tag:theconversation.com,2011:/es/topics/gallery-13986/articles
Gallery – The Conversation
2024-02-29T10:01:25Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223939
2024-02-29T10:01:25Z
2024-02-29T10:01:25Z
Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind – Tate show explores the artist’s radical legacy
<p><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono">Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind</a> at the Tate Modern delves into the legacy of the Japanese artist and activist. It covers seven decades of Ono’s art, from the 1950s to the present day, and unfolds in a loosely chronological fashion. The show follows in her footsteps from the experimental music and avant-garde art circles in the US, Japan and the UK in the 1960s.</p>
<p>The exhibition draws its title from Ono’s Music of the Mind series of concerts and events held in London and Liverpool in 1966 and 1967. This makes explicit the crucial role music has played in her development as an artist and activist, and at once attaches and detaches her from the rock ‘n’ roll music context (and shadow) of her late husband, John Lennon. </p>
<p>Ono was a musician in her own right, having studied music composition throughout her life (as well as philosophy and poetry), whereas Lennon had studied art. <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/yoko-ono/exhibition-guide">Ono said</a> on the meeting of their minds: “We crossed over into each other’s fields … from avant-garde leftfield to rock ’n’ roll leftfield. We tried to find a ground that was interesting to both of us. And we both got excited and stimulated by each other’s experiences.”</p>
<h2>Ono’s ‘instructions’</h2>
<p>In 1962, Ono hung 38 sheets of paper featuring a set of instructions, written in calligraphic Japanese script, on a wall of the Sogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo. No artist had exhibited concepts for artworks as artworks themselves before, so the show, Instructions for Paintings, was the first exhibition of conceptual art. Ono elevated art to an intensely intellectual activity, and the concept of art above its physical form.</p>
<p>Ono’s instructions also democratised art, as they triggered the imagination, thought and creativity of the audience who is left to “complete” the works by following the instructions in their real lives. This can be done by anyone, anywhere, at any time, either imaginatively or physically. One instruction entitled Painting To Be Constructed In Your Head reads: “Observe three paintings carefully. Mix them well in your head.” </p>
<p>Ono self-published her book, <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/archive/6/64/20190320203953%21Ono_Yoko_Grapefruit_A_Book_of_Instructions_and_Drawings_2000.pdf">Grapefruit</a>, a collection of over 200 instructions, in 1964. Many of them are scattered across the Tate galleries for visitors to follow.</p>
<p>The Tate show suggests that Ono’s work is a form of “participatory art”, a kind of art that engages audiences in the creative process. But this is reductive. Ono saw her instructions as encapsulations of ideas, and <a href="https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/learn/schools/teachers-guides/the-idea-in-the-work-of-art-2">ideas as stones</a> “thrown into the water for ripples to be made”. </p>
<p>I interpret Ono’s instructions as seeds for the cultivation of the “social imaginary” – an imaginary system of ideas, values, orientations and practices that binds society together. Beyond “creation”, Ono’s instruction project is a catalyst for continuous social change, a process of “construction” that leads to an alternative world. </p>
<p>Her instructions lead to a social balance between the individual and the collective, through reflective everyday acts. These small disruptive acts draw awareness to the fact that society is socially constructed, and so it is down to the power of people’s radical imaginary to change it. </p>
<h2>Ono’s commitment to peace</h2>
<p>For over seven decades, Ono’s radical ideas have contributed to powerful social ideas such as peace, freedom, equality and democracy. Her persistent commitment to world peace is expressed through her conception of art as a radical imaginary act. </p>
<p>Ono’s instructions are <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/2892207133">“meant for others to do”</a>. But precisely what kind of “doing” do they enable? Works such as Shadow Piece – “Put your shadows together until they become one” – and Film No. 4 (Bottoms) – “String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace” – instruct people to play, but to play “with” rather than “against” each other. </p>
<p>Ono’s playful works undermine the systemic causes that drive society’s problems and trigger processes of social imagining.</p>
<p>How do you play an all-white chess set with an “opponent” (White Chess Set, 1966), get undressed under a bag (Bag Piece, 1964), or shake hands through a hole in a canvas (Painting to Shake Hands, 1961) with a “stranger”? This requires working in concert with the other and coming up with a new set of rules – initiating new social relations that lead to radically new modes of thought and action. </p>
<p>Engaging the social imagination can contribute to changing the drives and consciousness of individual people who could collectively change the world – by imagining it not as it is, but as it ought to be. In doing so, they can construct the world they dream of. <a href="https://twitter.com/yokoono/status/1295742125687087105?lang=en">As Ono puts it</a>: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”</p>
<p>Ono’s distinct approach to the empowering social role of art galvanises people in many directions. To discover new constructive principles for creating spaces for critical thinking and artistic experimentation. For knowledge creation and political resistance. And to imagine an alternative world – because to “imagine” is to embark on a process of construction.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabriella Daris received funding from the Getty Foundation, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the British Society of Aesthetics, the British Association for Japanese Studies, the Association for Art History, the British Council, and Kingston University. </span></em></p>
For over seven decades, Ono’s radical ideas have contributed to powerful social ideas such as peace, freedom, equality and democracy.
Gabriella Daris, PhD candidate, Yoko Ono's conceptual art, Kingston University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/221868
2024-02-06T04:27:58Z
2024-02-06T04:27:58Z
Yhonnie Scarce’s glass works are a glistening, poignant exploration of how nuclear testing affected First Nations people
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573368/original/file-20240205-21-p37dyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C8000%2C5329&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cloud Chamber (2020). Blown glass, dimensions variable. On loan from the
TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria. © Yhonnie Scarce</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains themes and references to historical events which may be distressing.</em></p>
<p>Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist, has emerged in recent years as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curates a survey of significant works by Scarce from the last few years. </p>
<p>The exhibition presents a “best-of” for a wider West Australian public who may not be familiar with the South Australian artist. At the same time, it’s an opportunity for Western Australia’s art followers to see a range of works not previously assembled in Perth. </p>
<h2>A translucent shower</h2>
<p>The exhibition is installed across two levels, conjoined through an architectural void that invites spectacle. In this void, Scarce’s glistening Thunder Raining Poison (2016-17) hangs from the ceiling by hundreds of wires.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573614/original/file-20240205-15-cpme8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Thunder Raining Poison (2016-17). Hand-blown glass, wire, metal armature 500cm (height), dimensions otherwise variable. Collection: National Gallery of Australia. Purchased 2016. This acquisition has been supported by Susan Armitage in recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum. © Yhonnie Scarce.</span>
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<p>Scarce’s works are so steeped in the contemporary art idiom that, despite the centrality of glass throughout this exhibition, we might not at first consider her a “glass artist”. Yet in Thunder Raining Poison, and in her two other “cloud” works, Cloud Chamber (2020) and Death Zephyr (2016), the artist draws our attention to the fragility and beauty of the material. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573615/original/file-20240205-24-lnb849.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Death Zephyr (2016) (detail). Hand-blown glass, nylon and steel, dimensions variable. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased with funds provided by the Aboriginal Art Collection Benefactors, 2017. © Yhonnie Scarce. Image © Art Gallery of New of New South Wales 14.2017.a-c.</span>
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<p>Each of these cloud works are clusters of hanging glass yams. This potato-like tuberous root vegetable, which urban-dwelling Australians may not be familiar with, grows throughout the bush. </p>
<p>In Scarce’s aesthetic and material, yams signify death. The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, and perhaps the low lighting, seem to demand quiet in the space. In this silence we hear the gentle chiming of the hand blown yams, reinforcing their fragility. </p>
<p>Hanging in clusters, these clear and black glass yams evoke the dynamism of clouds collapsing into sheets of rain – black rain – falling after the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/maralinga">nuclear bomb tests</a> that were carried out on Scarce’s traditional lands in South Australia, between 1952 and 1963. Born in Woomera, Scarce is descended from the Lake Eyre Kokatha people and the Southern Flinders Ranges Nukunu people.</p>
<p>The works resonate with another Indigenous work in the gallery’s collection: Lin Onus’s installation work, <a href="https://sc.artgallery.wa.gov.au/19900236a-b-maralinga">Maralinga</a> (1990), which depicts an Aboriginal woman and children facing, in horror, a mushroom cloud signified by radioactive symbols. Yet Scarce’s material dialect is much more poetic. </p>
<h2>Nuclear colonialism</h2>
<p>Australian nuclear colonialism is a recurrent theme in the exhibition, with the upstairs gallery including three of Scarce’s Glass Bomb works from the Blue Danube series (2015).</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573619/original/file-20240205-19-sbts2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Glass Bomb (Blue Danube) Series 1, 11, 111 (2015). Hand-blown glass, yarn 18x48x18; 25x60x25; 22x64x22cm. Purchased 2016. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © Yhonnie Scarce.</span>
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<p>Perhaps the most poignant work with this theme is Fallout Babies (2016). Set in a corner space, this work is partially surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a graveyard with the buried bodies of children from communities that were exposed to the fallout from the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/maralinga">bomb testing</a>. The bodies are metaphorically represented by bulbous glass plums, which speak of fertility and promise. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573621/original/file-20240205-27-fvw0hy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Fallout Babies (2016). Blown glass, found hospital cribs, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. © Yhonnie Scarce. Photographer: Janelle Low.</span>
