reversal of form

by Robert C. Morgan

Installation view at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum channels with pink and aluminum color, 120 pieces measuring 87 x 7 x 2.5 in.

It is refreshing to know that there are artists working today who are not seduced by the allure of popular culture and who are willing to step back from the banalities of everyday life and see art in its own terms through its own visual syntax and within the terms of its own space. I am not referring to what the French Nabis called "art for art's sake" nearly a century ago. Nor am I advocating an approach equivalent to the formalist movement in American painting during the peak of high Modernism in the 60s. What is indeed unique about Tadaaki Kuwayama's art is a certain boldness in coming to terms with a new paradigm that exists outside the domain of popular culture. While the American Minimalists provide a clear antecedent in his work, there is a question as to whether this is the proper or even the most appropriate term to describe the work of Kuwayama. While one cannot deny that Minimalism has had an effect on changing the direction of art in recent years, or disregard the fact that Kuwayama's reductive position is obliquely tied to that history, it should be clear that not all art that carries a reductive posture is Minimal art.

Installation at  Stiftung for Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany, 1995. Metallic blue and aluminum color on bakelite with aluminum angles, 96 ft. long.

Although Kuwayama began his career as a painteron fact, a reductive painteron the late 50s in New York (where he eventually exhibited at the famous Green Gallery), it is important to examine the development of his work for what it is. The artist's relationship to the frontal surface, for example, is distinct from what defined many of the ideas inherent in Minimalism. The inappropriate term Minimal painting has been persistently used, in both gallery and museum exhibitions, as a means of identifying a kind of painting that might better be called reductive. From this perspective, one might consider the non-relationa paintings of Barnett Newman as having had an influence on the early paintings of Frank Stella and Brice Marden, not to mention on the early work of Kuwayama, whereas the late black painting of Ad Reinhardt seem less conducive to painterly influences than to works by early Minimal and Conceptual artists, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, and Joseph Kosuth.

Installation views at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum with yellow, blue, and aluminum color, 8 x 24 x 2.5 in.

Even so, there are those who will insist that their obsession with the frontal surface is primarily about the object or the transformation of surface into object. This evolution toward objecthood through the frontal surface of painting finds antecedents in works by the Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko and later in the monochromes of the Nouveau Realiste Yves Klein. Although their efforts were made nearly 40 years apart, there is a clear direction toward reductive painting that has little to do with the Minimalist object. Engaging in a reductive posture, whether on the frontal surface or in object form, may proceed from very different and diverse intentions. For an artist to work reductively does not automatically imply Minimalist art any more than an artist with a good idea should imply Conceptual Art. I would argue that Kuwayama is an artist who evolved from a reductivist position, yet whose work has often, though mistakenly, been called Minimalist.

Installation views at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum with yellow, blue, and aluminum color, 8 x 24 x 2.5 in.

In 1967, Kuwayama painted a series of monochrome panels, placed vertically in frames and tangential to one another, with titles such as Red, Mustard Yellow, and Pale Blue. The important feature of this work was that the color was directly painted on canvas and therefore was still contained within the fictionalized space of the painterly field. Their subject matter is as reduced as that of Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus or the Untitled white panels of Rauschenbergs' both of which were painted in 1951 and therefore could be cited as antecedents of the vertical monochromes of Kuwayama, painted six years later.

Installation at Ingolstadt Museum, Germany, 1997. Anodized aluminum channels with yellow and aluminum color, 20 pieces measuring 8 x 84 in. long.

Whereas painting retains the space of fiction, no matter how constructive or reductive, Minimalism is essentially about the objective point established by Donald Judd. Once art leaves the fictional space of the surface without necessarily becoming sculpture (in the relational sense of diverse parts in search of a formal resolution), and if it retains a position of reductive neutrality in object form, usually fabricated, then we can talk about Minimal art. While the method that supports this position may be a type of linguistic formalism (unrelated to Greenberg's aesthetic formalism), the result is perpetually directly related to form more specifically, the form of the object within a given context.1 What distinguishes the more recent modular work of Kuwayama is that his forms (panels or linear elements) are designed not so much to intercede within a given space as to create a new space through modular equivalence and repetition. In doing so, a reversal begins to happen whereby the emphasis is no longer given to the forms themselves but to the total space they inhabit. It is here that the viewer may begin to embark on another approach. Instead of focusing attention on the formal elements in order to create some sort of dialectical encounter with the space, the forms (as in the artist's recurrent use of color-tinted Bakelite panels) visually recede into the space. Having been altered through the placement of the panels, the recession of the forms into the space reaches a point that the artist calls infinity space without beginning or end, a pure space. In essence, the form(s) disappear and create space.

