Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/184563
Factory was three blocks away and we would walk over and wait for Andy to appear. I thought that is what every American high school student did for fun. I started to subscribe to Artforum when I was 17 and still have every issue going back in our home office, a clear monument to my misspent youth. I'm lucky to live with a lot of great art from my friends and artists I've worked with, but I never think of myself as a collector, because to me, living with these art works is like being in a three-dimensional inhabitable diary of my life. Also I've never paid much for anything I own, and consequently everything I have is either an "early work" or a benefit edition. I can live with that. ON FAMOUS FRIENDS AND MY DRUG PORTRAIT. Above: Guess who's coming to dinner. The dining room mixes and melds a who's who of provocative contemporary artists and design talents, beginning with the antlered and knitted chandelier by Virgil Marti. To the right of the door, Warhol flowers by Sturtevant from a 1966 dialogue with works by Houston's Kent Dorn, Lisa Yuskavage, and General Idea. The latter, displaying a trio of toy seals, must be guarded carefully from Daisy the canine, to prevent them from being mistaken for dog toys. On the left side of the door, an arrangement of works, clockwise from the top by national and Texas luminaries Tom Friedman, Houston-based Debra Barrera, an early John Currin, Pruitt and Early, anonymous watercolor found in attic, Nicola Tyson, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alan Sonfist, Pajama, the Glassell School's Will Michels, James Welling and Paul Cadmus. Bottom left: A testimony to art-world friendships, the entranceway features a sculpture by Cady Noland entitled Rotten Cop and an early painting by Glenn Ligon. A heavy-hitting conceptual piece, the Noland seems like a senior citizen's walker until the viewer looks more closely. Note the coded palette of the painted floors, established in the foyer: "White marks the public spaces, black for private," Arning explains.. Bottom right: Collecting mania. In the chockablock living room, three early works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, above an edition by Robert Gober. On mantle, an early sculpture by Sean Landers with paintings by Erik Hanson and Thedra Cullar-Ledford from her ongoing doll portraits. "I took my 'Art Since 1945' class with Robert Rosenblum — one of the great art historians of the when he was lecturing due to his intimate familiarity with them and their work. It was never Jasper Johns for long, it would be 'Jasper.' It was never Robert Rauschenberg, it was 'Bob.' I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life — I wanted to be able to call — Bill Arning NOVEMBER | PAGE 55 | 2012 Arning: I never want to forget how lucky I have been to know the greatest artists of my generation and to have been with them for their breakthrough moments. I have a Cindy Sherman film still because she was on the board of White Columns and donated it to raise money for the space, and at the end of the event it was unsold. She had her first solo museum show at CAMH. I recently got a chance to tell her that I landed here, and she congratulated me for ending up at such a cool museum. I came to have a Fred Tomaselli drug portrait of myself because Kiki Smith and I were editing an issue of Bomb Magazine and the theme was stars. Fred had been doing these constellation diagrams where every star was a drug — both licit and illicit — that people take to get through life. Fred had been doing these drug portraits of different people, and he said we could include one in the magazine, as long as he could do mine. I had a rock band for a number of years, so when he gave me the drug list, I could check off an awful lot of them. When I saw the finished portrait, I felt funny at the thought of a stranger having it, so I asked him if I could buy it. At the time they were inexpensive. Last year at the ADAA Art Fair in New York, James Cohan Gallery had a wall of them. I ran into a prominent NYC artist who was also the subject of one of the portraits at the fair who had not bought his at the time. He very much regrets it because they have gotten to be quite valuable now. It had really been quite a while since I had seen John Currin and his wife, the talented sculptor Rachel Feinstein, but they were in Maine this past summer on the last night that Mark and I were on Mt. Desert Island, and we got a chance to catch up with them over dinner. I had not seen their kids, who were marvelous. I bought my Currin painting from his studio when I visited very early on in his career, and it is from the first yearbook portraits that he finished right before his White Columns show. RESTORATION TALES. Arning: Our house was apparently the party house for the Audubon Court neighborhood for decades. A couple named Stan and Paul lived in it, and the interior was quite eccentric, shag carpet in the master bath. When we bought it, a friend pointed out that from the top of the stair landing, you can see seven different wallpapers, and none were subtle. Johnny Langer at Source History in Galveston gave us a paint history of the house and said, "This never happens, but there have been five complete paint jobs on the house in the last century, and no one had one bit of imagination. There are five shades of white. You can do any color you want on the house, and it will be historically acceptable." We went for a color called nightshade on the exterior