Hobsbawm pegged the beginning of this period at 1914, the onset of World War I. He saw it as ending in 1991, when the Cold War face-off between great powers that had shaped the world during the previous four decades, officially assumed a new, less confrontational form. In coining his phrase, Hobsbawm was thinking of extremes of violent conflict and mass suffering, extremes of ideology, of discovery in science and innovation in technology, of wealth and poverty. Looking at the world today, I doubt that The Age of Extremes is behind us. Seino's art makes no overt reference to such issues, yet it evokes extremes —especially extreme heat — in almost every recent work. He works under a critical prejudice persisting in the cultures of East and West that views the arts of the kiln as limited intellectually by their own distinguished tradition of high craft and the practical value of much that they produce. But Seino's work belongs in the context of the most serious sculpture produced internationally during the past 50 years. Its implication of extremes, as well as its intelligent deployment of materials, and its annexation of silence, earn it this place.Warfare never really ceased during the Age of Extremes, and it continues today, despite the common use in English of the term "postwar," meaning after World War II. Certainly the world wars of the 20th century were more devastating than any conflict of past ages. But the potential for all-out nuclear war that cast its shadow on human imagination during the era of the American and Russian standoff threatened the world with extremes of destruction,
suffering and death never envisioned before, except in various apocalyptic mythologies. Extreme heat — vaporizing heat — remains one of the few signatures of nuclear peril that everyone can comprehend. At this writing, the presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation have just signed an agreement to step back verifiably from the posture of nuclear confrontation that, in terms of the weapons systems and their control, has not changed since the 1950s, despite the widely shared view that the Cold War ended almost 20 years ago. (Many legislative obstacles remain on the American side before the treaty associated with this agreement can be ratified. Experts on nuclear technology have declared it a largely symbolic move in any case.)Most Americans who lived through the nuclear standoff of the Cold War have drifted into the consoling illusion that the nuclear threat — barring a monstrous act of terrorism — is a thing of the past. We literally cannot live with the fear and helplessness that acknowledgment of the threat entails. So denial sets in, and presses the truth of our situation down to the level of our unconscious awareness of the world.When Franz Kafka wrote, "art is an ax to break the frozen sea within us," he might have been thinking of just the sort of unconscious paralysis I am trying to describe, which denial of history and its terrors induce.These comments might seem to veer far from Seino's art but they do not. When I say that his work "annexes silence,
" I mean that it links the inherent soundlessness of static sculpture with the void of speech — even of inward speech — created by our repressed awareness of living in a world under constant threat of incineration. How does the work accomplish this? First, by cutting off language. In a 2009 gallery exhibition in Nagoya, Seino presented an installation of 23 elements, 7 on one long wall of a room, and 16-in two parallel rows-on the opposite wall. Similar but not identical in form, these elements jutted horizontally, perpendicular to the wall, 15 of them at about eye level, the rest about knee-high. By their spacing and similarity, they recalled common practices of minimalist and post-minimalist art. But where sculpture by artists such as Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys or Jannis Kounellis might handle space or the internal rhythms of a work similarly, Seino's forms not only remain untitled, they elude description: no nouns or adjectives specify their irregularities, although they all suggest charred remains — of what, we cannot guess.Many of Seino’s sculptures, whether in clay or in the heat-resistant carbon he has favored in recent years, share this quality of belonging to the aftermath of something. Inevitably, Seino’s Japanese background suggests the aftermath of the only nuclear attacks the world has seen so far: the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Debate still rages among American historians and others over whether the true necessity and function of these detonations may have been to force Japan’s surrender or to demonstrate a new American supremacy to the rest of the world, especially the Soviet Union.) Seino’s art, unlike that of some younger Japanese artists, would seem to exclude such topical references, but I believe it introduces them by means that only a kiln- and casting-oriented sculptor could. The affinity of some of Seino’s art to that of the Mono-ha tendency in Japanese sculpture of the late ‘60s is superficial. His turn from ceramic to iron, bronze and graphite as his preferred materials confirms this.
