the collaboration
by Arthur Aronstein
The war between art and love has reached a new impasse thanks to a collaborative exhibition by virtuoso power couple Majid Raheem and Celine Beauvoir—but whether this new ground brings peace or escalation to this conflict has yet to be seen.
Raheem (35) and Beauvoir (32) met as peers in opposite expressions: both young visionaries, Raheem’s breakout teakwood carving Echoes of Ancestry sold for 6.2 million just three months before Beauvoir’s touchstone surrealist revival Woman on the Strand auctioned for 8.1 million at Sotheby’s. Their coupling made sense as two stars who saw each other clearly in the same limelight. And the public waited years—first patiently, eventually begging—for them to channel their creative energies toward one vision; it was all but certain that this love they created, what seemed the greatest achievement of both their storied careers, would propel them into collaborating on the greatest project that either of them thus far made. To illuminate their story for we mortals looking up.
For six years this demand was either avoided or outright laughed off, until last February, in the form of a mailing list announcement, the news came that these requests—this pining—could finally be put to rest. Starting that summer, the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum would play proud host to what quickly became the most anticipated exhibition of the decade, solo or otherwise. These two giants, at the height of their creative and personal lives, would be uniting as artists with an entire museum as their canvas; these two artists, who showed us so much about form, innovation, imagination, were finally going to teach us about Love.
As bad memories tend to last longer than good, many won’t forget the disappointment they felt among the crowds winding up the spiral rampway on opening day. Pieces of My Past, a title revealed for the first time above a terse description that read My life, our story, disappointed people in more languages than ongoings at the U.N. that day. Patrons were surprised to find that, instead of a mutual showcase of each artists’ signature strengths put toward the same projects—a nursery of little art-babies the two birthed, nourished, and reared to maturity—they were greeted by a heavily separated showcase that had Raheem’s sculptures on the right side and Beauvoir’s portraits on the left. What shocked them, though, was not the unexpected curation of the exhibit, but its contents.
The exhibit boasted a whopping, record-breaking 217 depictions of human genitalia, the entire selection of original pieces on display, spanning modes and traditions from interactive film to reinterpolated medical documents, Renaissance to Romanticism. The vision, as plainly inferred from the names and dates associated with each piece, was simple: each artist set to the task of depicting the private anatomy of each individual (or individuals) they had slept with, before or during or in secret of meeting each other, in whatever form they saw best fit to express it. There were giant marble vulvas, impressionist fungal stalks with colorful throbbing veins, clitorises crafted with coils and still-life circumcisions. Patrons surveyed these works with hands over their children’s eyes, jaws slack, none stopping to look at the painstaking detail invested in each one.
The controversy of the exhibit did not reside solely in the reaction from the public; it was in the aftermath of how the two artists received, responded to, and ultimately allowed the exhibition to change the trajectory of both their lives and legacy. What went all but unobserved through the exhibit’s debut was the fact that, after a full headcount of the displayed works, the phallic depictions outnumbered the yonic ones by the totally-not-insignificant number of 119-98, a disparity that was of course uncovered through the careful survey of Raheem himself. “It was embarrassingly noticeable!” he shouted to her, echoing in the cavernous ceilings of their Gramercy Park apartment. Soon, the reviews came out, followed by the think-pieces, leading to a worldwide dogpile on the museum, the artists, the entire industry. The whole thing served to exemplify the follies of modern art and its players: that everything everyone thought about artsy metropolitan yuppies was true. That art was just a playground for their own intimacy.
For the next month the exhibit—along with the iconic museum that played its host—would be unceremoniously closed down. People who allowed the whisper of trend to bring them to its doorstep were turned away without explanation, the last remaining employee a security guard. But if they remained observant walking away, it’s possible they could’ve spotted one of the flyers plastered on walls and streetlamps for blocks in its vicinity, highlighter-yellow casting calls for women aged 18-99 that inquired for aspiring and experienced vaginal models to feature as subjects in the world’s most famous sculptor’s most controversial exhibit. And, since this is New York City we’re talking about, more than enough people stopped and looked and tore off a slip to help bump Raheem’s number to one more comparable to Beauvoir’s. Raheem was spotted leaving Via Carota with a different woman nearly every night that month, the caveat for inclusion being that their encounter had to be real, his memory had to be of a person and not of a model, and therefore applicants were more signing up for a Date-An-Artist sweepstakes than they were a conventional modeling gig. By the end of that month, though, Pieces of My Past was ready for its grand re-opening, featuring an additional 25 yonic sculptures for the public to contemplate over.
It was not that Raheem had more sculptures than Beauvoir did paintings that bothered her; the quantity, of course, mattered less than the quality. Indeed, if she was going to get honest about it, she’d say that her paintings of future NBA Hall of Famers and NYC political moguls earned more worthy examination than her husband’s new additions, women that he essentially picked up off the street. Yet achievement is never so praised in the art public as intention—something she has had to learn and relearn all too many times in her short life as an aesthetic darling. The hordes of new viewers, brought to the museum by the highly publicized narrative of Raheem’s ‘comeback,’ spent more time on the left side of the museum because there was now a story behind it: the guy who defied public humiliation and regained his manhood by sleeping with 25 women in 30 days, committing each of their genitalia to a sculptural form that captured their individuality with integrity and dignity. People looked at the sculptures not as single pieces but as the assemblage of an idea, a grand display that captured in its whole the story of an aspiration. The paintings—the penises—they were now an afterthought; majority of the museum’s patrons were men, some lacking confidence and others who struggled to contain it, all coming to worship at this shrine to a hero.
