Discovering ... Niki de Saint Phalle
in which my quest must now include a journey to the Tarot Garden in Tuscany
“Is perceiving only personal?
Does that mean my version is only mine?
Where does that put reality?
Does it exist?
Do I exist?
Is life a dream?
My dream that I can choose to make into a nightmare or a song?”
— Niki de Saint Phalle
“Whatever I decided to do, I wanted it to be difficult, exciting, grand.” The artist Niki de Saint Phalle wrote that in “Dear Mother,” her letter reproduced in What is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle.
The letter continues:
“I WASN’T GOING TO BE LIKE YOU, MOTHER. You accepted what had been handed down to you by your parents. Your religion, masculine and feminine roles—your ideas about society and security. I would spend my life questioning. I would fall in love with the question mark.”
I love that line, that idea: “I would fall in love with the question mark.” I also love the way Niki randomly slips into ALL CAPS in her writings; I can practically hear her SHOUTING as I read:
“I would spend my life proving I had the right to exist. I would one day make [Mother] proud of me by becoming famous and rich. It was my capacity to ACHIEVE that was important to me.
Yes, I would prove MOTHER WRONG. I would also prove MOTHER RIGHT.”
I have 14 renewals remaining of this book, and I am seriously considering using all 14 of them, at least until my obsession with Niki wanes or I break down and buy my own copy. (Considering I am moving in less than a month, I should fight this urge, as the task of boxing and moving and unboxing my library looms large.)
But let’s back up the train a bit: Who the hell was Niki de Saint Phalle, and why had I never heard of her, or her masterpiece, the Tarot Garden, “a vast sculpture park in Tuscany filled with twenty-two free-form, monumental women, animals, and figures of fantasy, some the size of houses and made habitable with kitchens and plumbing” until now?
From Feminist Rage to Celebration: My Discovery
Honestly, I don’t remember what the hell I was doing one evening earlier this year when I stumbled across “Tirs,” but it doesn’t matter. One minute I was reading “The Pioneering Feminism of Niki de Saint Phalle” in The New Yorker, and the next I was watching this woman with serious Jane Fonda in Klute vibes shooting and screaming about the end of the world, BANG!
“Tirs,” aka “shootings” or “shots” is quite literally that: Target pictures that Saint Phalle first started as bullseye targets displayed within her painted collage. This led to larger scale, white-painted assemblages of household items, knives, baby doll arms and so forth covered in plaster, with paint bags and cans of spray paint suspended over them that she would shoot at with a pistol or rifle, later as publicly staged shootings. And Jane Fonda attended one of these events, in Malibu, in 1962, because of course!
What in the actual fuck:
“We took turns shooting. It was an amazing feeling shooting at a painting and watching it transform itself into a new being. It was not only EXCITING and SEXY, but TRAGIC—as though one were witnessing birth and death at the same moment.
…
Why did I give up the shooting after only two years? I felt like a drug addict. After a shoot-out, I felt completely stoned. I became hooked on this macabre yet joyous ritual. It got to the point where I lost control. My heart was pounding during the shoot-out. I started trembling before and during the performance. I was in an ecstatic state.
…
It was also hard to give up all the attention in newspapers and newsreels I was getting from the shooting. Here I was, an attractive girl (if I had been ugly, they would have said I had a complex and not paid any attention), screaming against men in my interviews, and shooting with a gun. This was before the women’s liberation movement and was very scandalous.”
Anyway, after she had worn herself out with the shooting stunts, Niki continued making her art on a grand scale, only with a “more interior, feminine world” in mind. She began making her “nanas,” enormous sculptures of voluptuous women painted in wild, bright colors. Enormous is not an exaggeration: the HON, “the BIGGEST NANA I ever made,” she writes to Clarice Rivers, the inspiration for the original, was 90 feet long, 18 feet high, and 27 feet wide! She would take up the entire hall of a museum:
“We knew we were entering the sacred land of myth. We were about to build a goddess. A great PAGAN goddess.
As you, Clarice, were the original Nana, consider yourself the model for the GREAT GODDESS.”
“Tell me, am I a reincarnation from some ancient time?”
When Niki de Saint Phalle decided to create a magnificent sculpture garden in Tuscany — inspired by Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona — she not only believed it to be her life’s work, she believed it was her destiny:
“It is not an accident that I am making this garden in Italy. There is a reason. My hand is guided. I follow a path that has been chosen for me … I would like to give myself a piece of advice. Take it easy. Relax a bit more. Take those walks you want to take every day with your dogs. Read a bit more. Relax! I can’t do that. WORK WORK WORK. It’s my obsession and my destiny.”
In yet another New Yorker article I read as I spiraled into my Niki de Saint Phalle obsession, her Tarot Garden is described as “dazzling or deranged, transcendent or tawdry, depending on whom you ask”:
“Amid peaceful olive groves and ochre fields grazed by horses and sheep sits a house-size sculpture of a sphinx, with mirrored blue hair and a bright-red crown, a flower blooming on one of her breasts and a lavender heart on the nipple of the other. The interior is covered in shards of mirror, as if a colossal disco ball had been turned inside out. (During the two decades that Saint Phalle worked on the garden, her bedroom was inside one breast, her kitchen in the other.) A sprawling, fantastical castle, with a rainbow mosaic tower, sits near a blue head some fifty feet high, sprouting a second, mirrored head crowned by a huge hand. Downhill, the Devil stands amid some shrubs, a rainbow-winged hermaphrodite with a sweet face, womanly hips, and three gold penises. It is as if a psychedelic bomb had exploded in the most picturesque part of Tuscany.”
Sign. Me. Up. I have promised myself I will go visit this in person. I hope it is dazzling and deranged, transcendent and tawdry.
Although the Tarot Garden is still newly on my to-do list, I did visit the Stravinsky Fountain while I was in Paris most recently — featuring 16 sculptures inspired by compositions of Igor Stravinsky, made by Niki de Saint Phalle and her second husband Jean Tinguely. The black mechanical ones are Tinguely’s; the wild, brightly colored ones, of course, are Saint Phalle’s.
As I sat on the side of the fountain watching La Sirène spin, water spraying out of her massive, bright breasts, I felt joyous, powerful, free.
It was better than I had imagined.
“Art, to most people, is something terribly serious, and people refuse to realize that joy is something terribly serious, too.” — Niki de Saint Phalle
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wowowow I've never heard of her and I loved reading about this!💕