Something New…

“Great Purification Rite Doll”

[The word “blueprint” is a metaphor for a drawing to dream up a bright future.

However, this blueprinted plan discloses the bowels of the evil device that have taken away the future of many people.

If the nuclear power plants also have the indwelling spirits, I would like to relocate them, along with their sins and defilements, to the katashiro (paper figure), and offer a fervent prayer to have them pass into the nether world so that none shall return through all eternity.]

for higher resolution, click here

(tracing paper on blueprinted paper, 3’9″x2’3″, exhibited in the “No Nukes Art Exhibition” at Sakaimachi Gallery, Kyoto, Sept., 2013)

photo with higher resolution is here

2013年10月3日 okamoo コメントする

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Something Old… 3

Prostrating Figure on the Mani Wheel (mixed media, c1995)

In Tibet and its surrounding regions, the Buddhists exercise two completely opposite styles of praying– one with the physically hardest way with prostration– the other with the most easy-going rotation of a prayer wheel which contains a sacred transcript.

One person does both, though not necessarily at the same time. It is technically difficult to pray in these ways simultaneously for apparent reasons… but why not? My idea to combine mutually extraneous styles of prayer has found a shape in kineto-mechanical contrivance– or simply a gadget, if you prefer.

This piece is one of my “Pseudo-Tibetan Articles” (fake Tibetan tools).

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Something Old… 2

Twittering Machine / Die Zwitscher Maschine (iron, copper, plexiglass, 1987)

Homage to Paul Klee’s “Twittering Machine”

This is the very first piece I made in UW-Madison in the 80s when I was a grad student and the second kinetic toy after “the Kick-Ass Device”, my last piece in MSU-Moorhead, my under-grad school.

Paul Klee’s drawing “Twittering Machine” was something I really wanted to possess–a replica, of course– and I looked for a poster or postcard in the museum shop of MOMA but couldn’t find one.

The simple solution to obtain a replica is either cut out a plate page of an art history book or draw a copy by myself– I instead thought it would be killing two birds with one stone if I could make a three-dimansional representation of the Twittering Machine– to satisfy my personal longing and a project to be submitted.

Die_Zwitscher-Maschine_(Twittering_Machine)Orig — Image file from Wikimedia Commons

The original “Twittering Machine” has cuteness and eeriness juxtaposed in the picture frame where odd-looking mechanical birds are twittering. Its strange atmosphere is derived from the mismatched combination of birds and mechanism (or birds of mechanism). I thought I could make its 3D version with welding rods and copper plates, and somehow managed to realized it but never anticipated what would become of the piece after a quarter century; now the piece– with its iron rods rusted and the feathers tattered– has become something more close to Klee’s original in terms of eeriness.

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Something Old…

Tink Jump Rope (mixed media, 8″, c1995)

Don’t even remember when I made this… probably sometime in the mid 90s.
There were the other Tinks in series– one mending her broken wing with a sewing machine, one flapping her wings but no filight, one flying up with propeller-like rotating wings… now, some broken, some missing…

Tinker Bell looks unhappy while she is jumping rope, because jumping is substantially different behavior from flying which is her innate nature.

This piece is the only one in hand, today. Though I made three other versions of kineto-mechanical Tink in series besides this one, unfortunately they are most probably broken or missing.