Tony Shafrazi and the Return of Art

In the small, closely linked New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a way for the situation. The artist introduces the dealer to other artists, and the dealer introduces them to more artists. Tony Shafrazi arrived in New York in the late 1960s, a transplant from Iran from London. Within 24 hours, he met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Through Richard Serra, he was introduced to Zadik Zadikian, a sculptor from Erivan, Armenia, Soviet Union, and was obsessed with plaster and golden leaves. Zadikian became Shafrazi’s first ever artist to be exhibited.

“I didn’t even know he was Armenian,” Zadikian recalled last week. “Later, I was with him for nine months.”

That was in 1978, when Shafrazi brought Zadidian’s 1,000 gold bricks to his new gallery in Tehran. The installation is literally metaphorically – like hope, temple, like absurdity. A few months later, it disappeared and was swept away by the revolution.

“We have lost every brick in the revolution,” Zadikian said.

This week, the two men (now the 80s) gathered and made a comeback, with Shafrazi showing off Zadikian’s work at the Independence 20th Century Fair in New York. Shafrazi has not been exhibited at an expo since 2012, when he showed his work in Art Basel and was banned for breaking the expo’s self-evident rules. He closed the New York gallery in 2011.

At the stand-alone booth, Zadikian’s gilded plaster bricks (made in the United States) echoed Brancusi’s infinite columns and nodded, nodding to his first work with Shafrazi in the 1970s. In addition to Zadikian’s work, Shafrazi also displays a multi-panel canvas that resemble Brandon Deener’s Jiffy Baking-Mix box.

Elizabeth Dee, the founder of the fair, said she had never seen a dealer treat a booth with such intensity. “He was involved in this speech, not anything in his life as a dealer,” she told me last week. “He was involved like an artist, like a writer, like a producer, which shows that more than less care is the reason the market follows you.”

In the private club of Casa Cipriani (not far from the independent walk) in the lower Manhattan with a chic sea-themed hotel and private club, Tony Shafrazi is a known presence and a guest. Every staff member seemed to know the weirdness of the dealer and was fascinated by them. Although Shafrazi now lives in Palm Beach, he is often in New York and always stays in the hotel.

Later last week he called me to meet him at Cipriani’s restaurant for supper. The texture of the room reads as luxurious without being carved into the comics: thick brown purple carpet, polished wood and luxurious upholstered bucket chairs, with gold decorative dining tables draped in almost floor-to-ceiling fabric. The host took me to the table behind the dining room, and when Shafrazi arrived he was dressed in sync with the decorated clothes: a worn pink and yellow striped Oxford shirt, cream shirt pants and a black quil-seater coat, his white hair was characterized by white hair. Behind him, despite the floor-to-ceiling of the restaurant, sailboats and ferries glided over the incandescent river beneath the blue sky.

For those who only know Shafrazi, his return can be shocking. He is remembered in the shorthand: in 1974 the man who sprayed the words on Guernica, Picasso, of the Museum of Modern Art (he was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and quickly paid for $1,000 in bail, partly by Richard Serra); the dealer of embracing graffiti and giving to Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; Impresario sold Francis Bacon to American collectors with the enthusiasm of a revivalist missionary. These memories are real, but partly partly.

Dee thinks his return is a debate. “He is providing art and audiences to art and audiences. Both things,” she said, adding that she believes his presence proves that risks and concerns (not just brands) can still shift the market.

On tea and cake, Tony Shafrazi took me with two detailed brochures that he distributed on his independent booth, which is for every artist. Our conversation lasted over three hours, spanning centuries, and talked about everything from the Byzantine Empire to Elon Musk’s Spacex and Warhol’s approach to painting. He first talked about Memphis-born Brandon Deener, who came to paint after his music career. His independent debut – 16 Jiffy Baking Mix Box, Painted and Repeated – sounds like the Warhol Grid until you stand before it. Then it buzzes, warms, has more rhythm, and is ironic. Deener’s practice is rooted in jazz. His paintings develop like improvisation. He painted paintings by Miles Davis and John Coltrane and layered the graffiti texture with lyrical lines.

“Players created an inspiring melody tune that comes from the particular nature of the instrument,” Shafrazi said. “The sound they came up with, brand new, became signatures.”

Two years ago, Shafrazi took Deener through London and Paris to introduce him to the monuments of Western art that he had never formally studied. “After the trip, he had a vision of history, a larger vision of life, and a more conceived concept of problems art can solve,” Shafrazi said. Deener’s first international solo show “Resonance” on Galerie 75 Faubourg in Paris last year, which included 15 large oil paintings – a blend of sadness, toughness and improvisation. The initial personal channels became the practice of discovery. Jazz runs through the canvas like a heartbeat.

As for Zadikian-he and Shafrazi never stopped being friends, friendship has always been marked by Shafrazi’s persistence. Zadikian told me: “For five years, he has been pushing me” to give a speech like he is now in front of independence. “It will be 100 times better than the PS1,” said Momoa’s affiliated Center for Contemporary Arts in Long Island City. Shafrazi pushed Zadikian throughout the entire construction process made in the United States. “We have five of us working 13 hours a day for two weeks. One hundred and seventy units – I was exhausted,” Zadikian said. “But Tony contributed everything, even hunting for the right pigment from New York.”

Then our conversation (Shafrazi’s and Mine) went in every direction imaginable. It feels a bit like talking to Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut slaughterhouse. Shafrazi slides like a pilgrim, between the past, present and future, usually from sentence to sentence.

“Tony knows art beyond anyone, dealer or artist I’ve met,” Zadikian said. “He talks day and night, constantly, like he came back that day.” For Zadikian, the torrent of those words was a lesson learned. He teaches through stories. The conversation lasted for two or three hours – in the 1950s, you were in Iran for a few minutes, and then in the 1970s, with Rauschenberg. Andy Warhol of the 1960s appeared before jumping to Chelsea in the 2000s and then told without notice the history of Venice as a port city. Everything will merge if allowed. Shafrazi lives in history and refuses to watch from a distance. His identity has always been performative – a dealer who wants to be an artist, critic and historian right away. Admirers hear conviction. Skeptics hear Bluster. To him, they were the same thing.

Since Shafrazi last exhibited at Art Basel in 2012, the market has been through a cycle of contraction and speculation. On the opening day, he introduced Tony Shafrazi’s solo work. Since then, the fair has become increasingly bureaucratic and less dramatic. Dealers rely on strategic positioning and focus on content that sells.

Shafrazi’s famous phrase about Guernica has plagued the art world for decades. Some people think that he means “all lies killing people.” He insisted on the other side, saying that he wrote what he meant. Shafrazi spoke with Jerry Saltz in New York magazine in 2008, describing it as the structure of Finnegan awakening style, a phrase designed to work in either direction and claimed that the bill was about retrieving the painting from art history, about making it “absolutely newest, giving it life.” He said the painting was neutralized by the museum’s walls. He wanted to scream again. Since then, that paradox-the scheduler and the guardian have followed him.

Five years after the incident, he opened his first New York gallery in Soho in 1979, when the community still felt like a rehearsal space for the art world. After dark, the streets are mid-air, the attics are intoxicating and the floors are full of life. In that environment, he brings artists who thrust the city’s pulse on their sleeves: the chalk thread and the urgency of uneasiness, the cartoon color explosion of Kenny Scharf, the collage of Donald Baechler, their intentional embarrassment. He also traded with Bacon and Warhol and switched between norms and insurgents. The opening is not suitable for ease. They are crowded, wet, half-party, half-spectrum. Collectors not only want to buy, but can see the purchase, or just absorb any new energy released that night.

During those years, Shafrazi’s gallery was a stage like the business, playing a fanatical role – with some – that drew some, and others, always making sure no one left without a story. He likes to say that the dealer’s responsibility is to “host important, meaningful exhibitions.” This joke is part of the truth. Among his peers, he was a liar. For his artists, he is a man who sees them clearly, risking putting them in front of the audience.

By the 2000s, the scene had changed. He quit the fair, and his reputation fell into anecdotes: the spoiler, Impresario, The Hustler. But he never stopped. He sold it privately, consulted quietly, and talked endlessly. After his 25th Street Gallery closed in 2011, he began operating under the name of the gallery without walls, a nod to André Malraux’s museum without walls, French thinkers believed that the democratization of art and everyone who reads a book or replica has built a personal museum, which they saw. His return to independence, and his way of thinking about art and life, until the long shift and historical anecdotes, is about understanding his own personal museum.

He never surpassed the myth of the gods. In 2008, his gallery hosted a dazzling conserious collaboration between “Who is afraid of Jasper Johns?”, a distributor Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer superimposed one show on another until the gallery became the Hall of Mirrors. The opening fell on his birthday. After the party, two strippers dressed up as policemen to release the cake ice and performed Guernica perfectly. On a nearby table, the photo of Shafrazi was led in handcuffs. Brown climbed onto the table, handed him a red sugar coat, and shouted, “Write, Tony! Write!” First, Shafrazi followed the word “sorry”. The room was quiet. Then, with a pause that seemed to extend forever, he added another: “No!”

When I asked about the feeling of showing with Shafrazi again, Zadikian paused and said, “It’s very strange to restore the past.”