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Pointless Circularity: Terrence Heath I am that I am (The koan given to Nobuo Kubota at the Daitokuji
Temple) I have decided Nobuo Kubota's work is exactly what you see. There is no allusive mystery to unravel; there is no sub-text to second guess; there is no concatenation of symbolic references. There is exactly what is there before you. That said, these are pieces full of allusions, subtexts and symbols. At first such statements seem paradoxical, that is, they assert two contradictory truths as equally true. Rationally viewed, the statements are paradoxical but they nevertheless are equally central to Kubota's art and that is the fascination of his work for the viewer. The origin of the paradox lies, I think, partly in Kubota's life experience and partly in the era in Canadian history in which he grew up and became an artist. He was born in Vancouver in 1932 of Japanese parents. The Vancouver Kubotas are a Samurai family of southern Japan, or, as Nobuo says, "By the time my father was born, the Samurai were no longer employable and the sword only a symbol. He emigrated to Canada to seek his fortune." The Samurai connection is important for understanding the strong Japanese focus of the Kubota home and for Nobuo's later attraction to Zen Buddhism. Nobuo grew up with the traditional culture of Japan - language, Shinto legends, folk tales, music and theatre. He also grew up with a family message of the superiority of the Japanese and the admonition not to marry outside the race. His rebellion as a teenager was to centre in his rejection of this xenophobia. However, in the 1960s he became interested in Zen Buddhism through exposure to the "Beat Generation" and writings such as those by Jack Kerouac (Dharma Bums) and D. T. Suzuki. As an architect, this interest in Zen Buddhism was reenforced by the attraction of Japanese architecture, which was to have a profound influence on him later as a sculptor.
I have used the word "paradox" but it does not really define Kubota's work at all. His work does not have contradictory truths, but it is difficult to find the right description of experiencing the work without trying to talk about Zen Buddhism. And it is dangerous, at least for an uninitiated Westerner like myself, to talk about Zen: The question asked the master was "What is Zen?" and the answer was "Zen" and then again the question asked the master was "What is Zen?" and the answer was "No-Zen." Logical nonsense that makes sense. Nobuo has a favourite Buddhist story which is a good place to start in trying to "sense" (his word) his work. A monk is walking along a path and sees a flower. He says, "I see the flower and the flower sees me." And he continues on his walk. The works of Kubota are often described as "meditative" or "spiritual." This observation comes I think from the experience described in the story. The viewer sees the work and the work sees him/her. There is in this meeting no message, no demands, no involving. The works continue to be just themselves. If you like, the experience is the opposite of the Stendal Syndrome where one faints at the sheer magnificence of a masterwork. There is in Kubota's work a certain self-containment which respects the viewer's self. If you watch people looking at his work, they will stand or sit perfectly still for long periods of time, just being present. They may not be meditating in any disciplined way but they are absorbed. That is one reaction of viewers. The other is the opposite. They will often walk in and around the piece trying to figure out how it "works." They wave their hands through the laser beam of Passage to see what will happen; they look into the camera in the Mute Raven to see if it is a real camera; they try to find out what makes the steel bowls in Waves move. For Kubota this is the Western mind searching for a "scientific" explanation. If this were a western story of the monk, perhaps Cadfael, and the flower, the monk might pick the flower and take it apart, reduce it to its elemental parts to try to understand how it functions, what it is, what it might be good for. There is another more intellectual, less experiential level of "sensing" these works, and this involves the allusions, symbols and sub-texts of the pieces. The first allusion is to the Japanese aesthetics. Kubota, who was trained as a western architect, practised architecture for ten years, became a sculptor in the 1960s and showed regularly with Modernist artists of the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto, has deliberately adopted a Japanese "look" in his work, that is, he alludes to Japanese aesthetics and art. In Passage the Samurai sword, the rock garden, and the screen or the rocks set in the pool of Waves are obviously references to what viewers will immediately respond to as Japanese. D.T. Suzuki describes the Zen aesthetic as based on "wabi" and "sabi." (Zen and Japanese Culture) Wabi is literally poverty and refers to the utter simplicity of the Zen artwork. Wabi is probably most familiar to Western eyes as the brushwork of Zen paintings in which a simple stroke becomes the bamboo section or the bird in flight. What you see is what you get but the very poverty or simplicity is the wealth or value. Sabi means literally solitude or loneliness and refers to "rustic unpretentiousness." Sabi is probably most familiar in the simple handmade teacups of the Buddhist tea ceremony. Kubota, it seems to me, takes this aesthetic one step further. He not only alludes to the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the piece's construction but he also reveals the technological simplicity and unpretentiousness of the piece. In Passage the laser, the video camera and monitor and the wires connecting them are all visible. The technology itself is, if we adjust to our acceptance of the technological revolution of the past few decades, also simple and unpretentious. In Waves the spotlights and fans are an even simpler technology, set out for all to see. Only in Mute Raven does this simplicity take another turn. There is in this