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<p>Hollowing Earth (2016-17) is made of materials quite <a href="https://www.decorativecollective.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-uranium-glass">literally infused</a> with trace amounts of uranium. It glows a luminous green under the black-lit gallery. The glass vessels in Hollowing Earth represent bush bananas, another recurrent bush food in Scarce’s aesthetic cypher. The glass surfaces of many of these voluminous glowing bodies are torn while the glass is still hot and malleable. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573623/original/file-20240205-25-7zt0p1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Hollowing Earth (2016-17) (detail). Blown and hot formed uranium glass, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. © Yhonnie Scarce. Photographer: Janelle Low.</span>
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<p>
<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/as-the-world-pushes-for-a-ban-on-nuclear-weapons-australia-votes-to-stay-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-68337">As the world pushes for a ban on nuclear weapons, Australia votes to stay on the wrong side of history</a>
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</em>
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<p>Bush bananas also appear in the work In The Dead House (2020), a work previously installed in the old mortuary in Adelaide Botanic Gardens as part the <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-meeting-of-monsters-at-the-adelaide-biennial-brings-us-closer-to-our-fears-132753">2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art</a>. Laid out on a vintage mortuary trolley, fragile glass bodies are ripped wide open.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573624/original/file-20240205-27-ntl9ww.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">In the dead house (2020). Hand-blown glass, found mortuary trolley, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. © Yhonnie Scarce. Photographer: Saul Steed.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The work references early 20th century Adelaide coroner, Ramsay Smith, who <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-20/tommy-walker-graverobbing-adelaide-coroner-indigenous-history/12721850">profited from exporting</a> Aboriginal remains to British museums. Smith is notorious for having decapitated the corpses – and the bush bananas echo heads and bodies that have been violently disgorged.</p>
<h2>Moments of gentle beauty</h2>
<p>Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day includes some moments of gentle beauty found in the love of family and tragic ancestry. Both Remember Royalty (2018) and Dinah (2016) belong to stories of trauma, institutionalised racism and inhumane colonial abuse. But these are also moments in this exhibition that actively seek to restore pride that was once brutally taken. </p>
<p>Dinah includes a cropped photograph of the artist’s great grandmother, Dinah Coleman, taken in the 1920s without her consent. She was at Koonibba, a Lutheran mission near Ceduna, South Australia. </p>
<p>As the wall text notes, the photo was quite possibly taken by the anthropologist <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/family-history/family-history-sources/tindale-genealogies">Norman Tindale</a>, who visited in 1924. This suggests it was an anthropological image that subjected Dinah to a dehumanising scientific gaze. Scarce’s cropped photograph of Dinah restores her dignity and humanity. </p>
<p>Similarly, Remember Royalty takes images of Scarce’s close ancestors and enlarges them on fine vintage fabrics. They look out at an audience in 2024, returning their gaze as equals. Not surprisingly, this complex and sensitively presented work was acquired by London’s Tate Modern gallery in 2022. </p>
<p>As with the other works in this exhibition, we have the opportunity to contemplate this work in its raw yet visually seductive materiality, before this and the other works are once again dispersed. </p>
<p><em>Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day is at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until May 19</em>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-sliced-open-radioactive-particles-from-soil-in-south-australia-and-found-they-may-be-leaking-plutonium-161277">We sliced open radioactive particles from soil in South Australia and found they may be leaking plutonium</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221868/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kit Messham-Muir is the Lead Chief Investigator on 'Art of Peace', a three-year ARC Linkage project in partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) and National Trust (NSW) and in collaboration with academics from University of New South Wales, University of Melbourne, University of the Arts London and California State University. Art of Peace receives a Linkage Project grant (LP210300068) from the Australian Research Council over three years (2023-2026). He is not involved in any way with the curation or exhibition of Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day at AGWA.
</span></em></p>
The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, coupled with low lighting, seems to demand quiet in the space. In this silence, you hear the gentle chiming of hand-blown glass.
Kit Messham-Muir, Professor in Art, Curtin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222229
2024-02-05T17:23:04Z
2024-02-05T17:23:04Z
What makes something ‘cute’? Inside the exhibition defining the phenomenon
<p>Standing at the entrance to Somerset House, I noticed <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/368549">girls</a> – and irrespective of age, they can only be described as <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1363460717736719?casa_token=0P-RD37lxjsAAAAA%3AS55azMh3qGwHzmyG305duhZYV_YKsmKalL8ASl3qVf702XGPDrKHgEncKcBShyA0ly5ii370zvPuYg">girls</a> – dressed head to toe in pink, bows and frills, from their elaborately curled hair to their Mary Jane platform heels. </p>
<p>Glittering and adorned with stickers, <a href="https://doi.org/10.21159/nvjs.12.05">cute plasters</a> and whimsical jewellery, they, like this exhibition, stand out in the late-January weather. Beacons of colour in a sea of wintery greys and blacks. What are they here for? It can only be the gallery’s new exhibition on <a href="https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/cute">Cute</a> – the first large-scale exhibition to examine the phenomenon.</p>
<p>The exhibition starts by exploring “cute” as a historic appreciation of cats. It draws a connection from <a href="https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104XHB">Victorian cat portraiture</a> and <a href="https://andyholdenartist.com/hermione">collectable porcelain figurines</a> to the Japanese Hello Kitty. The exhibition celebrates the brand’s 50th birthday through a glittering kitty disco. </p>
<p>Jumping through time and geopolitical boundaries, the show demonstrates that “cute” cannot be bound to a single time or place but is an accessible concept that can be claimed by anyone. Appearing in its modern context through Japanese products of the early 20th century known as “fancy goods” for young women, it goes on to encompass diverse cultural products, from <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/3/24">comics</a> to computers, appliances to televisions, colonising even the screen itself as an <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367877916674741?casa_token=NGqBsExImOwAAAAA%3AcxVQvvNJ4IF6g-_lqcW_lYIKDQhgnqCvibZ_-OlOkM8z3hU8C279H2Gff0YmV6_OuRaZxK3NO4Qm_Q">aesthetic</a> in <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/article/845498/summary?casa_token=XheY2yytZKAAAAAA:QDsR1YeMLNj5Q5_DVbPCs80Ch6ToVLuTua8Af5TDo9jNNrVBe_1G_T0Da-svWbjQniluXRbJTS0">music videos</a> of the 1980s and 1990s. </p>
<p>The Hello Kitty section of the exhibition is a universe of plushies and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135918350000500205?casa_token=JH77fxBp6BQAAAAA:OLqETMB27HC8BYV_jbTkreO9EUww1NjWkLcJETX9Cf0w2MMgq1TaXbh3ouOnDoNYX2KBnvFUWtB44g">“Kitty mania”</a> in all kinds of products, from shoes and suitcases to tablets and karaoke machines. This encapsulates the most obvious secondary function of cute – <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/41/2/326/2907555">intense consumerism</a>, and its ability to sell objects of all kinds.</p>
<h2>Cute is a slippery word</h2>
<p>Moving upwards, visitors enter the “cute universe”. Here “cuteness” fragments and distorts into many shapes and meanings. </p>
<p>Playing on the word “slipperiness”, which is invoked several times in the <a href="https://www.somersethouseshop.com/products/cute-exhibition-catalogue">catalogue</a>, the exhibition’s efforts to put cute into distinct categories wrestles with its fluid qualities, which clamour for attention among the many objects on display. </p>
<p>The show is divided into sections – <a href="https://www.cute.guide/CB">“cry baby”</a>,<a href="https://www.cute.guide/PT">“play together”</a>, <a href="https://www.cute.guide/SCP">“sugar-coated pill”</a>, <a href="https://www.cute.guide/MO">“monstrous other”</a> and <a href="https://www.cute.guide/HS">“hypersonic”</a> – which all valiantly attempt to define “cute”. But the word resists definition. Objects of all kinds harness the differing qualities of cute to <a href="https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/eapc.2.1.49_1">incite emotions</a> – of sympathy, tenderness, love and desire. Though which emotions an object evokes vary, depending on the viewer. </p>
<p>The “cute universe” offers a deeper look at the concept through displays on community, how cute can disguise agendas, the juxtaposition of cute and horror and the glistening promise of cute as a future lifestyle aesthetic. The exploration reveals “cute” to be impossible to pin down. Neither good nor bad, it <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2012.738640?casa_token=6RE5gyzPQx4AAAAA%3AeKg-sDlxCI8qyOb0HSVC4JahEIxRod9fZ2LJ-Ne5KDcDitvkFv_-InpW4r08u1uxcgVtg01Dn7-0aA">is a tool</a> to be used, felt and interpreted, dependent on the viewer and performer in a codependent relationship of ambiguity. </p>
<h2>Playing with scale</h2>
<p>The exhibition also plays with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/90011648?casa_token=M4jXLh8pgEEAAAAA%3AIXDKAMjguiRNoGO7fHa7q_ZHqg4l49jr0f0TdOvLVOdtj9edOjnm7zSqMdJTB0rcA4DbBXi7wZxFCi0EFdchcrCUYlqFnGRbC9K7Bq6s-YYYOsWt3zw7&seq=4">scale</a>, with both oversized and undersized installations. This makes visitors feel they’ve become children once again, playing with tiny toys or experiencing an oversized world. </p>
<p>The immersive experience continues with hyper-feminine singer and visual artist, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/29/to-be-a-girl-is-to-always-be-performing-hannah-diamond-on-pink-punk-and-making-the-pop-album-of-the-year">Hannah Diamond’s</a> creations, which evoke girly pyjama parties and pink beanbags, staying up too late and watching music videos on TV.</p>
<p>These works are nostalgic, a retrospective longing for a time that has already passed. Within cute is a performance of desire, filling in the gap between what we have and what we have <a href="https://www.proquest.com/openview/004262f802bdec094b52706dea45c89a/1?cbl=1818460&pq-origsite=gscholar">lost</a>. The performance of cuteness can only take place in the presence of loss of innocence.</p>
<p>So what to think of this exhibition of cute? As the curator Claire Catterall told me, the show hints rather than dictates its meaning. Yet, in the end, the bigger questions remain: what is cute doing to society? What does it mean that we are so complicit in its manipulation? Who are the players in cute, and who gets to decide? </p>
<p>Ultimately, the exhibition leaves us to decide for ourselves, but how can we when the concept itself is so slippery? I left Somerset House, disoriented and fizzing, as if I had consumed too many sweets. And yet, as I thought about the exhibition on my journey home, I craved a second helping.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hui-Ying Kerr received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for her Doctorate in History of Design on Japanese
culture in the 1980s economic bubble.</span></em></p>
The show is divided into sections which all valiantly attempt to define “cute”. But the word is resistant to definition.
