Yoko Ono: ‘A Dream You Dream Together is Reality’

Yoko Ono with glass hammer. Photo credit: © Clay Perry

A phone rings as we enter the gallery.

‘Hello. This is Yoko.’

It rings again and the message is repeated.

And so we pass through into a world of strange music, cryptic events and grainy black and white films; of bizarre objects, bean bags and neatly-typed instructions. One of Landseer’s lions on Trafalgar Square is wrapped in drop-cloths. There’s a tape recording of snow falling at dawn; a stethoscope to listen to time passing; and an apple you can buy for £200 ‘to experience the excitement of watching [it] decay.’ There are some shards of broken milk bottles that have also been put up for sale, each labelled with a date to represent a future morning.

‘It is a useless act. But by actively inserting such a useless act… into everyday life, perhaps I can delay culture.’

Many of the visitors are young, revelling in the participation and playfulness. Some draw their overlapping shadows onto a wall. A man hammers a nail into a wooden panel. People write thoughts of their mother and pin them up alongside others. Couples play games of chess where both sets of pieces are white. A young boy jumps into a black sack and rolls around on the floor making shapes.

This is a retrospective of Yoko Ono’s multidisciplinary art from the mid-1950s to the present day. (‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ is at Tate Modern, London, until 1 September.)

We realise that each piece has a serious intent. The snow recording and stethoscope suggest we should treasure time, appreciate our environment. The covered lion challenges the enduring legacy of empire and colonialism. The chess game prompts us to think of war and peace. (The accompanying instruction says it’s ‘for playing as long as you know where all your pieces are.’) The black sack exercise asks questions of identity.

‘When I did the ‘Bag Piece,’ we go in the bag, and we’re very different. And also we see the world through it, actually. And there’s a big difference between the world and us that way. By being in a bag, you show the other side of you, which is nothing to do with race, nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with age. Then you become just a spirit or soul. And you can talk soul to soul.’

 Born into a middle-class Japanese family in 1933, Ono grew up for the most part in Tokyo. During World War 2, when she was 12, she was evacuated to the countryside to avoid the bombing. She and her younger brother, short of food and basic necessities, would lie on their backs and look up at the sky, escaping the conflict in their imaginations.

‘We exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualization to survive.’

This she later observed was ‘maybe my first piece of art.’

Aged 23 Ono moved to New York where she organised events and concerts that combined poetry, atonal music, vocalisation and amplified sounds.

‘I wanted most things to be performed in the dark, thereby asking the audience to stretch their imaginations. A glimpse of things was seen by occasionally lit matches and torches. This went on for four hours.’

Yoko Ono performing ‘Lighting Piece’ (1955) at the Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, in 1962. Photo: Yasuhiro Yoshioka; © the artist

Ono started issuing instructions for paintings. Viewers were invited to ‘complete’ the artwork in their heads, the idea taking primacy over the object. Back in Japan she wrote further instructions, some physical and some mental.

‘Scream.
1. against the wind
2. against the wall
3. against the sky’

‘Cloud Piece
Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put it in.’

‘Stone Piece
Find a stone that is your size or weight.
Crack it until it becomes fine powder.
Dispose it in the river. (a)
Send small amount each to your friends. (b)
Do not tell anybody what you did.
Do not explain about the powder to the friends you send.’

In 1964 Ono first performed ‘Cut Piece’, in which she sat silently on stage wearing a suit while the audience excised pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors.

‘To strip means not ‘to reveal to others’, but ‘to discover something hidden in humans’.’

Yoko Ono performs ‘Cut Piece’ (1964) in New York © Minoru

Ono’s work was funny, absurd, bonkers. But it was also fresh, thoughtful and disarming. Often partial or unfinished, it existed in the realms of the viewer’s imagination. It challenged preconceptions, asked questions and invited participation.

'The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people… In the mind-world, things spread out and go beyond time.’

Between 1966 and 1971 Ono worked in England. At an exhibition in the Indica Gallery, London she encountered the musician John Lennon who offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail.

‘I met a guy who played the same game I played.’

PLAY IT BY TRUST aka WHITE CHESS SET (1966) “Play it for as long as you can remember who is your opponent and who is your own self”. Yoko Ono. 1966

In 1969 Ono and Lennon were married in Gibraltar and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long ‘Bed-in for Peace.’ The couple settled in New York, using their public platform to promote peace, co-opting the techniques of advertising and propaganda to amplify their message.

In 1980 Lennon was murdered outside their apartment building.

Ono has continued to call for peace, to raise awareness about migration issues, to criticise violence. Her 2009 work ‘A Hole’ featured a pane of glass shot through by a bullet. A label reads: ‘Go to the other side of the glass and see through the hole.’

She has often returned to the consoling presence of the sky.

‘Even when everything was falling apart around me, the sky was always there for me… I can never give up on life as long as the sky is there.’

I found this exhibition inspiring. It asks us to unmake the world; to reframe and rethink our deeply held assumptions; to act and join in; to imagine peace together.

‘A dream you dream alone is only a dream.
A dream you dream together is reality.’


