In the Meantime:
A Playroom of my Own

Yuko Otomo
May 2014

#1: Shoku-Sho

 

Today, finally, I went to the Futurism show @ Guggenheim that opened at the end of February. I had been gathering my thoughts here & there on this first prototype of an “art movement” of the 20th century beforehand, thinking & writing on every aspect of it, except the visual elements, in order to concentrate on them later when I’d actually face the show. So, today, I thought I was ready to tackle its visual art aspect separate from the rest of the movement. But it didn’t work. It was too huge in scope & size to correctly grasp its meanings. I didn’t have enough time to really dive into it. To make the matter worse, I ran out of memo pad pages. So, I decided to cut in the middle and not finish viewing the whole show. I know I’d have to go back there soon again for sure, at least one more time, in order to do what I’d been aiming to do: to observe their visual art elements alone, separating them away from the other aspects of this massive creative social movement. I’m especially curious about how Cubism affected the new direction of their visual language & how Futurism’s visual elements expanded under the influence of Cubism to open up some new fields of possibility. I still have to prepare myself with a lot to digest in advance in order to really tackle my purpose of viewing this exhibition. Even with another visit or two, it’ll take a while for me to finish the writing on this fascinatingly curious Futurism to be able to post it on my Perpetual Ripplets column.

So, …

In the meantime, I have another job to do. I need to take care of the “ArtFairItis” I got from my art fair experiences in the city this spring. I feel a desperate need to clean out all the toxins that I swallowed & breathed in there. I’m not naïve about how art fairs work. An art fair is a fair/market where art is dealt with the moneymaking business as the bottom line, the foundation of thought & reality. Buying & Selling. It’s Commerce. Everybody knows that art is a commodity of an object of desire there. No one pretends to be spiritual or philosophical. Everybody wants to sell to make money. It’s Business. They want to buy to possess. They want to make money by buying & selling. It’s simple. It’s a convention, a business gathering to buy & to sell “things.”  “Things,” in this case, just happen to be called “art.”

I had never experienced art fairs before. So, this was my first “in your face” / “inside the belly of the beast” experience dealing with them.  Starting with the Armory Show in early March, then with PULSE (in which I was part of the poetry reading attraction of the fair) & the Outsider Art Fair 2014 this month, I attended 3 big art fairs, & I got sick, contracting “ArtFairItis.” I got sick psychically, morally & aesthetically. I thought I was solid & independent enough to be immune to the toxicities of the events. But, I was wrong. I got infected nonetheless.

The first symptom was a flat out depression of some kind; then came a hardened sense of a hatred toward art that I’d never experienced before in my life. I started to hate not just the “art business,” but “art” itself. As this new negative sensation was creeping inside me, I thought of 3 things. One was a film I’d seen a long time ago: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Another is Kumo no Ito (Spider’s Thread), a short story written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, & lastly a Japanese word: Shoku-Sho.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is an American film directed by Stanley Kramer in 1963 starring Spencer Tracy. In it, everybody fights for the cesspool of MONEY. It’s a comedy about the black magic of money power & the cruel enslavement caused by it.  It is so vile & stupid that there’s no space for tragedy to be part of it, it ending up being an epic slapstick comedy. Akutagawa wrote Spider’s Thread in 1918 for young readers to learn a Buddhist moral lesson about not being egocentric in this worldly world.  The third, Shoku-Sho, is both a noun and a verb used to describe the ill effects caused by eating.

Shoku-Sho consists of 2 kanji, Chinese characters symbolizing 2 things. Shoku means “eating, or food” & Kizu/Sho means “a scar.”  So, it basically means the scar caused by food or by eating. The Japanese dictionary explains 3 meanings of the word:

 

1. food poisoning

2. to become tired of eating (something)

3. to be bored and annoyed encountering  the same thing again and again

 

We use this word when we’re tired of being overfed or when overeating something. It can be used not just about food, but just about anything you take inside your system. We also use it to describe the decreased appetite caused by eating too much or eating the same thing again & again. The art fairs made me have “Shoku-Sho” in a strange but acute way. Being in 3 art fairs there in person myself to breathe in the air of an intense business of buying and selling mixed with the noise and chatter of the people made me have all the symptoms of Shoku-Sho, an ill effect caused by “ArtFairItis”.