piece a simple, old-fashioned camera but this time the technology is no longer operative. It is as if technology itself has become a presence like the flower in the story of the Buddhist monk. There is what might be called a sub-text to each of these pieces as well. It is the metahistory or myth structure of the journey - setting out, difficulties, initiation, return. In Kubota's works the myth is transmogrified into visual loops or return systems. The most obvious is that of Passage. Here, the laser beam is directed along the edge of a Samurai sword where it "glows" as it passes through smoke rising from below; it then passes through a screen and is received by a video camera and returned to a monitor next to the laser. In the monitor the beam throbs in an enlarged, continuously pulsating circle of light. Kubota says there are three components to the work: the materiality - laser, smoke, screen; the observer - the video camera; and, the memory - the monitor. In "Waves" the loop is more haphazard as the steel bowls move randomly before the air being moved by the fans. Every so often one of the bowls hits a rock, rebounds and is carried on again. Meanwhile, the reflections of rocks, bowls and moving water are projected onto a screen behind so that the loop has something akin to a film of itself. In the Mute Raven the loop has been reduced to the essential of the story of the monk and the flower only here the raven looks at the camera and the camera looks at the raven. An image is "transferred" from one to the other because instead of a lens the camera has a mirror and the eyes of the raven are similarly reflective. But what is the point of these loops, this circularity? On the one hand, the structure of the myth of the journey can be seen as one of the great storylines which retell the momentous acts of the hero. Joseph Campbell, who was an influence on Kubota, translated the myth of the journeys of heroes, such as Odysseus, into spiritual journeys which each of us goes through in life. But when Kubota sets up a visual representation of the journey as a loop, the myth becomes something else, it becomes simply what is. The heroic morality of the journey is not denied and the loop may become for a viewer a symbolic journey but the art work itself simply presents it as what is. The circularity in the work is pointless or, perhaps, its point is not in itself but in the viewer's desire to project on to it his or her own questing and questioning. What is the loop? Loop. What is the loop? No loop. And we return to the koan which Nobuo contemplated for a year at the Daitokuji temple in Kyoto, "I am that I am." Is it a loop? Is it a pointless circularity? It is interesting that it is similar to but very different from the Biblical statement attributed to Jehovah, "I am who I am." Nobuo claims that a year was not long enough for him to understand (if that is the right word) the koan. It seems clear however that one aspect of it is similar to the loops in his work and that is its circularity. And the circularity simply is, no matter what we read into it. At first, Nobuo Kubota's "sound singing" (the term coined by Paul Dutton) seems very different from his installations but the closer you look at them the more they can be seen as cut from the same cloth. This singing is made up of sounds which are simply sounds, that is, they do not signify anything. Kubota compares them to the paints which Pollock dripped and threw at canvases. As a child he heard endless hours of Japanese opera which he did not understand and which was therefore for him simply sounds. At the monastery he learned to chant Chinese Buddhist sutras which he did not understand and which were therefore for him simply sounds. As a member of the Canadian Creative Music Collective (CCMC) he performed with the Four Horsemen; as a young man he grew up with a love of jazz. Jazz scat singing was to become one of the influences for sound singing. As with the loops in his installations, his sound singing has structure: He begins with a succession of sounds and moves from phrase to phrase until he senses it is completed and then moves onto another. But in sound singing the artistic act is spontaneous invention. There is no time to make any judgements or rational analyses. There are no memorable tunes or sequences. The entire "artwork" is simply there. Perhaps, it is that it is, but certainly in hearing him "we are never where we are" in the sequences of sound. There is something very salutary for viewers of art in the
work of Nobuo Kubota. It can be surprising how relentlessly the Western viewer
applies rationality to the art he or she sees - what does it allude to? where
does it fit in art history, the mainstream, contemporary milieu? how does it
relate to earlier work? what does it mean? Kubota allows as much rational
superstructure to be built on the works as we may wish, but ultimately in the
presence of the works that is gradually quieted and then put aside as the simple
presence of the works bring the viewer to a contemplative state of simply being
there looking at the work (or hearing the work) that is also simply there. |
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Copyright © 1999 - 2007 KELOWNA ART GALLERY
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When
Nobuo Kubota was awarded a Canada Council grant in 1970 he was able to spend a
year in Japan. He went ostensibly to study Japanese art but he found his way to
Kyoto; there he was invited to live with a Zen master, Nanrei Sohatsu Kobori, in
his temple in the famous Daitokuji complex. This year of living the disciplined,
simple, practical regimen of the Buddhist monk was a turning point in his
concept not only of himself as an artist but of art itself. The paradox of his
work lies both in his acceptance of himself as equally of the West and of the
East and in the insight he gained that art is inherently an act of living not
making. As he was to say in an interview for an exhibition at the Owens Art
Gallery in 1975: "Art is secondary. It's a vehicle towards becoming as
complete a human being as possible."