Art Exhibition Reviews: Rothko, Sugimoto and de Waal, London/Japan: Adventures in Monochrome Autumn 2012

Here is a review of two current Japan-related exhibitions.  As these shows are in their last week(s) in London, I urge you to make the time to see them.

Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes
Pace London, 6 Burlington Gardens, W1S
4 October – 17 November 2012

Edmund de Waal: a thousand hours
Alan Cristea Gallery, 31 Cork Street
Saturday 6th Oct 2012 – Saturday 10 November 2012

A new majestic space, with its enormously high arching roof and stern white walls was the perfect venue for this exhibition by the Pace Gallery, which is famous for its duets series, where work by two artists is shown together in order to foster an artistic ‘conversation.’ Despite these two artists, Mark Rothko and Hiroshi Sugimoto, being from the opposite end of the artistic spectrum (an oil painter and a photographer), and from opposite ends of the world, the USA and Japan, the pairing is pitch perfect. The works share a grand scale; and they feature ‘horizon lines’, a strong horizontal division between two areas of contrasting colour/ tone. The true monochrome of the Sugimoto prints draw out the minimal colour in Rothko’s work emphasising the flecks of purple and blue, the deep brown rather than black, earthy and textural and warm, which contrasts with the cold dark slick seas of Sugimoto.

Sugimoto’s sea surfaces drew me in; I looked, looking more and more closely to see the almost imperceptible texture of the inky black sea. The qualities of some of the more recent pieces, lights shone on to the sea, images out of focus or mists that blur the strong division of sea and sky heaven and earth, caused me to pause and ponder the image. However, the Rothko paintings were rather flat and less engaging, in contrast to the Sugimoto photographs and his own luminous multi-layered coloured earlier work. The flatness and sombre colour scheme of these paintings, has been attributed to his mental state, as these painting were all created in the year leading up to Rothko’s suicide. Certainly, they have certain bleakness about them. However a more pertinent argument comes from the critic  Brian O’Doherty  who wrote in his 1985 catalogue essay for Pace’s exhibition of Rothko, that, “the works contracted to windows of some original darkness. His late paintings are less about any personal suffering in Rothko’s life,” and as Pace’s press release so succinctly puts it, “pertain more to eternal metaphysical questions.”

On viewing these pieces, my companion commented that, ‘These are paintings without history,’ agreeing with a common critical interpretation of this exhibition. The flat, blank Rothkos deny the viewer any attempt at reading a deeper meaning, avoiding imagery to deny any engagement with the political or social issue of his day, dismissing the point in history when they were painted. The Sugimoto pictures are pared down elements of water and air, which, regardless of human history or achievement, remain almost eternal just as Sugimoto pictures them. As art historian Richard Shiff wrote in the catalogue, “Rothko and Sugimoto think in terms of eras of history and eons of organic life, not the decades of their own lives.”

1000 hours is the title of a new exhibition by ex-Daiwa Scholar, Professor Edmund de Waal at the Alan Cristea Gallery, which is on until the 10^th November. This exhibition, as the title suggests has a central theme of time and our perception of time which is shared with the Rothko/Sugimoto exhibition. However, de Waal’s time is not the ever- enduring ‘eons’ that Sugimoto and Rothko reference, de Waal’s 1000 hours are manageable and humanly tangible, a relatively short period, at once made to seem long because hours are chosen over days or weeks to give a large number: one thousand sounds like a longer period of time than ‘6 weeks’ which it equals. De Waal wants us to consider our perception of time, most notably in the title of a piece called on the middle watch which is the period for those on the lookout on a Navy ship between 12am and 4am, a still time, when time drags and sense are heightened.

The artist also seeks to encapsulate the time that he spent during production of the vessels and somehow fix it in the vitrines which encase the ceramic pieces he displays, like a winters breath captured between clasped hands. Perhaps a more successful attempt at embodying this time comes from the marks left by the artists hand on the vessels, traces of the action of the artist’s hand- that moment shared between material and artist recorded like a vinyl record in the grooves of the pot: they successfully seem to record, “my thousand hours pleasure, tiredness and my sense of the fleeting moment and its afterlife.”

Edmund de Waal was apprenticed to the potter Geoffrey Whiting, who was influenced by Bernard Leach, a British potter who studied pottery in Japan and started making Japanese influenced ceramics in St Ives. De Waal also lived in Japan as a Daiwa Scholar and he spent a further year studying at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo, where his great uncle also lived. Like Sugimoto he has experienced two cultures, and is influenced by both Japanese and Western aesthetics. Furthermore, both artists cite the author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, as an influence on their work. Sugimoto has a series entitled Praise of Shadows, and Sugimoto says that he, “disdains the “violent” artificial light wrought by modern civilization.” De Waal has also entitled one of his pieces in this show in praise of shadows; which is entirely black small dishes within a black vitrine. The pure black vitrine contrasts with the ceramic glaze bringing out has subtle coloration, meaning we can appreciate the beauty in the mottling and pattern in the dark glaze. Without this strong black of the vitrine we could not sense this subtle detail in the glaze. The influence of this text could also give us a reason for the avoidance of colour, the artist concentrating on just the monochrome aspects; choosing the depiction of purely light and shadow over a preoccupation with colour.

However, I found this white cube room of the Cristea Gallery, and its strong white light to be the antithesis of Tanizaki’s ideals. Tanizaki describes a scene in his essay where he encounters the black lacquerware which he feels is best appreciated in the candle light of a Japanese shadowy room at a traditional inn. These white rooms are almost an embodiment of ‘violent light’ which Sugimoto describes.  Rather than by Tankizaki, it feels as if de Waal is more influenced by Modern minimalism, and has more  in common with the artist he cites as influences such as Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin and  Ellsworth Kelly, whose piece gave the name to sculpture for a large wall by de Waal in this exhibition. The huge, monumental square piece a thousand hours seems to show these influences in form, material and shape.  The white space of the Alan Cristea Gallery perfectly suits this square bold installation as it echoes the shapes and colours of the vitrines. De Waal’s recent venue for an exhibition, Waddesdon Manor, where colour gaudy textured, patterned surfaces and curvilinear lines seemed at odds with the clean crisp aluminium lines of the vitrines.

The idea of vitrines has preoccupied de Waal since he wrote his family biography The Hare With Amber Eyes. This book traces the story of his family across Europe and Japan by following a collection of netsuke (small Japanese sculptures) which were housed in a vitrine. He states “I keep circling back to vitrines and the way objects behind glass are suspended in their everyday life and I started to use them as part of the language of my sculpture.” These sleek, modern contemporary vitrines throw into sharp relief the organic nature of the pots, as if all the pots alive with the movements that created them.  To me it was as if the vitrines were abandoned by a futuristic society and some otherworldly fungi had sprouted growing out of the surface of the vitrines. The small black plates appear as if they are petri dishes abandoned from an unknown experiment.  With some of the vitrines the artist’s idea of capturing the pots may have gone too far, those with semi-transparent glass shrouded in a mist that separates us from the vases in a way that almost seems to suffocate them. Despite this, a thousand hours is an excellent exhibition, which like the Rothko / Sugimoto exhibition is very much worth seeing.