Hui-Ying Kerr, Associate Lecturer, Fashion Communication and Promotion, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217315
2023-12-05T17:13:01Z
2023-12-05T17:13:01Z
Japan: Myths to Manga – Young V&A exhibition celebrates nature’s influence on Japanese culture
<p><a href="https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/japan-myths-to-manga">Japan: Myths to Manga</a> at the Young V&A is loosely divided into four parts: sky, sea, forest and city. The underlying theme of the exhibition is showcasing how traditions developed in these contexts relate to contemporary Japanese culture. Japan’s dramatic natural landscapes are displayed as the inspiration behind the country’s art and culture.</p>
<p>Visiting the show entails taking a journey from traditional culture (such as kimonos, <a href="https://www.getty.edu/news/why-the-iconic-great-wave-swept-the-world/">Hokusai’s “Big Wave”</a> and Japanese monsters known as <a href="https://yokai.com/introduction/">Yokai</a>) to contemporary culture (such as manga, anime and urban legends). The exhibition explores how those traditional spirits are still alive in contemporary Japan. </p>
<p>In doing so, the exhibition avoids the trap of Orientalist representations of Japan: a different culture is presented without any sweet exoticism.</p>
<p>To engage young people and families, there are several interactive exhibits. This includes <a href="https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20231020-japans-ancient-art-of-taiko-drumming">Taiko</a> (traditional drums) that anybody can try to play, manga drawing, and origami folding. On the surface, the exhibition seems to appeal primarily to children. However, there is plenty to enjoy for adult visitors too, who might notice some interesting techniques of repurposing and retelling at play. </p>
<p>For example, in the “sea” space, Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/great-wave-spot-difference">The Great Wave Off Kanagawa</a> print is well known. But there is also a parody of it by contemporary artist <a href="https://toruishii.com">Toru Ishii</a>, which epitomises the essence of contemporary Japan. </p>
<p>Ishii’s wave almost swallows Tokyo Sky Tree (a new landmark building) and Tokyo city. Ink bottles, pens and desks are dancing in the wave, led by a knight on a horse. The office workplace has become a place of war. This echoes a well-known advertising slogan for the Japanese energy drink <a href="https://shimaguni.co.uk/blog/a-story-of-japanese-workplace-culture">Regain</a>: “Can you fight for 24 hours?” </p>
<p>Although the translated title of the piece is Going Work War, the painting has a second message about ocean pollution, as the giant wave swallows all kinds of things that do not belong.</p>
<p>Resonating with Ishii’s painting, the clothes made by the 12-year-old artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/coco_pinkprincess/">Coco-Pink</a> shown in the “city” space speak to the audience. Conscious of global environmental issues, Coco-Pink creates new extravagant outfits using old clothes, reducing waste through her creations. </p>
<h2>Cultural translation</h2>
<p>The exhibition can be interpreted as a work of <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315670898-20/museums-material-culture-cultural-representations-robert-neather">cultural translation</a>. Artists translated their ideas into artwork. Old myths were passed on orally for many hundreds of years, before being translated into the scripts displayed in the exhibition. The curators translated the exhibits by placing them into contexts known to the audience: sky, sea, forest and city. The visitors are offered an impression of Japan as balanced between its nature and cities.</p>
<p>One particularly strong example of this work of translation is in the “sky” section. Its exhibits relate to a Japanese tradition called <a href="https://www.japansociety.org.uk/resource?resource=72">Otsukimi</a>, which involves watching the beautiful full moon while enjoying rice cakes called Tsukimi Dango (“The Rabbit and the mochi”). It’s said that careful observers can see the image of a rabbit making rice cakes on the moon’s surface (“The Rabbit and the moon”). </p>
<p>This tradition travelled to Japan from China in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Heian-period#:%7E:text=Heian%20period%2C%20in%20Japanese%20history,ky%C5%8D%20(Ky%C5%8Dto)%20in%20794.">Heian period</a> (794-1185). Naoko Takeuchi, a famous manga author, translated this myth and tradition into her internationally known manga (later also <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103369/">anime</a>): <a href="https://sailormoon.fandom.com/wiki/Manga">Sailor Moon</a> (1991-1997). </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XDnKDYpvEgo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for a recent Sailor Moon movie on Netflix.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The girl fighters of Sailor Moon, displayed in five exhibits of manga sketches, all wear sailor uniforms. Sailor style is a popular school uniform among Japanese girls. It is a translation of uniforms worn by sailors in England and was first adopted by a girls’ school in Kyoto in 1920, as part of a wave of democratisation during the Taisho period (1912-1926). </p>
<p>The name of the manga’s protagonist, <a href="https://sailormoon.fandom.com/wiki/Usagi_Tsukino_/_Sailor_Moon_(manga)">Tsukino Usagi</a>, translates as “Moon’s Rabbit”. As much as the Japanese admire the power of the Sun (symbolised by a red disk in the Japanese flag), they are also attracted by the mystical power of the moon. Sailor Moon reflects the understanding of the moon as being female in Japan, but at the same time translates it into a female image of strength and mythical power, fighting for justice. </p>
<p>Attentive visitors understand that they are offered a translated image of Japan as they walk through different levels. It is up them to decide which levels to pick up and translate into new meaning for themselves.</p>
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<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nana Sato-Rossberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The exhibition showcases how nature coexists with Japan’s major cities.
Nana Sato-Rossberg, Professor in Translation Studies, SOAS, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/215206
2023-10-10T15:22:09Z
2023-10-10T15:22:09Z
Philip Guston: controversial delayed Tate show asks ‘what would it be like to be evil?’
<p>American painter <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/philip-guston">Philip Guston’s</a> (1913-1980) work was filled with creative innovation. But the paintings he is best known for are the series of cartoonish hooded figures begun in the late 1960s.</p>
<p>Guston called these painted characters “<a href="https://www.artnews.com/feature/philip-gustons-kkk-paintings-history-meaning-1234572056/">hoods</a>”. They represented members of Ku Klux Klan (<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ku-Klux-Klan">KKK</a>), an organisation that had haunted him since childhood. Painting these figures, Guston wanted to explore the idea of evil. “What would it be like to be evil?” he asked himself.</p>
<p>In Tate Modern’s vast Guston retrospective, which runs until February 25, the “hoods” occupy just one room out of 11. But Guston’s nuanced engagement with racialised evil caused a contentious three-year delay in the exhibition opening. </p>
<p>Produced in collaboration with three major US museums (the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), the London showing of Guston’s retrospective was originally slated for 2020.</p>
<p>In the atmosphere following the <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyd-why-the-sight-of-these-brave-exhausted-protesters-gives-me-hope-139804">murder of African American George Floyd</a> by a white police officer in Minneapolis, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/postponed-philip-guston-show-will-now-open-2022-museums-say-1919119">Tate announced that</a> the show would be postponed until “we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted”.</p>
<p>Tate was accused of <a href="https://artreview.com/patronising-postponement-of-philip-guston-retrospective-causes-outcry/">patronising its visitors</a>. The exhibition’s curator Mark Godfrey <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mark-godfrey-leaving-tate-1950948">condemned the decision and resigned</a>. Rumours swirled about Tate’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/26/sense-or-censorship-row-over-klan-images-in-tates-postponed-show">alleged intolerance</a> of internal dissent.</p>
<p>Tate director Maria Balshaw <a href="https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/10/03/postponed-philip-guston-survey-finally-opens-at-tate-modern#">now claims</a> that the delay allowed time for additional research into Guston’s depictions of the KKK. This is borne out in the exhibition, which begins by establishing key facts about Guston and his artistic commitment to condemning racism.</p>
<h2>Guston’s early work</h2>
<p>Born Philip Goldstein, Guston – whose later name change masked his Jewish identity – was the son of immigrants who had fled persecution in present day Ukraine. His family settled in the US as the KKK and racialised violence were on the rise. </p>
<p>Guston’s childhood was <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/in-defence-of-my-father-philip-guston">financially constrained and marred by family tragedies</a>. Largely self-taught, he worked through his fears by drawing “conspiracies and flogging and cruelty and evil” and demonstrated a prodigious artistic talent. This is evidenced in the exhibition through early works including <a href="https://ocula.com/art-galleries/hauser-wirth/artworks/philip-guston/mother-and-child/">Mother and Child</a> (1930), painted when he was just 17.</p>
<p>From here the exhibition proceeds chronologically. We accompany Guston through his experiments, first with surrealism, then with political murals.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="black and white photo of Philip Guston working on a mural with a group of children looking on." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552591/original/file-20231006-27-dto2px.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Philip Guston working on a mural with a group of children looking on (1940).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.aaa.si.edu">Archives of American Art</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Footage specially shot for Tate’s exhibition shows <a href="http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/14352">The Struggle Against Terrorism</a> (1934-35) a monumental, collaboratively made protest mural that Guston painted in Mexico. </p>
<p>In the 1950s, encouraged by his high school friend and fellow artist, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jackson-Pollock">Jackson Pollock</a> as well as <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/willem-de-kooning-1433">Willem de Kooning</a> and <a href="https://www.nga.gov/features/mark-rothko.html">Mark Rothko</a>, Guston began painting abstract compositions. In 1962, he received his first major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum which included several paintings shown in the Tate exhibition, such as <a href="https://emuseum.mfah.org/objects/19024/passage">Passage</a> (1957-58).</p>
