Alexander Mcqueen. Givenchy. Fall 1999.

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(Source: dinnerwithannawintour)

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Walking in My Mind: Yayoi Kusama

kusama:

PREFACE:

Art is the product of creative thinking within an aesthetic context. Rather than merely mirroring our social experience or the times we live in, art can actively ‘think’ about a broad range of cultural and social issues, engineering and giving form to new perspectives that have the potential to change the way we perceive not only our surroundings, but also our own cognitive activity. Art can illuminate, in other words, the unseen processes by which we make sense of the world as well as our own interior life.

Walking in My Mind examines this crucial dimension of contemporary art practice. Bringing together a diverse group of international artists whose work maps, models and explores the workings of the creative mind, it highlights the idea that an is an alternative way of thinking things out and ultimately of apprehending reality, especially aspects of our experience that are often otherwise closed or inaccessible to us. Besides investigating their own perceptual and creative processes, the artists in the exhibition also engage more generally with the question of how individuals process information and understand their surroundings. Their work, which often takes the form of immersive installations, invites us to become aware of own thoughts and feelings, and to reconsider the role these play in framing our relationships with external phenomena and the broader cultural context in which we live.

All art, of course, offer us the opportunity to see things through the eyes of its creator. But the works in this show go a step further: they layout mental landscapes that we can inspect and reflect on as if we were walking around inside the artist’s mind. The use of the word ‘walking’ in the exhibition title draws attention to the importance of our physical exploration of these works, as well as to the intimate link between bodily experience and creative thinking. It suggests that these artworks solicit both focused and unfocused ways of seeing, and that we should pay attention to the full range of our experience in responding to them. Rather than trying to find an answer to what they ‘mean’, we should allow ourselves to discover the different mental paths and ways of processing information that each work presents.

P.19

Yayoi Kusama, Chiharu Shiota and Pipilotti Rist each create an image of the mind that refers on different levels to the web-like structures of neuronal processes. Tyson’s work includes imagery of electro-chemical pulses. In the installations of both Rist and Kusama, viewers lose their orientation, one way or another, and - in a metaphorical sense - find themselves caught up in a network of neurons and synapses. Meanwhile, in Shiota’s work, the interconnections of thought processes find visual form in a web of black threads.

In Kusama’s installation Dots Obsession (2009), made up of mirrors and balloons decorated with red and white polka dots, we are in danger of losing our way, but in a manner that is entirely different from the experience of the other installations. One has a sense of being absorbed into this artificial scenario, of losing touch with the limits of one’s own body. Lost amid the balloons and mirror images, we cannot see the end of the passage. When we make our way through the space and step out onto the terrace of the Hayward Gallery and are confronted with her work Guidepost to the New World (2005), in which polka-dotted sculptures are scattered over an Astroturf lawn, it is as though we are seeing the outside world through Kusama’s eyes. This impression is reinforced by the trees between Hungerford Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, which Kusama has clad in polka-dot fabric. As Kusama herself has said:

“A polka dot has the form of the sun which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon which is calm, round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing … Our earth is only one polka dot among the million stars in the cosmos … Polka dots are a way to infinity.” 

This representation of infinity conveys a notion of the mind as something ungraspable and indefinable. And if we read her installations as images of her mind, then the dots could be taken to represent the millions of neurons that exist in the brain. As viewers wander amongst these ‘neurons’, they create the synapses. These polka-dot works are, in formal terms, the opposite of Kusama’s Infinity Net Paintings, where our thought patterns take the form of web-like structures, similar to those in her early drawings.


P.26

“When I’m facing a canvas and painting a net of dots I see the dots continuing on from the desk to the floor until they even cover my own body. The dots repeat and repeat and the net of dots stretches out infinitely. In other words, I forget myself, and become lost in the net, until my arms, legs, my clothes, and the entire room is filled with dots.”

