Artist of the Day: Yayoi Kusama.

"My life a dot: that is, one of a million particles. A white net of nothingness composed of an astronomical aggregation of connected dots will obliterate me and others, and the whole of the universe." - Yayoi Kusama

I really wish I'd seen the retrospective of  Yayoi Kusama's work at Tate Modern in 2012, but at that time she hadn't really crossed my radar. It was only when I came across her earlier work in a book in the university library whilst shelving, that I became a fan. I love her organic forms and obsessive patterns that speak of the interconnectedness of everything, encouraging one to forget all limits, abandon a sense of self.

Kusama is one of Japan’s best-known living artists and has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Born in 1929, she has produced six decades of pioneering work. Arriving in New York in 1958, she become part of the avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures.

Kusama’s family made their living by cultivating plant seeds and she grew up surrounded by fields full of flowers. This formative environment has been a touchstone for the artist throughout her life. From her earliest sketches to her most recent large-scale sculptures, Kusama has been fascinated by the plant world.

As a child she had visions and always found a way to draw despite her family's objections. Around the age of ten, Kusama began using polka dots and net motifs in her drawings, watercolours, pastels and oils. She later attributes this to a series of hallucinations, the result of a volatile family environment. At around 20, she left home to enter a class to study nihonga (Japanese-style painting).
Being extraordinarily prolific, Kusama managed to produce enough work for many exhibitions and began corresponding with American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, sending her 14 watercolours. In 1956 she was able to exhibit in America, and her name started to be known.





Archaic Dance Costume, 1953 - Yayoi Kusama



Yayoi Kusama, The Woman, 1953, pastel, aqueous tempera and acrylic paint, 45,4 x 38,2 cm

 

 

 

Column No.1, 1953 - Yayoi Kusama

Though it took a while for Kusama to re-emerge as an artworld celebrity outside Japan, neither her circumstances nor her fragile mental health have curtailed her productivity. Between 1978 and 2002 she produced 14 novels, a collection of poetry and an autobiography. Kusama seems to skip effortlessly through a number of different styles in a wide variety of media.

In her series of Infinity Net paintings, she adopts the minimalism of the white canvas. A close look reveals not the broad-brush approach of artists such as Robert Ryman, but tiny, obsessively repeated loops and arcs of white paint encircling darker-hued specks. A wash of thin white paint has also been applied, creating a soft veil over these coarse, gnarly textures.

INFINITY NETS [MAE], 2013
130.3 x 130.3 cm. (51.3 x 51.3 in.)




Snow Ball in Sunset (Snow Ball in Sansunset), 1953

Kusama’s achievement as a woman artist, coming as she did from a traditional background in a conservative part of Japan in the early part of the twentieth century, cannot be underestimated. It was her own unwavering drive and confidence in her talent that enabled her to forge her extraordinary career from such humble beginnings.



Gisèle Prassinos’s Surrealist Texts.

In 2009, I went to see Angels of Anarchy, the wonderful Women Artists and Surrealism exhibition in Manchester:

http://www.manchestergalleries.org/angelsofanarchy/resources/artists/index.html,

Angels was the first major exhibition in Europe to explore the crucial role that women artists played in the surrealist art movement and featured over 150 artworks, including paintings, photography, sculpture and surreal objects, created by three generations of artists from around the globe.
The 32 artists are some of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century, including Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington. These were radical, revolutionary women whose work still inspires, and sometimes shocks, today.

Since then, I have been interested in tracking down other female surrealist artists and writers, and recently I came across Gisèle Prassinos. She is a writer of novels, stories and poems and she also creates objects - particularly in fabric (I can't find any examples on-line, but if anyone does, please post as if they're anything like her stories,I would love to see them) .

“I never knew how to write a realistic story. I never knew how to draw or to write life as it is. Each line, each word distracts me and pulls me towards the impossible,” writes Gisèle Prassinos in her semi-autobiographical novel Time is Nothing (Le Temps n’est rien).



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Gisèle Prassinos reads to the surrealists. Photo by Man Ray

She was adopted into Andre Breton's surrealist group age 14 as the embodiment of the “femme-enfant.” She had no knowledge of surrealist practice of automatism, but wrote ecstatic literature from her unconscious and continued to produce stories, novels and poems long after her association with Surrealism had ended, proving her true importance as an independent artist. What the Surrealists took for a juvenile ease in exposing the unconscious was actually the first sign of a burgeoning literary talent.

Born in 1920 into what had been a wealthy and cultured Greek family which was forced to move to France to avoid persecution during hostilities between Greece and Turkey when Gisèle was only two (her father had to sell his library of 100,000 books to pay for the journey), she grew up in a difficult but stimulating environment that is reflected in her work.

She released her first book La Sauterelle Arthritique (The Arthritic Grasshopper) in 1935, supported by Paul Eluard’s preface and the photograph, above, by Man Ray. Holding her own among the formidable male personalities of the surrealist group, she was one of two female writers included in Breton’s 1940 Anthologie de l’humour noir.

What makes her writing fascinating is its intense association with the worlds of dream and myth. The construction of many of her stories leave the reader with the feeling of just emerging from a nightmare. Others incorporate the enduring themes and structures of myth, allowing her to create a personal Surrealist mythology.
There are frequently strange lapses in logic that the reader must simply accept as reasonable in Prassinos’s fictional worlds, such as in “Arrogant Hair”:

In the meantime, someone, no doubt, came in. It could be a little girl because I heard her teeth crack the shell of a nut…She looked at me, then, pointing her yellowish hands to the first child, said to me: ‘His hair must be smelly because I have found a small woodchip on the floor’.

