The Order of Things
Two summer
shows, side by side at the Museum of Modern Art, introduce little-known figures
with close ties to the Abstract Expressionist generation. Enter Door No. 1 and
you're inside the strange spider web and polka dot domain of Yayoi Kusama, a
flamboyant Japanese artist who worked in New York during the '60s. Choose Door
No. 2 and make yourself at home in the American sculptor Tony Smith's more
austere, but equally odd, architectural spaces. These are smallish, intense
shows that aim, as curator Robert Storr writes in the Smith catalog, "to whet
the appetite of the general public." Viewed together, they reveal surprising
affinities between two versatile and ambitious artists whose early childhood
traumas inspired them to try to redesign the world.
Kusama, the lesser known
of the two, is the more accessible and eye-catching artist and the more in tune
with our time. Born in 1929 in Tokyo, as a child Kusama suffered from
hallucinations that she was being overwhelmed by proliferating dots and nets.
Obsessive, repetitive patterns entered her work early on. Determined to take
New York by storm, she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe--a female artist who had
succeeded in the male-dominated New York art world--for advice. O'Keeffe,
initially puzzled by the young Japanese artist's ambitions, told her to show
her work to anyone willing to look at it. Kusama arrived in 1958 with a couple
of thousand small drawings and watercolors, mainly of O'Keeffe-like multiseeded
flowers in vibrant colors. Looking down from the top of the Empire State
Building at the crowds below, Kusama realized that she needed to do something
more spectacular--"like a bomb," she said--if she wanted to attract notice. She
extended the net patterns of the flowers across huge canvases, creating the
white-on-white "Infinity Net" paintings that remain among her most beautiful
creations and, along with color variants, were favorably compared at the time
to the decentered, "allover" paintings of Jackson Pollock (., 1960).
By 1961, Kusama had begun covering familiar objects--an
armchair, a stepladder, a rowboat--with carefully sewn phalluses (, 1962).
These monochrome "accumulations," as repetitively patterned as the infinity
nets, have a deadpan wit quite different from Claes Oldenburg's squishily
theatrical hamburgers and lipsticks, with which they were sometimes shown in
early Pop Art exhibitions. Like the polka dots, the proliferating penises were,
according to Kusama, an attempt to contain her fears by representing them. "I
was scared of penises," she blandly remarked at the press opening. Kusama's
1964 affair with Joseph Cornell (documented in Utopia Parkway , Deborah
Solomon's recent biography of Cornell) has a peculiar aptness: The man
terrified of women--who enclosed movie goddesses and ballerinas in little
fantasy boxes and nicknamed Kusama "You-you-I"--meets the woman scared of
men.
A kindred ambivalence
marks Kusama's "Food Obsession" sculptures, inspired, she claimed, by the image
of all the food a person consumes in a lifetime passing by on a conveyor belt.
Kusama's pasta-encrusted clothing may have a link (as curator Lynn Zelevansky
suggests) with eating disorders, which were barely discussed at the time. But
such objects as the bronzed (1965) have a mod glamour undiminished by the
passage of time.
By the mid-'60s, Kusama was experimenting with ways to
insert her own image into her work. She had herself photographed, nude except
for high heels and polka-dot stickers, then superimposed the image over one of
her accumulations of phalluses. In such works she seemed to be toying with male
expectations of the Asian femme fatale. By the late '60s, Kusama had turned
from these ambiguous engagements with the male gaze to more attention grabbing
performances. In 1968, she staged well-publicized nude-ins at MoMA's sculpture
garden and at such Vietnam War-era hotspots as the Board of Elections. A 1967
film called Kusama's Self-Obliteration , on view in a side gallery at
MoMA, gives a sense of what these occasions may have felt like. Kusama, clothed
in a kimono, dabs paint on her nude models, who begin to dance in comic
self-consciousness, then escalate, to a loud acid rock soundtrack, into
orgy.
Kusama's performance
pieces always ended the same way, with the arrival of the cops. They got her on
the cover of the New York tabloids, but they didn't pay the rent. Her paintings
and sculptures, with their use of body parts and food, anticipate the work of
such current artists as Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith (Tony Smith's daughter),
but they failed to attract the financial and institutional backing Kusama
needed. She remained desperately poor during her New York sojourn--another
reason, perhaps, for her obsession with food--and returned to Japan in 1973,
where she lives, by her own choice, in a Tokyo mental hospital that has a
special emphasis on art therapy. Today, Kusama is a cult figure in the Japanese
avant-garde, recognized not only for her art but for her novels as well--gothic
fables of sexual violence set in New York, with titles like The Hustler's
Grotto of Christopher Street (which ends with a suicidal leap from the
Empire State Building) and The Burning of St. Mark's Church .
