by Fraser Hibbitt for this Carl Kruse Blog
One large room seen through from the streetside of Saville Row. A family, ponderous, in front of what looks like a black-stained curtain tied about a pillar and attached to a large box. The draping falls on the floor stiff and meticulous. I walked three doors down and entered Hauser & Wirth, and was told promptly to go back to the window because there was a door there. There was. A heavy door that blended into the building. I enter, there is hardly a sound and the woman sitting at the counter doesn’t look up from the desk. The room is large and light. The walls are white. Behind The Magic Box, as the curtain entangled box is called, there is a smaller space adjoining the main room.ser
There are few artworks here. A large roll of paper, painted with a horizontal black strip, runs the length of a wall, bending inwards to follow the room. A disk in perspective, and Takesada’s compositions of vinyl glue. In the adjoined room, there are two delicate creations of string and wood, looking like rudimentary machines or antique instruments. They are left to speak for themselves. A freedom to evaluate in media res, like so much of contemporary art. No one stands there thinking a specialist knowledge is required, or, rather, no one can think so; I am sure many do. If I’m not careful, I might stumble into some ready-made meaning, some epiphany over shifting boundaries, liminality, tensions fraught with becoming, that I am sure will damn the whole thing. Perhaps that is why, sat motionless in Mayfair, the desk man and woman barely oblige the guest; they too are part of the exhibition and don’t want to spur that kind of thing on. Don’t say a thing!
Two pieces, Stream and The Magic Box, are from 1978 and 1988. The rest, with the exception of Work-P (2009-2013), are from the last four years. The latest are created with a medium Matsutani has experimented with since the 60s, poly-vinyl glue. He pours it onto paper, heats it the hairdryers, or dries it with fans, and then inflates it by sticking a straw into it and blowing through it. The effect of the glue is organic, three-dimensional, and textured. The quality of chance spontaneity. A relationship of a draughtsmen out of work and playing with his craft. They appear as scenes spied upon through a microscope, eager for connotation and interpretation.
Mastutani’s glue work saw his acceptance into the Gutai Art Association back in the 60s, a Japanese Avant-Garde group formed by Jiro Yoshihara in the Hanshin region in the mid-1950s. Against figurative art, against formal abstraction, the Gutai group focussed on ‘making it new’. Making it new with experimental techniques of applying paint, mediums, above or below genre and classification, and to present it new, in unconventional exhibitions. Mastutani had come into contact with group by the late 50s but had been told by Yoshihara that his work ‘had been done before’. That was, until he experimented with the glue.
Still working by hand, without a copy assistant, Mastutani has generated vinyl-glue compositions for over 60 years. As with a lot of post-war Art, the experience of art became paramount, about a new comprehension of composition, and for the artist a way of unravelling internality. Reactions to Matsutani’s glue work were half awe and repulsion: mainly women, he says, were repulsed by the bulging forms slashed open, the implicit violence of subject, reminding viewers of incised pregnant bellies, buttocks, and breasts.
Here on Saville Row, a child prances around The Magic Box, The Stream runs around the corner, opening onto the composition Germination, a likely protrusion. Age has mellowed the severity of a slashed eyelid and instead we find these compositions that easily bring to mind new life, blind mechanism, an unalterable willing to the surface. But I am stumbling now. It feels tame, unchallenging, balanced, hence the ability to stumble. The symmetrical wooden mechanisms that hang on the wall are delicate, so easy to crush, the delicacy of the whole thing, the mechanical day and night functionalism in these machines has a sleepy nihilism that instinctively makes you want to shout some nonsense. Input energy, output function, rattle on, a kind of corporate art genre – you could easily find these works in a meeting room. Still, I couldn’t find it unpleasant, but I doubt any artist wants ‘pleasant’ close to their work, and that’s the point, hence corporate art, the obvious child of pop art. How would it be somewhere else? Not in white-walled Mayfair? There is a reason why artists are/were/should be meticulous with their exhibitions, but perhaps there is no more room to shift boundaries.
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This Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.org
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include The Fermi Paradox, Knut Hamsun, and Moondog.
Also find Carl Kruse on his main blog at https://carlkruse.com