Presentation at:
The American Academy in Rome
Achille Bonito Oliva and Antonio Puri Purini present the books Natural Seduction and Workbook by Michele Oka Doner
with
Studio Stefania Miscetti & Pino Casagrande
Transcript of the presentation
Dana Prescott, Artistic Director at The American Academy provided the introduction.
Rome February 1st, 2005
Dana Prescott
Welcome and thank you to Ambassador Puri Purini, to Achille Bonito Oliva, Stefania Miscetti, Pino Casagrande, and to Michele Oka Doner who was a visiting artist here at the American Academy in 1987. Michele’s work continues to move from scale to scale from large public projects to the precision of jewelry and furniture. Michele Oka Doner creates harmonies between history and architecture, personal impulses and general ideas, craft and function. Oka Doner works in serenity and believe while confirming her self-confident tenacity and a resourceful adaptability touched with compassion. Furiously didactic her creations are charged with conviction and compelled by enthusiasm. …(Applause)
Ambassador Antonio Puri Purini
Thank you very much. It is for me a great honor to be at the American Academy and to present tonight the book of Michele Oka Doner.
It is the first time in my life that I present an artist book, and for me it is a great emotion to do it, mostly being present a critic such as Achille Bonito Oliva.
What has always impressed me very much of the work of Michele Oka Doner is her capability to look at the young appearances. I have the memory of an individual who picks up from the beach of Miami, shells, pieces of wood, and stones. Not only does she transform these simple objects into works of art, but she also establishes a connection between the object and the technology; the book outlines this connection in a wonderful and complete way.
I believe that to be an artist nowadays developing these premises is of extreme importance. It demonstrates that a person is able to cross the existence and thus the experience striving to know the world in which he or she lives. I believe that in our everyday life there is the need to engage ourselves in a work of reflection on what we do and what we should do. To be able to transform the research of this balance into something real is an enormous satisfaction.
I look at the phrase “nature, history, anthropology and archeology are the primary elements of Oka Doner’s lexicon.” [1]I think that it is a phrase that could have not been said in a better way. Nature is what surrounds us in a world that is much often threatened; history enables us to understand what happens around us; anthropology makes us understand the continuity of the human existence; archeology is the visual witness of our past. Nobody better than an artist such as Michele is can interpret what happens around us.
At this point I cannot forget my diplomatic nature: Michele Oka Doner is an American Artist but she is an American artist who is looking East and not West. And when I say East I mean Europe and not Asia and having been convinced that for a very long time nothing can replace the continuity of relations, of background which does exist between United States and Europe of which Italy is such an important pillar. It is incredible to be a witness of all this through Michele’s work. Michele knows well Italy and the Mediterranean Culture. She represents this connection with her art. To present the work in places such as the American Academy gives also hope that the message of Michele’s work arrives also to the young a public that in large part is represented here tonight. There are two distinct cultures, the American and the European one but they have one very strong aspect in common which is civilization. Thank you very much.… (Applause)
Michele Oka Doner
Thank you very much to Antonio. Not only were they beautiful and accurate words, but also passionate, and I enjoy that kind of passion. I have been coming to Europe since 1951 by a slow boat. It was quite a trip and I will always remember it. My teachers were Europeans. I do not know if I mentioned to you this Antonio, but I studied at the University of Michigan in the early Sixties.
My education was very strict. Not only did I have to learn too many things, but also the chemistry and the different materials. I was in a ceramic class and I had to make clay knowing which mines in Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio had clays of certain properties and how clay forms. These kinds of teaching do not exist any more but they really formed my life. I was at the School of Architecture that was just fallen out the School of Engineering not too many decades earlier. The architects who built a lot of pavilions at the University of Michigan were all engineers. So, the people from IIT and people from the Bauhaus and from Hamburg Academy were very close. My degree, even though I was a Fine Major, was a bachelor in Science and Design as they had no Fine Arts degree in the Sixties.
I want to start with a small overview and then present some slides that will articulate it. The image most of us have of art is the one of a discrete object, a simple thing, a product, a form. But art is no longer about that. It can be, it has become the opposite: the plural the collective the distributed project. I think that it is where art began long ago in the caves of Lascaux. The old notion of objects somehow being separate from their environments, from the flows that produce them, support them, and absorb them is evolving. I came of age in the Sixties, social changes taking place foster and atmosphere of questioning. I loved the sparkled and the ferment. As I create objects I wonder why our culture, late XX century Western culture, had pulled individual objects out of social and political context and put them on a pedestal. At the same time the NEA was created in the States. Many cities throughout the country passed percent for art loss. This gesture created a mandate to promote art and culture giving a visual and a material voice to communities. With a great enthusiasm I responded to the call for artists and I applied to work through an open competition slide process. I met people who wanted to change the world. Wonderful people.
