by Damien Spiccia
Among the standout documentaries at this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival is The Art Whisperer, an intimate portrait of Ginny Williams, the trailblazing art collector and patron who unapologetically cut through art-world snobbery while fiercely championing overlooked artists, particularly female ones.
We sat down with the film’s director Flemming Fynsk to discuss Ginny Williams, her legacy, and the making of his moving tribute to a true original.
How did you find yourself involved with this particular story?
“I was called by a producer friend of mine, who was in Sedona in Arizona, and he was working with a spiritual leader in Sedona. And he said, they want a film made about this leader, are you interested in doing that? I was curious. So they brought me out and it quickly sort of became clear to me that it wasn’t for me, they wanted to control it. I could have made an amazing film if he had allowed me to make the film I wanted to make, but they wanted propaganda. But Ginny’s daughter, Elle, was a friend of my producer’s friend, and we met in that house in Sedona, and we just started to talk, and she told me about her mother, who was already in her late eighties then. Elle wanted something made about her mother because she had made a significant dent in the art world, but Ginny was very private, so she didn’t want to be filmed or anything like that. It took a couple of years for Elle to orchestrate it, but Ginny and I ended up in the same house together, visiting Elle. That’s when I started to record just our conversations because she wanted to make films. She wanted to make a film about female artists who were 80 and still working. So, we started to work on that, but I was curious about her. I saw how she interacted with art, she called out bullshit when it was bullshit. And that’s how it all sort of started.”
Your approach really cuts through the pretentiousness of the art world. In your interviews with gallery owners and curators, did you get a sense that she was a divisive figure?
“Some hated her. Mostly because they were scared of her, because she was so blunt and direct. She was unapologetic about what she knew and what she felt. Some people didn’t want to be interviewed. I think she was sort of like, I think you call it Vegemite – you either hate it or love it. Most of the people I spoke to, they admired her and they respected her. But she could be rude. When I spoke to Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim, he said, ‘I’ve never had anyone like that on the board who would just cut through the bullshit and get to the point.’”
From the interactions in the film, you seemed to have a great rapport with Ginny. Did it take a lot of time to build that trust?
“It took a long time because even though I was fascinated by her, she would ask me, ‘what are you doing? What are you working on?’ And she would feel my insecurities, and she’d call them out. She would see through your masks, and that can be scary sometimes. It gives me goosebumps even to say that because I’ve just never met anyone who’s willing to be that present all the time, with anyone. She had this aura about her that was like a vortex sucking you in.
“Sometimes it was like both a whisper and a shout between us, because we were made of the same fabric. But then, as she started to trust me and we started to connect, we just bonded. She knew that she was close to dying. I became like a confidant to her, where we talked about death. It was almost like the mother I never had.”
She got into art collecting comparatively quite late in life, didn’t she?
“Yes, at 60. She was married to Carl [Williams], who kind of invented the cable network in America. She helped him, but she was in the background, she played the dutiful wife, and she was kind of happy with that role until he started to have affairs. He was honest about it to her, and she said, ‘well, I don’t wanna set that example for my daughter.’ So, they divorced. He kept all the money, so she didn’t have anything in the beginning. And she was a photographer, but she never really trusted that feeling. So, when they divorced, she bought a photography gallery that was closing down. And then one thing led to another, because she has that eye, she knows what is good. If she found something somewhere, she would value that as much as a Frankenthaler or whatever. She was way ahead of her time on so many levels..”
When she talks about women in art, she claims that she never meant to be a pioneer, that she just likes what she likes. Do you think she’s being coy there?
“She was a complex person. Of course she knew what she was doing. On a deeper level, she saw the inequality in the art world, and she wouldn’t have that. She absolutely picked the women, and she would make sure that other people did too. She would place them in in the Guggenheim, and the Hirshhorn, so people would take them seriously. Like Kusama, for instance, very early, before she became anything, she picked Kusama. Or Anne Hamilton. She saw the potential and collected stuff that couldn’t ordinarily be collected because it had live snails in it, or was site-specific.”
At the beginning of the film, she point blank asks the viewer – what is art to you? So, I put that question to you. What is art to you?
“It’s an interesting question because it brings me full circle to now. I grew up never knowing what art was. But now, I’m very clear about what art is. Art for me is a desire to express something and doing it. Whatever it is, painting, a film, writing a poem, whatever. And I feel that [Ginny] got that, maybe even without knowing it, because she responded to when somebody was trying to express something that was true to them, something that you can’t even put words to. She wouldn’t compromise on anything. She was absolutely true to that expression, and that, for me, is art.”
The Art Whisperer screens at the Revelation Perth International Film Festival on Friday 11 July at 4.30pm. More information here.
