Shadow Piece(s): Chance-Based Responses in Clay
E.C. COMSTOCK AND OLIVE COMSTOCK
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
“With Meiko Shiomi’s Fluxus Event Score, Shadow Piece (1963), as our starting point, seven ceramic artists each generate a response in clay to this shared set of written instructions. Fluxus, primarily active in the 1960s and 70s, was an international group of loosely associated artists across Europe, the United States, and Japan. The group exhibition structure (or lack thereof) of Shadow Piece(s): Chance-Based Responses in Clay reflects the amorphous collective structure of Fluxus. Event Scores, derived from experimental musical notation, take the form of a diagram made from language, arranging objects and actions into space and time relationships. Much like the subtle, idiosyncratic variations a ceramicist cultivates through their repetition of forms and surfaces, an Event Score produces a variable chance-based outcome each instance it is performed. Defined by their ambiguity, Event Scores are mobile and relational. In this exhibition, we use the form of the Event Score to expand on the chance-based element already at play in ceramic construction and firing methods. Fluxus’s anti-art, anti-object, and anti-author position reveals possible horizons outside of standard paradigms of objecthood and authorship in the field of ceramics. At the same time, ceramicists already engage in the structured chance and repetition that constitutes the spirit of Fluxus.
Meiko Shiomi is a Japanese artist, composer, and performer whose textual, conceptual, and sound works were crucial to the development of the Fluxus movement. Many of her event scores, or action poems, explore sound as a physical action and sensation of time. Shadow Piece (1963) exemplifies the spatial and temporal experiences that Shiomi offers access to through her many instructional pieces. By using Shiomi’s score, we bring attention to her legacy which expanded the boundaries of performance and the role of the performer within the Fluxus movement. She continues her practice in Minoh, Osaka.
In organizing this exhibition during an uncertain moment for artists of all kinds, we are looking for answers in new and old places—open to the insight which only cross-pollination can render. We see this uncertainty as a direct result of a history of defaulting to individualism in every sphere of culture. Our moment necessitates a search outside of the individual for solutions to collective problems. This exhibition therefore challenges the idea of the stand-alone object that retains its grasp on the ceramics arts. Shiomi’s score offers a bridge to histories outside of clay. These pieces can all be seen as an extension of the same conceptual proposition of the Event Score put forth by Shiomi, despite the physical space separating the objects and the artists. The pieces serve as artifacts or documents of the performance, communing with all previous iterations of Shadow Piece as it has been performed since 1963.
Though Event Scores were performed live in front of an audience, for Shadow Piece(s): ChanceBased Responses in Clay, the performance of the score has been iterated in the interiority of the studio. Here, we delight in the rich implications of considering ceramic objects as a record of a dance with materials and forms. This exhibition allows you to visually trace the movements in the studio by bringing together these artifacts of performance.
The artists in this show have been chosen for their attentiveness and embrace of repetition. They have each demonstrated an attunement to the relational dimension that unfolds in both the
making and the presentation of their work. Rhythm, contraction, expansion, volume, play, sorrow, writhing, contemplation–all of these emerge from the iteration and reiteration of form, surface, and image in the practices of these seven artists. We invite you to look for actions of tracing, assembly, and alteration as well as an attitude of curiosity that conjures the impish possibilities of Fluxus for the present.
Co–Curators: E.C. Comstock and Olive Comstock