Hirokazu Kosaka: On the Verandah Selected Works 1969–1974
The Pomona College Museum of Art is pleased to present the first solo exhibition examining the early performative artwork of Hirokazu Kosaka. In 1966, Kosaka left Kyoto, Japan to study painting at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Deeply influenced by his knowledge of Buddhist spirituality, Zen archery, Noh and Kabuki theater, the ground-breaking experimental art of Japan’s Gutai Group, and his exposure to contemporary art in Southern California, Kosaka began experimenting with body art and performance. Merging his youthful experiences in Japan with the emphasis in body art on physical endurance; in Conceptual art on process; in Minimal art on repetition; and in Gutai on concrete forms, Kosaka created performative artworks that attempted to creatively reconcile avant-garde artistic innovations with spiritual practices such as meditation, pilgrimage, and Zen archery. The title, “On the Verandah,” refers to Kosaka’s conception of in-between spaces such as those between East and West, nature and culture, the physical and the spiritual, and, as Kosaka says, a series of “infinite maybes.”
This exhibition, co-curated by Rebecca McGrew and Glenn Phillips, brings together documentation of Kosaka’s early artworks and rarely-seen films and is accompanied by a publication with an essay by Glenn Phillips and an annotated and illustrated chronology of artwork by Shayda Amanat. Born in Wakayama, Japan in 1948, Kosaka lives in Los Angeles, where he is an ordained Shingon Buddhist priest and serves as Artistic Director at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.
Introduction
The exhibition “Hirokazu Kosaka: On the Verandah Selected Works 1969-1974” represents the first solo exhibition examining the early performative artwork of Los Angeles-based Hirokazu Kosaka. The exhibition brings together rarely-seen films and photographs created between 1969 and 1974 and aims to demonstrate the range of innovative experiments in art-making that Kosaka explored during this period.
Deeply influenced by his knowledge of Buddhist spirituality, Zen archery, Noh and Kabuki theater, the groundbreaking experimental art of Japan’s Gutai group, and his exposure to contemporary art in Southern California, Kosaka began experimenting with body art and performance in the late 1960s. Merging his youthful experiences in Japan with the emphasis in body art on physical endurance; in Conceptual art on process; in Minimal art on repetition; and in Gutai on concrete forms, Kosaka produced performative artworks that attempted to creatively reconcile avant-garde artistic innovations with spiritual practices such as meditation, pilgrimage, and Zen archery.
In 2011, Kosaka was featured in the exhibition “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973” at the Pomona College Museum of Art. In that exhibition, he was shown alongside his peers in performance art Chris Burden, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and John White, and his friends and fellow artists Jack Goldstein (whom he shared a studio with for several years), William Leavitt, and Allen Ruppersberg. “On the Verandah” was conceived to acknowledge and explore the contributions of Kosaka’s lesser-known oeuvre.
The title, “On the Verandah,” refers to Kosaka’s conception of in-between spaces such as those between East and West, nature and culture, the physical and the spiritual, and, as Kosaka says, a series of “infinite maybes,” a different way of approaching and observing how one lives in and responds to the world. For Kosaka, this exhibition represents both an honor and a conundrum. His artistic and spiritual practices are so closely linked that, as a Buddhist priest, the process of non-ego and humility are much more important than recognition. Thus, “On the Verandah” attempts to reconcile both Eastern and Western practices of acknowledgement.
Raised in Wakayama, Japan, Kosaka now lives in Los Angeles, where he is an ordained Shingon Buddhist priest and serves as artistic director at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. Kosaka grew up in an 800-year-old Buddhist temple, where generations of his family lived and shared teachings in archery, religion, art, and craft. He often uses the Sanskrit word for eons of time, kalpa, to describe both his upbringing and his practice. When asked about the length of his art and archery practices, Kosaka states “800 years…I don’t know how many generations of archers in my family have been practicing…I started a long, long time ago. It’s in my genes. Kalpa is a very different way of looking at things.”
Born three years after the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the final stages of World War II, Kosaka witnessed the brutal aftermath of war, remembering injured soldiers and citizens dealing with overwhelming destruction and loss. His father served in the war, and Kosaka recalls his father’s story of being forced to walk barefoot in the jungle to avoid injury, but one day feeling the bones of other soldiers beneath his feet. These intensely disturbing experiences led Kosaka to other artists—many of them in the Gutai Art Association—who were also grappling with the question of how to make art after a holocaust. Kosaka responded to the Gutai group’s rejection of art of the past with symbolic acts of independence that focused on pursuing creative actions. Later, as a young man, these early memories of World War II came back to haunt him as he saw monks in conflagration in protest to the Vietnam War. Many of his artworks from the late 1960s were personal protests of war and its attendant atrocities.
In 1958, when Kosaka was nine years old, he first visited Los Angeles to study English. In 1966, Kosaka left Japan again to return to Los Angeles to study painting at the Chouinard Art Institute. Kosaka first studied with Robert Chuey, Watson Cross, and Herbert Jepson, focusing on figurative abstraction. Kosaka was classmates with Charles Arnoldi and Tom Wudl, and remembers Ruppersberg, who was working as a janitor post-graduation, teaching him to wax the floor. During his junior year, he moved into Ron Cooper’s former studio with Jack Goldstein. A number of his performances took place in their studio. Kosaka immersed himself in studies of philosophy—including reading texts by Claude Levi-Strauss and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—and contemporary conceptual and performance artists who were responding to these ideas, including Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Tom Marioni, and Dennis Oppenheim.
Throughout this research and exposure, Kosaka felt a cultural gap in his understanding of the motivations of artists in the U.S. He connected more with the performative impulses he noticed in art by the Gutai group. Saburo Murakami, who joined Gutai in 1955, in particular helped guide him “to a different plane, and a different way of looking at life and art.” In 1972, Kosaka helped organize the first exhibition of the Gutai artists in the U.S. at Mori’s Form Gallery in Los Angeles, and “dedicated” the space with his own Five Hour Run performance. At this point in his career, Kosaka realized that his work needed to look both backwards and forwards, to art, but also to archery and spiritual practices. Kosaka sought “action without intervening thought, to do it without thinking it. In art, archery, and daily life.”
As a seeker, Kosaka also wanted to explore different cultures. He traveled to Europe and South America, learned Flamenco guitar, studied Buddhism, and connected this with his upbringing. Ultimately, Kosaka considered his seeking a “hunting ground.” He explains, “Buddhism came from India through China, Korea, and Japan, and South Asia. India to Pakistan, Turkey to Greece, all the way into Sevilla in Spain. So many of the sentiments went East and West. The journey and the nomadic way of traveling, for me became symbols of that hunting ground for scholars, the research process, approach and observation. I was taught to sit on the verandah; not the exterior side or the inside, but this in between space called the buffer zone. You need that buffer to understand all sides.”
In 1973, Kosaka returned to Japan, where he performed a transformational two-part piece, Soleares. At the Signum Gallery in Kyoto, Kosaka played the flamenco guitar repertoire Soleares with a razor-blade inserted into his index finger for forty minutes. After this performance, he began a thousand-mile and three-month pilgrimage along the coast of Japan’s Shikoku Island. After completing this spiritual journey with several monks, he stayed on in Japan, in a Buddhist monastery where he was ordained as a priest.
This marked a turning point for Kosaka. In 1976, he returned to Los Angeles as a minister at the Koyasan Temple in Little Tokyo and focused his energy on scholarly studies. In 1983, he started working at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center and began developing theatrical performances. Since then, his work has expanded to an intensely creative and collaborative practice involving large-scale public performances, with elements of dance, performance, archery, sound, and other elements and themes found in his earliest avant-garde projects.
Rebecca McGrew
Senior Curator, Pomona College Museum of Art
September 3 – October 20, 2013 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
Artist
Curator
Rebecca McGrew
Glenn Phillips