Artists
- Peter GabrielOften the images applied to music are restrictive, so I was keen to work with fine artists in order to enhance and decorate the musical environment. Helen Chadwick , Yayoi Kusama , Cathy de Monchaux , and Nils-Udo are artists whose work I knew and admired so it was a pleasure working with them.
Helen Chadwick
Through her chosen medium, such as snow, meat, flora and chocolate Helen Chadwick (1953-1996) teased aesthetic sensibilities and confronted taboos while always embracing an element of transience. She once remarked: 'I try to elaborate fictions for potentially pleasurable moments of encounter, and one has to acknowledge that these are delicate and most likely cannot sustain themselves, like a bubble. Homo bular - Man is but a bubble.'
Helen Chadwick: An Appreciation
The death of Helen Chadwick on 15 March 1996 at the age of 42, robbed the British contemporary art scene of one of its most singular, colourful and influential figures. Helen's 20-year career was cut short by a heart attack just at a moment when her work was becoming more widely known than it had ever previously been. It was an uncomfortable irony that her last works should be shown under the collective title 'Stilled Lives', first at the Barbican Art Gallery in London and then at the Portfolio Gallery in Edinburgh (13 August-21 September 1996). Two years before her death Helen had started to photograph dead human embryos gathered from the Assisted Conception Unit at King's College Hospital. These details of cellular patterns and partially formed human features are ravishingly colourful and hauntingly poignant. Like much of her work, these photographs are at once beautiful and disquieting; portraits of death in life, microscopic memento mori made visible to the human eye.
From the early 1980s Helen was producing pieces whose themes were flesh, sex, femininity and the place of the body in society. While the ideas might seem forbidding, their execution was far from austere and became increasingly sensual, colourful and seductively physical. In 1987, Helen was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize for her work of the previous year,'Of Mutability'. Exhibited first at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1986, 'Of Mutability' was comprised of two installation works, 'The Oval Court' and 'Carcass'. 'Effluvia', Helen's show at London's Serpentine Gallery in late 1994, was a huge popular and critical success. Included were the works 'Loop My Loop', 'Cacao', photographs of brilliantly colourful flower sculptures and the controversy-creating, 'Piss Flowers'. The best description of her work came from Helen herself. In an interview for Real World Multimedia while working on her sculpture for the Eve CD-ROM, she spoke of the feelings her work provoked as "gorgeously repulsive, exquisitely fun, dangerously beautiful". Her provocative and sensuous work deserves to be recognised as highly influential, and her reputation as "the most important artist of her generation" must now be taken seriously.
Flesh, Sex, and Femininity
Helen once described the work of Frida Kahlo, the crippled Mexican artist with whom she felt a creative kinship and about whom she made a BBC documentary in 1992, as "art that embraces pain, not so much confronting issues as experiences". The description applies just as well to her own work. From the early 1980s, Helen was producing pieces whose themes were flesh, sex, femininity and the place of the body in society. While the ideas might seem forbidding, their execution was far from austere and became increasingly sensual, colourful and seductively physical. Her subject matter was frequently just that - the work's matter, its very material. In 'Meat Lamps' (1989), she composed photographic tableaux that juxtaposed the succulently fleshy surfaces of meat with electric light. In 'Loop My Loop'(1989), a golden braid of hair is entwined with a worm-like intestine, both attached to a wooden surface like a grotesque, gorgeous and ornate totem that wraps decorative blonde beauty up within its irreducibly carnal reality, corkscrewing glamour into guts, the inside into the outside. Both these works have been incorporated into the Real World Eve CD-ROM, as have others from Chadwick's mid- to late-eighties work, plus a specially commissioned 'Flower Cone' - a piece of landscape sculpture. Helen confronted our desire for beauty, for disguise, with the reminder of what lies beneath the physical surface. But she did so with wit and a certain down-to-earth insistence on the fact of flesh. Hers was 'body art' well before the term became newly fashionable. In this respect she can be seen to have been the forerunner of a host of contemporary artists taking the self as subject matter and material. Whereas many of these younger artists have tended to confuse the Self with their individual selves, often turning an investigation of subjectivity into a kind of narcissism, Helen abstracted her sense of herself as a woman into visual archetypes of female experience. While still a foundation student she was making self-portraits in jelly and casts of her face in chocolate and liquorice. Already, the scope of her work seemed defined - her physical self - as well as her trademark fascination with unconventional materials and defiantly non-traditional artistic practice. In this respect her work initially owed something to a strand of polemical feminist art from the 1970s. For her 1976 degree show at Brighton Polytechnic, Helen produced a half-hour performance piece called 'Domestic Sanitation'. Sealed in latex costumes and to the accompaniment of teen pop anthems and American radio commercials for beauty products, Helen and three friends dusted, hoovered and submitted to gynaecological examination in a prison-like living-room. 'In the Kitchen', another performance piece of a few years later, continued to mine feminist art's deconstruction of female social roles combined with Chadwick's theatrical sense of self-transformation. Here, the performers perambulated awkwardly, strapped into canvas replicas of kitchen furniture; a literal and comic collapsing of the homemaker into her equipment, the social role made flesh in a kitchen skin drama. The polemical element of these works would later shift into a full-bodied engagement with beauty, but a beauty that would almost always derive from the body.
