A meticulous, salty obsession.

Motoi Yamamoto at Westminster College

I’m a fan of earth art and have gone out of my way to see works located in some very remote areas.  But there are occasional works of art that capture the spirit of earth art but are much easier to see.  Motoi Yamamoto’s Return to the Sea: Saltworks is one such installation on view now at the Meldrum Science Center on the campus of Westminster College.  But you’ll have to hurry because the installation is only up through April 12 after which the whole thing will be swept up and taken to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and cast into the Great Salt Lake.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.  A little context is in order. Motoi Yamamoto’s medium of choice is salt. From massive constructions to intricate, maze-like illustrations his designs are mesmerizing works of simple sodium chloride; in fact Morton was a sponsor providing the 400 pounds of table salt needed for the installation.

Motoi Yamamoto during the installation of Return to the Sea.

I went to visit the exhibit during its creation.  It was almost a religious experience.  I was there over the weekend and the Meldrum Science Center was nearly empty with just a few students helping create the time-lapse video and overseeing an empty “public participation” space. Amidst that silence, Yamamoto padded about in stockinged feet and repositioned a mat on the floor.  Methodically he laid down an intriguing pattern that felt perfect even for its apparent randomness.

It's hard not to draw parallels to the art work of Yayoi Kusama, but that might be because I just finished reading Kusama’s autobiography, Infinity Net.  Both artists use meticulous repetition to create works that have an inherent Japanese attitude; an attitude that’s thoughtful and imbued with a deep, quiet emotion. And both artists’ work comes from very painful, emotional experiences.  For Yamamoto, that moment is the death of his sister at age 24 from brain cancer.
 

Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto (2014, salt)

The work is also spectacular for its use of line.  Yamamoto can draw a perfect line, in salt no less.  And he works quickly, faster than it appears from his quiet movement.  I spent a little over an hour watching him work and while it seemed like he was moving at a slow pace, he filled in a substantial portion of the design while I was there.  His lines are so fluid and precise, they reminded me of Keith Haring, another artist who was brilliantly adept at using precise, free-form drawing to create engaging art.

In the end, all of Yamamoto’s works are swept up and returned to the “sea.” In this case, the “sea” will be the Great Salt Lake at the site of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.  This seems like the perfect location considering Smithson’s embrace of entropy and a desire to allow his works to change with the environment around them.  Yamamoto’s act of destroying each work is an even more dramatic embrace of the theoretical, ethereal side of art.

You can participate in the destruction of the work on Saturday, April 12.  Something I would be doing if it weren’t for a conflicting commitment.  Find more information here. Here are a few more photos from of Return to the Sea: Saltworks.

Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto

Motoi Yamamoto at work

Installation of Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto.

More eye-straining art at the Grand Palais.

As promised, this is my second post about my trip to Paris's Grand Palais to see Dynamo: A Century of Light and Motion 1913 - 2013. You can read the first "Vine video" post here.  In this post, I'm featuring  static pictures instead of videos. I'll try and write less and show more pictures. Once again, I've grouped works into categories.

The black and white of op art.
Many of the works in this show were limited to just two colors: black and while. Limiting color doesn't mean you can't achieve impact.  From one of the earliest pieces in the show by Henryk Berlewi to later works that more forcefully embraced op art as a way to play with perception, black and white can be a powerful color scheme.

Henryk Berlewi, Kontrasty Mechanofaktur, 1924, Gouache on paper.

Victor Vasarely, Metagalazie, 1959-1961, paint on canvas.Victor

Victor Vasarely, Vega-Bas, 1967, paint on panel.

The power of color.
Dynamo showcased color in several amazing ways.  One of my favorite works was Chromosaturation by Carlos Cruz-Diez. The walls of these maze-like rooms were so precisely lit, that the rooms themselves became big blocks of color, more emotionally powerful than you might expect.  It also did strange things to perception of color.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromosaturation, Paris, 1965, Fluorescent Tubes, Lee filters, aluminum, acrylic paint medium.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromosaturation, Paris, 1965, Fluorescent Tubes, Lee filters, aluminum, acrylic paint medium.

Julio Le Parc, Surface Couleur - Serie 14-2E, 1971, acrylic on canvas.

