The artist Piotr Uklański keeps Val Kilmer's decapitated head in a cardboard box in a corner of his new studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. On the other side of the room stand a dozen stacks of cowboy hats in various states of distress. One hat looks like it was trampled by a horse; another looks like it was trampled by a horse with the wearer's head still inside. "They're all real," says Uklański, who was born in Warsaw in 1968. "I got them on eBay. Farmers all across the country sold me their grandfathers' hats. It was important to find ones that looked authentic."
Despite appearances, the head is not, in fact, authentic. The prosthetic noggin, like the cowboy hats, served as a prop in Uklański's debut film, Summer Love. In the film, which just kicked off a seven-week run at New York's Whitney Museum, Kilmer plays a character known simply as the Wanted Man. It's not a speaking role. When the movie begins, the Wanted Man is already a bloated corpse. The rest of the cast is filled out by actors who speak English with heavy Polish accents. The film has the happy distinction of being the first-ever pierogi western.
On a recent afternoon Uklański greets me at his studio wearing a pink-striped shirt unbuttoned to his belly. A puppy races around the stacks of hats and then dives into his lap; nearby sits his girlfriend, Alison Gingeras, the superstar curator who has hung art at the Pompidou and the Guggenheim and was hired last summer by the French billionaire François Pinault as chief curator for his collection and his two museums in Venice. She is also the mother of Uklański's one-year-old daughter.
He glances at Gingeras for support while speaking, and it's clear that their professional lives intertwine. Not that they've ever tried to keep this a secret. In 2003 the couple created a stir when Uklański bought a three-page spread in Artforum to exhibit a glossy close-up portrait of Gingeras's bare derriere—he called the piece GingerAss. "I wanted to confront the visceral feeling in the art world that such a relationship between an artist and a curator is morally dubious and completely taboo," says Uklański, before lapsing into a bit of artspeak: "I look for work that has a capacity to have its interpretation change depending on the context in which it's presented." For her part, Gingeras came to her boyfriend's defense in the magazine. "Uklański likes porn," she wrote. "It offers a clear-cut formula for how to create visual titillation using banal subjects and clichéd techniques."
There's more of that at play in his ongoing series The Joy of Photography, which features the most rehashed clichés of the medium: a sunset, a stand of trees, the Manhattan skyline. The idea is to rediscover beauty in images so universal that they've lost any distinguishing features.
