Posts tagged QAGGoMA
Vociferous Whimsy
Midnight ramblings by a young art critic
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Review | Yayoi Kusama: ‘Look Now, See Forever’
Yayoi Kusama
Dots Obsession 2011
Vinyl balloons, dot sheets, paint, mirrors
Image: Exhibition catalogue
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist whose paintings, sculptures, performances and installations have influenced generations of artists from minimalists in New York to contemporary practitioners the world over. Kusama was born in 1929, in Japan where she studied for one year before moving to New York in 1957/58 (reports differ). At the time New York was living in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism, a movement which had thrust the city to the centre of the art world. Kusama’s influence was to be profound as she defied definition, experimented and captivated everyone with her eccentric persona. In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan and her profiled waned in the US until retrospectives of her work brought her international attention, particularly the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. During the exhibition she began selling the silver spheres which made up her installation Narcissus Garden for the equivalent of $2. Reuben Keehan, Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art suggests this was clearly a critique of the institutionalisation of contemporary art. This is just one example where her work defies the expectation of genre, audience and authority.
Kusama has been continually influenced by the hallucinations she had as a child in which she was surrounded by colourful dots, flowers and patterns. Kusama’s mental illness is not extensively written of, nor does it need to be. She has an obsessive compulsive disorder. In Japan she chose to live at the Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo. She continues to live there, painting everyday. Her art and her life are inseparable.
An exhibition of Kusama’s recent installation, and well as video and sculpture is on display at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. Her exhibition ‘Look Now, See Forever’ features samples from her diverse output, but is perhaps less indicative of her defiance of genre and authority than earlier exhibitions. This exhibition, however, is highly engaging and sure to excite return visits.
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Yayoi Kusama - An Introduction. (Via KusamaDocumentary).
An exhibition of Kusama’s work is currently on display at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until 11 March 2012.
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Emily Floyd, Steiner Rainbow 2006
In this video for the Gallery of Modern Art’s 5th birthday celebrations, Peter McKay, Curator of Contemporary Australian art, speaks about the changing significance of rainbows. Emily Flod’s sculpture draws inspiration from the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, taking the small wooden sculptures used in Steiner/Waldorf schools and enlarging them. The scale is a little bigger than human, as you can see in the video.
As a Steiner graduate I immediately recognised this sculpture. At school there were many small wooden objects which we all played with, the rainbow was one. This sculpture draws our attention to colour and scale, as well as the relevance of rainbows (which McKay speaks about). Steiner Rainbow is large and imposing, but it also draws you in, irresistibly you have to walk around it. There are many ways this artwork could be displayed, just as when we were kids changing the angles of each colour arc. It’s temping to touch too and while I was in the gallery small children were encouraged not to touch the artwork, though you could tell they really wanted to. (This seems at odds with the intended use for small wooden rainbows but perhaps not contemporary art objects.)
An interview with Emily Floyd is available in the Hiede Museum’s Colour Bazaar: Nine Contemporary Works education resource here. Colour Bazaar was on display 12 February to 19 June 2011.
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Review| 21st Century: Art in the First Decade at GoMA
The 21st Century: Art in the First Decade exhibition fills three levels of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), South Bank, with all the unexpected installations and materials we have come to love. The product of ten years collecting contemporary art, 21 Centuryfeatures old favourites as well as a few specific commissions. At the entrance visitors will see two silver spiral slippery slides, which you are encouraged to slide down. Carsten Höller’s Left/Right Slide (2010) begins on level three and sends visitors flying to level one. The spirals are perfectly placed, like so much in this exhibition, for the viewer to see it from the best vantage point. In other words, it looks stunning from all angles from below to above as well as inside. From GoMA’s website:
[Carsten Höller] has stated that experience is the ‘material’ that he uses to create works that alter the viewer’s sensory perception, behaviour and sense of order or logic.
From the slide visitors walk right in to the Kunst Hall space of the gallery which divides the two large ground floor spaces. A hive of activity and a loud hum of voices will take you by surprise if they haven’t already as you approach Olafur Eliasson’s The cubic structural evolution project (2004). The artwork is compiled of a seemingly endless supply of white Lego pieces awaiting construction into a crumbling and desolate city. First featured in ‘Made for this World’ (2005 – 2006) his artwork is a favourite among visitors and like many in 21st Century visitors can see it in a new configuration. So many of the artworks felt like old friends as I saw them for the second or third time, and so many felt like instant friends, the kind I’d hope to visit again. These include Tobias Putrih’s Connection (2004) cardboard box arch which recalls the magnificence of industrial buildings using ephemeral materials and Bharti Kher’s The Skin Speaks a Language Not its Own (2006) an elephant sculpture many visitors will remember from previous Asia Pacific Triennials.
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Prepare for past posts
Some of you will be aware that Vociferous Whimsy hasn’t always lived at tumblr, previously (and until the glitches started) this site was Wordpress themed. Coming up I’ll feature past posts as a sort of best of feature. There are two reasons for this: one, I hate losing work and hope to show it to as many readers as possible, and two, while I prepare for end of year exams there can be content again! Things have been a little quiet, I know.
The first past post will be my review of Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art’s ’21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ exhibition which ran 18 Dec 2010 to 16 April 2011. Here’s me in front of Yayoi Kusama’s installation Narcissus Garden 1966/2002. (Photograph by Ivan Vanderbyl.)
