Can Rolex’s elite mentors rescue the arts? - British GQ

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How does a brand such as Rolex remake the arts? Simple: it runs the ninth iteration of its landmark Mentor And Protégé Arts Initiative in the teeth of a pandemic. Launched in 2002 as an adjunct to its existing Awards For Enterprise, to expand its philanthropy beyond science and technology, Rolex has gone on to create this global mutual-learning project. But rather than mimic the top-down talent spotting of an art prize, the programme speaks directly to the idea of transmission espoused by company founder Hans Wilsdorf.

Wilsdorf was no stranger to calamities – during the Second World War, in a tacit show of support from neutral Switzerland, he offered watches to Allied prisoners with a note explaining that payment would be taken after hostilities had ended – so he would doubtless be proud of a programme that, right now, is reshaping what it means to be an artist in a world transfigured by a virus that’s laid bare inequalities of race, gender and class.

Wilsdorf, who had no children of his own, bequeathed the brand to a foundation, thereby freeing it from shareholder interference or the meddling of less visionary descendents. Today it is the most recognisable and revered dial name in existence, reportedly producing in excess of one million watches per annum (in common with other high-end watch marques “The Crown” doesn’t reveal its figures).

A healthy position, then, from which to launch a philanthropic programme. But the Mentor And Protégé Arts Initiative takes the notion a step further, evidenced in the depth and rigour of its approach and the acumen of its participants. Just as the transmission of knowledge was central to Wilsdorf’s philosophy around watchmaking, so the Mentor And Protégé programme recognises that art is a continuum, an accumulation of experiences that can and should be shared across generations. Its goal, then, is to provide young artists of exceptional promise and talent (protégés) the space and time to work on a one-to-one basis with recognised masters in their field (mentors).

Here’s how it works. From its base in Geneva, the Rolex Institute assembles an advisory board of practitioners and institutional figures to suggest mentors, while a separate group of “nominators” search out likely protégés based on the chosen mentors’ preferences. Mentors are typically required to commit to six weeks of direct collaboration during each two-year cycle, during which they are expected to work on a project (the rights to which remain with its progenitors).

© Remy Lidereau

The protégés cannot be older than 40 at the conclusion of their respective cycle and cannot nominate themselves; mentors, in turn, must choose, after face-to-face interviews, from a shortlist of three candidates. It’s the due diligence of the advisory board, together with the high bar set by aspiring protégés, that undergirds the whole enterprise and the reason both mentors and protégés find the experience so rewarding. For Rolex’s part, it’s helped build a genuinely global creative community, one that, to date, encompasses 58 mentors and 58 protégés (drawn from 1,200 nominees), chosen by 253 artistic leaders and a further 123 advisors to the programme.

‘It was important when Carrie invited me to create something on my concerns about Covid-19’

Were it only about numbers, though, the initiative would be solely that: a means of telegraphing the company’s mission to disseminate knowledge across a range of disciplines. But the programme doesn’t end there: mentors receive CHF100,000 (£85,000) for their time, while protégés receive CHF40,000 (£35,000), plus additional funds to cover travel and materials. In addition to which, Rolex assigns a senior staffer to each pair to assist with itineraries and planning, ensuring that even though an “end result” isn’t imposed, the conditions for achieving an optimal collaboration are firmly in place.

Unsurprisingly, the artistic heft assembled by Rolex since 2002 is impressive: its first cohort included Robert Wilson and the late Toni Morrison and Sir Colin Davis. Brian Eno, Sir David Adjaye and Sir David Chipperfield have also taken part. Still, for the eight practitioners representing the current iteration of the programme, which was announced in Cape Town in February and includes Spike Lee and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the arrival of the global pandemic has thrown a further curveball into what was already an open-ended assignment. And with travel largely suspended in the first few months of the year, when the very survival of their respective cultural sectors was in doubt, whatever plan each pair had initially put in place needed to be swiftly revised – in one instance resulting in an immediate response to the pandemic itself.

The highly decorated American visual artist Carrie Mae Weems had been expecting to work alongside her Colombian protégé, Camila Rodríguez Triana, on an exhibition she was due to open in Spain in the summer. Instead, with Rodríguez Triana stranded in France and Weems working from her home studio in Syracuse, New York, they collaborated on a series of health advisories designed to run across screens, billboards, posters and shopping bags, the better to get the message out to poorer communities on the front line of the outbreak’s first wave.

“It just seemed to me that we needed to do something about Covid-19 and its impact on black, brown and native people and we had to do it fast,” explains Weems, who drew on an earlier work to create the public service announcements. “One of the key images I’m using is an image I created in 2012 that had to do with Black Lives Matter and the way in which black boys had been systematically targeted by police. I’m using one of those key images as it’s replicating across a number of social positions and the pandemic is simply another part of a social condition.It’s sort of an ecological violence, whereas police brutality is a social violence, but violence just the same.

“Covid-19 has upended some part of our lives but it hasn’t destroyed our lives. If we pay attention to the rules and we develop some rules that we can look at through the lens of art, and we can share these tools we have been granted with our community and our public, we might just be able to get to the other side of midnight.”

Famed for her “Kitchen Table” series of photographs – in which she and others articulated the lived experience of black women – for Weems these tools include performance, poetry, prose and collaboration, the last a distinct discipline she believes aids her narrative and underpins its success. Weems had originally earmarked 2020 to prepare a major show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, where she is currently artist in residence. Due to open next year, it’s based on the idea that the party’s over, a concept she drily accepts could now play “in a number of different ways”. So she’s asking a number of different artists to participate, including her Rolex protégé, an acclaimed filmmaker and artist whose work similarly centres on notions of personal, social and cultural identity.