Tony Smith, less well-known than his drinking buddies
Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, is nonetheless hardly obscure. His sculptures
of the last two decades of his life--he died of a heart attack in 1980, at the
age of 68--look perfectly at home in MoMA's sculpture garden. Maillol's nude,
Picasso's goat, and the other sculptures that Kusama's nude minions cavorted
among have been put into storage. Smith's (1964), a black, steel monster two
stories high, reigns in their place.
Smith liked to joke that
his career--architect, painter, sculptor--followed the initials of his name:
Anthony Peter Smith. He came to sculpture late, but the ambition to reshape the
world was there from the start, reaching back--as in Kusama's case--to
childhood trauma. Born in New Jersey in 1912, Smith was the grandson of the
designer of the standard fire hydrant and grew up among engineers such as his
father. He contracted tuberculosis at about age 4 and for several years lived
alone in a little prefabricated house in the backyard, so the rest of the
family would be protected from contagion. The previous year, during a family
trip to the world's fair in San Francisco, Smith had seen an installation of
Pueblo Indian cliff dwellings. Back home in his quarantine shack, he spent long
hours fashioning "pueblos" out of medicine boxes and covering them with
papier-mâché "adobe."
Such primitivizing fantasies made him particularly well
suited, when he was groping for a profession, to the "organic" architecture of
Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Smith studied and worked during the late '30s.
Smith's 15 or so completed buildings, mostly houses, are obviously indebted to
Wright in their light-filled eaves and open, geometrical forms. The three
interlocked buildings of the (circa 1951) are daringly deployed in a pentagonal
form across the rocky hillside of Connecticut coastal bluffs.
Architecture didn't give
Smith the control he wanted; changes to the Olsen compound, in particular,
depressed him. An ambitious plan for a hexagonally based church, raised above
the ground on stilts and with stained-glass windows by Pollock, came to
nothing. When his wife's opera career took her to Europe in 1953, Smith went
along and took his sketchbooks. There he hit on a pattern based on circles in a
grid which he called, after a geological formation near Bayreuth, Germany, the
Louisenberg series. Storr makes large claims for these paintings, seeing them
as the first successful attempt to "systematize the 'allover' painting"
invented by Pollock and Rothko. The art critic Lucy Lippard discerned a
different impetus in these buoyant pictures, labeling the peanut shaped forms
as "testicular"--a sign, Storr adds, of "the 'ballsy' ethos of [Smith's]
generation of male artists."
Back in the States, Smith--as interested in nets and grids
as Kusama--worked up his geometrical patterns into three dimensions, thus
returning, in a sense, to his architectural roots. (1961), currently placed as
a sort of triumphal entryway to the southeast corner of Central Park,
demonstrates the unsettling possibilities of tetrahedral shapes, where the
triangular faces have a dynamic lightness lacking in rectangularly based
structures. (The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has helpfully
added a note that the work "is not intended to promote cigarette smoking.")
A polymath and an
autodidact with no degree beyond high school, Smith had too many ideas. The
sexual pulse of a lot of his objects--"There is something erotic in all my
work," Smith admitted--is evident in loud titles for sculptures like She Who
Must Be Obeyed and Jim's Piece . He constructed almost as many
phallic shapes as Kusama and filled his notebooks with erotic doodlings
comparing the sex organs of humans and flowers, or depicting Christ--Smith was
a Catholic--with breasts.
Smith's political ideas are more elusive. He adopted an
upbeat American organicism derived from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.
There's nothing on record, as far as I know, to link him to his mentor Wright's
notorious sympathy for Hitler and fascism. But some of Smith's doodles and
offhand remarks give one pause. One of the drawings on view at MoMA is a
diagram of the races, with the Jews identified as "circumscised [ sic ]
cut off from Earth." In another drawing, from 1943, Smith develops his personal
symbol, the "spiral cross," which is really nothing but a relaxed swastika.
Traveling in Germany after the war he felt an uneasy admiration for Hitler's
Haus der Kunst exhibition hall in Munich--"As you may have guessed," he wrote
to the painter Barnett Newman, "the thing as a whole was very like the church
[design] I sent you"--and for Albert Speer's gigantic stadium at Nuremberg.
Such remarks inspire Storr's rather defensive observation that "unlike fascist
art and architecture, Smith's sculptures and buildings were insistently built
to human rather than superhuman scale."
It may be that grandiose
schemes for redesigning society inevitably flirt with repressive politics. Or
perhaps the New York art world, in which Kusama ran aground, required such a
tough-guy mentality to survive. Either way, Smith's work, unlike Kusama's,
seems locked into its time. The inflexible architect leaves behind a whiff of
Ayn Rand; his twisted metal hulks suggest the ruins of uninhabitable places.
Walking through Smith's fantasy world of black steel, I found myself drawn to
some of his softer, more tentative objects, like the handmade plaster web
called Wingbone (from his daughter Kiki's collection) or a pencil sketch
of confused sperm, tangled up (in a traffic jam?) with the caption: "Will
Jackson Pollock affect our cars?" These, it occurred to me, had the Kusama
touch--anarchic, whimsical, looking for a perch to call home.
