When, at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, French painter Marcel Duchamp hung 1,200 empty coal sacks from the ceiling of a windowless gallery lit by a single light bulb, then handed out flashlights at the door so visitors could find their own way through the art, this most inventive artist of the 20th century created an entire second meaning for the word “Installation.” The medium that arose in the following years asked artists to adapt their ideas to the space provided for their work and in turn to use their work to transform that space. Six decades later, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) was gifted by the G.W. Anderson family with the funding for a Great Hall, which was intended to be a locus for Installation Art. A number of artists have attempted to fulfill that mandate, but the sheer size of the space defeated them. Until now. On the 87th anniversary of Duchamp’s first not-at-all tentative efforts, Japanese artist Onishi Yasuaki has wedded his work, Stone on Boundary, to UMFA’s Great Hall. The result feels like the most essential exhibit to open in Utah this year, if not this decade.
Onishi’s title refers to his aesthetic and philosophical concern with such boundaries as exist between inside and outside, visible and invisible, and humanity and nature. These are certainly proper concerns for art in our time, beginning at least as early as Paul Cezanne’s obsession with individual objects, their own boundaries, and their encounters with other things. Onishi’s study of these phenomena employs copper foil, a mundane material that was elevated by its use in stained glass by artists such as Louis Comfort Tiffany. Onishi has molded this malleable metal around river rocks gathered near his home city, Osaka, which is celebrated for its many temples and civic emphasis on spirituality. A footnote on this venerable environment reveals that it was the target for the second atomic bomb in 1945, but was protected by clouds that would have prevented observation of the weapon’s impact.
The cup-like vessels that Onishi creates, reminiscent of Japan’s Zen school of pottery making, are attached to slender wires and built into a web that exhibits tensile strength while responding to gravity. Now imagine a life-sized relief map of a couple of acres of the Oquirrh or Wasatch Mountains. If that copy of the natural surface of Earth in those places were made of Onishi’s copper cups wired together, then was lifted off the ground and suspended in the overhead space of the Anderson Family Great Hall, you might have Stone on Boundary.
Onishi’s technique also suggests the active surface of water near the shore, where it rises and erupts as its waves respond to their encounter with land. Seen from below, his construction seems to fill the space overhead, while viewed from the numerous second floor vantage points provided by the Hall’s architecture, it rises in swells to form mounds and then falls precipitously into valleys. In places the effect can be powerful, physical, and bring on feelings of vertigo appropriate to its power.
These are my responses to Stone on Boundary: visitors will have their own experiences. For comparison, though, some of us will recall a couple of early shows in the same space: one of paintings by Brian Kershisnik and the other some fifty images of Mount Olympus by a wide selection of artists. For me, both exhibitions left the Hall seeming huge and remote, while the art, superb as it may have been, could not produce an impressive effect in the matter of scale. More recently, in what has become an age of exterior murals, some of these that were produced for this space did a better job of standing up to it from their positions on the walls of the box. None of them, however, launched into the space and effectively filled it the way Stone on Boundary does. Here and now, to me the Hall now feels both intimate and exhilarating, while losing none of its architectonic impact. And for the first time it feels exactly the right size. That is the skill of Onishi Yasuaki at work. Stone on Boundary is scheduled for a two or three year visit, but I hope it will remain for so long as it continues to exert its presence.
All images courtesy of the author.
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
