Fragment: Mladen Stilinović

Bad Art Writing has given me cause to explore the darker regions of my hard drive, where I keep finding fragments like this one from mid-2011.

Within the small but extraordinarily fertile artistic milieu of 1970s Yugoslavia, Mladen Stilinović found a means by which to unassumingly and not unamusingly highlight a revolutionary intellectual pretence of staggering — and, I submit, unflagging — absurdity, that of a hierarchy of colours. Even in the most radical of modernisms, red and black had been afforded a status apart, a symbolic value of mythic proportions imbuing a self-belief of historically determined, even messianic, revolutionary inheritance. Pink, meanwhile, was utterly marginalised, too girly, too queer, too impure to qualify as anything more than decorative or pretty. So what does dissolving the chromatic classes do, as Stilinović does? On one hand it suggests that there is a relationship between the two, and that this relationship is direct. On the other it demonstrates that this relationship is disempowered, indeed totally muddled, when the two classes are presented together, that there is no immanent reason for the their role in the absurd hierarchy, that as with all class divisions, inheritance relies for its privilege on a specific set of political associations. And, rather hilariously, these are classes that can have no impact on the form of those political associations — or, indeed, any interest in them.

And there is a footnote to the sentence on red and black:

As hyperbolic as this may sound, the unimaginative decision of ‘the largest radical publisher in the English-speaking world’ to brand its ‘Pocket Communism’ series in precisely these shades speaks volumes for their appeal to the petty narcissisms of the libidinal economy of political economy

Yayoi Kusama: Tenacious beauty

This was the cover story for the July – September 2012 issue of Flash Art, for which I was never paid, despite some persistent hectoring and invoicing on my part. I've been stiffed a lot before, but never by such a big name. Turns out it's had a second life on the internet, surfacing from time to time on social media – you can find it at their website. 

The Obliteration Room (2011). Installation at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Courtesy the Artist and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo. Photography by Natasha Harth.

For a woman of 83, you could say that Yayoi Kusama’s moment has been a long time coming. It’s not that she’s been particularly unsuccessful or insignificant until now, rather that throughout her sixty-plus years of exhibition practice, Kusama has always seemed curiously — fascinatingly — out of step with her times. While associated with numerous developments in international art from the postwar period to the present day, she has somehow eluded shorthand art-historical description as a minimalist, a Pop artist or a conceptualist, a fate that has befallen many of her illustrious friends and contemporaries: Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, On Kawara. For decades this meant that she was commercially overlooked and written out of an art history that she helped construct, while her struggles with the social conditions of her identity — as a woman artist, an Asian artist, an artist living with mental illness — are well documented. But it is arguably because of her consummate ‘insider-outsider’ status, coupled with an astonishing output and a consistently experimental approach to a bewildering array of media across a range of cultural fields, that she has managed to combine popular appeal with art-world credibility. She has achieved the rare position of having both historical and contemporary significance.

And so it is that in the seventh decade of her practice, Kusama’s moment has finally arrived. With a full career retrospective due to open at the Whitney after iterations at the Reina Sofia, the Pompidou and the Tate, on top of museum-scale exhibitions of new work in Australia and Japan, solos with Victoria Miro and Gagosian, regular appearances at art fairs and biennales worldwide, and a much-vaunted collaboration with Louis Vuitton, all taking place in the last twelve months, the artist, and her profile, show no sign of slowing down. Her aesthetic, forged in traumatized post-war Japan and the avant-garde of ’60s New York, demonstrated its extraordinary currency and public accessibility when The Obliteration Room (2011), an interactive work that Kusama had designed for children, became an international Twitter phenomenon in January. While all this is cause for a certain celebration, the degree of public visibility also allows for critical reassessment of the artist and her work, accounts of which have been necessarily partial, focusing on particular periods of her life, most often her furiously inventive New York years, or aspects of her identity, intriguing biography or formidable media persona.

Happening “Love in Festival” (1968). Organized by Yayoi Kusama in Central Park, NY. Courtesy Yayoi Kusama.