<h2>‘What if I died?’</h2>
<p>The global political turmoil of the late 1960s – addressed by the work of a younger generation of emergent “contemporary” artists – marked the end of a line for Guston’s generation. Pollock died in 1956, killed in an <a href="https://www.grunge.com/939772/the-tragic-real-life-story-of-jackson-pollock/">alcohol-fuelled car crash</a>. Rothko <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/26/archives/mark-rothko-artist-a-suicide-here-at-66-mark-rothko-abstract.html">took his own life</a> in 1970. De Kooning <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/153331750201700512">succumbed gradually to dementia and isolation</a>. Guston began again.</p>
<p>“What if I died?” Guston mused, perhaps thinking of these friends. “What would I paint if I came back?” </p>
<p>From the late 1960s, he abandoned abstraction, restricted his palette to mostly pink and black and began to work on the “hoods”. As younger artists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-art-of-the-photograph-the-photograph-as-art/2021/04/15/5668ef7e-626f-11eb-afbe-9a11a127d146_story.html">fixated on photographic mass media</a>, Guston invoked the comic strip <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-gender-fluidity-of-krazy-kat">Krazy Kat</a>. He borrowed its strong black outlines and simplified forms to depict the Klansmen. </p>
<p>A mob of them cruise in a ludicrously cartoonish vehicle in <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/philip-guston-city-limits">City Limits</a> (1969). A single “hood” meditatively smokes and paints a self-portrait in <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/philip-guston-the-studio">The Studio</a> (1969). The “hoods” inhabit a sickly, empty city painted in <a href="https://cdn.jewishboston.com/uploads/2022/06/09_City-729x486.jpg">City</a> (1968) like unctuous tiers of strawberry blancmange, or a repulsive mountain of tumbling pink flesh.</p>
<h2>Introducing the ‘hoods’</h2>
<p>First exhibited in in 1970, the “hoods” had a hostile reception. Discouraged, Guston stopped painting for over a year. He spent the time travelling and finally settled in upstate New York, where he worked in seclusion until his death.</p>
<p>In spite – or maybe because – of the crisis incited by the “hoods” critical rejection, the paintings Guston made next are a tremendous synthesis of his preceding work.</p>
<p>Powerful colours return, along with forms that are recognisable, but dreamlike and strange. In one room, his large canvases are juxtaposed with ink drawings made in collaboration with his partner, the poet and painter <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_McKim">Musa McKim</a> (1908-1992). </p>
<p>McKim composed words around which Guston drew: “I thought I would never write anything again”, says one. “Then I put on my cold wristwatch.”</p>
<p>The final room in the exhibition is filled with work done at night and dominated by the colour black. <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/90583/couple-in-bed">Couple in Bed</a> (1977), painted after McKim suffered a stroke, shows the pair apparently asleep. Guston clings to McKim, clutching his paintbrushes and still wearing his “cold wristwatch”.</p>
<p>After seeing Guston’s Tate retrospective, I led an undergraduate seminar analysing the New Right’s political rhetoric. The discussion turned to memes and how their crude comic simplifications serve far-right agendas well.</p>
<p>The exchange made me think back to Guston’s <a href="https://ocula.com/art-galleries/hauser-wirth/artworks/philip-guston/blackboard/">Blackboard</a> (1969) a painting of three hooded Klansmen on a schoolroom board. Did Guston mean to show the educational apparatus that engenders racism? Or was this a prompt to think about the interpretive frameworks that get placed around controversial works of art, including his own? </p>
<p>I’d like to think it was both. Guston wanted to pass on tools that we could use to take apart everything – form, colour, identity, politics – and to help us put it back together, in an improved form.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215206/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Carolin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Guston’s complex engagement with racialised evil caused a contentious three-year delay in the exhibition opening.
Clare Carolin, Senior Lecturer, Art and Public Engagement, King's College London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/208987
2023-07-04T11:00:48Z
2023-07-04T11:00:48Z
The fascinating Cameroonian art of spider divination is on display at London exhibition
<p><a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/tomas-saraceno-webs-of-life-exhibition/">Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life</a>, which opened at London’s Serpentine South Gallery in June, explores how humans relate to spiders. It features installations of spider webs displayed and lit to be viewed as sculptures. There are also films: one made about Saraceno’s work with groups battling lithium mining in Argentina and another about <a href="http://nggamdu.org/">spider diviners</a> from Somié village in Cameroon.</p>
<p>That’s where I came in. <em>Ŋgam dù</em> (the Mambila term for spider divination) is one of many types of oracle or divination used by Mambila people in Cameroon. It is the most trusted form and – unlike other types which are sometimes dismissed as mere games – its results <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Mambila-Divination-Framing-Questions-Constructing-Answers/Zeitlyn/p/book/9781032174082">can be used as evidence in the country’s courts</a>. Variants of this form of divination are found throughout southern Cameroon and the long history of the word <a href="https://nggamdu.org/nggam-du/"><em>ŋgam</em></a> attests to the longevity of the practice.</p>
<p>I work as a social anthropologist in the Mambila village of Somié. I have visited almost every year since 1985, working on a variety of projects. Divination was the focus of a chapter in my PhD in 1990, but I never stopped working on the subject. As well as becoming an initiated diviner, I have continued to think about the wider implications of using divination or oracles.</p>
<p><em>Ngam dù</em> is a form of divination in which binary (either/or) questions are asked of large spiders that live in holes in the ground. The options are linked to a stick and a stone then, using a set of leaf cards marked with symbols, the spider is left to make its choice.</p>
<p>The hole plus the stick, stone and cards are covered up. The spider emerges and will move the cards so the diviner can then interpret the pattern relative to the stick and stone. If cards are placed on the stick, then the option associated with that has been selected, and vice versa if the cards are placed on the stone.</p>
<p>Things get more interesting (at least to me and other diviners) if both options are selected, or neither. Sometimes a contradictory response is interpreted to mean that the question posed is not a good one. The diviner is thereby told to go and discuss the issue with the client and reframe the problem, posing a different question.</p>
<p>The process is “calibrated” regularly by asking test questions such as “Am I here alone?” or “Will I drink tonight?”. Spiders that fail these tests are discarded as liars and not used for future consultations. It’s also common to ask the same question in parallel to get a consistency check, so more than one spider can be used at the same time. Sometimes the stick and stone option are reversed to ensure that the spider isn’t just moving the cards always in the same direction.</p>
<p>Mambila diviners rely on these tests to justify the system, although they also say (as do many groups in Cameroon) that spiders are a source of wisdom since they live in the ground where the “village of the dead” is found.</p>
<h2>Tomás Saraceno and spider divination</h2>
<p>As an anthropologist, I avoid questions about whether spider divination is true. For me the important question is: “Does it help?”</p>
<p>Sometimes the results of divination are considered, but rejected, and the advice is not followed. Even in these instances it can be helpful, however, since it enables people decide on a course of action.</p>
<p>People use the results as a tool to help them think through hard decisions such as who to marry, or where to go for treatment when a child is ill. The latter involves weighing up conflicting considerations about expense, the possibility an illness has been caused by witchcraft and the reputations for effective treatment of different traditional healers as well as of rival biomedical health centres.</p>
<p>I met the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno when he had an exhibit at the Venice Bienale in 2018. He was intrigued by the <a href="http://www.era.anthropology.ac.uk/Divination/Spider/index.html">computer simulation of spider divination</a> that my colleague Mike Fischer had made. He invited me to Venice to demonstrate the simulation and talk about spider divination in front of his “sculptures”, which are made in collaboration with spiders. They are patterns of spiderwebs displayed as art.</p>
<p>As we talked, I said that if one day he wanted to visit Cameroon I would be happy to introduce him to the diviners I worked with. In December 2019, he came with his friend, the filmmaker Maxi Laina. We visited Somié, where he worked with the diviner Bollo Pierre Tadios and the Mambila filmmaker Nguea Iréné.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FFesNa4qMXA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Tomás Saraceno in Collaboration: Web(s) of Life.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Saraceno and Laina came with some questions to ask from their friends. This included “Who would win the 2020 US election?” This was the Trump v Biden election, the results of which Trump went on to question. The answer was that there would be a new president but it would not be straightforward!</p>
<p>Saraceno liked the idea that spiders could help humans resolve their personal problems. It gave an example of a different way in which human-spider relationships are expressed. Bollo liked the idea of opening the process up to questions from outside the village. He already has some clients from other places in Cameroon who call him, so working internationally is very doable.</p>
<p>He suggested that Saraceno could make his work accessible via the internet, which he has now done <a href="http://nggamdu.org/">through a dedicated website</a>. Some of the first results are included in the Serpentine exhibition along with film made by Nguea Iréné of Bollo in action. The film will also be shown in the village later in the summer.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/tomas-saraceno-webs-of-life-exhibition/">Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life</a> is on at London’s Serpentine South Gallery until 10 September.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208987/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Zeitlyn has received funding from AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC</span></em></p>
Ngam dù is a form of divination in which questions are asked of large spiders that live in holes in the ground. The results of spider divination can be used as evidence in Cameroon’s courts.
