#first time using a canvas that’s not square in ages this feels illegal

[sleepytownzzz]

party supplies

[caveartfair]

6 Works That Explain Yayoi Kusama’s Rise to Art World Stardom

Yayoi Kusama with recent works in Tokyo, 2016. Yayoi Kusama Seattle Art Museum

Can a single polka dot change the course of art history?

Yayoi Kusama thought so. After arriving in New York in 1957, the artist began applying the motif to paper, canvas, walls, and even her own naked body. “Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody!” she recalled of her early ethos, in a 2012 autobiography. “I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot!”

Indeed, Kusama became just as influential as that of her modernist, male predecessors. Her early “Infinity Net” paintings, begun in the 1950s—monochromatic canvases filled with thousands of tiny dots—paved the way for Minimalism. She helped pioneer Pop, performance, and installation art, too. Her sculptures burst with accumulations of plastic flowers and soft forms resembling phalluses. (She’s hinted that both Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg borrowed motifs from these works.) Her happenings brought dancing, nude dot-covered people to busy corners of New York, including Times Square. And her installations continue to place visitors within mind-bending, mirrored, and very Instagrammable environments that resemble endless celestial expanses.

Kusama has said that her artwork is an expression of her life, and particularly of her obsessive-compulsive neuroses. “My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots,” she once wrote. In 1977, she entered a Tokyo sanatorium for treatment of her compulsions, and has been living and making art there ever since. She’s been known to work in 50- to 60-hour stretches, a trance-like process she’s called an “indescribable spell.”

Today, at 89 years old, Kusama continues to create—spreading her ever-accumulating dots, and the sculptures and paintings they cover, around the world. Below, we explore her monumental influence through six deeply irreverent, important works.

Infinity Net (1979)

Infinity Nets 1960, circa 1979. Yayoi Kusama Sotheby's

By the time Kusama left her native Japan for the United States in 1956, she’d already begun her practice of dot-making. Covering sheets of paper with miniscule, repetitive marks not only fed her love of art, but also helped her cope with the stress-induced hallucinations she’d experienced from a young age. (She’s described these as being a result of her mother’s violence and vehement disapproval of her artistic aspirations.) “By translating hallucinations and fear of hallucinations into paintings, I have been trying to cure my disease,” she explained in a 1999 interview.

After writing to Georgia O’Keeffe from Japan and receiving an encouraging response, Kusama relocated to the U.S., first landing in Seattle and then New York. She was quickly accepted by the city’s avant-garde community of artists, who admired her rejection of the action painting popularized by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. “I wanted to be completely detached from that and start a new art movement,” Kusama has said.

Instead of adopting the dramatic marks of Abstract Expressionism, Kusama made all-over compositions of a different, more restrained sort. She called these increasingly large, white-on-white canvases painted with tight-knit patterns of dots “Infinity Nets.” In 1959, they became the subject of her first New York solo exhibition and created an immediate sensation, inspiring a rare rave review from then-critic Donald Judd, who’d later be crowned the king of Minimalist art.

It was these paintings that created a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and, as writer Grady T. Turner has pointed out, balanced “avant-garde aesthetics” and the “hallucinatory images” that consumed Kusama’s own mind. In a 1961 article titled “Under the Spell of Accumulation,” Kusama described the impulses behind these canvases: “I gradually feel myself under the spell of the accumulation and repetition in my ‘nets’ which expand beyond myself, and all over the limited space of canvas covering the floor, desk and everywhere,” she wrote. Over the course of her life, Kusama has continued to make “Infinity Nets.” While they range in color and scale, they all retain the repetitive marks of what she refers to as her “obsessional” practice.

Accumulation No. 1. (1962)

Left to right: Installation view of Yayoi Kusama, Ennui, 1976, Accumulation, 1962-64, Red Stripes, 1965, Arm Chair, 1963, in “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017. © Yayoi Kusama. Photo by Cathy Carver. Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“My sofas, couches, dresses, and rowboats bristle with phalluses,” Kusama once said succinctly, when describing her sculptures from the 1960s. One of her first three-dimensional works, Accumulation No. 1., grew from her “Infinity Net” paintings. “I painted infinity nets day after day, and while doing so, the whole room appeared to have been covered with nets,” she recalled. “So I created pieces by covering sculptures with nets.”