These materials have enabled him to produce small sculptures of unaccountably massive presence. Like the iron forms that Richard Serra has pounded to an unearthly density using a drop forge, Seino’s much smaller sculptures often give the impression of having been shaped by inestimable forces. His assembling of forms into regular arrays or series sometimes responds to the space of a room or a site and sometimes serves as a way of highlighting the possibly uncontrollable differences among seemingly repetitive shapes and surfaces. This logic of arrangement he shares with sculptors in America and Europe.But all of these decisions in Seino’s art began to take on meanings beyond intensifying the viewer’s attention to unnoticed material details when he started using graphite as a primary material. He explained in conversation that he uses this substance in part because it can literally be cooked away, and he has become interested in disappearance. His interest in disappearance appears logical in retrospective because his sculpture has for many years focused openly on the addition of things to the world.Consider the additive structure of so many of his clay sculptures from earlier decades: they direct our attention to their own coming into existence, as products of materials and forces and as the fulfillment of a structural logic, such as stacking or echoing the boundaries of an enclosure.In the past 45 years or so, much non-figurative sculpture internationally has concerned itself with the addition of materials and meaning to the world and their erasure from it. Seino has refreshed the impact of these concerns through his choice of graphite as a material, together with his work’s pervasive reference to extreme heat, discussed earlier in this essay. We think of graphite and charcoal as primary media of drawing. And in offering embossed or chance-inscribed sheets of graphite as drawings in themselves,
Seino seems to take us inside the mark that we see as the traditional unit of graphic expression. The choice of a material that appears to merge mark and surface serves as his fundamental graphic move, initiating a new relationship between drawing and sculpture. (Similarly, his printing of photographic images on graphite surfaces proposes a new relation between drawing and photography.)But, in another move so subtle that it easily passes unnoticed, Seino has adopted an elemental material that is on everyone’s mind: carbon. Every day we hear news reports that touch on “carbon tax,” one’s “carbon footprint,” the “carbon cycle” — all referring to dimensions of the climate crisis that threatens to alter the world irreversibly through a gain in global temperature.
Seino sculpture at Soker: Next door to Huffman's show, Japanese sculptor Shoich Seino presents wall-mounted pieces at Don Soker Contemporary Art. Decoration and apocalyptic overtones meet in this work as they almost never do in American sculpture. (Note: The gallery will be closed this weekend but will reopen the Seino show during normal business hours Thursday through May 22.)
Two kinds of objects make up Seino's exhibition: roughly cubic forms, sectioned into smooth and rough halves, that hang about waist high, and sequenced small panels of black interrupted by similar forms with a coppery finish.
Seino casts these elements at extremely high temperatures. They combine copper and a ceramic graphite compound of relatively recent invention that finds uses in the aerospace and nuclear power industries.
Modern technology has annexed forces long associated with mythic visions of hell. Something of that hellish echo comes across in Seino's sculptures. The most rough-hewn ones look like relics of catastrophe. Inevitably, they bring to mind the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and perhaps, in the American context, the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The panel-like pieces make quieter reference to Japanese folding screens and personal Buddhist shrines which, when not in use, enfold radiant images in darkness.
The quietism of the latter series makes a fine foil for the incinerated look of the "cubes."
The first correspondence I had from Mr. Seino Shoichi was postmarked Nov. 13, 1978. It was an invitation for a group exhibition being held at the Muramatsu Gallery (Ginza, Tokyo) from Nov. 27 to Dec. 2. This exhibition was the third meeting of Hanshakei (Engl. - Reflectance). I had the opportunity to go to Tokyo while this exhibition was being held and remember climbing the steps to the Muramatsu Gallery, relying on the instructions printed on the invitation. I had absolutely no knowledge of the makeup of this group nor the four artists who comprised it. However, judging from Seino's home address in Nagakute-cho,a suburb of Nagoya (he had sent the invitation), I assumed he had heard somewhere that I was interested in contemporary art, and that was why I had received the invitation.
At the time, the work he had done was an "objet" made of black pottery. It was oblong in shape and entitled "Pool". Was it that the planes which protruded symmetrically like wings appeared to be on the surface of water? Also, in the center were two forms which looked like a pair of feet. The two forms were touching each other and arranged in the opposite direction so that they looked just like the feet of a swimmer making a turn.
Leaving aside the works of the other three members, as I left the gallery I remember wondering to myself how Seino's work meshed with this group called Hanshakei. I didn't understand their work enough, but could this be a group which hoped to express in artistic form a quick and alert response to the physical world without preconceptions? I don't remember meeting Seino at the time, so perhaps we passed each other without knowing it.
