Despite our best efforts, memories eventually fade away. For centuries, people have created memorials sites, and used objects and images to honor and preserve the remembrance of those that have passed. These sites are often designed to document existence, while inevitably underscoring absence.

For over a decade now, Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto has been engaging with his memories through the physical act of creation. Building large scale installations by hand and out of salt, Motoi brings form to the immaterial, actively wrestling with memories that are in a constant state of flux. Just as memories are unfixed and transient, Motoi’s installations are equally unstable and temporary. Motoi transforms salt into intricate and laborious installations, which are eventually swept up and returned to the sea. DailyServing’s founder, Seth Curcio, had the opportunity to speak with Motoi about the cultural implications of salt, the immaterial qualities of death, and the forms best suited to articulate loss.

The following interview was translated with the generous assistance of Miyako Fujiwara.

Image Courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

Seth Curcio: For nearly two decades, you have made intricate, yet temporary, installations using salt as your primary medium. I know that salt is a very important substance in Japan–as it is in many cultures–used in funerals, to ward off evil, as an offering, and as basic support for life. However, I understand that there was a very personal experience that brought you to this material. Can you tell me what led you to use salt and how it initially took form within your practice?

Motoi Yamamoto: I use salt because in Japan salt is used at funerals. My sister passed away from brain cancer 17 years ago. In order to overcome her death, I made pieces by picking up each event one by one, related to the theme that a person is going to die. I started thinking that I would like to make an artwork based on funerals.  And, I realized that in Japan we use salt at funerals, and this is why I began using salt for my art. The history of salt in Japan, how we use it, and the meaning of it, were all very suitable to my concepts.  Also, I liked the color of salt very much. At the beginning, I baked it into the shape of bricks, and then piled them up to build a sculpture of a bed.  Later, I made a three dimensional piece which was based on the complicated shape of a brain.

SC: Coping with death can be very difficult for many people. It can be equally challenging to convey emotions caused by loss. Yet, you have developed an acute visual language that allows you to simultaneously address your personal dealings of loss, while also giving form to the universal sentiment of mourning. Has the process of creating these works changed your feelings of death? How it altered your thoughts on loss and the process of mourning?

Motoi Yamamoto: I can’t tell if my feelings of death have been changed by the passage of time or by the process of creating my work.  I don’t have any way to compare to the two alternatives because I’ve only experienced this through my work, not through a more conventional mourning process.  I would like to think that it altered my thoughts on loss gradually, but I don’t know.

Image Courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

SC:I’m fascinated by the connection between the ephemeral nature of your work and the fleeting quality of memories. It seems that just as a memory can never be fully permanent, neither can your installations. They’re both present for mere moments in time before slipping away. In a quote you mentioned, “What I look for in the end of the act of drawing could be a feeling of touching a precious memory.” Do you feel that your work is an action to preserve a memory, even though the nature of the work is temporary?

MY: I would say my work is not an action to preserve a memory, but rather a way to try and recall all the memories as much as I can.

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An artwork featuring live bees, created by French artist Pierre Huyghe. Her "head writhes with bees, like thoughts buzzing," writes Adrian Searle Photograph: Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty Images.

In 2010, David Shields gave us ‘Reality Hunger’ — a mashup of over 600 stolen quotes, arranged into a manifesto. ‘Reality Hunger’ was Shields’ attempt at an ars poetica for what he referred to as ‘a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists […] who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.’ This week, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gives us her version for the art world: dOCUMENTA(13), which opened  June 9 in Kassel, Germany. In honor of a certain symmetry between the two projects, #hashtags attempts a Shields-like text in search of the nature of contemporary art, all drawn from writings on dOCUMENTA.

Dear reader, I hope these lines find you well, wherever you are right now. I have decided to address you through an archive of other voices postcards, as to remain on Documenta 13’s wavelength.[1]

dOCUMENTA (13) is located in an apparent simultaneity of places and times, and it is articulated through four main positions corresponding to conditions in which people, in particular artists and thinkers, find themselves acting in the present.[2]

It is devised with our young generation in mind…the artists, poets and thinkers they follow, so that they may recognize what foundations have been laid for them, what inheritance they must nurture and what inheritance must be overcome.[3]

— On stage. I am playing a role, I am a subject in the act of re-performing.

