RESEARCH = Look at other artists' practices (not only photographers) who dealt with the same topic of my project= peace, solitude, connectedness, mindfullness (research on art context)
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/t-magazine/haegue-yang.html =
An Artist Whose Muse Is Loneliness
Arts and Letters
Haegue Yang seeks isolation and then mines the accompanying confusion to reflect on the nature of belonging.
WHEN THE ARTIST Haegue Yang shows old artworks in new places, she likes to create a fresh piece that links the exhibition to the local context. For her current presentation at the Bass, a museum in Miami Beach, Yang asked the curators what the region’s famously multicultural residents have in common. A particular holiday? A certain food? Not really, they told her. “But isn’t there any commonality you can think of?” she asked. The curators looked at one another. “Hurricanes,” they said, half joking.
The notion of violent storms as a binding force fascinated the 48-year-old South Korean artist, whose sculptures, room-size environments and videos often address themes of individual and national identity, displacement, isolation and community. After months of meteorological research, Yang produced a new work for the Bass show: “Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity,” a chaotic floor-to-ceiling digital collage swirling with storm-tracking symbols, satellite photos of Floridian McMansions, distorted palm trees and sinister gyres that covers vast swathes of the museum like dystopian wallpaper. The show is called “In the Cone of Uncertainty,” which in forecasting terms refers to hurricane projection but might as well be a description of Yang’s overall philosophy.
Over the past decade, Yang’s work has appeared at some of the most esteemed contemporary art forums in the world — including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale — and she recently filled the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with an ambitious installation blending sculpture and performance. With sensual, melancholy works made from venetian blinds and other domestic objects, Yang has managed to escape the conspicuous identity politics that define much of the contemporary art world. “Every institution now wants to be global and to have a more international and cosmopolitan point of view, but what does that really mean?” asked Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, who organized Yang’s exhibition. At its worst, it can mean that non-Western artists are tacitly required to represent (or perform) the cultures they came from. Just as the institutions of the 1980s and ’90s seized on artists creating work around their socially marginalized identities (female, gay, nonwhite), it sometimes feels as though the current art world showcases people born outside the United States or Europe only on the grounds that their art refers to their heritage. Yang, however — an artist who is not known to spend more than a few days or weeks at a time in any given place — takes a stubbornly elliptical approach, refusing to embody any single nationality or perspective in her work. By embracing ambiguity, Yang has found a way to make art about identity without tying herself to one based on gender, race or geography. “You cannot reduce it to a political one-liner,” said Comer.
The artist herself is like the calm center of a high-velocity hurricane. In 2019 alone, she was in 15 shows on four continents. Remarks on how busy she must be tend to be greeted with the sort of wary skepticism with which one might regard a doctor’s suggestion to lay off the exercise and have a cigarette. Yang acknowledges that she might be “doing a lot,” but on the other hand, she suggests, notions of “rest” and “free time” are “sometimes too neoliberal to protect blindly. When passion and devotion goes over the border, is it something to condemn?” She is always working, and has spent her career deliberately isolating herself from friends and family as a kind of artistic method. The only downside is existential: “What comes along with the intensity of the work is you almost lose yourself,” she said, although even this condition has its advantages: “I think the confusion is good to have.”
Lately, Yang’s success has kept her shuttling between her studios in Seoul and Berlin, a professorship in Frankfurt and her many exhibitions. In November, she made a brief appearance in Graz, Austria, to install work in a group show at the city’s contemporary art museum, Kunsthaus Graz. We spoke in an old-fashioned cafe with scuffed parquet floors and a resplendent strudel that Yang discovered a few years ago when she had a solo exhibition at the same institution. She wore a roomy black sweatshirt over a white collared shirt, Yohji Yamamoto skirt-pants and an air of pensive self-reflection. She mentioned her solitude early, and I asked her if she ever gets lonely. Yang, who often communicates in diagrams, reached for a pen and drew two circles on a page. “Here is loneliness,” she said, pointing to one of them, “and here is humbleness. If I didn’t travel, I imagine I’d feel much more confident, but not so humbled.” Yang is single by design, and has no children and few close friends. A writer whose work resonates with Yang, the French novelist Marguerite Duras, once said, “One does not find solitude, one creates it.” In fact, now that she’s found success, her biggest struggle is maintaining a sense of alienation akin to what she experienced during her student years in Germany. The currents of personal doubt and instability that give her art its enigmatic allure stem from this nomadic condition: “Loneliness,” she said, “is the price I pay.” To continue producing meditations on belonging, Yang cannot afford to feel at home.
- https://www.christies.com/en/stories/10-artists-who-thrived-in-isolation-b0d47047ff8141e8ac341ec7a1a77cd4 =
‘A kind of freedom’: 10 artists who found inspiration in isolation
Many of today’s highest-selling artists produced their best works in solitude, away from the clamour of society
Frida Kahlo
Pain thrums through Frida Kahlo’s life and art: childhood polio crippled her; a near-fatal bus crash at the age of 18 led to a life of surgeries and recoveries; abortions and miscarriages left her traumatised. Then, of course, there was her turbulent on-off love affair with Diego Rivera, a string of adulterous liaisons and her strained relationship with her mother.
Kahlo channelled this personal suffering into her art, birthing a macabre creativity now feted the world over.
Frida Kahlo painting in bed, 1952. Photo: Granger / Bridgeman Images. Artwork: © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / DACS 2020
She began painting in 1925, during her nine-month convalescence from the bus accident, using a custom-made lap easel and an overhead mirror installed in her bed’s canopy. Over the next 20 years or so, Frida painted the frailty of the human body, life and death and decay with haunting poignancy.
‘I paint myself,’ she once said,
‘because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.’ Of
her 143 surviving paintings, 55 are self-portraits.
Frida Kahlo painting in bed, 1952. Photo: Granger / Bridgeman Images. Artwork: © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / DACS 2020
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) saw art as a means to effect social and political change. By the early 1970s, he was widely regarded in Europe as one of Germany’s leading conceptual artists. He was, however, less well-known across the Atlantic.
It was during his first trip to America in 1974 that Beuys unveiled I Like America and America Likes Me, a live performance piece — or Action — that has become one of his best-known works.
Detail of the poster produced to advertise an exhibition of photographs of Joseph Beuys’s Action, I Love America and America Loves Me, New York, 1974, by his collaborator Caroline Tisdall. Photo: © Tate. Artwork: © DACS 2020
It involved Beuys spending three days in a room with a coyote. The artist later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’
To Native Americans, the coyote was a god that could move between the physical and spiritual worlds. After the arrival of European settlers, it was seen rather as a pest. Beuys sought to confront the schism. ‘You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can this trauma be lifted,’ the artist explained.
Detail of the poster produced to advertise an exhibition of photographs of Joseph Beuys’s Action, I Love America and America Loves Me, New York, 1974, by his collaborator Caroline Tisdall. Photo: © Tate. Artwork: © DACS 2020
Agnes Martin
In 1967, Agnes Martin (1912-2004) gave away her painting materials and fled New York in a pickup truck. She resurfaced around 18 months later on a remote mesa in Taos, New Mexico. ‘I’ve finished painting,’ she said to Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, just before she took off. ‘I’m never painting again.’
According to Glimcher, ‘She felt she had painted everything she could paint. She needed to go back to New Mexico, to that kind of space and solitude.’ But more than anything, he adds, ‘I don’t think she could cope with the notoriety that she was starting to gain.’
Agnes Martini in her studio, April 6, 1991. Galisteo, New Mexico. Photo: Courtesy of Charles R. Rushton / Art Resource, NY. © DACS 2020. Artwork: © 2020 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY and DACS, London
In Taos, Martin led a simpler, if isolating existence. She didn’t own a television, or a phone, or a cat for that matter. ‘I can’t have any distractions,’ she said to Glimcher.
She would not return to painting until 1974. And when she did, her aesthetic had changed — her grids had morphed into an exploration of horizontal and vertical lines, the pastel greys and whites replaced with soft pinks, yellows and blues. This new painterly language would earn her widespread recognition and cult status as a sort of desert mystic.
Agnes Martini in her studio, April 6, 1991. Galisteo, New Mexico. Photo: Courtesy of Charles R. Rushton / Art Resource, NY. © DACS 2020. Artwork: © 2020 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY and DACS, London
Ivon Hitchens
Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) is perhaps best known today for his post-war abstract paintings of the British countryside, executed in blocks of rich, vibrant colour. Many such landscapes were painted in and around Greenleaves, the rural home he shared with his family near Petworth in Sussex.
Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979), A Boat and Foliage in Five Chords, Second Study. Oil on canvas. 18 x 46 in (45.7 x 116.9 cm). Sold for £197,000 on 23 November 2016 at Christie’s in London. © The Estate of Ivon Hitchens. All rights reserved, DACS 2020
The artist’s retreat to Greenleaves at the outbreak of World War Two — his London studio was bombed in 1940 — marks a turning point in his work. Surrounded by six acres of woodland, Greenleaves proved a fertile source of inspiration: the silver birch trees in his garden, the nearby meadows, and the sunflowers, poppies and dahlias from his courtyard garden would populate his canvases for the next 40 years.
Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama has described her work as ‘art medicine’; the making process as a form of ‘self-therapy’. ‘If it were not for art,’ she once revealed, ‘I would have killed myself a long time ago.’
Yayoi Kusama (b.1929), Infinity-Nets, 2004. Acrylic on canvas. 46 x 36 in (116.8 x 91.4 cm). Offered for private sale at Christie’s. View post-war and contemporary artworks currently offered for private sale at Christie’s
By drawing and painting repetitive patterns, Kusama seeks to obliterate her hallucinatory daemons and escape them. ‘I paint them [dots] in quantity; in doing so, I try to escape,’ she explained of her polka-dot works in an interview with Artspace in 2017. Her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, which first won her critical acclaim in New York, are her most sought-after works at auction.