'The Oval Court' and 'Carcass'
The first of these saw the artist using photocopied images of her own naked body arching voluptuously in consort with various animals. The images are challenging and contrary - the animals had to be dead in order that they could be imaged, yet the images produced were of a sensual embrace of life, the means of reproduction of the distinctly unusual images was the prosaic photocopier - and were incorporated into a piece that employed and gently satirised rococo painting and classical architectural forms. The photocopied images formed a pool-like structure at the centre of the gallery space around whose walls, draped along columns, were hanging photocopied images of the artist weeping. Celebration and mourning, rapture and transience all combined in a work that was to win Helen her first mainstream exposure. It was 'Carcass', however, that pushed this exposure into newspaper coverage. A tall, rigid arrangement of glass panels filled with rotting household rubbish and the remains of the creatures used for 'The Oval Court', 'Carcass' was a bubbling eco-system of decay. Until it sprang a leak, split a seam and propelled its ten gallons of putrefying slime all over an upper room at the ICA. Unanticipated, 'Carcass' and its explosion foretold the examination of suppuration, bodily discharge and libidinal expulsion in Helen's later works, 'Cacao' and 'Piss Flowers'.
Piss Flowers
Twelve white-enamelled bronzes cast from cavities made from urinating in the snow, 'Piss Flowers' attracted the sort of prurient press outrage that contemporary art frequently attracts. The publicity was no doubt invaluable but the simplicity of the work's conceit was overlooked. 'Piss Flowers' was a collaboration between Helen and her husband, American artist and technician David Notarius. The couple had met in 1990 while Helen was hanging a show in Houston, Texas, and the work was conceived as an expression of sexual desire. Helen explained the work in The Independent:
When David and I had been together for about a year we were living in different countries. There's nothing like separation to sharpen up desire and out of that sense of urgency the concept of the 'Piss Flowers' was formed when we met again in Canada. We heaped up piles of snow and first I would piss into it and then he would piss around my mark. I made casts of the indentations which were eventually exhibited as bronze sculptures.
While Helen went on to describe the 'Piss Flowers' series as "a unique form of lovemaking, a metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily", the media reaction was less than generous. Appearing on a Jonathan Ross chat show on British television with one of the works, she was ridiculed by the host who described the work as "shit". Helen talked about this experience in an interview: "The audience (at the TV show) just reacted with this great 'yahoo'. I was incredibly shocked at the hostility. The whole thing seemed engineered to increase the gap between the artist and the public."
The reaction to 'Piss Flowers' was indicative of the extent to which Helen's work was seen to correspond to a caricature of contemporary art as deliberately shocking. On the other hand, there was a barely concealed sexism at work. Chadwick, as a woman artist, celebrated sexual pleasure and carnal union through the use of the "non-artistic" material of urine. That she should take sex as subject-matter, with which the British are notoriously uncomfortable at the best of times, made 'Piss Flowers' doubly taboo. The reactions to the work deliberately overlooked the resonance that it had with her other work, but the public and critical response to the Serpentine show were overwhelmingly positive; the show was a huge success.
