when form is neither a division of time nor a mark of eternity...

"the limitless and continuous movement of a living body is fixed into a stationary position. but the movements are not weakened by being formalized. it is a sort of continuous creation which gains in activity and power upon being formalized. the form is neither a division of time nor a mark of eternity. it is the movement of that inseparable entity which is at once momentary and yet eternal."
soichi tominaga in sofu teshigahara

hiroshi teshigahara directed several of my favorite films, most notably woman in the dunes. teshigahara's cinema world is filled with tension, claustrophobia, angst, and a feeling of overwhelming heaviness - if air is to breathe, sometimes it can be so thick as to suffocate.

i don't know much about the director's biography, but when i picked up this catalog of works by sofu teshigahara, from 1958, i wondered if they might be related, and was surprised to find out that the sculptor was in fact the director's father. in 1926, as a young 25 year old artist of ikebana (traditional japanese flower arrangement), sofu founded the sogetsu school, which was celebrated for its mastery of traditional ikebana techniques in conjunction with more experimental and avant garde languages.

by 1930, his expanded language moved beyond flowers and vases, to an ikebana exhibition using scrap metal, and he eventually moved away from ikebana at times to create large scale stand alone sculpture, thereby creating not only arranged forms, but formed forms. after the 30's, his works tended to move back and forth between expanding ikebana language and modern sculpture, and his 1949 exhibition was considered revolutionary in relation to ikebana traditions.

sofu's thorny limbed structures, and his sometime use of fragmented - almost fractal-like and punctured - surfaces, reek of a kind of post-apocalyptic being, suggesting not just a response of someone who experienced WWII in japan, but also an existential consciousness and postwar nihilism that became part of the art of japan in the late 50's, which was shared across mediums with the gutai group, fluxus, the electronic avant garde works of composer's such as takemitsu, and experimental film through directors like sofu's son hiroshi.

while sofu's sculpture look tame by contemporary standards, his movement from framing flowers to carving thorns suggests an aggressive act towards trying to reconcile the violence of recent human behavior. the works feel like organic mutations; and as much as the thorny works are provocations, his softer smaller "blobby" sculpture seem not only quiet, but weak and underfed. kobo abe's work seems a perfect meeting ground for the elder and younger teshigaharas' works - with the younger making films from abe's texts, and the elder making multi-limbed sculpture with auras reflective of the queasy sexual atmosphere of abe's writing.

even though tominaga's introduction talks mostly about sofu's sculpture in formal terms - equating the formal with time, physical movement, psychology, etc., i think the power in sofu's work does not come so much from the way he fragments surfaces, and plays with futurist time and cubist space, as much as his sculpture feeds off a kind of desperate, uncanny feeling, that gives the works' formal beauty a whole lot of tension.

by western standards these 1958 sculpture seem hardly aggressive or revolutionary, but in the late 50's sofu's works were certainly moving into their own territory - not just within the context of ikebana, but in terms of sculpture in general. this is particularly visible with the red piece pictured above, which looks a bit like a later ken price merged with the surface of a disco-ball, and the 'thorny' works which remind me of early anish kapoor sculpture minus the raw pigment.

unlike noguchi, sofu remained in japan, and it was his relationship to a single traditional japanese craft - ikebana, that gave his work a very different feel than noguchi's, which was influenced much more by a response to japanese aesthetics overall than a conversation or conflict with a single traditional craft medium. i think that once noguchi embraced western ideas of modern art and culture, his constant return to japanese tradition and/or craft was a way of maintaining his connection to eastern aesthetics. this wasn't an attempt to disrupt or work against tradition, as much as to include it in his modernist dialogue - and thus expand western modernist language. sofu's relationship was much more about breaking tradition and craft wide open, to expand japanese sculpture - and ikebana - visual language.

in terms of japanese art, it wasn't until the recent era of japanese "superflat" that sofu's language has pretty much left the building; and i wonder if to some degree the superflat phenomenon was so huge, because it was japanese artists' first full-blown embrace of pop art. murakami, nara, and the like, clearly want to move art away from the traditional modernist approach of artists like sofu, who, like newman and rothko, explored traditions - craft tradition as well as certainly modernist tradition - and attempted to pull both forward. it was not the revolution that warhol, oldenburg, and ramos sought... those guys weren't wrestling on cliffs with picasso or valazquez the way pollock was; they were thinking about the sexiness of coke bottles, ray guns, and comic books.

