The Last Arrangement
featuring work by:
Bruno Burri, Ferdinando Cortina, Orri Forslund, Hockto Furosaki, Barry Harper, Pablo Marmol, Lucy Otter, Doroteo Parra, Primo Páramo, Haru Setsuko, Gabriel Sierra, Lucas Scandinavia, Olga Tamaribuchi.
This exhibition operated as a sort of kaleidoscope, a source of inspiration, and a testimony to the strategies and experiments used to insert ideas of art into life by a group of artists and creators with dissimilar backgrounds, all related to the Hockto Furosaki Ikebana Club.
The Hockto Furosaki Ikebana Club operated in a small storefront on San Francisco's Market Street. Its main attraction lay not only in its eccentric and sometimes classic floral compositions but also in its radical forms of display, which often surprised customers and passersby. It was the only store in the neighborhood, and probably in the entire Bay Area, that displayed a single product from its inventory at a time—on a pedestal, on a table, or, if you were lucky, in front of the window. The display changed periodically according to the season, but there was always a single arrangement of flowers, branches, and leaves in an otherwise empty room.
On the occasion of the Horticultural & Flower Symposium that took place in San Francisco in 1975, the Hockto Furosaki Ikebana Club staged an exhibition on the thirteenth floor of 140 New Montgomery.
At House of Seiko, the artist Gabriel Sierra and curator Diego Villalobos stage a recreation of this obscure exhibition. Some of the artworks, display furniture, and layout are modified from their original presentation to accommodate the current site. All works are exhibited on specific days, hours, or moments during a particular period of time over the course of the exhibition.
This exhibition is based on a passage from Gabriel Sierra’s, yet to be published, novel Siete Cavernas (Seven Caverns).
Worries & Flowers
By Foster Black
Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1975
Scholars speculate that the real purpose of the mysterious floral arrangements known as Ikebana is actually an attempt to neutralize the shadows and emptiness that define the vernacular of Japanese architecture. Others claim that the true function of the traditional flower arrangement is to tame the mysterious forces of nature. However, there are passages in classical Japanese literature that mention complex yet simple floral arrangements in Shinto altars, as well as flower offerings in Buddhist monasteries. In the later part of the 15th century, this practice evolved into a flower-arranging technique with strict rules. Since then, the floral art of Ikebana has gone through many phases of evolution. No one knows exactly how or why, but experts and historians seem to agree that it is a ritual centered on the appreciation of natural phenomena.
The critic Nene Hiradaria described The Last Arrangement exhibition as interesting and, at times, enigmatic. In her review for Ikebana-Today Magazine, she wrote, “The expectations of unpretentious beauty and harmony that we usually find in an Ikebana show were present—there are usually no surprises or modifications to the rules. However, in this show, all these preconceived ideas seemed to disappear or be modified in search of spontaneity, an optimism that speaks of fragility and brevity, and the transcendent, ephemeral aspects of the human condition.”
The Hockto Furosaki Ikebana Club operates in a small storefront on San Francisco’s Market Street. Its main attraction lies not only in its eccentric and sometimes classic floral compositions but also in its radical forms of display, which often surprise customers and passersby. It is the only store in the neighborhood, and probably in the entire Bay Area, that displays a single product from its inventory at a time—on a pedestal, on a table, or, if you’re lucky, in front of the window. The display changes periodically according to the season, but there is always a single arrangement of flowers, branches, and leaves in an otherwise empty room.
What a contradictory Ikebana show, composed of only a few floral arrangements and a group of artworks—such as drawings, paper cut-outs, paintings, videos, magazine clippings, objects, and slide projections. Three replicas of Alexander Calder’s Explosive Object from 1944 sit beside a pile of branches on a table, in proximity to a pile of fresh seasonal flowers placed inside a very modern container on a pedestal. In this show, tradition has disappeared or been reformulated. With the exception of some floral compositions in the purest classical style—one elegantly made with a single structural branch and another with an assortment of green rounded leaves with drops of water resting on them—the rest of the presentation leans more towards the experimental. This includes the display of a tumbleweed, brought from Montana by the author and presented on a plinth with a postcard, and a group of black paper cut-outs shaped like the leaf-like Poker spade symbol, sequentiallyarranged as a frieze throughout the room. One of the works that surprised visitors the most was a real man lying on a desk, dressed in black and wearing a striped bowtie, quietly looking at the ceiling with fresh flowers in his mouth. The man was pretending to be a vase, which was quite convincing since he was a professional actor. The amusing and sometimes cold presentation of what were supposed to be timeless ideas of balance, simplicity, and harmony contrasted with the expectation that an Ikebana exhibition should be captivating and refined, composed of a serene atmosphere.