In this respect, it is informative to track the various critical frameworks through which the artist’s work has been read. Kusama’s early, modestly scaled watercolors operated within the general discursive territory in which the nihonga (literally “Japanese-style painting”) of her academic training intersected with idiomatic Japanese surrealism, re-emerging after suppression during the ’30s and ’40s, and a fascination for American Abstract Expressionism. Interestingly, two of her earliest champions, Shiho Nishimaru and Ryuzaburo Shikiba, were psychiatrists. On relocating to the United States in 1957, first to Seattle, then to New York several months later, Kusama’s work underwent a profound shift in palette, scale and composition under the influence of first-hand encounters with the canvases of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. During this period, her work tended to be discussed in the typically modernist terms of its formal innovations as it evolved from her iconic net paintings through soft sculpture to installation, performance and happenings. Gradually leaving the art world to embrace street protest, the sexual revolution and popular culture in the late ’60s, tabloid scandal and titillation became the order of the day, before her return to Japan in the mid-’70s found a critical community unable to assimilate her work with the developments of that country’s own turbulent sixties. This combination of popular sensationalism and critical ambivalence has been cited as one of the factors leading to her subsequent mental breakdown, and she faded from the view of the West.

Kusama’s “rediscovery” fifteen years later found enhanced focus on her role as a racial and sexual other in the Green Gallery circle of the late ’50s and early ’60s, with particular attention to the generative effects of her illness on her work. Standard accounts posited her all-consuming nets and especially her trademark polka dots as inspired by and even direct representations of hallucinations suffered during childhood, which were attributed to an unhappy family life. Japanese criticism, on the other hand, has tended to concentrate on the richness of Kusama’s practice, which, by the end of the ’70s, had taken a literary turn, the artist producing numerous volumes of poetry and prose in addition to ongoing work in painting, sculpture, print-making and collage, supported throughout the ’80s by such pioneering Tokyo spaces as Fuji Television Gallery and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Kusama herself has had much to say about her influence on numerous major figures in American art, among them Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg and Lucas Samaras, while asserting her relevance as a contemporary artist and no mere historical curiosity. More recently, her verve for self-promotion, collaborations with fashion houses and merchandisers, and made-to-order works of spectacular scale, have seen her grouped alongside those great marketers of contemporary art Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami.

While all of these perspectives shed light on aspects of Kusama’s work, they are insufficient in isolation to account for the totality of her practice. Nor do they fit together particularly well; in combination, they often reveal more about the position from which Kusama is seen that they do about her art. The picture is further complicated by contextual and historical factors. For instance, Kusama was not the only Japanese avant-garde artist to spend time in the United States in the mid-twentieth century: Yoko Ono had been living in New York with her family since 1952, Ay-O and Tadaaki Kuwayama arrived in 1958, Shusaku Arakawa in 1961 and On Kawara in 1965. For its 1965 survey “The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture,” MoMA managed to conduct studio visits with over 100 New York-based Japanese artists. Kusama also had the singular distinction of being active in Europe as well as the US, through her association with the concrete art and “new tendencies” avant-gardes Nul, Zero, Azimuth and the French Nouveaux réalistes. These connections not only enrich considerations of the optical and spatial complexity of her work; the Duchampian exploitation of artistic persona by Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni and Kusama’s sponsor and collaborator Lucio Fontana offer interesting perspectives on the development of the artist’s image as a recognizable icon. In addition to an exhausting commitment to studio practice, Kusama maintains fastidious control over any work requiring fabrication, as she does with her various commercial collaborations, despite having lived as a permanent psychiatric patient since 1977.

I’m Here, but Nothing (2000). Installation view at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Courtesy Yayoi Kusama.

Given that it features so prominently in her life and work, Kusama’s mental state is worth addressing in relation to her practice. Her illness, which emerged in childhood, has been diagnosed as depersonalisation syndrome, a severe dissociative disorder that can result in episodes of detachment and anxiety, as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Assessment of the relationship between the artist’s illness and her work has shifted over the course of her career, both on the part of critics and historians, and by the artist herself. In addition to the argument that her visual motifs are attempts to picture psychic trauma, Kusama’s work is often thought to be a product of her obsessive disposition, which would account for its repetitive, labor-intensive character, as well as being a therapeutic outlet for her suffering. More recently, however, Kusama has suggested that her condition, at least in its current manifestation, is as much a product of her work, possibly due its proximity to the core of her practice. Whatever the case, illness provides an unstable framework for interpretation.

