the environmental sculptor

Criticism – Enrico Crispolti

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Criticism – Enrico Crispolti

Enrico Crispolti

Enrico Crispolti

1. The Kosanji Temple Hill of Hope

The landscape is sculpted throughout to form a dazzling totality of white marble, variously negotiable through constant changes in level, offering countless accessible close encounters, all-enveloping like a finely crafted total environmental situation and yet, at the same time, a stage looking out onto the surrounding landscape of mountain green and sea blue. Here, in its totality as human artifact, the sculpture itself turns back into nature, distinctly measuring itself against but also at the same time finally resolving itself into the jagged natural mountain landscape in which it is situated. Kazuto Kuetani has been building the Hill of Hope at the Kosanji Buddhist temple at Setoda-cho in the province …

2. Kuetani the environmental sculptor

Itto Kuetani

There can be no doubt that Kuetani’s vocation is to operate as a sculptor in a primarily environmental dimension. Although his qualities of sculptural imagination also prove highly impressive in object-sized work, the power and density of his sculptural invention can certainly be appreciated to the full in his environmental works, which are those that constitute the bulk of his sculptural output so far. Since the sculpture created in Villa Desideri at Marino near Rome in 1981, Kuetani has been aware that the greatest goal his sculptural work could be offered lies in the realm of environmental space, something that involves a whole range of relations that are unknown in …

3. Organicity − matter − nature: Kuetani’s “poetics”

Kuetani has a deep and sensitive love for stone. This is immediately evident to anyone looking at his sculpture, whether monumental or on a smaller scale. Because of his love of stone, he experiences sculpture in a wholly personal and direct way, creating it with his own hands, stubbornly and heroically, even it is when very large in size. He never delegates the work to others, as often happens even with famous sculptors. It is only in colossal works, as in the case of the Hill of Hope, that assistance is obviously necessary. His love of stone thus becomes the first evident feature of his sculpture, which is always conceived …

4. Kuetani’s environmental works

Kuetani arrived in Rome in 1969 and has now been living for thirty years partly in Carrara, where he works, and partly in Japan, where he installs his environmental sculptures. He began exhibiting his work in the second half of the 1960s in Hiroshima, his hometown, and held an exhibition in Rome at the Galleria Schneider in 1975. The impersonal works of wood or marble produced at the time displayed an orientation towards the articulation and movement of organic forms. The sculptures of 1972 and 1973 show the influence of Arp’s organic plastic modulation and Moore’s insertion of significant voids into the context of plastic volume. These works are repeatedly …

5. Training in Japan and Italy

While Kuetani was tempered as a man by his childhood in the tragic setting of Hiroshima after the A-bomb, he was trained as a sculptor in Tokyo under the guidance of his uncle, Katsuzo Entsuba, a lecturer at the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts. Entsuba developed a very free style of figurative work characterized by vivid narrative imagination and open to both traditional and western influences. He also experimented with different materials (wood, bronze and stone) and the various coloristic possibilities they offered. Entsuba’s studio offered the young Kuetani, who started work there in 1957, a training ground in both technical and cultural terms. In this period he developed his …

6. Kuetani and environmental art in the second half of the twentieth century

Kuetani is thus a primarily environmental sculptor. In his work imaginative reference to the planning dimension is not occasional with respect to a commitment mainly directed towards an object-oriented measure of sculpture, but on the contrary a wholly predominant and constant feature. The results of the work performed during the 1980s and 1990s in the creation of various ensembles of environmental sculpture – and especially a plastic-architectonic ensemble of such complexity and unusual size as the Hill of Hope – stand authoritatively alongside numerous works by other sculptors, also of the previous generation, operating in different cultural spheres on the environmental scale. Environmental sculpture is practise rather than “poetics”, i.e. …

7. The overall design of the Hill of Hope

Modello del Colle della Speranza

Situated near the area of the Kosanji Buddhist temple at a higher altitude above sea level, the Hill of Hope rises to form an authentic acropolis. In terms of its overall design, it constitutes a structured sculptural park within which a multiple pathway connects various situations. Some of these are of a truly plastic nature, such as the huge sculptures acting as both visual and ideal landmarks, while others are places and constructions connected with various functions of social use. It is crossed internally by numerous paths at different levels. Kuetani exhibited the draft blueprint in the summer of 1998 at Carrara’s 9th International Biennial of Sculpture (IX Biennale internazionale …

Notes

1. In IX Biennale internazionale di scultura Cittdi Carrara. Scultura Architettura Citted. Enrico Crispolti and Luca Massimo Barbero, Electa, Milano, 1998, p. 164. 2. In IX Biennale internazionale…, cit. 3. In Kazuto Kuetani, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Centro AttivitVisive, Ferrara, 17 January − 21 February 1988. I expanded this article in Kazuto Kuetani, scultore del dialogo, in “La Gazetta delle Arti”, a. XXII, n.s. n. 3, Venezia, April 1990, pp. 6-9 (which also contains some articles by Kuetani himself). 4. In IX Biennale internazionale…, cit. 5. This concept was born in the sphere of literary criticism and then adopted in art criticism in the western culture, especially by Italian critics. “Poetics” …

Criticism – Enrico Crispolti

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