Patti Warashina: Recent Works

THE CIRCUS: REAL POLITIQUE SERIES WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS! COME INSIDE, WALK AROUND, SEETHE SIDESHOW FIRST! THE STRONG MAN! THE WOMAN CLOTHED IN SUN AND SOOT! THE MAN-WHO-SEES-ALL AND THE AIRPLANEHEADED MAN! SEETHE PERFORMANCESIN THE RING! THE BALANCING ACROBATSAND THE PERKIEST BALANCING ACT OF ALL - MAESTRO THE DOG, MASTER OF THE RING AND THE BIRDS!!

Patti Warashina's circus figures are extraordinarily engaging works, involving their viewers and interacting with them. A synthesis of circus ring and sideshow, they invite visitors to stroll from figure to figure and puzzle out each one. Perched on stands, they meet their audience face to face. They are unified by costume and pose like performers in a ring, but like sideshow freaks, they are remarkably varied, and a little comic, weird, and unsettling. Strong Man projects astonishment with the big exclamation point that replaces his head - most of his barbells turn out to be bombs with lit fuses. The visual pun of bomb with barbell is nearly instantaneous, and he becomes an allegory of mindless force.

Allegorical possibilities are rampant in THE CIRCUS but many are more elusive and complex than Strong Man's.

The woman clothed in sun and soot is titled Air Apparent and provokes several understandings. Visually she presents a burning sun on a sooty polluted figure with wild eyes and hair, and thus a damaged atmosphere is indicated.

Verbally, the title puns with "heir apparent" to suggest a legacy to future generations. For art enthusiasts, it also loosely puns with Aire de Paris, a work by that exemplary humorist of 20th art, Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp's precious air of Paris was encapsulated in a glass flask that Warashina refers to visually by a similar flask of precious unpolluted air.

Freewheeling imagination and an irrepressible comic spirit have long been characteristics people relish in Warashina's art, characteristics she often links with contemporary issues as in THE CIRCUS. Her drollery has allowed people to feel upbeat while confronting what are, in many cases, rather biting and acerbic propositions. She calls THE CIRCUS "Real Politique" referring to the pri nciple of undisgu ised self-interest. Whi Ie the puns of Air Apparent are styl ishly playfu I, and the face and hair are droll and bizarre, the meaning they construct is alarming. These little pleasurable jokes along with those of other figures, accumulate into a thematic group of female figures presenting issues about the world's resources - depletion, pollution, imbalances, abuses. Elegant Crow Whisper wears a startling saw-blade skirt and saw-blade spurs; the teeny bikini of Zero reveals a target on her stomach, referring to zero population growth. A shooting gallery of ducks is precariously balanced on a submerged mother nature in Sitting Ducks, and the black veil of lines and hooks that shroud the woman's face in Hook Line and Sinker bring her hapless fish.

A smaller thematic group relates to control of force and by force: for example, Strong Man, Blow-Back (suggesting, she says, how "the consequences of our actions will come back to bite us"), and Winglet Adventure (with a bird and rocket "flying around in the same air space"). Tule Lake Retreat is no resort but one of the camps where West Coast Japanese were incarcerated during WWII. The tower-guard with a pompous cigar and arrogant posture draws on standard caricatures ofThe Banker and The Capitalist back then, but this work also draws on Warashina's own lapanese-Arnerican past; she substitutes the better-known trials of Japanese-Americans in the coastal cities, for the struggles of her own family in Spokane Washington, where she was born in 1940 and where her dentist father's patients abandoned him during the war. For now, she says, this work refers to the savage and intractable persistence of ethnic animosities in our contemporary world.

The dreadful and the comic intermingle in THE CIRCUS. "Absurd," Warashina says, "absurd and scary." The world itself "is like a circus, like a crazy show." Seen from afar, she says, from the scale of the universe, our human world is like an anthill of manic and demented activities. The circus figures reveal this delirium, but they do not succumb to it. Instead they stand with quiet dignity, balancing delicately on their tiny pedestals and gesturing gracefully.