This is what happened.

Simply stated, being in art fairs made me HATE “art.” In art fairs, with the business side of art pushed to the forefront with such force, art effortlessly falls into a mishmash of the visual cacophony & nonsense of human activities. I felt sick to the stomach & I started to hate art. I started to hate looking at art, hating thinking & reading about art & also hating being an artist. I almost felt cursed being involved in art to begin with. The art fair experiences made me totally “anti-art.”  Anything relating to “art” had become unbearably disturbing to me. I didn’t know how to cope with symptoms I’d never experienced before. All I could do was to shut myself out of anything “art” just to be away from its toxic associations for a while.

Walking into the art fairs, the first impression I got was an image of a brothel. The flea market like compartmentalized limited space rented out by an each dealer in the fairs with “works of art” displayed as commodities looked like a brothel full of prostitutes waiting to be picked up & bought. Or, it even gave me an associated image of a slave market where slaves were auctioned off. To witness “art” being displayed, so naked & so insensitively raw, just to be bought by MONEY, was one of the most OBSCENE experiences I’d ever had. The mixture of cacophonic chatty noises and a thick air of business made me strangely ill as soon as I stepped inside where DESIRE & MONEY shake hands with each other to obtain more DESIRE & MONEY. Another image that came to my mind was the one of a department store where compartmentalized items of different categories were sold next to each other with no concern. There were no traces of joint efforts to pay attention to the aesthetics of the whole exhibition space as “one.” It’s all about patchworking the space with the business intention. The insensitivity toward the management of the fair space as a whole was so blunt, loud and carefree in the basest way.

When an artwork is separated from the artist’s original intentions to be commoditized as an item to be bought & sold, how sad it looks! Even a masterpiece looks shabby, sad & fragile, sickly & abundant. Even innocence looks impure. Good paintings look superficial. Bad paintings just show their vulgarity as pure material aspects.  Everything is thrown into the desert full of MONEY. Every particle of its aesthetic organism is shattered & pushed to the front of the market to get attention to be bought & sold. Money tags hang next to art whether you see them or not. The booths are like small shops to sell GOODS. Dealers are like shopkeepers trying to make a sale. Unlike an art viewing in other public spaces such as museums or even galleries, art in art fairs looks totally abused. None of them have breathing space of their own; there is no true care or love surrounding them. It hurts too much to see art in this kind of unethical & unaesthetic environment.  How can anybody pick anything worthwhile? That’s why you need an insistent sales pitch by the dealers to explain what’s what in the most manipulative ways to seduce the buyers.

Once is enough, I thought. I’m not a buyer, or a seller, or a journalist who writes about the fairs as her job. I have nothing to do there but to just get sick. I’m quite sure I’ll not be going back to any of the art fairs next year. Of course, I might change my mind when the season arrives again, but what reasons do I have to have to change my mind, I wonder?

In the meantime, I’m trying to forget the things I ate with my eyes…

 

#2: Dialogue

I feel almost normal. My appetite for art is coming back slowly but surely. So, as I try to shake off all the residues of ArtFiarItis, in the meantime, S & I went to Chelsea for a “gallery hopping.” We wanted to have the sense of our routine back. As usual, we made a planned map of a route, since going back & forth on long Chelsea blocks could be exhausting if it didn’t flow well. We picked some shows to see. Some of them were to end soon.

