Friese Undine
William Traver Gallery, 587-6501.
Through Sept 2.
Yumiko Kayukawa
Roq La Rue, 374-8977.
Through Aug 10.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the use of text in visual art, and how
the push and pull between word and image alerts the viewer to an inherent dissonance.
At the risk of pedantically repeating myself, I’m going to drive through that
territory again. The occasion for this is two exhibitions that have led my thinking
beyond artists’ options to the influence from graphic design, another realm
of visual knowledge.
The two shows are by Friese Undine and Yumiko Kayukawa, and to me, their design influence seems to be the poster. Posters have been inching their way into the exclusive country club of fine art, at least since movements such as Dada, Futurism, Constructivism, and the New Typography erupted, blossomed, and came of age early last century. We’ve seen it more recently in the attention paid to rock-show ephemera and the work of Art Chantry, and the result is–to condense the thought horribly into theory-speak–an understanding of how the vehicles of mass communication have influenced the way we receive information.
More simply put, it’s how we expect words and images to relate to each other. Think about the aims of commercial graphic design: to combine words and images in such a way that the message delivered bypasses your brain and goes straight to your believing-and-buying impulse. There are worlds of theory attached to how this should be done, based on psychology, cultural theory, trends, visual balance, and deliberate imbalance. Living in a world organized by graphic designers–and we do, be sure of it–teaches us to read the shorthand of design, and allows us to wallow in the subversive pleasures of artists such as Undine and Kayukawa.
Undine has made a career out of appropriating the language of propaganda to suggest strangely specific movements, and inappropriate orders from above. His new work is quieter, without the eye-abusing colors and text that seem to shout from the surface of the painting. There are no references to Freud or Machiavelli, two of his favorite figures, both of whom have had their work recontextualized into irreducible (and incorrect) sound bites.
The new series consists of monotypes: ink drawings printed, via glass, onto painted backgrounds. These backgrounds are unstable color fields, reminiscent at times of the sponge-painting so popular in the ’80s (mostly drab beiges, yellows, and grays). In each set of text and image, one is suggestively violent or poetic, and the other is everyday and understated. A set of missiles pointed at the sky has text that reads, “And his prose can be heavy.” With a garbage truck: “They constantly struggled for the wheel.” One, my particular favorite, shows a woman at a towering slot machine, with the text, “To caress them, command them and avenge herself upon them.”
At the juncture of these contrasting intents lies the work’s subversive quality.
Kayukawa (who lives in Sapporo) takes her cue from Japanese Pop, traditional Japanese painting, and, in a couple of cases, a kind of New Age-y imagery. Her nods to tradition include the integration of calligraphy, free-floating flowers, bubbles, stars, and insects in the work’s composition, as well as the sometimes impossibly positioned bodies (much like shunga, the erotic prints). Her flat, bright style and gorgeous, stylish girls are like advertisements for fun, as impossible as fashion magazine scenarios but equally as desirable. But the impossibility is acknowledged in Kayukawa’s world, where calligraphy drips with honey and girls are caught in spider webs.
Not all of them work so well. Yorokobi (Joy) and Kanashimi (Sorrow) show a woman in two empty landscapes adorned with skulls, fire, and a cheetah humping her leg. Somehow the goddess trope isn’t as effective as the girl power implicit in the two fashionistas in Danshingu Ooru Naito (Dancing All Night) or the cute alt-country girl in Samurai. I’m most attracted to these more visually complex works, which use the elements of good design to full effect, where the illogical flowers and butterflies and rabbits don’t read as symbols or icons, but as part of a visual system. Like Undine’s inverted propaganda, these drawings don’t appeal to your logic, but rather to your desire. Like a perfectly designed ad, they might very well make you want something; doubtless the “something” is ineffable, intangible, and nothing the artist wants to sell.