ART REVIEW : Mineko Grimmer’s Sculptures as Entrancing as Ever

In the eye of the storm that was Los Angeles’ 1987 art fair, a small sculpture made of modest, natural materials stopped the glitz-saturated crowd in its tracks. An oasis of calm formed around the work, a hushed aura that revived the battered senses of the fair’s visitors.

The restorative powers of Mineko Grimmer’s work were, perhaps, even bolstered by the fair’s surrounding array of bloated intentions. But it would be hard to imagine any context in which Grimmer’s work wouldn’t slow one’s breath, relax one’s pace and draw one’s undivided attention to the subtleties of sound and shadow.

“Palisade,” Grimmer’s current, site-specific installation at the Mesa College Art Gallery (through June 8), is, characteristically, fully entrancing. As Grimmer states in the show’s accompanying video and catalogue--both as finely crafted as the art they describe--her work is part sculpture, part kinetic art and part performance. It is a graceful, elegant environment that “performs” itself, with each moment of its life span distinct and unrepeatable.

In “Palisade,” evenly spaced, raw wood beams about 9 feet tall form an enclosure in the shape of an incomplete circle. Inside the defined space sits a square, shallow trough of water, framed in wood and surrounded by a carpet of small, smooth pebbles. Stretching diagonally across the pool, from one corner to its opposite, Grimmer has suspended two piano wires. Beneath the wires and aligned perpendicular to them, sits a length of brass rod on a thick wooden stump.

From waist to shoulder height, slender bamboo rods jut inward from the beams of the palisade’s exterior wall. Each protrudes at a slightly different angle, and they coalesce in the center as an airy, floating thicket. Just above the highest of these bamboo rods hangs the heart of the installation, a pyramidal mass of pebbles and ice, hung with its point downward.

As the block melts, water and stones fall through the bamboo thicket into the pool below, occasionally hitting one of the wires or the rod along the way. Each such block lasts four or five hours, and, in the course of each day’s performance, the elements of the installation collaborate with time, temperature and chance to compose a unique musical score.

Water drips gently over the bamboo, becoming audible only as it joins the larger pool, and sending ripples to the corners of the trough and reflections to dance on the palisade walls and gallery ceiling. Single stones tap their way through the bamboo before their simple splash, sometimes preceded by the prolonged twang of a piano wire. When a cluster of pebbles releases itself, the pace intensifies, the rhythm grows more complex and the silence afterward, more pronounced.

Silence plays as great a role as sound in Grimmer’s work, as it does in the work of composer John Cage, whom she cites as an influence. In both artists’ work, silence is less an empty interlude than a malleable form, one that quickly becomes charged with anticipation and filled with the ambient sounds of everyday occurence that, typically, pass unnoticed.

Chance, another mainstay from the shared vocabulary of Cage and Grimmer, guides “Palisade” with a free, invisible hand. Every day the gallery is open, the frozen stone mass is replaced, and every few days, the stones that have fallen into the trough are gathered again, but even following this cyclic maintenance of the work, no two moments of its life are ever the same, either visually or aurally. The basic structure of “Palisade” remains a constant, as does the force of gravity that helps activate it, but the evolving shape and sound of the work are left to the variables of temperature, humidity and, most of all, chance.

Random gestures and patterns have appeared with some frequency in the art of the past century, but even in the work of such worshipers of the chance occurence as Duchamp or Arp, chance has been more of a medium than a message. It has been integral to the process of a work’s creation, but usually not to its fixed, finite and static product. In Grimmer’s work, chance presides throughout the entire duration of a work, for the work itself is continually in-process.

Grimmer’s choice of the palisade form, traditionally used for defensive enclosures, takes on added meaning in light of her work’s relationship to chance. The palisade’s wooden stakes embrace an inner realm where chance and spontaneity reign. They distinguish--and protect--this realm from that beyond, the everyday world of order, control and rational thought.

Visitors to the environment that is “Palisade” tend to stand at the opening of the circle of posts, on the brink between the two realms, but it is toward the inner world, that of the delicate spirit and spontaneous soul, that Grimmer pulls us, rapt and willing.

The formal simplicity of “Palisade” has its own, deep-seated appeal. Grimmer, born and raised in northern Japan and now living in Los Angeles, respects the purity and honesty of her raw, organic materials. They are as true to nature as the cyclic quality of “Palisade,” where ice melts into water then is frozen once again, where stones are gathered together, left to disperse, then gathered again.

The rich, meditative quality of stones in traditional Japanese gardening infuses Grimmer’s work with an added layer of significance.