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Part I: Gush.

Sometimes all it takes for an artist is a show – it arrives at the perfect moment and can serve as a fuel for future creative reflection extending well beyond the original encounter.  Such has been my experience peering into the world of Yayoi Kusama.*  The inspiration derived from seeing the diverse body of work (and media) of an artist insistent on asserting an authentic, personal vision (one which not so paradoxically turns out to be deeply resonant for the many), is unparalleled.   I was overwhelmed by this artist’s impressive body of work, her years of dogged pursuit, dedication, and perseverance, not to mention her non-binary, multifaceted defiance of any outside attempt to categorize or pigeon-hole her work and life.  There was something very pointed and powerful for me in this individual’s career and life, in spite of her struggles along the way.  And she continues to create in the face of it all, including, surely, an acute awareness of her own mortality as she transitions into her 10th decade. 

I feel certain art-making is Yayoi Kusama’s way of transmuting her suffering (chaos, confusion, pain, alienation, etc.).  This must be, in part, why her work and life are so interesting to inhabitants of the chaotic early 21st century.  It really speaks to the entire spectrum of the human condition across time and place but which finds its most unrestrained expression in the digital era:  self-indulgence, self-transcendence, hopes, fears, failure, success, struggle, resistance, outrage, protest, surrender, highs, lows, light, dark, expansion,  contraction, contradiction, loud, quiet, hard, soft, contemplative, monkish, introspective, riding the continuum of an life through successive waves of profound confusion and self-doubt as well as profound insight and self-acceptance.

 I was and still am enveloped.

Part II.  Layers, Siftings and Further Musings in a Transitional Era.

Yayoi Kusama’s work will continue to stimulate my thinking in a variety of ways for months to come, but as I am now constantly grappling with art/craft/making in an era of increasing resource limits and crisis-level climate alterations, I also wanted to look at her work through a more narrow lens.  Regardless of what we all personally “believe”/accept about climate change, we are approaching the Earth’s carrying capacity (i.e., its capacity to carry humans in our current configuration) on many resource fronts.  This has implications for every aspect of human life, but in the context of creative endeavor generates many deep and serious questions, not the least of which are:  Is it possible to, and how can we, develop a sensibility in our making that can integrate and nurture humanity, other species, as well as the environment we share? And what does an “aesthetic of sustainability” look like and, importantly, can that become as universally embraced as the fossil-fuel driven aesthetic seems to be today?   One might ask if these questions and their answers even matter at all, but I think the do.  It is my belief that their answers can contribute to how successfully we collectively respond to our many current and future challenges.

We don’t need to look too far into the past to find a time when sustainable making was the only kind of making.  Today many draw attention to, for example, wabi-sabi and related aesthetic concerns as antithetical rescue remedies for the excesses of the industrially created artifact: something rustic, direct, uncomplicated, salvaged, organic, entropy-embracing.  As I reflect on Kusama-world, I am struck by how much our expectations and aesthetic values are outgrowths of the instant-gratification, fossil-fuel -driven world we all inhabit, and how her work is quite possibly this waning era’s most vivid and exuberant expression.

From a materials standpoint alone, Kusama’s work is saturated with acrylic paint, a wide range of plastics and other petroleum-derived components, as well as vast arrays of electric light. These are the materials for the vast majority of 20th and early 21st century artists/designers/makers.   These are also peak fossil-fuel-consumption-era materials, by-products of processes contributing to habitat-degrading greenhouse gas emissions.  Include the energy and resources embedded in manufacturing these materials and components, the embedded and operational energy of a large scale exhibition of this type and its mass-manufactured “swag” (which, as a child of this space/time I will admit to being attracted), and the energy embedded in the cloud-dependent mass social-media feeds (to which I am also a steady contributor and participant), and we have a completely unsustainable model …unless of course we can very quickly (like, yesterday) develop an energy source dense enough to match the miracle of fossil-fueled energy, one that doesn’t destroy the habitability of our planet!

