Yayoi in Wonderland

One day after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern. I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated and I was restored, returned to infinity, to eternal time and absolute space.

Yayoi Kusama,The Anatomic Explosion Happening, Central Park, NY,1969

In the manifesto for a 1960s Central Park Happening, Yayoi Kusama called herself “the Modern Alice in Wonderland.” Like Alice, she possesses a vivid and unruly imagination, and at age eighty-three continues to make bold and compelling works in a wide range of media. Even through the shifting cycles of the art world, she has never strayed from the purity of her own vision. For Kusama, art is a creed and in Infinity Net, the Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, she discusses her life and undying commitment to her art practice.

Kusama is best known for her polka dot and netted surfaces inspired by the hallucinations that began in her childhood. Kusama sees her work as a kind of therapy, a process through which to face and conquer her phobias. She enacts a gesture she calls self-obliteration as a form of liberation:

White nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness. By the time the canvas reached 33ft it had transcended its nature as canvas to fill up the entire room. This was my ‘epic’ summing up all that I was. And the spell of the dots and the mesh enfolded me in a magical curtain of mysterious invisible power.

Kusama grew up in a well-to-do Japanese family with a cruel, oppressive mother and a philandering father. She attributes her mental disturbances in part to the stresses of her dysfunctional family. Kusama’s mother discouraged her daughter’s art making so vehemently that she even destroyed all of Yayoi’s materials. She wanted her daughter to be a proper Japanese girl with the simple goal of marriage. Kusama did not bow to her mother’s wishes and instead threw herself fully into her creative pursuits.

In 1957, at age twenty-seven, Kusama left her home in Matsumoto and made her way to New York after a stop to exhibit her work in Seattle. Even though her time in Japan offered little exposure to the art world, she was savvy enough to know she needed to get to New York to be taken seriously as an artist. She describes years of living hand-to-mouth, sustained only by her nearly uninterrupted studio sessions. In the fall of 1959, her hard work paid off with her first solo New York exhibit.

Kusama in her New York studio, c.1961 Image courtesy:Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / © Yayoi Kusama

Kusama became a player in the NY art scene and crossed paths with many art stars of the sixties, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, and Donald Judd who became a champion of her work. She had a ten-year relationship with Joseph Cornell who showered her with love letters and incessant phone calls. Kusama describes Cornell as a devout, poorly dressed misanthrope who lived with his eccentric and overbearing mother. Kusama and Cornell shared many nude-drawing sessions, but never consummated their relationship. Evidently, Cornell had sexual issues stemming from his mother’s frequent lectures about the dangers of “filthy women”.

Kusama had her own problems about sex. She was terrified of penetration and horrified by even the thought of a penis. Her phobia inspired the obsessive creation of phallic soft sculptures that grew to room-sized accumulations.

I began making penises in order to heal my feelings of disgust towards sex. Reproducing the objects again and again, was my way of conquering the fear. It was a kind of self-therapy, to which I gave the name ‘Psychosomatic art’.

Yayoi Kusama, Compulsion-Furniture, Accumulation, 1964

Later, Kusama became well known for her provocative nude Happenings that promoted sexual liberation. The media often blurred the line between Kusama and her work to portray her as a mysterious free-spirited personality. Kusama had no interest in sex and said her band of performers called her ‘Sister’ because to them “I was like a nun – but neither male or female. I am a person who has no sex.”

Kusama managed to pursue her work with an entrepreneurial zest despite her bouts of mental illness. In the mid to late 60s, she managed and produced a series Happenings around the globe. She used her studio to present the participatory body-painting project, the Nude Studio, the KOK social club and the Orgy Company also known as the Kusama Sex Company. All of these ventures aimed at sexual liberation through communal experience.

Kusama designed clothes for her Nude Fashion Company with the aim of bringing people together, literally with the Couple’s Dress, a sleeping-bag-like garb to be worn by two people at once. She also designed the Party Dress that featured cut out holes at the breasts and genitals to facilitate easy access for love-making. Kusama also made films, wrote poetry and fiction, and for a time published a newspaper called Kusama Orgy.

