Personal affects: T. J. Wilcox curates.

Marie Antoinette kept us waiting. Not the queen herself, of course, but an elusive photograph of a little-known portrait by her friend and favorite artist Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. Other images of this most regal sitter would have been far easier to secure. But no other portrait, no matter how grand, could boast having been painted from memory seven years after the queen's beheading as a gift offered to her only surviving child by an exiled painter who had once depicted the mother-daughter pair in, shall we say, decidedly happier times. And as such, this royal portrait was the only one that would suffice for T.J. Wilcox's artist-curated "exhibition" for Artforum. He explained, "I'm fascinated when a single image can represent both a private interior experience and a greater collective one. This painting was literally something that could remind a woman of her deceased mother, but it also stands for the collapse of an entire era and social system, so it works on the personal and epic levels at once."

The same could also be said for many of the apparently unrelated pictures on these pages, whether Ludwig Bemelmans's assured line drawing of his intimate, society decorator Elsie de Wolfe, or Rirkrit Tiravanija's half-scale model of Philip Johnson's Glass House, situated in the Museum of Modern Art's beloved sculpture garden, another of Johnson's designs. With the recent passing of the architect, not to mention MOMA's physical reinvention, the image has accrued new layers of meaning, which make all the more poignant Wilcox's fantasy that the bespectacled nonagenarian might have gazed down on his country house from his city house in the museum's adjacent tower.

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Fantasy is an operative word here, fueling the artistic universes of a Joseph Cornell or an Edward Gorey. But ultimately it is Wilcox's own fantasies--his rapturous affections and projections--that unite these images more than any of the scenarios unfolding within them. Such an intense regard animates his short films as well, which he has strung together in his recent series of "Garlands," making unlikely bedfellows of Chopin and Pamela Harriman (to say nothing of her real bedfellows, Frank Sinatra and Aly Khan, among other inamorati). Working with such loaded, recherche allusions is not without its risks. Wilcox acknowledged as much in reference to the images that close his project here: "A friend once described it as the 'cringe factor'--you know, an empty bed or someone standing on the beach at sunset. But these works rise above that and carry the weight of their cliches without dissolving into them, evincing instead the poetics they were intended to convey." Such is also true of Wilcox's project in these pages--and of his art. In both, his deft juggling of cultural registers manages to conjure a sentimental world while slyly eluding the pejorative connotations of that word. For every lonely Prince Ludwig there is a swaggering Smithson; for every sultry Marchesa Casati, an impossibly ecstatic Divine.

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"The New Order album cover and the Monty Python image speak to the sort
of trickle-down art that reached me in the suburbs as a teenager. The
combination of Fantin Latour's classicism and the tiny color bar on the
album cover suggested that canonical images weren't set in stone, that
the history of images was in fact something malleable, something that
could be re-created in the present."
--T. J. Wilcox

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"I'm interested in documentaries, and these images represent unusual
ways to approach that form. In the white screen of the Sugimoto
photograph, we're seeing the light of an entire projected film, which
evokes all those that have transpired before it in this spectacular
space. Brassai's photographs seem so sophisticated and glamorous that
it's easy to forget the obscurity and even criminality of his subjects.
The dignity with which he treated them was a radical gesture for which
we should still be grateful."
--T J W

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"These images are all homages to personal histories that have been
expanded on and embellished to make great works of art. Growing up as a
teenager watching Andy Warhol films, I imagined I would come to New York
and it would be peopled with Ludwigs and Edies, and we'd all go to
places like Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel."
--T J W

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"Robert Gober's posing as a bride in the newspaper is such a brilliant
and subtle way to insert himself and his belief system into the larger
context of the everyday world. It's moving that as a gay person you
could wish just to be taken for granted as a bride and thrown out with
the trash."
--T J W

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"We all have to construct an outer persona to be able to move through
the world. Most of us find some way to do it, with greater or lesser
degrees of success. It's the rare person who decides that rather than
simply making it through the day, she's actually going to star in her
life."
--T J W

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"I admire artists who develop a language and a body of work so fully
realized and detailed that when we enter into it, we're entering into
an entirely unique universe. Joseph Cornell is a great example, someone
who created a personal poetics from source material that doesn't seem as
if it could ever have contained such subtlety."
--T J W

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"These works are filled with a pregnant air of memory and nostalgia. In
its fragmentary nature, Matisse's Piano Lesson looks like childhood
remembered. You don't recall all the details of the room, but you
remember the way the light looked coming through the grillwork on the
balcony. You remember the metronome, the way the sound filled the space,
and the quiet diligence of practicing the piano."
--T J W

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