Yoshitomo Nara, Fight (detail), 2013. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Refreshed as we are with Mental Health Awareness Month giving way to Pride Month, we’re still a bit under the weather. The diagnosis: fever. The only cure: more Editions.
As such, following our recent musings on extinction, we thought it would be a great idea to lighten up the mood just a tad. Taking a closer look at the works on offer in our upcoming Evening & Day Editions auction in London, now feels like the time to dig into a few artists’ individual struggles and how they manifest in their alter egos. One might think this isn’t exactly light, but if extinction implies death, an alter ego implies at least twice as much life. Or to quote our beloved enabler Mr. Hennessy Youngman out of context, “that’s like double art.”
Francis Bacon: Inside out
Francis Bacon, Triptych (after, Triptych, 1983), 1983. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Affection, devotion, obsession, and infatuation are synonyms with different implications, but they always seem to be about ourselves or someone else, or perhaps the parts of ourselves we see in someone else. For Francis Bacon, we might still be untangling these threads, but when it comes to his work, we know that his ex-lover George Dyer served as his alter ego. Triptych (after, Triptych, 1983) is a psychological depiction of Dyer that shows just how much our lovers can become a stand-in for ourselves as well as a companion. Against the anguish of orange, the fleshy apparitions have a fluidity that leaks between planes of existence, with the black void in the central panel serving as an escape route — either to death or to a higher plane of understanding that we find only when we open our eyes wide enough. Bacon executed this work shortly after Dyer’s suicide, and we can sense how much he must have felt he had lost a part of himself that he might not have truly ever had.
Francis Bacon, Miroir de la tauromachie (Mirror of the Bullfight), 1990. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Orange continues to haunt us in Bacon’s Miroir de la tauromachie (Mirror of the Bullfight), as the artist presents a map of his compulsive fascination with bullfighting as a metaphor for our confrontations with death. Across three of the four lithographs, man and beast duke it out in an interior appointed with mirror-like structures that represent a duality of death: that it stares back at us as we face it. Again, the distorted fluidity of the figures implies that, between matador and bull, there’s a bit of each in both.
Francis Bacon, Miroir de la tauromachie (Mirror of the Bullfight), 1990. Evening & Day Editions, London.
In the final lithograph, Bacon presents a distorted portrait of his alter ego against the black void — the other side of the mirror. Perhaps we can gain a greater understanding through these works of our collective struggle against our inner nature. Whatever the case, these ideas seemed to do a number on our dear Francis, who once remarked that “bullfighting is like boxing — a marvelous aperitif to sex.” As much as this might be a dating app red flag, it always seems to come back to sex, death, and fighting, doesn’t it? Yoshitomo Nara would like a word about the latter.
Yoshitomo Nara: Keep on menacing in the free world
Yoshitomo Nara, Fight, 2013. Evening & Day Editions, London.
Nara’s iconic girl embodies a sentiment that seems to be widely felt these days. We’ve all felt powerless and angry at times, so we naturally identify with her. But as Nara’s alter ego, she also suggests the Japanese concept of Tatemae — the outward behavior we must display to conform to what’s expected of us, even when it’s different from how we feel. When filled with rage, we must present a polite and gentle disposition; under stress, we must appear cool and collected; and we must smile through any despair.
So perhaps the Nara girl shows us the inversion of the masking, of it crashing out into our exterior world. Beyond reminding us that we must look after the future for the young, she outwardly expresses the rage and frustration of contemporary life, but from within a small, gentle constitution. It’s a telling alter ego for Nara, who draws on the profound loneliness of his rural childhood to explore the ideas of alienation and defiance that resonate so strongly today in cultures around the world.
One ego couldn’t fit all that Picasso
Pablo Picasso, Minotaure aveugle guidé par Marie-Thérèse au pigeon dans une nuit étoilée (Blind Minotaur Guided Through a Starry Night by Marie-Thérèse with a Dove), 1934. Evening & Day Editions, London.
One of Picasso’s most utilized visual stand-ins, the Minotaur, gives us a lot to unpack in the context of our beloved Pablo. At once man and bull, the figure embodies Picasso’s complex and contradictory artistic nature, and in the original myth, the Minotaur was a singular being, just as Picasso is a singular artist. The Minotaur’s unbridled animalistic instincts offer further clues to the artist (surprise — sex, death, and fighting are back), but there’s a bit more poignancy here. Picasso depicts himself as a blind Minotaur in this work — powerful and masculine, yes, but also vulnerable and suffering. The figure is being guided by his lover Marie-Thérèse, who is holding a symbol of peace. We’re back to that complex and contradictory nature, where we find the artist channeling his desires toward productive forces. His being caught between the purely imminent world of art and the relational world of interpersonal relationships created a tension that was never fully resolved by either end. As viewers, it’s the ability to live in that tension that’s so captivating.
In Greyson Perry, Art diagnoses you
Grayson Perry, Animal Spirit (Large), 2016. Evening & Day Editions, London.
We’re no longer the armchair psychoanalysts around here; rather, Greyson Perry’s hybrid bull/bear figure is analyzing us. Where Picasso’s Minotaur is merged with his own identity, Perry’s figure looks outward, merging into its being all that it sees in how masculinity negotiates with itself at scale. The figure stands in a desolate and apocalyptic environment, with signals of failed industry and a collapsed community. This work was inspired by economist John Maynard Keynes’ use of the phrase “animal spirits” to describe a psychological drive within economic systems. To Perry, the experience of the 2008 financial crisis suggested that “the market was just as prone to emotional weather as any human system.” The artist’s figure, at once bearish and bullish, stares us down, ready to charge, dispelling the myth of male rationality with a fervor that would even make a Nara girl smile.
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