As an exhibition, The Last Arrangement is a rarity. Nothing stays the same, as artworks come in and out each day during the course of the show, yet the theme repeats itself with each new iteration. Textures, sensations, and accumulation seem to be present in each of the works. While not all of the pieces can be considered traditional Ikebana per se, they are all intensely linked to its spirit. The artworks were installed on tables, plinths, walls, and screens in an empty office space on the thirteenth floor of 140 New Montgomery, as part of the San Francisco Horticultural & Flower Symposium in 1975.
Familiar and strange noises invade the space at times, while emotional symphonic music fragments make you feel as if you are in a movie. Random objects are scattered on a table—some related to the realm of flower arrangements, others clearly not. Bundles of branches, flowers, and foliage are arranged meticulously or intricately organized in a vase or basket. Opinions are divided. While some works relate in an abstract and conceptual way to the floral art genre of Ikebana, others note an alleged absence of beauty. The ancient magic that is supposed to characterize an Ikebana show is displaced by modern ideas in an empty room scattered with office furniture and discarded files. The good news is that Nene Hiradaria concludes her article by telling us that the Hockto Furosaki Ikebana Club is actually an extraordinary philosophy school disguised as a flower shop.
Things Seen and Unseen
By Diego Villalobos
In 1974, Georges Perec published Species of Spaces, a work that explored in great detail, through scale and taxonomy, how we inhabit our everyday surroundings, both seen and unseen. From the molecular to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, Perec’s text transitions outward like a zoom lens, pulling us away and distorting our sense of perspective as he fits more information into the picture plane. As we gain a wider perspective, things become more distant, and thus, perhaps, the more information we try to grasp, the more unknown things become.
Gabriel Sierra is interested in understanding how the space between things works—from the gap between the words on a page to the air between objects in a room, or the space between knowledge and intuition, fact and fiction. This fascination with the in-between has led Sierra to create a vast body of work that sits at the crossroads of architecture, sculpture, performance, image-making, and storytelling, where the human body and its relationship to the built environment is always at the center.
Sierra, like Perec, thinks of space not only in material terms but also as an ideological construct. Take, for instance, his Structures for Transition (Estructuras para Transición), 2008 and ongoing, where he alters the framing of passageways (doorways, window frames, etc.) by extending the architectural forms of a threshold or by adding wooden elements to an existing armature. The visual and physical fracturing of the structure not only enables a sense of self-awareness in how one moves from room to room or how new fields of vision can be created through obfuscation, but it ultimately asks us to consider the form and function of an exhibition space, the relationship of a work of art to its site of presentation, and the role of the art spectator as interpreter. Through these inquiries, Sierra’s structural interventions remind us that ideology is expressed through architectural forms and spaces and that the larger world is built in relation to our bodies’ physical and ideological accessibility to it.
The importance of having the viewer involved for the activation or realization of an artwork are ideas that are deeply embedded in the works of artists such as Helio Oiticica, whose immersive installations and audience participation works challenged modernist principles of categorization; or Lygia Clark, whose modular sculptures called Bichos (critters), made of metal and without a fixed form, challenged conventional notions of sculpture. The Neo-Concrete movement of the early 60’s in Brazil, of which these artists belonged to, embraced experimentation with color, form, and space, as a means of creating a formal abstraction that challenged European modernist principles that were dominant throughout Latin America.
Even though Sierra is generations apart from those artists, you can see traces of their work In his thinking––in particular how materials, forms, and space influence our behavior and sense of self. What sets him apart, however, is his more detached, almost anthropological, approach to examining aspects of everyday human behavior.
In works such as Background, Figure, Figure, Background, 2008-2012, Sierra built a white platform on one of the Aspen Art Museum’s exhibition spaces blurring the spatial lines between the floor, wall and ceiling, creating a near total depthless white cube where the visitor’s presence became exaggerated, and placed in stark contrast to the near total void created by the artist; or in installations such as EndsMeddlesBeginnings, 2012, where Sierra presented a group of panels that at a simple glance appear as minimalist paintings with apertures, but are in fact rigged in such a way that, depending on the day of the week, are opened or closed, granting varying degrees of access to the exhibition space. These installations by Sierra evoke a state of impermanence. Just as much as he pays close attention to the dynamics of space and the porosity of architecture, he also plays with the construction of language as a tool for mediating the world at large and as a means for creating new temporalities.
Artist Biographies:
