The problem with infinity snark
Welcome to the 65th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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Since my last email, this mailing list has grown quite a bit, passing the 1,000 subscribers mark. I'm very grateful that you are interested in these missives.
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I was going to send out an email last week. But then I realized that passing the 1k subscribers mark means that I've now moved from the "free" category of the mailing-list provider into the paid one. It took a few days to set things up properly. Now, I'm ready to go again.
I don't mind paying for the service; it's only fair enough, right? Should you decide to send some money my way, it will go towards making sure that these emails will get sent out in the future as well.
If you're wondering what this is, it's the back side of my old iPhone 4s in its case. You'll see that it's well worn. But I mostly want to point out that orange dot, a sticker.
Why would I show you a worn sticker on an equally worn iPhone case? Well, it's not just any sticker. Instead, it's a sticker from one of Yayoi Kusuma's exhibitions.
I don't remember the year, but at some stage, the artist had an exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. The exhibition consisted of a white room with white furniture inside. Visitors were given a sheet of coloured stamps that they could place anywhere in the room. I ended up placing one sticker on the back of my iPhone. I don't want to pretend that there were any other motives for that than merely liking the colour orange.
I'd like to think that before that particular exhibition, I had seen one of those mirrored rooms at the same gallery. Even though I typically do not remember being a part of things that I actually wasn't a part of at all... Then again, how would I know? Well, anyway, I'm pretty certain that I went into a relatively small room covered with mirrors and lights. There might or might not have been a relatively short queue -- I don't remember. (For sure, there was no long queue. If there's anything I will not do it is to stand in a queue for a long time to look at art.) I did enjoy the experience.
After I had seen the exhibitions I described above, Kusuma's appeal in the US blew up. There was at least one other exhibition of the "Infinity Mirrors" in New York City (this time with long queues). In terms of popularity, things got so much out of hand that there was an article in The Atlantic magazine:
If you click on the link (you might as well) and look at the little window in your browser that displays the article's URL, you'll see this as part of the whole: "yayoi-kusamas-existential-circus". Existential circus.
The article isn't terrible per se. I remember reading it and thinking "yeah, that's just a good way to summarize what's wrong with us consuming art" (this is not literally what I thought; I don't remember my exact thoughts, but they went along those lines).
But now I'm thinking that I made things much too easy for myself, in much the same fashion as the writer in question did. There simply is something a bit too convenient about the take in this article, isn't it? Its dunking on selfies, the go-to ill of our larger culture -- as if one of the very first photographs ever made wasn't a selfie:
Hippolyte Bayard, 1840
OK now, you might say, that's not any more a selfie than Cindy Sherman's photographs are self portraits. You're right. Let's take this one instead:
Robert Cornelius, 1839
There is something too convenient to dunk on our desire to take our own photographs. And there are a few other things in that Atlantic article that are just too convenient, such as the overall snark -- that, I'll have to admit, I fell for.
That's the thing with snark, especially online: it's so easy to fall for it.
There's a large retrospective of Yayoi Kusuma's work in Hong Kong right now. The above is a portrait of the artist at around age 10 (ca. 1939). I don't remember where, but I came across this gorgeous illustrated and animated time line of her work. If you can find the time, have a look at it. It will open your eyes to what her work really means.
After I had read the text and looked at the work, my first immediate reaction was to feel guilty over having enjoyed the Atlantic article. Even as that article includes a number of biographical and artistic details, it seems to miss the mark so widely. I mean, given that Kusuma already installed infinity rooms in the mid 1960s, to call this art "for the Instagram age" feels wrong and misguided.
I'm also loving this detail from the time line:
In June [1966], Kusama creates her first outdoor installation, Narcissus Garden, an unofficial display at the Venice Biennale. Lucio Fontana provides financial support for the work, which consists of 1,500 mirrored plastic balls displayed on the grass outside the Italian pavilion. Kusama sold the balls for two US dollars each, a low price intended as a critique of the art market’s escalating prices. Biennale organisers draw the line, telling Kusama that she must stop selling art ‘like hot dogs or ice cream cones’.
I was going to add a few thoughts on Twitter here, but I just decided against that. It just feels like a waste of mental energy to comment on the site any further. My account is now inactive. I've started using Mastodon, which so far has been vastly more meaningful (if you want to find me there, I'm @jmcolberg@det.social).
Social media appear to be imploding before our eyes right now, and I can't say that I'm saddened by it. I think there's a growing understanding that we need more meaningful ways to connect with each other. In photoland, a number of people have now started mailing lists. Let's see where this goes.
With that I'm going to conclude for today. I hope you're doing well, regardless of whether your fall is getting colder and colder or your spring warmer and warmer.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg