Essays

Michiko Itatani: Virtual Signs/Witness

The H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art featured the exhibit "Virtual Signs/Witness" Sept. 6-Oct. 22, 2005. The exhibit featured work by Michiko Itatani, a professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago whose work has been seen in more than 100 exhibitions. The following essay was written for the exhibit's catalog by James Yood, who teaches contemporary art history and criticism at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and writes regularly for Artforum magazine. See the catalog

Itatani's Journey

By James Yood

It's probably the nature of life to try to impose order in the face of overwhelming chaos, to privilege reason over forces we cannot fully reckon or understand. Michiko Itatani is an artist who is, however, differently inclined, intrigued by chaos because she never considers it as chaos at all, instead as just those forces we imperfectly comprehend, those parts of the cosmos we must somehow expand our consciousness to understand. In her art she senses swirling and multiple aspects of being, suggests simultaneously the physical and the metaphysical, invokes the material and the spiritual, and understands that we only partly glimpse the stupendous universe of which we are a tiny but crucial — to us, anyway — part. She seeks secret harmonies, those pulses of energy that just might be at the root of it all. While most of us live more or less fully, more or less contentedly, in the microreality of our lives, Itatani is somehow drawn to the macroreality of existence, to the pursuit of those larger systems we can only dimly see — but see we do — on the periphery of consciousness.

Take, for example, Michiko Itatani. She is Japanese. She is an American. She is a woman. She is an artist. She is a Chicagoan. She is a professor. Each of these — and we could add many more — is a kind of universe in and of itself, a structure, a narrative, a sign we variously read and interpret. But they tell us nothing, really, about Itatani, they are at best tangential to who and what she really is. We must seek her elsewhere than in these signs, in larger contexts, looking always for the macro, never the micro.

Even a cursory glance at Michiko Itatani's work tells us that this is an artist whose work seethes with layers, often literally and visually, but more often conceptually, as different pictorial systems glide in and out of one another. There are times when it seems we must simply dive into this work, set aside our supposed certitudes about time and space and the laws of nature, and prepare ourselves to have those certitudes challenged and then extended toward richer and deeper realms.

Untitled, a 2005 painting from Radiant Triage, is a fine opening immersion into the special aspects of this artist. It looks as if you took one of Leonardo's Deluge drawings and overlaid upon it one of his more complex mechanical drawings. Things swirl and hover, collect themselves in spirals or in geometric play, and wobble and gyrate to and fro. Are these a few molecules, bits of quarks or indeterminate proteins colliding toward some new assemblage, building blocks literally coming into being, or are they entire solar systems congealing in some brutal cosmic endgame, apocalypse now, the vortex of the end of days? They are both and neither — to Itatani they invite a suggestion of the fundamental geometric processes of the universe, the physics that is always at the core of the physical. The dark and brooding palette of this painting is echoed in her Untitled painting from Unquiet, 2005, and here Itatani seems more willing to name names. The swooping wedge of prey that cruises this astral sky bears more than a passing resemblance to a stealth bomber, a hint of some of the bitter fruit that technology can bring forth, that our journey to that good night may not be so gentle after all. Untitled painting from Angular Contact, 2003 (page 6–7), continues our sweep through distant realms. A red planet courses through space, seeming some generative force that carries a range of elements with it. Little snippets of matter cascade about, and there's also some activity that seems to coalesce onto smaller canvases that are attached to the larger one, true satellites of their planet. These radiating canvases are forms of idea impulses, additional bursts of information that augment their context, minor chords that give texture to their milieu.

Itatani's painting techniques range widely, but crucial is her signature webbing or netting procedure, where taut parallel lines of paint are laid down in disciplined array, a trace memory of the canvas threads beneath, a building up of surface in some string theory that functions as a lattice of energy. This is all heady stuff, and much more than two pears and an apple. But in Itatani's construction the forces that move the planets also move the things of the earth as well, that the laws of nature — even those we can't fully decode — seem absolute, true universals. Those laws are somehow both generative and destructive simultaneously, just as we understand that our passage through life involves both a birth and a death. But it may be the impulse of the universe, her work suggests, just slightly to prefer the generative, that the forces swirling around us somehow accrete toward congress, that the big bang may have been more of a quiet union. The several works on paper, each Untitled from Virtual Signs/Witness, 2005 (page 13), in this exhibition are inventories of these impulses, almost lexicons or charts of her concerns, tautly organized and somewhat systematically laid out, with the occasional and surprising more intimate moment sprinkled in as well.

For this would be no universe at all if everything was glum and forbidding, if we weren’t somehow swirling toward a future of a kind of enhancement. Several of her paintings on display here seem most aligned toward this sense of the generative. Untitled painting from Joyous Resonance, 2005 (page 5), has its title give itself away, exulting in the lush and creamy paint that appears to radiate out of the orb at the top like a kind of astral light, a rain of potent energy, that falls gently on the elliptical striated disks congregated below. It reminds one of those ancient Egyptian images of Akhenaton worshipping the sun god, and as with those images this painting is like turning your face toward the sun in springtime, feeling the richness cast upon you from a sphere millions and millions of miles away, a metaphor for the life-giving processes of nature. Smaller in scale, Untitled painting from Field Test, 2003 (page 4), dispenses with the large orb, and the beautiful purple and periwinkle blue rivulets of paint seem almost to suggest sprouting gladioli or irises, the moistness of oil paint offered as a kind of lushness and fecundity that is truly exhilarating.

The push and pull of Untitled, painting/installation from Diamond Dust, 2003–2005 (opposite), (the title of its group an allusion to Joseph Beuys, an artist who was similarly concerned with nature and the implications of its interpenetrating systems) is like some tantric wheel of energy, a whirlpool of forces gyrating in space, as close an image to pure creation as one can imagine. The more staid and specific array of smaller canvases below indicate some of the eventual residue of those creative forces, energy transcribed more or less into matter.

Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy begins in a dark wood, in a disorienting confrontation with nature that lets him imagine the world anew, discovering for himself the forces that underpin existence. Untitled painting from Cosmic Night's Out, 2005, calls this to mind, as Itatani brings us to a kind of primeval forest where the trunk of a single tree stands in isolated majesty. It’s evening, we sense, when the light of day wanes and gives way to the deep blues of night, when the nocturnal world begins to take possession, making what had been illuminated and logical become mysterious and magical. This is an Ur-tree, the kind around which our ancestors congregated, where Adam and Eve played out their drama, a shaft of life that moves from 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 become intimate and near. Itatani’s painterly webbing filters the scene, 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 of abject awe with "The love which moves the sun and other stars."

Michiko Itatani is too much of her time to believe that such certitude will ever be offered to us, that the universe will ever give up its secrets, that we will ever be able to see our existence in a context large enough to embrace its totality. And she is also completely of her time to sense that the search for that certitude, the investigative spirit, and our hunger to understand and process, is central to what makes us human. Meaning resides in the journey, not the destination, in the quest, not the accomplishment, and through Itatani’s work we are invited to travel toward those distant realms of which we are forever a part.

James Yood, 2005