Open about her illness, Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric asylum in Tokyo since 1977. She is now in her nineties. Most recently, in response to the current health crisis, Kusama shared a message with the world, in which she says it’s time ‘to fight and overcome our unhappiness’.
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh’s painful last years saw the creation of some of his most famous works, including The Starry Night (1889), Wheat with Crows (1890), and Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), the last of which sold for $82,500,000 in 1990 at Christie’s New York, setting a record price at auction for any work by the artist.
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Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy, 1889. Oil on canvas. 17¾ x 23¾ in (45.1 x 60.4 cm). Sold for £10,121,250 on 7 February 2012 at Christie’s in London
Much of his work from 1889, including Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy, was completed during his stay at Saint Paul de Mausole, a former monastery that had been converted into a private hospital for the mentally ill.
His urgent brushstrokes, use of electrifying colours and ridges of thick impasto would pave the way for early 20th-century Expressionism. Yet during his time at the asylum, maintaining the balance between his mental health and being able to focus on his work proved difficult. ‘To sacrifice one’s freedom,’ he wrote to his brother Theo, ‘to stand outside society and to have only one’s work, without distraction… it’s beginning to weigh too heavily upon me here.’
Georgia O’Keeffe
After the death of her photographer husband, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1946, Georgia O’Keeffe would spend summers and autumns isolated at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, living off a generator and without a telephone. The house was sparsely furnished, reflecting her minimalist aesthetic.
Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch, photographed c. 1960. Photo: © Tony Vaccaro / Bridgeman Images
She said the solitude offered ‘a kind of freedom’ that brought her closer to nature. The view of the wide open desert backed by the Cerro Pedernal mountain, as in Red Hills with Pedernal, White Clouds (1936), became her favourite subject.
‘It’s my private mountain,’ she explained. ‘It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.’
V.S. Gaitonde
Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924-2001), more commonly known as V.S. Gaitonde, is one of the highest-selling modern Indian artists at auction. According to Deepanjana Klein, Christie’s International Head of South Asian Art, ‘his mostly monochromatic paintings have a depth that engulfs you in silence and stillness.’
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Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001), Untitled, 1996. Oil on canvas. 55 x 40 in (139.7 x 101.6 cm). Sold for $4,092,500 on 13 September 2017 at Christie’s in New York
Those same qualities of silence and stillness also characterised the man himself. As the late art critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni explained in 1983, ‘Gaitonde isolated himself very early in his career from everything in his environment which he considered irrelevant to [his] intensity as a painter.’
Gaitonde only produced around five or six paintings a year, and rarely mixed with fellow artists. ‘Everything starts from silence,’ he once said. ‘The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences.’
Paul Cézanne
Born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne studied law before leaving for Paris in 1861 to pursue a career as a painter. There, he met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro and later exhibited at the first (1874) and third (1877) Impressionist exhibitions.
By the early 1880s, however, Cézanne had returned to Provence and begun to withdraw from the Paris-centred Impressionists.
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Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Bouilloire et fruits, 1888-1890. Oil on canvas. 19⅛ x 23⅝ in (48.6 x 60 cm). Sold for $59,295,000 on 13 May 2019 at Christie’s in New York
In the rugged solitude of his sun-drenched homeland, his work pivoted in direction. He played with perspective and used short, hatched brushstrokes, blocks of strong, saturated colour and irregular lighting.
Today, works from Cézanne’s groundbreaking late period are highly sought after by collectors at auction. Formerly in the storied collection of S.I. Newhouse, Bouilloire et fruits (1888-90, above) sold for $59,295,000 in May 2019 at Christie’s in New York, well above its on-request estimate in the region of $40 million.
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Joseph Cornell
Born in New York in 1903, Joseph Cornell (died 1972) would become renowned for his exquisite shadow boxes — glass-fronted wooden constructions filled with combinations of ephemera — and his reclusive, solitary existence. The artist famously never married or left his family home on Utopia Parkway in Queens.
His imagination, however, roamed gloriously, wildly free. During excursions into the city, he would gather ephemera (trinkets, shells, postcards, coins, toys) that inspired imaginary travel to far-flung lands. These found objects would become the heart and soul of his shadow boxes. Assembled in his mother’s basement — usually at night — these ‘poetic theatres’ became his refuge.
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Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), Medici Slot Machine: Object, 1942. Box construction — wood, glass, mirror, metal, marbles, jacks, coin, paint and printed paper collage. 15½ x 12 x 4⅜ in (39.4 x 30.5 x 11 cm). Sold for $5,037,500 on 15 November 2018 at Christie’s in New York © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020
Cornell established cursory friendships with Dalí, Duchamp and Lee Miller, among others, and an intense yet sexless relationship with Yayoi Kusama. Yet the more his reputation grew, the more hermit-like he became. After the death of his beloved brother in 1965, and his mother the following year, Cornell was plagued by a longing for the intimacy that had so eluded him.
In December 1972, during his last conversation with his sister, he confided, ‘I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.’
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