Beauvoir, being the innovator she had proven time and again to be, did not see this disparity as defeat but instead as opportunity. There was an energy here—the very kind of subconscious desire and psychological friction that served the foundation for great art—and it was within her power—no, her responsibility—as an artist to capture it. These were not her enemies; they were objects of new artistic material. At the very end of the exhibit, at the top of the winding ramp that defined the building’s unique architecture, Beauvoir set up a booth next to the women’s bathroom entitled Daily Affirmations. Word-of-mouth spread quickly that this was not some kind of hippie-dippy tarot thing but instead a raffle conducted each day to determine which lucky volunteer would have their member immortalized in paint with the rest of the exhibit—after a (often extremely quick) trip to the women’s bathroom, of course. Then the result would be composed live, in front of an audience mostly disappointed that it wasn’t their shape being rendered in her pseudosurrealist style on canvas, the selected candidate often too beset by ambrosia to react to its results. It was fascinating but perhaps never surprising what people were willing to excuse so long as the context was artistic. Kyleigh and Paul Hoover, a newly retired couple from Grand Rapids, MI, couldn’t be happier with their first visit to the city, with Kyleigh describing her husband’s selection as “The ultimate party trick,” the man of the hour reeling behind her with shaky knees and florid cheeks. The cubist rendition of Paul Hoover can be found in section 3B.
Those few that still followed this debacle from a standpoint of genuine artistic interest were clueless yet insatiable to the ways this experiment affected Raheem and Beauvoir. Rumors swirled around the actual status of their relationship—if they could even be considered a couple anymore or if they could be better understood as bitter rivals. They were no longer seen or photographed together, their shared apartments across the city remained dark, and the nature of their actual exclusivity was as open and progressive as labels could describe. Like all great artists copy one another, Raheem responded to Beauvoir by attempting to implement live and interactive elements to his side of the exhibit, yet these opportunities proved in far lower demand than those offered by his wife; women weren’t as willing—if at all—to line up in public for him. Still, each day there would be at least one, so each day there would be a new sculpture, a new portrait.
In their shared inhabitation of the museum, each running their operation from opposite bathrooms on the top floor, neither were witnessed to speak nor even look at each other. Experience and creation, creation and experience. The museum allowed it to continue—allowed the two of them to live there—because never did the public care more about going to one. It would close and those spiral windows would darken and yet the two of them remained in their booths by morning, vacant eyes weighed by dark circles, where or if they slept never ascertained.
It was on one of these nights where, almost inexplicably, the lights in the museum never turned off. The building stayed aglow in amber as it did for corporate banquets and special debuts, events that no longer happened due to its temporary function as a hedonistic battleground, the absence of the muffled, murmured schmooze likely of a certain eeriness to longtime neighborhood locals; instead they heard crashing, slamming, shattering, tearing. It’s hard to say what exactly motivated the discordant symphony that echoed in the swirling atrium that night, but what awaited the opening staff next morning shocked curators and custodians alike. At the base of the ramps, in light that beamed down from the panoramic roof, a pile of broken vaginas and punched-through penises made a vulgar mountain on the floor. If the perpetrators represented average citizens, they would be tracked down for federal property destruction, made examples of as enemies to the very essence of what it means to be human, but they weren’t. For artists, this gesture was viewed in the opposite light. The initial outrage quieted to conclude that this was the culminating act of the exhibit itself—that what they saw before them was part of the artistic vision from the start—the finale they knew would come but never could’ve anticipated as mere mortal citizens. Of course they were always one step ahead of everyone! It’s why they had been elected to the pedestals they sat on, both as individuals and as one, effortlessly perfect and flawed like they reminded everyone to see in themselves. Yes, it did not disappoint. Critics and consumers were gracious to accept the revised narrative of the exhibition’s masterful retrospective execution: a classic from the start. They had been looking for answers even though, as the exhibit demonstrated once and for all, the artist deals more in questions.
What those who made pilgrimage to this final monument didn’t see, however, distracted as they were by the sheer variety of crudeness laid before them, were the two pieces left in the space between the bathrooms on the top floor, spared with ambiguous preference over the ones piled at the bottom. Their survival was assumed as arbitrary, unintentional, two pieces that were forgotten and untitled and treated that way. Pieces that were neither elevated nor much distinguished from those broken on the floor, one a simple wood carving and the other just a spritz of colorful dots, two works together next to each other, totally unspectacular when viewed at a distance.
Photo of Arthur Aronstein
BIO: Arthur Aronstein is a writer from Wyoming. You can find his work in Burial Magazine and Citywide Lunch. He thinks you should check out "welcome to the sunrise suites" and "when my ex-wife dies" from the Blood+Honey archive.