Michiko Itatani: Virtual Signs/Witness

Michiko Itatani Virtual Signs / Witness

September 6, 2005–October 22, 2005

In my youth, I wanted to pursue writing fiction. Though my main medium has been in the visual arts for the past 30 years, I am still dealing with the idea of fiction.

My basic concerns are always personal and humanistic. Using a fictional and symbolic space, in which I condense experienced and imagined multi-layered events, I am examining the issues of territory: the human body and the cosmos, flesh and technology, the individual and the State, desire and choice, taboo and obsession.

My process of art-making starts with gathering various fragments from experiences, events, documents, literature, history, science, myths, customs. I catalogue those fragments, mutate them, make images, and let them interact with each other. It is an act of fusing research, observation, memory and imagination. And I further intervene into the fragments and consider manifold possibilities. It is my fiction writing; incomplete, fragmented and under inquiry.

Michiko Itatani

Itatani’s Journey It’s probably the nature of life to try to impose order in the face of

contentedly, in the microreality of our lives, Itatani is somehow

overwhelming chaos, to privilege reason over forces we cannot fully

drawn to the macroreality of existence, to the pursuit of those larger

reckon or understand. Michiko Itatani is an artist who is, however,

systems we can only dimly see—but see we do—on the periphery

differently inclined, intrigued by chaos because she never considers

of consciousness.

it as chaos at all, instead as just those forces we imperfectly comprehend, those parts of the cosmos we must somehow expand

Take, for example, Michiko Itatani. She is Japanese. She is an

our consciousness to understand. In her art she senses swirling and

American. She is a woman. She is an artist. She is a Chicagoan. She

multiple aspects of being, suggests simultaneously the physical

is a professor. Each of these—and we could add many more—

and the metaphysical, invokes the material and the spiritual, and

is a kind of universe in and of itself, a structure, a narrative, a sign

understands that we only partly glimpse the stupendous universe of

we variously read and interpret. But they tell us nothing, really, about

which we are a tiny but crucial—to us, anyway—part. She seeks

Itatani, they are at best tangential to who and what she really is. We

secret harmonies, those pulses of energy that just might be at the

must seek her elsewhere than in these signs, in larger contexts, looking

root of it all. While most of us live more or less fully, more or less

always for the macro, never the micro.

1

Untitled painting from Radiant Triage RT-2 2005, 84” x 72”, oil on canvas

Even a cursory glance at Michiko Itatani’s work tells us that this is an

Untitled, a 2005 painting from Radiant Triage (above), is a fine

artist whose work seethes with layers, often literally and visually, but

opening immersion into the special aspects of this artist. It looks as if you

more often conceptually, as different pictorial systems glide in and out

took one of Leonardo’s Deluge drawings and overlaid upon it one of

of one another. There are times when it seems we must simply dive

his more complex mechanical drawings. Things swirl and hover, collect

into this work, set aside our supposed certitudes about time and space

themselves in spirals or in geometric play, and wobble and gyrate to

and the laws of nature, and prepare ourselves to have those certitudes

and fro. Are these a few molecules, bits of quarks or indeterminate

challenged and then extended toward richer and deeper realms.

proteins colliding toward some new assemblage, building blocks

2

Untitled painting from Unquiet UQ-1, 2005 78” x 96”, oil on canvas

literally coming into being, or are they entire solar systems congealing

swooping wedge of prey that cruises this astral sky bears more than

in some brutal cosmic endgame, apocalypse now, the vortex of the end

a passing resemblance to a stealth bomber, a hint of some of the

of days? They are both and neither—to Itatani they invite a suggestion

bitter fruit that technology can bring forth, that our journey to that good

of the fundamental geometric processes of the universe, the physics that

night may not be so gentle after all. Untitled painting from Angular

is always at the core of the physical. The dark and brooding palette

Contact, 2003 (page 6–7), continues our sweep through distant

of this painting is echoed in her Untitled painting from Unquiet, 2005

realms. A red planet courses through space, seeming some generative

(above), and here Itatani seems more willing to name names. The

force that carries a range of elements with it. Little snippets of matter

3

Untitled painting from Field Test FT-1 2003, 42” x 34”, oil on canvas

cascade about, and there’s also some activity that seems to coalesce

memory of the canvas threads beneath, a building up of surface in

onto smaller canvases that are attached to the larger one, true satellites

some string theory that functions as a lattice of energy.

of their planet. These radiating canvases are forms of idea impulses, additional bursts of information that augment their context, minor chords

This is all heady stuff, and much more than two pears and an apple.

that give texture to their milieu. Itatani’s painting techniques range

But in Itatani’s construction the forces that move the planets also move

widely, but crucial is her signature webbing or netting procedure, where

the things of the earth as well, that the laws of nature—even those we

taut parallel lines of paint are laid down in disciplined array, a trace

can’t fully decode—seem absolute, true universals. Those laws are

4

Untitled painting from Joyous Resonance JR-2 2005, 72” x 60”, oil on canvas

Untitled painting from Angular Contact AC-2 2003, 96” x 202” x 4”, oil on canvas

somehow both generative and destructive simultaneously, just as we

gently on the elliptical striated disks congregated below. It reminds one

understand that our passage through life involves both a birth and a

of those ancient Egyptian images of Akhenaton worshipping the sun

death. But it may be the impulse of the universe, her work suggests,

god, and as with those images this painting is like turning your face

just slightly to prefer the generative, that the forces swirling around us

toward the sun in springtime, feeling the richness cast upon you from a

somehow accrete toward congress, that the big bang may have been

sphere millions and millions of miles away, a metaphor for the life-giving

more of a quiet union. The several works on paper, each Untitled

processes of nature. Smaller in scale, Untitled painting from Field Test,

from Virtual Signs/Witness, 2005 (page 13), in this exhibition are

2003 (page 4), dispenses with the large orb, and the beautiful purple

inventories of these impulses, almost lexicons or charts of her concerns,

and periwinkle blue rivulets of paint seem almost to suggest sprouting

tautly organized and somewhat systematically laid out, with the

gladioli or irises, the moistness of oil paint offered as a kind of lushness

occasional and surprising more intimate moment sprinkled in as well.

and fecundity that is truly exhilarating.