'Walking on thin ice
I'm paying the price
For throwing the dice in the air.
Why must we learn it the hard way
And play the game of life with your heart?
I gave you my knife,
You gave me my life,
Like a gush of wind in my hair.
Why do we forget what's been said,
And play the game of life with our hearts?
I may cry some day,
But the tears will dry whichever way,
And when our hearts return to ashes,
It'll be just a story.
It'll be just a story.’
Yoko Ono, ‘Walking on Thin Ice'

No.465

Philip Guston’s Art of Anxiety: Not Inventing, But Revealing

Dawn (1970), Philip Guston, oil on canvas. Glenstone Museum, Maryland

‘Well, it could be all of us. We’re all hoods.’
Philip Guston

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of Philip Guston. (Tate Modern, London, until 25 February)

Guston was a fiercely political artist, raging at injustices he saw all around him. He articulated his anger and anxiety through narrative murals and allegorical paintings, through abstract works and depictions of dark cartoonish nightmares. He was a restless soul who believed the role of the artist was not to invent fictions, but to reveal truths. He pleads with us to care, and prompts us to reflect on the enemy within – within our society and within ourselves.

‘I feel that I have not invented so much as revealed in a coded way, something that already existed.’

He was born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, the youngest of seven children. His Jewish parents had fled persecution in present-day Ukraine. In 1922 the family moved to Los Angeles, where, struggling to make ends meet, his father, a scrap collector, hanged himself in the shed - and 10 year old Phillip found the body. 

Philip Guston in New York, in 1952 Martha Holmes/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

As a child Goldstein was interested in cartoons and Renaissance art. At 14 he began painting, and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a life-long friend.

‘I grew up politically in the thirties and I was actively involved in militant movements and so on, as a lot of artists were… I think there was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change.’

Goldstein became politically active as the United States saw the rise of racism and antisemitism; and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. He joined a group of artists creating large-scale narrative murals supporting workers’ rights and resistance to fascism and oppression. 

'Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.’

In 1935, at 22, Goldstein moved to New York where, concerned about the climate of antisemitism, he changed his name to Philip Guston. He was deeply affected by the war in Europe and the Holocaust. And so he turned to his easel and painted the bombing of Guernica; children playing and fighting in ruined townscapes; haunted camp inmates.

‘That’s the only reason to be an artist… to bear witness.’

Martial Memory Philip Guston, 1941, Oil on Canvas

In the late 1940s, suffering a crisis of confidence, Guston destroyed everything he’d been working on. Perhaps he felt figurative painting could not do justice to the horrors that had so recently taken place.  

‘I began to feel that I could really learn, investigate, by losing a lot of what I knew.’

He decided to change course, and immersed himself in New York’s emerging Abstract Expressionist scene, hanging out with Rothko, de Kooning and Kline. 

‘The trouble with recognisable art is that it excludes too much. I want my work to include more. And ‘more’ also comprises one’s doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognising it.’

Standing close to the canvas, Guston painted forms coming into existence – perhaps you can detect a body or a head - using gentle, complementary colours. Critics dubbed him an ‘abstract impressionist.’ His favourite shade was cadmium red, and it would continue to feature strongly in his work for the rest of his career. 

‘I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why.’

Beggar's joys, Philip Guston, 1954–1955 oil on canvas

In the late ‘60s Guston was deeply moved by the Vietnam War and the political upheaval in the United States. 

‘The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’

Feeling that his art had to make more overt political statements, Guston made a dramatic return to figurative work.

‘The hell with it. I just wanted to draw solid stuff.’

He had always liked comics, and his new images drew on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. He painted cartoonish, blood-spattered Klan figures driving around town in a childish car, pointing at the sights, the legs of a man projecting from the boot. He depicted similar hoods relaxing at home with a cigarette by the window; in the courtroom, at the office and drawn on blackboards - suggesting they were part of the curriculum.

'Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.’

Where previously Guston had shown Klansmen conspiring, in the act of racial assault, here they were engaged in the mundane activities of everyday life. It was as if he was saying: evil is all around us; it is institutional, systemic - in our courts and schools and on our streets; it is hiding in plain sight.

‘My attempt was really not… to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me… I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot?’

Most striking among these works was a picture of a hooded artist at work in the studio, painting himself. 

‘I perceive myself behind the hood.’

The Studio, Philip Guston, 1969 Oil on canvas

Guston implies that we are all complicit in the injustices we see around us. We carry with us our own prejudices and partialities; our unconscious biases; our inertia and failure to act. We should turn our critical faculties on ourselves.

'There is another man within me that’s angry with me.’
Thomas Browne

Guston presented his startling new work at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970. But the show was not a success and he only sold one painting. Critics were hugely disappointed that he had deserted the abstract cause, and he lost friends as a result. 

‘There is nothing to do now, but paint my life; my dreams, surroundings, predicament, desperation, [my wife] Musa – love, need.’

Depressed at the response, Guston turned to painting strange dreamscapes populated by objects that meant something to him – mental junk that he called ‘crapola.’ Repeatedly he depicted cigarettes, irons, clocks and steaming kettles; clocks, blinds and bare bulbs; sinister dangling light-pulls. And everywhere there were old shoes and severed legs - echoes of the Holocaust.

'The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.’

In 1973 Guston painted himself: pastrami-pink, indolent, smoking in bed with a plate of ketchupped chips on his chest and a stack of shoes at his side. There’s a bare light bulb and a light-pull. His paintbrushes sit unused. It’s a desolate image. 

Interviewer: Do you think of yourself as kind of pessimistic?

Guston: I don’t think it’s pessimistic. I think it’s doomed.

In 1980 Guston died of a heart attack, in Woodstock, New York. He was 66.

Smoking, Eating . Philip Guston (1973). Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/The Estate of Philip Guston

Guston was clearly a melancholy figure. But he demonstrated that, even at our lowest ebb, we can find some solace in art. He teaches us to be restless; to embrace radical change when we’re running out of steam; to see the enemy within; and to turn our critical judgement on ourselves. 

‘Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.’

'People just ain't no good,
I think that's well understood.
You can see it everywhere you look,
People just ain't no good.