David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203212
2023-04-24T13:32:36Z
2023-04-24T13:32:36Z
Yevonde: an introduction to the woman who pioneered colour photography
<p>The National Portrait Gallery, London, reopens in June following a three-year closure for the “<a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/assets/uploads/files/News-Release_NPG-2023-24-Programme-Launch.pdf">largest redevelopment</a>” in its 127-year history. Its opening exhibition, <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2023/yevonde-life-and-colour">Yevonde: Life and Colour</a>, will be the most comprehensive to date on British photographer, <a href="https://www.maryevans.com/weekly/yevonde/yevonde.php">Yevonde Middleton</a> (1893-1975).</p>
<p>Signing her work simply, Yevonde (though she also worked under “Madame Yevonde”), she was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, she was a pioneer. Yet <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/blog/yevonde-a-beginners-guide?tags=photography">Yevonde</a> is not widely known outside photography circles. </p>
<p>In 1921, she became the first women to lecture at the <a href="https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/d1bd8e08-f35b-3b75-b5de-199281847bd3">Professional Photographers’ Association</a>. In the 1930s – against a tide of resistance – she championed the use of colour photography and was the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Goddesses_Others.html?id=5UymAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">first person in Britain to exhibit colour portraits</a>. </p>
<p>Over a 60-year career, Yevonde photographed the rich and famous. Around 10,000 sitters passed through her studios. She also ran a successful commercial photography business until the year before her death, shortly before her 83rd birthday.</p>
<p>From her teens, Yevonde was an advocate of women’s suffrage and was active in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Womens-Social-and-Political-Union">Women’s Social and Political Union</a>, the militant wing of the suffrage movement, from 1909. </p>
<p>However, a personal disinclination for suffragette lawbreaking (and the prison sentence that would likely follow) led her to champion women’s emancipation via a different route.</p>
<p>In her autobiography, <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-camera/oclc/86024496">In camera</a> (1940), she remembers thinking at age 17: “I must earn my own living … To be independent was the greatest thing in life”. </p>
<p>It was an advertisement in suffrage newspaper <a href="https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:has924jop">Votes for Women</a>, that gave Yevonde the idea that photography could offer economic independence.</p>
<p>Yevonde’s only formal training was an apprenticeship to <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp17338/lallie-charles-ne-charlotte-elizabeth-martin?role=art">Charlotte (Lallie) Charles</a> (1911-13). Despite not finishing, and taking only one photograph throughout, it gave her the fundamentals to start a photographic business.</p>
<p>In 1914, having just turned 21 – and with some funding from her family – she opened her first studio.</p>
<h2>Colour photography and innovation</h2>
<p>Yevonde’s decision to set out on her own coincided with the decline of Lallie Charles’ studio. This reflected a widespread malaise in photographic portraiture, which was at that time stylistically confined to long-established conventions of black and white.</p>
<p>She explained that clients were: “Getting tired of the pale soft … prints, tired of the artificial roses, of the Empire furniture … They grumbled at the lack of variety in the poses.”</p>
<p>Seeing an opportunity to try something different, she developed a more dynamic approach and style, establishing a moderately successful business despite the disruption of the first world war and a stint as a land worker.</p>
<p>But it was with the advent of <a href="https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/history-colour-photography">Vivex</a> – a technically demanding process for colouring photographs – around 1930, that Yevonde’s breakthrough came, despite strong resistance to colour photography from within the profession and potential clients. </p>
<p>“I started experimenting madly”, she remembered in her autobiography, “oblivious of the fact that people did not want such things.”</p>
<p>She believed that photographers had become: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>So engrossed in the beauty of light and shade and in their deep velvety blacks and sparkling whites that they will tell you quite seriously that the colour photograph is unnecessary and unnatural.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the same time, Yevonde was excited to discover that a few studios were beginning to explore the new process, despite feeling that their preoccupation with achieving naturalistic colour rendered everything “astonishingly unattractive”.</p>
<p>She declared that her priority was to use colour differently, to “produce a striking and original picture”.</p>
<h2>Yevonde’s Goddesses Series</h2>
<p>Yevonde’s most famous project – the Goddesses Series of 1935 – was inspired by a charity ball. Soon after she photographed several society women in the guise of a mythological goddess. Each woman was furnished with props derived from Yevonde’s, sometimes whimsical, interpretation of their attributes.</p>
<p>For me, the series reveals both the extent and the limits of her pioneering spirit.</p>
<p>Despite her attempts to renegotiate the conventions of her time, Yevonde – ever the expedient businesswoman – was mindful of her client’s wishes, the majority of whom were female. As a result, many of her subjects align with the prevailing expectations of beauty and behaviour: looking sultry but with a submissive air, gazing wistfully out of the frame.</p>
<p>But in other examples, the women she photographed appeared liberated from the shackles of expectations for their sex. There’s daring composition and movement in the <a href="http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/yevonde-madame-1893/object/mrs-richard-hart-davis-as-ariel-yevonde-1935-goddesses-p6648">representation of Ariel</a> and the <a href="https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1410633/mrs-mayer-as-medusa-photograph-madame-yevonde/">confrontational gaze of Medusa</a>.</p>
<p>In other work, an audacious use of saturated primary colour is highly effective, as in the portrait of actress <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2023/yevonde-life-and-colour">Vivien Leigh</a>.</p>
<p>In her photograph of actress Joan Maude, a vibrant palette of reds is brought together in a single image. This shows an industrious photographer thrilling to the possibilities offered by the new colour technology.</p>
<p>Sadly, with the outbreak of the second world war, Vivex ceased trading and Yevonde was obliged to return to black and white.</p>
<p>Throughout her career, Yevonde sought to promote and motivate other women photographers, encouraging them to “come out and meet one another” and to “join the association” of photographers. </p>
<p>“We must see one another’s work and criticise, and, more important still, receive criticism,” she wrote in her autobiography, “or we shall never improve”.</p>
<p>Most previous exhibitions have favoured Yevonde’s Goddesses Series. The planned show at the reopened Portrait Gallery, however, will broaden the scope considerably and include some newly discovered works. </p>
<p>As much as I love Yevonde’s use of colour, I am looking forward to seeing her later portraits in black and white and her practice of bringing elements of surrealism into her portraiture and other commercial work. </p>
<p><em>Yevonde: Life and Colour will be at the National Portrait Gallery, 22 June to 15 October 2023.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203212/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Darcy White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Yevonde was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, a pioneer.
