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The Ghost of Frida Kahlo

© Christine Hamm

A photograph of Yasumasa Morimura as Mona Lisa

Yasumasa Morimura at the Luhring Augustine Gallery

The gallery is filled with super-sized, color saturated photos that look like paintings. At the back, behind a curtain, a film is projected against the wall. In the film, the artist M sits on a bench and summons the spirit of Frida Kahlo, who slowly and faintly manifests herself next to him. Or rather, Yasumasa Morimura dressed and made up as Frida Kahlo shows up. Yasumasa Morimura and Frida Kahlo have a dialogue, as least partially in Spanish and then she fades again. Yasumasa Morimura is dressed in coat and tails and plays a synthezier, as if summoning her with his music.

The film is, I believe, a paradigm of what Yasumasa Morimura does with the photos in rest of gallery. In each photo, he poses as Frida does in one of her famous self-portraits. Instead of paint strokes composing the image of a face, he uses heavy make-up to evoke her features. He also poses against a painted backdrop; the same background she uses in her paintings and uses plastic flowers and animals instead of the “real” flowers and animals that Frida appears to be representing in her paintings. As you can start to see, this is where it gets tricky. What do fake flowers mean in the photographic copy of a real painting? What does it mean when a male Japanese photographer imitates a female Mexican painter? I have a few ideas of what might be Yasumasa Morimura’s intention.

Frida Kahlo is famous for being obsessed with herself; with presenting herself in a certain light, with creating a self with paint -- in a give and take between art and life; her work was both discovery and creation of her self. When Yasumasa Morimura poses as her, he is questioning the ability of the artist to create an authentic self, just as he is questioning the “reality” of photography. After all, he stages photos to look like paintings. As much as this word is over-used, Yasumasa Morimura “deconstructs” the notion of western art history. He has, throughout his career, posed as each figure in dozens and dozens of famous old masters. Usually he takes the place of a woman. By doing so, he critiques a tradition that both controls and excludes women in its method of painting and seeing, and excludes the Asian as being the unknown, unimportant, “other.” He represents that which was not recognized in art history.

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