The best thing about this installation is the smell of fresh pine that greets you as you approach the gallery space. Upon entering, you are presented with a winter wonderland, a woodsy nature trail with artworks along the way. "Forecast: Snow" inhabits an odd space conceptually because of all the disparate things going on in the work.
A Winter Wonderland – Erik Wenzel
The best thing about this installation is the smell of fresh pine that greets you as you approach the gallery space. Upon entering, you are presented with a winter wonderland, a woodsy nature trail with artworks along the way. "Forecast: Snow" inhabits an odd space conceptually because of all the disparate things going on in the work. It is not part of "the pathetic aesthetic," the trashy overload aesthetic or the high production value aesthetic. But Sone picks up on some of the moves from each of those styles and works in ideas of his own. The Styrofoam snow banks, fake snow, rough maquettes and snowballs made of crumpled up paper all give the show a loose and somewhat corny feel. The slack paintings of ski lifts hiding on the walls between the trees also contribute to this. But then we are also presented with works made of marble and crystal. The marble especially contrasts the low with high. The crystal sculptures of snowflakes are like paperweights, an expensive material used for a lowbrow sense of opulence.
I am reluctant to engage in too much tangential theorizing about this installation. Mainly because that would involve asking the question, "what is Yutaka Sone trying to say about snow?" That just sounds stupid. It implies a lot of dead seriousness about something simple. Maybe it’s not so stupid. Sone is pretty straightforward. He is saying he likes snow. It interests him in a number of ways that have resulted in a wide variety of artistic investigations.
The show is snow abstracted. First as fantasy, snow is sugary and romantic. The stuff of ski resorts, snowmen (there is a large sculpture of one on skis) and walks in nature, where it always snows on Christmas and a warm mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows it waiting for you in the cabin. The second abstraction is snow in the realm of science. When it snows, we don’t experience it as crystalline structures, microscopic architecture or as pure mathematics. But in science we do. Under magnification, that is exactly what snow is.
In this regard, then, Sone’s untitled snowflake drawings are closest to accuracy. Drawn from microscopic pictures and hung from the lofty reaches of the gallery, they are the first that I’ve seen to engage that area of the society. Tilting at different angles and in different sizes, they are meant to represent falling snow. But that is something a teacher might do when making the classroom bulletin board for the winter months. This makes the art quaint and fun. The drawings are kind of pathetic and funny. They look like drawings by high school students asked to make pictures of snowflakes from their textbook. Some drawings are more accomplished and developed than others. Many of these geometric crystals are drawn with speed lines to imply they are flying through the air. But shaped like boxes or space stations, they hardly seem aerodynamic. I guess that is the wonder of nature since snowflakes really are shaped like that and yet flutter so gracefully from the sky.
Clearly "Forecast: Snow" brings up the kitschy and the campy but it is in the presentation that makes the show so interesting. Walking through the wooded trail, it is more than evident that Sone carefully and intentionally put it together. While there is a self-conscious tinge, a little bit of winking going on, it is not ironic or satiric. "Forecast: Snow" believes in art and the joy it can be not like so many snotty unicorn paintings seen at the booths of sophisticated galleries at art fairs. Nor is it treated with the shit eating grin, turn-everything-for-a-profit style of Jeff Koons.
Sone’s commitment is most clear in the labor of love that is the work in marble. First planned out in plaster and wood, they end up being painstakingly wrought from huge blocks of marble. Seeing a piece like Ski Lift (2004) makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Why make a sculpture of a ski lift? And then why, in the name of God, go to a master studio in China and tease it out of solid marble? The icing on the cake, as it were, is that the rock is about as far away from frozen water vapor as you can get but twinkles like a fresh dusting of powdery snow on a cold winter night. "Here is fun, here is camp," says "Forecast: Snow" Here is an installation that is serious but not too serious.
It is funny like bad joke that a show about snow is presented in Chicago in winter. While the city is notoriously cold for about seven months of the year, it doesn’t always have much snow. Usually what happens is we get a nice covering of snow and then the temperature warms to about 40 degrees. The snow melts and then we’re plunged into deep freeze that lasts for ages, all the fun of winter nowhere to be found but here it is in Yutaka Sone’s show.