Stranded on the other side of the Atlantic following the opening of a show in Paris, Rodríguez Triana says the first few months of the Rolex programme offered her the chance to work with her feelings around finding herself housebound in France. “As an artist I know I have the possibility to make visible what is happening in my society, my concerns about it. It was important when Carrie invited me to create something [on] my concerns about Covid-19. That invitation permitted me to leave the shocked state I was in and create something to make visible my concerns about Covid-19 and the hunger of people living on my continent.”

Her whereabouts in flux, and with film and installation projects to complete in Colombia, Weems notes that her protégé’s work has developed a subtext around nationhood, nationality and nativism that wasn’t there when they first met. No wonder. Another overarching effect of the pandemic, in terms of society, has been the growing tide of urgent activism and with it the need for audiences to become less passive, more participatory. So must artists follow suit?

Weems: “I’ve been looking at these issues for a very long time and artists are often ahead of the curve in terms of what’s going on socially, so we are responding very deeply to our moment. But what’s changed speaks to the issues of structures and power. Suddenly cultural institutions are on notice in a whole new way. Historically they represented, for the most part, white men. Some of them have been great artists, some of them have been mediocre artists, but all of them have been represented very, very well in our institutions. And because of this moment they are finally at a crossroads in terms of who, what and how they are going to represent culture and art going forward. I was the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2014. Like a minute ago! So museums are really grappling with where they are. So that’s what is changing, how culture is represented.”

When theatres shut in March, a multifaceted compact of art and craft, audience and actor was rendered mute, with little indication of how or when these intricate relationships might be restored. For Phyllida Lloyd, the acclaimed British director who signed on to mentor the rising star of New York theatre Whitney White, the curtain call was as abrupt as it was challenging. “I had just committed to a big theatre project – three plays – that were going to happen next year and were already absorbing every second of my time. The imposition of a forced sabbatical has been a shock and surreal. But, at the same time, the trouble with being a mentor is making the time if you are working a lot, so being told you can’t work has created space for unforeseen dreams between Whitney and myself.”

‘It’s very rare to have a moment of community with other female directors. It replenished my soul’

Renowned for her ground-breaking reappraisals of Shakespeare as much as her joyous jukebox musicals Mamma Mia! and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, Lloyd professes to only having accepted her role after seeing the particular vision and rigour with which Rolex sold it to her. “Frankly, I felt the ‘after-sales service’ and backup was of such high quality that it became irresistible.” For her part, White, an artistic associate of New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company, was keen to “get off the hamster wheel” and spend time with a leader in her field. “Because the nature of this job is that there can only be one [of us], it’s very rare to have a moment of community with other female directors,” she says. “And I find whenever I’m able to do that my soul is kind of replenished and in this circumstance incredibly so because Phyllida is so extraordinary.”

Fortunately, mentor and protégé had spent time together in London before the March lockdown hit, since when they have convened over Zoom to map out what they might do together. “We are talking about a journey we might want to make,” explained Lloyd, “a personal journey for Whitney that, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and the special onus on us all to understand each other and become true allies, is a journey that I need to go on too. There’s much that we all need to learn.”

Part of that journey relates to the emergent director’s background as a writer, performer and musician and as the daughter of a Jamaican musician, who she only met for the first time in 2009. “I’m talking to Phyllida about my ongoing process of discovering family roots and origins. We’re also talking about the political moment we’re in and how it affects me specifically, so exploring the historical and familial surroundings of that could be quite fruitful.”

While the content must remain under wraps, the context is clear: with the performing arts and, in particular, under- or unsubsidised companies facing what has been described as an extinction-level moment, White and Lloyd are considering what theatre needs to be. And White, whose immersive dramas have received rave reviews, recognises a wider role for her art and perhaps a reckoning for those who don’t explore the new performative landscape.

“I’m actually training myself to be an artist who can be as productive in times of peace and abundance as times of scarcity,” she says, “because theatre is, by its nature, a business of scarcity. I did a little show downtown in New York very early in my career and it was very difficult to keep the theatre at capacity. And I look at some of my colleagues who are also activists and they are speaking to crowds of 5,000. So I’m redefining my relationship to the audience right now, because when you are among people in protests, these people are passionate. Theatre has to be an arena for passion and for political discourse that makes you want to get up out of your seat and into the street. So I’m letting myself let the word ‘theatre’ encapsulate more. And if writing for performance can start speaking to this passion and the needs of people, it would be wonderful to see that critical mass around theatre again.”

When that will be and what form it might take remains unclear as this article went to press. So while Lloyd recognises the importance of the government’s £1.57 billion aid package for the arts, she is adamant that it’s the practitioners who must see the benefit first. “The government bailout is earmarked for ‘mothballing’, but this ignores the real creators, the freelance artists. We absolutely have to get back to performing. It is true that great social upheaval has bred great art, so it’s all about context: being nimble and not being obtuse about how or where you might find your audience. I think it’s ‘Get back to basics.’ Get back to community and probably the street.”

The present cycle of the Rolex Mentor And Protégé Arts Initiative is due to conclude in early 2022, by which time the impact of the pandemic will surely have made its mark on any resulting works. In the meantime, Lloyd is certain of the opportunity it’s afforded all eight participants. “One thing an artist needs is time and what this programme has given us is time to create. And, for me, the lockdown period has been an extremely fertile period of unforeseen time.”

Read More

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How Watch Industry Leaders Are Coping With The Coronavirus 

Samuel Ross And Virgil Abloh On The Power Of Mentorship 

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November 21, 2020 at 01:08PM
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Can Rolex’s elite mentors rescue the arts? - British GQ

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