Inka Essenhigh
Victoria Milo Gallery
An Indian Encounter
National Gallery
AS A DISGRUNTLED member of A Chorus Line remarked, on being told as a child that she had “a very different kind of charm”, “Different is fine, but different’s not pretty. Pretty is what it’s about. I never knew anyone who was different who couldn’t figure that out.”
That may well still be the case for those with showbusiness aspirations, but for some years now the reverse has been true for the visual arts. What has been required above all is difference, and no judgment can be conceived of more damning than to call a painting “pretty”. But maybe things are on the turn now: at least two new shows in London seem to suggest it. Both of them in places of impeccable avant-garde credentials, too.
Encountering the work of Takashi Murakami at the Serpentine, your first reaction is that you have surely wandered into the wrong gallery. It is as though, expecting Tracey Emin, you find yourself consorting with the Teletubbies. But if Murakami is patronised by the Serpentine, there must surely be some vital subtext to these cheery images of flowers with smiling faces and cute, Disneyish mushrooms? Some bitter irony not immediately evident? Well, um, yes, sort of. What makes Murakami truly contemporary is that one has to read the text of a detailed interview with him to get much inkling of what he thinks his paintings really mean. And while our eyes tell us that his world is almost unadulterated Enid Blyton, his words tell a very different story.
In the catalogue he explains that he began in Japan working within the nihon-ga tradition, that very conservative turning-away from European and American Modernism in favour of anodyne subject-matter and an intense concentration on the technical side of painting. For 11 years he trained and worked in this way, knowing virtually nothing of what was happening in the world outside. Then he discovered that nihon-ga could be regarded as politically suspect, and decided to travel to America, where, though this was the early Nineties, he found himself bowled over by Pop Art, and learnt a few new tricks.
He was still uncertain as to what exactly he wanted to say, but help came in the form of a sort of nonsense tradition, at much the same time that Jeff Koons became fascinated by kitsch. Murakami started to invent nonsense characters, like Mr Dob, a sort of cross between Mickey Mouse and Mr Blobby, and Kaikai Kiki, an inanely beaming little girl, whose very point was that they did not mean anything specific, and build paintings round them.
Hence, apparently, the grinning flower faces and the anthropomorphic mushrooms. Prominent too is the influence of Japanese anime and manga films. Their virtuoso animation, and their evocation of a universe in which everything is in a state of flux, have an important bearing on Murakami’s dazzlingly coloured, very slippery images, in which everything is disturbingly halfway to being something else.
In relation to his mushrooms he quotes the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. In other images, not much different in their superficial impression, he cites, of all things, some of Francis Bacon’s most unsparing images, such as his studies of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer. But without the titles, who could guess? Inka Essenhigh remarks of the paintings (also large and acrylic) in her first London show at Victoria Miro: “I see them as being about America: fake, fun, pop, violent, but also quite attractive.”
Not exactly pretty, then. But the colours are straight out of early Disney, and the components — characters, one is tempted to call them, though they are at least semi-abstract — clearly belong to the same fairytale world as Murakami’s inventions. In Essenhigh’s work, though, the fluidity of form is even more striking. Like the characters in some manga film, they are constantly in the process of transforming themselves from one shape to another.
Way, way back in these images’ geneaology, Beardsley must figure — especially the Beardsley of Bon Mots. Even closer, perhaps, are the illustrations of Beardsley’s follower Alan Odle. Undeniably there is something creepy as well as innocently decorative in Essenhigh’s art, which makes it finally seem much more complex and substantial than Murakami’s. And more mysterious. There are still benefits to be gained from an artist keeping his (or her) mouth shut.
Fairly or not, Queen Victoria is generally associated in the arts with the pretty and saccharin. Obviously it seems unlikely that she would ever commission for herself disturbing pictures of the destitute or anything reflecting on the seamy side of her empire. But in this context the pictures by the Austrian artist Rudolf Swoboda in the National Gallery’s show An Indian Encounter do tell a slightly different story.
Not that there is anything in the least squalid about any of them. But they are far different from the chocolate-box representations of India and the Indians that one might expect. It seems that Queen Victoria was particularly struck by the liveliness and character of the 34 “native artisans” brought in by the organisers of the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition to ply their trades before the London public.
Presumably no one told her that they were all from the Central Jail in Agra, and had received their training as part of a prison reform programme.
Anyway, whether she knew or not, she commissioned Swoboda to paint five of them, and was much pleased with the result. So much so that she then sent Swoboda to India at her own expense to sketch a lot more, selected from various ethnic and religious groups as well as uniformed soldiers, a juggler and a snake charmer. Swoboda has a keen eye for quirks of character as well as striking details of native garb, and even paints children without sentimentality.
The Queen’s interest in Indian subjects continued after Swoboda returned to England, and he was subsequently commissioned to paint portraits of her Indian servants, among them Ram Singh, the architect of the Durbar Room at Osborne House, where these pictures normally hang. The opportunity to see them in London, for the first time, is as unexpected as it is charming.
- Takashi Murakami, Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2 (020-7402 6075), to Jan 26; Inka Essenhigh, Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Road, N1 (020-7336 8109), to Dec 7; An Indian Encounter, National Gallery, WC2 (020-7747 2885), to Jan 19