Nevertheless, there is something decidedly contemporary about the collocation of personal trauma and aesthetic sublime in Kusama’s work, even if her internal suffering manifests only as temporary visual or spatial disturbances in the viewer through assured games of color, contrast, line, light and scale, not to mention uncanny organic and sexually suggestive structures and compositions. Her recent work is most fully realized in this regard, and makes a compelling, if unconventional, standpoint from which to view her earlier production. Frequently participatory and physically or perceptually encompassing, Kusama’s work appears to have long anticipated the politics of spectacle underlying much contemporary museum display, as immersive and interactive art become the order of the day. But for all its phenomenological effectiveness, it is arguably the warmth of Kusama’s work, its little idiosyncrasies, its endearing oddness that causes the crowds and the critics to return to it. In this sense, it is telling that the two artists Kusama cites as most influential on her work are not Judd and Warhol but her early mentor, Georgia O’Keeffe, and her lover of ten years, Joseph Cornell: figures similarly close to the art of their time who ultimately deny easy categorization. The greatness of van Gogh, Kusama has written, lay not in his demons but the “tenacious beauty” of his art. This, then, is an artistic intention worth bearing in mind when taking this moment to look back over Kusama’s vast and incomparable oeuvre.

Foreword: Column 6

Totally forgot I wrote this. From Column 6, late 2010.

Nuts. Almonds to be precise. Almonds in a spa bath. Quoting Andy Kaufman. As you do.

Wilkins Hill have always frustrated potential interpreters, even angered a few, with the wilful opacity of their work, its determination to evade those systems of exegesis that have become heuristic habit. What do the almonds/Kaufman say exactly? ‘Whatever is unknown is magnified.’ The spa bath picks the reference and concurs with the epistemological dictum. And why not? After all, a viewer — let’s say they’re an art critic, always the first audience, at least insofar as the generally accepted topography of the art world is concerned — stands before the object, attempting to render its unknown operation known, only to find that the object refuses to be understood. The garbled, machine-translated, speak’n’spell artist statements are no use; they’re as bad as the work, part of the work. It's an obstinacy that presents itself as unknowability, knowledge that cannot be internalised, or worse: no knowledge to be internalised, nothing to know, pure exteriority of being. It just gets bigger and bigger. Meanwhile Heidegger looks on from his hut, gazing through a distorting field of glass bricks, through whose material opacity he recognises the age-old spinning of the hermeneutic circle, and thinks about getting back to work.

In this sense — perhaps the only sense that might be made of it short of sampling an almond or two — Wilkins Hill’s Windows impersonating other windows, presented at Artspace in March and April of 2010, epitomised the problematics of writing about, around and through art. Thus the necessary partiality, the at times fragmentary nature, of the accounts contained in Column 6. Credit to Andrew McNamara for attempting to tackle Wilkins Hill’s installation for us, but their work only magnifies a condition inherent in every form of creation that exceeds linguistic expression. As with the speech-act, then, perhaps it would be better to follow the voice, a factor that forms an uncanny thread in the works and texts platformed in this issue, which draws on Artspace’s artistic program of January to September 2010. Criticism begins with the act of listening, or, more provocatively, in becoming the voice itself, or of joining it, in discord or harmony, as in Bec Dean’s sensitive and quietly agonistic treatment of Tony Birch and Tom Nicholson’s extraordinary Camp Pell Lectures. Perhaps writing, like speech, is itself a performative act, and necessarily incomplete.

Listening and performing have been crucial to Artspace’s program in the period covered by Column 6, and to point out that they have eluded the issue would be make a dramatic understatement. Though Artspace’s galleries, studios and discursive spaces have played host to elements of the Biennale of Sydney since 1996, David Elliott’s 2010 edition of the event represented the first time that the organisation had been directly involved in programming the relevant content. Artspace, Elliott and the team behind Tokyo’s vibrant experimental art venue SuperDeluxe, particularly its curator Mike Kubeck, put together SuperDeluxe@Artspace, transforming the galleries into a bar cum nightclub that played host to a veritable catalogue of live performers from Australia, Japan, New Zealand and beyond for the entire run of the biennale. In lieu of this publication’s capacity to accurately document the event in all its maverick spirit, conviviality and sonic radicality, we have opted to follow Column’s speculative agenda and commission Sean Lowry’s observations on music in contemporary art that begin this issue.