They contrast greatly with Alexander Calder's famous circus from the early 20th century, a zany and ribald group of little bent-wire figures. They also differ from French images by Degas, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, full of relish for the acrobatic movement of circus figures and dancers. Those earlier circuses do not project allegorical nuances or invite moral scrutiny the way Warashina's does. Her figures press us to read and interpret thei r gestures and the objects they hold, which they present to us as calmly as medieval saints displayed their emblems in painted altarpieces or in carvings beside the doors of Chartres Cathedral. Like such venerable figure groupings, Warashi na's ci rcus figures invite contemplation, standing watch over an elusive interplay of meaning to which each contributes.

Warashina mentions a 'variety of ancient sculptural figures as inspirations for THE CIRCUS, and also for her 2001-2002 figures called MILE POST QUEENS whose innovations she drew upon for THE CIRCUS. For example, she has cited Japanese ceramic Haniwa figures, Etruscan statues, Greek caryatids with their architectural functions, and Egyptian statues. In these historical encounters she was drawn to static, dignified, and poetic figures, guided by a decade of loss and grief in her own life. Her dear friend and fellow ceramicist Howard Kottler died in 1989. A few years later, Warashina left her position as Professor in the University of Washington School of Art to be with her husband, ceramicist Robert Sperry who died in 1998. Shortly thereafter, her mother died.

A ceremonial stillness appeared in Warashina's work as early as 1989, in some little Egyptianlike boats with tiny figures.

The slender MILE POST QUEENS evoked transitions and passage, and even felt to some like funerary figures. THE CIRCUS returns from that world of spirit and myth to the contemporary world, with robust humor and zany inventiveness.

Still, its lively interplay is tempered by the chasten ing awareness of death and transience.

At the heart of THE CIRCUS may be nostalgia for another loss both wrenchingly personal and potentially universalthe loss of the circus itself and an enchanted world of safety, innocence and wonder that it was part of. When Warashina was a little girl in Spokane, the circus came to town regularly.

She says, "Whenever it came, my father always took me; he always bought me a baton with a sparkly end and tassel, or a kewpie doll or something. And we always went to the sideshow first." But her father died when she was ten. The world's show goes on and on, though the ringmaster now is only a little dog. "As though," she says, "the world is madness; and who is in charge? It might as well be your DOG, you know?"

THE SAKE SETS: DRUNKEN POWER SERIES After THE CIRCUS, Warashina made a series of SAKE SETS. This designation evokes her Japanese heritage, while the sets also playoff American teapots with matching cups and a tray. Each set forms its own little world of connected figures and props like a miniature circus group. THE SAKE SET themes have much in common with THE CIRCUS and so do their satirical wit and gleeful fantasy. A nude female figure (sake vessel) among bare branches and tree stumps (cups) suggests environmental depletion; a bird (vessel) balancing its egg precariously on its back among tree stumps seems to image nature's fragility. A man with bulging eyes (vessel) is panicked at a rocket heading for him, identical to his own rockets (cups). Other worldly motifs are new: e.g. the raucous bad judgment of two men frolicking in an oil slick; the breathlessexcitement of new commerce and prosperity imaged in a Chinese woman among stacks of coins; and an ominous submarine lurking among lotus blossom cups, image of hidden armaments throughout the planet.

There is no trace of funeral melancholy in THE SAKE SETS. In their bold color, whimsy, and topicality they suggest a return to the outer world and also a revisiting of an earlier time in the artist's creativity, around 1970 when she and her colleagues were in the exciting forefront of sweeping changes in ceramics. Artists working in clay then felt trapped in several dichotomies: it was widely asserted that they should make utilitarian vessels and related craft objects, not "high art" sculpture; should be devoted to the nature of clay and firing processes, avoiding anything "artificial" or mechanical; and should be guided by venerable traditions not by personal expressiveness. Many found this a choking set of limitations. They responded with industrial glazes, paint, and mixed media; they drew upon autobiography, contemporary painting, and the most outrageous and questionable aspects of popular art, commercial objects, and vernacular practices. Pop Art and Funk Art were their new styles. Among them, Warashina often directed her work against gender stereotypes and sex discrimination as well as against the esthetic rigidities of ceramics itself.

