考斯：孤独时代的陪伴

Installation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossArtists have been alerting us to beauty before sinking us into despair for centuries. Think ofAndy Warhol’s colour-drenched, seemingly celebratory 1967Marilyn Monroeseries — look what our image of the woman did to her. Street art, too, changes tack halfway through the viewing process. In its most basic form, public tagging at first appears audacious, but graffiti artists exist at the peripheries of society: by writing their name on a wall, they make themselves, and their very exclusion, visible.Back in the ’90s, this is how New York artistKaws(real name Brian Donnelly) first made his mark — by defacing adverts on the city streets; adding cartoonish faces to the perfume models of bus-stop ads, wrapping them in tentacles. Since then, he has collaborated with Nike, Marc Jacobs and Kanye West. More recently he worked with Dior on its 2019 spring/ summer collection and with Uniqlo on its summer 2019 line. This year, one of his paintings sold for around US$14.8 million at Sotheby’s.He hasn’t been mainstream in Australia, though, until now. In September, a major show of his work comes to the National Gallery of Victoria, entitledKaws: Companionship in the Age of Loneliness.Installation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossThe new show features more than 100 works by Kaws, encompassing painting, sculpture, work on paper and limited-edition toys, and that’s not including ephemera like photographs and sketchbooks. “Brian has worked as an illustrator, in animation, in fashion, in street art and the gallery space,” says Simon Maidment, the show’s curator. “There’s an equivalence for him across all of these disciplines; he has a very non-hierarchical view of how to engage in the world creatively.”His work, particularly his cartoonish motifs, lures its audiences in with warm, fuzzy, nostalgic tropes and characters that feel safe — theSmurfs,The Simpsons,SpongeBob SquarePants,Sesame Street,Michelin Man— and inserts elements of tragedy like crossed-out eyes and solemn cuddles. Most of all there is a loneliness expressed in his work. “He brings together this childlike quality with iconography around death and mortality,” explains Maidment. “The tension and slipperiness between these things is at the heart of his artistic practice.”Installation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossKaws most acutely expresses this with a character known as Companion. A kind of mutated version of Mickey Mouse, he is often depicted head in hands, lost in melancholy. The NGV has commissioned a new seven-metre-high sculpture of Companion for its permanent collection. EntitledGone, he is seen holding a character in the pose known as ‘pietà’. Like Michelangelo’s sculpture of the same name, the clutched body is dead; Companion is alone.Installation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom Ross“Kaws’ sculptures, at times on a monumental scale, are very much the embodiment of contemporary anxieties, fears and grief,” says Maidment. “Heavy emotions, but embodied in these almost cute, cartoonlike figures.” By securing our attention via nostalgia, Kaws highlights our collective loneliness in the social media age. Like the dead character inGone, our innocence and our relationships have been taken from us; the tragedy being that we did this to ourselves.Kaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessopens Friday September 20 at the National Gallery of Victoria.Installation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom RossInstallation view ofKaws’ Gone, 2019 on display forKaws: Companionship in the Age of Lonelinessat NGV International, Melbourne 20 September 19 – 13 April 2020. Photo: Tom Ross