JAPAN SOCIETY Kazuko Miyamoto Instruction Manual

June 5, 2024
JAPAN SOCIETY

JAPAN SOCIETY Kazuko Miyamoto Instruction

JAPAN SOCIETY Kazuko Miyamoto
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Introduction

With a strikingly independent spirit, Kazuko Miyamoto (1942–) is an artist that has nev-er been intimidated to eschew conventions and chart her own course. Miyamoto’s expanding vision for over five decades has resulted in paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and performances, as well as installation and textile works that oscillate between geometric and organic forms. Throughout her career, the presence of the artist’s hand has remained a constant aesthetic sensibility, as has the use of mod-est, often found materials such as nails, string, umbrellas, tree branches, brown paper bags, and newspapers.
Miyamoto’s distinct artistic approach recast Minimalist forms and strategies —repetition, geometry, the grid—by introducing a visual language of handmade and subtly irregular elements. Despite important affinities to the work of artists who came to be known as Minimalists, Miyamoto’s art has been from its outset an idiosyncratic exploration of gestural abstraction and personal references.
Miyamoto was born in Tokyo and has lived and worked in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood since 1964. From 1968, the artist responded to and critiqued the innovations of Minimalism by emphasizing process, material, and performance. Her involvement as an early member of New York’s A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) Gallery, the first all-female collective in the United States, and the estab-lishment of her own Gallery Onetwentyeight in 1986, underscore the importance of feminism, collaboration, and community in her practice.
This survey—the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition—brings together for the first time key bodies of Miyamoto’s work, including her early paintings and drawings from 1968–1973, as well as her breakthrough string constructions, begun in 1972, and her kimono series that she initiated in 1987 and continued through the 2000s. By highlighting critical moments of experimentation, the exhibition traces the conceptual complexity and visual range of an artist who has challenged and broad-ened the legacy of post-1960s international art. #kazukomiyamoto

Gallery 1
The late 1960s and 1970s were among Miyamoto’s most fertile and important periods of production. Trained as a painter, the artist graduated from the Art Students League in 1968 and quickly found her footing in Manhattan’s multicultural Lower East Side, setting up her first live-work studio at 117 Hester Street. Immersed in New York’s down-town avant-garde milieu, Miyamoto began to question conventional methods and values of art-making, and art’s consumption, disposability, and display.
In Miyamoto’s innovative string constructions (1972–1979) the artist plays with the parameters of abstraction, architecture, and scale. Undermining the rigid geometry and mechanical repetition of modernism, she instead introduces a human factor and, with it, the possibility of error, chance, and ephemerality. These dynamic spatial compositions—site-specific interventions made from industrial cotton strings systematically hand-stretched between a constellation of nails hammered into the floor and wall—were made based upon the artist’s experience in a given space.
Her first pieces were bi-dimensional and featured simple lines of black string nailed along the mortar joints of her studio’s brick walls. They became more complex and intricately shaped. Several important string constructions have been remade es-pecially for this exhibition and are displayed together here for the first time, including Male (1974), her first three-dimensional piece; Untitled (1975), an early work shown at A.I.R. Gallery in one of five solo exhibitions the artist had there; and Sail (1979), which, until now, has not been on view since it was originally displayed at Nobe Gallery the year it was created.
Even in this early phase of her career, Miyamoto confronted the roles of in- tellectual versus manual labor, a question she explored in her parallel work with Sol LeWitt, whom she assisted in the execution of his early open cube sculptures and wall drawings. This idea is made evident in a nearby photo- collage, Stunt (1982), which documents Miyamoto performing in her studio, two in-progress LeWitt sculptures behind her, juxtaposing their strict geometry with the corporeality of the human body.

Gallery 2
During her initial years in New York, Miyamoto developed a distinctive visual lan-guage. Working within a vocabulary of Minimalism—geometry, industrial materials, seriality, monochrome color palette—yet subverting its strict economy of means and mechanical production, Miyamoto introduced an element of imprecision into her work.
In an early painting, Untitled (1972), seen here, Miyamoto incorporated enamel spray paint to form a dot pattern intersecting with an underlying grid of straight lines on the canvas. Her choice of spray paint as a material allows for the edges of the dots to soften and fade in a more free-form approach. The piece is reminiscent of an earlier charcoal and acrylic work, Go (1971). Both evoke the game of the same name, which originated in China and is popular in Japan, in a direct reference to her cultur-al heritage. The piece may also be read as autobiographical; as a child in Tokyo, Miya- moto’s mother ran a game- house.
Around this time, and for many years subsequently, Miyamoto employed her own body as a central agent in the conceptualization of her art, imbuing it with a personal quality. In String around a cylinder of my height (1977), on view nearby, the height of the sculpture equals the artist’s. Originally conceived as a pair, the coun-terpart (now lost) represented the height of Miyamoto’s partner at the time. Such connections to the artist’s body and past life experiences anticipate her later perfor-mative works, including her impersonations of different marginalized figures that she played out on the streets of New York, her dance rituals, and her kimono series (1987–2000s), on view in the next gallery.

Gallery 3
A large part of Miyamoto’s practice since 1980 has revived the modernist readymade, infusing found materials and artifacts with autobiographical and historical moments that have shaped her world. Her kimono series (1987-2000s) is particularly notable, exploring the signification within archival traces and the pliant nature of personal identity. From a young age, Miyamoto studied traditional Japanese dance in which she wore the kimono, a garment that she also learned to construct and sew as a child in Tokyo. Considering a career in textile design, she briefly enrolled in the Fashion In- stitute of Technology before returning to the fine arts, which she regarded asa more liberating path.
Miyamoto often uses found objects-umbrellas, twigs, cardboard, a fur coat, a plant, her dog. a photograph of her father-as props in her performances. The kimono has been an essential and recurring motif that served to express aspects of her own history and cultural identity. Wedoling Klmono (2004) is transcribed with love poems by renowned ninth-century Japanese female poet Ono no Komachi in the artist’s handwriting. Bowery IMllsslon Kimono (1990) exposes the socioeconomic inequities taking place in Miyamoto’s neighborhood in the 1990s. (The year the artist made this kimono was the same year the Bowery Mission-the city’s second oldest
shelter-added services for women.) Others re-engage past experiences-Pholo Kimono (late 1990s) features black-and-white photographs from the 1998 performance Kazuko lin the SnOw. The kimono works span many forms and materials, and combine the apP appropriation of antique kimono and undergarments-Wedding Klinmono (2004), Target Klimono (2005)-kimono passed down from the artist’s parents-Women on a Sep Ladder (1987)-as well as ephemeral, intimate, and delicate kimono newly constructed from newspaper, silk, or gauze–Paper Kimono (1990), Plant Kimoino (1991), IPlink Gauze Kimono (the 1990s). To emphasize their sculptural qualities, the kimono works
hang in space in the gallery, rather than against the wall, and are complemented by related works on paper as well as selections of paintings and drawings from Miyamo to’s oeuvre that echo the artist’s formal strategies.

References

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