MINEO MIZUNO Installation – Nests – at the edge of the “loggia” Huntington Art Gallery, 2022 Photo: Mineo Mizuno
Built up and eroded by space and time, our physical presence is so fragile that we seek protection in our thoughts, as if they weren’t part of life’s chemistry. A Nobel prize scientist laughed: idealism is out of natural history —he told me, and convinced me that our brain is wet.
Merry Christmas from my neuronic islands: Mineo Mizuno’s art at the Huntington Art Gallery, the outdoor installation at the end of the loggia, opens two asymmetrical eyes on the landscape. The manzanitas collected by the artist on the mountains met fire, cold, and storms for a long time. Like bones handled with love, they become a natural sculpture, the nests of two rough, twisted bodies barely framed by thin lines of metal, perhaps underlining how remote they are from the neoclassical columns.
They look at the population of trees and bushes in the gardens with no regret. Struggle is gone. What remains of the original trees is nothing but a reflection of life. Yet they still change every day, an afterlife in process.
Mineo’s art doesn’t connect to nature, it is nature itself resurrected by the artist’s hands. The empty nests are made by him. They recall the power of emptiness, the presence of disappeared trees, as well as the intangible ghosts filling a mansion that is not a house any longer, and the ghosts of railroads replaced by freeways. In 1911 these Los Angeles transportation systems, the Yellow Cars, covered a space bigger than subways in New York. First Collis’ and then Henry’s Huntington financial empire. Henry died in 1927, his family sold the Yellow Cars system in 1944.
The spirit of all these losses is there, so strongly filling the empty nests that birds seem unwilling to bring their life inside them. Rigid is the sculpture. It doesn’t smell.
But, also many Christmas presents for us in those nests:
-the beauty of a calligraphic construction
-the value of zeros in the space they offer to parcels of air
-the joy of emptiness between the limbs of the sculpture, so that designed gardens, sky, and mountains appear as a new picture at every instant, every angle —no help needed from painters or photographers.
The main present, though, is invisible. It only works through imaginary lands free from names or dates. I would say free from words but, how can I tell?
If sounds could replace words, the drops of Bach played by Richter on the piano might give the idea: it is Bach’s music and it is not. The musical script has been transformed by an artist. Time-distance disappears. Stretchings, speed alterations and nuances of sounds win on the written structure. Music becomes contemporary.
Mineo Mizuno, like Gerhard Richter, plays pieces of wood recomposing unique forms. They don’t need to express his own personality. Not even emotions, that are typically human. I would say they enjoy the place in which they stand, at the edge of the terrace, with no separation from the garden before them. As if they could breath it.
Mineo pours water on ideas’ lack of physicality. He drinks the air, reshapes the language, and destroys History’s “lontananze.” Dry mouth for Chronos. Art is the present moment for people who live in it. It is also for birds, if they finally get in touch with Mizuno’s desire.
Merry Christmas to all of you, Rosanna Albertini
Photos by RA, improved by Peter Kirby
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