Today’s collective unconscious keyword was “dialogue.” We ran into this word many times as we walked around. It started with August Sander/Bernd and Hilla Becher: A Dialogue (@ Bruce Silverstein). This joint photography show was curated by Hilla Becher herself, & I was happy to see some of the architectural photos of old houses, not just their signature portraiture works of post-industrial landscapes. To match their work with Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century portraiture is a sincere idea that quietly but genuinely provokes the connected psyche of both subjects to come alive naturally. I enjoyed seeing familiar images of People & realized that workers had the most modern faces. Their faces can be ours in our time. I respect their shared role as the archivists of history.

We tried to skip some galleries promoting toxic art, peeking in & out quickly. Some art is so toxic & bad that you wonder why anyone wants make such things or wants to deal with such things. What cursed lives on both ends: the maker & the dealer/buyer alike. I am very aware of the mechanism of the art business. So, I get suspicious over how the shows are prepared. I wondered, “Why Soutine now?” when I saw Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine (@Paul Kasmin). Life in Death, a dialogue between Life & Death in Nature Morte & in stormy landscapes. A dialogue between life & death in his work is like a cry, a shout or a scream, a sob & a poem.  It was interesting to re-realize how strongly he was connected to the history of the art of painting. I enjoyed thinking of Vincent’s influence on him & his influences on Ab-Ex painters that subsequently changed the course of the history totally.

I hate appropriation art & I have clear reasons why, but I’m not going into that here now. But, interestingly, this afternoon, we saw 3 appropriation art shows in dialogue with art history. One was Glenn Brown (@Gagosian), another was Shellie Levine (@Paula Cooper) & Robert Longo (@Metro Pictures). GB is in a dialogue with classic mannerism; SL with a constructivist & RL with Ab-Ex. They all had consciously arranged conceptual twists. But they all looked dead — just to express my basic reaction to all of them. The most cynical one was GB’s, showing off the kitschy cheap psyche of classicism & death; the cleverest, almost intellectually sneaky one was SL’s & the most obscenely absurd one was RL’s.

I could not figure out RL’s metaphysical points & intentions behind these massive, labor intensive / materially dependent fake Ab-Ex paintings in b&w drawing form. The press release for this show, Gang of Cosmos, tells us, “In entering into this dialogue with major figures of 50 years ago, Longo acknowledges Abstract Expressionism’s undiminished importance in American art and its influence on his own thinking.” It’s funny to read this kind of writing, since basically nobody disputes the importance of Ab-Exism & we all have been through it one way or the other, whether we like it or not, have been influenced or not, rebelled against it or not, ignored it or not. So, what is it to tell us now about its significance by showing the b&w version of exact motifs of those famed Ab-Ex works? I asked one of the attendants, who were placed to watch us not touch the works, if RL himself actually worked on these drawings with his hands or had he hired people to make them for him. A big work force & a big techno involvement such as digital manipulations to translate the 3-D details of the physical paints of the original works, Gang of Cosmos were made by, for & of the art industry. Some silly & dark association with the Gang of Four popped in my mind on & off as I walked through the show.

The last one we saw was a dialogue show pairing 2 artists I am very curious about. Yves Klein & Andy Warhol. Klein/Warhol Fire and Oxidation Paintings (@Skarstedt). Fire & Piss/Water. What a match! It’s an inaugural show of the gallery’s new space in Chelsea. The press release talks more about the gallery expansion than the art they’re showing. This crazed territorial game of gallery space expansion is too “alpha-male” in the lowest grade for my taste. Nonetheless, the show was fantastic. Wished it was presented with a bit more breathing space for each work, but the idea to juxtapose abstract works by 2 of the most idiosyncratic & rebellious artists, born in the same year, 1928, done by fire & water (piss) fascinated me.

The b&w short film of Klein creating fire paintings accompanies the show to demonstrate his creative process. Fire from a blowtorch makes a pattern as water from a hose tries to maintain the heat to not go so high as to burn the painting itself. An effect of the water is not just to help the temperature go down, but it also creates its own liquefied alchemical traces on the picture plane, adding more intricacy into his fire tracing pattern making. It’s quite mesmerizing to see how controlled Klein was in maintaining his sense of aesthetic judgment concerning how far & where to go as he created these fire paintings.

