Trocadero.com where I found the examples of the Japanese pottery posted in April ( Yakinomo: Fired Thing) is a fascinating site. It is as if you discovered a dusty little antique shop on a Tokyo side street; upon entering , you’re suddenly in a vast bazaar with many little stalls selling objects from the near-tacky to the sublime, including some that can only be described as museum-quality fine art. But beware: it’s easy to get lost in this site as it is the mother-lode for many other sites and finding your way back to the beginning can be a challenge.

Wandering down one of Trocadero’s mazes I came across a very interesting man named Nishimura Yohei (b.1947) an artist who might be best described as a conceptual ceramicist. One of his projects was to take books, interleave the pages with clay, then fire them in a kiln. I’ll show the you strange results of this project in the next post “Bookish Photographers”.

What really intrigues me are two works by Nishimura Yohei. One consists of two handsome wooden frames, each of which contains a glass vial. In each of the little bottles are the pulverized ashes of a “popular magazine”; one, the familiar TV Guide, the other a book called “Traveler’s Friend”, a guidebook I assume. One must assume because all is left of Traveler’s Friend is about an ounce or two of white ash, and the same with “TV Guide”. As the site says: “Each [little glass bottle] is surrounded by a slightly opaque rubbery substance that brings an out-of-focus aspect to parts of the bottle, making it appear ghost-like or wrapped in fog.”

 

 

So what is going on here? What possesses a man to immolate two very ordinary specimens of the mass media and then present their ashes in little glass bottles ? Are we inclined to remember the objects fused by the terrible heat of the atomic bombs dropped on Heroshima and Nagasaki and memorably photographed by Japanese photographer Heromi Tsuchida ?

 

 

Heromi Tsuchida, Immolated Buddha

 

All I know is I’m inclined to remember them. Is all the detritus of our consumer civilization destined to end up as little heaps of white ash? Then there is the conflict between the horror and mundaneness of the Nishimura piece and physical beauty of its presentation, a conflict that often energizes the best conceptual art. I’m thinking of Christo’s’ shroud rippling in the wind, wrapped around a building with a terrible history, the Reichstag in Berlin.

 

 


Christo

 

Another piece I recall is Jim Sanborn’s bronze “Kryptos” a lacy bronze scroll of cryptography in front of the CIA building in Virginia: secrets terrible and mundane wrapped in an enigma that not even the CIA experts themselves could decipher for years.

 

James Sanborn, Kryptos

 

Another friend, who tragically died by his own hand in 1990, was Yuri Schwebler; in 1970 he turned the Washington munument into a sundial. The result, a monstrous shadow marking time across a landscape of snow provoked the mind and delighted the eye. I’m sorry I don’t have a photo of this piece ( I also remember some very elegant drawings Yuri did of the work) but here’s a link to a funky Youtube video featuring Uncle Walter Cronkite and a few sad moments of Yuri himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M5WXcVsfIk.

Yuri Schwebler said of his sundial monument. “The artwork begins as an idea, crosses three planes of reality, the mental, the physical, the spiritual, and ends as an idea.” Which is a pretty good description of the best in conceptual art.

 

Nishimura Yohei

Nishimura has another work that explodes in the mind and delights the eye. What you see a small, exquisitely painted, jewel-like ceramic box, completely sealed. Inside the box is a popular magazine , title unknown. Pick up the box and shake it and you can hear the magazine rattle. You can’t open the box without destroying it. Again a beautiful combination pf the magnificent and the mundane. We can only share the puzzlement of the future archeologist that comes across this artifact. Instead of a mummified pharaoh, the sarcophagus of the 21st century holds the remains of a Japanese manga comic book or a copy of the TV Guide.

And speaking of sarcophagi, finally we have the work of David Maisel who has a book out called Library of Dust. The library consists of a number of weathered canisters “containing the cremated remains of the unclaimed dead from an Oregon pychiatric hospital”, some going back as far as the 19th century.

 

David Maisel

 

Refined estheticism combined with a brutal banality. As Andre Breton said: beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.