— Under siege. I am encircled by the other, besieged by others.

— In a state of hope, or optimism. I dream, I am the dreaming subject of anticipation.

— On retreat. I am withdrawn, I choose to leave the others, I sleep.[4]

Now, here in Kassel, the total bareness of the first rooms of the canonical core, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, is broken by the display of Kai Althoff’s letter to Christov-Bakargiev explaining his decision not to take part in the exhibition (“life” was more important)—although a work of Althoff’s is, despite this, still featured in the Rotunda.[5]

Andrea Büttner, "Moss," dimensions variable, ongoing.

By the entrance stands a plastic dinosaur that I think is a work by Jimmie Durham. There is so much empty space and outdoor movement between venues that you notice the extraneous or realize, belatedly, that what you had looked at was art. Outside the press conference, young people wore sandwich boards with slogans like WHAT ARE BLUE BALLS? THEY’RE LOVELY and EVERYONE IS EATING HUMAN FLESH. Despite its absurdity, I automatically associated the action with the Kassel art student protests of 2007. Only when I saw the same boards in Ida Applebroog’s installation in the Museum Fridericianum did I know that they belonged to it.[6]

Another viewer saw Zeilinger’s badge and asked if he was one of the artists. The brusque reply: “I am not an artist.” Everyone here is a “participant.”[7]

Ida Applebroog at dOCUMENTA(13), photo courtesy Flickr/Creative Commons. June 6, 2012.

“Is that art?” The question comes up repeatedly while navigating Kassel.[8] I believe that art is a form of research, that it has a big relationship with society.[9]

These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary.[10]

dOCUMENTA (13) takes a spatial or, rather, “locational” turn, highlighting the significance of a physical place, but at the same time aiming for dislocation and for the creation of different and partial perspectives—an exploration of micro-histories on varying scales that link the local history and reality of a place with the world, and the worldly.[11]

Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED.org.

This week’s column is accompanied by photographs by Brad Carlile, whose work is included in the upcoming exhibition Fragile Boundaries at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts from June 15 to September 16, 2012.

Your counselor, hard at work.

As a Political Science major, my choice to minor in Studio Art has taken more than a few by surprise, especially those who are familiar with my artistic skill level. My question relates to how to cope with being in a setting where others are clearly more skilled, and why you might argue that one should not lose hope and pursue their art knowing that when it is completed it will not receive the highest marks or hardly any praise. I love creating art, and I recognize that I will never have my pieces in a gallery, but sometimes I need a bit of motivation. Art gives me the escape and freedom that my other majors seem to squelch, but should I keep going when I’m simply mediocre?

Absolutely you should go on making art if you find it enjoyable. Skill is an issue now because you’re in an academic environment, which (of necessity and long-standing tradition) emphasizes certain kinds of proficiency and maintains a hierarchy. But you won’t always be in school and you won’t always be facing these particular pressures. Eventually you’ll be on your own and it will prove vital to have a pastime that is satisfying.

If instead of art you discovered that you liked to bake, but usually produced cakes that were lopsided in comparison to those of your peers, would you be asking if you ought to give it up? Or would you just accept baking as a hobby and leave it at that? The increasing standardization and professionalization of the fine arts has produced a generation of people who, a hundred years ago, would have been content to be Sunday painters but today feel that if they can’t get an A+ or a solo show or the MacArthur Grant, they’ve failed. This is all wrong because it takes the pleasure of doing completely out of the picture (pun intended). It’s the logical result of a society that prizes experts and punishes amateurs. But as all dedicated amateurs are wont to point out, the word itself comes from the Latin amator meaning “lover.” You can love what you do simply because it brings joy to your life and not because you are an ambitious professional.

Brad Carlile, Nerja, 2009. Photograph (no digital manipulation), 30″ x 40″

Please don’t stop making art. Try to appreciate the skills of the other artists around you and learn from them while you are in school. When you don’t receive high marks or praise for your work, ask for detailed feedback from people you trust and see if anything they say is useful to you. Spend time with art in galleries, museums and publications—you’ll see that skill is not the only element that counts. Above all, savor the time you have to make your work because soon you’ll graduate and acquire a busy life. Art may well be your solace and comfort in the days ahead.