Kusama Presents an Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty Vol. 1, #2

While Kusama enjoyed noteriety though out the international art scene, Japan was not always wiling to embrace her wayward daughter. The Japanese media portrayed her as shameful exhibitionist and her family was mortified by all the bad press. In a letter, her mother wrote:

The fact that you have become a national disgrace is an insult to our ancestors, Yayoi, and I’ve just returned from the cemetery, where I went once again today to ask for their forgiveness. If only you had died of that bad throat infection you came down with as a child…

Even without the support and encouragement of her family, Kusama spent sixteen incredibly productive years working in New York. In the early 70s, her struggles with health issues became overwhelming and in 1973 she returned to the quieter life of Japan. In 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she still lives today. She constructed a studio across the street from the hospital where she works daily. In the years since her return to Japan she has mounted exhibitions around the world including the Venice Biennale in 1993, countless museum exhibits and her recent retrospective at the Tate that moves to the Whitney this week. As always, Kusama continues to grow her enterprise into new realms. Penguin recently published her illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and just this week, Louis Vuitton unveiled a fashion collaboration with the artist.

For Kusuma, the highest goal is total freedom in art and life and we can be assured that she will continue to tread steadily upon her innovative path.

I have been painting, sculpting, and writing for as long as I can remember. But to tell the truth, to this day I do not feel that I have ‘made it’ as an artist. All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials. Overhead is a distant, radiant star, and the more I stretch to reach it, the further it recedes.

The Very Eye of Night

Jancar Gallery has consistently supported the work of women artists working in a feminist vein. Their current exhibition continues this legacy with a group of works inspired by Maya Deren's final film, The Very Eye of Night. Deren's 1958 work features inverted images of dancers moving through a starry sky like satellites on a celestial journey. Bodies glide and hover as their ghosted forms overlap and mingle. Deren used the Milky Way to evoke common themes in her oeuvre, including the primitive, mystical power of the natural world, and the psychological and somatic expressions of human life.

Like Deren, the artists in Jancar Gallery’s thoughtful exhibition explore temporality, poetic movement, and mortality through symbolism and repetition The show includes works by Anne Colvin, Dorit Cypis, Micol Hebron, Sofie Bird Moller, Tricia Lawless Murray and Elizabeth Tremante.

Down the Line, a video by Sofie Bird Moeller, features clips borrowed from several filmed black-and-white versions of the Invisible Man dressing and undressing. Moeller choreographs movement across the screen as clothing appears to float and twist of its own volition. Fabric is contorted through the body’s gestures into hovering veil-like forms that infer ghosts, or other harbingers of death. The frequent cuts and shifts of space destabilize any coherent narrative contained in the original films and develop a dreamscape composed of recurring images.

Like Moeller, Anne Colvin uses found footage to create an uncanny and haunting work. Her magenta-drenched video, The Study, offers an eerie scenario as a group of figures move languidly in reverse through a shallow space. Excerpted from Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time, the footage maintains the surreal tenor of the original as Colvin heightens tension through tight repetition. Colvin’s actors are trapped in a loop that evokes the terror of a perpetual trauma, not unlike slow-motion clips of the JFK assassination.

Still from Anne Colvin's The Study, 2009

Revers-ability (diptych) Dorit Cypis’ two large-format photographs show the artist standing with her camera in a frozen posture of turning away. The artist is dwarfed by the vastness of space as she poses for the eye of the camera as well as the eyes of the viewer. The space of the photograph is a duplicate, but the body is a mirror as each image shows Cypis’ torso arcing in the opposite direction.

The mirror and the eye also play a significant role in Tricia Lawless Murray’s Solar Annulus, a work comprised of three dioramas contained inside square wooden boxes. Like Duchamp's Étant donnés, the works can only be viewed through a small peephole. The viewer is forced into an intimate position with Murray’s erotic and fragmented imagery of the female body and nature. She uses mirrored surfaces and spinning mechanisms to disorient the optical experience of each work. The third box incorporates a small video screen that features a silhouetted woman waving a cloth into the night wind. She appears weightless much like the dancers who float across Deren’s dark sky. 

front of the exhibition invitation

Deren has referred to her use of time as vertical, a poetic structure where space and time may interleave simultaneously without the constraints of the linear narrative. The works in The Very Eye of Night pay homage to this structure and to Deren's visionary exploration of the intersections between the internal and external movements of the body.

