Bamboo Sculpture Creates ‘Conversation’

There’s a conversation going on at the Koplin Gallery, but the tongues doing the talking are made of bamboo. The words are the sound of pebbles and water plopping into a shallow pool.

Artist Mineko Grimmer has installed a large, minimalistic sound sculpture, called “Symposium,” that causes the conversation.

The “speakers” of “Symposium” are four 8-foot-tall open wooden columns surrounding a square pool. Suspended above the pool is an inverted pyramid of pebbles frozen in ice that drop into the water as the ice melts. But before reaching bottom with a plop or a ping, the stones usually strike layers of bamboo branches jutting out horizontally from each column like long, wagging tongues.

The conversation is quiet, interspersed with stretches of silence. The atmosphere is contemplative, serene.

“The columns are like people . . . It’s people talking to each other,” Grimmer said the other day. The Japanese-born, Los Angeles-based artist is showing “Symposium” along with other recent works at the West Hollywood gallery (8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd.) through April 16. The gallery also features painted reliefs by Barbara Schwartz.

“Symposium,” recently shown at an annex of the Whitney Museum in New York, embodies many aspects of Grimmer’s oeuvre, one that blends East and West sensibilities with properties of physics, the passage of time, the continuous cycle of life and principles of transformation.

In “Symposium,” melting ice represents transformation that occurs “in the moment” or “actual time,” Grimmer said. “It’s quick change that is happening while you’re watching.” But large rocks hanging within each column symbolize “stopped time.” Erosion that occurred over a long period, before the rocks ever came close to a gallery, changed their shapes from angular to smooth.

A recycling process alludes to the cycle of birth and death. Grimmer said she makes new ice blocks with the fallen pebbles of former pyramids.

“New life is born and dies,” she said.

Physics comes into play in the way gravity causes the chatter of falling matter and balance holds the structure together: The bamboo branches would tip the columns over were they not weighted down with heavy rocks.

Chance takes part in Grimmer’s art too. In “Symposium,” “some of the pebbles hit all the (bamboo) layers, or some hit none at all,” she said. “They fall unpredictably and at random,” yet, like nature, they seem to follow a sort of pattern. (Grimmer’s ice sculptures, some table-top size, are sold with a metal mold to make the ice pyramids in addition to a pyramid with pebbles cast in resin for permanent display.)

Eastern influences in Grimmer’s work include the yin-yang life cycle of “Symposium.” Its meditative aura alludes to Zen Buddhist philosophies, Grimmer acknowledged.

“People are mesmerized or hypnotized by the sound or motions, and meantime they are taken away from daily life in a kind of meditation.” But, she said, she doesn’t consciously refer to these themes nor feel that her work is confined to them. “The concept of the continuous cycle of life is a universal idea.”

Yet, said Grimmer, nee Watanabe, in other ways her Eastern roots have influenced her work.

As a youth in Northern Japan, she lived among Shinto shrines, pagodas and other structures that are often recalled in her architectonic constructions. In addition, she builds her sculptures without nails (joints are made with dowels), having informally studied traditional Japanese carpentry.

Grimmer, 38, began her formal art training at Iwate University in Japan, continuing her studies at Otis/Parsons after moving here in 1981. She says Western influences on her work include the geometric, fluid and precise sculpture of Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. Musician John Cage, who, like herself, incorporates the sounds of silence in his compositions, also made a great impression.

But just what does the mix of noise and nothingness say in the “Symposium?”

“You have to listen!” the artist said with a smile.