It ain't that in their hearts they're bad.
They can comfort you, some even try.
They nurse you when you're ill of health,
They bury you when you go and die.
It ain't that in their hearts they're bad.
They'll stick by you if they could.
Ah, but that's just bullshit, baby.
People just ain't no good.

People they ain't no good.
People they ain't no good.
People they ain't no good at all.’

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,'People Ain't No Good’ (N Cave)

No. 445

The Textile Sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz: ‘We Find Out About Ourselves Only When We Take Risks’

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1960s, photo artist’s archive

'Art does not solve problems, but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.'
Magdalena Abakanowicz

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. (Tate Modern, London until 21 May 2023)

In the 1960s and ‘70s Abakanowicz took tapestries from the wall into three-dimensional space. She made sculptures that were organic, soft and fibrous. And she employed traditional craft skills in the service of high art. Her huge haunting textiles bring to mind vibrant plant life and mysterious foliage; rippling garments and pulsing body parts. These are enchanted environments.

Abakanowicz teaches us that, in whatever field we’re working, we can always rewrite the rules.

'It is easy to follow, but it is uninteresting to do easy things. We find out about ourselves only when we take risks, when we challenge and question.'

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan.
Photo credit D. Cummings-Palmer

Abakanowicz was born in 1930 into an aristocratic family in rural central Poland. Her early years were overshadowed by the Polish-Soviet War, by Nazi occupation and then by Communist rule. She studied at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Warsaw and began her career painting large biomorphic designs on fabric. But her real interest was in weaving.

‘I am interested in constructing an environment from my forms. 
I am interested in the scale of tensions that arises between various shapes which I place in space. 
I am interested in the feeling when confronted by the woven object. 
I am interested in the motion and waving of the woven surfaces.
I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation. 
I am interested in the path of a single thread.
I am not interested in the practical usefulness of my work.’

Abakanowicz was naturally independent minded. From the outset her tapestries dispensed with preparatory designs or templates (‘cartoons’). Rather she improvised on the loom, creating colourful, fluid, abstract shapes, switching between materials with remarkable dexterity - from sisal to wool to horsehair. 

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan.
Photo credit D. Cummings-Palmer

In the mid-1960s she discarded the rectangular format of traditional tapestry. Instead she hung curved fabric forms freely in space. The burnt umber sculptures she created at this time suggest cocoons, shells and insects; a beguiling journey into the forests of her childhood.  

‘Strange powers dwelled in the woods and lakes that belonged to my parents. Apparitions and inexplicable forces had their laws and their spaces.’

Abakanowicz went further still. She took to arranging her fabric sculptures - or what an art critic dubbed ‘Abakans’ - in specially lit clusters, so that they cast compelling shadows and could be in dialogue with each other. She sought to create immersive ‘situations’ or ‘environments’, places to explore and hide.

‘The Abakans were my escape from categories in art. They could not be classified. Larger than me, they were safe like the hollow trunk of the old willow I could enter as a child in search of hidden secrets.’

Abakanowicz employed industrially woven cloth, rope, hemp, burlap, flax and found material. Sometimes her work seems like tall trees or vines; sometimes like strange boulders or pods; sometimes like huge heads or interior organs. You can walk among them, as if through a magical forest or a mysterious alien landscape. There is a sense of comforting softness; of germination and budding; of brooding silence.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan.
Photo credit D. Cummings-Palmer

‘I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet. It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves… our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles… We are fibrous structures.’

In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s Abakanowicz went on to create humanoid sculptures and outdoor installations, working with metal, wood, stone and clay. All the while she continued to explore humanity’s relationship with nature. She passed away in 2017 at the age of 86.

So often in life and business we are boxed in by convention and tradition. We feel obliged to follow the crowd along the beaten path.

Abakanowicz, the weaver of sculptures, teaches us to deny hierarchies; to transgress rules; to see opportunity everywhere.

‘I like neither rules nor instructions, these enemies of the imagination. I make use of the technique of weaving by adapting it to my own ideas.’

'So tonight, gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf,
And just enjoy yourself.
Groove. 
Let the madness in the music get to you.
Life ain't so bad at all,
If you live it off the wall.
Life ain't so bad at all.
Live your life off the wall.'
Michael Jackson, ‘Off the Wall’ (R Temperton)

No 403

'With an Apple I Will Astonish Paris’: Cezanne, Starting Revolutions in Unexpected Places

Paul Cezanne - Still Life with Fruit Dish. Museum of Modern Art in New York

Photograph: www.scalarchives.com

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne. (Tate Modern, London until 12 March, 2023)

'There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.’

Cezanne painted intense, almost abstract, landscapes from flat planes of bold colour. He gave us enigmatic portraits that capture the sensation of being in the room with the sitter. He created still lifes that are hypnotically vivid and spatially disorientating. He demonstrated that infinite opportunities can be offered by a narrow range of subjects. He built a bridge between Impressionism and Cubism. And he subverted the traditional hierarchy of art.

'The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.’

Paul Cezanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of a milliner and later banker. At the age of 22 he set aside his law studies when his schoolmate Emile Zola encouraged him to join the creative community in Paris.

Cezanne sketched in the capital’s museums and attended classes at the Academie Suisse. The city was a hotbed of social and political unrest. Zola was a republican and Cezanne’s mentor Pissaro was an anarchist. But Cezanne was a shy, introverted fellow, less obviously opinionated.

'The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world. That's why I've withdrawn from it.’

Paul Cezanne self-portrait 1875 © RMN-Grand Palais

Cezanne expressed his revolutionary zeal in his art. 

