The Full Moon

By Rob Packer

A spectacular full moon tonight in London:

Yayoi Kusuma at the Tate

By Rob Packer

Apart from friends and family, the best thing about being back in London is just the range of cultural options. Each one of the seven arts is here in force: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, dance and cinema. Sunday was the turn of sculpture and painting and my first trip to the Tate Modern in more than a year to see the Yayoi Kusuma retrospective (continuing until 5 June).

I’d not heard much about Kusuma (1929—) before the exhibition probably because this is the largest exhibit of her work ever in the UK. My friend, Albert, was on hand though to give me a one-sentence rundown just before going in: “When she reached 50, she checked herself into a hospital and has been living there ever since.”

Kusuma moved to the United States in 1957, returning to Japan in 1973, and there is a complete transformation between the painting of her early years in Japan and her more expressive installations in the US. For me, her formative works were some of her most interesting: she originally apprenticed as a traditional Nihonga painter but gave it up and taught herself European and American avant-garde painting instead. In one painting, she draws you into the claustrophobia of post-war Japan: as you look at the circle of bodies transformed into ropes surrounding two leafless trees, you realize that instead of looking into the painting, you’re actually looking out at the world outside the prison walls. In another, she represents a heart as a red splodge with black lines that makes it look like she’s inside the body with a torch. And a series of similar-looking, diversely coloured round objects that represent germ cells, sunspots or flower buds, suggest universality between astronomical and biological.

Her move to the US looks a clean break with Japan, as she became involved with the New York art scene of Andy Warhol. At the same time, two symbols came to the fore that would become her trademark: the polka dot and the phallus. And they go everywhere: fabric phalli on shoes, a canoe full of phalli, phalli cooked on a baking tray, polka dots on a horse, polka dots on people at a naked 1960s happening, etc. So much so, I was half expecting to hear a five-year-old (there were plenty in the gallery) ask: “Mummy, what’s a phallus?”

After Kusuma returned to Japan in 1973 and checked herself into a hospital in 1977 (where she also set up an atelier), her style changed again with large paintings, some with spermatozoa shapes—that one prim commentator called “sprouting polka-dots” or “tadpoles”. Her recent years in Japan also produced the most spectacular and approachable installations of the show: a darkened family living room with everything covered in fluorescent polka dots and a mirror-covered room with tiny, round lights flashing in different colours.

For an artist active for over 60 years and covering a wide range of media, it’s difficult for any retrospective to be representative of the entire opus. Her early painting was fascinating and her two recent room-sized installations hypnotic. While interesting and influential, her US period with its polka dots and protuberances actually ended up feeling repetitive after a while and we did end up leaving with something approaching phallus fatigue.

Yayoi Kusuma, Tate Modern (until 5 June 2012)

Spring Saffrons

By Rob Packer

Since I arrived back in Britain last weekend, the late winter English weather has either been sunshine and blue skies or woollen clouds that turn into a Turner sunset. That was until today when the weather started to resemble the Brazilian winter of last July (wet with absolutely no escape from the freezing cold).

Before the weather turned, though, I got out into the garden to take some photos of the crocuses, or to give them their Spanish name, azafranes de primavera, spring saffrons—more beautiful, more poetic, and more mellifluous than the frog-sounding crocus.

A Day in the Country

By Rob Packer

It’s a rare occasion, but every so often whenever I’ve been outside the UK for a while, an uncontrollable and inexplicable desire comes over me and I want to see some of “England’s green and pleasant land”. It normally doesn’t last long, nor is very frequent (my last craving was more than five years ago), but for one day, Cotswolds, North Downs, South Downs—it doesn’t matter which—I arrive back in London and force the family into a day out in the country.

This time we chose Blenheim Palace—not House as they will correct you at the gates—mainly because none of us had been before, it’s a World Heritage Site and if Capability Brown didn’t get this out of me, no-one would.

For those who don’t know, Blenheim is an enormous English Baroque stately pile in Oxfordshire and is yet another English place with funny pronunciation (Blennim). Between the family, we (or mainly, my mum) managed to piece together that it was awarded to the Duke of Marlborough after an English or British victory at the Battle of Blenheim around 1700. But then the parlour game of guessing which of which post-Glorious Revolution war it was: there were, after all, so many! Was it the Nine Years’ War or War of the Spanish Succession? Maybe it was the Anglo-Dutch War or even the War of Jenkins’ Ear? With smartphones, parlour games don’t last too long, though: Wikipedia came to the rescue and we were instructed that it was indeed the War of Spanish Succession.

Blenheim Palace. You need to be a long way away to get it all in frame.

The house palace really is something special.