Installation at Satani Gallery, Japan, 1996. Mixed media, glass, mylar, graphite, and aluminum.

As a theoretical comparison, this is different from the large-scale steel sculpture of Richard Serra. Whereas Serra (whom the critic Robert Pincus-Witten once termed a Postminimalist) is concerned with site specificity, his weathering steel plates are still within the context of sculpture. Serra's work is pragmatic in its confrontational value. It offers itself as an intervention into everyday time and space. Kuwayama's approach goes in another direction. Instead of insisting on his work as sculpture, Kuwayama transforms the space through the repetition of modular elements and thereby offers a completely new syntax to the way a space is normally perceived, both physically and conceptually. This was made evident in his recent site-specific installations at the Chiba City and Kawamura Memorial Museums in Japan in 1996. Although different elements were employed in each case, using different sizes and modular shapes, fabricated in synthetic Bakelite or constructed in mylar, glass, and aluminum, the emphasis was not on the sculpture but on the transformation of the space through the use of modular elements and the concept of disappearance in relation to the repetition and placement of the elements. In a Kuwayama installation, the space becomes the object through this process of reversal. The materials are simply the vehicles to make a passage into the reality of a new kind of space, to bring space into being which is close to the practice of the great 15th-century Japanese landscape painter Sesshu.

Installation at  Chiba City Museum, Japan, 1996. Aluminum color on bakelite, 15 pieces measuring 4 x .75 ft.

Kuwayama likes to refer to this kind of space as absolute, as if there were no beginning or no end, as if the transference into time were an entry into the moment, and the moment would be absolute, unequivocal, unremitting in its perceptual sense of wholeness, its gestalt. There is a purity here that again recalls the unwavering commitment often attributed to Ad Reinhardt. One of the most lucid articulations of this concept in relation to Kuwayama has been written by the Japanese critic Koji Taki:

Pure space may seem very different from the actual space in which we live, but this purity stimulates our imagination. Purity means more than mere simplification. And we are made to leap into this pure space, carrying our load of complexity, moving beyond the real world with the freedom of the imagination. We do not see a world which is breaking down, a world going to ruin, a world full of amorphous human passion, or a world of simple beauty. Rather we see a world which appears beyond human perceptions, beyond settled and familiar meanings, a world which horrifies and thrills our spirit. We experience simultaneous terror and ecstasy transcending reality.2

Installation at  Chiba City Museum, Japan, 1996. Three corners with three colors, metallic pink, yellow, and blue on bakelite.

This pure space is the space of the imagination made real without interference, without temporal intrusions. One could argue that Taki's description of pure space is close to Minimal art specifically the light installations of Dan Flavin, the stacks of Donald Judd, the elevated grid structures of Sol LeWitt, the alloy planes of Carl Andre. It might even apply to the 努hite�paintings of Robert Ryman (although given his concern for the framing edge, Ryman could not be considered a Minimalist). But there are other factors (previously described) that distinguish Kuwayama痴 recent installation from the work of these artists, both formally and conceptually. The concern here is how to deal with the isolation of a pure space that is somehow exempt from the flow of history, that is entirely within the realm of the imagination, a space somewhere between phenomenological Neo-Platonism and Sesshu's marvelous void.

Installation at Kawamura Memorial Museum, Japan, 1996. Metallic pink and yellow on bakelite, 136 pieces, 8 ft. high.

The theologian Paul Tillich once spoke of the space of tragedy as a condition in which the historical sense of time is lost. In his book Theology of Culture, he refers to the Greek tragedies as events conceived in a space that is removed from diurnal processes:

Human existence under the predominance of space is tragic. Greek tragedy and philosophy knew about this. They knew that the Olympic gods were gods of space, one beside the other, one struggling with the other. Even Zeus was only the first of many equals, and hence subject, together with man and other gods, to the tragic law of genesis and decay. Greek tragedy, philosophy, and art were wrestling with the tragic law of our spatial existence. They were seeking for an immovable being beyond the circle of genesis and decay, greatness and self-destruction, something beyond tragedy.3

Installation at Kawamura Memorial Museum, Japan, 1996. Metallic pink and yellow on bakelite, 136 pieces, 8 ft. high.

