2024-07-13 06:15:52
For those who don’t visit art galleries often, the artworks displayed there can feel somewhat intimidating and difficult to approach.
When you meet the artist in person, you are careful about what to say and worried about making mistakes. What is the honest daily life of such artists like this?
When I meet the author himself, a curator, or someone from a studio that has worked with the author in the past, or an acquaintance, I often hear stories about his or her daily life.
Knowing about the struggles and sometimes shabby daily lives of everyone else makes you think again about the process by which art is created.
● Hold on strong
In fact, most works of art are recognized by only a few people in their time. So artists sometimes have to move forward without being swayed by their surroundings and trust their intuition.
We met John Corbett, a friend and director of the foundation of pop artist James Rosenquist (1933-2017), who is currently holding an exhibition in Korea.
Unlike Andy Warhol, Rosenquist was a billboard artist who focused on painting and using symbols and metaphors, and thus received less attention for not having a “trademark” expression.
In the midst of this, interest in the painting itself has been growing more than the title of ‘pop art’, and it is receiving renewed attention. Corbett told Rosenquist’s story about such changes in the times.
“One day James brought in a stack of art magazines from the 1950s and 1960s and laid them on the table. He flipped through them one by one, pointing out each artist he saw.
While doing so, he kept turning the pages, saying, “This is the first time I’ve seen this author,” “I don’t know this person either,” “I know Picasso,” “This is my first time seeing this author,” “This is an author I don’t know.”
“There are many writers mentioned in the media, but only a few survive.”
Rosenquist wanted to show that if you remain faithful to the voice that flows from deep within, without being swayed by the constantly changing reactions of your time, your time will come and you will see the light of day.
True to his word, he has recently been re-evaluated as an important American artist with a large-scale work newly acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
● Not as fancy as I thought
Artist Kim Joo-young, known as a ‘nomadist artist’, recently told the story of when he left his professorship and went to France in the 1980s at the ‘Monday Salon’ held at the Total Museum of Art in Jongno-gu, Seoul.
Kim, who left with only sneakers and a bag, enrolled in the University of Paris, where he was impressed by the lectures that talked about free thinking rather than drawing methodology.
The little philosophy professor who I went to and begged to take his classes because I wanted to study postmodernism was Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze accepted him, perhaps because the student from the East seemed eager, and the writer, who did not even speak French properly, adapted by writing down the words he heard and later looking up related content in books.
The studio was shared with other artists in an empty building scheduled for demolition for reconstruction. In Korea, her work, which often uses the color black, was described as “dark and negative,” but the French art world’s completely different response and the achievements she received, such as awards and residency programs, led her to continue studying and working.
Then, upon returning to Korea, she said that she was worried about how to accept the gap between the reality of an artist and ordinary life in front of her friends who had dressed up like a lady to meet a friend who had gone to study in France, which was different from her very casual attire.
● Digging deep enough to be shabby
The life of an artist is less elegant and sometimes even shabby than we imagine.
Francis Morris, the honorary director of Tate Modern, who visited Korea, remembered Louise Bourgeois as “a scary person to work with.” If you said something that didn’t suit her, she would storm out, but then a moment later she was incredibly kind and unpredictable.
Such bourgeois always recalled the trauma and painful memories they experienced as children and used them as the source of their work.
Morris says, “The bourgeoisie tried to heal their trauma through art, but (for the sake of good art) they wanted the problem to remain unsolved forever.” So, great artists delve deep into issues that ordinary people would ignore because they are too shabby and shameful, focusing on themselves.
The Netflix documentary series ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ also features Warhol’s shabby side. Coming from an Eastern European immigrant family, Warhol always had a complex about not being able to be like a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon People).
“I am so weirdly made that I can’t fit in anywhere and I can’t change it,” is a common diary entry.
Warhol’s art is the result of delving deep into the complexes and fantasies of capitalist society. Even Warhol could not fully understand the discrimination that his young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he loved and cherished, received as a black man.
In this way, artists each embrace their own real-life problems and the anxiety they bring, and create something from them.
It is one of the reasons why good works of art comfort the audience by directly delving into the misery, anxiety, and emptiness that all humans experience.
※ ‘A Spoonful of Inspiration’ is a newsletter that introduces news from the art world, focusing on various examples of creativity seen in art. It is published every Thursday at 7 AM.
▶Subscribe to our newsletter
https://www.donga.com/news/Newsletter
Reporter Kim Min [email protected]
2024-07-13 06:15:52