But the forms she began to affix to found objects, like armchairs and ladders and shoes, weren’t so much nets as protuberances: soft, stuffed conical forms that looked more like fields of waving seaweed or forests of penises. Kusama went on to name this series of objects “Compulsion Furniture.” She later described Accumulation No. 1. as an embodiment of not only her obsessive-compulsive disorder, but other psychological forces, too, like sexual anxieties. “As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see,” she explained. “The armchair thickly covered in phalluses was my psychosomatic work done when I had a fear of sexual vision.” Interestingly, her friend (and rumored lover), Judd, helped her stuff these forms.

But Kusama’s early sculptures went beyond symbolizing her psychological state. They also influenced the burgeoning Pop art movement, which used household objects and the repetition of images and forms to explore consumerism and mass production. Oldenburg, in particular, was likely inspired by Kusama’s softening of hard-edged, everyday objects; in 1962, he, too, began making soft sculptures—sewn, stuffed, giant reproductions of deli sandwiches and toilets.

Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (Floor Show) (1965/2016)

Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (Floor Show), 1965. Yayoi Kusama "Yayoi Kusama" at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

In 1965, Kusama erected the first of her now-famous immersive environments. Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field (Floor Show) fused her interests in repetition, sexual exploration, psychology, and perception by filling a roughly 25-square-meter mirrored room with a thick carpet of soft, twisting phalluses camouflaged in the artist’s signature polka dots. Visitors were encouraged to enter the room and interact with the total environment, where their reflection repeated endlessly against a field of odd sensual forms so pliable and lumpy, they looked alive. The experience, as curator Catherine Taft has written, created a kind of “psychosexual encounter with one’s own body and image.”

Kusama saw the room as the manifestation of a “long-cherished dream” to be sublimated by her own art. There, she entered a space that existed beyond everyday life and psychological trauma: “Like Alice, who went through the looking-glass, I, Kusama, (who have lived for years in my famous, specially-built room entirely covered by mirrors), have opened up a world of fantasy and freedom,” she later wrote.

Other artists took note of the heady effects of Kusama’s first Infinity Room on the viewer—and on the avant-garde 1960s art world. Shortly thereafter, Lucas Samaras created his own mirrored environment. “He did it again,” Kusama remembered saying when she saw the work. “I hope Lucas pursues the path of creativity and pain inherent in artists from now on, instead of following what Kusama has done.”

Since 1965, Kusama has produced over 20 “Infinity Mirror” rooms, including one for the Japanese Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. In recent years, they’ve become the major draw of Kusama retrospectives, transporting viewers into a kaleidoscopic black hole of shimmering dots, while also providing the perfect backdrop for a selfie sure to inspire lots of likes.

  Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967)

“By obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the infinite universe,” Kusama explained in 1999. In other words, obliteration offered the artist an access point into a more fantastical, unrestrained world. She explored this idea in this 1967 film (her only one), made with Jud Yalkut. In it, she transforms her surroundings and her own body with polka dots, all set to a psychedelic soundtrack.

In the short film, Kusama is something of a ringleader, bringing people, animals, and environments together by anointing them with little circles. She rides a dotted horse while wearing a dotted cloak; enters a lake, where she covers a canvas with circles; and joins an orgiastic tribe of dot-swathed people. “I paint polka dots on the bodies of people, and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe,” she later wrote in her autobiography. The film points to the sense of freedom Kusama found in repetitive mark making. Here, psychological and sexual liberation is delivered via unfettered, proliferating circles.

A year after she made the film, Kusama began describing herself as the “High Priestess of Polka Dots,” and her SoHo loft as the “Church of Self-Obliteration.” It was there, in 1968, that she officiated a wedding between two gay men (an illegal union in New York at the time). In her church, people were free to do as they pleased. In 2002, for the installation “The Obliteration Room,” Kusama put polka dots into the hands of visitors themselves. Using colorful stickers, they collectively transformed a vapid white room into a warm, colorful sanctuary.

Walking Piece (1966)

Walking Piece, 1966. Yayoi Kusama "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Theory" at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015)

Kusama staged dozens of Happenings during the 1960s and early ’70s. One of the first—and least conspicuous—was Walking Piece. In it, Kusama asserted her identity as a Japanese immigrant and an artist by walking New York’s grey, empty streets wearing a hot-pink floral kimono and holding a faux-flower-adorned parasol. “At home in Japan, Kusama’s preferred mode of dress had been consistently modern. In New York, she would sometimes wear traditional Japanese clothing as a means of declaring her outsider status,” the Whitney Museum has explained of the performance. “The delicate kimono contrasts with and highlights the cruel, commercial, alienating side of the city.”

