Kaari Upson’s Relational Alchemy

‘Well, if I try to make something beautiful, it never turns out that way,’ said Kaari Upson. And who doesn't identify with that sentiment: the attempt, the failure, the try again, the fail again, the fail better? I must clarify that the American artist’s oeuvre is most certainly not not beautiful – and staggering, weird, striking, transportive, consoling. Perhaps the beautiful is more so when not an aim but a byproduct, a surprise, possibly (like all art) a matter of taste: one woman’s trash is, as they say, another woman’s treasure.

Couches that are and are not themselves, upturned, teetering on one side, sloping and slumping in dusky neon hues, a little bit haunted, a little bit alive. Soiled dayglo silicone mattresses hung on the wall like sloughed skin, like old and new, like urban relics, like visage-less portraits. (‘If you presented anything at CalArts with four sides and a face,’ Upson said of her education, ‘it was a painting.’) Hanging forests of slender synthetic limbs, cast from legs and trees, knots and knobbly knees, snaking termite trail dermis. Dollhouses, dredged from the past, made large, creepy and uninhabited, possessed and fulsome like all dollhouses are, regardless of scale. Forms that sidestep forms that are never stable, like domestic spaces, childhood, abject states, women.

Perhaps the beautiful is more so when not an aim but a byproduct.

When were you last not not yourself? I bet you know, though you may not (not) wish to say. Sigmund Freud postulated that trauma can only be fully understood when it resurfaces in another, for lack of a better word, incident. Though I had been not not myself for some while, it was during a global plague that left no person untouched, a time filled with inversions and absences, that I became fixated upon Upson’s vast and varied practice, which so chimed with a heightened sense of uncanny and pervasive displacement. How objects in the world, with its new appearance of having been apocalyptically abandoned, seemed possessed of their own wills, effortlessly pushing time and space around like it was nothing, like it had always been this way, we just hadn’t noticed.

During those ennui-filled days, I began work on an epic (yet unwritten) essay about mattresses in contemporary art, provisionally titled ‘The Impossible Object’, after Marcel Duchamp’s optically bemusing Apolinère Enameled (1916–17) (also known as ‘Impossible Bed’) and Upson’s description of her work as dealing with ‘the inability to conceptually work through these things’. What are ‘these things’? Anything can be the question of art, particularly when no answer is sought and irresolution reigns supreme. The mattress essay, the impossible object, the thing that could not be worked through grew until it was to take in more than I could possibly contain. I thought often of Anne Carson’s 2005 essay, ‘Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’, which opens with the description of her earliest memory, a dream of waking in the middle of the night and coming downstairs to find the living room somehow made strange: ‘It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.’ As a child, Carson explained the dream to herself by saying that she had ‘caught the living room sleeping’, or ‘I had entered it from the sleep side.’

I saw Upson’s obsessive process – her interest in the cracks in narrative, in the discarded and dissolute – as a model for writing.

Alongside contemporary art references, I hoarded a clutch of touchstones that slid from sleep and dreams to capitalism and death, which seemed an obvious and inevitable trajectory. The ‘Queen Mab’ chapter in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Vladimir Nabokov’s 1964 dream diary index cards, Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book (1976), Alphonse Bertillon’s early 20th century crime-scene photographs, the famous Hollywood film noir The Big Sleep (1946), a series of retro mattress ads and two of the most beautiful sculptures in Rome’s Borghese Gallery – Antonio Canova’s Venus Victrix (1805–08) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 1620 copy of The Sleeping Hermaphroditus (c.100–500 CE). I wanted to make the mattress, in writing, into a kind of ‘impossible object’, which the essay itself would also be. It would be both found and made, a body that held bodies, a portal into some other place, like the mattress that ascends in the ‘Bed’ act of Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1975), rising and rising and rising to – anywhere but here.

In her studio, Upson described the possibility of casting two trash cans for work in progress in terms of a kind of relational alchemy: ‘There can be two of them incorporated, leaning against themselves. Or I can make one, make it hard, and make the other one off of it, which would then push a new negative space into it.’ Sculpture, with its many positives and negatives, casting insides and outsides, is the most empty and full, itself and not itself art form. Cast sculptures are doubles, incipient doppelgängers of their original selves. In this, sculpture is not unlike writing, which relies on symbols, words, sentences, life to make something more or less like it. I wanted to push new negative spaces into things, too, and I saw Upson’s obsessive process – her interest in the cracks in narrative, in the discarded and dissolute, in the continuousness of making – as a model for writing. ‘It was always my intention to take facts and kind of contaminate the shit out of them,’ she said of her fondness for gaps, distances, voids and hollows. ‘And I sometimes think that no project is ever really over; it kind of keeps running at a lower vibration while something else takes over, and it all interconnects only later, maybe years later.’

For the duration of her career, Upson made drawings, videos, installations and sculptures that were united by an interest in the porous boundary between inside/outside. ‘Body and stain are always in my work,’ she explained, noting that when substances stay inside the corpus, they are palatable, vital, but oozing, dripping out. Visible to all and sundry, they become unseemly, abhorrent. We might say the same of the division between body and mind, the mess of interior states transgressing to the exterior, which are also central to the artist’s body of work. For several years, she focused on a sprawling work, The Larry Project (2005–12), in which she delved into the real and imagined life of a wealthy pseudo-playboy neighbour of her parents in San Bernardino through personal belongings found in his abandoned home. At various points, she felt herself close to melding with or even replacing Larry (‘I am more he than he is,’ she wrote on one untitled drawing from 2007), and spoke of it as a detective hunt, or even an exorcism – the making of the work was an experience, the un-worked-through thing happening in real time to her body, to her alone.

The making of the work was an experience happening in real time to her body, to her alone.

Upson said of her silicone mattresses, such as Rubells (2014), that they were all-consuming: it was impossible to work on anything else at the same time, took multiple hands at once (the moulds often weighed around 45 kilos) and the results were entirely unpredictable. The same was true of her ultimate project, a series of modestly sized paintings that she completed shortly before her death from metastatic cancer in 2021 aged 51. The works in ‘Portrait (Vain German)’ (2020–21) are based on miniature portraits made with thick impasto paint and mixed media, then scaled up in 3D to make moulds and casts onto which were painted layers of urethane, resin and pigments. They share the muddy psychedelic hues of her previous work and its commitment to a deranged figuration more about feeling than representation. ‘The skin of the real’, as Upson referred to her process, is as real as the real, if not more so.

‘I want to make work that confuses people,’ Upson offered, which really means, in her typically oblique way, to pull them in, to believe they’re capable, like her powerfully mute objects, of anything: ‘I expect a lot from my viewer; they should just take a little time.’ She professed a disinterest in mastery and repetition, because the most important part of art was the not knowing that happened in the studio, before a work was complete – although that was an idea she also rejected: ‘I’m not really interested in saying when something is finished.’ I like to think that’s because life never is. Coming at things from the sleep side, the undeciphered ‘skin of the real’, seems to me as good as it gets. It seems, actually, like living the dream. I think this is the beginning, or maybe the end, of the mattress essay.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 with the headline ‘Skin of the Real’

‘Kaari Upson’ will be on view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk until 26 October

^{Main image: Kaari Upson, My Mom Drinks Pepsi II (detail), 2015, aluminium, stainless steel and powder-coated steel, 99 × 129 × 162 cm. Courtesy: © Esmé Trust/Kaari Upson Trust and Sprüth Magers; photograph: Timo Ohler}