In 1870, in order to avoid conscription in the Franco-Prussian War, Cezanne moved to L’Estaque, a seaside village just west of Marseille. Over a 15 year period he made 40 paintings of the hot dry landscape, endlessly curious for fresh views and perspectives. 

'Here, on the river's verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left.’

Overlooking an azure sea, the yellow and brown block houses, with their shuttered windows and ochre gable roofs, create jagged, geometric patterns, intersecting with factory chimneys, telegraph poles and the grey viaduct. 

We are witnessing the first steps towards Cubism.

'I believe in the logical development of everything we see and feel through the study of nature.'

Mont Sainte-Victoire, near Aix, featured in over 80 of Cezanne’s works. He painted it from the valley below, from his garden at Jas de Bouffan, from the roof of his studio and from the local quarry. The limestone mountain looms in the distance, a brooding permanent companion, sometimes reduced to just a few blue and white brushstrokes. Whereas the Impressionists had been interested in light, atmosphere and the fleeting moment, Cezanne was fascinated by geology, soil and timeless presence.

'I am a consciousness. The landscape thinks itself through me.'

Paul Cezanne - The Sea at L’Estaque behind Trees

Still life was traditionally considered an unimportant genre. Great painters tended to concern themselves with historical, mythical and religious themes. But for Cezanne everyday objects represented an opportunity for subversion. Rather than precisely depicting an item itself, he would convey his consciousness of it. This was the art of perception.

'People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.’

Here are oranges, apples and pears; ginger jar, sugar bowl and water jug - arranged against a piece of patterned fabric, l’indienne. Cezanne presents these things in blazing, iridescent colours, in endless permutations. Sometimes his vision seems warped, the bottles, dishes and fruit at risk of tumbling off the table. A plaster Cupid stumbles clumsily onto the scene. The apples shimmer. The oranges quiver. A dazzling white sheet floats across the canvas. 

'Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.’

Scientists have since observed that Cézanne's woozy imagery corresponds with the way we actually see the world. Our eyes are not static when we look, but are making frequent tiny darting movements, ‘saccades’, between areas of visual interest. 

Cezanne’s portraits are like his still lifes. You get more of a sense of the sitters’ presence than of their personality. Here’s his wife Marie Hortense, whom he painted 29 times over 25 years. She sits in a yellow chair, her lips pursed, her hair parted, her hands clasped on her lap. Here’s his son Paul, a dreamy melancholy soul. And here’s his phlegmatic gardener Vallier, legs crossed, hat pulled over an expressionless face. 

Paul Cezanne - Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair (1888-90). Art Institute Chicago

'The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.’

I was particularly struck by the thought that Cezanne’s revolution began in still life, the field of art with the lowest esteem. When I was a young ad man, everyone wanted to work on beer, cars and jeans. But it’s difficult to make an impression on a category that is already considered cool and creative; that already attracts the attentions of the great and the good. The Planners that made their name in my time did so on the roads less travelled, on difficult brands in unfashionable sectors - detergent and dog food, soup, soap and financial services. The stone that the builders rejected can indeed become the cornerstone.

Cezanne died in 1906 at the age of 67. He had always been admired by his fellow artists. Degas, Gaugin and Monet; Pissarro, Caillebotte and Renoir all kept his work. And Picasso referred to him as ‘the father of us all.’

‘Cezanne cannot put touches of two colours onto a canvas without it being an achievement.’
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Cezanne taught us to find truth in nature; to reflect on and celebrate sensation; to look and look again - because even if we cannot fully comprehend the world around us, we can at least enjoy our perception of it.

'We live in a rainbow of chaos.’

'I pick my friends like I pick my fruit.
My Granny told me that when I was only a youth.
I don't walk around trying to be what I'm not.
I don't waste my time trying to get what you got.
I work at pleasin’ me,
'Cause I can't please you.
And that's why I do what I do
My soul flies free like a willow tree.
Doo wee, doo wee, doo wee
And if you don't want to be down with me, you don't want to pick from my
Apple tree.’

Erykah Badu, ‘Appletree' (R Bradford / E Badu)

No. 394

Planning Is What a Planner Does: Bruce Nauman and a Solution to Imposter Syndrome

Bruce Nauman's Human Nature/Knows Doesn 't Know (1983/1986) at Tate Modern Photo: D. Palmer

‘What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.’
Bruce Nauman

I recently visited a fine retrospective of the work of artist Bruce Nauman (Tate Modern, London, until 21 February).

Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941, the son of an engineer at General Electric. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin, and art at the University of California. He went on to set up studios in Northern California and then Pasadena, before settling in New Mexico in 1979. His work covers a broad range of media: sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking and performance. 

Nauman films himself stepping carefully through a narrow corridor, walking around the perimeter of a square ‘in an exaggerated manner’, falling backwards onto a corner wall. He films his studio at night when he’s not there.

Nauman records a scream, puts it on a reel-to-reel tape machine and covers it in a concrete block. He makes a cast of the space underneath his chair. He pinches his flesh as if curious about its material properties. 

‘You may not want to be here.’

Nauman plays a violin tuned to the notes D, E, A and D. He washes his hands vigorously and repeatedly at a studio sink. A cup of coffee tumbles and spills, over and over again. Neon instructions flash on and off:

‘Laugh and Die, Play and Live, Speak and Live, Play and Die, Feel and Die, Sleep and Live.’

he True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) 1967 Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel, Switzwerland)

Nauman’s world is disturbing and disorientating. Our anxiety is enhanced by the murmur of projectors; by the hum of neon and amplified footfalls; by distant yelling and screaming clowns.

On a collection of monitors the same bald disembodied head rotates while shouting aggressively: 

‘Feed me, Eat me, Help me, Hurt me.’ 