In recognising further the format’s limitations, the issue also sees greater priority given to artist pageworks as a means of expanding the possible uses of the publication. Simon Denny, Sean Rafferty and Justene Williams have each contributed significant projects to the pages of Column 6, which accompany its textual interventions as reminders of the centrality that artist’s practices have to the publication’s remit, and as exemplary propositions in themselves. Thanks is due to Melanie Oliver for her excellent work in commissioning these pages, and for collaboratively editing this issue from its inception to its realisation. Melanie has worked as Artspace’s Assistant Curator, joining its hard working and committed staff for an intense period within the organisation, to lend a steadying hand while we have been engaged in numerous activities both in Australia and abroad. Her contribution has reinforced the idea that institutions large or small operate most effectively when collectivity is embraced and ideas flow smoothly but rigorously — such is the structure necessary to a base from which a polyphony of voices might emerge.

Introduction: Column 5

Oh, I get nostalgic. Column was a journal that Blair French and I founded for Artspace Sydney, which ran to ten issues published twice yearly between 2008 and 2012. It was a flexible platform – most issues comprised essays commissioned for publication after exhibitions were presented, enabling writers and curators to engage with the material actuality of the art they discussed, alongside texts drawn form our public programming and other projects; two issues published papers from our conferences; while issue 9 was a stand-alone book accompanying the exhibition Burn what you cannot steal. I edited or co-edited the first six issues as well as Burn what you cannot steal, and particularly enjoyed taking liberties with the introduction. This foreword from issue 5 (2010) provides a pretty good sense of our projects, a rather intense program of exhibitions, residencies, conferences, symposia and publishing. I like to think of its reflections on theory as 'thinking in public' (something I also used to call 'embedded criticism') as something of a manifesto for the idea of Bad Art Writing.

Some later issues, recently.

Without wishing to become too repetitive, recent events compel us to observe once again that the socio-economic backdrop for this issue of Column is, as it has been for the past two editions, the ongoing meltdown of the financial system that has sustained the institution of liberal democracy since the dual reformation of market capitalism and Real Existing Socialism at the end of the 1980s. While the market fundamentalists and new moral capitalists bicker in their desperate scramble to shore up their defenses against the emergent threats of sovereign debt and currency devaluation, let us take the time to consider how art and artists are responding to a situation in which the internalisation of the condition of precarity has extended rapidly from individuals to enterprises to entire economies.

Column has never claimed to represent or survey the totality of art production and presentation. It is, after all, a publication whose primary role is to function as a forum for reflection on the discursive activities and contexts of a single artistic organisation and its community, activities that include the publication itself alongside the exhibitions, residencies and public programming activities. The selection of texts contained herein is by and large generated by or otherwise related to these activities, and necessarily takes them as their central focus. However, if certain threads that emerge as the texts, and the practices they discuss, enter into dialogue with one another in the context of this compendium are any indication, then certain shifts are at work within recent artistic practice, which, if not consciously developed in direct response to the economic crisis, certainly confront it in interesting ways.

It is possible to determine from the texts in this issue two key threads that have concerned Artspace and its broader community, which might be summarised in the dual sense of the term ‘autonomy’ as it pertains to art — the question of the autonomy of art as a practice distinct from other fields of human activity; and the political autonomy of the art worker, the degree to which the conditions that sustain the production of art might be determined by its producers themselves. Neither of these concerns is particularly new, and indeed they are common to many of the more nuanced understandings of the art of the past four decades. Nevertheless, it is their contemporaneity, the fact that these areas are being explored at the same moment in time, and in some cases their coarticulation, challenging institutionalised understandings of the limits and social function of art in a singular movement, that constitute fertile ground for theory and criticism, and for further practical activity.

It could even be posited that these practices are already theoretical and critical, not in the sense that they might conveniently illustrate a given idea about art, nor through the active and crucial participation of its actors in debates around contemporary art — an important function of the drive toward self-organisation — but that the works themselves effect sophisticated engagements with the ever-shifting frameworks of making and understanding art. As such they might be described as theory-producing. In testing the limits of what is understood as art, and, perhaps more importantly, of precisely how art is understood, they at once suggest the possibility of transversal exchange with other fields, and the necessity for theory, the act of thinking in public, to constantly challenge its suppositions, and to draw its energy from that which sits just beyond its grasp.

