Garden Seating, Reading, Thinking, by Kinji Akagawa in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
Kinji Akagawa is a plump, friendly looking middle aged professor of Public Art from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His audience at the Autonomous Cultural Center in Weimar, Germany is more than eager to welcome his ideas in spite of a new Kodak Carrousel that makes it impossible for him to juxtapose images in his descriptions of what he and his students (and any curious specialist he can inveigle to expand his piddling budgets by their profi generosity). He points out that a visiting Baukunstler, Herbert Bayer, gave him his first inspiration in Japan to become a public artist. He first came to America to study at the Cranbrook Center outside Detroit, followed by another LA apprenticeship, and teaching residencies in Atlanta and elsewhere before settling in in Minneapolis.
His badly digested Heidegger doesn’t make for a clear introduction to his work. Basically he entreated his Weimar students from the nearby Bauhaus Uni to graduate from a primeval egocentric stance to an exocentric one. A dollop of John Dewey concludes his appeal for art working as experience that deepens the human community it is serving. One must say that he tries too hard to seem American, his Zen Buddhism heritage getting more and more raggedy the harder he tries to be a good guy, into a kind inZen Buddy. But once he starts working rather than philosophizing, his achievements are singular.
His first public commission was from the Minnesota Highway Department to create a highway resting place next to Lake Superior. Stone and wood, all the local variants, are his materials, and he really does make them into luminous exemplars. Through a range of commissions all across the Midwest, he and his students (and unwary observers who don’t realize this man is a budget multiplier who hornswoggles the innocent into helping him out!) have created a chrestomathy of exemplars to enhance public spaces. He is himself an innocent saintlike man, relishing that one of his design has proved irresistible to a flight of ducks. (No mention of the fact that duck shit is becoming a formidable problem in such installations).
And he is philosophical about the perishability of his creations. When the uptight head of the Walker Center tried to keep him from using wood for his seating in the Sculpture Garden (penknife sculptors could make a mess of things!), Kinji opted for the carvers. When it looks like his original Lake Superior wooden installations are shredding from time and wind and rain, he sends them authorization to remove it and replace it.
Kinji is much better with wood and stone than he is with words. His mad cap Germanic philosophizing is a useless distraction. He should realize that Reactions Speak Louder than Words. Show how the public relishes his creations. For example, he noted that in MultiKulti Minnesota, the users of his public spaces differed sharply, ethnically, in height, weight, and level of sociability. So he has created multi-ethnic spaces that account for such differences. He needs to forget what little he has assimilated of Martin Heidegger and concentrate on the simple German word, MUSTER, a model that can be emulated.
REACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS: Observe shrewdly and carefully how discrete publics respond to the various exocentric patterns he devises for them. And follow his publics’ differing wishes. And fuck the messed up Kodak Carrousel. He needs movies to show how people move in his devices. Kenji needs to ignore his painfully accreted philosophy notes and look for some hot shot undergraduate film makers to show his MUSTERS in play. One image of a restlessly contented sitter is worth fourteen paragraphs of obscurantist Germanic metaphysisizing. Kenji has already made himself the George Nakashima of public seating. No mean feat. For our feet. 12/13/04.
No comments:
Post a Comment