A few years ago, S & I saw a fantastic retrospective of his in Paris that helped us understand his work & its philosophical foundations in a total sense. His obsession with fire was very serious & elemental in the most profound sense. Resulting works created in 1961 all look elegantly mysterious & aesthetically puzzling & inviting with their powerful natural ambiguity. Some are titled & some are not: Peinture de Feu; Marque du Feu; Lâ eau et le feu. Each painting is literally painted by fire (& water), leaving the traces of cosmic alchemy that took place over 50 years ago on the material, in this case, on cardboard. I remember he studied Judo seriously & had even visited Japan. His understanding of void was solid.

Oxidation Paintings by Warhol is also about cosmic alchemy. In his case, he used liquid/water. It’s piss. Male urine to be exact. Like a potter studies the glaze & its alchemy, he experimented with his materials & the method of application. He said a woman’s piss didn’t work since it just made a puddle. He needed some explosive sprouting force to splatter the liquid to make patterns of oxidation on the surface of a canvas prepared with metallic pigments in acrylic. The new direction toward abstraction he took in the later days through shadow paintings & oxidation paintings was taking him away from the accustomed illustrative reality of pop-art & its head twisting ironies.

With Pollock-like spatters, drips & explosions all over the picture plane, he shows an array of accidental alchemical processes. Visually, it is superbly beautiful & inviting. Some are independent single pieces; some are in series such as Oxidation Paintings (in ten parts). They were all done in 1978 – 79. Like looking at the magnificent surface of glazed pottery created in fire, it is a mind opening experience to face these greenish, bluish, ochre, silver & gold colors making mesmerizing indescribable alchemical motifs. I had to tell myself not to think of “piss/urine” but just to look at the visual reality in front of me. The idea of urine as part of creative materials & methods made me uneasy & almost horrified. To see the “beauty” created by “piss”?!? Looking at these piss paintings was one of the strangest visual sensation experiences I’d had. The sense of beauty & disgust both confronted me as the visual reality in one. I was too curious & too invited not to look at them as I wondered with some thoughts. How conscious was Warhol of the way piss would fall on the surface? Is this his piss? Is it his hired men’s piss? etc.

Interesting to notice that both Klein & Warhol used a male physical force as a creative tool. To see works created by the 2 artists with the oppositional elements of nature: Fire & Water (urine is water nonetheless) in one space next to & facing each other was an experience that tested my sense of limits of visual enjoyment. Amazing to witness that they both succeeded in the transformation of a material reality to bring in another level of new realities. You forget about the original materials: “paper (cardboard)” in Klein’s case & “canvas” in Warhol’s case, when you face them. A dialogue between 2 artists; a dialogue between 2 elements of nature & a dialogue between them & us … This show will stay in my mind for a long time.

After finishing the quite enjoyable gallery hopping, we walked east via W. 21st St. between 9th & 10th Aves. The mist-like drizzle went on & off quietly with the sun coming in & out all day. The pre-dusk hour was trembling with the lush fresh green of new leaves of trees making the silent music of a transparent light/shadow in a intricate delicacy as majestic wisterias & ivies climbing up on brick walls of the old 19th Century West Village buildings. I could not stop marveling at the beauty of the season. Vegetation, air, water, earth, light & shadow; they all are having multiple dialogues at the same time. I claimed, “This is the best dialogue I’ve seen today!”

#3: Roses & Peonies

 

No matter how we want to argue, “Warhol” keeps living in our life.  We see things related to him still happening & developing in many directions. His legacy created an important foundation that supports various art organizations such as our beloved Steve Cannon’s A Gathering of the Tribes & one of our favorite cinema venues, Anthology Film Archives. This way, his effects live on among us. He affected the world in such a way; “Before & After Warhol” are a million miles apart whether you like it or not.