Somehow Tillich's concept of spatial dominance seems too overtly Western in its interpretation, too laden with the cultural weight of the past, and therefore exempt from the possibility that space exists as a reversal of form in relation to time. As a visual antidote to Tillich's theology, Kuwayama offers a reversal of form through the abstraction of the measured interval, a rhythmic punctuation that lightens the effect of the physical space. The premise of spatial dominance is suddenly transformed into a recession of form, thereby permitting a meditative pure space to evolve into the viewer's consciousness as an intentional act. We see it, for example, in the artist's recent anodized aluminum panels (what he calls channels in which two channels, measuring 19 centimeters are jointed and alternate according to two chosen colors. We see it again in the Kozo paper works in which three layers of paper are laminated through the artist's wax-pressing technique. Using modular elements in a repeatable format, Kuwayama places a single horizontal pencil line in each of six units, alternating three times between blue and red.

Installation view at  Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich,  1998. Metallic blue and aluminum color on bakelite with aluminum angles, 8 ft. long.

Given Moholy-Nagy's cultural synthesis of space and time into a single space/time based on his own research and experimentation in visual perception and relative motion, it would appear that Tillich's view of culture is more related to a single linear view of time that is essentially pre-relativistic. This is not to dismiss Tillich's understanding of spatial predominance as a cultural force capable of usurping history in favor of mythology. An abundance of spectacles supports Tillich's view, based on the current fascination for visual art that echoes the vapid premises of pop culture. Ironically, it is within the realm of globalized pop culture that the mythological references to the mass media are strongest, not in the reductive art of Kuwayama. Simply stated, the tragic sense of space in Western history which is slowly becoming a history of media should not be confused with the concept of pure space in Eastern culture which tends toward a deeper spiritual understanding of reality. It is this latter reality that concerns Kuwayama. It is a reality removed from the everyday media and all the material consequences that it entails.

Installation view at Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich, 1998.  Metallic blue and yellow on bakelite with aluminum angle, 4 x 4 ft.

One could make the claim that the kind of pure space advocated by Kuwayama is not so much a tragic space as it is an evocation, an opening or a threshold, that allows for a moment or moments of elevation beyond the banalities that pull us down into the gravity of our existential reality or even the denial of that reality. Kuwayama has described the desired effect of his art as being something not of this world, in other words, transcending what we already know through the mass media and through the tragic events that surround us. He is not concerned with making an expression or with signifying a social truth or with offering a new global paradigm for art. Fundamentally, Kuwayama is interested in the kind of rarefied experience that can be obtained through his form of total art. What he describes as something not of this world is indeed a perception of infinity, a rare glimpse of something to which human beings have not yet been acculturated. One might call it science fiction, but this is too facile. It is not science fiction.

Installation view at  Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich, 1998. Repetition of two colors, aluminum and yellow, anodized aluminum channels, 8 x 12 x 2 in.

I like the concept of the Noh actor described by Nobuyuki Hiromoto, riken no ken.4 As I understand Hiromoto, who cites the work of Zeami, one of the great practitioners of Noh theater, riken no ken is the method by which the actor looks at himself by using his internalized outer image. This concept may seem close to the Western gestalt yet is beyond the Western analysis of perception. Kuwayama's art is fundamentally concerned with the act of perception indeed, the viewer's experience through the reversal of form into space, whereby the material focus is transformed into an arena of pure space. This is far removed from the pragmatic objecthood of Minimal art. Yet, at the same time, Kuwayama does not deny the essential materiality of his work. Rather, he is concerned with how the act of perceiving this materiality as a modular sequence of forms gives us the exacting quietude of a spiritual experience.

Robert C. Morgan is a critic and artist whose books include Between Modernism and Conceptual Art.

Notes
1. The distinction between aesthetic and linguistic formalism is analyzed and discussed in my essay Formalism as a Transgressive Device in Arts, December 1989. 
2. Koji Taki, Tadaaki Kuwayama's New Project in Tadaaki Kuwayama Project '96, co-published in conjunction with the two exhibitions at the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (June 1 - July 21, 1996) and the Chiba City Museum of Art (June 15 - August 18, 1996), p. 54. 
3. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 33. 
4. Nobuyuki Hiromoto, Objective Space: Looking Forward to Project '96, in Tadaaki Kuwayama Project '96, op. cit., p. 61.