Yayoi Kusama
The main themes of Yayoi Kusama's work are repetitive visions that she has experienced from a young age. Her artistic expression also arises from a deep interest in the problems of relationships between people, society and nature.
If it hadn't been for art, I'd have killed myself a long time ago.
For Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, art is therapy, a way of combating the psychological consequences of being "an unwanted child born of unloving parents." Born in 1929, it was during her childhood that Kusama began to experience "repetitive visions", images of multiplying dots that crowded her visual field and infested the spaces around her. These images became the polka dots and proliferating forms that have since recurred throughout her work, which she has called psychosomatic art.
Kusama has worked in a variety of media; from painting in the 1950s and 1960s, through the performance-based "happenings" organised during her 12 years based in New York, to the creation of mixed-media environments and "soft sculptures". A self-confessedly "obsessional" artist, Kusama's creative output responds to the dictates of her stormy, unsettled psychology, one that is deeply suspicious of authority and patriarchy. Her compulsion to create has also led her to design clothes and write six novels. "Art, Kusama says, is both a symptom and a cause for my obsession."
The image that dominates Kusama's art - in her painting, mixed-media installations and sculptures alike - is the polka dot. It's a motif that, having found its place in her earliest work, has persisted ever since. The figure of the polka dot has allowed Kusama to visually represent her repetitive visions while also being able to "suggest multiplication to infinity. Our earth is only one polka dot among millions of others."
The need to externalise interior feelings and to express extreme subjective sensations that is so prevalent in Kusama's work made her the ideal artist to respond to Peter Gabriel's song, 'Come Talk To Me', itself an account of repressed emotions that coexist with the intense desire to express them. It's a song that Kusama describes as "...so beautiful. The lyrics are very mysterious and avant-garde. As I listened to 'Come Talk To Me', I got a totally different impression about my artwork. Linking sculpture and music is a new challenge, one I would like to continue."
Cathy de Monchaux
Cathy de Monchaux's work begins with personal writings, which she mutates into an iconography, and then interprets in sculpture. She subverts stereotypical hard and soft materials so that they become ambiguous and almost androgynous, sometimes producing a repulsive/seductive effect. Her anthropomorphic iconography explores gender and ritualism. Born in 1960, Cathy de Monchaux is a graduate of London's prestigious Goldsmith's College who lives and works in London. De Monchaux's work uses glass, leather, velvet and brass in seductive combinations that nevertheless create a sense of threat.
At first sight, the work appears to be safe, beautiful and negotiable, de Monchaux explains. But up close, it's frightening, repulsive, dangerous and difficult to define.
Cathy de Monchaux's works are wall-mounted objects that frequently include anatomical forms; hands become ornately crafted brass claws, heart-shaped objects are either tightly compacted concentric arrangements of polished brass, red velvet and black leather, or opened to reveal disturbing internal workings of brass supports. Either way, the sense the work gives is of strange, otherworldly and hybrid forms caught at a moment of transformation, opening or shutting, or holding themselves back before leaping. Works such as 'Many Little Deaths' (1993) and 'Wise Men Don't Jump' (1993) feature figures visible that resemble small, uncategorisable creatures.
The little figures in my work exist either camouflaged within a pattern or standing on their own", says de Monchaux. "For me, they represent an anthropomorphic animal/human. The figures go from male to female, sometimes neither one nor the other, sometimes both." These enigmatic figures best encapsulate the strongly suggestive sense of physicality present in de Monchaux's work. "There's the visual possibility it will change by opening, snapping shut, breaking or unrolling." De Monchaux elaborates: "One has to be able to believe in the object enough to imagine that it could undergo a metamorphosis. In fact, they never do; that change occurs only in the viewer's imagination.
In short, the sort of creative engagement that de Monchaux's work elicits makes it ideal for inclusion in the Eve CD-ROM format, where the viewer's interaction allows her hybrid creatures to be let off the leash.