Nauman seems to be concerned with the big questions: with truth and lies, agency and chance, life and death. He wants to rouse us from our stupor; to shake us from our habituated norms. 

‘You have to kind of not watch anything, so you can be aware of everything.'

Nauman returns repeatedly to the theme of children’s games. We are invited to consider card tricks, balloon dogs, hangman and musical chairs. 

Bruce Nauman (October 7, 2020-February 21, 2021) at Tate Modern, London: installation view featuring “Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning)” (1992); (photo: Tate Photography (Matt Greenwood); artwork © Bruce Nauman / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020)

‘Somebody is always left out. The first one to be excluded always feels terrible. That kid doesn’t get to play anymore, has nothing to do, has to stand in the corner.’

Nauman seems to be asking: Is there some secret in the inherent cruelty of these games; in the unfairness, the deception, the repetition? Isn’t this what life’s about?

'My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.’

We are being watched by a camera as we walk along a wall. As we turn the corner we catch a glimpse of ourselves on a monitor. And then we are gone. There’s a wire mesh cage with a narrow claustrophobic corridor. Do we want to go in? A woman takes instructions from an unseen man.

'Sit down, lie down, roll over, play dead, sit up, stand up.’

This is a dark, dystopian place of concrete and cages; of surveillance cameras and flickering screens; of brash neon signs and black marble blocks illuminated by sodium light. It suggests themes of disorientation and disempowerment. It prompts paranoia.

‘Learn to recognise when you need to know something.'

I left the exhibition in awe of the diversity of Nauman’s thoughts and provocations. He refuses to be constrained by conventional subjects, materials and practice. He continually explores what an artist and artwork can be. 

I was particularly struck by Nauman’s description of his evolving relationship with his craft.

'When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.’

Nauman gives a compelling definition of the relationship between art and the artist.

‘If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.’

I wonder, can we learn something here about Planners and Planning?

Still from 'Clown Torture', 1987, by Bruce Nauman. https://theartsdesk.com

In the early years of my career I spent a good deal of time in search of the definitive course, the critical text, the rules and regulations that would qualify me as a Planner. I wanted to learn how to do it. 

I was troubled by imposter syndrome. I had arrived in the trade in a roundabout way, via Market Research. I lacked the classical BMP education and I doubted that I had all the skills, talents or accomplishments of a Proper Planner. It said Planner on my business card, but was that justified? I anticipated that ultimately I would be exposed as a fraud.

I’m not sure I ever got the education I was craving. I doubt it ever existed. Indeed, when I reflect on what we did as a Planning community at BBH over those years, there comes to mind a vast disordered array of methods, styles and approaches to our quest for understanding. 

We interviewed semioticians and psychologists, ecologists and economists, fashionistas and futurists. We sought to comprehend the pioneer spirit, the colour yellow, the meaning of play. We researched in nightclubs and briefed in safari parks. We visited archives, farms and factories. We observed people in shops and doing the laundry, went on roadtrips and barhops. We examined changing definitions of human progress and female heroism, the language of cool and the craft of choreography. We conducted blind taste and deprivation tests. We watched parents watching their children, and asked children to draw their parents.  We commissioned statistical models, regression analyses and price elasticity studies. We created brand planets and media ecosystems, mood edits and manifestos. We drew pyramids, conveyor belts and stadium charts. We rebranded milk and redesigned jeans. We constructed a teenager’s bedroom.

To be fair, while some of these exercises were illuminating and fruitful, others were illusory and futile. But all were embarked upon in earnest endeavour; with a curiosity to find fresh perspectives and compelling answers. 

Planning is a discipline that is constantly seeking to define itself; endlessly striving to delineate and circumscribe, to classify and set limits.

Nauman prompts us to be more liberal in our understanding of our trade. Planning is an activity, not a product. It is not something we learn how to do. Planning is what a Planner does. And we should start every day trying to figure out what that can be.

Nauman’s preoccupations are perhaps best summed up in his piece ‘Clown Torture.’ The artist examines the jester’s obligation to perform; his or her determination to obscure their true self. He is drawn to the fears of a clown.

A clown repeatedly enters a room and a bucket of water comes crashing down on top of him. A clown jumps up and down screaming. A clown sits on the toilet reading a magazine. A clown recites a nursery rhyme.

'Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left? Repeat.’

'Now if there's a smile on my face,
It's only there trying to fool the public.
But when it comes down to fooling you
Now, honey, that's quite a different subject.
But don't let my glad expression
Give you the wrong impression.
Really I'm sad.
Oh I'm sadder than sad. 
You're gone, and I'm hurtin' so bad.
Like a clown, I pretend to be glad. 
Now there's some sad things known to man,
But ain't too much sadder than the tears of a clown,
When there's no one around.’

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, ’The Tears of a Clown’ (H Cosby, S Robinson, S Wonder)

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year and an improving 2021.
Look after yourselves. 

No. 312

Bonnard: Liberating Oneself from the Literal

Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath, 1936. Photograph: Tate

‘I leave it…I come back…I do not let myself become absorbed by the object itself.’
Pierre Bonnard

I recently visited an exhibition of the work of French Post-Impressionist painter, Pierre Bonnard (Tate Modern, London until 6 May).

The table is laid with a red gingham cloth. There is fruit, a water jug, a coffee pot. The dog perches. We see a vase of flowers, a bowl of lemons, of peaches, a notebook and pen. Amber walls. Summer heat. The door to the garden is open. A lush lavender landscape reaches out to us across that table, through the French windows.  A sun-drenched vista of greens and yellows beckons beyond that open door. A vibrant exterior life viewed from a secluded interior.

