COBRA’s ‘Sculpture as Place’ at Green Gallery

×

Expand

Photo via The Green Gallery - thegreengallery.biz

COBRA - Sculpture As Place Place exhibition

COBRA's "Sculpture As Place" exhibition at The Green Gallery

Tokyo-based artist COBRA’s work isn’t overtly about frames or frameworks, but both run like a quiet undercurrent through his exhibition “Sculpture as Place” at Green Gallery, on view through September 6. The first thing to catch the eye is a chest-sized purple birdcage on the gallery’s interior wall. Nearby are stacks of minimalist wood boxes and a row of seemingly ordinary 11 x 8–inch photographs, but it’s the birdcage that stand out, mainly because a purple avian habitat is an especially odd sight within this frame of reference.

Mounted inside the cage is a small 6 x 6–inch trompe l’oeil painting of an egg cracked open, its yolk and albumen glistening against the shell. At first, it registers as dark comedy: a bird never born replacing the bird that should be there. Step back, though, and the joke deepens. The cage functions as an absurdly ornamental frame for a very traditional and technical acrylic painting. That piece, titled Story of egg (bird gallery for bird), delves into the strange case of frames in the art world. Are frames ever neutral borders? Are they active content, as in the ornamental collars around the Poussins, or are they intrusive distractions as evidenced by frameless Jackson Pollocks? What we get by trying to answer these sticky questions in COBRA’s case is a clever play on the old joke: which is it, the chicken or the cage?

Layers of Authorship

But this isn’t mere wordplay; it’s an excavation of the frameworks that surround art itself. Consider those “mundane” photographs. They show COBRA and his crew in Milwaukee, costumed as Green Gallery proprietor John Riepenhoff, who also happens to direct Sculpture Milwaukee. If Sculpture Milwaukee relies on the city as its frame, COBRA complicates the picture by reframing the organizer himself. The photographs hang without frames, as if to underline the point. COBRA doubles down on this meta-inquiry by including two artists from his own XYZ Collective in Tokyo—Hikari Ono and Yui Yaegashi—folding additional layers of authorship and affiliation into the show.

Meanwhile, in the center of the main gallery the stacks of boxes feel very staid and somewhat conventional … actually very 1960’s Green Gallery. Not this one on Farwell in Milwaukee, but the one that was owned by Richard Bellamy in New York. And the layers of meta continue to pile up. Especially when you notice that those perpendicular stacks of rough-hewn minimalist boxes have holes cut out of their faces so that each component becomes an individual birdhouse. In one easy move, COBRA takes the history of modern art, subverts it, and brings it all the way back to nature. I wonder if he had that quote by Barnett Newman in his head as he hole-sawed them out: “art theory is to artists what ornithology is to birds.”

More likely he was thinking about the language and agency of the artist. Who makes the art, the artist, the viewer, or the dynamic frameworks of social and physical spaces in which they’re placed?

Makes me think about my Ghanaian friend who laughed when I told him what the concept of “to have your cake and eat it too,” meant. He thought it was such a clumsy way to say one wanted two things at once. Apparently in Kumasi they say “You can’t have chicken for dinner and eggs the next day for breakfast.” Apparently, it’s more alliterative in Twi.

In art we’re always trying to hold on to two irreconcilable models of reality: the primacy and preservation of the individual creator, and the endless chain of contingencies and contexts that shapes all our experiences.

Chicken for dinner and eggs for breakfast.