i have no idea if sofu ever read manga, but one could loosely compare his dark, mutant, broken, mended, thorny - and beautiful - forms, with the dark post-apocalyptic creatures and narratives of someone like osamu tezuka (who not only wrote sci-fi comics about a robot boy, but also a comic version of the life of buddha). neither was particularly interested in popular culture's language, as much as they were both attempting to express a 50's eastern human condition - not so much through the visual language of advertising and pop culture as much as revealing the emptiness, and feeding the psychological needs, hidden beneath it. both artists revolutionized their crafts in ways that allowed them to continue to work with, and against, the traditions they were part of. ikebana and manga has never been the same since.

which is itself angles in space...

i recently discovered the work of charles ginnever while looking through the reviews section of a 1973 issue of artforum, which contained a smallish image of a sculpture, untitled from 1972. in the photograph, the angles made of wood, appear as a relatively simple pair of objects, yet the relationship of the lines, planes, angles, and material presence suggests a slow down, a feeling as if the piece was wrought from a series of complex decisions and calculations. i didn't know anything about ginnever before discovering this image, but he has a great website, and fortunately for us untitled is a middle period piece of work, and he has continued to explore similar territory towards some beautiful structures that mine systems, permutations, and the language of minimalist form.

during the 70's, artforum's exhibition reviews tended to be a few short columns written by one writer reflecting upon 3 or four shows that he or she somehow felt were connected. ginnever's work is reviewed here with a show of helen frankenthaller's sculpture and work by another artist i'd never heard of, boris lover-lorski. the reviews were written by joseph masheck, who connects the exhibitions through their medium... sculpture. while he takes both frankenthaller and lover-lorski to task - although not for the same reasons - his description of ginnever's untitled work expands upon what one can see in the small black and white reproduction.

he begins by telling the reader that "untitled" was shown along with 2 other works of ginnever's and all 3 were displayed on hammarskjold plaza - a public space in ny, which meshack importantly points out had been used for demonstrations. he goes on to describe the work's formal qualities in depth:

"a large construction consisting of two visually simple but geometrically complex angles - their legs meet at a corner angle which is itself angles in space - resting on their legs. this pair of angles is put together with massive, unfinished lumber, to which has been applied a cheerful, workmanly care that is noticeable in the crude yet serviceable joints and the practical yet honest patches fixing flaws in the timber. whether by design or by adjustment to the site, where the legs of the angles are chamfered to rest flat on the ground, they also fit exactly into the corners of the square parapet on which the piece is set, claiming the space as well as enhancing it. i like the feeling that the work is built to spec."

many things excite me about the image and masheck's description of it (especially the use of the word "chamfered"), because the image along with masheck's words, suggest ginnever's work is not exactly what it seems to be, and that it is wholly his own. but perhaps i should mention some of my own first impressions based on the image - before i had read meshack's review...

first off i imagined the scale as being somewhat smaller than "a large construction" thinking the ramps might be scaled to skateboard ramps and/or a small tent-like bus stop shelter. i saw them as architectural experiments (which formally of course they are), but more so towards people occupying their inside spaces, particularly in rain or snow. the wood stood out a great deal, as without any knowledge of the meticulous approach to angles and site, the materials felt wonky and temporary. the visibility of knotted wood suggested something other than the crisp minimalism of the time, and perhaps more human than machined. the angles of the wood edges that meet the ground suggests that the two objects are potentially two smaller revealed areas of a single larger work, connected physically beneath the ground as if forming the shape of an "M".

looking at the image, i kept thinking about a person on a bike or a skateboard moving in and out of both spaces in figure 8's. the odd ramp-like forms somehow suggested entrances and exits of corb's art building at harvard... and for some reason as much as corb is a stretch i can't stop thinking about kaprow, which seemed even more of a stretch - yet ginnever's wooden structure evokes for me some strange connection to kaprow's set for 18 happenings in 6 parts, which was also wrought from cheap wood; and like ginnever's sculpture, kaprow's set was all about the potential of how humans might move through it. for some reason every time i see this image i think of kaprow.

after i read meshack's review, i was interested in the fact that "untitled" was presented in a public space - and a space that had been used for demonstrations. of course, even from the photograph i figured "untitled" was purposely sited (or site specific), but now i see this is not only because of its form (which of course does confront the site with intentionality), but because of its potential "use" by humans - which brings the work's intentions closer to someone like serra (with tiled arc, twain, etc.)

taking my own impressions, along with meshack's writing, as well as what i was able to glean from ginnever's website, it makes sense that his public work could appear to be a stage or a set for activity, as ginnever's performance works of the 60's also fell under the rubric of "happenings", giving my kaprow association to "untitled" a little more intuited weight than a random perception.