A woman is observed in the mirror on the mantelpiece. Her head turned away, looking past us and through us. A woman absorbed in her grooming, scrubbing her neck, pinning her hair. A woman framed by a bathtub, illuminated by the brightly coloured tiles, distorted by the water. It is as if we have just walked into the room.

We are invited into the intimate domestic world of the artist and his wife, Marthe - a world of silent companionship, of lethargy and ennui. Marthe passes the time with coffee and private thought. She nibbles at fruit and talks to the dog. She escapes to her bath - ‘the only luxury she had ever longed for.’ Often unwell, she has been prescribed daily water treatments to soothe her.

Renowned for his sunny landscapes and vivid colours, Bonnard is sometimes described as a ‘painter of happiness.’ But he himself is not so sure:

‘He who sings is not always happy.’

Indeed Bonnard seems somewhat removed - a man withdrawn, observing his home and home-life from a distance, through a window or doorway, across a table; through bands of colour, layers of memory. Figures are like ghosts. They move in and out of focus, in and out of frame. Self-portraits seem anxious, mournful.

'One always talks of surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture.'

Occasionally Bonnard employs photography, not as a record of actuality, but rather to bring to mind natural, informal poses; to suggest incidental occasions, snapshots of time.

Bonnard describes himself as ‘the last of the Impressionists’, and he does indeed paint impressions – recollections of lost moments, remembrance of things past. He works in the studio, from memory rather than from life. Taking months and sometimes years to complete a canvas, he lets his imagination recreate events; frees his intense pigments to dissolve into one another; allows colours to take over from objects, patterns to take over from people, ideas to take over from accurate representation.

‘The presence of the object…is a hindrance to the painter when he is painting. The point of departure for a painting being an idea.’

There is a lesson for us all here.

Of course, brands often have to reside in a real world of cold calculation and rational reflection. But the best brands can also abstract themselves from reality, liberate themselves from the literal. They inhabit a landscape of impressions, feelings, moods and colours; a place of emotional truth, of memories, dreams and desires; the world as we recall it, as we imagine it, as we want it to be.

Sometimes, like Bonnard, we need to learn to let go.

'So far away from you, and all your charms,
Just out of reach of my two empty arms.
Each night in dreams I see your face,
Memories time cannot erase.
Wide awake, and find you gone,
And I'm so blue, and all alone.
So far away from you, and all your charms,
Just out of reach of my two empty arms.’

Percy Sledge, ‘Just Out of Reach'  (Virgil "Pappy” Stewart)

No. 219

‘The Same, But Grey’: Pablo Picasso on How To Handle a Mid-Life Crisis

Pablo Picasso, The Dream

A few years back, as I was approaching 50, I visited the Post Office to renew my driving licence. I handed my expired licence, along with the new form and fresh photos, to the polite Sikh man behind the counter. He compared the new photo with the old, laughed and said:
‘The same, but grey.’

This in many ways captured how I felt about being middle-aged.

I knew deep down I was the same person as the awkward freckled teenager who slapped coconut oil in his hair and wore white towelling socks with Romford cut-downs. I knew I was the same as the twenty-something who ate off paper plates, made soul mix-tapes and worshipped at the altar of conversation; the same as the industrious thirty-year-old, the pedestrian centre back who learned to love Bach, Beckett and ballet.

But I knew too that I was grey. My knees creaked. My back was playing up. I couldn’t read restaurant menus or hear discussions in crowded bars. I was increasingly sentimental, nostalgic and stubborn. What’s more, I was inclined to talk about bin strategy, travel routes and parking permits at any opportunity.

When we reach 50 we have to come to terms with the fact that we have more years behind us than ahead of us; that we’re not quite as in touch as we once were; that our cohort is no longer the cultural centre of gravity; that we are the same, but grey.

So how should we deal with it?

'Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.'
Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror

I recently attended an exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work from the year 1932, when he had just turned 50 (Tate Modern, until 9 September).

By 1932 Picasso was successful, famous and wealthy. He lived a life of bourgeois respectability with his wife and son in his grand Paris apartment. He wore tailored suits and had a chauffeur-driven car. He was planning the first major retrospective of his work.

But Picasso was not entirely comfortable with his lot. He didn’t appreciate that the critics and art establishment were looking elsewhere for innovation and new ideas. His marriage was strained, and over the last five years he had been in a secret relationship with a much younger woman, Marie-Therese Walter. Moreover, being proud of his humble roots, he struggled to make sense of his wealth:

'I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.'

Picasso was middle-aged. His life was characterised by responsibility, conformity and comfort; by nostalgia, self-justification and pining for lost youth. And he was curiously dissatisfied with it all.

So far, so conventional.

But Picasso had an outlet for his frustrations and anxieties: his art. He established a new studio above his Paris apartment, and he bought a mansion house in Normandy where he could experiment with sculpture. He set about an extraordinary period of industry and creativity.

'Everything you can imagine is real.’

Picasso painted Walter sitting, sleeping and swimming; surrounded by plants, busts and bowls of fruit; in shadows and reflections; bright, colourful images in purple, blue and gold; vibrant two-dimensional portraits like playing cards. He deconstructed and reassembled her; abstracted, distorted and fragmented the female form. There were curved limbs, breasts, hips and hands; a heart-shaped head. Mouths became slits; faces buttons. Walter melted into a squid.

Incredibly prolific, Picasso switched seamlessly between painting, drawing and sculpture, producing new ideas every day, creating work in series: surrealist studies; goddesses attended by Grecian fauns; crucifixions; geometric human forms; a village in the rain; and, at the end of the year, the rescue of a drowning woman.

