Galleries go dotty
Two entirely different artists and artworks come under the spotlight – the installation of a room of dots at the Auckland City Gallery, by Yayoi Kusama, and from our Collection at Te Manawa ART an array of prints by Eileen Mayo.
Yayoi Kusama’s The Obliteration Room has been running at the Auckland Art Gallery, in the gallery’s creative learning centre over the summer.
It opened on December 9 and is due to come down at the beginning of April.
The installation, a sort of continued artwork in process, goes something like this: A room is set up where everything is painted white – shelves and cupboards, kitchen bowl of fruit, floors and ceilings. This ‘‘clean slate’’ presents an interesting enough study, as it stands as a whitewashed domestic scene.
People entering the installation are given a sheet of primary coloured sticky dots that they then peel off and place wherever they like in the room. So, over time it becomes this strange riot of colour.
Kusama is famous for dots. The story goes that she experienced hallucinations as a child, where her vision was clouded by spots, and from then on, they have become her personal motif.
She uses them in paintings and as part of installations, making her name in mid1960s in New York.
She is well known and in New Zealand she was highlighted in a giant exhibition at the Wellington Art Gallery a few years back, when they put spots all over the front of the gallery building.
I think some of the concepts of the installation are the most interesting part of the experience. Mainly, its title ‘‘obliteration’’, which suggests a destruction, of all that bare white, rather than ‘‘creation’’, which is usually what we associate with art. And transformations, rather than static art pieces, always have a degree of interest.
The galleries lap up Kusama – this exhibition especially, because it has an active participation component. It toured everywhere from London, Mexico City, South Korea and Switzerland to the Dunedin public gallery, until coming north.
This idea of ‘‘interaction’’ between visitors and gallery exhibitions is a fashionable aspect of art now. Gallerists may love it, but I have a more lukewarm reaction.
There is a big element of PR window dressing in my opinion, whereby performing a mundane task, here peeling off a sticky dot and choosing where to put it, is meant to make us feel somehow part of a creative process. We are, in a very small sense, but surely it is pretty lightweight.
Perhaps it is tied to this sense of giving everyone a ‘‘voice’’ – something else to blame on social media – but I always feel a bit patronised by the proceedings.
I pocketed my dot page for gift giving to grandchildren later and I have a sense of anarchy rising where I don’t like to be herded and steered. It is what I like about older-styled art galleries – they leave you alone to think. Whereas this seems to turn into some sort of weird group therapy exercise that I don’t want to be part of.
To completely contrast, as a review in two parts, I draw attention to a series of prints by Eileen Mayo. These are at home, hung behind the front desk at Te Manawa ART and sourced from our generous supply in the collection.
Mayo would have to be as far from Kusama as it is possible to be – just proving what a wonderfully eclectic grouping art can be. Born just over two decades apart, Kusama in 1929 and Mayo 1906, they occupied different worlds. Mayo comes from an earlier heyday in Art Nouveau London, training for a while at the Slade, mixing with well known artists like Laura Knight and Henry Moore.
She worked in a range of media, including woodcuts, lithographs, tempera, tapestry and silkscreen prints, and is included in the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Her earliest works belong as part of the arts and crafts movement, full of naturalistic elements, creatures and landscapes, and notably an enormous number of cats – probably due to their ever-popular appeal.
She came to New Zealand, to Christchurch, where she lived until her death, after a brief period in Australia, where among other jobs she created designs for stamps and the new decimal coinage, moving to join her mother who had emigrated soon after the early death of Mayo’s father in 1921.
The illustrations carry well with time, retaining an optimistic playful quality with strong design.