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November 15, 2007
Mariko Mori's Ode to a Dying Star
Mariko Mori, Tom Na H-iu, 2007. Glass, lights, electronics.
A Star Is Born
I love to be surprised and I was really surprised by Mariko Mori's Tom Na H-iu (Deitch Projects, 18 Wooster), to Dec. 22). I had once dismissed Mori's work as Cute Pop. Rumor has it that there are 200 words for cute in Japanese, thus displacing the old saw that there are 200 words for snow in Inuit, which has proven to be slightly exaggerated. Surely there are separate words for wet snow, dry snow, grandma snow, three-dog-night snow, in your face snow and possibly a dozen more snow words to add to your imaginary vocabulary. But is it possible that there are 200 kinds of cute? Let me count the ways: baby cute, puppy cute, girly cute, school-girl cute (fetishized by Japanese men), Bo-Beep cute, food cute. There's even, I think, boy-toy cute.
One-time fashion model Mori once specialized in her own ultra-cute Pop persona, which I supposed was a kind of goof. Then she came up with her weird spacecraft, Wave UFO, for the Venice Biennial in 2005.
Wondering by, it was the early evening opening at Deitch that caught my eye; everyone under 40, everyone in black. How retro. Ducking in I saw Mori's floorpiece called Flatstone that had at its center a glass version of an ancient Jomon vase. Two smaller pieces - one a version of what lay ahead - worked much better. The pearlescent glow, the rounded minimalism was quite beautiful. Well, I haven't use that word in a long time.
I had forgotten the Pop Mariko Mori and it wasn't until much later that via internet I dredged up that icon of the coy and thus became puzzled by the strange transmogrification that has taken place. Was this because she has been living in New York?
When I had climbed the rank of stairs up to the gallery platform and into the darkened room, in the middle of that room was a huge slab of rounded-off ice - or it looked like ice; some unearthly, absolutely perfect essence of translucency. It was a giant glass thumb. Lights inside of it flickered on and off. Some jokers in silhouette made a mockery of it's 2001-ishness by bowing down as if this cool megalith were a giant idol. When they were sipping white wine later, I noticed that their shoes had cost much more than my monthly rent.
I quickly scanned the wall text outside the room for the back story. Too much to read! At home I perused the press release on my computer. Tom Na H-iu is named after "an ancient Celtic site of spiritual transmigration." Mori's Tom is hooked up via internet to the Super Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo. Tom "visualizes the internal light of dying stars." Atmospheric neutrinos are blue, solar neutrinos are green, neutrino bursts are multi-colored and the muon negative electric charges are pale pink and yellow. There is not a vestige of cute.
SCROLL DOWN FOR A REVIEW OF ALAN SARET'S GANG DRAWINGS.
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Alan Saret, Violet-Fire Falls Ensoulment, 1968.Color pencils on paper.
The Gang's All Here
Alan Saret's gang-drawings (The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St., to Feb. 7, 2008) are each made with a fistful of colored pencils. He started making them in the late-'60s as preliminary sketches for his then well-known and quite positively received tangled-wire sculptures. Since then, the drawings have taken on a life of their own.
The delicate, faintly multicolored scribbles sometimes describe circular structures and other shapes, but they mostly look like tufts of hair. Two of Saret's sculptures hang in the show and indicate rather nicely where the gang-drawings spring from and, by the way, suggest that the sculptures themselves might easily fit in the genre of sculpture called "drawings in space." That genre includes some works of Picasso, Gonzales, and David Smith, as well as more recent manifestations, such as Patrick Dougherty's gigantic snagged sapling pieces that continue to proliferate all across the nation and even abroad.
Saret was a player in what was once called anti-form art, along with Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Lynda Benglis and a few others. Sculptors, riffing off the soft works of Claes Oldenburg, the felt and grease of Joseph Beuys, and other diverse influences, let it all hang out, as it were. Materials, some of them decidedly anartistic, were dropped, plopped, propped, strewn, flung and hung, randomly arrayed, all in the name of getting beyond both Cubism and composition. Why not let gravity and the nature of the materials do the work? Play it as it lays. Of course, anti-form lasted all of two weeks, but the glorious tidewrack remains, mostly as photos but with some prime pieces by Eva Hesse, felt-hangings by Morris, prop-pieces by Serra, and Saret's tangles.
Saret's last "museum" show was at P.S. 1 in 1990. The Drawing Center claims that its current 30-drawing survey is his first museum show in almost two decades. Apparently he "withdrew from the artworld in the mid-'80s to concentrate on site-specific and architectural projects." Or as we say in the art world (but not in Artopia), out of sight is out of mind. A cliché as telling as my other favorite: if you can't photograph it, it doesn't exist.
Saret's drawings, which I was not previously aware of, are like animal scratchings on the walls of a cave. They are thickets. They are grass. Like Saret's sculptures, they are almost not there. Their not-there-ness is why they have such presence.
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Posted by jperreault at November 15, 2007 10:32 AM