Picasso observed: ‘The work that one does is a way of keeping a diary.’

But this was no ordinary diary. It was a precise catalogue of a man’s passions, fears and fantasies. Sometimes his work was sensuous, erotic. Sometimes it was disturbing, unsettling. His penis never seemed too far away. Indeed in September of that year, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, on seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s work, described it as almost schizophrenic in its variety of styles. He declared that the artist’s 'psychic problems … are in every respect analogous to that of my patients.’

One can’t help concluding that Picasso’s inner turmoil in 1932 fuelled his phenomenal creative output; and indeed that his phenomenal creative output helped calm his inner turmoil.

Of course by no means did 1932 entirely solve Picasso’s problems. A couple of years later, his marriage disintegrated after Walter bore him a child. And he became increasingly troubled by the deteriorating political and economic situation in Europe and in his native Spain.

Nonetheless 1932 did produce a body of work that put Picasso right back in the vanguard of contemporary art – which is where he needed to be. He was moving forwards, not back. And critics subsequently dubbed this his ‘year of wonders.’

Perhaps there’s a lesson for us all here.

If we are faced with our own mid-life crisis - with the threat of increasing comfort and diminishing relevance - we should not go looking for new relationships, buying embarrassing cars, wearing inappropriate fashion. Rather we should keep our nose to the grindstone. We should actively engage with life and culture - by designing, composing and inventing; by writing, making and building; by creating something useful, beautiful, interesting, memorable.

As Picasso observed: 'Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.’

'Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

 Dylan Thomas, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night'

No. 194

‘Today Is Their Creator’: Creative Lessons from Robert Rauschenberg

I recently attended a retrospective of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. (Tate Modern until 2 April). Blimey. I can’t claim to have had an emotional connection with his work. So much cardboard, cartoons and cut-outs; so much repurposed refuse and random bits and bobs. I suspect my tastes are too conservative. But walking from room to room, through a chaptered narrative of the artist’s career, I could achieve some kind of rational connection. I found myself admiring him. And I certainly felt there was a great deal that commercial creatives could learn from this mercurial talent.

1. Be Restless

Rauschenberg was born in 1925 into a fundamentalist Christian household in Port Arthur, Texas. Having served in the Navy during World War II, he took advantage of the GI Bill to travel abroad and he briefly attended art school in Paris. He subsequently studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an institution that encouraged experimentation across a whole host of media. There he learned to do ‘exactly the reverse’ of what he was taught.

Rauschenberg was a restless spirit. The breadth of his output was breathtaking. In the course of his career he explored the possibilities of print making and paper making; photography and collage; pop art and abstraction. He painted in stark black and white monochrome, and in bright vivid colours. He designed costumes and stage sets; worked with found objects and images; experimented in kinetic and interactive art. He collaborated with other artists, with dancers, musicians, scientists and engineers. He choreographed performance pieces and co-created the first Happenings.

Rauschenberg never settled on any one style or form of expression. With his appetite for the untried and untested, he remained resolutely in the present.

‘It is completely irrelevant that I am making them - Today is their creator.’

Rauschenberg was blessed, and perhaps cursed, by what one critic called ‘a perceptual machine.’ He just kept seeing, feeling and thinking different things.

Rauschenberg’s impact on the broader creative culture of his day and on subsequent artistic movements was phenomenal. Most obviously to me the Britartists of the 1990s seemed to be in his debt: way back in the 1950s he created a piece out of his own bedding; he designed a work around a stuffed angora goat; he took a drawing by the established artist Willem de Kooning and erased it…

I guess all of us in the world of commercial creativity should ask ourselves: Are our own ‘perceptual machines’ functioning and well oiled? Can we sustain an appetite for the new as we grow old? Are we, like Rauschenberg, truly, relentlessly, restless spirits?

2. Explore ‘The Gap Between’

‘I want my paintings to look like what’s going on outside my window rather than what’s inside my studio.’

In 1954 Rauschenberg began to integrate objects he’d found on local New York streets within his canvases. Wallpaper, windows, wheels and ‘one way’ signs; Coke bottles, brollies, light bulbs and stuffed birds. They all found their way into his Combines, as they were called. It was an approach that brought together painting and sculpture in a new and compelling way.

‘A picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.’

Monogram

Rauschenberg seemed fascinated in art that more intimately embraced reality; that broke out of the boundaries that had been set for it; that explored the liminal spaces, betwixt and between.

‘Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two.)’

I was struck by this idea of exploring ‘the gap between.’ So often in the commercial sector we impose our own constraints on creative expression, or we accept the constraints of convention. But in an ever-changing world there’s always interest to be had in the borderlands between collapsing categories; on the frontiers of technology; at the cusp of change.

In my own time at BBH some of our best work inhabited the threshold between different channels, practices and technologies: press ads that behaved like posters; posters that behaved like films; films that played backwards; shorter timelengths, longer timelengths; longer copy, no copy at all; reflective still images, special builds, interactive posters, POV camerawork; films that focused on real people, real events, real experiments; Chinese takeaway lids. So often the opportunities occurred at the margins of standard practice, on the edge of the frame.

Are we as alert as we should be to the creative potential in collaboration, combination, co-ordination? Do we remember sometimes to make the medium the message? Are we eager to explore the ‘gap in between?’

Retroactive II

3. Be Ruthless

‘I’m not interested in doing what I know or what I think I can do.’

By all reports Rauschenberg was charming, gregarious and fun. A smile was never far from his lips. But he was ruthless with ideas, both his own and those of others. He knew that you cannot progress if you still have your feet in the past.

When Rauschenberg arrived in New York as a young man in 1949 the dominant creative movement was Abstract Expressionism. But he was determined from the outset to make a clean break.

‘You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you’re going to be a good Abstract Expressionist. And I think I always considered that a waste.’

In 1962, around the same time as Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg began experimenting with silkscreens. He reproduced and artfully arranged found images that were historic and contemporary; political and cultural; mundane and arresting. These silkscreens brought him substantial recognition and, in 1964, they won him a prize at the Venice Biennale. He immediately called home and instructed his assistant to destroy any silkscreens left in the studio. He was alert to the insidious seductions of success.

Are we in the commercial sector as willing to dismiss established practice and break for the new? Are we as decisive as Rauschenberg? Can we claim to be as ruthless with our own success?

4. Let’s Get Lost

As I was about to depart the exhibition, I returned to a piece called Mud Muse. In 1968 Rauschenberg filled a large metal tank with 1000 gallons of bentonite clay and collaborated with technicians to animate this clay with bubbles that responded to the sounds around it. The result was an art exhibit that gurgles, slurps and plops. I watched a party of young school kids consider it. They were at once amazed and amused. And they demonstrated the emotional connection that I had failed to make.

Mud Muse

‘I still have an innocent curiosity about how things go…All I’m trying to do is get everybody off the highway and, if anybody follows my lead, they’ll soon be lost too.’

Perhaps this is Rauschenberg’s best lesson. I’m sure sometimes we over-think our engagement with ideas. Sometimes we should let go and embrace a little innocent curiosity. Sometimes we should just take a turn off life’s highway. Come on, let’s get lost.

‘Let's get lost
Lost in each other's arms
Let's get lost
Let them send out alarms

And though they'll think us rather rude
Let's tell the world we're in that crazy mood.

Let's defrost in a romantic mist
Let's get crossed off everybody's list
To celebrate this night we've found each other
Mm, let's get lost.’

Chet Baker/ Let’s Get Lost: Frank Loesser, Jimmy Mchugh

No. 116

(Don’t) Turn Your Back On Me

I attended an Edvard Munch show at the Tate Modern. Dark, melancholy, awkward stuff. Angst, loneliness, jealousy. A difficult relationship with society in general and women in particular.

It was striking that he painted quite a lot of pictures of women with their backs to the viewer. A powerful expression of exclusion, loneliness, unrequited love.

I spent my youth being turned away from London’s elite nightspots. Perhaps it was the sleeveless plaid shirt, the white towelling socks, the caked on Country Born hair gel. But the bitter sense of disappointment hasn’t left me. I can taste it now. And I learned more about clubbing from Spandau Ballet videos than actual experience…

‘He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’

Handel, Messiah

As a young executive I was invited to apply for an Amex card. I applied and was duly rejected. Naturally I was confused and disappointed and I never spoke to them again. I’m sure consumers often feel a similar sense of exclusion from brands. Refusal and denial are shaming, embarrassing. The fear of rejection is almost as powerful as rejection itself. And then there are the coded gestures, the arcane language, the gender and cultural specific semiotics. The feeling that you don’t belong, that you’re not welcome here. It’s a private conversation, you wouldn’t understand.

I guess that’s why strategists so often recommend that brands are more open, inviting, transparent. We want brands to look us in the eye, to reach out from the canvas with a knowing glance and a welcoming smile. Easier said than done, of course.

Yet the turned back does not have to be all bad.

The Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi often painted a solitary woman with her back to the viewer. She goes about her daily routine in a quiet middle class home, lost in private thought. Hammershoi’s subjects seem more loved than feared. This distinctive reverse view gains its power in part from being so unusual. But also from the sense of intrusion on private time. The sense of seeing, but not being seen. It’s a little awkward, but also intriguing. Am I encountering her truest self, her identity freed of relationships, social constraints and concerns about appearance?

It reminds me of the oft’ cited quote from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Ethics is what you do when no one is looking.’ (I’ve uncovered versions of this quote from many sources. Henry Ford said ‘quality means doing it right when no one’s looking’. And of course, most recently Bob Diamond suggested ‘culture is how we behave when no one’s watching.’)

So how do brands behave when no one is looking? What would the brand encountered in a quiet room be up to? Would we find it dutifully engaged in customer-centric endeavours? Would its jaunty personality be sustained when there’s no one to impress? Would we discover an honest engagement with issues of citizenship and responsibility?

I’m worried that we’d most likely find the brand plotting a marketing and PR plan. I’m worried that in business as in politics too much thought nowadays is given to how things will play, how they will be perceived and reported. I suspect that too often the brand’s instinctive ethical and commercial compass has been replaced by recourse to brand image tracking and favourability ratings.

I appreciate this may be a curious thing for an adman to say. I should perhaps celebrate the triumph of modern marketing, the inevitable victory of perception in the All Seeing Age. Perhaps like a modern celebrity the smile must always be on, the guard must always be up. But it still makes me a little melancholy…

And what of Agencies? How do we behave when no one’s looking?

We are often perceived as conventions of feckless youth and superannuated yuppies. And I confess I was a little uncomfortable when Clients first started plugging in laptops, decanting lattes and working at our offices. I worried that they’d disapprove of our timekeeping, that they’d be offended by our cussing.

But as more Clients have made the Agency their mid-week home, I think the Agency has benefitted. The Embedded Client often sees passion, industry, talent and integrity. They get to see our truest self. And it’s not as bad as they, or we, may have expected.

In the words of the great Brit Soul luminary, David Grant…‘I’ve been watching you watching me. I’ve been liking you, Baby, liking me…’

First published BBH Labs: 10/09/

No. 15

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