This afternoon, S & I saw a tasteless self-commoditized kitschy show of Ultra Violet, one of his major “muses.” Her reconstructed studio was on sale. It was quite distasteful, although it was sweet to see young Taylor Mead in some of the photo panels there. Then we saw “piss” paintings by Warhol himself. In the evening, we encountered another extension of the Warhol legacy. We were at the Rene Ricard Memorial Tribute @ Eldridge Street Synagogue in downtown Manhattan. Friends of Rene (*everybody calls him by his first name…) gathered there to pay tribute to a poet, art critic, painter & actor who passed away recently at the age of 67. R.R. was in many of Warhol films & was a major part of the Warhol clan.

We walked into the impeccably restored, magnificently mystical, semi-dark space with stained glass windows, gilded decorations & wooden benches. Drinks (some cocktail & wine, etc.) were served at the front of the space as a welcoming gesture. We were told an orange/red dish colored sweet cocktail with an orange rind in it was Rene’s favorite…too bad, I forgot its name. It was nice to be a bit tipsy & afloat before the memorial started instead of the usual “after event” routine.

The list of readers was quite impressive. Personalities of the NY art scene now & then, including Penny Arcade, Luc Sante, Richard Hell, Brice Marden, Francesco Clemente, the Schnabel sisters, Sur Rodney Sur, Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Rita Barros, Stefan Bondell, Lisa Leibman, Larry Gagosian & others… with Raymond Foye as the master of ceremonies. From the art scene to the poetry scene to the family/friends circle, every reader gave his/her utmost personal tribute, laden with love & admiration, to him.  The key word of the tribute was “A Poet Maudit”: an anglicized French original version of Le Poet Maudit. A Cursed Poet. Quite a few speakers used this term… as if it were the highest laurel for any artist… Also, Jack Smith’s & Genet’s names were mentioned a few times.

Many episodes told us of the extravagances of his life style: how he wasted an exorbitantly huge sum of money in one shot, blowing it off buying jewelry, alcohol & drugs. Typical stories of the Warhol/post-Warhol era when freedom & decadence went hand in hand. Many spoke of his gentle & generous spirit; some read his poetry. His role of putting artists such as Basquiat & Schnabel “on the map” was crucial to the 80s art scene. R.R. was a perfect conduit to connect the 2 worlds: Underground & Mainstream.

The reception tables were decorated with roses, peonies, rosemary & thyme (without parsley), red & green plums. Hybrid multi-petal pink roses with a tint of orange color & big heads of pink peonies, also with the same tint of orange, were set in big vases here & there, corresponding to the color of the cocktail. They emanated a flame-like glow in the semi-dark space. Rain fell on & off quite heavily at times throughout the evening.  But it stopped when the tribute was done. Some guests took stems of roses & peonies out of vases to bring them home. I did the same. I picked 3 rose stems myself. The out-worldly orange-pink colored roses had such vibrant & intense thorns, not just on the stems, but also on the leaves. I also saved bunches of rosemary & thyme twigs from being dumped into the after party trash bin. Raising a toast to Rene & to Genet, I stole 2 fancy cocktail glasses as souvenirs.

We walked home with Geoffrey Hendricks & Sur Rodney Sur, who live not too far from us. I felt the rose thorns keep pricking my hands all the way home, even though I’d wrapped them carefully with layers of napkins. “Why didn’t you take peonies instead?” S asked me. I said nothing, keeping my personal secret over the color of the roses relating to the story of my mother’s memorial almost 10 years ago to myself alone.

Roses kept us company for a few days & started to wilt. So, I hung them upside down to dry them in my kitchen window.  Now, all the orange pink multi-layered petals got dried & lost the original flaming color, turning itself into a “shocking pink.” Soon, they will join the other dry flowers in the basket as a reminder of the ever-changing  beauty of life. The rosemary & thyme are almost ready to be stored in jars. One day, I’ll cook something with freshly dried herbs saved from R. R’s memorial tribute reception table.

 



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