For this would be no universe at all if everything was glum and

The push and pull of Untitled, painting/installation from

forbidding, if we weren’t somehow swirling toward a future of a kind

Diamond Dust, 2003–2005 (opposite), (the title of its group an

of enhancement. Several of her paintings on display here seem most

allusion to Joseph Beuys, an artist who was similarly concerned

aligned toward this sense of the generative. Untitled painting from

with nature and the implications of its interpenetrating systems) is

Joyous Resonance, 2005 (page 5), has its title give itself away,

like some tantric wheel of energy, a whirlpool of forces gyrating

exulting in the lush and creamy paint that appears to radiate out of the

in space, as close an image to pure creation as one can

orb at the top like a kind of astral light, a rain of potent energy, that falls

imagine. The more staid and specific array of smaller canvases

8

Untitled painting/installation from Diamond Dust DD-1 2003–2005, dimensions variable (110” x 92”), oil on canvas

Untitled painting from Cosmic Night’s Out CN-1 2005, 84” x 72”, oil on canvas

below indicate some of the eventual residue of those creative

become intimate and near. Itatani’s painterly webbing filters the scene,

forces, energy transcribed more or less into matter.

as if it is in some ether both beyond but somehow still of nature. Dante eventually closed his long journey in Paradise, face to face in a state

Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy begins in a dark wood, in a

of abject awe with “The love which moves the sun and other stars.”

disorienting confrontation with nature that lets him imagine the world

Michiko Itatani is too much of her time to believe that such certitude

anew, discovering for himself the forces that underpin existence. Untitled

will ever be offered to us, that the universe will ever give up its secrets,

painting from Cosmic Night’s Out, 2005 (opposite), calls this to mind,

that we will ever be able to see our existence in a context large

as Itatani brings us to a kind of primeval forest where the trunk of a

enough to embrace its totality. And she is also completely of her time

single tree stands in isolated majesty. It’s evening, we sense, when the

to sense that the search for that certitude, the investigative spirit, and our

light of day wanes and gives way to the deep blues of night, when

hunger to understand and process, is central to what makes us human.

the nocturnal world begins to take possession, making what had been

Meaning resides in the journey, not the destination, in the quest, not

illuminated and logical become mysterious and magical. This is an

the accomplishment, and through Itatani’s work we are invited to travel

Ur--tree, the kind around which our ancestors congregated, where

toward those distant realms of which we are forever a part.

Adam and Eve played out their drama, a shaft of life that moves from

James Yood, 2005

underground to the sky, from beneath us to above us. Itatani shows this tree ringed by some halo of phosphorescence, as if life itself comes to the tree to orbit it and do it homage, that it is part of an interpenetrating circle of being, as if the cosmos in Van Gogh’s Starry Night could

11

Michiko Itatani

Michiko Itatani has been a professor at The School of the Art Institute of

State University, Long Beach; San Francisco Art Institute; Haystack

Chicago since 1979. Her work has been seen in more than 100 one-

Mountain School of Craft, Maine; University of Chicago; Northwestern

person and group exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally.

University; SACI, Florence, Italy; Hospital Filed Summer School, Scotland; University of Bonn, Germany; Royal College of Art, London;

The artist is represented by the Flatfile Contemporary Gallery and

China National Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, China; Tokyo

Printworks Inc., Chicago; Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York; Sherry

National University of Art and Music; and Shizuoka University of Art

Leedy gallery, Kansas City, Mo; Geleria Senda, Barcelona, Spain and

and Culture, Japan.

Galerie Bhak, Seoul, Korea. Her works are in numerous corporate, public, and private collections, including those of The Art Institute of

She has received several fellowships and awards for her work including

Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Harold Washington Library,

Illinois Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the

Erie Art Museum; Olympic Museum, Switzerland; Villa Haiss Museum,

Arts Fellowship, Marie Walsh Sharp New York Studio Grant and John

Germany; Musée du Quebec, Canada; Museu D’art Contemporani

Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She was awarded a “Distinguished

(MACBA), Barcelona; McIntosh Museum, University of Western

Artist Membership” at the Union League Club in 2004.

Ontario, Canada; Musée du Quebec, Canada; and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.

James Yood teaches contemporary art history and criticism at She has taught at many other institutions, including Maine College of

the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes regularly for

Art, Portland, Me.; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; California

Artforum magazine.

12

Untitled paintings from Virtual Signs/Witness VW 1-3 2005, 42� x 30�, graphite & prisma color on mylar

13

2001 Alford Park Drive Kenosha, WI 53140-1994 www.carthage.edu/artgallery

Untitled painting from End Sight/Insight EI-6 2004, 59” x 72”, oil on canvas (cover & page 1)