Thus, a special element of humor in THE SAKE SETSaddresses ceramics itself. In the sixties and seventies, many ceramicists had made parodies of cups and teapots, to travesty the utilitarian vessels that dominated and even defined the field. Patti Warashina made far more radical inventions then (including clay chairs and big machine-like structures) but now she revisits that era with her own parodies of vessels, an amusing homage to the history of her generation and fellow radicals like Howard Kottler.

THE SAKE SETS also reengage with gender issues, in a gentler way than formerly.

As circuses lead back to her father and to the fascinating public world, so the sake sets lead back to her mother and to a domestic world of privacy and imaginative power.

Of course serving tea or sake is itself often women's work and often in the home, with friends, relatives, company.

But also, decorating and even making ceramic objects was widely practiced as a vernacular home skill by American women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

At the YWCA, Warashina's mother made ceramic objects that fascinated her little girl, who now recalls ceramic roses, a brush and

mirror

set, and, most wonderful

of all, a chess set whose knight "was kneeling

and had a cape and sword."

Significantly, THE SAKE SETS are like THE CIRCUS in being more interactive than Warashina's earlier works.

In the seventies, her radical altars, bizarre cars, and punning kilns were made for gallery pedestals and owners' shelves.

Subsequent

narrative pieces constructed

by pure white surfaces and often by protective

from many small lively figurines were distanced display cases. Warashina

spoke of making

compared her works to bright vignettes of tiny people, glimpsed through played outside through the long dusk light of northern summer evenings. one a little cosmos,

but only to a degree.

fill it from the pot; and it is important Individual

physical as well as imaginative amused,

choose which

cup to drink from, and

moveable,

As a result, they are open to our participation.

CIRCUS and THE SAKE SETS admit surprised,

She

windows of their houses when she THE SAKE SETS are like that, each

to the artist that they really work.

sake sets, like THE CIRCUS, are flexible,

yet integrated sets of objects.

puzzled,

For, if we had one, we could

from viewers

"little worlds."

Warashina'sTHE

us to their worlds

or enlightened

to be

and also, more

literally, to stroll about among them, or to sip some refreshment from them.

They are accessible, and even vulnerable to breakage, to a degree that involves new daring and confidence.

Perhaps it is a kind of passage through death

and an integration

of death with life and past with present, that

make possible this joining of viewers with artworks experience

and this counterpoint

one simultaneous

into one

of tragedy and comedy

in

interplay of meanings.

Martha Kingsbury Guest essayist, Professor Emerita of Art History,

University

of Washington,

Seattle, WA

IMAGES Air Appar

Cover:

nt, from

Clay, glaze, mixed Left Panel:

Blow Back/ from

Hook/

Right Panel Top:

Strong Man/ from

The Circus: Real Politique

The Circus: Real Politique

lOx

The Sake Sets: Drunken whiteware,

Snowbird,

from

Porcelain,

whiteware,

Series/ 2003

68 x 17 x 9" w/base

& glaze.

earthenware,

Series, 2003

69 x 19 x 14" w/base

The Sake Sets: Drunken

Artwork

Series/ 2003

68 x 18.5 x 15" w/base

Silent Sound/ from

Oops/ from

This publication

media-

Series/ 2003

15" w/base

media-

Porcelain, Right Fold:

X

Clay, glaze, mixed

Porcelain, Right Panel Bottom:

media-

Line/ & Sinker, from

Clay, glaze, mixed Center Panel Botlom:

72 x 21

The Circus: Real Politique

Clay, glaze, mixed Center Panel Top:

The Circus: Real Politique media.

& glaze.

21

11" w/base

Power Series/ 2004

8 x 24

X

The Sake Sets: Drunken

& glaze.

Power Series/ 2004 X

14" w/base Power Series/ 2004

17 x 14 x 13" w/base

and Images: Courtesy of Howard House Contemporary

was funded

ŠJundt Art Museum,

by the Jundt Art Museum's Gonzaga

University,

Annual

Spokane,

Campaign

Art Callery, Seattle, WA

2003-2004

WA 99258-0001