It is a poignant moment.  I am clearer than ever as an artist/designer/maker as to my own purpose and vision and how to manifest it; I am also increasingly aware that I need to find new (or return to earlier) ways of creating to reduce my ecological footprint.  Rhetorical question:  Are the imperative to create and the imperative to reduce my footprint mutually exclusive?

We live in an era of dissonance at many levels of our lives.  We attempt to hold many truths which are ultimately mutually exclusive.  So it is for fossil fuels: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. This fact is one source of a host of misunderstandings and conflicts, of mis- and mal- investment, of alienation from wealth and power on one end of the spectrum and the dense consolidation of wealth and power on the other.  In an era of transition, we will be looking for ways to hold on to whatever we can of the by-products of this energy system, even if to do so endangers our core support system.  We hope something will come along to save us before we are forced to make hard choices.  This dissonance can be paralyzing, and it shows no signs of abating as new generations come of age.  It suggests a repeating “error” code firing in our brains coupled with an increasingly dysfunctional “reset” switch.

And so it is, at the likely twilight of fossil-fuel driven exuberance, that Yayoi Kusama’s work is a beautiful, joyous, riotous, inspiring symbol of life. Her work and being are also about persistence and resilience.  I think we flock to its material abundance and ebullience for comfort and affirmation in an uncertain age.  I love the show for this but I am also sobered by it because it reminds me of the hard work ahead.  We artists and makers especially must work to realize a new, unified, resilient vision of person and planet and stay the course in the same way that Kusama has continued to work her entire life to realize her unique vision – it’s demanding, arduous and on-going.  That is the nature of making/creating, of life and work….And it’s all-hands-on-deck now.  K.C.

Images: My own, taken during the show (except from the large composite above: a friend captured the frequently elusive shot from the Dots Obsession viewer): some composites of highlights; my digital montage of Kusama’s celluloid montage, and mash-up selfies from The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away and Phalli’s Field.

*Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors! is showing now at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta – I received a gift invitation to the show or I would not have made it at all as tickets are, alas, sold out. However, there are numerous windows into this show and her work on YouTube and elsewhere on the fabulous Internet.  Check it out!

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The High Museum of Art in Atlanta recently hosted a collection of works by the Dutch designer, Iris Van Herpen (“IVH”) (Iris Van Herpen: Transforming Fashion).  The show was diverse and complex and I am grateful I was able to make it to the museum before it closed earlier this month.  I was immediately inspired to write about it.  Interestingly, the process of writing opened up a whole new way of looking at my own work.  Before I returned to my modest exertions in the studio though, I recorded these thoughts and observations about the exhibition.

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Point of beginning:  I am rapidly drawn in by the unconventional, diverse and harmonious use of materials and form.  The pieces, all presented on the female figure, are vibrant, innovative, and impeccably crafted.*  The human form as an armature sets the sculptural limits of each piece, but within their respective envelopes, there is room to explore a variety of 3-dimensional ideas.  With chain, leather, polymers, film and other materials, through hand, laser, and 3-d print technologies, a coherent vision emerges.  This work exemplifies the holistic nature of design: a fusion of artistic sensibility, utility, and high craftsmanship.  My designer-mind turns at fever pitch to process all of the surface nuances and architectural splendor of the pieces.  At times, I feel I am practically hyperventilating from excitement.  A fresh encounter like this is potentially life-altering.  I am having an IVH “moment”, and I recognize this kind of experience as one of the hallmarks of my growth as an artist/designer/maker – the very best of creative cross-fertilization.

There are conceptual underpinnings to Iris Van Herpen’s work, to be sure. Technology is a strong driver but at its core is the notion of chaos.  This one idea, chaos, has so thoroughly captured my imagination that I am sure I will never look at anything the same again.  This is not the “chaos” of common parlance (as in disorder or break-down), or the formless, primordial reality posited by the ancient Greeks; but rather, the mathematical concept relating to non-linear systems dynamics.**  While I certainly have an incomplete understanding of the concept (and intend to apply myself further to the task of improving that understanding), I begin to appreciate this notion of chaos as a core dictate of process embodied in the exhibited works.  Via bundled and recursive layers, each piece is a composite of complex inputs.  Each suggests a semi-permeable system, one of feedback loops, altering vectors, potentialities, of scaled iterations, re-curving, reorganizing, and unfolding to infinity…except that they are all neatly arrested in space and time as discrete finished works.  There is a sense that this designer/artist/visionary has, in the completion of each piece, dialogued with chaos and deepened the scope of her dance with it.  One aspires to the level of individual and collaborative creative freedom, technical prowess, and innovation on display at this extraordinary exhibition.

