You Don't Have to Be Yayoi Kusama to Make Pumpkin Art

1: Portrait of a Pumpkin

2: Sorry Cinderella - It Looks Like You're Gonna Be Walking Home  

Stephen Alexander (2024)

 

Last week, on a freezing cold day, I paid a visit to the Shapero Gallery on Bond Street, in London's Mayfair, to see the Modern Muse exhibition, featuring works by various twentieth and twenty-first century artists [1]. 

 

Prints by all the usual suspects were included - Picasso, Warhol, Hockney, and (groan) Banksy - but there were also works by artists with whom I'm rather less familiar, such as Yayoi Kusama, whose black and white pumpkin I particularly appreciated [2].

 

For whilst traditionally a muse is conceived as an inspirational female figure, either mortal or divine, that seems a bit narrow and I think and we should open up the concept to include animals, plants, and even inanimate objects. 

 

After all, we're not ancient Greeks. And there's really no need to personify and feminise those forces and desires that fire the human imagination. 

 

Surely, like Kusama, we can all find inspiration in a piece of winter squash and a rotting vegetable might serve as a muse just as easily as Venus rising from the waves, or the lovely face of Kate Moss. 

 

The genre distinction between portraiture and still life is, I think, essentially untenable. Leonardo da Vinci's Head of a Young Girl (1506-08) is really no different from the visual representation of a head of cabbage - perhaps that's what Claude Lalanne was trying to tell us all along [3].  

 

And so, with all this in mind, I thought I'd follow Kusama's lead and turn to the humble pumpkin as muse - the above pictures being the result. The first, is a simple portrait; whilst the second, a rather more violent and complex image, deals with themes of death, decay, and disappointment.          

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For more information on the Shapero Gallery, please click here. For details of The Modern Muse exhibition in particular, click here.  

 

[2] The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama - now in her 96th year and still going strong - has had a lifelong fascination with pumpkins and has elevated everybody's favourite squash (and organic Halloween prop) to iconic status in her art. As one critic writes: 

      "Equally rooted in personal memories and universal themes, her pumpkins rival the recognisability of Warhol's Soup Cans. Whether capturing the essence of infinity with her intricate net patterns or playing with a kaleidoscope of colours, Kusama's Pumpkins offer a visual feast that resonates globally."

      See Essie King's article, '10 Facts About Yayoi Kusama's Pumpkins', on myartbroker.com (8 Dec 2023): click here. 

 

[3] In 1968, Lalanne produced an ambitious sculpture entitled L'Homme à la tête de chou, combining human and vegetable. Serge Gainsbourg famously purchased the piece and it inspired his 1976 concept album of the same title. Lalanne produced a second version of the work in 2005, which was donated (in lieu of inheritance tax) to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2021.

      Readers who are interested in knowing more on Lalanne, Gainsbourg, and the man with the cabbage head might like to see my post of 16 June 2023: click here. 

On the Evil Genius of the Image: Notes on the Mugshots of Donald Trump and Hermann Göring

Mugshots of Donald Trump (24 August, 2023) 

and Hermann Göring (22 June 1945)

 

 

So much has already been said about Donald Trump's instantly iconic mugshot taken at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia - apparently the most viewed photograph in the world - that there's not much for me to add. 

 

The muted grey background is rather flattering and deflects from the harshness of the lighting. Trump, wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, stares down not just the anonymous prison photographer, but all of his political opponents and critics in the mainstream media. 

 

It's a fuck you look of angry defiance and with this one image, Trump brilliantly turns the tables on those who had hoped to humiliate him and, perhaps, seals victory in the 2024 presidential election. For this photo, available on a wide range of merchandising (i.e., commercial propaganda), has already helped the Trump campaign to raise millions of dollars.   

 

Malcolm McLaren may have showed us how to create cash from chaos, but it's Donald Trump who best understands how to monetise notoriety and I think that the conservative commentator Candace Owens is right to describe Trump's approach to doing politics as punk rock (something that Johnny Rotten had pointed out years ago) [1]. 

 

Even those who loathe Trump concede that this picture is, in its simplicity, visually compelling. One that has not only historical but cultural significance; i.e., one that can be discussed in relation to art as well as politics. Zach Helfand amusingly - and rightly - discusses it within the context of work by Da Vinci, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Andy Warhol [2].  

