A Gothic Happening:
Mindful, Meditative, Monstrous, Pattern Making
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These are all brief and in the context of Frida Kahlo and Kusama Yayoi’s lives and relationships to their art. If you would prefer to mute and/or turn of your camera for the first section, please let us know and we can put a message in the chat when we’re moving on.
Frida Kahlo and Mindful Art
Kahlo’s life was not what she anticipated: after polio left her right leg thinner and shorter than the left and a tram accident caused multiple injuries that would cause chronic pain and lead to multiple surgeries, over the course of her life, Kahlo was forced to drop out of medical school. It was during her recovery that she started painting regularly.
Kahlo produced 140 known paintings of which 55 are self-portraits. Most of those reflect in some way on her physical pain and the way in which that pain affected her mental health.
The Artist as Art
It’s also important to note that Kahlo took command of the image she presented to the world, turning herself into a canvas. She was mindfully non-binary in refusing to shave her underarms, allowing her facial hair to grow in, and in not plucking her unibrow while wearing dresses and elaborate hairstyles. She was mindfully traditional in marrying Diego Rivera and non-traditional in openly bisexual extra-marital liasons. She was mindful is choosing the traditional clothing of her mother’s side of the family to conceal her assistive devices (indeed, that she chose to conceal them for many years) but eventually followed in her German father’s footsteps as an artist. She was equally mindful of the motifs she chose to repeat both in her art and as part of her image during her lifetime.
Frida’s Favorites
Flowers
Animals
Thorns
Damaged Architecture
Love
Kusama Yayoi and Obliteration Art
Kusama Yayoi is a painter, and installation/performance artist who lived and worked in New York from the early 50s to the early 70s. Now 92, she continues to create in a studio across from the psychiatric hospital where she self-admitted in March 1977 and still lives.
Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama’s childhood was fraught not only because of WWII but because her mother was emotionally and physically abusive. In her memoir, Kusama reports her first psychotic break around the age of 8 when the flowers on her family’s seed farm spoke to her.
Kusama and Obliteration Art
While her mother discouraged her desire to create, Kusma trained in traditional Japanese painting and then began working in other mediums and styles. In the early 50s, she began experimenting with “infinity nets” - fields of polka dots filling any available space - taken from her hallucinations.
In 1957, after striking up a correspondence with Georgia O’Keefe, Kusama emigrated to the US, quite a scandalous decision for a young, single, Japanese woman at the time. Before leaving, she burned most of her early work so that her mother wouldn’t be able to profit from it if she ever became famous.
Kusama and Obliteration Art
Her first popular works were more sophisticated versions of the infinity nets, composed of the same shape repeated over and over again. Kusama named the style “obliteration art” because she would often go into dissociative episodes while painting and cover not only the canvas but the walls and windows of her apartment and sometimes even parts of her body. She felt the only way to survive her mental illness was to cover it completely with her work, to obliterate herself with repeating shapes and colors, to become inseparable from her art.
Kusama and Pumpkins
Though most of Kusama’s hallucinations were frightening, she says that she found the appearance of pumpkins, which her family had on their farm and which fed them and their neighbors during WWII, comforting. The reason they entered her art as a motif, she explains, is that she finds drawing the gourds repeatedly to be soothing and meditative, a tool to help her control her anxiety.
Kusama and Polka Dots
Yes, that is a pile of plush polka dot dicks. There’s a story there. I can tell it if y’all want.
Kusama’s Installations
Kusama Happenings
What We’re Doing Today Is...
Motifs: Literary Gothic
Motifs: Gothic Aesthetic
Motifs: Japanese Yokai Woodcut
Motifs: Fraisketten
Motifs: Victorian Mourning Jewelry
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