On the Outside of Clay work

I have written about Satoru Hoshino's work on a number of occasions in the past, but here 1 would like to treat it from a different angle. My ultimate purpose is to evoke being present at a particular moment when Hoshino became an artist. Of course, words (the Other ) cannot intervene at this most thrilling and in some senses erotic moment that occurs between the maker and the object he makes. That is because this moment shared by the maker with the object is so self-reductive that language (the critical moment) is lost. It is surrounded by a dense space-time and manifests itself in a way that makes an outside gaze impotent. This space-time, which must exist to some extent around any artist, may stay in effect at all times with hardly any break or it may suddenly pour down on him with great impact in a way that completely changes everything he does. These two kinds of space-time probably govern the working process of most artists. What is important is how primal this process becomes under either of these conditions of space - time, especially the latter. Or, taking it from another point of view, the issue for the artist is whether he is able to grasp or make use of what is fundamental or primal in these conditions. Capturing the primal quality of the space-time of making art may have ambivalent results. The artist may stray out of the self-reductive, dense space-time, leading it toward destruction and bringing a completely different meaning and direction into it. This has the dramatic impact of transforming the condition of space-time of making art into something that is entirely meaningless. It is a desperate gamble, a possibly self- destructive leap. One might see here an eroticism related to death of the kind described by Bataille. In speaking about Hoshino, it is essential to understand that he does not treat clay simply as a material. His encounter with clay "as a physical substance" is more "primal and fundamental." This encounter is made even more primal by the fact that it is not derived from inner values held by the artist in the past. Nor were his ideas developed in a condition of space- time in which he courageously rejected the past. Rather, his present way of working is the result of a decisive flow of space-time that completely nullified not only the values of the past but the personal existence of the artist. The fundamental factor was something that attacked him from the "outside" and that he could not defend himself against. The phenomenon, the overwhelming physical intrusion, that led Hoshino to treat clay as a brute physical substance rather than an artistic medium was a landslide that destroyed Hoshino's studio in 1986. 1 would like to quote at length from a text the aritist wrote the following year. When a disaster occurs and a person is thrown out into chaos, he makes himself into a center and creates a "passage" through the chaos. To deepen relationships , find meaning, and build new order. A sudden catastrophe. A fact which cannot conceivably be removed from the world. Disaster exists just as certainly as the coming of death. Is it impossible to conceive of an order that contains such a possibility? People attempt to find words to describe the indescribable, death or disaster, and try to understand. However, there are facts that slip out from the edges of the words. People try to construct order while the chaos of the universe keeps on endlessly undermining it. It is endless struggle, but it is necessary to keep on constructing a "passage." "Gendai no Me" (Contemporary Eye), November 1994, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo All of the subsequent developments in Hoshino's work go back to this. The landslide that swallowed up his studio in an instant changed his conception of earth as an objectified thing. It became a metaphor for the universe and the incredible amount of energy that it contains. He could not longer think of clay, a form of earth, as an ordinary medium to be manipulated by the hands. Earth had attacked with overwhelming existential force, revealing itself as something that he could not control even if he threw his whole body against it. Earth possesses an energy that a human being cannot fight even though the human will wants to give it order. This conflict is injected into the dully-glowing matter of Hoshino's black ceramic work. To Hoshino, the substance of clay ,or earth, is a threshold zone where he makes contact with the world. It is a site where order and chaos are mixed, a site where the body operates in a primal state, not yet reduced to a sign, and a site where there is an uncompromising conflict between an inner and outer world. Since Satoru Hoshino became aware of this site, he has discovered a self that exists outside the collective and become an innovator in contemporary ceramics. That is, he has discovered his true nature as an artist. Arata Tani, art critic (Translated by Stanley Anderson)

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