In the Frame for July 2012

This month’s In the Frame was written by a work experience student at the Archives & Museum. The picture chosen will be on display in our new exhibition British Outsider Art, which runs until 3 November. Readers may also be interested in a major Madge Gill retrospective, curated by Bow Arts and on display at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow until 23 August. For more information on the exhibition, visit Bow Arts. The student writes as follows:

This picture using pen and ink on cardboard depicts what it says on the tin, a ‘Woman in Elaborate Clothes and Bonnet.’ It is completely in black and grey/cardboard colour and kind of disturbing. The woman’s elaborate clothing is made up of patterns and shapes thrown chaotically together. Also, despite the diversity of the patterns and shapes on the clothing, the woman’s face is incredibly plain and petite in comparison.

I think the reason I find this picture disturbing and confusing is because it doesn’t make much sense. It’s all mangled together and has no order or structure.

I think this style could possibly reflect back onto Madge Gill’s own life, as she went through many tragic and chaotic events in her lifetime such as being an illegitimate child, sent to an orphanage when she was nine, loss of one of her three sons, giving birth to her still-born daughter and loss of the sight in one eye.

This drawing is just one of hundreds Madge Gill drew throughout her life. When she died her son found hundreds of drawings in the boxes underneath her bed, all drawn on things like postcards and cardboard because they were cheap. She spent most of her time after she lost the sight in the left eye in bed just endlessly drawing, knitting and embroidering. She most likely did this as an escape from the hard and tragic life she had lived.

 

Woman in Elaborate Clothes and Bonnet - Madge Gill (1884 – 1961)

Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 3

( continued from previous post )

Our volunteer continues:

The retrospective reinterpretation of Kusama’s work by critics was fuelled by an interest at the time in psychiatric art in Japan and Kusama became a poster child for ‘Outsider Art’. However, whilst she fits into this category if you consider her ‘untrained’ due to only 18 months studying nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in her early twenties, Kusama has never been excluded from influential artistic circles, but was in fact an extremely active participant in the artistic infrastructure dominating both New York and Tokyo at the times she lived there. A morbid fascination with pathology along with the simplified idea that madness is a direct source of creativity often leads to individuals being too enthusiastically labelled as ‘outsider artists’. Art critic Abe Nobuo has made the telling point that although hallucinations may provide rich sensory experiences for artists to draw from, it is not enough for the artist to merely reproduce the hallucinatory experience: the artist needs to connect their own personal experience of the hallucination with specific artistic intent, for that painting to become a work of art. ‘The greatest appeal in Kusama’s work is that she seizes the devilish malice which comes sprouting up from the unconscious darkness, and turns it into art.’¹

Some of the more revealing interpretations of Kusama’s work come from looking at her artistic intentions in relation to the current artistic climate. The current exhibition of her work at Tate Modern doesn’t focus on her mental health as much as does the publicity surrounding it. In fact the only reference to her as an outsider within the exhibition is in Walking Piece, a series of colour slides of Kusama from 1966 dressed in Kimono and flowers wandering the streets of New York, which explores her position as a female, Asian artist in a predominantly white, male New York art world, exemplifying a theme of patriarchal defiance which runs throughout her work.

The Yayoi Kusama exhibition continues at Tate Modern until 5 June 2012.

¹ Cited in G. Borggreen, “The Myth of the Mad Artist: Works and Writings by Kusama Yayoi” in Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies vol 15 (2001), pp. 39-40.

In the Frame for April

Two weeks or so ago we were pleased to welcome a year 9 student from a local high school on a work shadowing placement here at the Archive and Museum. We are grateful to her for taking responsibility for this month’s In The Frame. She has chosen Mountain Range by ‘Spicer’.

“The first thought I had when looking at this painting was that it was a reflection. In the middle to the left are several curved brushstrokes that, to me, give the impression of a water droplet hitting the surface of a smooth, still lake. After further inspection of the painting, I realised that perhaps it could be an indication of wind, or maybe just some random brushstrokes inserted by the artist.

“We don’t know much about this painting, except what we see, and the same goes for the artist. The artist (male or female) was named ‘Spicer’, and painted this in January 1950. Otherwise, mystery surrounds this piece of artwork, which is probably why it appeals to me.

“The whole effect is quite unexplained – we don’t know where this place is or if it was just imagined by the painter. The different shades of blue and purple give an aura of the unknown, almost like a mystical land. It almost looks like, with a stretch of the imagination, that there is a castle sitting on the middle mountain. The flowers too (though I confess that the extent of my knowledge of botany goes no further than watering my mum’s garden) look like there is something different about them.

“But the main reason I chose this painting is the use of colour. To begin with, the colours used are quite dark, which could reflect this person’s state of mind, but gradually change towards the top of the painting. I especially like the strips of orange and bright blue behind the mountains, since they compliment each other and stand out.

“The sky has a small range of colours – mainly indigo, lilac and peach – but is the most beautiful part of the whole painting. The clouds were formed very well – not too abstract yet not just a load of shapes – and give an impression of dusk, twilight or sunset. The other colours used in the painting are either quite bright and loud, or depressed and miserable, so the sky offers an alternative and a mix of both.”

 

Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 2

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Our volunteer writes:

When considering Yayoi Kusama’s art, most critics choose to focus on her lifelong pathological hallucinations. However, Kusama began reflecting on her work in relation to her illness only after returning to Japan in the 1970’s and her subsequent admission into the psychiatric hospital where she continues to reside. Earlier self-analysis showed sharp insight into the creative processes governing her work. During her time in New York she was acutely aware of current artist trends such as Abstract Expressionism but disassociated herself from such trends in an effort to cement her individuality as an artist. She identified childhood visions as inspiration for some of her most dynamic work such as her Infinity Net series, but related these creative sources to her current belief in Mysticism and attributed artistic power to the harnessing of the dark and demonic side of experience, to listening to the undercurrents of life and identifying things that hide in the shadows: “My mind now searches for all attractive splendours which unfold from the shadow of the obscure world.” However, she didn’t illustrate these beliefs with any personal psychopathological experiences. This changed dramatically after her hospitalization in 1977 when accounts of her mental health began to dominate her own artistic story, and renewed the interest of art critics. This switch to a more psychological account of her work could be due to treatment she was receiving making her more self-aware and better able to articulate her past experiences.

( to be continued )

Yayoi Kusama – Outsider Artist? 1

The moving story of artist Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong battle against nightmares of obliteration – hallucinations of polka-dot patterns pervading and threatening to destroy not only her, but her family, her home and her world (a battle she fights precisely by deploying her artistic talents to depict these patterns) – is one often told in exhibition publicity, frequently under the rubric of the widely-supposed yet unexamined assumption of a link between ‘madness’ and ‘creativity’. In 2009 our Archivist saw Kusama’s work in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and London’s Hayward Gallery, and came away impressed by the scale, accessibility and sheer joie de vivre of her output. The photograph below is of Dots Obsession, as displayed at the Hayward. Now that her work has returned to London (in a retrospective at Tate Modern), the ‘myth of the mad artist’ is likely to put in a renewed appearance, at least according to one of our volunteers here at the Archives & Museum, who has written a review of the exhibition.

( to be continued )