Theaster Gates made his name with multimedia artistic research that freely combines a sociological and anthropological approach to art with relational practices, working on-site with communities and approaching objects and materials as vessels of collective cultural memories. Starting with his contemporary archaeology on the recent past of American Black communities, his practice has since expanded to explore how various material heritages embedded in craftsmanship and traditions around the world can translate into entire belief and value systems.
An extensive solo presentation at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, “Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei,” is the result of the deep research and learning Gates embarked on after his first visit in 2004 to Tokonoma, a region known in Japan for its rich ceramics tradition. Here, Gates entered into contact with the ancient art of anonymous artisans, focusing on the beauty of everyday tools and objects masterfully made by unknown makers. This inspired an extensive and multilayered cultural and anthropological speculation that informed this, Gates’ first solo exhibition in Japan.
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“Afro-Mingei is a speculation and a proposal more than a promise,” explains Gates in the statement accompanying the exhibition. “This exhibition celebrates the complex cultural interweaving that has happened in my life since I first visited Tokonoma in 2004. As I am consistently exposed to the lives, values and making practices of others, Afro-Mingei offers me a language for examining my truth.”
Notably, with “Afro-Mingei,” Gates engages with an essential exercise of cultural preservation, understanding and hybridization that encourages the embrace of multiculturalism. Through a series of works and installations dense in narratives and content, Gates embarks on an attempt to understand and celebrate the subcultures’ resistance to hegemonic colonial forces of cultural erasure and oblivion. Blending the philosophy of Japanese Mingei with the aesthetic of the “Black is Beautiful” cultural movement, which played a big part in the American Civil Rights movement (1954-1968), the show proves how the process of identity awareness is always nurtured by cultural symbols, rituals and traditions shared within a community that recognizes them collectively.
Gates clarifies in his statement: “It is not an exhibition singularly focused on Black art, nor an attempt at reproducing Mingei objects. It is not fusion or collision; rather, Afro-Mingei is a testament to what happens when people yield to the possibilities of cultural influence through making and friendship. Afro-Mingei is simply a way of giving designation and form to a concept I’ve examined for over twenty years in my practice.”
Most importantly, with this exhibition, Theaster Gates has effectively delved into the global conversation around contemporary traditions and distinctive systems of knowledge rooted in Japanese civilization, while drawing unexpected connections and blended influences from African and Yoruba practices and sensibilities. A Japanese collector commented during a private visit: “This exhibition means a lot for Japan. With it, the artist was able to encourage an acknowledgment of the importance of this ceramic tradition as part of the national heritage despite it not yet being talked about. Many might not even know about it in today’s Japanese society, which has been subjected to a compressed process of modernization after the war.”
The term Mingei was coined by religious philosopher and art critic Yanagi Soetsu, a.k.a. Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961) alongside like-minded associates such as potters Hamada Shoji and Kawai Kanjiro, and refers to traditional ceramics crafts produced by nameless artisans. From a rich aesthetical, philosophical and spiritual approach to reality embedded in Japanese culture, those artworks find their sense of harmony and perfection in making “a singular beauty absent from conventional notions of art and aesthetics.” Therefore, the beauty in Mingei artifacts is not in the genius of the individual artists, but in works created in artisans’ innocence, resulting in items used by people in their daily routines.
As soon as one enters the show, it is clear that at its heart there’s a strong desire to celebrate Mingei and honor the makers who are native to a place and have resisted numerous impositions of cultural identity and assimilation. In each room, Gates invites us to explore a series of craft reliquaries that he has assembled. However, in their eclecticism, they already go beyond cultural specificity to be more like a global compendium, aiming to provide the perfect inspiration to imagine a more hybrid and multicultural human future.
Drawing from multiple spiritualities and moving from sacrality to drama, the artist evokes different sacred spaces. While some rooms resonate with the solemn, silently suspended spirituality one can feel when entering a Japanese shrine, others appear to be animated instead by the vibrant rhythm of a Yoruba-inspired spirituality blended gospel in Black Churches. Notably, one of the first works we encounter in the space consists of an altar-like installation celebrating the makers he was in artistic communion with, the ones he began to admire and who, as spirit guides or shamans, have eventually influenced his practice ever since. In the following room, he then introduces a series of staple elements and cultural objects linking to the Black churches and the gospel communities, with the sculptural installation A Heavenly Chord, featuring seven Leslie speakers and a Hammond B-3 Organ as a symbol of spiritual transference through monastic music and experimental sound.
Blending different traditions and spiritualities, Gates suggests humans across cultures all share this need for otherworldly elevation and spiritual reconnection and have always felt the need to translate into some material objects. The moment of spiritual containment then prepares the visitors for the Black Library & Black Space: a library full of books becomes a testament to the artist’s commitment to rescuing identity and traditions and, with that, a sense of community. With remarkable community projects such as The Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago under his belt, Gates has often actively contributed to the collection, preservation and stewardship of Black cultural spaces and archives: rescuing and reactivating an array of abandoned buildings and objects, including the personal effects left and other ephemera from sources that played a vital role in his community, become the artist a way to keep them alive and subtract them from the restless and often blind circulation that brings to obliteration. In this, Gates shares some of the values of Shintoism, particularly its “principle of the life within things,” dedicating a significant portion of his practice to honoring and recontextualizing materials, traces of places and stories that have been left behind.
Photo: Koroda Takeru Photo courtesy: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
By adopting this approach, Gates has appropriated a repurposed wood floor from a demolished elementary school gymnasium also featured in the show, which he has transformed into a complex abstract composition. This highlights the gradual erasure of a universal and formative space for play, socialization and development. Continuing his exploration of labor and materiality, Gates has developed a dense architectural and conceptual symbolism that reveals cultural meanings and memories embedded in mundane materials in the collective urban landscape. In this way, by repurposing objects with a new poetic ritual significance, Gates transforms these contemporary findings into precious documents and traces of how our civilization has been dealing daily with the timeless existential questions, confronting the uncontrollable passing of time and the fading of all things.
A series of ceramics works he created with those artisans are also on view: fired in Chicago and Tokoname, these black vessels stand as containers for spirits and totemic presences suspended between past and present. Titled Black Vessels for Doric Temple, they have the same monumentality as an ancient temple, in the rigorous and solemn arrangement of columns that ensured harmony, balance and proportion. The hybrid ceramic forms draw inspiration from African, Japanese, Korean and Chinese traditions, showing how diverse cultures share a strong desire to create using clay and fire. These ceramics are the result of alchemical processes, giving humans a way to control physical reality while creating vessels of spirituality to transcend it.
Leveraging the power within all these objects to elevate them to the status of artworks and taking them to the distinctive global platform allowed by contemporary art, Gates honors and extends the legacies of those who once owned these cultural artifacts. The exhibition closes with this visionary Disco Tokkuri, a utopian yet possible space where these sensibilities and traditions can still reconvene and be revived as part of a single and much broader human history. The one imagined by Gates is a place to celebrate the richness of cultural diversity and the potential of cultural exchanges, where We All Drink Together, as the title of the central installation in the last room, a monumental shelf with a series of ceramic pots and glasses, seems to suggest.
In this major exhibition, Theaster Gates doesn’t offer final answers or solutions, but he does present various possible interpretations of the cultural significance of different materials and objects from around the world. In this way, Gates demonstrates some of the ways in which this blending of cultures can occur or is already occurring. Most importantly, with his final installation, he envisions how diverse global traditions have already been intersecting, blending and enriching human creativity and expression.
“Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei” runs through September 1 at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.