The narrator assumes the entrant is a little girl because, apparently, little girls crack nuts with their teeth. Woodchips are indicative of bad smelling hair, and, even more strange, although the smelly hair seems to permeate the entire room, the girl is only made aware of its smell by a visual input. The short stories in this collection often concern children, or are written from a childlike point of view, from which this sort of imaginative logic might seem perfectly reasonable.

Now, Black Scat Books, a small publishing venture dedicated to “sublime art and literature,” offers the first comprehensive selection of Prassinos’s neglected surrealist texts to appear in English.




http://readingintranslation.com/2014/02/25/bleak-fairy-tales-gisele-prassinoss-surrealist-texts-translated-by-ellen-nations/

 

Gisele Prassinos
for the speech of early morning
and its muscular taste of rebirth
even if daylight arriving should choke it
I would open the flowers of poison unaided
and let the last day dawn
I function, fertile
uselessly repeat
cannot offer oblivion
its gone way beyond tears
where are the flowery phrases of yesteryear?

Artist of the Day: Viera Bombová

Exploring cyberspace often means drifting into many cul-de-sacs of distraction where sometimes wondrous discoveries and treasures can be found. Today I discovered the work of  Slovakian Viera Bombová (b 1932)  who illustrated books mainly in the 60s and 70s such as Janko Gondášik (Swine Herdsman Janko, 1969), retitled Die Goldene Frau (The Golden Woman, 1972) in German, a series of Slovak folk tales originally compiled at the turn of the century by Samo Czambel. (Thanks to https://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com for posting about her. Also excited to discover Clive's work - he's originally from Newport where I used to live, and has work in the museum there).

Here is a selection of beautiful mixed media pieces by Viera Bombová. I love the rich and textured colours, elements of primitivism and abstract expressionism, collage and print used to render the dreamlike narratives.



 

Manitou ajándéka. Indián mesék (Manitou’s Gift. Native American folk tales),
Bratislava-Budapest, 1968

The elements of Slovak folk art later,  mix just as naturally in the American Native or Pacific motifs in the folk tale books of the respective people.



Pred Odchodom


 

 “Under this mask, another mask”.  

- Claude Cahun 

 

 

 

Shadow hand IV



The Other

 

The Other calls again.

It wants to turn the inward out,

give shape to things

I would rather remain formless.

I must become a distiller,

get back to the essence,

cultivate a sense of presence.

Resist all definition.

I’II never finish taking off these masks.

 

 

I was excited to discover the work of Gertrude Hermes today while viewing some of the beautiful first editions from the Gregynog Press that was set up by the Davies sisters in 1922.

Five Senses 1934

The Yoke woodcut, 1954-75



Gertrude Hermes (1901 − 1983) THE WARRIOR’S TOMB 1941





Bees. Colour woodcut, 1963









 



Down by the River



 

With thanks to Arrastoneglade www.arrastoneglade.wordpress.com for the inspiration to place text and image together.

To Be is to be Percieved: experiencing Beckett's later works.

The theatre is in utter darkness.

A spot-lit mouth seems to float disembodied on the stage.

Almost immediately the mouth begins a deluge of sound, a stream of consciousness you can barely understand. Like being cornered by a lonely stranger who gushes torrents of words at you as if you can somehow expunge her pain, it is exposing, disturbing, bewildering, yet strangely compelling.

  "Out into this world …" it begins. Did you turn off the gas? Your mobile? "This World …"

Not I, the first of three short plays by Samuel Beckett that I saw at the Barbican on Saturday as part of the month long International Beckett season, is inspired by the woman covering her ears in Carravaggio's Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and the numberless muttering old crones one sees in the streets ("Ireland is full of them," Beckett said). It is the sound of a woman unbridled, telling the truth about how it is to live the fragmented life of women, perpetually having to stitch the pieces together to attempt to make a whole.
 

Footfalls, in contrast, sees the actor obsessively pacing up and down the stage like Hamlet’s father, doomed for a certain term to walk the earth. It has a very musical structure, the walking like a metronome, one length measured in exactly nine seconds. I can still hear the rhythm of her shoes on the boards.
The mother asks of her daughter, May: "Will you never have done? Will you never have done revolving it all?" But May cannot stop walking, searching for something that happened, a secret or suppressed memory, an "it" that remains forever elusive. She may or may not be a ghost and is undoubtedly a haunted individual. The womb as also being the tomb is a recurring theme with Beckett who was very familiar with the work of Munch and May’s pose is reminiscent of Munch’s Madonna.

"another creature there
somewhere there
behind the pane
another living soul
one other living soul
till the end came
in the end came
close of a long day"

Rockaby is a performance poem in the shape of a play. The title refers to  traditional lullaby where a baby's cradle falls from the treetops, again bringing together Beckett's favourite juxtapositions of life and death. As she rocks herself towards death in her mother’s chair, a woman hears a dull, expressionless pre-recorded voice – her own – recount details from her own life, and that of her dead mother’s. One rock back-and-forth per line plays against the recorded narrative, the movements coming in and out of the light. As with Not I, the voice speaks in the third person. Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived. The woman sees no one and is seen by no one. Voice has become her own observer, without whose surveillance any claim to existence would be invalidated. As the woman descends deeper into the depths of her self, the voice gets progressively weaker.

 

Afterwards, emerging, the audience was bewildered, disorientated, yet it was a strangely bonding experience. I found myself walking no where in particular with Cormac Sheridan, a student at Goldsmiths college who happened to come from Enniskillen, the town that hosts Happy Days, the annual International Beckett festival. He told me how he'd seen Waiting for Godot performed in Yiddish, and had taken part in a John Cage piece in the underground caves of Marble Arch.
As we parted with a hug, Cormac said, I might see you there some time, and I said, yes, probably, because somehow, after the magical intensity of the past hour, anything seemed possible.


     


HAPPY DAYS