 

Helfand also suggests that the Trump mugshot has a precedent in the arrest photograph of Hermann Göring, which, as I think readers will agree, is an excellent spot. For we see in this image of the president of the Nazi Reichstag the exact same mixture of indignation and contempt for his enemies as in the Trump photo; it's a portrait of a powerful man cornered, but unbowed.

 

One wonders, in closing, why it is exactly that good people never seem to produce such captivating images: Is is because they always like to smile and signal their virtue? Is it because they lack menace? Or is it simply the case, whether we like to admit this or not, that evil has a more photogenic quality?  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the Candace Owens podcast on the The Daily Wire (20 August 2023) in which she gives her take on the Trump mugshot and discusses the positive reactions of other black Americans: click here. 

      As for Johnny Rotten, the former Sex Pistol declared his support for Trump several years ago - and voted for him in 2020 - seeing in him something of a kindred spirit (anti-liberal, anti-establishment, anti-woke). See Drew Wardle's 2021 article in the online magazine Far Out, in which he expresses his disappointment with Rotten's MAGA brand of conservatism and offers a possible explanation for it: click here. 

 

[2] See Zach Helfand, 'The Trump Mug Shot's Art-Historical Lineage', in The New Yorker (28 August, 2023): click here. 

 

 

Video bonus: to watch Trump's own take on having his mugshot taken on Forbes Breaking News (1 Sept 2023): click here.  

Blue Balls (With Reference to the Work of Jeff Koons and D. H. Lawrence)

Jeff Koons with one of his blue gazing balls

Photo by Lucy Young

 

 

Like the American comedian Jena Friedman, I've long admired the artist Jeff Koons and so I would share her sadness at having to write something "even remotely negative about this purveyor of the shiny and provocative" [1] - we can leave this to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who loathes the aesthetics of the smooth and famously compared Koons's artwork to Brazilian waxing [2]. 

Fortunately, therefore - and unlike Ms Friedman - I have a rather more positive view of the blue gazing balls [3] that Koons has ingeniously placed on little shelves in front of various reproductions of classical and modern masterpieces, including works by Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso - he even stuck one in front of his enlarged version of the Mona Lisa (see below).   

According to Koons, these large glass baubles represent the vastness of the universe, whilst also giving us a sense of the intimacy of the here and now [4]. I'm not sure about that - and this isn't why I like the gazing balls. 

 

I like them, because they make me want to smash them; make me want like an excitable child to cup the little globe of magnificent full dark-blue in my hands and then toss it up in the air, allowing it to fall with a little splashing explosion on the floor; make me want to take one of the fragments and examine it closely in all its broken brilliance [5].   

 

More, I feel like taking one of the spheres and bringing it hard down on the head of the viewer who stands before it and admires their own reflection; they who only see themselves in each and every great work of art (their experiences, their desires, their lives); they who only want to know what an image means so they can explain it away.

 

This lust for knowledge is what Rupert Birkin describes as the conceit of consciousness: "'You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut'" [6] - isn't that what he says to Hermione the great lover of art and culture?  

   

And yet, ironically, it's she who brings a ball of lapis lazuli crashing down on his head five chapters later, achieving her voluptuous consummation:

 

"Her arms quivered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it around in her hand as she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious. 

      Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning, and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head." [7]

As I say, that's what I'd like to do with one of Koons's gazing balls, thereby transforming it from an object of narcissistic self-reflection into a weapon to be used against those who just have to put themselves into every picture.

 

 

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball (da Vinci Mona Lisa) (2015)

Oil on canvas, glass, and aluminum 

jeffkoons.com 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Jena Friedman, 'Why Jeff Koons's Blue 'Gazing Balls' Give Mona Lisa Something New to Smirk About', Artnet News (22 June 2017): click here. 

[2] See Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2018). The opening sentence of the first chapter reads: "The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, i-Phones and Brazilian waxing." 

      For my discussion of the aesthetics (and politics) of smoothness with reference to the above text and the work of Jeff Koons, click here. 