Darcy White, Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Sheffield Hallam University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203254
2023-04-04T15:06:04Z
2023-04-04T15:06:04Z
Ashish: Fall in Love and Be More Tender exhibition – a glittering testament to a fashion genius
<p>The first retrospective exhibition of the fashion designer <a href="https://ashish.co.uk/">Ashish Gupta</a> has opened at London’s <a href="https://www.wmgallery.org.uk/">William Morris Gallery</a>.</p>
<p>As an expert in fashion marketing (and a proud owner of a number of Ashish’s renowned shimmering <a href="https://www.wmgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-43/ashish-fall-in-love-and-be-more-tender">sequined skirts</a>) I was greatly excited by the prospect of the show.</p>
<p>When the day of my visit came, not only was I was able to immerse myself in Ashish’s wonderful creations, but I had a chance encounter with the designer himself. He told me that the skirt I had chosen to wear that day (a sparkling green fish print fabric, covered in iridescent sequins) was from one of his earliest collections.</p>
<p>It was in 2021, 20 years after Gupta founded his label eponymous label, Ashish, that the Morris Gallery’s curators Roisin Ingleby and Joe Scotland conceived the exhibition. Ingleby told me of the hours of joy they had spent in Ashish’s London design archive, selecting the 60 designs that would eventually be showcased through the exhibition.</p>
<p>As a designer, Gupta is celebrated for colourful, glamourous, extravagant designs realised through detailed craftsmanship. Up to 30 garments are handmade each season. They are <a href="https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2022/11/13/ashish-gupta-on-expressing-identity-through-art/">made to order</a>, with a limited run on designs, ensuring exclusivity and longevity. </p>
<h2>From a Delhi boy to the king of sequins</h2>
<p>Ashish Gupta was born in Delhi to GP parents. His first exposure to fashion was through a copy of Vogue magazine that his mother had “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/07/ashish-gupta-colour-and-sequins-are-my-response-to-our-terrifying-world-">smuggled into the house</a>”.</p>
<p>At his strict Catholic school, <a href="https://www.lampoonmagazine.com/article/2021/11/04/ashish-gupta-designer-indian-manufacturing/">Gupta was bullied</a> and fashion and cinema became his escapism. </p>
<p>Having initially studied fine art in India, he moved to London to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2000. He remembers the then course director, <a href="https://www.businessoffashion.com/community/people/louise-wilson">Louise Wilson</a>, giving him the best possible advice: to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/07/ashish-gupta-colour-and-sequins-are-my-response-to-our-terrifying-world-">dream</a>. </p>
<p>The colour, sparkle and sequins which have come to define his work ever since are the realisation of that dream.</p>
<p>When Gupta’s eponymous label was discovered by the famous <a href="https://www.brownsfashion.com/uk/sets/browns-focus">Browns Focus boutique</a> on London’s South Molton Street, he was launched from making clothes for friends into the <a href="https://showstudio.com/contributors/ashish_gupta">international fashion industry</a>.</p>
<p>Gupta is now considered a pioneer in the way his designs challenge heterosexual, masculine stereotypes and explore the role of clothing in <a href="https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2022/11/13/ashish-gupta-on-expressing-identity-through-art/">making political and social statements</a>. </p>
<p>This exhibition focuses on the stories told by his creations, demonstrating fashion’s power as a form of cultural commentary.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A colourful shirt dress hangs on a mannequin." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519261/original/file-20230404-28-iuma7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ashish’s Wax Print Dress on display at the exhibition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the earlier pieces on display is a Dutch Wax Print Dress (2005), a celebration of London’s multicultural heritage. The dress is made from African wax print fabric – a material with a complex colonial history – and embellished with sequins.</p>
<p>In the same room is Ashish’s <a href="https://www.brownsfashion.com/uk/shopping/ashish-immigrant-t-shirt-11786702">Immigrant T-shirt</a> combined with a more traditional South Asian embroidered red skirt and veil from his 2017 spring/summer collection. </p>
<p>This collection was the first to explicitly reference his experience as an emigrant by combining elements of western dress and eastern influences.</p>
<p>Designed during the time of Brexit and the <a href="https://www.jcwi.org.uk/the-hostile-environment-explained">British Home Office’s hostile environment policy</a>, this collection explored the emotional impact of leaving home and beginning life elsewhere. Throughout the exhibition are designs that pay testament to Gupta’s belief in equality and inclusive representation.</p>
<h2>Crafting cultural commentaries</h2>
<p>The cultural and political narratives that define Ashish’s creative storytelling are on show through the combinations of craft skill, materials, sequins and hand embroidery, throughout the exhibition.</p>
<p>Sequins have become Ashish’s signature style and far from <a href="https://www.fashionabc.org/wiki/ashish-gupta/">cheap embellishments</a>, they represent a technical art form, enabling a different way of working with fabric.</p>
<p>Ashish’s garments are hand made in India using <a href="https://www.lampoonmagazine.com/article/2021/11/04/ashish-gupta-designer-indian-manufacturing/">traditional artisinal craft skills</a>.</p>
<p>Many of the garments on display highlight Ashish’s play on traditional craft through the embellishment of sequins, including crochet and Fair Isle knitwear. </p>
<p>On display in the centre of the opening room is the designer’s adaptation of a high vis jacket, with a lumberjack shirt and jeans from the 2010 autumn/winter collection. Here, the addition of sequins play with heterosexual norms.</p>
<p>The second section of the exhibition centres on the <a href="https://10magazine.com/ashish-ready-to-wear-aw17/">Yellow Brick Road</a> collection from autumn/winter 2017, which was inspired by the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. </p>
<p>These pieces feature multiple versions of the Rainbow pride flag, to form a collection that celebrates people of colour and queer communities.</p>
<p>The final section of the exhibition showcases the skill of hand embroidery on display in Ashish designs. </p>
<p>A highlight for me was the dressing gown created using <a href="https://www.culturalindia.net/indian-crafts/zardozi.html">Zardozi</a> – a south Asian embroidery technique using gold thread.</p>
<p>This fascinating exhibition presents the wonder of Ashish’s creativity and highlights the power of garments to convey stories and meanings. The glittering genius of combining sequins with traditional craftmanship has Gupta firmly on fashion’s catwalk of fame.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.wmgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-43/ashish-fall-in-love-and-be-more-tender/">Ashish: Fall in Love and Be More Tender</a> is a free exhibition, on now at the William Morris Gallery, London, until 10 September.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203254/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Naomi Braithwaite does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new exhibition pays homage to the king of sequins, who combines detailed, traditional techniques with unconventional materials.
Naomi Braithwaite, Associate Professor in Fashion Marketing and Branding, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197854
2023-03-22T11:28:09Z
2023-03-22T11:28:09Z
Van Gogh Museum at 50: how galleries are challenging the ‘tortured genius’ narrative
<p>At the time that Vincent van Gogh was creating his acclaimed work, <a href="https://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starry-night.html">The Starry Night</a>, he was hospitalised at Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum. He painted the vivid night sky from his room without the bars of his window, editing out the institution. Yet, in the case of museums, it is often the institution who edits out the patient.</p>
<p>In collections, objects and stories relating to mental health have largely been presented through a medical model, viewing patients as subjects and silencing their voices. </p>
<p>Where mental health is part of an artist’s story, their creativity may be wrongly credited to their suffering. Often, these narratives sit uncomfortably close to spectacle, an echo of the Victorian freak show in the digital age.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/514286/original/file-20230308-26-9i4yw3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>This article is part of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/vincent-van-gogh-31028">Van Gogh Museum at 50</a> series. These articles mark the 50th anniversary of Amsterdam’s pioneering gallery and explore evolving cultural perceptions of one of the world’s most famous artists.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, museums are grappling with how best to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-wellcome-closed-its-medicine-man-exhibition-and-others-should-follow-suit-196171">expose and address biases</a> and gaps in collections and programming.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en">The Van Gogh Museum</a> first opened 50 years ago. A pioneer of the single artist approach, it formed a keystone of Amsterdam’s tourism strategy.</p>
<p>Outside of the museum, approaches to mental health (although greatly advanced from van Gogh’s time) were still disempowering. Lobotomies – a Nobel Prize-winning invention in the 1940s – had experienced a post-war boom, but public opinion towards them had become distinctly unfavourable by 1973 after the <a href="https://www.glensidemuseum.org.uk/psychiatric-hospital-1861-1994/mental-health-timeline/">high-profile death of a patient</a> a few years before.</p>
<p>Throughout his life, van Gogh experienced poor mental health. His <a href="https://journalbipolardisorders.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40345-020-00196-z">complex symptoms</a> caused episodes of intense psychosis, hallucinations and cognitive dysfunction. During one such episode, he famously cut off part of his ear. He died in 1890, by probable suicide. </p>
<p>Van Gogh’s battle with mental health is well known but our perceptions of his story are often less critically evaluated. This highlights a long history of misconceptions around mental health. Since the time of Aristotle, <a href="https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/are-genius-and-madness-related-contemporary-answers-ancient-question#sthash.nOak4JW7.dpuf">illness and creativity have been thought to be connected</a>. Van Gogh rejected this idea, considering <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/ey-exhibition-van-gogh-and-britain/van-gogh-challenging-myth">“madness an illness like any other”</a>. </p>
<p>The concept of the “tortured genius”, which sees suffering as a necessary part of creativity, is unhelpful yet deeply embedded. Think of the narratives we hold for <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/creativity-mental-illness-health_n_5695887">Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath and Robin Williams</a>.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.1999?saml_referrer">2014 study</a> even discovered that van Gogh’s work was perceived as higher quality by viewers exposed to his mental health story. In promoting suffering over seeking help and recovery, the topic of mental health becomes a spectacle rather than a vehicle for social change.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"967808171925491712"}"></div></p>
<p>“<a href="https://theboar.org/2020/07/artistmentalhealth/">Everybody has their yellow paint</a>” – a meme originally posted on social media site Tumblr – neatly illustrates this point by positioning van Gogh as a “beautiful tortured soul” who ate toxic yellow paint to coat his insides with sunshine. </p>
<p>His potential suicide attempt is reframed as a misunderstood quirk. Yet, as tragic stories of social media-inspired self harm demonstrate, the misinterpretation of mental health issues has real impact.</p>
<h2>Rethinking mental health</h2>
<p>Several institutions, including the Van Gogh Museum, are now working with audiences in order to reevaluate their perspectives on wellbeing.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.museumnext.com/article/wellbeing-with-vincent/">Discussions</a> between the Van Gogh Museum and young people experiencing mental health vulnerability highlighted the opportunity for the museum to normalise mental illness and to encourage people to seek support where needed.</p>
<p>The community of young people suggested progressive ways for the museum to become a safe space for engagement in which people could tell their own stories. </p>
<p>The resulting project, <a href="https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/about/organisation/inclusion-and-accessibility-policy/open-up-with-vincent">Open Up with Vincent</a>, has created online and onsite activities such as meditation films, material for school pupils and collaborations with healthcare institutions.</p>
<p>A key part of the museum’s findings was that, in having an uncertain diagnosis, van Gogh’s story resonated with young people as it did not probe his struggles through a medical model. Narratives around his art and life could, instead, open dialogue on mental health and support audiences to consider their own relationships with mental health and wellness. </p>
<p>In the UK, the Tate galleries, working with the mental health charity, <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/">Mind</a>, have challenged existing approaches in order to create a more useful dialogue. Finding that 50% of people experiencing mental health problems noted the shame and isolation as worse than the illness itself, they created a <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/ey-exhibition-van-gogh-and-britain/van-gogh-challenging-myth">more factually accurate portrayal</a> of van Gogh’s mental health through animation. His story becomes a powerful reminder that we should not be defined by our mental health.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dFqAKp6xmLg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The animation that resulted from Tate’s collaboration with the mental health charity, Mind.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As museums develop their institutional perspectives on healthcare from a medical model to a social model, they are evolving into agents of radical change. Co-production with communities has vast potential to develop healthier societies by exploring the intersections of creativity and wellbeing.</p>
<p>The Van Gogh Museum is celebrating its 50th year by “treating audiences” to a “splendid party” and “special activities”, in a nod to the Dutch tradition of being generous to others on your birthday. However, particularly in the context of continued funding crises, we need to be mindful that culture is more than just a “treat.” It is an essential tool in tackling the mental health crisis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197854/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charlie Pratley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Museums have pushed the narrative of Vincent van Gogh as a ‘tortured genius’ for decades, but in its 50th year the Van Gogh Museum is questioning this approach.