In the still of the night we believe we will be held - until then we we hold our own bodies stiff. The legacy of psychoanalysis allows us to see that bodies can be endlessly remade, re-choreographed, outside the traditional architectonics of human reproduction. Psychic health is in part contingent upon the body finding its rhythm in words and time. Choreography and psychoanalysis would do well to join in a conversation about the body's time.         

--Immobile legs, stalled words: psychoanalysis and moving deaths, Peggy Phelan   


The Very Eye of the Night is on view at Jancar Gallery June 30-July 28, 2012                                                                       

Pleasing the Crowd

...Therefore, art-amusement must be simple, amusing, upretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehersals, have no commodity or institutional value.

The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. 

-Manifesto on Art / Fluxus Art Amusement by George Maciunas, 1965

Alison Knowles, Proposition #2, 1962

In 1965, George Maciunas penned Fluxus-Art-Amusement, a counter to what he saw as the alienating and elite nature of art in the 1960s. He called for a breaking down of the barriers between art and life with the utopian goal that eventually art would be made by and consumed by everyone. Fluxus artists generated works using simple materials and everyday experiences to short-circuit the complexity and pretentious nature of high art. For instance, Alison Knowles’ Proposition #2 (1962) engages everyday props of the kitchen as she performs a common cooking ritual: “Make a salad.” Proposition #2 could be performed for a small audience or for hundreds and always ends with the communal act of sharing food.

While Fluxus artists did call for “play” in art, they still maintained a rigor and dedication to conceptual and creative goals. Their work is accessible, but not “dumbed-down” for a mass audience. Years ago I encountered the friction between art and entertainment while discussing the performance of a John Cage piano work with a group of undergraduate students. It was a lengthy work and we all struggled with how to speak about it. One thing that kept coming to the surface was the issue of pleasure. In the process of our discussion, it became clear to me that the difference between art and entertainment is the level of the audience’s engagement. In entertainment, the audience can remain passive as the work washes over them. Art requires committed engagement, in the case of a Cage work, active listening.

My students chafed against anything that wasn’t immediately “entertaining” and I realized as a teacher, it was my duty to help them learn to experience and think about challenging works of art outside of their comfort zone. I lament that hasn’t been the goal of many recent museum exhibitions. Carsten Höller’s 2011 show, Experience, transformed the New Museum into a fun house, complete with a giant slide, mirrored carousel and over-sized mushrooms. This notice on the museum’s website echoes the amusement park nature of the exhibit:

Please note: Visitors must be a minimum height of 48 inches to use Untitled (Slide) or Mirror Carousel. Visitors under the age of 18 must be accompanied by an adult. Due to increased attendance, after 4:30 PM, we cannot guarantee that visitors will have time to use Untitled (Slide) or Giant Psycho Tank. No refunds or return tickets will be issued.

 New Museum installation of Carsten Höller’s Mirror Carousel

While the exhibit promised “experience” it seemed the most pervasive audience action was that of waiting in line. There was the long waiver-signing queue before one even got to wait in the extensive line for each “ride” (just like a regular amusement park). There were also patrons stumbling around the museum wearing Upside-Down Goggles. Being trapped in the elevator with a group of them felt like being the only person at the party who wasn’t stoned, as the space echoed with gasps of “whoa man, everything is upside down.”

patron's experiencing upside-downness

The Höller exhibit was the most well attended show in the New Museum’s history. The same is true of Art in the Streets, MOCA’s 2011 show on street art, which attracted 201,352 visitors. MOCA’s very recent Transmission LA: AV Club, featured a multi-media food and arts extravaganza “curated” by Beastie Boy, Mike D and sponsored by Mercedes Benz. In a video interview on Nowness, Mike D says he wants the show to be a “grown up theme park, a six flags for adults.” His “curatorial” vision hinges on what he likes, what would make for cool home décor if you could get all of your art and music buddies together to reinvent your space.

While I like the Beastie Boys as much as the next person, it’s shocking and embarrassing that MOCA's Director Jeffrey Deitch turned the Geffen space over to a completely inexperience curator. It’s an obvious attempt to put on a crowd pleaser with the added bonus of music celebrities and a car show (Benz premiered it’s new Concept Style Coupe at the show).