on his website, you can see that ginnever's work from the mid-1980's forward combines conceptual sculpture (what i would call something that comes from ideas as opposed to formal concerns) and formal sculpture (obviously concerned mainly with form) into a space of pure perception (where seeing literally changes one's thinking, expanding one's mind simply through the experience of looking). these ideas would not be out of place in discussing an artist like turrell, but ginnever does these things through the careful manipulation of form, with repetition and permutations, and nothing else. his works are static in terms of actual motion, but long before the internet hijacked the word, ginnever's sculpture was filled with "virtual" motion. i am also interested in how his relationship to minimalism seems a conversation rather than a conversion, and more than anything his work continues to feel experimental.

in looking at the evolution of ginnever's work, i realized that while judd shed his early colored idiosyncratic forms in all their awkward unresolved beauty, ginnever still carries something of his earliest work with him. his recent large scale works are generally steel and generally "slick" but they still have a beautifully unresolved quality to their "design", and the work has continued to evolve - less with signature tropes, than continuing to expand the view.

enter the year of the golden sun or spore...

here to say happy new year is a 1961 gold ink drawing by harry bertoia, one of my heroes, who has been mentioned here several times. bertoia worked with the eames in cranbrook (and back here in LA), designed furniture, made incredibly underrated abstract monotypes, worked with sound sculpture, self-released a series LP records of his sound sculpture, created large scale sculpture for public spaces, etc.

over the years i have been lucky enough to buy a few cheaply priced monotypes (some of which i will try to post in the near future); but because the monotype was harry's preferred mode of drawing, actual traditional pen or pencil on paper drawings are rarely seen.

the drawing pictured above was created to accompany a letter describing a sculpture that harry was offering for sale to a collector. it shows a sculpture described in the letter as 7 feet tall with a four foot diameter orb on top and the entire structure resting on a marble base. the selling price in 1961, direct from the artist, was $1200... i suppose the price now would be at least ten times that.

in light of how much bertoia's works were inspired by nature, it seems fitting to post this spore or sun (or blue moon perhaps) as it sprouts up from the ground as a symbol of the new year risen...

when nature makes sculpture...

listen to the silent language of sculpture...

"so with our eyes we listen to the silent language of sculpture. listen carefully. to do otherwise - to be indifferent - is the greatest betrayal of one person by another, of one culture by another."

images and text from sculpture/inuit, 1971, canadian eskimo arts council. a super thick beautiful book of inuit sculpture from the early 1900s - 1960s. readily available on ABE for less than ten bucks. highly recommended. my copy, a soiled and worn reference, found in my grandmother's sculpture studio.

i've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand...

i've been thinking a lot about how certain images remain in your unconscious mind and kind of work on you over time unknowingly. the one thing blogging has done for me is that there is an automatic record of the date of discovery for every image i post.

i don't go back and look at older postings or images much, in fact revisiting things in cyberspace is almost never. i don't have the empty minded flipping of pages experiences in this space as i do with the bulging books in my studio filled with cut out findings, held in place with tape. with the books it's not so much a process of seeking as wandering through images that are familiar, but which i'm still struggling to understand why they attracted me in the first place. they contain images i've gathered over a longer period of time and on a less consistent basis. with the blog, i simply roll towards certain things in a just awakened state, where inspirational fodder for a morning gets replaced the next morning...

the blog as a set of images is much like my conscious brain, with each image fading a bit as i add a new one (strange that these digital photos now live as though they were actual photographs fading with age...).

last night i was working on finishing up a piece that i've been working on the past 6 months or so (it will be part of my show that opens saturday). during its making, things hover conversationally as i build: watts towers, tramp art, molecule models, bruno taut's alpine architecture, terragni's ideas towards the danteum, the paintings of kupka. these, and other things i've already forgotten, bubble to the surface out of the process of thinking and making; but as always, there are things that go into a work, that i really i hadn't thought about or consciously noticed as an inspirational presence. last night, i went into my studio to take a picture of all the parts lying on the floor. it actually wasn't until i looked at the window on my digital camera to take a picture, that i saw the space of my studio as a flattened image, and i remembered this snapshot of toy trains that i posted on airforms a year or so ago.

i had posted it in relation to the paintings of alfred jensen, and strangely enough suggested then that the arrangement could be or might be 'a score' (this entire work was birthed from a 12 page classical music score, and could still also be read as one). the interesting thing is not only might that the train photo have unconsciously suggested the structural form which is so clearly present in the piece, as much as i originally connected the train forms in the photo to images in a painting (jensen's). this responding to a sculptural work in a photograph and connecting it to images in a painting, suggests a deeper relationship between the painted and sculpted things i make.

it is rare when a single image or simple object can become a model of the connectedness of all things that one makes, as well suggesting a connectedness among all things one responds to in the world. the train photo and the photo of these objects on the studio floor reveal to me a kind of intuitive focus - being able to work while both knowing and unknowing at the same time - and in some ways the trains show me more because it's difficult to see one's own works in a light of such distance and clarity.