Architects focused on bringing more light into the buildings so that people could enjoy their spaces. They called on me to provide ten of thousands of reflective bronzes. Poets in Sacramental California spoke to me about the richness of the valley and I incorporated their experience into an image bank in the Sacramental Central Library floor. I have argued with people of Kansas City that if they use real water in community pools can I bring real fires into their community centers? I wanted to show you the result. I brought to New York City a metaphysical hearth in Herold Square, warm glowing and amber underground 11.00 gold master tiles, luxury for everyday for the collective. To borrow a metaphor from my own material I am a piece of advocate in a much larger matrix of people who were trying to change the world. … (Slide projection) … (Applause)
Achille Bonito Oliva
Question: “Can we negotiate nature?” Answer: “Yes, through beauty.” Beauty is a form of defense. In the case of Michele’s work, she organizes a defense where language, elaboration of forms and of resistances develops a “chamber nature”.
Being an artist coming form the East Michele Oka Doner is a pioneer and not a pioneer at the same time. She owns two matrixes that belong to European roots. On the one side she has an analytical spirit that reminds me of George O’Keefe. On the other side the eroticism Michele’s works embodies moderately reminds me of the work of Louise Bourgeois. These two matrixes cross each other, grow and develop the artist’s objects. The object fakes to be a useful object.
The day-to-day object design, in a giant format, seems to measure the prosthesis that Michele organizes in order to transform organic forms into solid and definitive ones. This resistance always contains a principle of transformation. The organic shapes that utilizes, contain the geometry of curves. It is not by chance that she uninhibitedly utilizes forms of language used by many artists almost a “marketing agent” of art forms. It is the sign o f a liberty that enables her to have a sort of explicit kleptomania that is under everybody eyes. When she realizes these pierced spoons I like to think that there is the unconscious memory of of Lucio Fontana behind. I like to think of George O’Keefe when she utilizes the woods.
This capacity to structure the microorganism develops the masculine side of transforming the identity of a craftsman into a more respectable identity of artist. I do like very much this idea of circularity. On one side Michele works with organic forms of nature. On the other side she works with archetype forms.
In her installation at the Miami airport she was able to place the sky on the floor, turning it up-side-down, to bring light into the subway through ceramic and gold entirely handmade. To bring the constellation into the airport seem to me to show a circular cosmic vision and its relationship with nature that is drenched with this pioneering matrix that surely make of her a nomad of the forms. Nomadism and eclecticism are attitudes that are very much in connection with post-modernism. Michele already took this direction in the Seventies. Michele does not recycle materials, but also forms. Thus what is left is what resists to time and to its consumption, there is an “ethic of saving”. It seems to me that the question: “ Can we negotiate nature?” It is a question that she has unconsciously been posing to herself through these years. There is a free ethic even though it is always linked to tradition and to nature. “Chamber nature” sometimes runs the risk of being a precious thing, and this is something that must be said. Sometimes it tends to miniaturize nature.
Strangely in her work there is the presence of formal anticipation, something she is not conscious of. I sometimes see in her works the shapes of the sculpture Cacio, a great Cuban artist. The artist often forgets memory, the used materials and the used language. Thus, form remains beyond what the artist initially intended to affirm at the very beginning.
The work talks to a third person. What we saw this evening is a series of images that follow an itinerary that is neither horizontal nor vertical. It is, instead, circular. The organic element that is circularity confirms the artist’s anthropological identity. Michele is a woman and her works show this aspect, even though not in a biographical way. I like this sort of impersonality that allows her to speak in a third person. It is typical of the American culture that after theSturm und Drang, the Action Paintingof the Fifties, and after the Sixties it has settled in a more impersonal and neutral language that it is at the same time linked to the engine of form which is also the diaphragm from where a family of forms develops; they have no relationship with each others, and this is what really interests me.
There is always an attempt to respond to commissioners, both public and private. In regards to the public commissions I would like to remind that Michele realized works in public spaces that presented communication problems. I want to recall a great sculptor, Richard Serra, who was obliged to remove his work in a New York piazza following a petition signed by the habitants of the neighbourhood. The problem was that Serra’s sculpture was not a monument in a traditional way, meaning that it gives its shoulders to the future, and that it is just autobiographical and celebrative. A contemporary art form placed in the open air is almost always abstract, tautological and invasive. It confirms with its overbearing overhang the obstruction it represents. Michele’s pavement in Miami’s airport does not imply a strong visual impact, a shape that blocks the passage. Her work features discretion and astuteness, qualities that are all feminine. Nevertheless, in this case it is constitutive of the formal aspect that contains the form as a carpet. It does not invade the entire pavement of the airport; it is not a dripping of archetypal forms, of a constellation that occupies all the corners. It is circumscribed. This form also shapes the perimeter. This is another important element that is characteristic of her work: to work on the borders and to know where the difference between art and life lies. She clearly indicates the usage of the artistic object: on the pavement one can walk; the spoons could be used for the salad, even if I would never do it.
With this explicit play of a naturalistic and elegant “blackmail”such an elegant naturalism that it is not unconscious. I like to think that she has a laic and puritanical idea of art that is also drenched with a linguistic memory belonging to European avant-gardes expressions.
There is a connection between Europe and United States. There is the history of design that one who elaborates forms cannot ignore. It feels that Michele lives all the benefit of these forms meaning that Michele leaves the most fulfilling side. If Michele lived in Rome, I am sure she would find out to be a hedonist. Michele treats herself to forms and she offers them to us at the same time.