Yayoi Kusama began to experience visual and auditory delusions in her teenage years. Diagnosed as schizophrenic and manic-depressive by a psychologist who discovered her artistic genius during her adolescence, she continued to suffer from pronounced neurosis after moving to New York in the late 1950s. In a show of 1959, she exhibited her first Infinity Nets. The New York art scene at the time was dominated by Action Painting, but Minimalism, with which Kusama would compare her works, was beginning to emerge. With its distinctive visual rhythm and monochrome palette, Kusama’s work attracted considerable attention. To the artist, Infinity Nets released something indefinable and ineffable in her innermost depths ‘into the chaos of the void’.

“My life is a dot, in other words, one of a million particles. Through the white matrix of nothingness of dots connected on an astronomical scale, self and other and the entire universe is obliterated”,

she has explained. She bases her aesthetic ideas on dissolution and combination, proliferation and separation, a feeling of disintegrating into particles and of hearing messages from outer space. But this is not mere obliteration, for in the process, she elevates herself, like cosmic dust, into something eternal. Externalizing her inner microcosm, she projects it onto a macrocosm far surpassing our powers of conception, and in doing so acquires an infinite mission. This is the source of the momentum that has sustained Kusama’s creative energy for over half a century.

Kusama’s first environmental work, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show was exhibited in 1963 at the Gertrude Stein Gallery. She filled a 10-meter-long boat with stuffed phallus-shaped objects and then covered the floor, walls, and ceiling of the gallery with 999 black-and-white photographs of this sculpture. She then went on to produce environmental works employing the phallus — a symbol of her terror of sex — and macaroni, standing for the food mass-produced by american consumer society. In Driving Image Show (1964), she covered the gallery floor with macaroni, and in Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field (1965) she created and environment out of mirrors and plastic. Mirrors were also employed in the 1966 Kusama’s Peep Show, where she exhibited the Endless Love Room, a hexagonal, mirrored space illuminated by flashing red, white, blue, and green lights, creating visual equivalents of such immaterial and intangible things as ‘mechanization, repetition, threatening ideas, impulses, vertigo, and all-encompassing, non-existent love’.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, and after several retrospective exhibitions during the 1990s, mostly in the United States, began to create much larger installations that have been exhibited around the world. She continues to employ the mirrors featured in Endless Love Room. In Fireflies on the Water (2002), 150 tiny lights hang down from the ceiling, creating an effect of infinite repetition on the mirrored walls and the pool in the centre of the floor. The result is a scene of great serenity and ethereality. The three-dimensional objects, repeated endlessly and illusionistically  in the two-dimensional mirrored surfaces, visible to the eye but impossible to actually reach out and touch, are the perfect embodiment of Kusama’s art of phantasms and hallucinations, evoking the indefinable and ineffable.

from Walking in My Mind, “Between the Microcosm and the Macrocosm”,
essay by Mami Kataoka

South Pole, Geodesic Dome ( Buckminster Fuller )
1975 - 2009

Photo Credit: Forest Banks
via { antarcticsun }

lorenzomakesthings:

Ai Weiwei Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 (3/3)

lorenzomakesthings:

Ai Weiwei Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 (2/3)

lorenzomakesthings:

Ai Weiwei Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 (1/3)

Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam
Marjorie Cohn

“June 15, 2009

From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).”

…

more at { uruknet }

Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927 - November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.

Luhmann’s systems theory focuses on three topics, which are interconnected in his entire work.

1. Systems theory as societal theory
2. Communication theory and
3. Evolution theory

Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. While his theories have yet to make a major mark in American sociology, his theory is currently well known and popular in German sociology and has also been rather intensively received in Japan and Eastern Europe, including Russia. His relatively low profile elsewhere is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a difficult task, since his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists.

Luhmann himself described his theory as “labyrinth-like” or “non-linear” and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood “too quickly”, which would only produce simplistic misunderstandings.

{ Wiki }

gurafiku:

Japanese Poster: Rock Collection 94. Yusaku Kamekura.