the other interesting thing is that the train photo is taken at an odd angle, where the images of things lying flat on a table, are read as cascading and related to pictorial rather than actual gravity. when i started these piles of wood i imagined they would be on the floor, a series of minor architectures for humble thoughts. eventually, i decided to string them together, suggesting more of their internal musical and narrative structure. to allow them to not only suggest architecture but to also construct architecture with them. the final work will not reflect the train images as they were in life, but as they are in the reading of a photograph.

inspiration is such a strange thing. an image or object tends to work hardest on me when i've seemingly forgotten all about it. conscious replication is of little interest, as it tends to deny a source the ability to reveal deeper truths beyond it. for me, it's about planting seeds and allowing them to grow within you unnoticed, until they bubble to the surface in these relatively surprising ways. i don't try to direct these things so much as i let them continually jab my insides in tiny and seemingly unimportant ways - never really noticing they've had their way with me until i finish a piece and realize it didn't exactly come from where i thought it did.

when benjamin wrote that for book collectors "ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects. not that they come alive in him, but it is he who lives in them.” i think he's both right and wrong, for there are many things we do enter and live inside of, but there are also certain things that enter us - and while they are sometimes slumbering inside us unnoticed, there are times that they do come alive. in many cases we might not remember they are in us, but they are continually working their quiet magic in wonderfully mysterious ways. once in awhile, a moment decides to let you in on this little secret, and you see what you have done, and you realize that you are not so much the guide, as much as the guided.

sculpture is...

sculpture is
my year 4 moving forms, ice cream flower odors, fears
5 praise from a grandmother for a mud pie lion
7 the found book of nude marble women hidden by a
school-teaching methodist mother
diana of the ephesians
egyptian embalmers and the sepulchral barge
the fight between the monster tiamat personification of
chaos darkness disorder evil and marduk god of light
where water is the parent of all things - where universal
darkness reigns - where gods have been forgotten
face illuminated by sun and moon
the babylonian hero wrestling the lion
tossing a bull
standing on a gryphon
the carrying of mud bricks by yoke and by cord
the dialectic of survival
everything i sought, seek
what i will die not finding

david smith, in possibilities, 1947

wishbone house...

a 6 foot tall playground design by artist colin greenly. this precast concrete structure was designed for a competition initiated by art in america and the corcoran gallery in 1967, with 5 visual artists invited to submit models for the final round (art in america and the corcoran chose the winner). the wishbone house won, and was supposedly installed in a washington dc playground (anyone out there ever see this in person?).

"the piece was executed specially for the competition insasmuch as the work i have shown previously would in no way be appropriate for the location contemplated. i considered the problem in this order: playground, sculpture, climb on, climb in, sit on, shade essential, minimum upkeep, maximum shape, minimum cost, reproducibility." colin greenly, 1967

thinking differently in each direction...

"i keep thinking of a very simple phenomenon that struck me when i was a little kid. i used to walk to the beach every day, down to the end of a jetty and back the other way, and it always struck me as being completely significant that the ocean was on the left when i was going down, and when i turned around, it was on the right, and i had a totally different experience just from turning around and walking the other way. i always thought this was very curious. i always thought there were two different places. everybody knows that you don't have the same experience in turnabout - your relation to the sun has completely changed, left/right brain coordinates are off - everything is different. in fact, you probably have a side you favor as you walk. you probably think differently in each direction. your anticipation and memory change. to me, that's a sculptural concept. if a sculpture allows for that experience, it implies self-awareness. the content of the work is that the viewer looks at himself in relation to what he's looking at..."

richard serra, interviewed in the pratt journal of architecture, 1985.
(images from todd's new astronomy)

three views...

bordsobjekt (table piece) by bjorn norgaard, 1967. a combination simple / complex grouping of basically three element arrangements - the thing, a white shadow of the thing messy, a white shadow of the thing geometric and crisp. if you look at it from the front you see all three,while from each of the two sides you only see one.

part fluxus table scraps, part architectural model, part constant's new babylon, and part skateboard ramps for the mind; norgaard's seminal work is seemingly junk thrown together until you start to deal with it as sculpture - objects defined by the space they inhabit and how one moves around them within that space - clearly there is some expanding complexity lurking beneath the apparent simplicity and misleading sense of arbitrariness.

each of the trash forms are vessels, and each looks like it might have held the same amount of plaster that ended up as the forms on the right and left of the objects... if these empty vessels once contained the foodstuffs of nourishment, then what is one to make of the ramps and lumps beside them? these white forms have no pockets, nor room in their interiors for existing matter to be stored or held. do they contain ideas? or a different kind of nourishment? or can they relieve a different kind of hunger...?