It is important to get people into art museums, but content shouldn’t be sacrificed for the immediacy of entertainment. We already have lots of escapist distractions in theme parks, movies, malls and the like. Museums need to maintain their role in preserving works of cultural significance and should be investing in education, in finding ways to make challenging works accessible to a wider audience.

Punching the Clock

Dawn Kasper, This Could Be Something if I Let It

Much attention has been paid to Dawn Kaspers’s recent Whitney Biennial project This Could be Something if I Let It. I was curious about the work after having seen Kasper perform countless times in Los Angeles. I’ve always found her work to be a bit self-indulgent and ambling, as was the case with Meditations for a Fucked Up Emergency. For this work, Kasper moved all the objects from a storage room into the main gallery space as she and her collaborators broke into operatic vocalizations or recited banal diatribes. While it may have made for a nice conceptual gesture, it was excruciatingly tedious to watch Kasper carry and drag objects for nearly an hour. To complicate matters, Kasper was second in the performance line-up, so all of the “stuff” had to be put back into the storage room before the third performer could present her work.

While Meditations for a Fucked Up Emergency certainly could be called a durational performance, it is a stretch to call This Could Be Something if I Let It a durational work. For the project, Kapser moved the contents of her studio and domestic life into the Whitney. The work is an extension of a project she began in LA called Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment, where she inhabited an art space and turned it into her temporary studio.

According to the Whitney website:

Regarding the 2012 Biennial as a full-time job, Kasper is spending every day of its three-month run making new work, holding studio visits, and playing music while the Museum is open to the public.

There are many precedents for art as life as work projects Hsieh, Abramovic, Ukeles and countless others have executed durational performances in the realm of real-life. What these artists’ works all have in common is a structure, a focused dedication to the frame and action that is ritualized through containment.  As a durational performer, the first rule is commitment to your own plan of action. If Kasper is working “full-time” at the Whitney is it ok for her to “take personal days” or arrive late? The day I visited the Whitney, Kasper was absent from her work. While the video interview on the Whiney site shows Kasper interacting with patrons in a bustling open space, I was met with a cordoned off studio piled full of boxes, containers and supplies.

  Dawn Kasper, This Could Be Something if I Let It

It turns out her absence was not an anomaly as can be evidenced by this bit from Marissa Perel who penned a two-part interview with Kasper for the Art 21 Blog:

 3:00 pm: I show up and wait. I spend time observing the piles of artwork, stacks of DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, shelves of books and equipment, photographs on the walls, videos playing on monitors, a drum set. 

…I start to panic; could she just not show up to her own show? Impossible, if she’s here, she is going to have to come up eventually.

Is it enough for an artist to name and claim a distinction for their work? Is Kasper’s work durational if she says it is? Does any one question the validity of the work outside of that distinction? There is a real crisis all over the genre of performance as an “anything goes” attitude replaces a sincere engagement with the power of the body and ritual. Far too often the only critical discourse on an artists' work is lifted directly from the artists' own statement. In contemporary performance, there needs to be a much deeper critical questioning about both form and content. 

Sweating Blood

Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood, Super-8 color, 1973

...it is not a matter of the text remembering the body; it is rather the body that doubles itself in the text--it makes the ink bleed, in-corp-orates words. Moreover, the flowing that occurs here does not move in one direction, neither from the body to language nor from language to the body. Rather words and blood move across the seam that cuts origin from destination, inside from outside, literal from metaphoric, life from death, oblivion from memory; they move back and forth across the body's boundary. They go in; they go out. They tear and wound. They slip and run. It is in that seam and what plays across it, and not in the archive and what it saves, that the body is remembered.

--Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost

The name of this blog is borrowed from a 1973 work by Ana Mendieta. In the work, Mendieta sits silently as blood from a large cow's heart drips slowly over the surface of her face. The blood marks and becomes the language of the work as Mendieta's mouth remains mute. She is inside ritual and we bear witness to her solemn and sacred action. Body based performance evokes a powerful link to primal and primitive body knowledge. With this blog, I hope to address works that engage the body, language, and ritual. After years of bemoaning the lack of critical inquiry in contemporary art, I'm finally taking the leap to bring my voice to the subject. More soon...