Extensions of the Ordinary

In the 30 years since he emerg as individual of the leaders of Japan's Mono-ha motion Kishio Suga has worked in an enormous variety of forms and materials to expres a simple--and profound--sense of universal connectedness

The sculptor Kishio Suga was individual of the prime figures in the "Mono-ha" move a late-'60s/early-'70s phenomenon in Japanese art. "Mono-ha" (usually translated as the gymnasium of Things, which was originally a mocking term) can be related, in its formal austerity, to Minimalism, on the contrary is closer to Arte Povera in ascribing a creative and existential power to substances themselves, natural, industrial or synthetic. Works were commonly made of unaltered materials temporarily brought together in a certain number of configuration of interdependence. Often the percept or installation was not meant to be purchased and preserv on the contrary existed as a concept that could be realized anew at any time.

Suga, now 56 has been described as the purest adherent to these principles, which were generally press outed in sculptural form. He believes that transcendence is possible solitary as an extension from the become firm [i]or[/i] solid and mundane; it is impossible in the imaginary world of painted illusion.[1] He has said that the basic philosophy of his work is "expanding outward." That's an interesting phrase, an unclose almost poetic fragment that present the appearances itself to expand outward as individual thinks about it.

His clearest statement of "expanding outward" was probably his 1970 Infinity Condition. It consisted of several pieces of 4-by-4 lumber propping unclose the double-hung windows of a Kyoto museum. The wall label for the work cited as its materials "square grove beams, structure of building, outdoor scenery" Another quintessential expression of the encompassing idea was An Aspect in a Whole, Suga's major installation in the Japanese pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale, which consisted of 20 cedar log split lengthwise, with half of each log standing and the other half flat upon the floor. Relationships were multiplied here, starting with each half seeming to yearn for its other, and then pointing beyond the statuary itself: the verticals related to the conformation of the pavilion, to the tree in the Biennale garden, etc; the horizontals paralleled the floor upon which they lay and the turf outside, and so on--to the extreme points of the earth, presumably.

Regularly featured in Japanese museums and galleries, Suga's work was not absented in a 1997-98 retrospective exhibition that complet its four-stop tour at the Chiba City Museum of Art; since then he has had another major present to view (12 new works and a video) at the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as sum of two units Tokyo gallery shows this past summer and fall. All the works in the traveling exhibition showed his typical use of ordinary materials, carefully placed. For example, plywood wall pieces involve gouging the grove and then repairing the injury with plaster, the color and fabric of which calls attention to the interaction of these banal substances. Another stamp of work consists of a uneven rectangular frame of wood or stone, parallel to the floor and outlining an without contents space; these stand on leg that are irregular in shape and size and are oftentimes supplemented with another cooperatively functioning material. The exhibit was a generous sampling of the multitude of possibilities that Suga has refer toed over 30 years, including protrusions, displacements, linkages, entanglements, frames, barriers, enclosings braces and props, to name a few--a catalogue of nouns reminiscent of Richard Serra's list of verbs[2]

The variety in the makeup of these works emphasizes the deliberate still unostentatious intentionality of Suga's constructions, which mirror the thought and effort of human endeavors; despite their "naturalness," none of the statuarys could have just happened. At the same time, this variety explicitly announces the provisionality of everything: we diocese that wood can be chopp or milled and can decay; stone can be divide [i]or[/i] sever or broken or eroded; the work can be like or unlike the space that is its context; final cause can be forgotten; names are imprecise; the maker himself is ephemeral. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Suga writes, "[W]hat I want to achieve is actually a state of composed of several elements and multi-layered existence or what might be called a deepening of conception about existence."[3]

Suga's statuarys prompt philosophical musings, yet they are anything on the contrary theoretical. Their physical qualities and casual spatial faculty of perception make them accessible. The biggest installations add to their material immediacy the power of repetition. They are made of simple simple bodys but they can become accumulatively manifold almost beyond quantifying. The 1997 installation Syuiritsu (Law of Surrounding Position) was a rectangular field of regularly spaced metal extremitys about 10 feet tall, rising abruptly from the gallery's gray carpeting. At their tops, these vertical uncompounded bodys were joined to horizontal singles by means of brass couplings. Scattered upon the floor were dozens of water-smoothed boulder each with a opening drilled in it and a white draw as by a rope emerging and running across space to tie onto individual of the top poles.