View from Keswick, in the Lake District
My time in the UK was split between the timelessly serene Lake District (and former haunt of Wordsworth and Coleridge) and the frenetic expanse that is London. It is the perpetual longing for the both/and that I have come to know as elemental, similar to the paradox captured so poetically in that famous line from D. W. Winnicott: It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found.
Lots of plays, lots of art, lots of time with friends. I’ll offer up a few highlights over the next few days. When it comes to special exhibitions currently on view in London, this is a singular moment in time in that the three biggest shows with the longest lines are all by artists in their final years: Lucian Freud was 88 when he passed away last year, Yayoi Kusama is 82, and David Hockney is 74. All of them are almost dizzingly prolific and tirelessly exploratory. No laurel resting, no slowing down. Very inspiring.
I’ll start at the top. My favorite of the three was Kusama’s show at the Tate Modern. I’ll talk about the other two in future posts.
Kusama has a memorable back story. From a review in the Guardian by Tim Adams:
All art is attention-seeking, but few artists have ever taken their demands to be noticed to the extremes of Yayoi Kusama. Now 82, and resident by choice for the past 35 years in a psychiatric care home in her native Tokyo, Kusama is currently seeing all her wishes come true. Not only has she been granted this obsessive-compulsive 14-room retrospective by the Tate, one of her career-defining Infinity Net paintings sold for $5.1m in 2008, a record for a living female artist.
Success did not come easily. Born in patriarchal and deeply conservative Japan of the late 1920s, even the idea of becoming an artist, as a woman, must have taken a supreme effort of will. To become an artist quite as liberated from convention as Kusama must have felt a lot like the insanity she has always feared – and to some extent nurtured – in herself…
She seems to have been drawn to surrealism, but given it a less playful, more psychologically unbalanced field, an edge perhaps explained by the fact that at the same age as she was seeing her visions, she was forced by her mother to spy on her father in bed with his string of mistresses and geishas. She developed a loathing of phallic images, and an overwhelming fascination with voyeurism.
Her response to these disturbing, formative forces seems twofold: she sought a kind of self-obliteration, covering herself and everything around her with her trademark polka dots – there is, among many other spotted surfaces, a fabulously spacey suburban living room here in which the edges of objects, sofas and tables are blurred by primary-coloured circular stickers, picked out in a psychedelic light. Elsewhere, mirrored “infinity rooms” take these points of colour into more dimensions than the eye can easily cope with. Almost nothing has been immune from Kusama’s dottiness: horses and cats, buses and houses, trees and fields and rivers, she has camouflaged them all. Damien Hirst’s outsourced efforts look decidedly spotty by comparison.
The range in this body of work is extraordinary. One room is full of her early paintings—obsessionally patterned and subtle in the absence of saturated color—and are reminiscent of early aboriginal paintings that use dots to reference the mystical landscape of central Australia. She moves from paintings of minimal tonality to obsessive phallic sculptures, also understated chromatically, to color used in an almost fetishist manner. Colored dotting soon becomes her signatory style but it does not come across as cheesy or inauthentic. Kusama’s work feels like it came from “complete necessity” (to quote my favorite line from Roberta Smith*). I loved every moment of the show.
Not without irony, Damien Hirst‘s Tate Modern show opens soon. A master of marketing and self promotion, his work almost never passes the coming from necessity test. Sure, that’s not the only measure for engaging and compelling art. But it has come to be an issue of increasing importance to me.
A room full of exquisitely subtle Kusama early paintings
A closer view of the painting surface
Phallicizing every object
Wild phallic landscapes as well
Infinity Mirrored Room. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
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* Roberta Smith’s plea for what she longs to see and feel in contemporary art exhibitions is outlined here.
Wow! The Kusama shows looks fabulous. I have never seen the muted or absent color works – just beautiful.
I read the article about Lucien Freud in the current Vanity Fair. You are fortunate to be able to see that show. I appreciate the devotion and determination of his work although I am not as much a fan of his as Kusama’s.
Thanks for reporting in – and for that lovely photo. The English countryside is so lovely!
The phallic riddled furniture looks like it has been under the sea and covered in coral.
In covering everything in her dottiness Kusama has become invisible behind her bold repetitive design. It reminds me of a child playing hide n seek, thrilled with both the hiding and being found.
Another great post Deborah. Thank you. I particularly like your coming-from-necessity test. I look forward to more posts on the subject.
Thanks Nancy for alerting me to the Vanity Fair article. I’ll look for it. I am very much in line with you—respectful of what he accomplished by not personally inspired by his approach.
Diana, great comment. It is very undersea-like. And the childlikeness of Kusama’s work is part of what makes it feel authentic and personal, qualities I value highly.
Thank you Tracy for you kind words. The coming-from-necessity test is elemental IMHO.