Yoshihiro Suda
When Chicagoan Adam Scott was given a one-person show at the Museum of Contemporary Art recently, he installed only one painting–an image of the museum burning, referencing Ed Ruscha’s 1968 depiction of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ablaze. Though Scott is actually a pretty interesting painter, this seemed a punkish gesture with the quality of a one-liner, especially compared to Suda’s far more subversive installation. And Suda’s work really is site-specific in an era when much sculpture is mislabeled as such. While he brought some carvings with him for this exhibit, once he saw the spaces he’d been given he completed more–in his room.
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Another of Suda’s Weeds can be found in gallery 109, housing an exhibit of traditional Japanese flower paintings; here he’s installed three actual-size carved weeds sprouting from the floor. Even though his sparse installation makes use of empty space in a way reminiscent of the paintings, they’re more pleasant, even eye tickling. Suda says he admires the paintings but doesn’t believe in a hierarchy of plants that values flowers more than “weeds,” which in any case is not a real botanical category but a term for plants unwanted by humans. Seen from across the room, Suda’s carvings contrast strongly with the paintings: small, vertical, and three-dimensional rather than large, rectangular, and flat, like the other Weeds installation they suggest growth and hence time.
Back at the McCormick indoor court on my last visit, frustrated by the fact that viewers were missing Suda’s Weeds, I started trying to point it out to people. One woman asked, “Which way to the Renoirs?” Another said with a sarcastic laugh, “I’m really impressed,” then asked, “What are they supposed to be?” A couple seemed more interested, and the man remarked on how weeds “pop up all over”–including in his driveway. But only one person seemed to really get it, a boy of seven or eight who’d been looking with some care at the neoclassical sculptures while his father remained seated. When I showed him Suda’s weeds, he gasped, “Oh, wow!” and his face shone with wonder as his father led him away.
