Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect: Wabi-sabi and the art of the wrong
Ailsa Weaver
I am at a fetish party in a Tokyo nightclub in 2011.
Inside the foyer, brightly lit, is a strange scene in which the participating punters have become performers, more entertaining than any of those advertised on the posters.
Behold: a patient queue of Harajuku Lolitas, rubber enthusiasts, military fetishists, demonic anime tropes; a photographer on a step-ladder; a vacuum bed made of transparent latex, noteworthy for its lack of breathing apparatus for safety. There is a sense of anticipation, enthusiasm and unease.
Having waited half an hour, perhaps longer, for her turn, a girl climbs into the contraption and strikes her signature kawaii street-snap pose. The air is sucked out from around her, her form encased like shrink-wrapped supermarket meat.
She holds the pose, and her breath (she has no choice) for maybe twenty seconds. In that moment, she is as hyper-real as the plastic food in the windows of the nearby restaurants. She is a doll in a packet - although inescapably, the folds of her gingham petticoat and the strands of her nylon wig are not perfectly in place, as they would be in a box from Mattel.
A flash goes off and the bizarrely beautiful frozen moment has been documented. Therefore, it ceases to exist. The suction is released and, free, she climbs out and walks away.
I like it, but I don’t quite get why.
•••
Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect: a widely accepted (if unreliably creditable) translation into English of the essentially untranslatable Japanese philosophical and aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi.
I first came across wabi-sabi in context of the practice of contemporary multi-disciplinary Japanese Australian designer Akira Isogawa. His thoughtful work, which consistently transcends commercial boundaries, is informed by an uncanny alliance between the aforementioned kawaii, popularly translated as ‘cute’ (although Isogawa prefers ‘adorable’) and wabi-sabi, defined by US academic and Leonard Koren as: “… a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.”
Wabi-sabi has its origins in Zen Buddhism, a subject with which I am only rudimentarily familiar. I understand that variously, wabi-sabi can be found in deeply complex Japanese traditions often dismissed as cliché in the West: the tea ceremony; haiku; solitary meditative contemplation. Deeper investigation reveals wabi-sabi’s praise of patina; an appreciation of the degraded, the rustic and authentic; the intimate and nuanced.
So on that basic level of understanding, wabi-sabi is an ingredient in lots of stuff that I am naturally drawn to.
Stuff that’s a little bit wrong.
High on my Lotto-win wish list would be work by the late New Zealand born, Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne. In her review of a Gascoigne retrospective ten years after the artist’s death, critic Juliette Peters states:
“ … Gascoigne's effective reconfiguration of the ordinary was the widespread interest in folkloric objects, the vernacular products and styles of settler Australia, informed by (a) pop art revisiting of the everyday object. … The seeking of beauty in the palimpsest, the worn, the weathered …”.
By all accounts, Gascoigne was a curious person and her path to art making a circuitous one. Based for a time in the traditional Japanese floral discipline of ikebana, before setting up camp on her signature ground of assemblages of roadside detritus, her expressive journey seems to have been an almost unconscious pilgrimage of creative and emotional hermitude.
The shadow of wabi-sabi looms long over this legend: it is the wit of the difficult. Her work is beautiful to me because it is at once effortless and not easy.
•••
I am at a popular exhibition in a Sydney art museum in 2014.
Inside a large room, brightly lit, is a strange scene in which amateur art critics have become more of a spectacle than the works they discuss. They know what they don’t like. They like what they know.
Out of the often heavy-handed, psychedelic mess, one painting comes sharply into focus. It is not small, probably a metre and a half square, but it is, indeed, intrinsically modest.
The painting is Domestic interior, by Queensland born, Sydney based artist Noel McKenna, a former Sulman Prize winner.
The perspective is flat and childlike - yet no child could have rendered it. A lone little whippet sits before a brick fireplace - yet too far away from it, surely, to be warmed. The cool room of grey and green is austerely furnished with objects that imply a kind of wistful aspiration of the ordinary - yet it hums with personality. There is too much space; the acrylic technique expertly inexpert; weirdly pronounced detail in places and broad plains of nothing in others.
It is - deep breath - very wabi-sabi. Humble, beautiful and a bit wrong.
I like it. And now I get why.
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Noel McKenna, Domestic Interior, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 150.5 x 150.5 cm/ Image courtesy of the artist and The Art Gallery of NSW
