Review C109
Gaston Bachelard notes that "miniature is one of the refuges of greatness." Miniature, he says, encourages us to focus, to concentrate, and through this intensified way of looking, to see beyond the object itself: "the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world."
Miniature is not, although they are often confused, Minimalism. Minimalism's masterpieces, the Donald Judds, the Carl Andres, the early Michael Ashers and Robert Irwins... these are all created on a somatic scale, that is, a scale that addresses the size and experience of the human body. Distracting details have been expunged, as the contemplative gaze is reflected by the scale of the work, rather than focusing down into it. Yoshihiro Suda's exquisite miniature drawings and sculptures of delicately formed flowers and tiny weeds are small in size, rather than in scale. The placement of the drawings, off centre on paper, encourages the eye beyond the boundaries of the worked area to the white plane of the page, and beyond to the wider frame of the gallery space.
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| Yoshihiro Suda: Clematis , painted wood; courtesy Douglas Hyde Gallery |
Here, if anywhere, is where Suda's work enters into dialogue with that of Takehito Koganezawa. Koganezawa's video pieces, set at various points and heights around the walls, merge drawn images in a series of continuous loops. Skylines segue into fragmented objects, figures float by to be subsumed into what appears to be a primordial mass of bacteria. Space, as Foucault and Bachelard both note, is never neutral; it is always saturated with qualities. Memories of place, people, things; philosophies, ideas, histories all impose themselves and come between us and pure abstract contemplation. The qualities saturating the gallery space are complex, and this exhibition takes its place in a series of meditations at the Douglas Hyde that seem obsessed with the difficult architecture and resonances of the space itself. The placement of Suda's weed (in an otherwise forgotten window area); the siting of Koganezawa's other video, Sex without sex (for men), at floor level in the area created by the Douglas Hyde's generally unused spiral staircase, seem to focus more on the role of the work within the gallery than on the work itself. In this context, Sex without sex (for men) is a jarring addition to an exhibition, which would, however, seem thin without it. Its installation seems co-opted into the rationale of Suda and Koganezawa's deliberations on space, and suffers in the process. Art which explores the gallery and conditions of exhibition exists at both miniature (Suda and Tony Mattelli, who also creates tiny plants disrupting the fabric of the gallery - ivy, for example, at The Greenhouse Effect ) and minimalist scale, and while Ma is an intriguing meditation on the qualities of space, the narrow gate at the Douglas Hyde seems to open up the narrower field of vision of the gallery itself, rather than into an entire world.
Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture, based in Dublin.
Yoshihiro Suda and Takehito Koganezawa: Ma , Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, July 2004