Over the next several years, Kusama inserted herself more boldly into New York’s public spaces. In one Happening, she went grocery shopping wearing a phallus-adorned dress and matching hat. Her most famous public works, dubbed “Body Festivals,” brought together groups of naked performers whom she painted with dots. They gathered and danced in high-profile, bustling places—like the Museum of Modern Art, Wall Street, or Times Square—collectively asserting their personal freedom and sexuality. Some performances, dubbed “Anatomic Explosions,” also carried stark anti-war messages; in them, Kusama’s collaborators wore monstrous masks resembling the politicians whose policies the artist didn’t agree with.

Pumpkin (2010)

Kusama with Pumpkin, 2010, 2010. Yayoi Kusama "Yayoi Kusama" at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

While polka dots are Kusama’s most recognizable motifs, pumpkins are a close second. They have cropped up in drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations throughout her career. The first of these oddly shaped squashes appeared in a work Kusama made in 1946, a full 10 years before she relocated to the United States and began making the work that would catapult her to fame. It depicted the kabocha—a kind of pumpkin used extensively in Japanese cooking—rendered in the late-19th century Japanese painting style of Nihonga. With typical fervor, she painted the form over and over again, becoming lost in its grooves and bumps. “I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely on the form before me.…I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin,” she later recalled.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, though, that pumpkins reappeared in her work, as a means of fusing abstraction and representation. They filled her canvases with an almost “anthropomorphic presence,” as curator Catherine Taft has pointed out. Indeed, Kusama has described the motif in human terms. “I love pumpkins because of their humorous form, warm feeling, and a human-like quality,” she explained in a 2015 interview. Since then, they’ve become synonymous with Kusama and her practice. During the run of her installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, she handed out little sculptural pumpkins to visitors. More recently, she’s reproduced the vegetable in the form of shiny, massive sculptures covered—yes—in her signature polka dots. One of the largest and most striking versions sits in her native Japan, on an idyllic perch in Naoshima—appropriately, an island completely covered in art.

from Artsy News

[catsynth-express]

MoMA Part 2: Stephen Shore, Thinking Machines, Max Ernst, Is Fashion Modern

Our initial report from MoMA focused on the current exhibition of print and 2D works by Louise Bourgeois. But in November, the entire museum was a trove of intriguing exhibitions – even with the current construction – and today we look at four more of them.

We begin with Max Ernst: Beyond Painting, a survey exhibition built around the celebrated Dada and Surrealist artist’s frequent description of his own practice as “beyond painting.” It does actually include paintings, but also is many early drawings and works on paper as well as his sculptures and early conceptual work.

Ernst first came to prominence as the founder of the Cologne branch of Dada after World War I (in which he served in the German army). Like other in the Dada movement, much of his work was deliberately provocative and low-fi and went outside of traditional artistic practice. One of the seminal works from this early period was the portfolio Let There Be Fashion, Down with Art, which mixes technological drawings, equations and other elements in absurd and non-sensical ways. Despite the tone and organizing concept, some of the individual illustrations are quite beautiful.

In the above page, we see a feminine figure juxtaposed with geometric and architectural elements. It could have easily been one of Louise Bourgeois’ drawings from three decades later! It also reminded me of the composition in some of my photography.

“Beyond Painting” did include paintings, particularly from Ernst’s surrealist period after relocating from Cologne to Paris.

[Max Ernst. The Nymph Echo (La Nymph Écho). 1936. Oil on canvas.]

The hard-edged lines have given way to the dreamy organic shapes frequently employed in surrealism. But Ernst’s renderings have more of a biological feel – there is abundant vegetation, and some elements appear as microscopic life forms but on a human scale.

Despite his reputation as a provocateur within the often dark worlds of Dada and surrealism, Ernst’s work often has a very playful quality, even endearing at times. That comes out most in his sculptures, some of which can even be described as “adorable”

[Max Ernst. An Anxious Friend (Un ami empressé). 1944 (cast 1973)]

This one, in particular, is worth walking around, as there is another figure on the back side.

The exhibition culminates with 65 Maximiliana, an illustrated book co-created with book-designer Iliazd. [Max Ernst. Folio 10 from 65 Maximiliana or the Illegal Exercise of Astronomy (65 Maximiliana ou l’exercice illégal de l’astronomie). 1964. Illustrated book with twenty‑eight etchings (nine with aquatint) and six aquatints by Ernst and letterpress typographic designs by Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd). Page: 16 1/16 × 12 1/16″ (40.8 × 30.7 cm). Publisher: Le Degré 41 (Iliazd), Paris. Printer: Georges Visat. Edition: 65. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of David S. Orentreich, MD, 2015. Photo: Peter Butler. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.]

In addition to Ernst’s aquatint illustrations and Iliazd’s fanciful typography, the book also features a completely invented hieroglyphic script by Ernst. It brings his career full circle to those early Dada books from Cologne.

As described above, beauty and artistic interest often originate outside traditional artistic practices. The exhibition Thinking Machines explores the artistic ideas that emerged alongside early computer technologies as well as the beauty of the devices themselves.

It is easy in the age of ubiquitous, distributed, and often invisible computing that the most powerful computers were singular and central elements of many workplaces and institutions. The Thinking Machines CM-2, made in 1987, both fits in the emerging dystopian future imaged in the era but also collapses complexity to beautiful patterns in the red LEDs against the black cubic casing. Apple has always been known for their design, and some of their early offerings were featured, including the Macintosh XL (successor to the infamous Lisa).

While the machines themselves were works of art, artists immediately saw their potential for exploring new ways of creating – we can only imagine what Max Ernst might have done with these technologies! But we don’t have to imagine with others, such as John Cage. Here we see both the score and record for HPSCHD, his collaboration with Lejaren Hiller that featured computed chance elements and computer-generated sounds on tape alongside live harpsichords.

The intersection of music and technology is at the core of what we do at CatSynth, but we have also long been interested in technology in other arts. The exhibition included samples of sonakinatography, a system of notation for motion and sound developed by Channa Horwitz.

The notation system uses numbers and colors arranged in eight-by-eight squares and can be used to represent music, dance, lighting, or other interpretations of motion over time. The notation and a proposed work were submitted by Horwitz for 1971 Art and Technology exhibit at LACMA – although the proposal for the piece with eight beams of light was included in the catalog, it was never fabricated. Horwitz work was buried beneath the work of male artists and she was not invited to speak or meet with industry representatives collaborating on the exhibition. This led to an outcry about the exhibition’s lack of women, a problem that echoes to this day in the world of art and technology. Fortunately, women were recognized in this MoMA exhibition of early technology in art. In addition to Horwitz, we saw work by Vera Molnár, a pioneer of computer art. In the print below, she digitally riffs on a drawing by Paul Klee.

Surprisingly, MoMA has rarely delved deeply into fashion in its exhibitions. For a long time, the biggest major exhibition the museum held for this medium was Bernard Rudofsky’s 1944 exhibition Are Clothes Modern?. But the museum is revisiting the topic in a major way with the current Items: Is Fashion Modern? a deliberate play on Rudofsky’s original title. The exhibition includes 111 garments and accessories and places them in both conceptual and chronological organizations. There are of course mainstays of fashion such as the “little black dress.”

It is hard to look at a fashion exhibition without thinking “Would I or would I not wear this?” In the above example, the dress on the left is something I would wear, while the one on the right is something I would not (except perhaps as a costume for a film, etc.). But side by side they show a range of tastes and styles and how they shape and reflect our images of our own bodies. The most intriguing design in the “I would wear this” category was this dress from Pierre Cardin’s “Cosmos Collection”. Even if this was intended to represent “the future”, I could see it easily working in the present, whether the present is 1967 or 2017.

[Cardin. COSMOS]

The exhibition did also touch on new technologies and innovations, such as with this dress that uses 3D printing technology.

[Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louise-Rosenberg. Kinematics Dress. 2013. Laser-sintered nylon.]

Of course, not all fashion is “high fashion”, and the exhibit deliberately covered both. There were the ionic baseball caps of the New York Yankees and their evolution over the years (someone had to design each one of them). And even a display of Jewish kippas, ranging from the simple to the whimsical.

I was particularly amused to see the Yankees-themed kippa. It was two “religions” colliding.

Our final exhibition is the MoMA’s large and comprehensive retrospective of works by photographer Stephen Shore. I have to admit, I was not particularly acquainted with Shore’s work, and after touring the exhibition I realize I should have been. In many ways, Shore’s work is photography writ small, often employing simple camera technologies, including a novelty Disney toy camera from the 1970s and Instagram on an iPhone in his current work. And his subjects range from the foment of 1960s New York and Andy Warhol’s Factory to stark rural landscapes.