 

[3] Gazing balls - or what Americans rather prosaically call yard globes - are mirrored spheres, ranging in size, and now mostly used as garden ornaments. Traditionally made of glass, they are now often stainless steel, ceramic, or plastic.

      The speheres originated in 13th-century Italy, where they were hand-blown by skilled Venetian craftsmen, but were popularised by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in the 19th-century and appear in a number of gardens designed in the modern period (particularly in the 1930s). However, they seemed a bit naff by the 1950s - only slightly more sophisticated than garden gnomes. 

 

[4] See the article by Alex Needham - 'Jeff Koons on his Gazing Ball Paintings: "It's not about copying''', The Guardian (9 November, 2015): click here.

 

[5] I'm recalling the scene from chapter I - 'The Blue Ball - of D. H. Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod (1922) in which a young girl (Millicent) breaks a Christmas ornament and her father (Aaron) then carefully examines one of the pieces. See pp. 10-11 of the Cambridge edition, ed. Mara Kalnins, (1988).   

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 42.

 

[7] Ibid., p. 105. 

 

 

Reflections on the Virgin Mary's Pussy

 

Aubrey Plaza as the Virgin Mary holding 

Grumpy Cat as the Meowsiah (2014) 

lostmediawiki.com

 

There are no cats in the Bible. 

 

Neverthless, during the Middle Ages, they silently crept their way into Christian mythology and became associated with the Virgin Mary, as evidenced in the work of many great artists including Leonardo, Rubens, and Rembrandt. 

 

It's not really clear why the Madonna became associated with a feline companion, but one legend is that a cat had given birth to a kitten beneath the manger in Bethlehem and that Mary was deeply touched by the display of maternal tenderness that mirrored her own love for the newborn baby Jesus. 

 

Further, it's sometimes claimed that when Jesus began to cry due to the coldness of the stable in which he lay, the she-cat instinctively jumped into his make-do crib and comforted the infant with the warmth of her body and gentle purring.      

That's a nice story. However, I can't help imagining in my more diabolical moments what might have happened if the cat had sucked the breath away from Mary's bundle of joy and suffocated the Son of God ...

 

Would Joseph have strangled the creature in a rage? 

 

Would Our Lady have adopted the kitten in order to compensate for the loss of her child and become its blessed surrogate mother? 

 

Would the Three Wise Men have fallen down in worship before the kitten and recognised him as their Messiah? 

 

Would we celebrate the birth of a feline saviour each December?   

 

Would Nietzsche have written a work entitled Die Antikatze?

 

And would we now find the above photo of Aubrey Plaza an iconic and profoundly serious image, rather than an amusing and mildly blasphemous one?

 

 

Note: this post is for Gail Marie Naylor, whose picture of the Virgin Mary holding a cat inspired me to write it: 

 

 

 

The Naked Truth About Unicorn Girls

Betty the naked unicorn girl 

photographed on Brighton beach by 

Ben Hopper as part of his ongoing project 

Naked with Masks

As most readers will be aware, the unicorn is a legendary creature with a single large, spiraling horn said to possess magical and medicinal powers projecting from its forehead. A symbol of purity and grace, the unicorn could be captured only by a virgin. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo informs us that, whenever the fabulous beast encounters a seated maiden, it overcomes all instinctive fear and ferocity and contentedly lays its head upon her lap.  

As many readers will not be aware, however, the unicorn girl is a contemporary urban myth. For some, she is quite simply the girl whom you always long to meet but never do; a fantasy figure who forever lies out of reach and out of your league.    

But for others - belonging to a slightly kinkier, polyamorous world - the term unicorn is a synonym for hot bi-babe. That is to say, a very good-looking young woman prepared to go down on members of either sex and come up smiling and willing also to form a threesome with a pre-existing (usually heterosexual) couple.

The danger for such bi-poly women is, of course, that they become a type of exotic pet or unicorn bae, who is vulnerable to exploitation by a couple who often wield the power and dictate the terms of the relationship very much to their own advantage; insisting, for example, that their unicorn be single and not take on any additional lovers, nor do anything that might threaten to disrupt their primary relationship, such as favouring one partner over the other.     

I would encourage any unicorns trapped in such a triangle to liberate themselves immediately and instruct those couples who attempt to control their sexual and emotional freedom to go fuck themselves.