Later in 1982, I attended an exhibition of his new work at Gallery Westbeth in Nagoya. It was his first solo exhibition and it was then that I first met him. The work was fired and made of dolomite. It was white and rectangular in shape. The work was an installation which stood completely against the walls to the left and right. It stood about chest level in height and there were two added legs in the direction of the major axis.
Walking through the gap which maintained the symmetry, and then stopping right in the middle of it, it resembled banks of snow left behind on the sides of a road that had been cleared of snow. It seemed as if one had been caught in the hallucination that one's body was placed in the clarity which echoed the spaces of the Snow Country. At this time,
Seino exhibited an installation work of fired rectangular shapes that were piled up in a fixed, regular manner like stairs.It
gave one the impression of part of the clean and pure space within an old Grecian structure.
It was at that time that I first met Seino and directly spoke with him. Some people might feel that he is taciturn because of the manner in which he speaks -in a somewhat low voice, weighing his words. However, this is how he has become accustomed to speaking, cutting off any unnecessary explanation and embellishment and only speaking clearly about the central point. It is for that reason that the primary impression one receives is that of a person who is sincere and with an open heart and mind, just like the surfaces of the white, rectangular forms he was exhibiting. Looking back know, it is already 20 years since I first saw his exhibition at the Muramatsu Gallery and 17 years since I first spoke intimately with Seino. In that time, one can see changes in the forms of the many experiments he has made, but flowing through the heart of Seino's flourishing creative desire and fresh personality is something that has remained completely unchanged till the present day. At that time, I heard something surprising. It had to do with a time five or six years before I first came into contact with his work at the Muramatsu Gallery. From 1965 to 1976, I had intermittently published a small magazine called Ten(Engl. - Point). He had subscribed at a book store in Shimokitazawa in Tokyo. This was probably in the early 1970's. In the 1960's and 1970's, various spheres of different art forms became interlocked like a jigsaw puzzle. It was a time when there was a balance maintained between the complicated points of contact of these various groups. From the inception of this small magazine, I had Mr. Kano Mitsuo take care of the binding and cut illustrations. Each month, I had articles submitted by people who were at the forefront of each artistic sphere at that time - haiku, poetry, the fine arts, music and so on -. It was my hope to then sell the magazines at two or three bookstores in Tokyo that also sold books on poetry.
Consequently, even nowadays, I sometimes hear that some unexpected person had also subscribed to Ten. Seino was one of them. Possibly, we had attended the same performance of Ankoku Butoh.
While maintaining an amazingly wide interest in all of the artistic spheres, how was he able to cut away the things which surrounded that chaos and then manifest his own concise and succinct creative world? Once again, a new interest in Seino rose up in me.From the end of the 1980's and into the 1990's, this artist began to use graphite in many ways as his basic material. Varying the thicknesses slightly, he fired various square board-like shapes. He used heat to make traces on the surfaces. Then he covered the surface of the ground with them. These external forms also remind one of very blackened, ancient tombs or coffins, yet within it is possible to see substantive ceramic objects which have been neatly arranged at regular, fixed distances. One after the other he has presented such installations. The way in which the individual pieces that comprise these exhibitions have been fired and received the shapes they've been given- the feeling of surfaces, the subtle differences in the color tones - have become clear by means of a fixed arrangement of space for the first time. Also, by means of changing those arrangements, the nature of the space becomes kaleidoscopic, and each time he exhibits it again forces us to change our perception.Recently, he has been adding plant-like motifs to the surfaces of square planks, and experimenting with transferring reflections of the area around the mouth of a river onto curtains which cover walls. Gradually, the concern of the artist is the natural environment itself, but how will he incorporate this into his work?
It makes one feel that his work is changing because of a search in this direction. Tracing the stream of Seino's work which I have encountered, it is due to his work process in which the basic material of earth has been shaped by applying heat that he has even changed his residence. By following the way of life of potters and sculptors in former times, Seino has continued to investigate a way for ceramicists that is at the extreme border of those arts. It is because of this attitude I embrace him once again with great respect.
In Seino's recent work, he has temporarily planed away the attribute of "pottery". What will he substitute in its place? This would seem to be a very interesting question and because of it I am filled with great expectation.
Shunkichi Baba ,haiku poet ,Art Critic
Translated by Rumme,Ltd.