When lines collide.
I can't believe what you can accomplish with just a simple line.  These works are stunning for their simplicity.  But also for their ability to really screw with your vision.

Francois Morellet, 4 Doubles Trames, 1958, oil on canvas.

R.H. Quaytman, Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 (RGB), 2010, silkscreen and gesso on wood

Evariste Richer, Slow Snow (Day Snow/Night Snow), 2007, acrylic on canvas.

Michael Scott, Sans Titre, 1989, email on aluminum

Philippe Decrauzat, Shut and Open at the Same Time, 2008, paint on wood. Installation view with Mirrors, 2013, stickers.

The art of reflection
In my previous post about Dynamo, I mentioned that seeing one's self in art is powerful.  These works prove that to be true. While I may appear to be up-side-down in some of these photos, It's actually because the art works and their strange lens-like qualities distort reality; or do they simply reveal reality.

Le Prisme by Nicolas Schoffer was a dizzying window that opened onto an endless kaleidoscope, making the viewer feel like the walls of the Grand Palais were hollow and filled with magical light.

Nicolas Schoffer, Le Prisme, 1965,

I'll take a work by Anish Kapoor any day.  His intense use of color and reflection captivate the viewer and force moments of self reflection. The fact that they frequently create instant, constantly changing abstract works of art  just makes them all the more intriguing.

Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2008 Aluminum Lacquer.

Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2008, Aluminum Lacquer.

Anish Kapoor, Islamic Mirror, 2008, Stainless Steel

Yayoi Kusama is famous for her spots, usually rendered in bright colors and painted on everythig from pumpkins to spindly tenticles.  Here they covered the walls of a precisely constructed museum-gallery maze. Reflective domes covered with more reflective domes created a world where every museum visitor was repeated endlessly.  It was like a strange art-world quantum physics universe.

Yayoi Kusama, Invisible Life, 200-2011, Acrylic mirrors and recessed spotlights.

Basking in the glow
Some of the masters of light were on view in Paris. Dan Flavin's minimalist and structured fluorescent tubes were brilliant for their ability to transform a gallery and everyone in it. Neon also made a big showing.

Dan Flavin, Untitled (to you, Heiner with Admiration and Affection), 1973, Fluorescent Tubes.

Francois Morellet, Triple X Neonly, 2012, Blue Neon Tube and 2 Transformers.

Francois Morellet, Triple X Neonly, 2012, Blue Neon Tube and 2 Transformers.

Robert Smithson, The Eliminator, 1964, Replicated in 2013, Steel, glass, and neon.

Perception is certainly not reality.
I'll close with one of my favorite works in the show. Felice Varini's Vingt-trois disques evides plus douze moities et quatre quarts (2013, orange acrylic paint on adhesive foil) was mind-blowing.  I first experienced it entering the main hall of the Grand Palais. We were there for a completely different event.  I didn't know it was part of the Dynamo exhibition and assumed it was an abstract, rather perplexing series of random splashes of paint splattered across the front of the building; probably done by some street artist who's made it big in the fine art world.  It made little sense to me but hey, we're talking contemporary art here, so I processed it and moved on.

It wasn't until the following day, after having purchased my ticket to Dynamo that I was wandering through the galleries and the reality of these orange splashes locked into view.  As you stepped through a door onto a patio, all those random shapes created a perfect pattern. I love that the view almost didn't seem real.  It's almost as if someone used Adobe Illustrator to add the pattern afterwards.  And it didn't feel like that just in the flat photo you see here.  The effect was even more disorienting when you were standing in front of the image. It was pure art-world magic.  But maybe like many things in the contemporary world, it was enabled by technology, which would be appropriate considering the technological feeling than many of the works in Dynamo embraced.

Felice Varini's Vingt-trois disques evides plus douze moities et quatre quarts, 2013, orange acrylic paint on adhesive foil

Felice Varini's Vingt-trois disques evides plus douze moities et quatre quarts, 2013, orange acrylic paint on adhesive foil

Felice Varini's Vingt-trois disques evides plus douze moities et quatre quarts, 2013, orange acrylic paint on adhesive foil