also be showing some Paul Thek etchings. I’m a great fan of both. They were involved and there’s a poignancy of showing them both at the same time. One of the things I can see in the programme now is that, in order to be present, I’m also going backward. As much as I love having new artists in the programme, it’s the first time I can see another movement – it’s Keith Arnatt’s estate, or David Salle or Stephen Prina. Before, I wanted to be the first to show an artist. Now I can see another impulse, another way of doing it.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “You have an amazing range of publications and magazines on your desk in your office in the gallery.”
MAUREEN PALEY: “I’m a magazine junkie. In the early days it was ZgPress magazine. It’s run by an amazing woman, Rosetta Brooks, together with early issues of Andy Warhol’s Interview, and I also loved the art magazine Avalanche. They really shaped my world. There was a belief that you should know about everything – film-makers like Tarkovsky, Herzog or Fassbinder – and be engaged and that would inform what you did. You wouldn’t dare think you could have a gallery without understanding the zeitgeist. I remember Wolfgang [Tillmans], years ago, took me to see what has become one of my favourite films, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “What do you look for in an art collector?”
MAUREEN PALEY: “Some people act like the market is attacking the integrity of art. I have a different approach. I think about how art, right back to the ancients, is linked to the idea of alchemy. What we are looking at in art throughout culture is something almost magical. It’s there to illuminate. With the gallery people who are not going to possess it can look at it, but in possessing it, you’re enabling more art to be created.”
SKYE SHERWIN: “You seem to have a great interest in ancient belief systems.”
MAUREEN PALEY: “I do. One of the things I’ve embraced recently is Chinese scholar’s stones. I’ve been told that, while the scholars who reflected on them were serious in their pursuits, the stones were about bringing a sense of magic and joy. It was supposed to help with an understanding of the immortal. I think art, too, is allowed to have all those qualities. In our desire to understand, we can still be playful.”
Peter Hujar: Thek’s Studio 1967, Maureen Paley, 21 Herald Street, E2
Text Skye Sherwin
Portrait by Frederike Helwig
