THE STORIES WE TELL

Kusama "Pumpkin Room"

I went to Cleveland last week. Not the ugly Cleveland. Not the rust belt-y, poverty, river-on-fire Cleveland. I went to the beautiful Rockefeller Parkway, Case Western College, Ohio Botanical Garden Cleveland. The one where international architects like Frank Gehry and Marcel Breuer designed buildings that sit among stately mansions. 

Frank Gehry, School of Business, Case Western University

One of those mansions was previously owned by the Glidden paint mogul. Glidden House was converted into an exquisite boutique hotel with original, legitimate artwork in the hallways. It’s surrounded by exquisite, perfectly manicured gardens. It charges 3X the Holiday Inn rate. I stayed two nights.  Sometimes, you just need to jump off that cliff!

I went to see the Yayoi Kusama exhibit. She’s the nearly-90 year old, diminutive Japanese “polka dot lady” with the flaming red Buster Brown haircut. Her show opened over a year ago to sell-out crowds in Washington, D.C. It equaled that success in New York City and Toronto and is now ensconced at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

The park outside Cleveland Art Museum

People might also know that Kusama — along with her obsession with polka dots — is mentally ill, suffering from hallucinations and nervous disorders. She says that she draws repetitive patterns to obliterate the images in her head. I assumed that’s pretty much why all artists create, ill or not.  

Kusama was the only child of a loveless marriage; her father was a philanderer, her mother played the victim and Yayoi admits that she grew up with very odd messages concerning sexuality. Her early days in the art world were punctuated by her nude art performance pieces, high-profile partying and an uncanny, instinctive talent for marketing her own brand.  By the 1970s, most art intellectuals considered her over-exposed and a spotlight seeker.  

Her return to Japan drew tepid response. She had something of a breakdown, checked herself into a mental institution where she continues to live forty years later as more or less a “live-in, out patient” but with a private art studio. Obviously, given her age, she’s frail but still works and claims that “aging frees the child within us.”  I get that and her installation is full of joy — colors and lights and mirrors and more dots than any one place could ever deserve.

It’s the other thing I want to talk about…the emphasis on her mental health. 

I expected some push-back from my last review. (O.K., so the color on the walls, the framing, the lighting…picky, picky, picky!) It’s the other thing…capitalizing on the state of Josephine Tota’s mental health as a major part of an ad campaign that has my knickers in a twist.

Austrailian Hannah Gadsby delivers a powerful monologue on Netflix. Cherokee native writer Tommy Orange’s current bestseller THERE, THERE is setting the literary world aflame this Fall.  Both stress the importance of stories — stories repeated throughout our lives that go unchallenged and get passed along as truth. True or not, they inform the way we see ourselves, our history, our professions, and our sexuality.

It’s time to take a hard look at the stories repeated about artists.  The magic burden of victimization is delivered with every press release, every chapter in the art history book, that details a slip into mental illness, depression, loneliness, or addictions as though that explains a life’s work. The stories continue the mythology that to be a good artist — certainly, a great one — requires pain and damage and suffering. Logically, the reverse must also be true. Ergo, stabile family, good educational foundation, middle class most of the way…you must fail as a great artist because you missed the suffering class.

Guess what? Facts do not substantiate any of that. Several studies in recent years proved just the opposite. One from 2005 (Stanford Medical Research) found that depression and mental illness decreases creativity. Another from Sweden found that all artists for all media are most creative when they are in positive moods.  There is a tiny bit of evidence that writers and poets may suffer more frequently from depression. I’m merely speculating here but all artists may be drawn to life style choices that diminish their overall health — mental and physical. 

But I want artists to stand up. Be strong. Be proud. Reject the roll foisted on the profession by centuries of excuses: 

“We must not be good business people because’s we’re ‘artistic,’ 

“Our worthiness quotient is less because we’re really crazies. We are unreliable because…” 

“Artists are always poor and suffering, (addicted, neurotic, psychotic);  they should be grateful for any scrap of attention or reward that gets thrown their way.”

In the case of Josephine who began seriously painting after age 70, that right there gives pause. As a seamstress, she witnessed women in all their stages of marriage, parenthood, abandonment. Her paintings reflect the sadness of the female role in the society she knew honed through mature experience.

Was she all those other things — lonely, depressed? Hell, yes, sometimes! Am I? You bet! I’m past 70; let me count the ways!  Is it enough to scare my family sometimes? Yep…but I’m a writer. I’ll use the personal mental stuff because, basically, I have no shame.  

Visual artists give us pictures. And yes, background, politics and mores of their culture and era are all relevant when discussing their art. So talk about that when you’re doing those bios.   

Kusama continues to give us dots — an eternity of dots. It’s hard not to smile when you’re surrounded by Wonderbread dots. And pumpkins.

Wonderbread Dots, Kusama exhibit