Brad Carlile, Ran, 2010. Photograph (no digital manipulation), 30″ x 40″

I am an artist whose work typically requires a lot of high tech equipment to be realized. Most of my projects use computers, programming, microprocessors, media processors, digital projectors, video monitors, sound systems etc. etc. etc. Lately I’ve begun to worry that my work is being driven by the technology, rather than the other way around. I sincerely believe that just because you can do something it doesn’t follow that you should, but I have found myself coming up with project ideas that are based primarily on newfound technological capabilities. Is this putting the cart before the horse? How can I avoid the pitfall of relying on the tech spectacle of gadgetry and make sure that the conceptual basis of my work takes center stage?

I’m happy that you wrote me with this question because I’ve seen so many exhibitions where there was an amazing spectacle of gadgetry (lights, things that moved or beeped, stuff on timers and motions sensors, videos, etc.) and while I’ve marveled at the technical know-how of the makers, I sometimes feel like there’s little beyond the wow-factor. It’s not often that I’ve found the bells and electronic whistles to be well-married to the ideas behind them (exceptions include Jon Kessler, Arthur Ganson, Ann Hamilton). In fact, as some kinds of technology get cheaper and easier to use, the more it seems like ideas are being replaced with Arduinos.

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Jeff Koons continues to refuse being anything but his audacious self. Today from the DS Archives we look back at his exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in 2009. Koon’s work will be on view at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt between June 20–September 23, 2012.

The following article was originally published by Catherine Wagley on November 28, 2009:

Jeff Koons, Couple (Dots) Landscape, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Jeff Koons, November 14-January 9th, Gagosian Gallery

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” sang Bob Dylan in 1966, in his brash classic Absolutely Sweet Marie. It’s a line Dylan presumably appropriated from Don Siegel’s dark 1958 noir, The Lineup, a fact Jonathan Lethem insightfully pointed out in his 2007 essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence.‘  Siegel’s film used the more unwieldy “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” No matter which way it’s said, the sentiment rings true. It’s honesty that distinguishes the unlovable, often spineless villain from the law-breaker who nihilistically disregards conventional morality and candidly embraces his renegade status. Read More »

For this edition of Fan Mail, David Culpepper of Ink Tank in Austin, TX has been selected from our worthy reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line.

Ink Tank has been together for less than a year in Austin, executing several group projects rather quickly. Their birthplace is Richmond, VA, where David Culpepper and VCU professor Matt Lively began their collective as a gallery and screen printing shop in Plant Zero’s studios. Current members include Andrea Hyland, Chris Whiteburch, Emily Cayton, Nate Ellefson, Matt Winters, Vladimir Mejia, Austin Nelsen, Julia Clark, Landon O’Brien, TJ Lemanski, and Casey Polacheck.

The Purge, Chris Whiteburch, Last New Year, Ink Tank, 2012

Celie Dailey: You guys look like you’re having fun!

David Culpepper: We are serious about having fun. The Last New Year project in particular was a unique experience where we were able to almost live where we were working. It became a club house atmosphere with everyone hanging out and making stuff, eventually leading to the addition of a couple more members.

In regards to having fun, putt-putt is a recreational sport centered on goofy ways to challenge the player. Part of the research for PARmageddon was playing putt-putt and watching countless apocalypse movies.

PARmageddon, Ink Tank, 2012

CD: What captivates humanity about its total destruction?

DC: Whether it is an actual date, Nostradamus’ predictions, or an ancient culture’s artifacts, the end of the world both panics and excites us for whatever reasons.

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Made in L.A., the first-ever Los Angeles biennial, debuted this week at The Hammer Museum, Municipal Gallery and LAXArt. It seemed a good time to revisit the last California Biennial, held at the Orange County Museum of Art and heavy with SoCal artist.  How many biennials does one state need and does this new one really fill a niche that needs filling? Those are questions I’m thinking about this week.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

On November 2^nd, 72 year-old Jerry Brown, a walking archive of California radicalism, gave his gubernatorial acceptance speech from the stage of Oakland’s Fox Theater. “Now look,” he said, with let-me-level-with-you straightness, “I like the symbolism of this theater because it was dark and . . .  there were people camped in here and they were burning the ceiling and cooking their meals. But now it’s turned into a beautiful venue.” California resembled the Fox, Brown suggested: a dark, broken down shell of its former self with a charred ceiling. He ended with an even weirder sentiment:

And while I’m really into this politics thing, I still carry with me that sense of kind of missionary zeal. . . . And I’m hoping and I’m praying that this breakdown that’s gone on for so many years in the state capital . . . that the breakdown paves the way to a breakthrough. And that’s the spirit that I want to take back to Sacramento.

