Review : Sculpture at Its Prime in ‘Primal Spirit’ : An exhibition of 10 Japanese sculptors at the County Museum of Art is an original piece of work

When asked why he didn’t paint from nature, Jackson Pollock replied, “I am nature.” Any of the 10 contemporary Japanese sculptors in “A Primal Spirit” could say the same even though it’s hard to imagine them echoing Pollock’s arrogance.

The exhibition is quietly spectacular and a triumph for its curator, Howard Fox, with its citadels of logs, dancing tree-trunks and serene stone circles. In organizational terms it is a highly original piece of business, ranking close to the museum’s “German Expressionist Sculpture” in its revelation of art we didn’t even know was there.

Which is not to claim absolute originality for the work itself. Anyone who has ever seen a Zen and garden, bonsai tree, Raku pot or tea house will find something familiar here. So will anyone who has ever seen an Abstract Expressionist painting or attended one of those European summer extravaganzas of contemporary art with their huge site-specific installations. There are apparent Western precedents for this work in everybody from Carl Andre to Alice Aycock.

How could it be otherwise? The modern West has admiringly soaked up Oriental art ever since the Impressionists fell in love with prints from the floating world. Franz Kline’s paintings used to be compared with Far Eastern calligraphy. California artists such as Robert Irwin and Ed Moses would be in big trouble without Zen.

In a world of easy travel and instantaneous communication, how could these Japanese artists not know and absorb such aspects of Western art as seem pertinent to their own?

Kazuo Kenmochi’s installation includes a mound-shaped 40-foot wall of wooden-crate detritus randomly painted in dark pitch. Its structure suggests armor plate, its shape the aftermath of destruction. Its backdrop is a checkered wall of painted-over landscape photographs in deep brown and fire orange that strongly echo the work of West Germany’s Anselm Kiefer. An inescapable connection is drawn between the havoc Germany brought down on itself in World War II and the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima.

Kenmochi’s work resembles the rest in its evocation of large, sometimes devastating forces but is singular in its allusion to a contemporary event and nearly unique in its incorporation of painting.

At first glance Isamu Wakabayashi appears as a painter. His “Sulfuret Garden--A Distant Imagery” is made up of a series of hanging copper panels, some blank, some bearing a rough dark rectangle that looks painted. It’s not. Shapes are formed from pitting and darkening caused by a chemical reaction between the metal and applied sulfur. In the center of the room stand two masses shaped like cotton bales stained with sulfur yellow. There is a hint that the flat copper shapes come from contact with the bales, creating a byplay of substance and shadow.

Wakabayashi brings us closer to the essence of “A Primal Spirit” in his involvement with the elemental forces of nature--the Earth, Air, Fire and Water of the I-Ching and astrology. The general genius of these artists comes from maintaining the ancient Oriental belief that humankind is a part of nature, neither its master or its steward but simply a link in the cosmic chain.

Universalism has traditionally led Japanese artists to seek expression through a kind of anti-originality. It’s well-known that the Japanese aesthetic makes no particular distinction between art, craft, and decoration or, for that matter, between the aesthetic worth of something man-made and that of a particularly fetching rock or tree.

Far from resulting in a debased visual culture, the attitude has produced one of the rare civilizations where so-called craft objects possess such extraordinary quality they are self-evidently works of art. Much here requires a double-take before we’re sure it wasn’t phenomenally formed by quirky collaboration between humans, time and the weather.

Shigeo Toya’s remarkable “Woods” shows serried ranks of 28 whitened man-tall wooden uprights that seem to have gotten their shapes from centuries of erosion, dry rot, termites, lightning bolts and hungry worms. Some unmistakable presence haunts each post, as alive and awesome as an ancestral spook. Talk about animism.

Looking at Chuichi Fuji’s tormented tree trunks lies somewhere between watching a gardener artfully wire a Japanese black pine and witnessing the antics of the Pilobolus dancers. Massive hairy bark trunks do deep abdominal bends over one another. Amusing, ominous and philosophical, they are at one moment like something out of “Fantasia” and the next a deep rumination on the nature of paradox. How Fuji manages to make pretzel bends in great cypress and cedar is a mystery that doesn’t bother much. He’s so artful it looks like it just happened.

Few of these artists have big reputations even at home. Toshikatsu Endo has cracked the ranks of the international mainstream and maybe that’s not so good. He’s about the only artist in the show whose work betrays Western-style self-consciousness. His untitled ring of stone is distinctive enough to stand apart from similar work by Richard Long. But Endo forces the issue by having three of the stones cast in bronze. Instead of triggering the insight of a haiku verse, the move feels tinny.

Even so, Endo joins the others in the attitude of submissive detachment that lends the work its amazing clout. Because it appears to have somehow happened spontaneously we have no sense of some massive human ego trying to force its vision of things on us. Nothing gets between us and the aesthetic experience. We have the refreshing sense that we have discovered and somehow created it ourself.

Artists here who don’t play at being nature undertake the role of the humble craftsman. Emiko Tokushige is the only woman on board and she assumes the role of a basket-maker fashioning objects from palm fiber, rope, cotton, old stockings and whatnot. At a glance her big pieces could be basketry beanbags and the little stuff tiny containers. It only takes a second to see the beanbags as creatures from the atavistic ooze. Purely abstract as they are, they could be shiny little rhinos basking malevolently among the dinosaurs. Grouped small pieces have the aura of demons with the crackling hair of madmen. Tokushige stands among the strongest talents here.

Kimio Tsuchiya plays the eccentric carpenter in a 19-foot-wide fan of lumber scraps he calls “Silence.” It’s impressive when artists get the title right. His “Landscape” looks like a bunch of broken log slices stacked so carelessly against the wall that some have fallen down. But it’s sculpture without doubt. The effect is like those stone groupings in sand gardens that appear both accidental and inevitable. These guys have a knack for inevitability.

Three remaining artists produce a kind of sculpture-as-architecture. Tadashi Kawamata’s raw plank piece crawls across the bridge of the museum’s central court looking for links to the real world and its inner rhythms. Takamasa Kuniyasu’s piece of criss-crossed logs towers in a tall gallery like the battlements of an ancient castle in a samurai film. Rather threatening. It takes on another twist because of myriad small bricks inserted between logs. It makes one aware of ones microscopic inner workings in its own metaphor of cellular growth,

Koichi Ebizuka fools us again by coming on like a builder of traditional Japanese architecture with its low porches, simple uprights and virgin wood circles filled with pebbles. In the end it is sculpture about a journey through changing experiences of vertical, horizontal, straight and crooked, mass and plane. There’s a charming sense of romance about it.

And about the rest. What these artists have really achieved here is a new International Japanese style. Its distinction doesn’t come from formal invention. It rather re-invests the egotistical, chilly international mainstream with passion, poetry and romance.

* A TALK WITH TWO ARTISTS: Please turn the page.