This issue of Column covers a particularly active period for Artspace, encompassing the calendar year 2009 and a very early part of 2010. Aside from Artspace’s regular exhibition program, this period saw a number of major discussion events, including a three-part investigation of organisational and institutional practices within the field of art and its various intersections with the social sphere. Beginning with the international conference Spaces of Art, whose texts comprised the fourth issue of Column, these discussions were extended and refined in the symposia One Way or Another: artist self-organisation in New South Wales and Common Knowledge: collectivity and collaboration in artistic, curatorial and critical practice. Selected texts from these programs are reproduced here. In addition to the Spaces of Art issue of Column, this period also involved the preparation of several major publications that significantly elaborate issues of relevance to the texts contained in this volume: Conceptual Beauty: perspectives on Contemporary Australian Art by Jacqueline Millner; Raquel Ormella: She went that way; and, produced in collaboration with Te Tuhi the Mark, Bruce Barber: Works 1970–2005.

A few introductory remarks are necessary with regard to certain contributions to this issue. The dialogue between Terry Smith and Rex Butler that appears in these pages is an edited and expanded version of a conversation that took place at the launch of Smith’s book What is contemporary art?, hosted by Artspace in November. In order to contextualise the discussion, which referred heavily to the book, and to a lecture given by Smith at the Power Institute the evening prior, we have reprinted a condensation of the ideas in the form of a text that first appeared in October, restoring its original title. We thank Hal Foster and the MIT Press for their permission to do so. The thirty-two-page section devoted to Imprint, curated by Anneke Jaspers with the support of the Arts NSW Emerging Curators Program, was commissioned for Column but also appeared as a self-funded standalone publication. It is intended to operate at once as a site of critical reflection on the exhibition project of the same name, as a forum for the presentation of supporting and developmental documentation, and as an experiment in using the format of publishing as a means of further extending the ideas explored in the exhibition. Finally, it should be noted the contribution of What, How & for Whom (WHW) was not developed as an essay as such, but is the text of a lecture presented as part of the Common Knowledge symposium; stylistically, it was written to be read aloud.

The contingent, performative tone of this last text is perhaps appropriate to the intentions of this publication. The texts and images contained in Column 5, are, as with each issue, reports, documents and analyses of activities that take place in the world, albeit within the capacities of a single institution. They are part of an ongoing process of dialogue and reflection that is integral to the development of Artspace’s artistic and discursive programs.

Žižek has noted of the vicissitudes of the economic crisis that ‘in late Spring 2009 it was “renormalized” — the panic blew over, the situation was proclaimed as “getting better”, or at least the damage as having been controlled (the price paid for this “recovery” in the Third World countries was, of course, rarely mentioned) — thereby constituting an ominous warning that the true message of the crisis had been ignored, and that we could relax once again and continue our long march towards the apocalypse.’ Though the Greek crisis and the panic around the valuation of the renminbi have since intervened, the case remains the same — whatever shocks may come its way, whatever gloomy prognostications are offered by the reformist Prechters, Soroses and Stiglitzes, global capital maintains an extraordinary and remarkably counterintuitive optimism about its own prospects. There is no more concrete illustration for this than the mood at a pub, situated directly behind Artspace, that is frequented by finance sector workers, presumably as a halfway point behind their jobs in Sydney’s CBD and their homes in Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and the expensive apartments in Woolloomooloo’s Finger Wharf. Buoyant during the boom years, often filling up by 3 pm on a Friday afternoon, it fell almost completely silent in the immediate aftermath of September 2008. Slowly but surely, the bankers have returned, and with it a big-spending bravado apparently immunised against each subsequent shock. The lessons of history, it seems, can be forgotten in the blink of a dividend.

The contributions to this issue of Column and the practices they explore, no matter how specialised or episodic they may appear in isolation, collectively propose a thinking that runs counter to this blind addiction to ideology, embracing memory, processes of historical retrieval and enactment, and challenges to dominant epistemologies and hermeneutics as strategies that struggle toward an understanding of the conditions of contemporaneity, and the development of means by which to critically engage them. They are thought experiments made public, movements toward realising the political potential of art and writing, to reflect on, and to compel, action in the world.