[Stephen Shore. New York, New York. 1964. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/8 × 13 1/2″ (23.2 × 34.3 cm). © 2017 Stephen Shore, courtesy 303 Gallery]

[Stephen Shore. U.S. 93, Wikieup, Arizona, December 14, 1976. 1976. Chromogenic color print, printed 2013, 17 × 21 3/4″ (43.2 × 55.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Thomas and Susan Dunn. © 2017 Stephen Shore]

I particularly like the “ordinary” nature of some of the settings, main streets, highways, abandoned booths. The juxtaposition of New York against the small town and rural landscapes feels quintessentially American. Shore was also known for working in color, especially after leaving New York – this was something that wasn’t done so much in the world of art photography at the time. He also deliberately subverted the idea of art photography at times, including in his 1971 exhibition All the Meat You Can Eat, which was composed mostly of found imagery (commercials, postcards, snapshots) in dissonant arrangements that were more theatrical than anthropological.

Shore also did commission work. A few of these took him abroad, including to Israel, where he combined his interests in photography and archaeology. His most recent work fully embraces the modern technology of Instagram sharing – you can follow Shore’s Instagram account – and on-demand printing. The subject matter is varied, often focusing on small-scale or interesting framing of everyday items, but there are also occasional snaps that wouldn’t appear out of place on a tasteful personal account.

It’s not uncommon for me to be inspired to pursue my own work after an exhibition. This was certainly an example, as Shore’s photography mirrors many of own work in the medium, particularly focusing on place and texture, as well as traveling the country to pursue one’s art. Indeed, the inspiration was a bit more poignant because wondering the images I felt that this was exactly what I should be doing. It perhaps that realization that led me to tear up a bit as I left.

MoMA Part 2: Stephen Shore, Thinking Machines, Max Ernst, Is Fashion Modern was originally published on CatSynth

[hollyleedhamfashion]

Architecture (Noun)

 1. the art or practice of designing and constructing buildings.

2. the complex or carefully designed structure of something.

During this week’s session and lecture the topic was architecture and fashion. Architecture is all around us, everything man has made has been carefully designed, thought about and constructed.

Fashion throughout time has structure similar to that of architecture and in some cases has not only been influenced by it but also influences it.

Back in the 18th centaury the lady’s dresses had a large metal frame- petticoat, which held structure of the dresses and skirts much like that of beams within houses, this is my first early example of how architecture and fashion relate.

 Many artists and designers started out as architects for example Josep Font, who is currently the chief designer at Delpozo.

In the past architects such as Gaudi have personally influenced me and my work with the spiral stair cases and stone work he constructed.

As the years and decades passed architecture and fashion have developed in many ways, ‘less is more’ has definitely become a relatable phrase within this topic, clothing has become more revealing and architectural structures have become modern and minimal for example, Zaha Hadid's Modern Architecture(featured as a separate image), the building is a very simple and smooth shape in comparison to the church featured in my blog post, also the contrast between the rusty looking becket building which also juxtaposes the very detailed and classic church design.

This shows a large difference in the stages of development over the years.

 The task set in today’s session was to capture images of surrounding architecture and create a sustainable fashion garment. Taking this into consideration and like stated above I wanted to include a juxtaposed idea, creating something modern and quirky, with features create from old and detailed designs.

 Using cardboard, I created structured square prisms like the steeples of the church, and the large church window section. 

when looking around the building I noticed how the walls had slight graffiti on them so decided to incorporate this into one of the triangles with the word toy encrypted within. this creates a larger sense of the new street culture and how these culprits look at architecture as their own personal (and very illegal) canvas. 

All the images included in this blog post have a very different outlook on architecture and show how times are changing and the development of the architects within the modern day society. Using this as my main inspiration I tried to include a very modern outlook on a cardboard dress with an idea created from an ageing building.

Looking at my design now I feel like there could be more detail added maybe clear sections to replicate that of windows and maybe even sprayed to match that of the rusty looking becket building. However being under a time limit pf 2.5 hours including research time and idea development I feel this design does replicate that of both modern and ageing architecture.

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=architecture+definition&*&dobs=architecture

http://www.archdaily.com/tag/zaha-hadid/