#16 'An emergency exit to another realm'
On being art, making work into your 90s, having desk talismans and productively thinking of nothing
Oh Marilla, as Anne would say, I think I’ve found another kindred spirit.
“Words cannot express how much I love trees,” the Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin told a reporter not so long ago. “They stand silent, yet they are very much living and animated beings. I kept pondering how I could keep their energy alive in my work until this primal concept of unity and division dawned on me.”
Last year Kim was invited, for the first time in her 50-year career, to take part in the Venice Biennale, aged 89. Now, at 90 years old, she is about to open a two-part solo show with Lehmann Maupin in London (from Feb 27) and New York (from April 3).
Kim makes these great big, rough-hewn chainsawed sculptures out of Brazilian timbers, harvested in forests she’s loved for decades. Recently she’s been making smaller, somewhat tidier, painted assemblages and paintings that are equally Sottsass-esque*, exhilaratingly colourful and DIYed. All her works bear the same title: Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One. Add and Divide and I think it’s really something, the fact that half a century on, that singlemindedness is still yielding exciting vibrant life-full works.
“I want to be remembered as an artist of all four directions,” she told the interviewer in that piece. “Whether I go east, west, south or north, I approach my work with the same heart.”
This sentiment chimes with the first of two entries of Patti Smith’s Books of Days I had to read today. I love how they work together:
28 January (left): “Desk talismans: a postcard image of Mark Rothko. A St Francis tau from a monk in Assisi. Sam Shepherd’s pocketknife. A gold-flecked Murano bowl from Dimitri. Keep on going, no matter what, my talismans seem to whisper.”
29 January (right): “Thinking of nothing. I remember my mother sitting like this. And I would ask, What is it, Mommy? And she would say, Oh nothing. And now I know what nothing is.”
Keep going and also, keep daydreaming. Let your mind wander. Be both determined and impulsive, focused and loose, a rooted trunk and a leaf on the wind.*
Also, have desk talismans! Have things to hand that help — that ground you or root you, that let your mind soar, that warm your heart, things you love to hold in the palm of your hand.
Nell (I think?) came up with “shelfscape” when we were at the Guardian, and it’s never not a cool idea. I’m in the library rn, but at home, near my desk, I have a Japanese spinning top, a pale pale gold-coloured rough crystal from Karis, a polished obsidian from Jodi, a postcard of Eggleston’s Untitled, 1974, another of Oasis no 7 by Hans-Rucker-co, made for Dokumenta 5 in 1972 (at the top of today’s letter), a photograph of my sister and I eating ice-cream on a cold day, as teenagers, and a tiny plushie my kid crocheted for me.
I wasn’t around in 1972, so I definitely never got to see Oasis no 7. It was conceived as “an emergency exit leading people to another realm,” — a see-through inflatable that protruded from the 18th-century facade of the Fridericianum in Kassel, which has had artists and architects dreaming ever since.
What do you keep by your side/elbow/keyboard?
A few other sculptures I’ve recently foraged out in the wild and online, numbered clockwise:
Marlow Moss, Spatial Construction in Steel, 1956-57, Leeds Museums and Galleries, currently on view in Bristol at the RWA in the wonderful Paule Vézelay: Living Lines show, dedicated to the formidable British abstract artist. (I was in Bristol last Friday to see the show, for a forthcoming piece in Guardian Saturday. I love how curator Simon Grant said he’d first come across her work when he started working at Tate Magazine in the early 2000s: “One of the first things we did was a piece on Vézelay’s film script, a surrealist dream script that never made it anywhere. That took me down a rabbit hole. It was the quality of her work: I thought it was really interesting and I didn’t know who she was. That’s always a good sign.” That indomitable curiosity and expert openness is so beautiful, isn’t it? Not being the specialist who knows but the specialist who doesn’t.)
Alexander Calder’s Constellation with Quadrilateral from 1963. Painted wood and steel wire. Held at the Whitney in NYC. (Photograph: Rob Corder)
Julia Wood’s work, about which so little has been written but whose archives are at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
Geoffrey Harris, Generations, 1971, a public sculpture in bad disrepair that sits on the Maitland Park Estate in Camden. The London County Council commissioned it as part of its mid-century Patronage of the Arts Scheme, which saw all kinds of properly amazing pieces installed in the green spaces of housing estates around the city…
…including Henry Moore’s Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 installed on the Brandon Estate, Lambeth, in 1961 (photograph: Steve Cadman).**
… and Lynne Chadwick’s The Watchers, 1960, on the Alton Estate in Roehampton, one of which figures was stolen in 2006. It has since been recast and the full ensemble restored to its original location.
And three more things:
I loved this piece by Robert Barry on Italian futurist Luigi Russolo (and his assistant Ugo Piatti)’s Intonarumori, or “noise intoners”. Of course, you want to hear the sounds they make, and that’s its whole own piece, but today, I’m just loving the instruments’ sculptural presences, what Barry describes as “a flock of cubist birds or an artillery battery designed by Tove Jansson”.
While in Bristol I spent an age in the 900-year-old cathedral, a beautiful building. I really loved these memorials for members of the erstwhile Berkeley family, set into niches in the walls of the Eastern Lady Chapel, each framed by a canopy of inverted cusped arches, like an architectural shorthand for “sparkle!” and “delight!”. So extra.
I’m doing my utmost to get to Brussels to see Lynda Benglis’s forthcoming show at Xavier Hufkens. I came to her work late, but oh my days, when I did, it felt like I’d reached the moon. Still now, I can’t adequately say how how much I love it, how alive it makes me feel. This show, titled What if?, is all new-ish works, including, I’m told, “a group of significant ceramics, two cast polyurethane sculptures, and Relic (2014–2023), a never-before-exhibited work in aluminum”. Pictured here is a 2013 piece titled Moctobi.
Kim Yun Shin talks about the material and herself becoming one: “Trees are reborn as sculptures, and simultaneously, I am also conceived as another life.”
Lynda Benglis too identifies, bodily, with what she’s making: “It all comes from my body. I am the clay; I have been extruded, in a sense.”
Which brings me to this beautiful way Germaine Greer introduces Paule Vézelay, then 92, in the 1984 interview below, conducted mere months before she died: “Her work is her life and she keeps it about her as a living oyster keeps its pearl.”
Notes
* One day, one day, I’ll live with a Carlton:
**Another Henry Moore, Draped Seated Woman, AKA Old Flo, was installed on the Stifford Estate, Stepney, in 1962, then removed to Yorkshire Sculpture Park for a few decades and nearly sold off by Tower Hamlets council for £20 million, before finally coming back to the East End, though not to the estate goddammit, but Canary Wharf, in 2017.