Charlie Pratley, Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/167391
2021-09-08T14:23:17Z
2021-09-08T14:23:17Z
Tribute to Yusuf Grillo: Nigerian art activist, scholar and bridge builder
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420021/original/file-20210908-22-kj1stl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=132%2C51%2C882%2C465&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Yusuf Grillo contributed significantly to art and art education in Nigeria.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">TY Bello/Instagram</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Nigerian contemporary visual artist and scholar <a href="https://www.vanguardngr.com/2021/08/breaking-legendary-artist-yusuf-grillo-dies-at-87/">Yusuf Grillo</a> died on 23 August 2021, aged 87 years. Art scholar Sule James explains Grillo’s influence and impact on art on the continent.</em></p>
<h2>Who was Yusuf Grillo?</h2>
<p>Yusuf Grillo was not only an artist but also an administrator, educator, and mentor to other artists. He was born in 1934 to the family of Yinus Ventura Grillo and Kalia Grillo in Lagos. His grandfather had returned from Brazil to his African homeland after the abolition of the slave trade. Grillo was identified in Yoruba culture as Omo Arugbo (child of old age) because he was the last of 11 children. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Painting of a woman with eyes closed" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419988/original/file-20210908-25-m4cumi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A painting by Yusuf Grillo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bonhams</span></span>
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<p>He attended Saint Andrew’s Primary School, Oke Popo, Lagos; Saint Peter’s Primary School, Faji; and the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral School, where Aina Onabolu, the father of modern Nigerian art, was a visiting art teacher. He also attended the Secondary School of the Yaba Technical Institute (now Yaba College of Technology). He learnt and benefited from the artistic practices of other pioneers of modern art in Nigeria, including <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/akinola-lasekan/">Akinola Lasekan</a> and J.K. Oye. (Both were contemporaries of Aina Onabolu).</p>
<p>In 1956, he enrolled to study Fine Arts at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology, Zaria, now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He graduated with a diploma in Fine Arts in 1961, specialising in painting.</p>
<h2>What role did he play in advancing art in Nigeria?</h2>
<p>During his long art career, over six decades, Grillo played a significant role in the advancement of contemporary art and art education in Nigeria. He was a prominent member of the Zaria Art Society, formed by students at his college. Their creative activism left indelible imprints on Nigeria’s artistic terrain. The first three sets of students who graduated in 1959, 1960 and 1961 were not all opposed to the imported curriculum, replete with colonial imprints from the Royal Art School. But they were opposed to their British lecturers’ abhorrence of any African art background in their works. The students saw this as culturally slavish and unrelated to their artistic heritage. </p>
<p>This gave rise to the “Natural Synthesis” artistic ideology, which defined modern African art as a synthesis of the old and the new. The old was the indigenous cultural artistic practices of Africa, while the new was the Eurocentric stylistic variables promoted by the West, especially during the colonial years of the 20th century. The Zaria students stated in their manifesto that they had a duty “to promote, through art, Nigerian cultural values with utmost dedication, love, and willpower”. They passionately pursued this ideology and explored indigenous themes in their art.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of a man and woman on a bicycle." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419992/original/file-20210908-13-1va0mj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A painting by Yusuf Grillo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bonhams</span></span>
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<p>These pioneering members of the Zaria Art School may be perceived as classmates but they were not. Their years of training in Zaria simply overlapped. Grillo personified the spirit of “Zarianism” as he was sensitive to Yoruba traditions and drew inspiration for his works from that culture. In doing so, he represented images from Yoruba traditions that echo the lived experiences of people in fashionable Yoruba cultural dress forms.</p>
<p>Another major role Grillo and other “Zarianists” played in advancing art in Nigeria was towards the establishment and growth of other art institutions in the country. Grillo laid the artistic foundation at Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, where he taught art for several years from the early 1960s and served as head of department for 26 years.</p>
<h2>What was the core of his work?</h2>
<p>The bulk of Grillo’s works show the influence of Yoruba culture, through which he forged his interest in creating African cultural identity. His subject matter was influenced by human activity. His themes are derived from everyday life events around him, rooted in Yoruba indigenous context. Although a devout Muslim, Grillo installed many splendid stained glass designs in churches in Nigeria. He participated in several group and solo exhibitions and produced large bodies of paintings in public and private collections.</p>
<h2>What techniques was he famous for?</h2>
<p>Although Grillo is famous for Western naturalistic style, the technique he is known for is the use of planular forms and angular structures which found an appropriate correlation in the Yoruba wood carving style. His works highlight more vigorous engagement with the blue, purple, and green palettes. The formal characteristics of his paintings show stylised and elongated figures. They are easily identified by their slimness, elegance and grace, which represents the contemporary ideal of beauty in the Lagos of his youth. </p>
<p>The style and techniques of Grillo’s works must also have been influenced by his interest in mathematics and experiments with cubist forms, using bolder geometric shapes. In addition, his interaction with architects and workshop training he attended in Bradford in Britain taught him about stained glass techniques. It also spurred his interest in mosaic, santex, and other materials which can be used to embellish buildings on monumental scales.</p>
<h2>What legacy does he leave?</h2>
<p>It might be argued that the most enduring legacy Grillo bestowed is his faithfulness to Yoruba culture without ossifying traditions. He represents a creative bridge that filled the transitory gap between dynamic Yoruba wood carving traditions and contemporary Yoruba art.</p>
<p>He will be remembered for the gaps he filled, the many artists he mentored, his creative works and for laying the foundation of modern art in Yaba College of Technology, Lagos.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167391/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sule James does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Yusuf Grillo charted a path in African art and enabled the emergence of more artists.
Sule James, Research Associate, University of Johannesburg
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111392
2019-02-13T11:49:18Z
2019-02-13T11:49:18Z
Ivanka and her tower of crumbs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258528/original/file-20190212-174890-rwe25c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artist Jennifer Rubell hired a model to vacuum for two hours each night from Feb. 1 to Feb. 17.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For two hours each evening, an Ivanka Trump lookalike has been vacuuming a hot pink carpet at the Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C. </p>
<p>As she appears to be on the cusp of completing the task, spectators soil the carpet with bread crumbs. She vacuums them up. The audience tosses more crumbs onto the carpet. The pattern repeats itself. </p>
<p>Jennifer Rubell’s installation, titled “<a href="https://www.culturaldc.org/ivanka-vacuuming-by-jennifer-rubell-press-release">Ivanka Vacuuming</a>,” has already elicited a response from the subject.</p>
<p>Following the Feb. 1 opening, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-performance-piece-ivanka-vacuuming-seems-to-irk-the-first-daughter-even-more-than-fake-news/2019/02/05/fe70801c-296c-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html">Ivanka Trump tweeted</a>, “Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up. I choose the latter,” to which <a href="https://twitter.com/jenniferrubell/status/1092826529791426561">Rubell parried</a>, “I would encourage you to see the piece and form your own direct response. … Not knocking anyone down. Exploring complicated subjects we all care about.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1092826529791426561"}"></div></p>
<p>As a historian of contemporary art, I wanted to learn more about this <a href="https://forward.com/schmooze/418831/ivanka-trump-family-slams-jewish-artist-sexist-ivanka-vacuuming/">headline-grabbing</a> work. So I followed Rubell’s directive and saw it myself.</p>
<p>The piece certainly pops: It’s pink. Very pink. And the Ivanka double has a plastic sheen that borders on surreal. </p>
<p>It took a moment to adjust to the saccharine visuals. But it soon became apparent that Rubell was drawing from a rich tradition of performance art. She seems to be compelling viewers to think about the huge numbers of women who perform invisible labor – all in exchange for a few crumbs from the great American pie.</p>
<h2>Repetitive, relentless work</h2>
<p>The work of art has been staged at the back of the gallery, in a space surrounded by three white walls. In the foreground, there’s a white cube, approximately three-and-a-half feet high and topped with a two-foot mound of Panko bread crumbs. Text invites the viewers to scatter the crumbs onto the pink carpet to keep the Ivanka doppelgänger busy.</p>
<p>Fortunately, the night I visited, Rubell was in the gallery observing the performance. She told me that she has witnessed the live performance in Washington, D.C., a few times. Otherwise, she’s been watching it on a live feed from her home in New York City.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist Jennifer Rubell’s work has already elicited a response from her subject, Ivanka Trump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Ivanka lookalike is a model whom Rubell hired through an agency. In my brief conversation with Rubell, she mentioned that although she had to make some minor adjustments to the model’s hair color and makeup, it was relative easy to mimic Ivanka’s look because she is already so doll-like.</p>
<p>Rubell cited <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4bcwswEACAAJ&dq=art+since+1900+1945+to+present&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimmtW3rrTgAhXwmuAKHWdfAKEQ6AEIKjAA">pioneering performance artist</a> Vito Acconci as an inspiration for her interest in the medium. You can see his stamp on “Ivanka Vacuuming” in works like “<a href="http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/step-piece/">Step Piece</a>.” Over a performance period of one month in 1970, Acconci documented himself, each day, stepping on and off a stool in his apartment at the rate of 30 steps per minute until he was unable to continue. He wanted to highlight the absurdity of certain repetitive tasks.</p>
<h2>Invisible female labor</h2>
<p>In her work, Rubell is also tackling the seeming endlessness of mind-numbing labor. But she’s doing it in a way that aligns herself with artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who co-founded the California Institute of Arts’ Feminist Art program. </p>
<p>In 1972, Chicago and Schapiro collaborated with other feminists to create installations, performances and discussion groups concerned with the invisible labor performed by women, especially in the home. </p>
