An Earth Whose Center Isn’t Europe : LACMA’s ‘A Primal Spirit’ tries to show how recent Japanese sculpture cannot be understood from the perspective of Western art

Remember elementary school, where a world map hung on every classroom wall? More than likely, that graphic representation of the Earth’s topography was a Mercator projection, named after the 16th-Century Flemish geographer, mathematician and cartographer Gerardus Mercator. In 1568 Mercator drew a picture of the continents and their relative positions that, with certain alterations, would be in wide use for the next 400 years.

The great cartographer’s conception was positively brilliant. It was also quite wrong. In order to transfer the spherical drawing on a globe to the flat surface of a map, Mercator devised a clever mathematical scheme. The map that resulted beautifully preserved the shapes of continents and oceans, but at the cost of an incorrect impression of their relative size and position. The map we all have come to picture instantaneously in our minds is way out of whack.

There’s no reason to assume Mercator was being malicious when he drew this skewed picture. He wasn’t gleefully attempting a global prank. From his perspective, such a projection made perfect sense. It looked right.

His perspective, quite simply, was that of a European man living at the dawn of a boisterous era of great colonial conquest. Africa, India, the Orient, the New World (both north and south)--from his home in Duisburg, Germany, Mercator looked out on the expanding world and, on a piece of paper, projected what he saw. Is it any wonder that the map he drew to record this perception would locate Europe smack in the center of the picture--and make it a good deal larger than life, to boot--while non-Continental locales would be spread out toward the periphery? The Mercator projection is something like a global target with a European bull’s-eye.

I thought of the Mercator projection the other day, while in the galleries of the County Museum of Art. The large exhibition, “A Primal Spirit: Ten Contemporary Japanese Sculptors,” wrestles with Eurocentrism. Curator Howard N. Fox has gone to great lengths to show how recent Japanese sculpture cannot be understood if approached from perspectives common to Western art. The show wants to disrupt our Mercator view of the contemporary-art map.

Or, to use the currently fashionable terminology of Deconstructivism, “A Primal Spirit” means to decenter our perceptions. The show acknowledges that these 10 artists represent neither an organized movement nor the only type of work now being done by artists in Japan. But it does attempt to demonstrate the existence of an important and convincing art, which, when seen through a lens shaped by Western culture, does not disclose its content. The “primal spirit” of the title might be described as a quintessential “Japaneseness” in modern Japanese art, a way of ordering perception that simply has no counterpoint in the West.

However, for me, the most compelling piece in the show also happens to throw this premise into considerable doubt. The sculpture is Toshikatsu Endo’s “Lotus II,” a waist-high ring of charred wood, clay, steel and water that is both visually seductive and conceptually disarming. Perhaps 12 feet in diameter, its conventional gathering of elemental qualities of earth, air, water and fire invokes ceremonial rituals.

The weathered enclosure seems designed to mark out a significant place. Yet, after marshaling its forces to viscerally entice, the sculpture becomes unexpectedly disturbing by refusing full access to that inner sanctum. Endo has carefully calibrated the scale of the piece to make its mostly visible interior finally inaccessible to the spectator.

Leaning over the wide, waist-high wall, you can see only so far into the ceremonial volume, never fully penetrating its ever-present, always unattainable heart. The interior space is made seamless and constant by the circular form of the ring, but in the vicinity of where you stand, that space inevitably disappears behind the separating wall. No matter where you move to try to grasp the whole, you are defeated. Your mind fully “knows” the hidden place, but it keeps slipping out of reach nonetheless.

Knowledge is a lot like that. Endo’s sculpture incorporates an inescapable, structural tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy: Here, the fragment is contained in the whole, and the whole is contained in the fragment. This concept does find echoes among Western ideas--for example, in the perceptual gestalts so important to American Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s. Still, it is entirely possible that this and other sculptures surveyed by this ambitious exhibition evince a sensibility that is indeed uniquely Japanese. Who’s to say?

More to the point, Endo’s sculpture throws the exhibition’s premise into question for a reason much more easily identifiable than trying to isolate the purity of thoughts. Across the patio from the Anderson Building at LACMA, where “A Primal Spirit” is on view, is the soaring Shin’enkan Pavilion, which houses the museum’s historical collection of traditional Japanese art. There, you’ll notice something significant: The collection contains no sculpture--at least, no sculpture in the modern sense that we, in the West, have come to understand.

Like Western sculpture before the 20th Century, Japanese sculpture traditionally partook of functions fully integrated within the conventional life of society. Such things as three-dimensional devotional figures and carved reliefs designed to be ornamental, especially as architectural decoration, are abundant in the pavilion. From the perspective of traditional Japanese culture, the idea that sculpture could be regarded as an autonomous entity in itself is unthinkable.

That idea is peculiar to the modern West, where it fueled generations of avant-garde artists. We have come to regard the idiom of gallery- and museum-bound art as perfectly normal, but it is in fact an oddity unrepeated by any other culture, including Western culture before the modern era. This contradiction was most eloquently articulated by Carl Andre, in his great sculpture of the 1960s and early 1970s. When he stacked bricks inside the art precinct of a gallery or museum, his orderly volumes had to be regarded as sculptural ideas. Outside, on the street, they were just ordinary stacks of bricks.

Like any American or European artist of the day, the Japanese artists in “A Primal Spirit” apparently take this distinction for granted. It’s fine with me if they do. But the fact that they do also means that this Japanese sculpture cannot represent a way of ordering perception that has no counterpoint in the West. The idiom itself

is of Western origin, and its embrace by these artists an emphatic sign of its global reach.

Laudably, “A Primal Spirit” strives to shake us free from our egocentric and ethnocentric illusions, and endeavors to dislodge Western culture from its habitual Mercator projection of the world. Finally, however, the show doesn’t decenter our illusions at all; it simply tries to re center them, in Japan. One privileged ethnocentrism is set aside in deference to another.

The artists, meanwhile, seem to be up to other things. Check out Tadashi Kawarmata’s huge, shell-like wooden structure, which follows the exterior form of the Anderson Building without ever touching it. Tellingly, the art museum gives his sculpture form, even though it keeps hands off. Elsewhere, the three pyramidal piles of kindling and ceramic blocks in Takamasa Kuniyasu’s “Return to Self” are like giant funerary pyres, which consume the available space inside the gallery. Kuniyasu’s and Kawarmata’s sculptures are conscious of their dilemma. They make me think it’s reasonable to wonder whether non-Western nations can really modernize themselves, without becoming westernized in the process.