Painting as “Womb”
Peculiar, round shapes float in the middle of the painting. They look similar to a pore-like substance on the back of a leaf that I saw through a microscope in a science class when I was little. They also remind me of a body cavity of some protozoa I read about in an encyclopedia. These forms are pregnant with masses of seeds and eggs and seem ready to disperse them afar at any moment. In fact, they may be quietly waiting for the chance to lay the eggs and incubate them.
The paintings by Kazuko Date remind one of a primordial landscape, a scenery prior to the separation of life into flora and fauna. Considering the typical course of a woman’s life, Date began her career as an artist rather late, and her work is an outpouring of all that had accumulated within herself over the years. She came to give metaphorical meanings to the images that arose from the canvas, such as a womb with a new life, contours of the human body, and the home. Built upon her personal experiences, Date evokes in her images women’s role as the child-bearing sex, the mother-daughter conflicts, and the burdens of the household, but also the joys of passing life into the future.
There is a word that perfectly captures both the intense impression one receives from Date’s paintings and the artist’s thoughts which I learned later: womb (tai胎). In addition to
“to be pregnant” or “the maternal organ where the child nestles,” this Chinese character also contains more symbolic meanings such as “the source of life energy, vibrant enough to engender a new human being” or “a beginning of something, a sign.” Therefore, alongside its common usage in terms such as kai-tai (conception), bo-tai (the mother’s womb) and tai-ban (placenta), it also appears in much more abstract terms such as hai-tai (to originate, arise). Date’s paintings, or more specifically, the surfaces of the panels on the wall that the artist faces in her studio, function as a matrix of this “womb” where embryonic activities begin.
This also relates to the diffused and prolific quality of Date’s images. The forms in her paintings are neither figuration that mimics the real world nor abstraction that is radically removed from the natural world. As such, they embody a rich ambiguity that instantly renders this type of dualism futile. The art historian Henri Focillon once wrote, “although it [form] is our most strict definition of space, it also suggests to us the existence of other forms. It prolongs and diffuses itself throughout our dreams and fancies.”[1] That is to say, the meaning of a painting is fostered through the meeting of our perception of the image and our imaginations that we project onto the image. Date’s works, because they do not clearly represent any particular organ in the maternal body, are paintings of generative “wombs” that carry, with the viewer’s involvement, the potential force to multiply into infinity.
Moreover, if we were to consider Date’s works as “paintings of a womb” in the sense that it is where something begins, we can trace its progression by examining the changes in the techniques Date has employed. When she began her career as an artist, Date mostly produced collage paintings where she would paste various materials on the flat surface and apply paint over the top of the pasted medium. She incorporated elements that were external to the painting itself. Gradually, that technique shifted toward printing methods, and further to her current technique where she uses acrylic paint, occasionally mixing sand into it, to apply freehand onto the panel surfaces. The principal elements underpinning her current works are the lines drawn by automatism-like strokes and the board’s ground color that shows through the sheer pigment, as if shimmering in front of our eyes. Numerous, amorphous forms arise from within the radiating pearl-like, creamy white “ground.” The image is no longer created with outside elements, but gently grows from within the placenta that supports the painting.
As we stand in front of the large painting, created by piecing together many wood panels, we are overcome by an odd feeling, as if we are peering into a large microscope. What further intensifies this impression is the artist’s particular method of framing. The edges of the canvas crop many of the motifs depicted on the surface, indicating the exterior realm that extends beyond the limits of our perceptual vision. Such an arrangement reminds us of the composition frequently seen in micrographs. At that moment, we realize that we are witnessing, as an enlarged image, the activities of life on a microscopic level, the drama of life played out by wombs pregnant with seeds and eggs.
Looking back into the arts of the 20th century that expressed such an internal vision of the body, the name of two female artists comes to mind. The first is Judy Chicago, who led the feminist art movement of the 1970’s in America. In her autobiography, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist[2], Chicago writes that she began depicting living organisms, and especially forms derived from male and female human genitals, on board panels from when she was an art student. She called these forms “the image which originates from within my most deepest emotions.”[3] However, as she became more heavily involved in the feminist movement, she began to associate these motifs all too clearly with specific body parts and made them into symbols of the “feminine” essence. In contrast, in the case of French-born sculptor Louise Bourgeois, despite her occasional provocative and obvious use of genitals as her motifs, she fundamentally pursued organic abstract forms that were reminiscent of the beginning of life. In Focillon’s sense of being suggestive of “the existence of other forms,” Bourgeois’ polymorphous works carry an openness that “prolongs and diffuses itself throughout our dreams and fancies.” It can be said that the distinctive forms Date paints follow this genealogy of visualizing genital forms ― namely, forms of the “womb” ― that has been represented by Bourgeois’ art.
How filled with motion and energy are Date’s panels. The spores and ovaries are reverberating, and the seeds and eggs are dispersing everywhere. Also visible here and there are the lines of her drawings derived from the croquis she makes of a moving dancer, reflecting her strong interest in the physical movements of the human body such as dance. The womb in Date’s works is not a world that incubates its eggs in seclusion, but is an internal world that openly exposes itself to the outside world.
翻訳：佐野明子 Translator: Meiko Sano
[1] Henri Focillon, George Kubler (trans.), The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 34.
[2] Judy Chicago, Kazuko Koike (trans.), Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Artist (Tokyo: Parco Publishing), 1979.
[3] Ibid., pg. 50