<p>Titled “<a href="http://www.womanhouse.net">Womanhouse</a>,” this influential exhibition criticized prevailing attitudes towards femininity and domesticity that had been instilled through a range of cultural messages, from <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/232216924508831346/?lp=true">advertisements for home appliances</a>, to toys like the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hhjjhYGQtY&annotation_id=annotation_660006&feature=iv">Barbie doll</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Describing their motivation for the exhibition, Chicago and Schapiro wrote, ‘Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/files/2011/08/gri_2000_m_43_b29_f9_326031ds_d1.jpg">The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43.1.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The exhibition was set up in a dilapidated Los Angeles mansion. A group of 23 artists refurbished the residence prior to installing their work to make the familiar spaces of the home seem strange. For instance, the walls of the kitchen were pockmarked with fried egg sculptures that resembled eyes or breasts, while the shelves of a linen closet were merged into the body of a life-size mannequin doll.</p>
<p>In “Ivanka Vacuuming,” I also see echoes of New York-based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In 1973, Ukeles got down on her hands and knees <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/special-topics-art-history/seeing-america/work-exchange-and-technology/v/ukeles-washingtracksmaintenance">to scrub the floors and steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum</a>. <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/">In another famous work</a>, Ukeles shook the hand of every New York City sanitation worker.</p>
<p>Like “Ivanka Vacuuming” and “Womanhouse,” Ukeles wanted to bring attention to the drudgery of everyday tasks that are crucial to our well-being but go largely unrecognized and unrewarded. </p>
<h2>The viewer as enabler</h2>
<p>There’s a twist to “Ivanka Vacuuming,” however: It requires audience participation. In order to complete the work, viewers must grab from the pile of crumbs sitting on an abstract cube in the darkened half of the gallery and toss them into the brightly lit performance space.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Audience members are invited to make a mess – and then grapple with what it feels like to have someone else clean it up.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rubell’s invitation to viewers made me think of Yoko Ono’s famous “<a href="http://imaginepeace.com//archives//2680">Cut Piece</a>” from 1964. In it, Ono sat on the floor with her legs folded beneath her body and a pair of scissors by her side. Viewers were invited to approach the artist, one by one, and cut off a piece of her dress. The performance continued until the artist was almost naked. </p>
<p>I was also reminded of the 1990 work “Untitled (USA Today),” in which artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres <a href="https://hammer.ucla.edu/take-it-or-leave-it/art/untitled-usa-today/">piled a large mound of candy</a> wrapped in red, blue and silver foil against the corner of a gallery and invited visitors to help themselves. Torres was prompting the viewer to think critically about the sugary news dished out by mainstream newspapers like USA Today and the way many readers uncritically gobble it up. </p>
<p>Likewise, Rubell’s work challenges her audience to engage and to think critically.</p>
<p>Vacuuming isn’t inherently degrading or abject. But it’s difficult to imagine Ivanka, at any point in her privileged upbringing, wielding a vacuum. </p>
<p>The artwork is jolting in the way that it juxtaposes Ivanka’s public image – pristine, professional, camera-ready – with tasks performed by the maids and housekeepers who labor in Trump’s homes, hotels and resorts.</p>
<p>But Rubell slyly subverts the dynamics of control. Who’s in charge? Is it the wealthiest one percent whose needs power the vacuums, start up the hotel laundries every night and turn on the kitchen fryers at 4 a.m.? </p>
<p>Or, perhaps it’s us – the public, the spectator – who keep the crumbs coming, participating in a system that privileges the few at the expense of the many.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Preminda Jacob does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new piece of performance art features a lookalike Ivanka Trump vacuuming crumbs. Not only is it a cutting commentary on labor and gender, but it also highlights the complicity of the viewer.
Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/35096
2014-12-10T19:33:38Z
2014-12-10T19:33:38Z
Getting up close to the work of Chuck Close at Sydney’s MCA
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66668/original/image-20141208-5160-je31l1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Close has pushed the limits of the humble print.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pace Gallery, New York © Museum of Contemporary Art, photo: Jess Maurer</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>With more than 200 prints on display, <a href="http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/chuck-close-prints-process-and-collaboration/">Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration</a> is one of the biggest printmaking exhibitions to be held in Australia. The whole top floor of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has been given over to this show. </p>
<p>Very early in his career, Chuck Close was provoked by a comment made by the most prominent art critic of the day in America, Clement Greenberg, that it was impossible to paint a face. As Close <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/portraiture-time-mad-men-180951151/?no-ist">asserted</a> in 1968, portraiture appeared as the “dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date and shop-worn of possible things you could do”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=788&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66664/original/image-20141208-5143-124ue2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=990&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chuck Close, Bob, 1970, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1975 © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Process-driven portraits</h2>
<p>Between 1967 and 1970 Close produced a series of eight huge painted black and white portraits, which in meticulous detail reproduced every nuance of the face of his sitter as recorded in the photograph he made with his large box camera. These gridded paintings on gessoed ground were executed with black paint, with a limited application of white highlights. </p>
<p>Close sought fidelity not so much with the features of the sitter, but with his photograph. </p>
<p>One of the paintings from this series, Bob, 1970, was acquired by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mollison">James Mollison</a> in 1975 for the National Gallery in Canberra. That is the opening work in the current exhibition. From it, we learn very little about the personality of the stage-set designer, the sitter Robert Israel, or for that matter about the nature of portraiture, but a lot about image, perception and process. </p>
<p>It is this conceptual concern that Close brought to his printmaking. This process-driven artist, who is obsessed with recording every change in the development of work, could take trail proofs or state proofs at every stage in the realisation of the work. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66663/original/image-20141208-5149-fj60ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chuck Close, Keith/Mezzotint, 1972, mezzotint, edition of 10, © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery, photograph Maggie L. Kundtz, courtesy Pace Gallery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The mezzotint, Keith (1972) based on a photograph of a fellow artist, Keith Hollingworth, was developed by Close in collaboration with Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press, in Oakland California. Again it was Mollison who in 1976 had the foresight to acquire the mezzotint, all 19 progressive trial proofs, as well as the actual copper plate. </p>
<p>At this exhibition, these are being exhibited as a group for the first time. The mezzotint is a most painstaking technique. Unlike most of the normal methods in printmaking or drawing, where you make a black line on a white surface, in the mezzotint you work from black, slowly scraping away the roughed-up surface, to create detail and to arrive at white lines against a black background. </p>
<p>Close challenged his master printer and himself by adopting this technique and employing it on an unprecedented scale, in the modern era, of more than a metre for his plate. As you examine the transformations in the trail proofs, there is a grid emerging as a compositional structural element. </p>
<p>What is clear from the Keith mezzotint, as well as all of the series of woodcuts (both Japanese and Western style), linocuts, etchings, colour paper-pulp prints, screenprints, tapestry prints, fingerprints (literally made by his fingerprints) and all different manifestations of digital prints, is that Close is not primarily a photorealist, with whom he is normally grouped, but a conceptual artist, and one who is more than anything else concerned with process.</p>
<h2>The event that didn’t change Close’s art</h2>
<p>At the age of 48, in 1988, Close’s life changed abruptly as he experienced a catastrophic spinal artery collapse while attending a function in New York. It left him paralysed from the neck down. </p>
<p>Through intensive physio he regained partial control of some of his muscles and has continued to make art, although it was now from a wheelchair with brushes strapped to his hands, assisted by helpers. </p>
<p>The remarkable thing was that “the event”, as Close prefers to call it, did not appear to have had any impact on the style, technique or conceptual framework of his art, but only on the mechanism of its production. </p>
<p>In his 1998 retrospective, which I saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it was impossible to differentiate his work before and after “the event”. The same is true in this major print retrospective curated by Terri Sultan. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66665/original/image-20141208-5160-sfjmbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chuck Close, Emma, 2000, oil on canvas, © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery, photograph By Ellen Page Wilson, Pace Gallery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MCA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The strategy throughout his print oeuvre remains essentially the same: the subject is a photograph, usually the face of a sitter, which is then gridded and subjected to a process of distillation through some printmaking technology and finally realised, frequently on a huge scale. </p>
<p>A common conceptual conceit running throughout all of his prints is a game between the highly personalised pixelated surface apparent in the print, when seen at a close viewing distance, and the hyperrealist illusion created when viewed from a distance. </p>
<p>Additionally, and central to his practice, is the desire to clearly reveal and record all of the stages in the metamorphosis of the image. It is as if the conjurer and alchemist give us privileged access to their world and reveal their bag of tricks, and we still gasp with amazement and disbelief at the final outcome. </p>
<p>Chuck Close has worked with some of the great master printers and printmaking workshops of our time. He has pushed the limits of the humble print from that of an affordable, democratic multiple to that of a huge, mesmerisingly complex and very expensive artwork produced in multiples. </p>
<p>His art is ultimately a celebration of solemn monumentality presented with an American sense of scale. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration is on display at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art until March 15. Details <a href="http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/chuck-close-prints-process-and-collaboration/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35096/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sasha Grishin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
With more than 200 prints on display, Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration is one of the biggest printmaking exhibitions to be held in Australia. The whole top floor of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary…
Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University
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