The spirit of hoping breakdown leads to breakthrough? It may not be exactly what he meant, but it’s what he said–it seems Brown wants to bring to Sacramento a cagier, drawn-out version of rock-bottom theory.

A similar spirit courses through the 2010 California Biennial, which opened at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) on October 24^th. The show lives in the carefully organized, carefully contextualized, and temporarily rehabilitated remnants of a breakdown, waiting patiently for breakthrough to happen.

The story of art world breakdown is old—as old as Jerry Brown—and becoming fairly tedious. It involves the gutting of expressionism, parsing of formalism, and fires burnt in what artists hoped would be the carcass of the cathedral-like modernity (which like the Fox, insists on being rehabilitated). Zlatan Vukosavljevic’s biennial contribution deals with this carcass in the glibbest way. His DuckBunny Chamber, a yellow tent shaped like the head of a flopped-over rabbit, invites viewers to enter and stand in the middle, because, as the wall label explains, so much art remains aloof and roped-off. You’re rarely allowed to look at an object from the inside. That’s been true, of course, and the perception of art as sublimely untouchable persists in many museum-goers. But, while I found standing inside the chamber whimsically pleasant, art’s austerity has been broken down so effectively (and literally, with jackhammers) that the joke feels tired. Exhausted even, not to mention uncomfortable with itself. Which is why Vukosavljevic’s glibness unnerves—DuckBunny Chamber, like much of the show, feels thoroughly comfortable with discomfort.

Vukosavljevic, born in Serbia in 1958, is one of the show’s six foreign born artists–about 20 hail from the Western U.S., 17 from the Mid-west, and 12 from the East. More interestingly, he’s also one of the oldest (only John Zurier, born in ’56, is older). The average birth year of the 45 individual artists, plus collective members, is 1973.86, and this would have been closer to 1976 if not for those few outliers who popped into the world between 1956 and 65. The show certainly has a youthfulness about it, but not a renegade energy as much as a hip, tech-savvy approach to material. It’s smart, though more bookishly informed than clever (some work–like Andy Ralph‘s spinning-wheel trash buckets–has smart-ass sass, too, thankfully). Thirty-seven artists have complete or in-progress MFAs; three have MAs, and at least three have PhDs.

But, while well-schooled, this biennial doesn’t bask in a headiness worthy of, say, Sherrie Levine or even young Dan Graham. Alex Israel’s Property offers one example of what the show does bask in. An assembly of rented props, Israel’s installation spans the length of one of OCMA’s many oddly-shaped galleries and looks like thrift-store decorating by someone with high-end ingenuity and a good design degree in his back pocket. At the center of the room, two big blue-rimmed mirrors that face each other create an endless progression of blue rectangles. The night of the opening, a man in a fedora with a well-dressed woman hovering behind him leaned in to photograph one of the mirrors, brushing his shoulder up against the other in the process. When the guard tentatively told him not to touch, the man said, ” I wouldn’t do that.” The woman clarified, “He’s an artist.” That mix of curiosity, desire and slightly inappropriate pretension seems to be what Israel’s carefully curated installation comments on, and what a few other artists dance around as well.

Patrick Wilson‘s adept Albers-on-steroids acrylics; Gil Blank’s flawless, almost-commercial but anti-theatrical text paintings; and even Barry MacGregor Johnston‘s poetically un-monumental doorway installation; take a relatively risk-less approach to making. Not to say their work isn’t good. If I were their grad school professor, I’d be immensely proud: they’re knowledgeable, self-motivated thinkers who genuflect to their predecessors but in an aware, foregrounded way. They know how to wield their chosen tools, and I imagine most of them talk about their work expertly. But as an observer, someone who’s always waiting for art to show me what I don’t know, I want more.