There are a lot of other ideas that might be explored in connection with this exhibition, and I ran the gamut as I refined this post:  fashion and sustainability, the promises and limits of technology in the face of environmental degradation, holistic creative practice, to name a few….but these topics are for other posts.  For now, I am content to rest in the strange, paradoxical comfort represented by chaos.  Maybe that is the seduction of the exhibition and of Iris Van Herpen’s work – the hope, light, and magic in these pieces are reminders that we are each manifestations of pure, unfolding process, modified at points in space and time by myriad influences, each exerting forces with varying degrees of potential or predictable outcome.  We are indeed, living, breathing chaos, emergent processes of vectors known and unknown.  We might as well relax and enjoy the ride!

Footnotes:
*Throughout this article, I make a distinction between the sculptural, exploratory pieces and the more “accessible/market-friendly” couture (as seen, e.g., in the runway footage looped in conjunction with the exhibition).

** Apparently the term “chaos” belies the true nature of the dynamical systems it signifies although it continues to be used.  See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Press, 1987.

K.C. May, 2016

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Last July I quietly entered the 10th year of my textile/fiber entrepreneurial adventure.  I have been working with cloth, fiber and allied processes for over 20 years but doing so as a livelihood came a bit later.  10 years is a milestone, worthy of much review and assessment.  As 2015 came to an end, I began that review.  In the midst of my musings on the past year’s fiber/textile-art, design, and making, I had a chance to see a couple of shows which I found inspiring (note to self: get out and see more work by other makers!).  Here are some impressions:

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Early December: I am fortunate to have a friend who insists I see Indigenous Beauty at the Michael C. Carlos Museum* (s/a my postscript below) before it closes (alas, it did close on January 3rd).  We go together and supplement the show’s interpretive content with our own; I am always enriched my friend’s observations.  Much of the show’s gratification for me is in its substantial assemblage of textile-based artifacts, largely vestments, bags, sheaths and shields.  Many of these pieces are imbued with ritual significance.  As we walk through the gallery, the energy and vitality of these pieces fills the space with a palpable solemnity; beauty, indeed, and truth.  This work has deep roots.  I am reminded that the fiber/textile continuum stretches far into the past (well beyond the time of the makers of these artifacts), and far into the future during which, if humans manage to survive the Anthropocene, textiles will be re-visioned through both familiar and as yet undiscovered materials and techniques.  I am privileged to be a participant in that continuum.

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Currently at the Ventulett Gallery, Fractured features works by Lynn Pollard and Karen Reese Tunnell.  In contrast to its title, my impression of the work of these two artists is one of continuity and solidity.  Both artists works’ are quite complex, layered with rich, abstract detail and nuance.  Each body of work “speaks” in visual “harmonics”: one quietly powerful, contemplative, the other energetic, vibrant, and assertive. Both resonate with something almost primordial, owing much of their intensity to the careful management of inherently unpredictable base techniques (successive indigo vat immersion and marbling, respectively).  I feel a kinship with these artists and recognize a shared source of inspiration.  Seeing this show reminds me of how lucky I am to have gravitated toward textiles and fiber as my central media/formats.  If you have any doubt as to the power of techniques and materials generally associated with fiber/textile craft to move the heart and soul on a universal level, go see this show.  It will change your mind.  Show closes on January 22, 2016.

Postscript:  Turning over a new leaf, my husband and I went to the Carlos this past Sunday.  I happen to live within walking distance of the museum and although my intention has always been to make the connect at least one a month, I have not been able to do so.  This year, I hope to make good on my intentions! K.C.