Genitalpanik 1: My Pussy My Copyright

Deborah de Robertis 

facebook.com

Some readers may remember that I expressed my admiration for the performance artist and vulva activist Deborah de Robertis after she initially came to public attention in 2014, by exposing her cunt at the Musée d'Orsay in front of Courbet's obscene masterpiece, L'Origine du monde: click here to read, or re-read, the post. 

It was, I thought, a courageous and amusing attempt to expose the hypocrisy of a phallocentric art world happy to stare into the abyss of a gaping vagina on a canvas or a screen, i.e., when framed by culture and offered as an image to be consumed, but uncomfortable with seeing such in the real world made of actual living flesh.   

Anyway, I'm pleased to report that Ms de Robertis is still continuing with her one-woman attempt to change the world by spreading her legs and declaring ownership of her own body: my pussy, my copyright; this time round obliging visitors to the Louvre to contrast the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa with the explicit display of her sex.

What Leonardo would have made of this, I don't know: for whilst he loved to paint beautiful women and possessed a detailed anatomical knowledge of their bodies, including their reproductive organs, his erotic fascination was clearly for young men and he drew many highly intimate studies of the male anus.

Nor do I know what the mostly bemused tourists who witnessed the event made of it; press reports that they were stunned and outraged seem exaggerated to me. What I do know is that the authorities weren't amused and the artist was held in custody for two days before appearing before a beak who ordered her to face trial on October 18 on charges of sexual exhibitionism and assault (she allegedly bit a security guard during her arrest).

Her defence, of course, will be that her goal was not to exhibit her genitals in a sexually aggressive manner, but to make people think about the role of women within art and, in this case, to remind them of the work of the Austrian artist Valie Export; the stunt at the Louvre being essentially an act of homage to the latter and her 1968 performance Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, which I'll discuss in part two of this post ...

Notes

To watch Ma Chatte Mon Copyright (2017), by Deborah de Robertis, uploaded to YouTube on 29 Sept 2017, click here. 

To read part two of this post on Valie Export and her Action Pants, click here. 

On the Art of the Kiss 2: Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt: Der Kuß, 1907-08.

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm x 180 cm.

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Almost everyone is surely familiar with Gustav Klimt's gilded Art Nouveau masterpiece, The Kiss. Indeed, when I was a student back in the 1980s, it was almost obligatory to have a poster reproduction on the wall, purchased from Athena and placed alongside a work by his more daring, fiercely talented young protégé, Egon Schiele, who stripped away the prettiness and coyness of Klimt's gold leaf.

Looking at it now, however, I have to confess to finding its dreamy symbolism and romantic idealism all a bit too hippyish for my tastes (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). And, annoyingly, one also can't help thinking of Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat - and one doesn't want to think of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber (or the tedious Hebrew scriptures upon which they based their musical) under any circumstances, but particularly when trying to discuss a work of erotic art rather than Christian rock. 

And, obviously, The Kiss is primarily an erotic painting; featuring as it does a pair of lovers lost in a moment of bliss, bodies entwined. But it's a subdued rather than scandalous eroticism, that lacks the perverted excess that belongs to the pornographic imagination and which characterised Klimt's notorious Faculty Paintings (1900-07), commissioned by the University of Vienna (none of which were ever displayed and all of which were destroyed by the retreating Nazi forces in 1945). 

It really is a lovely work, The Kiss; one that was enthusiastically received and which immediately found a buyer. But, in all honesty, it's simply not as challenging as some of his other great canvases. His public reputation damaged and his confidence severely shaken after the Vienna Ceiling Affair, Klimt was looking to win back favour and produce a successful picture; to demonstrate to himself, as well as his critics, that he wasn't too old, too nervous, or too stupid to do so.

Ultimately, The Kiss is a compromise; unlike the beautifully provocative Goldfish (1901-02), which mockingly invites his detractors to kiss his arse.

Today, retaining pride of place in the Belvedere Museum, Der Kuß is regarded as a national treasure by all proud Austrians, who boast it's not only more popular than Leonardo's Mona Lisa - and might even be more valuable if sold - but is a much bigger canvas to boot!