Some art gave me more of that, particularly work by the show’s women, many of whom seemed unconcerned with asserting identity, freer to indulge in the confusingness of personhood than earlier generations of feminist and female makers. Stanya Kahn’s film, It’s Cool, I’m Good, is one of my favorites. Battered and bandaged, Kahn rides and limps around the California landscape talking in a resigned, compellingly undirected manner about anything in particular: nature, food, her injuries. At one point, she sits by the ocean wearing a hospital gown and droning on about mating rituals while flies her bandages prevent her from swatting gather on her back. Yet as delightfully unconstrained as Kahn’s film feels, it still resonates with Jerry Brown’s sensibility. In it, Kahn is comfortable with brokenness, and breakthrough seems to be a mystical possibility lurking in the distance.

The same night Brown gave his Fox Theater Speech, Senator Barbara Boxer celebrated victory in Hollywood. While Brown levelheadedly assured his audience of his “missionary zeal,” Boxer unleashed zeal without warning. She hopped up and down when she said, “I am that fighter,” talked about commercials as if they were battlefronts, sucked up to Obama, made jokes about her height, and threatened to tackle  “anyone who tries to hurt our state or the people in it.” She was on fire, not cagey in the least. And while Brown-like reserve has a place in politics (combativeness doesn’t always get decisions made), I want art to have more fight.

When you leave the OCMA, you see Allison Weise’s banner over the exit. In bubbly yellow text it asks, “So What Are We Going to Do?” It’s the perfect question, and the question all the work in the biennial is swimming around, whether intentionally or not. I hope the answer leads to a breakthrough with Boxer-like nerve.

Island, 2012. Book and oil paint.

Michael Berryhill’s oil paintings at KANSAS make me uneasy. In trying to decide why, I made a list of the things that remind me of his work. Instead of smoothing these references out into a proper review (as I had initially planned), I present them to the reader as is. I believe that this enumerated strategy will better serve objects that, by their very nature, elude clever and perspicuous description. The contents of list appear in no specific sequence, and may be read in any order.

1.The limits and possibilities of looking at something and trying, endlessly, to paint it.

2. Uselessness

3. “Destruction is part of the (loving) understanding of the object.” – Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

4. Hallucinations that other people have described to me while on ayahuasca

5. Inevitable failure in the face of dogged persistence

6. Arrested locomotion; arrested sublimation

7.  A dream I once had about looking at everything and everyone through a fish tank

8. Preserved, decorated flotsam (from the ocean’s floor)

9. Aridity

10.  Raw(ness): Being in or nearly in the natural state: not processed or purified, not diluted or blended, not being in polished, finished, or processed; Having the surface abraded or chafed or very irritated; Lacking covering: not protected and susceptible to hurt – Merriam-Webster dictionary

11. Ecstasy versus Nirvana

12. Teenage flesh and sinew

13. Colors that, though they have been blanched and desiccated by the sun, still appear astonishingly bright

14. A joke I got too long after everyone else

15. Transference (disambiguation)

16. “[Painting] will get smaller, weirder, and more monstrous” – John Kelsey, Bohemian Monsters

17. Three point perspective, foreshortening, and cross-hatching

18. Philip Guston

19. Peter Saul

20. and Forrest Bess

21. “I remember that it was hard to look at it and hard not to look at it too.” – Joe Brainard, I Remember

22. Dehydrated muscle fibers, any animal

23. ____________________________________________________

24. Deflation, ­sexual impotence

25. “If I hear the explanation that I’m hovering between abstraction and representation one more time I’m going to go on a killing spree.” – Charline Von Heyl

26. A school project I made in 3rd grade that involved using dried, pliable mouse bones as material

27. Interior landscapes

28. Turgidity

29. Gravity

30. “At twenty-four she left all of those opinions behind and for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon line she craved. “ – Joan Didion, The White Album

–Carmen Winant

Schmevelations, 2012. Oil on linen.

Pump Jack Ass, 2009. Ink on canvas, wood, and styrofoam.

Tombstone, 2012. Plaster, cardboard, and oil paint.

Loss Leader, 2012. Oil on linen.

Life After Death Rose, 2012. Found object, plaster, and cast iron.